Part 10

He half turned away but Mrs. Pratt laid her hand on his arm as her voice went on gently:

"That action was so like your wonderful mother, dear boy. You're all she's got and yet she'll sacrifice herself to let you go if you want. Now don't you think you could make a little sacrifice for her and stay at home?"

Edwin kicked the leg of the tea table and fidgeted with his hands, but he did not answer.

"You see it's no use," said Dora bitterly. "He'll do nothing for me; better say no more."

She poured out tea, clattering the china in her nervous annoyance.

Mrs. Pratt began again:

"Oh, Edwin, dear, I'm sure you don't mean to be unkind----" but Edwin interrupted her rudely. His mouth was shaking, but his voice was quite steady.

"It isn't fair," he said passionately. "It isn't fair of Mother to begin at me again. She shouldn't have told you anything about it. I said I'd do what she wanted, but it was all arranged that I could go and now she's gone and raked it all up again with you. But I'm going all the same."

He stopped confusedly, and became aware of his mother moaning gently: "Oh, Edwin, oh, Edwin!" Mrs. Pratt was repeating in her amazement. "Well, I'd never have believed it; I'd never have believed it."

"Believe what you like," Edwin addressed her distractedly and turned to his mother. "Don't go on saying 'Oh, Edwin'," he shouted. "I hate my name; I hate everything."

He ran from the drawing-room, and Mrs. Greene subsided into tears.

"My poor Dora," said Mrs. Pratt soothingly. "My poor, dear Dora, what a terrible afternoon. I know how sensitive you are, and how you must suffer from such a scene."

"Indeed I do. Nothing could be more unlike me. But what can I do? My son's been taken from me by his grandmother. I'm powerless against her."

"It's shocking, really shocking, and especially when you've got nobody but him."

"I've always been lonely; I've had very little happiness since I was a girl. When I look back to my old home and then think of what I've suffered since I left it, I often wonder I've lived so long."

"You're wonderful, Dora; always so brave, always putting the best face on things."

"I do try," said Dora beginning to brighten, "But oh how difficult it is when Edwin behaves to me like this."

"I don't think you should worry. I'm sure it must be Mrs. Greene's influence. No boy of his age could possibly behave like that unless his mind was being poisoned."

"Do you really think so?" asked Dora with interest.

"I do," said Mrs. Pratt, dropping her voice to a mysterious note. "And I really think you ought to work out some scheme to prevent it."

"But what can I do?" There was pause, and then Mrs. Pratt spoke triumphantly.

"I know, Dora. I've thought of the very idea. You must let him go this visit, and then towards the end of next term you must write and say you're not at all well, and the doctor is very anxious about you and says that you must be spared all worries and troubles."

"But I'm quite well," said Dora limply.

"Yes, of course, I know you are, but don't you see? It's a real opportunity for you if you do that. He can't go and stay with the old woman if your heart is weak, and gradually you can get him away from her influence."

"I'll do anything for Edwin. You know that, Violet. I'll make any sacrifice for him; anything to free him from this terrible effect his grannie is having on him."

Dora spoke earnestly, beginning to believe under the spell of Mrs. Pratt's suggestion that Mrs. Greene was indeed exercising a malign influence on her son.

The plot to rescue Edwin was gradually evolved in all its details, but it was never carried out.

Early in November, Dora received a telegram that sent her straight to Waterloo, and thence--after a hideous hour of waiting for a train--down to Edwin's school, where she was greeted by his pale and anxious-looking headmaster.

"I have very bad news for you," he said. "I find it utterly impossible to express my regrets and sympathy."

"Is Edwin alive?" asked Dora Greene steadily.

"Yes, he is alive," answered Mr. Foster. "But the doctor has seen him and the spine is severely injured. He is quite unconscious."

"Will he live?"

Dora Greene, to whom tears came so easily, was dry-eyed and stony as she asked the question and listened to the answer.

"Only for a few hours. He may regain consciousness before the end."

"Tell me exactly how it happened, please."

"It appears that this morning during the recreation half-hour, Edwin and another boy were so foolish as to dare each other to walk round the gymnasium roof on the coping that you can see from here." Mr. Foster moved over to the window as he spoke. Mrs. Greene followed him and stood looking at the long, high building jutting out from the side of the house.

