Part 6

"The boy brought it nearly ten minutes ago--so I kept him. I didn't like to disturb you, miss."

I took it. It was from the matron of the hospital. "Patient doing well. Out of danger."

"No answer," I said.

So Walter Markham was going to live, and I had promised----

"Good news?" Cheneston said.

I handed him the telegram, and he followed me into the drawing-room.

"Oh, Pam!" he said. "Then you can marry him and be happy! I wish I could do something just to show my enormous gratitude to you."

"Do you really mean that?" I said. I swung round on the music-stool, on which I had seated myself, and smiled up at him.

"Of course I do."

"Then give me five hundred pounds," I said.

Cheneston lit a cigarette.

I do think the girl who has been brought up among a pack of brothers and a crowd of male cousins misses something. When you start knowing men for the first time in your twenties--when your critical faculties are at their very keenest--you do get a fearful amount of astonishment and thrills out of the appalling difference there is between their ways and the ways of your own sex. It's a never-ceasing source of wonder to you.

I had startled Cheneston by a totally unexpected demand for five hundred pounds--and he lit a cigarette.

A woman would have played with something, probably the blind-tassel--Cheneston was standing near the window--repeated my question, and tried to read my face; the man did none of these things. I think cigarettes are to men what dangly things about dresses, and bracelets, and hairpins are to women--something they can play with and readjust when something has robbed them of their poise and sang-froid. I notice that nervy women and shy women often have scarves and bead necklaces and things they can finger in stressful moments.

"Would you like it in notes, or will a cheque do?" Cheneston asked quietly. "If you will take a cheque I will give it to you now; if you want notes I am afraid you must wait until I can drive in to the bank."

"I want it in notes," I said.

I wanted him to ask questions, to show enormous astonishment and interest. I was furious with him for being so calm.

"I think you owe me something for coming here," I said crudely.

I wanted to rouse him at any price. I don't know quite what there is in feminine make-up that makes you suddenly want to hurt the man you love--and somehow the more aloof and patient and wonderful they are, the more you want to scratch. It's only when they get a bit peevish and earthly that you suddenly leave off and feel repentant. If a man, especially a husband, ever patted me on the head, I should _bite_ him; and I don't know why, but terribly gentlemanly men always make me feel horribly unladylike.

I don't think I'm a nice character--but I don't think people who feel things terribly, and get themselves all sort of churned up with intensity, are very nice--not what ordinary people call "nice," anyway. I think ordinary people like to feel "sure" of you because it's a great compliment when it is said of you, "She's always just the same." They advance on you with the same trustful confidence that a kitten does on its saucerful of milk. I own it's bad luck to find a saucerful of dead sea, or a minute proportion of fire and brimstone.

"I owe you more than five hundred pounds," Cheneston said quietly; then he looked at me for the first time. "Pam," he said, "you've altered so lately. Are you happy?"

"I'm a twittering bunch of sunshine," I said.

I felt black inside with bitterness and rebellion.

"I'm glad," he answered quietly, "you didn't just strike me that way."

I wanted to cry like a silly kid, and yet I wanted to be a woman of the world and sting and say clever, lashing things full of prettily covered up spite.

I wanted to feel old and hard and bad, and I could only feel young and inadequate and tearful and sniffy, and I hadn't even got a handkerchief.

I opened the piano. I was thinking how horrid it is to have our parents thrust upon us, and have to do humiliating things for them that put you in a false position with the people you love best. My brain was a tangled bunch of rebellious "whys?" all squirming like blind kittens.

"Do you mind if I strum?" I asked.

"Please do," Cheneston answered courteously. "Will my smoking worry you?"

"Oh no," I said carelessly, and what I wanted to say was, "Don't you even care enough to ask me why I want that five hundred pounds from you? It's positively insulting of you just to give it to me without a single query as to its destination. How dare you--dare you--dare you think I am the sort of young woman who calmly asks for five hundred pounds for pin-money! Your silence implies that you _think_ I am."

