OLIVIA sat by her little table, dispensing tea and accepting homage with a flutter of pleasure at her heart. She had been oddly nervous—she who had entertained the stranger Olifant, at Medlow, with the greatest self-confidence, and had grown to regard tea parties at the flat as commonplaces of existence. The two men had drifted in from another sphere. She had reviewed her stock of conversation and found it shop-worn after five months’ exposure. The most recent of her views on “Hullo, People!” and on the food at the Carlton had appeared unworthy of the notice of the soldier-scientist and the adventurous man of letters. She had received them with unusual self-consciousness. This, however, a few moments of intercourse dispelled. They had come, they had seen and she had conquered. “At first I didn’t recognize you,” said Olifant. “I had to look twice to make sure.”
“Have I changed so much?” she asked.
“It was a trick of environment,” he said, with a smile in his dark blue eyes.
The feminine in her caught the admiration behind them and delightedly realized his confusion, the night before, at her metamorphosis from the prim little black-frocked quakeress into the radiant creature in furs and jewels and flame-coloured audacity.
“And now you’re quite sure it is me—or I—which is it?”
“I’m quite sure it’s my charming landlady who for the second time feeds the hungry wanderer. Miss Gale, Triona, makes a specialty of it.”
“Then, indeed, I’m peculiarly fortunate,” said Triona, taking a tomato sandwich. “Will you feed me again, Miss Gale?”
“As often as you like,” she laughed.
“That’s rather a rash promise to make to a professional vagabond like myself. When he has begged his way for months and months at a time, he comes to regard other people’s food as his by divine right.”
“Have you done that?” she asked.
“Much worse. You don’t keep chickens?”
“Not here.”
“That’s a good thing. I think I’m the world’s champion chicken-stealer. It’s a trick of legerdemain. You dive at a chicken, catch it by its neck, whirl it round and stick it under your jacket all in one action. The unconscious owner has only to turn his back for a second. Then, of course, you hide in a wood and have an orgy.”
“He is not the desperate character he makes himself out to be,” said Olifant. “He spent two months with me at ‘The Towers’ without molesting one of your hens.”
“Then you’re not still there?” she asked Triona.
“Alas, no,” he replied. “I suppose I have the fever of perpetual change. I had a letter from Finland saying that my presence might be of use there. So I have spent this spring in Helsingfors. I am only just back.”
“It seems wonderful to go and come among all these strange places,” said Olivia.
“One land is much the same as another in essentials,” replied Triona. “To carry on life you have to eat and sleep. There’s no difference between a hard-boiled egg in Somerset and a hard-boiled egg in Tobolsk. And sleep is sleep, whether you’re putting up at Claridge’s or the Hotel of the Beautiful Star. And human nature, stripped of the externals of habits, customs, traditions, ceremonials, is unchanging from one generation, and from one latitude or longitude, to another.”
“But,” objected Olivia, with a flash of logic, “if London’s the same as Tobolsk, why yearn for Tobolsk?”
“It’s the hope of finding something different—the ignis fatuus, the Jack o’ Lantern, the Will-o’-the-Wisp——” He was silent for a moment, and then she caught the flash of his eyes. “It’s the only thing that counts in human progress. The Will-o’-the-Wisp. It leaves nine hundred and ninety-nine men out of a thousand floundering in a bog—but the thousandth man wins through to the Land of Promise. There is only one thing in life to do,” he continued, clenching his nervous hands and looking into the distance away from Olivia, “and that is never to lose faith in your ignis fatuus—to compel it to be your guiding star. Once you’ve missed grip of it, you’re lost.”
“I wish I had your Russian idealism,” said Olifant.
“When will you learn, my dear friend,” said Triona quietly, “that I’m not a Russian? I’m as English as you are.”
“It’s your idealism that is Russian,” said Olivia.
“Do you think so?” he asked, deferentially. “Well, perhaps it is. In England you keep your ideals hidden until some great catastrophe happens, then you bring them out to help you along. Otherwise it is immodest to expose them. In Russia, ideals are exposed all the time, so that when the time for their application comes, they’re worn so thin they’re useless. Poor Russia,” he sighed. “It has idealized itself to extinction. All my boyhood’s companions—the students, the intelligentsia, as they called themselves, who used to sit and talk and talk for hours of their wonderful theories—you in England have no idea how Russian visionary can talk—and I learned to talk with them—where are they now? The fortunate were killed in action. The others, either massacred or rotting in prisons, or leading the filthy hunted lives of pariah dogs. The Beast arose like a foul shape from the Witch’s cauldron of their talk . . . and devoured them. Yes, perhaps the stolid English way is the better.”
“What about your Will-o’-the-Wisp theory?” asked Olivia.
