JOHN FREKE was one of the most highly respected men in Medlow. A great leader in municipal affairs, he had twice been Mayor of the town and was Chairman of the local hospital, President of clubs and associations innumerable, and held Provincial Masonic rank. But as John Freke persisted in walking about the draper’s shop in Old Street, established by his grandfather, his family consorted, not with the gentry of the neighbourhood, but with the “homely folk” such as the Trivetts and the Gales. His daughter, Lydia, and Olivia had been friends in the far-off days, although Lydia was five years older. She was tall and creamy and massive and capable, and had a rich contralto voice; and Olivia, very young and eager, had, for a brief period, sat adoring at her feet. Then Lydia had married a young officer of Territorials who had been billeted on her father, and Olivia had seen her no more. As a young war-wife she pursued all kinds of interesting avocations remote from Medlow, and, as a young war-widow, had set up a hat shop in Maddox Street. Rumour had it that she prospered. The best of relations apparently existed between herself and old John Freke, who put up the capital for her venture, and desultory correspondence had kept her in touch with Olivia. The fine frenzy of girlish worship had been cured long ago by Lydia’s cruel lack of confidence during her courtship. The announcement of the engagement had been a shock; the engagement itself a revelation of selfish preoccupation. A plain young sister had been sole bridesmaid at the wedding, and the only sign of Lydia’s life during the honeymoon had been a picture postcard on the correspondence space of which was scrawled “This is a heavenly place. Lydia Dawlish.” Then had followed the years of sorrow and stress, during which Olivia’s hurt at the other’s gracelessness had passed, like a childish thing, away. Lydia’s succeeding letters, mainly of condolence, had, however, kept unbroken the fragile thread of friendship. The last, especially, written after Mrs. Gale’s death, gave evidence of sincere feeling, and emboldened Olivia, who knew no other mortal soul in London—the real London, which did not embrace the Clapham aunt and uncle—to seek her practical advice. In the voluminous response she recognized the old capable Lydia. Letter followed letter until, with Mr. Trivett’s professional assistance, she found herself the lucky tenant of a little suite in a set of service flats in Victoria Street.
She entered into possession a fortnight after her interview with Blaise Olifant, who was to take up residence at “The Towers” the following day. Mr. Trivett and his wife, Mr. Fenmarch and Mr. Freke, and the elder Miss Freke, who kept house for her father, saw her off at the station, covering her with their protective wings to the last moment. Each elderly gentleman drew her aside, and, with wagging of benevolent head, offered help in time of trouble. They all seemed to think she was making for disaster.
But their solicitude touched her deeply. The lump that had arisen in her throat when she had passed out across the threshold of her old home swelled uncomfortably, and, when the train moved off and she responded to waving hands and hats on the platform, tears stood in her eyes. Presently she recovered.
“Why should things so dear be so dismal?”
Myra, exhibiting no symptoms of exhilaration, did not reply. As they approached London, Olivia’s spirits rose. At last the dream of the past weeks was about to be realized. When she stepped out of the train at Paddington, it was with the throb of the conqueror setting foot, for the first time on coveted territory. She devoured with her eyes, through the taxi windows, the shops and sights and the movement of the great thoroughfares through which they passed on their way to Victoria Mansions, where her fifth-floor eyrie was situated. Once there, Myra, accustomed to the spacious family house, sniffed at the exiguous accommodation and sarcastically remarked that it would have been better if air were laid on like gas. But Olivia paid little heed to her immediate surroundings. The cramped flat was but the campaigner’s tent. Her sphere of action lay limitless beyond the conventional walls. The walls, however, bounded the sphere of Myra, who had no conception of glorious adventure. The rapidly ascending lift had caused qualms in an unaccustomed stomach, and she felt uneasy at living at such a height above the ground. Why Olivia could not have carried on for indefinite years in the comfort and security of “The Towers” she was at a loss to imagine. Why give up the ease of a big house for poky lodgings halfway up to the sky. A sitting-room, a bedroom, a slip with a bed in it for herself, a bathroom—Myra thanked goodness both of them were slim—and that was the London of Olivia’s promise. She sighed. At last put down Olivia’s aberration to the war. The war, in those days, explained everything.