The long narrow drawing-room looked so beautiful, so dainty, so fresh. The candle-light was reflected softly on the white panelled walls; the fierce little blue lobelia on the quaint grey chintz seemed to stand out, and the moonlight coming through the french diamond-paned windows lay in pools on the grey carpet like stagnant water--the room was so big that the mellow candlelight never spread to there.

It was all so big and grave and stately that I felt like an angry mosquito--and yet fate had behaved rottenly to me, assigned to me an ignoble part.

I chose the wonderful love-song from "Samson and Delilah," and I forgot Cheneston, I forgot the room, and the blue dragon-pots of late madonna lilies. I forgot myself--only the scent of the lilies stayed and drenched me with indescribable sweetness, and I seemed to struggle down into the soul of Delilah and understand why she hated and yet loved Samson for his strength, as I hated and loved Cheneston for his.

Cheneston was sitting in the arm-chair, gripping the sides, and when I stopped he lit another cigarette.

I could have smacked him.

"Thanks," he said, "it's a wonderful thing."

I played the opening bars of "Thank God for a Garden."

I felt like a worn-out mosquito.

"I'm afraid you're tired, Pam," he said when I had finished. "You look awfully tired."

"I think I'll go to bed," I said. "My head is rather rotten."

"I'll ask nurse to bring you an aspirin."

"No thanks--it's just sleep I want. I shall be all right to-morrow."

"I'm sorry your head is bad."

"I often get headaches."

He held open the door for me.

I wondered if he were going to refer to the five hundred pounds.

"Good-night," I said slowly.

"Good-night," he answered gravely. "I hope your head will be better in the morning."

Outside the door of old Mrs. Cromer's room I paused. I had a passionate and overwhelming desire to go and tell her the truth. I was in need of counsel. I craved advice. I felt that nothing in the whole world could ever be right again. The future terrified me, and all the people in it--Walter Markham, mother, father.

I felt I would give anything to go and lay my burden on someone else's shoulder.

If I felt like a mosquito at all, it was when it feels and fears the approach of winter.

*XIII*

I woke at midnight with an extraordinary feeling that I was the last person left alive on earth, a consciousness of desolation and isolation terrifying and indescribable. I used to get it when I was a child, and I would have gone into a lion's cage for company. I believe it is some form of nerve pressure medical men can't explain.

I got up shivering and put on my little silk kimona.

I felt I had to go to Mrs. Cromer--I had to tell her all about Walter Markham, who was getting better and who thought I loved him and wanted to marry me, and Cheneston who did not love me. I felt I had to tell her about Grace Gilpin--the very lovely person Cheneston cared for.

The impossibility of struggling through the immediate future alone and unadvised appalled me; chiefly I was terrified about Walter Markham, the man to whom I had been so horribly unkind in my kindness, the man who believed I had gone to the hospital to see him because I cared. I had fostered the belief because he was dying--and he had lived, and all the hopes I had raised and the delusions I had tenderly fostered lived with him.

My life had been the life of a little child until my meeting on the shore with Cheneston that day, all things ordered and planned for me, and now I was suddenly called upon to play a role almost verging on drama, requiring subtlety of which I was quite incapable, finesse of which I could have no knowledge.

I crept, shivering, along the panelled landing, past Cheneston's door. I knew the nurse was sleeping in the little dressing-room attached to Mrs. Cromer's.

I prayed Heaven she was asleep as I cautiously opened the door.

The night-light on the washhand-stand burned steadily; it was reflected in little spots of primrose light on the mahogany furniture.

I crept to the bed.

The old lady was lying very still. She looked extraordinarily lovely and fragile, and a tiny smile curved the corners of her sweet old mouth, as if she had fallen asleep in a network of happy thoughts.

She seemed so small in the big room full of furniture.

I realised as I knelt beside her how much I loved her, what an ideal she would always be in my life.

I softly kissed her hand, kneeling there, and then I realised it held a letter, and I caught sight of the words.

"I fall asleep happily because I leave you to another mother--little mother Pam of the big eyes and the big heart. The child loves you, Cheneston----"

I touched her face; it was cold as ice. touched her hand.