"Is that the coping?" she asked, "where that bird is?" A pigeon was walking jerkily along the narrow ledge, stopping every now and again to nod its head with meaningless little movements.

"Yes, that's it. I need hardly tell you that it is absolutely against the rules to do so, and indeed no boy has ever before made the attempt. Edwin was to go first. He climbed out through a dormitory window, up a sloping piece of roof and from that on to the coping. He walked quite steadily the full length of the building, but at the corner the boys think he looked down and got dizzy. Anyhow he fell."

Mr. Foster stopped for a moment. His voice was husky as he continued:

"I was there in a few minutes; the matron too, but he was quite unconscious. When the doctor came we moved him into a ground-floor room, and the doctor fitted up a bed and made his examination."

Mr. Foster looked desperately at the silent woman confronting him and said again:

"I cannot tell you Mrs. Greene, what this means to me. It's the most tragic thing that has happened in all my school career."

"I should like to see Edwin now, please," said Mrs. Greene, and was taken to the class-room where Edwin lay, his eyes closed, his rosy face pale and drawn, on an improvised bed.

The matron who was sitting beside him, rose and offered her chair to Mrs. Greene who sat down, still silent. All through the evening she sat there, gazing unflinchingly at the small figure on the bed. The doctor came in and spoke to her, but she did not answer. Food was brought on a tray, but she refused it. The matron sat opposite her on the other side of the bed, occasionally moving a pillow or bending down to listen to the child's uncertain breathing.

Towards eleven o'clock Edwin's heavy eyelids lifted and he looked vaguely at his mother.

"I didn't know you were here, Mother," he said uninterestedly.

"I've just come to see you, darling," said Dora Greene stooping to kiss him.

"Am I ill?" he asked.

"Yes, Edwin, you've had a bad accident."

Presently he asked, still passively:

"Am I going to die, do you think?"

"You've hurt yourself rather badly, dear," his mother answered and could not keep a tremor from her voice. He lay still with closed eyes. At the first sign of consciousness the matron had hurried from the room. She now came back with the doctor, who lifted Edwin's hand to feel his pulse and then laid it gently back on the coverlet.

Suddenly Edwin opened his eyes.

"I say, Mother," he said, with more animation than he had shown, "if I'm going to die, I'd awfully like to smoke a cigarette first."

Dora looked at the doctor, who shook his head. She stood up and drew him a little aside.

"Give me a cigarette," she said in a savage undertone. "Give me one at once; it can make no difference."

"I hardly think----" he began helplessly. But she interrupted, still in an undertone of concentrated intensity.

"Give me it at once; I insist."

The doctor handed her his case. She took out a cigarette.

"There, darling," she said to Edwin, and her voice was soft again. "Look, I'll put it in your mouth for you and light it."

The doctor gave her a match and she held the little flame steadily to Edwin's cigarette. He drew in a breath and choked a little.

"It's ripping," he said thickly. "Thanks awfully, Mother." His eyelids fell again and the cigarette dropped from his flaccid lips. With a little choking sigh, Edwin Greene died.

Mrs. Greene stood still, but in a moment the doctor took her arm.

"He's gone, Mrs. Greene; poor little chap. Will you come away now?"

But with a loud moan Dora Greene fell on her knees and subsided in a passion of tears over the body of her son.

"He's gone," she cried, "gone, and he never loved me. First his father took him from me, and then his grandmother, and now he's dead and I'll never have him."

For a moment both doctor and matron were taken aback by the sudden change from rigid self-control to complete abandon, but as the sobs turned into laughter and screams, both regained their composure. With some difficulty they half led, half carried, Dora Greene to the school sanatorium, where she passed the night between tears, hysteria and passionate vituperations against the father and grandmother who had robbed her of her son during his short life.

V

During the next few months Mrs. Pratt proved herself so willing a confidante, so soothing and consoling a listener that Dora Greene finally asked her to come and live with her.