He threw out his hands. “Ah! That is the secret. Keep it to yourself. Don’t point it out to a thousand people, and say: ‘Join me in the chase of the Will-o’-the-Wisp.’ For the thousand other people will each see an ignis fatuus of their own and point it out, so that there are myriads of them, and your brain reels, and you’re swallowed up in the bog to a dead certainty. In plain words, every human being must have his own individual and particular guiding star which he must follow steadfastly. My guiding star is not yours, Miss Gale, nor Olifant’s. We each have our own.”
Olifant smiled indulgently. “Moscovus loquitur,” he murmured.
“What’s that?” asked Olivia.
“He says, my dear Miss Gale, that the Russian will ever be talking.”
“I’m not so sure that I don’t approve,” said she.
Triona laid his hand on his heart and made a little bow. She went on, casting a rebuking glance at Olifant, who had begun to laugh:
“After all, it’s more entertaining and stimulating to talk about ideas than about stupid facts. Most people seem to regard an idea as a disease. They shy at it as if it were smallpox.”
Olifant protested. He was capable of playing football with ideas as any man. Self-satirical, he asked was he not of Balliol? Olivia, remembering opportunely a recent Cambridge dinner neighbour’s criticism of the famous Oxford College—at the time it had bored her indifferent mind—and an anecdote with which he drove home his remarks, that of a sixth-form contemporary who had written to him in the prime flush of his freshman’s term: “Balliol is not a college; it is a School of Thought,” cried out:
“Isn’t that rather a crude metaphor for Balliol?”
They quarrelled, drifted away from the point, swept Triona into a laughing argument on she knew not what. All she knew was that these two men were giving her the best of themselves; these two picked men of thought and action; that they were eager to interest her, to catch her word of approval; that some dancing thing within her brain played on their personalities and kept them at concert pitch.
She was conscious of a new joy, a new sense of power, when the door opened and Myra showed in Lydia Dawlish. She entered, enveloped in an atmosphere of furs and creamy worldliness. Aware of the effect of implicit scorn of snobbery, she besought Olifant for news of Medlow, dear Sleepy Hollow, which she had not seen for years. Had he come across her beloved eccentric of a father—old John Freke? Olifant gave her the best of news. He had lately joined the committee of the local hospital, of which Mr. Freke was Chairman; professed admiration for John Freke’s exceptional gifts.
“If he had gone out into the world, he might have been a great man,” said Lydia.
“He is a great man,” replied Olifant.
“What’s the good of being great in an overlooked chunk of the Stone Age like Medlow?”
She spoke with her lazy vivacity, obviously, to Olivia’s observant eye, seeking to establish herself with the two men. But the spell of the afternoon was broken. As soon as politeness allowed, Olifant and Triona took their leave. Had it not been for Lydia they would have stayed on indefinitely, forgetful of time, showing unconscious, and thereby all the more flattering, homage to their hostess. In a mild way she anathematized Lydia; but found a compensating tickle of pleasure in the lady’s failure to captivate.
To Olifant she said:
“Now that you know where your landlady lives, I hope you won’t go on neglecting her.”
But she waited for Triona to say:
“Shall I ever have the pleasure of seeing you again?”
“It all depends whether you can be communicated with,” she replied. “Alexis Triona, Esq., Planet Earth, Solar System, is an imposing address; but it might puzzle the General Post Office.”
“The Vanloo Hotel, South Kensington, is very much more modest.”
“It’s well for people to know where they can find one another,” said Olivia.
“That you should do me the honour of the slightest thought of finding me——” he began.
“We’ll fix up something soon,” Lydia interrupted. “I’m Miss Gale’s elderly, adopted aunt.”
Olivia felt a momentary shock, as though a tiny bolt of ice had passed through her. She sped a puzzled glance at a Lydia blandly unconscious of wrong-doing.
“I shall be delighted,” said Triona politely.
When the door had closed behind the two—
“What nice men,” said Lydia.
“Yes, they’re rather—nice,” replied Olivia, wondering why, in trying to qualify them in her mind, this particular adjective had never occurred to her. They were male, they spoke perfect English, they were well-mannered—and so, of course, they were nice. But it was such an inadequate word, completing no idea. Lydia’s atrophied sense of differentiation awoke the laughter in her eyes. Nice! So were Bobby Quinton, Sydney Rooke, Mauregard, a score of other commonplace types in Lydia’s set. But that Blaise Olifant and Alexis Triona should be lumped with them in this vaguely designated category, seemed funny.
Lydia went on:
“Major Olifant, of course, I knew from your description of him; but the other—the young man with the battered face—I didn’t place him.”
“Triona—Alexis Triona.”
“I seem to have heard the name,” said Lydia. “He writes or paints or lectures on Eugenics or something.”
“He has written a book on Russia,” replied Olivia drily.