Cheneston's mother had fallen asleep happily.

"Oh, my dear!" I whispered. "And I came to tell you--and now you'll never know that I wanted to be his mother, and he wanted another sort."

I don't know how long I stayed there. I seemed very close to her. She was so beautiful, the loveliest old thing with that little tender smile curving her lips; the peace of her, like the loveliness, was indescribable.

I wondered if in heaven there were things to mother and love. I hoped so; her life had been so full of warmth, so radiant with humanity. I thought of her extraordinary quaintness, the delicious way she put things--I heard again her laughter.

I looked at the letter.

"The child loves you, Cheneston."

He mustn't see that; last words have a tremendous significance, and we credit those who are near heaven with super-insight; just those few words might set him questioning and wondering, might get between him and Grace Gilpin.

Had I right to rob him of her last message?

To leave it there would be to give myself a chance; to take it would be to destroy my last.

I took it very gently from her fingers.

I would not destroy it, it was not mine to destroy; I would cherish it very carefully, and after a while I would send it to him anonymously.

I realised that the need for my presence at Cromer Court was over; I was free to go, my part was played and the curtain was down.

Exit Pamela Burbridge from Cheneston Cromer's life.

I staggered to my feet.

It is easy to do dramatic things, to make your exit; but to slip away when you want to stay, when your whole heart is aching to stay, to make exits so silently and unostentatiously that the ones you long to miss you hardly know that you are gone--that is the hardest of all.

I knew before I left Mrs. Cromer's side that I was going to run away--away from Cheneston and Walter Markham and mother and father.

I had to. I couldn't stay and face things out.

To begin somewhere else all over again.

It was the explanation I was afraid of, explanations to mother, to father, to Cheneston, to Walter Markham.

I was running away from Explanations.

I wrote a little note and pushed it under Cheneston's door, where he would find it in the morning.

"Please send the five hundred pounds to mother.--P.B."

I packed a few of my serviceable clothes in a handbag.

I had five pounds in notes and fifteen shillings in silver.

The dawn was just breaking when I left the Court.

The world was wet and cold.

I looked back at the house from the other side of the wrought-iron gate; its shuttered windows seemed like hostile eyes.

I felt a little like Eve expelled from the Garden of Eden--I wondered if her expulsion had taken place on a wet morning before the sun was up.

*XIV*

I had read "Alone in London" stories, rather wonderful, poignant things. I remembered two, one by Horace Newte and one by Peggy Webling. They had gripped me at the time. I had been so lonely in my real life that I always found it easy to get inside the skin of the heroines I was reading about, and for days my lonely walks with Pomp and Circumstance across the wet moors and through leafless lanes were no longer lonely or desolate--they had become the streets of the greatest capital in the world.

If you have sufficient imagination and a cheap lending library near you your world is never unpeopled. I often think that the library is the one thing that prevents prisoners going mad--you couldn't go mad if you were allowed O. Henry once a week and Jane Austen to read yourself to sleep with.

Two things I hadn't expected about London happened: it was radiant with sunshine when I arrived, and no one took the faintest notice of me.

I was a little nonplussed; then I found a boarding-house, not in Bloomsbury, where the wallpaper was not flowered and the atmosphere was not cabbagey; the landlady neither stared at me nor asked questions, and the maid was fat and brisk and efficient; and there was a parrot in the basement who said "change for 'Ighgate" all day long; nothing could have been less sinister or more normal and cheery.

I cried myself to sleep the first night--it seemed the right thing to do; but I left off in the middle because I couldn't think of anything more to cry about.

I had a dear old lady in the room next to mine. She knocked at my door just as I was falling to sleep.

"My dear," she piped, "if you should hear a raid warning, if you would just tap the wall. We all go down into the cellar--and one likes to prepare a little."

"Prepare?" I said.

"Hindes," she whispered apologetically, "curlers--you know--one doesn't like----"

I fell asleep smiling on my first night in darkest, dreadfulest, naughtiest London.

The next day I started to hunt for work. I was paying forty shillings a week, and had only four pounds ten left of my money.