The arrangement worked surprisingly well. Life settled into a routine of gossip, bridge and tea-parties, broken only by a joint summer holiday and an occasional week at Easter when Dora went to stay with her father, now a widower, but still running his small parish competently and successfully.

It was tacitly understood between the two ladies that when Mrs. Greene had indulged in a long narrative embracing every sorrow and grievance of her existence, she should pay for the luxury of having an audience by performing that function in her turn.

Mrs. Pratt's saga confined itself to full details of her sufferings at Mr. Pratt's hands during the months that preceded his departure from this life in a violent attack of delirium tremens.

Mrs. Greene was already acquainted with the history of Mr. Pratt's life and death, but it made good hearing none the less, and on the other hand Mrs. Pratt particularly enjoyed the point in Mrs. Greene's reminiscences at which handkerchiefs were brought out, and they recalled what a happy, bright boy little Edwin had been.

"Those were happy days," Dora would sigh fondly. "I was a happy wife and mother till death stole both my treasures."

"But you've been so wonderfully brave, dear," Mrs. Pratt would murmur. "See how you've built up your life again."

"I have been lucky in having you to help me. I couldn't have done it without you, Violet; you know how little use the Greenes have been to me."

This was an immensely satisfactory opening. Violet Pratt, a solitary woman except for her friendship with Dora Greene, enjoyed vicariously the many slights and rebuffs which Dora considered that she endured from her husband's relations.

By 1928 this list of slights had been added to by both Mrs. Rodney's daughter-in-laws. Helen, Mrs. Geoffrey Greene had failed to call on her Aunt Dora for nearly two years, and had moreover never once invited her to a meal of any sort.

"Not even tea," said Dora acidly. "And you can hardly think that would be too much trouble even in a small house."

"Indeed you can not," Mrs. Pratt answered warmly. "And especially after the kind way you asked her to dinner as a bride."

But the most recent insult was naturally the most interesting.

At the wedding of Hugh and Jessica only three weeks ago, Mrs. Edwin, arriving a little late when the bride was already in the church, had been hustled into a back seat instead of being allowed to take her place in one of the front pews with the rest of the family.

"Of course I don't really blame Jessica," said Dora, as she had already said some twenty or thirty times during the last three weeks. "But still, it just shows. Some arrangement should surely have been made for me to take my proper place, and even if I was a little late, well, I haven't a motor like some of the others."

"I expect it was all Mrs. Rodney's doing," suggested Mrs. Pratt darkly.

Dora pounced on this.

"Do you really think so?" she asked eagerly. "Well, I wouldn't be surprised at anything after the way she has always looked down on me and put me on one side."

It was at this propitious moment that the maid brought in a letter at which Dora exclaimed triumphantly:

"There now, talk of the Devil----"

She read the letter and handed it to Mrs. Pratt.

"Read that, Violet," she said. "Read it and tell me what you think of it. I should have thought that even Edith might have remembered that next week is the anniversary of little Edwin's death. Not the actual day of course, but I should have thought that a different week altogether would have shown more courtesy and consideration. She knows I always keep these few days sacred to my memories."

Mrs. Pratt read the short letter.

"207 Sussex Square, "November 12th.

"DEAR DORA,

"I hear that Aunt Sarah is to be in town next week when Hugh and Jessica get home from their honeymoon, and I feel it would be nice both for her and for Mrs. Greene to have a reunion with the young people. There are six of us now, and my idea is to have a little dinner-party next Friday night at 7.45, for the six Mrs. Greenes. I do hope you will be able to come; both the old ladies are getting rather frail now, and I think it would give them pleasure.

"With love from Rodney and myself,

"Your affectionate sister-in-law, "EDITH GREENE."

Mrs. Pratt sniffed.

"I see," she said venomously. "I see, Mrs. Rodney makes it sound like a treat for her mother-in-law, but I suppose its just to make another opportunity for showing off."

"Of course it is," answered Dora angrily. "And what a cruel week to choose. She can't have forgotten old Mrs. Greene's wickedness to my poor little Edwin and yet she asks me to meet her almost on the anniversary of his death. And I don't at all care about meeting Hugh and Jessica after the way I was treated at their wedding."

"I should refuse if I were you, Dora."