Meanwhile Olivia had thrown up the sash of the sitting-room window and was gazing down at the ceaseless traffic in the street far below—gazing down on the roofs of the taxis and automobiles which sped like swift flat beetles, on the dwarfed yet monstrous insects that were the motor-buses, on the foreshortened dots of the hurrying ant-like swarms of pedestrians. It was gathering dusk, and already a few lights gleamed from the masses of buildings across the way. Soon the street lamps sprang into successive points of illumination. She stood fascinated, watching the rapid change from December day into December night, until at last the distant road seemed but a fantastic medley of ever-dying, ever-recurring sounds and flashes of white and red. Yet it was not fantastic chaos—her heart leapt at the thought—it was pregnant with significance. All that rumble and hooting and darting light proclaimed human purpose and endeavour, mysterious, breath-catching in its unknown and vast corporate intensity. Shivers of ecstasy ran through her. At last she herself was a unit in this eager life of London. She would have her place in the absorbing yet perplexing drama into the midst of which she had stepped with no key to its meaning. But she would pick up the threads, learn what had gone before—of that she felt certain—and then—she laughed—she would play her part with the best of them. To-morrow she would be scurrying about among them, with her definite human aims. Why not to-night? Delirious thought! She was free. She could walk out into the throbbing thoroughfares and who could say her nay? She put her hand to her bosom and felt the crackle of ten five-pound notes. To emotional girlhood the feel of money, money not to hoard and make-do for weeks and weeks with the spectre of want ever in attendance, but money to fling recklessly about, has its barbaric thrill. Suppose she let slip from her fingers one of the notes and it swayed and fluttered down, down, down, until at last it reached the pavement, and suppose a poor starving girl picked it up and carried it home to her invalid mother. . . . But, on the other hand, suppose—and her profound and cynical knowledge of human chances assured her that it would be a thousand to one probability—supposing it fell on the silk hat of a corpulent profiteer! No. She was not going to shower promiscuous five-pound notes over London. But still the crackling wad meant power. She was free to go forth there and then and purchase all the joys, for herself and others, hovering over there in that luminous haze over the Westminster towers of the magical city of dreams.
She withdrew from the window and stood in the dark room, a light in her eyes, and clenched her hands. Yes. She would go out, now, and walk and walk, and fill her soul with the wonder of it all.
And then practical memory administered a prosaic jog to her aspiring spirit. Lydia Dawlish was coming to dine with her in the common dining-room or restaurant downstairs. Shivering with cold, she shut the window, turned on the light and sat by the fire, and ordered tea in the most matter-of-fact way in the world.
Lydia Dawlish appeared a couple of hours afterwards—fair, plump, and prosperous, attired in one of her own dashing creations of hats set at a rakish angle on her blond hair, and a vast coat of dark fur. Olivia, in her simple black semi-evening frock run up by an agitated Medlow dressmaker, felt a poor little dot of a thing before this regal personage. And when the guest threw off the coat, the flowered silk lining of which was a dazing joy to starved feminine eyes, and revealed the slate-blue dinner gown from which creamy neck and shapely arms emerged insolent, Olivia could do nothing but stare open-mouthed, until power came to gasp her wonder and admiration.
“It’s only an old thing,” said Lydia. “I had to put on a compromise between downstairs and Percy’s.”
“Percy’s?”
“Yes—don’t you know? The night club. I’m going on afterwards.”
Olivia’s face fell. “I thought you were going to spend the evening with me.”
“Of course I am, silly child. Night clubs don’t begin till eleven. A man, Sydney Rooke, is calling for me. Well. How are you? And what are your plans now you’ve got here?”
She radiated health and vigour. Also proclaimed sex defiant, vaguely disquieting to the country bred girl. Olivia felt suddenly shy.
“It will take me a few days to turn round.”
“Also to find clothes to turn round in,” said Lydia, with a good-humoured yet comprehensive glance at the funny little black frock. “I hope you haven’t been laying in a stock of things like that.”
Olivia smiled. This was but a makeshift. She had been saving up for London. Perhaps Lydia would advise her. She had heard of a good place—what did they call it?—an enormous shop in Oxford Street. Lydia threw up her white arms.
“My dear child, you’re not going to be a fashionable beauty at subscription dances and whist-drives at Upper Tooting! You’re going to live in London. Good God! You can’t get clothes in Oxford Street.”
“Where shall I get them, then?” asked Olivia.
From the illustrated papers she had become aware of the existence of Pacotille and Luquin and other mongers of celestial fripperies; but she had also heard of the Stock Exchange and the Court of St. James’s and the Stepney Board of Guardians; and they all seemed equally remote from her sphere of being.
“I’ll take you about with me to-morrow,” Lydia declared grandly, “and put you in the way of things. I dare say I can find you a hat or two chez Lydia—that’s me—at cost price.” She laughed and put a patronizing arm around Olivia’s shoulders. “We’ll make a woman of you yet.”
The lift carried them down to the restaurant floor. They dined, not too badly, at a side table from which they could view the small crowded room. Olivia felt disappointed. Only a few people were in evening dress. It was rather a dowdy assembly, very much like that in the boarding-house at Llandudno, her father’s summer holiday resort for years before the war. Her inexperience had expected the glitter and joy of London. Hospitably she offered wine, champagne, as her father, a lover of celebrations, would have done; but Lydia drank nothing with her meals—the only way not to get fat, which she dreaded. Olivia drank water. The feast seemed tame, and the imported mutton tough. She reproached herself for inadequate entertainment of her resplendent friend.