I found it at once. I took the money in a cinema booking-office. It was dull, and I got thirty shillings a week; I took it because it gave me the entire morning to hunt for more remunerative work.

I met with no adventures in my hutch. I was sworn at several times for giving the wrong change, and the gorgeous gentleman in Prussian blue and silver uniform, who waved the people to their seats inside, gave me a packet of butterscotch. But the more remunerative work did not present itself. I was untrained. I could not type or do shorthand, and I had no previous experience. The men who interviewed me were most civil, they suggested Clark's College or Pitman's. I was no good to them.

I had to change my boarding-house. I went to one near Kentish Town, it was very clean, and the landlady had been a professional cook. I boarded with the family, and a Polish Jewess also lived there, a skirt hand in a big West End tailor's. She used to press my skirts.

I wondered if anybody was advertising for me, or if there was any fussation going on. I did not think I was worth a whole detective for one minute. I did not attempt to hide. I had read somewhere that to live an ordinary life was the surest way to escape detection.

I wondered, as the months slipped by, if Cheneston had married Grace Gilpin.

I did not lose Cheneston. I could always step right back in memory into the days I had spent with him, days of infinite and dear delight.

I knew I loved Cheneston, that I wanted passionately to be his wife; that if he were to ask me to marry him I would marry him rapturously and thankfully, even though I knew he didn't care two straws about me and would need a photograph to remember the way I did my hair.

I believe the "if she be not fair for me, what care I how fair she be" sort of people are very, very jelly-fishy.

If you care for a man you care for him, and that's all there is to it; the fact that he cares for someone else or doesn't care for you doesn't alter your feelings, it only makes the pain and hurt of it an artistic success.

I wish I was jelly-fishy in my feelings for people. If I were I could say of Cheneston, "I can't stick here! I'll float on." But I'm a barnacle creature where I love. I shall be Cheneston's girl even if I never see him again. My heart went from me when I first met him, and the doors closed after it and left a little hole. It will always ache, and I shall always know there is a hole where a heart should be--especially when I listen to wonderful music or see sunsets or little children at play.

I shall never, never have another heart to give away; some women have theirs on bits of elastic so that they can always pull them back and give them away again; a man sort of holds it until somebody else wins it, like a challenge shield or a football cup.

I gave mine entirely and unconditionally; I believe that time will cocaine the hole.

I look to time to do a lot for me in the healing and dulling line--all that the poets and the proverbs say it will. Time never fails you--when all else fails, you can always kid yourself you haven't given it long enough to perform the miracle.

I don't ever want to see anyone I knew in the old life. I feel that the Pamela Burbridge of those days is dead, poor thing! but she has a more exciting time than most defunct people, because every night I shake her up and make her live over again her enchanted halcyon days by the sea and at Cromer Court.

She lives in sunshine and happiness for an hour or two of memory every night, even if she has to die off while I go and do my day's work.

Life is really awfully funny and un-understandable. Why are we given feelings we've got to squash?

Are we big if we squash them and little if we let them grow?

I wouldn't squash my feelings about Cheneston.

I simply love them.

I couldn't squash them even if I knew I would grow such a huge and splendid national character, and such a power for good, that they would give me a gold-leaf Pamela Memorial in Kensington Gardens with a lightning conductor, and ten lines in the _London Guide Book_ all to myself.

*XV*

I have lost my job, and the little Russian tailoress presses my skirt every day and has lent me a pound.

Russia doesn't seem a lucky country for me; the cinema proprietor was a young Russian Jew, and when the August orders about Russians serving came up he got five months' exemption, and now he's joined up and the cinema has been turned into a Y.M.C.A. canteen. I help them two nights a week.

It was funny; the other day there were a lot of men expected in. It's just outside the station, and often we get officers, and an officer in Walter Markham's regiment came in. I knew it was his battalion. The officer was just home on leave. I asked him if he knew Captain Markham.

"Used to be under him," he said. "Went West, poor chap! Died in a hospital somewhere up North."

"Are you sure he died?" I said.