"I've a good mind to do so. I should have thought even Edith would have known better than to ask me to a party next week."

"Perhaps she doesn't mean you to accept."

"That's probably it, Violet. I believe you're right. She's chosen that date purposely so that I shan't go. Well, she'll be disappointed for once. I'll go. I'll write this minute and tell her that I'll come but that I think she should have known better than to ask me."

Dora Greene moved over to her desk.

"Come and help me, Violet," she said. "We must concoct a good letter."

The two ladies sat happily down to accept with the maximum of ungraciousness the invitation which would provide them for weeks to come with a fruitful topic of discussion and complaint.

MRS. GEOFFREY H. GREENE

MRS. GEOFFREY H. GREENE

I

It was at Lavinia's wedding that Geoffrey was introduced to a tall girl wearing a green frock and a green hat fitting her head so closely that only two small curves of bright hair were visible on her cheeks.

She looked moody and impatient, and when he asked if she had seen the presents she said: "No thanks, I don't want to."

Slightly repelled by her manner but attracted by her lime green frock and her copper-beech hair, Geoffrey tried again.

"Shall we get out of the crowd and find a peaceful corner somewhere?"

She shook her head.

"No, I don't really think it's worth while," she said. "I'm going home now. I wouldn't have come at all if I hadn't been afraid Martin's parents would be piqued, but now they've both seen me so I can justifiably escape."

Geoffrey noticed that her eyes were a clear, cool grey that contradicted the warmth of her hair, and he liked the wide smile that lightened her face as she explained her presence at the wedding, so there was a trace of eagerness in his voice as he asked:

"Are you a Peile relation then? I'm sorry I didn't hear your name when we were introduced."

"Yes, I'm a sort of cousin of Martin. My name's Helen Guest. I didn't hear your name either, but you're a Greene, of course."

"I'm Lavinia's brother."

"Yes, I thought you were. You're rather like her. She's extremely pretty, isn't she, but not at all paintable."

"Do you paint then?" asked Geoffrey diffidently, conscious of ignorance and anxious to avoid a snub.

She frowned. "Well, yes I do; off and on, and not very well. But there it is, I do. I'm going now. Good-bye."

Her smile followed quickly on her frown, she nodded to him, and merged into the crowd, leaving Geoffrey bewildered and a little depressed and solitary.

Three months later when he met her at dinner at Lavinia and Martin's house, he went up to her with the pleasant sensation of renewing an interrupted friendship.

"How do you do, Miss Guest," he began. "I've been hoping to meet you again in some place not so crowded as the last time."

Helen looked at him coldly and directly.

"Was there a last time?" she queried.

"I beg your pardon?"

"I merely said, 'Was there a last time?'" she repeated in a nonchalant voice.

Geoffrey flushed.

"Yes," he said very distinctly, and his look matched hers in coldness. "We met before at Lavinia's wedding which you were not enjoying very much. You said I was very like my sister who was pretty but not paintable, and you were wearing a green frock, very much the colour of the one you've got on now. Have I produced sufficient evidence to prove that I am not trying the old familiar gambit of 'where have we met before?'"

He noticed that her cheeks were scarlet and that she was obviously discomfited, and it surprised him that anyone so aggressive should be so easily routed. She stood silent for a moment, and then laughed suddenly.

"We're obviously going to quarrel," she said. "Let's do it nicely; we'll preserve a state of armed neutrality as long as we can, and when we have to abandon it we'll keep to all the rules of pretty fighting, and to begin with I'll admit that I remember you quite well at the wedding. I was only being contrary."

Geoffrey's heart leapt. There was something fresh and vital about this girl. She provoked him, but she attracted him far more. He found it immensely stimulating to be repelled by her at one moment, and in the next, subjugated by her candid charm.

He sat opposite her at dinner, and though she talked animatedly to the man on her left, her colour remained high and he knew that she was conscious of him.

He speculated hazily on the nature of her attraction for him and decided that it was partly due to her looks, partly to her brusque inconsistency, and that undoubtedly in this strange duel which had started between them, hers was the next move. It was his role to wait and lurk, hers to make the attack or the appeal.