They talked; chiefly Lydia, after she had received Olivia’s report on her family’s welfare and contemporary Medlow affairs; and Olivia listened contentedly, absorbing every minute strange esoteric knowledge of the great London world of which the pulsating centre appeared to be Lydia, Ltd., in Maddox Street. There Duchesses bought hats which their Dukes did not pay for. There Cabinet Ministers’ wives, in the hope of getting on the right financial side of Lydia, whispered confidential Cabinet secrets, while Ministers wondered how the deuce things got into the papers. There romantic engagements were brought from inception to maturity. There also, had she chosen to keep a record, she could have accumulated enough evidence to bring about the divorces of half the aristocracy of England. She rattled off the names like a machine-gun. She impressed Olivia with the fact that Lydia, Ltd., was not a mere hat shop, but a social institution of which Lydia Dawlish was the creating and inspiring personality. Lydia, it appeared, weekended at great houses. “You see, my dear, my husband was the son of an Honourable and the grandson of an Earl. He hadn’t much money, poor darling, but still he had the connection, most useful to me nowadays. The family buy their hats from me, and spread the glad tidings.” She commanded a legion of men who had vowed that she should live, free of charge, on the fat of the land, and should travel whithersoever she desired in swift and luxurious motor-cars.
“Of course, my dear,” she said, “it’s rather a strain. Men will cart about a stylish, good-looking woman for a certain time, just out of vanity. But if she’s a dull damn fool, they’re either bored to tears and chuck her, or they’ll want to—well—well—— Anyhow, you’ve got to keep your wits about you and amuse them. You’ve got to pay for everything in this life—or work for the means of paying—which comes to the same thing. And I work. I don’t say it isn’t pleasant work—but it’s hard work. You go out with a man to dinner, theatre and a night club, and dismiss him at your front door at two o’clock in the morning with the perfectly contented feeling that he has had a perfectly good time and would be an ass to spoil things by hinting at anything different—and you’ve jolly well earned your comfortable, innocent night’s rest.”
This explosion of the whole philosophy of modern conscientious woman came at the end of dinner. Olivia toyed absently with her coffee, watching successive spoonfuls of tepid light-amber coloured liquid fall into her cup.
“But—all these men—” she said in a low voice—the position was so baffling and so disconcerting. “You are a beautiful and clever woman. Don’t they sometimes want to—to make love to you?”
“They all do. What do you think? I, an unattached widow and, as you say, not unattractive. But because I’m clever, I head them off. That’s the whole point of what I’ve been telling you.”
“But, suppose,” replied Olivia, still intent on the yellowish water, “suppose you fell in love with one of these men. Women do fall in love, I believe.”
“Why then, I’d marry him the next day,” cried Lydia, with a laugh. “But,” she added, “that’s not the type of man a sensible woman falls in love with.”
Olivia’s eyes sought the tablecloth. She was conscious of disturbance and, at the same time, virginal resentment.
“As far as my limited experience goes—a woman isn’t always sensible.”
“She has to learn sense. That’s the great advantage of modern life. It gives her every opportunity of acquiring it from the moment she goes out into the world.”
“And what kind of man does the sensible woman fall in love with?”
“Somebody comfortable,” replied Lydia. “My ideal would be a young, rather lazy and very broad-minded bishop.”
Olivia shook her head. The only time she had seen a bishop was at her confirmation. The encounter did not encourage dreams of romance in episcopal circles.
“But these men who take you out,” Olivia persisted thoughtfully “and do all these wonderful things for you—it must cost them a dreadful lot of money—what kind of people are they?”
“All sorts. Some are of the very best—the backbone of the nation. They go off and marry nice girls who don’t frequent night clubs and settle down for the rest of their lives.”
They drank their coffee and went upstairs, where questions of more immediate practical interest occupied their minds. Olivia’s wardrobe was passed in review, while Myra stood impassive like a sergeant at kit inspection.
“My poor child,” said Lydia, “you’ve not a single article, inside or outside, that is fit to wear. I’ll send you a second-hand clothes man who’ll buy up the whole lot as it stands and give you a good price for it. I don’t know yet quite what you’re thinking of doing—but at any rate you can’t do it in these things.”
Olivia looked wistfully at the home-made garments which Lydia cast with scorn across the bed. They, at least, had seemed quite dainty and appropriate.
“Well,” she said, with a sigh, “you know best, Lydia.”
These all-important matters held their attention till a quarter past eleven, when Mr. Sydney Rooke was announced. He was an elderly young man in evening dress, with crisp black hair parted in the middle and thinning at the temples. A little military moustache gave him an air of youth which was belied by deep lines in his sallow face. His dark eyes were rather tired and his mouth hard. But his manners were perfect. He gave them both to understand that though Lydia was, naturally, the lady of his evening’s devotion yet his heart was filled with a sense of Olivia’s graciousness. Half a dozen words and a bow did it. In a polite phrase, a bow and a gesture he indicated that if Miss Gale would join them, his cup of happiness would overflow. Olivia pleaded fatigue. Then another evening? With Mrs. Dawlish. A pleasant little party, in fact. He would be enchanted.
“We’ll fix it up for about a fortnight hence,” said Lydia significantly. “To-morrow, then, dear, at eleven.”
When they had gone Olivia, who had accompanied them to the flat door, threw herself on the sofa and, putting her hands behind her head stared over the edge of her own world into a new one, strange and bewildering.
Myra entered.
“Are you ever going to bed?”
“I suppose I must,” said Olivia.
“Are dressed-up men like that often coming here?”
“God knows,” said Olivia, “who are coming here. I don’t.”