"Positive. He had a sudden relapse. Ballyntine, one of our senior officers, was pipped at the same time and got sent to the same hospital. He was there when Markham died. He's rejoined since; he's out there now. Why? Did you know Markham?"

"He was a great friend of a friend of mine."

"Jolly decent chap," the young officer said.

I thought it such an accurate epitaph. He was a jolly decent chap. I turned away because my eyes were so full of tears.

If he had recovered and I had married him I could never, never have made him happy. I should have been one of those wives who suddenly look at their husbands with vacant eyes, and have thoughts they cannot tell when they are asked--you see, Cheneston Cromer is with me for keeps, the memory of him will never go, and I know that often I should wander away from Walter with Cheneston, and be sorry to come back, and Walter was too great a dear to treat like that, a very gallant and honest English gentleman.

Regina Merolovitch has found me a "job" at twenty-five shillings a week. She says it is only temporary, and soon I shall find something better; but I don't know. I am only "honest and willing," and the world seems overcrowded with honesty and willingness unadorned.

I "do anything" for Madame Cherry, who has a little cherry-coloured shop with grey fittings and purple hangings in the West End. Sometimes I am in the showroom, sometimes I make tea for the girls, sometimes I pick pins off the showroom floor, sometimes I "match" things at the big London stores, sometimes I take things home to customers.

I marvel at the prices people pay for clothes. The people who fluff in and say, "I must have some little cheap thing, madame," seem to pay most and buy most.

Madame made a wonderful "little cheap thing" the other day--black tulle over blue tulle, and all of it edged with blue beetles' wings, and blue tissue round the waist to match.

It was done in a violent hurry because "he" was coming home on leave; "he" was staying at the Savoy with her for a few days, and then they were going down to their country seat when he had seen about his kit.

She paid for the girl's "hurry."

Madame never breaks her promises.

She had promised it by seven, and I was to deliver it at the Savoy.

"And wear your best coat and skirt; and if it is fine you can wear that blue velour hat that has just come in, but don't put any pins in it," said Madame. "I can't have people carrying my boxes and going to the Savoy looking anyhow."

Madame's boxes are French grey with bunches of cherries on them, tied with gay cherry ribbons, and "Cherry" written across. They are a part of her general scheme.

I had one of them on my arm when I went to the Savoy.

I like the Savoy; it never smells foody, and the orchestra chats to itself instead of shouting at you. I like an orchestra that chats to itself, and then you can talk without feeling you oughtn't to.

I was very, very tired, and I did feel an awful alien in that place. It's not personality or breeding that makes you feel at home in big restaurants and hotels--it's just clothes. It doesn't matter if you've given your twelve country seats to the country for hospitals, and you've got the newest thing in Rolls Royce's nestling on the kerb outside; if you've got the wrong clothes on you feel as out-of-place and insignificant as a flapper at a silver wedding.

I found the right suite and delivered the box; an ecstatic young woman rushed out in a violet kimona with black storks on it. I think my appearance rather nonplussed her, it's horribly embarrassing to wear decently cut clothes sometimes.

"Are you Madame Cherry's daughter?" she said. "Well--it's frightfully decent of you to bring it--er--will you have a cocktail or anything?"

I went down the lift with a huge box of Fuller's chocolates tucked under my arm.

I adore Fuller's chocolates.

As I stepped out of the lift at the bottom someone grasped my arm and said:

"Pam! Pamela Burbridge!"

It was Grace Gilpin.

She looked simply gorgeous.

She wore a cloak of dull velvet the exact colour of her hair, with a great skunk collar. There was a sort of laughing radiancy about her, as if she were bubbling and dancing with happiness.

I wondered if she knew that my people didn't know where I was. I thought I could trust mother for that. I was right.

"I met Mrs. Burbridge not so very long ago," she said. "She was most mysterious and injured about you, Pam. What have you been doing? She seemed quite martyred. I couldn't get anything out of her. Have you got married, or gone on the stage, or what? Won't Cheneston be surprised! You must stay and have dinner with us and tell us all your misdeeds."

"Cheneston?" I said.