After dinner two tables for bridge were arranged, with Geoffrey at one, Helen at the other, and he did not speak to her again until, after saying good-night to Lavinia, she half-turned to him, bringing into play the suave clear line of chin and throat.

"I'll take you home if you like," she offered casually. "I've got my car here."

As Geoffrey thanked her formally he felt that again she had put him at a disadvantage. He should have had a car to take her home in, but for her to take him, dropping him like a small boy at his mother's front door, was humiliating. It irked him to sit idle while she slipped into the driver's seat and pressed a green slipper ruthlessly on the starter knob. There was a moment of rending noise, then, "Better let me turn her over once or twice," Geoffrey suggested. "The engine's bound to be cold if it's been standing out here all that long time with no rug on.

"I never do put a rug on," Helen looked at him sidelong. "If you once begin pampering your car there's no end to it."

Geoffrey burst out laughing. It re-established his superiority to find that she could be silly, petulant and peevish.

"I simply don't believe you," he said through the agonising noise of the self-starter. "You forgot I expect, and now you won't admit it."

At that minute the engine suddenly jumped to life, and Helen started the car with a grinding of gears and a jerk.

There was good ground for criticism but Geoffrey held his peace, and in a moment he heard her saying: "Do you want to go straight home or would you like to come to my studio for a bit?"

Surprised, he answered promptly.

"The studio most certainly, please."

"It's a queer untidy sort of hovel. Only a bedroom and a kitchen and a lovely big studio. I don't live there all the time you see. In fact my family kick against my living there at all, and I have to go home at frequent intervals. But when they get too much for me I come and live in the studio for a few weeks."

"Is the family atmosphere particularly trying then, and is it in London?"

"No, and yes. It is in London, in Lowndes Square, and it isn't really trying at all. They're darlings, but I'm very difficult, you know."

"So I should imagine," said Geoffrey softly, to which Helen only replied:

"Do you mind not talking? I can't cope with the traffic if I have to concentrate on you."

As they drove along the Embankment, Geoffrey twisted his body into the corner of the car, to watch her face as she drove. Even in the cold yellow light that struck over her as they approached each lamp-post, and faded so quickly as they passed it, her colouring disturbed and troubled him.

He wondered if she still had a trace of summer sunburn, or if all through the winter she kept that orange glow under her skin, so that it seemed to be lit from underneath. Concealed lighting, he thought vaguely; and very subtle too. Much more attractive than pink laid on, or even pink that looks as if it were the top surface; this is really orange and pink mixed, and a layer of skin over it all.

He was conscious of his hurried heart-beats and his thick, hurried breathing when he looked at the dark-red hair lying so flat on her glowing cheeks, and when for a second she turned to him, he found himself completely disconcerted.

"We're nearly there," she said. "It's painfully conventional to have a studio in Chelsea, but I couldn't find another that I liked."

She ran the car into a garage; they got out, walked along the road, and turned up a narrow little alley at the end of which they were confronted by a blue door.

Helen fumbled with her key; the lock was stiff; impatiently she flung back her dark shawl and stooped, green-frocked and red-haired, against the bright blue background.

Geoffrey took a step forward. The juxtaposition of the three colours was intolerable to his nerves, already jangled and overstrained. His chest was aching, his ears drumming, and just as the lock yielded he caught Helen in his arms and kissed her violently and repeatedly.

Suddenly he released her and stood on the threshold feeling cold and sick.

"I'm sorry," he said, "I've been unpardonable."

"You have," she said. "Entirely. I can't imagine what happened. Anyhow I think you'd better go now; everything's sordid and abominable."

There was a small red mark at the side of her mouth. Geoffrey stared at it stupidly and could not find anything to say that would not sound either meaningless or offensive. Suddenly he was filled with immense pity for himself and her, and words came easily.

"I've hurt you a little," he said, "I'm sorry, my dear, but I'm afraid we're bound to hurt each other, you and I. I never meant to kiss you; it was entirely because of the blue door and the way you stood against it. It really was too much, all that blazing blue and green, and your red hair."

"What do you mean?" she asked curiously. "You can come in for a minute if you like. I want to know what you mean when you say it was the blue door."