“I’m fed up with Russia,” said Lydia dismissively. “Even if I wasn’t—I didn’t come here to talk about it. I came in about something quite different. What do you think has happened? Sydney Rooke has asked me to marry him.”
Olivia’s eyes flashed with the interest of genuine youth in a romantic proposal of marriage.
“My dear!” she cried. “How exciting!”
“I wish it were,” said Lydia, in her grey-eyed calmness. “Anyhow, it’s a bit upsetting. Of course I knew that he was married—separated years and years from his wife. Whether he couldn’t catch her out, or she couldn’t catch him out, I don’t know. But they couldn’t get a divorce. She was a Catholic and wouldn’t stand for the usual arrangement. Now she’s dead. Died a couple of months ago in California. He came in this morning with Lady Northborough—introducing her—the first time I had seen the woman. And he sat by and gave advice while she chose half a dozen hats. His judgment’s infallible, you know. He saw her to her car and came back. ‘Now I’ve done you a good turn,’ he said, ‘perhaps you’ll do me one. Give me five minutes with you in your cubby-hole.’ We went into my little office, and then he sprang this on me—the death of his wife and the proposal.”
“But it must have been exciting,” Olivia protested. “Yet——” she knitted her brow, “why the Lady Northborough barrage?”
“It’s his way,” said Lydia.
“What did you tell him?”
“I said I would give him my answer to-night.”
“Well?”
“I don’t know. He’s charming. He’s rolling in money—you remember the motor-car I turned down for obvious reasons—he knows all kinds of nice people—he’s fifty——”
“Fifty!” cried Olivia, aghast. To three and twenty fifty is senile.
“The widow’s ideal.”
“It’s exciting, but not romantic,” said Olivia.
“Romance perished on the eleventh of November, 1918. Since then it has been ‘Every woman for herself and the Devil take the hindmost.’ Are you aware that there are not half enough men to go round? So when a man with twenty thousand a year comes along, a woman has to think like—like——”
“Like Aristotle or Herbert Spencer, or the sailor’s parrot,” said Olivia. “Of course, dear. But is he so dreadfully wealthy as all that? What does he do?”
“He attends Boards of Directors. As far as I can make out he belongs to a Society for the Promotion of Un-christian Companies.”
“Don’t you care for him?”
Lydia shook her exquisitely picture-hatted head—she was a creamy Gainsborough or nothing.
“In that way, not a bit. Of course, he has been a real good friend to me. But after all—marriage—it’s difficult to explain——”
In spite of her cynicism, Lydia had always respected the girlhood of her friend. But Olivia flung the scornful arm of authority.
“There’s no need of explanation. I know all about it.”
“In that case——” said Lydia. She paused, lit a cigarette, and with her large, feline grace of writhing curves, settled herself more comfortably in the corner of the couch—“I thought you would bring a fresh mind to bear upon things. But no matter. In that case, dear, what would you advise?”
Before the girl’s mental vision arose the man in question—the old young man, the man of fifty, with the air and manner and dress of the man of twenty-five; his mark of superficial perfection that hid God knew what strange sins, stoniness of heart and blight of spirit. She saw him in his impeccable devotion to Lydia. But something in the imagined sight of him sent a shiver through her pure, yet not ignorant, maidenhood: something of which the virginal within her defied definition, yet something abhorrent. The motor-car had failed; now the wedding-ring. She recaptured the fleeting, disquieting sense of Lydia on her first evening in London—the woman’s large proclamation of sex. Instinctively she transferred her impression to the man, and threw a swift glance at Lydia lying there, milk and white, receptive.
A word once read and forgotten—a word in some French or English novel—sprang to her mind, scraped clear from the palimpsest of memory. Desirable. A breath-catching, hateful word. She stood aghast and shrinking on the edge of knowledge.
“My darling child, what on earth is the matter with you?”
Olivia started at the voice, as though awakening from a dream.
“I think it’s horrible,” she cried.
“What?”
“Marrying a man you can no more love than—— Ugh! I wouldn’t marry him for thousands of millions.”
“Why? I want to know.”
But the shiver in the girl’s soul could not be expressed in words.
“It’s a question of love,” she said lamely.
Lydia laughed, called her a romantic child. It was not a question of love, but of compatible temperament. Marriage wasn’t a week-end, but a life-end, trip. People had to get accustomed to each other in dressing-gowns and undress manners. She herself was sure that Sydney Rooke would wear the most Jermyn Street of dressing-gowns, at any rate. But the manners?
“They’ll always be as polished as his finger-nails,” said Olivia.
“I don’t see why you should speak like that of Sydney,” cried Lydia, with some show of spirit. “It’s rather ungrateful seeing how kind he has been to you.”
Which was true; Olivia admitted it.
“But the man who is kind to you, in a social way, isn’t always the man you would like to marry.”
“But it’s I, not you,” Lydia protested, “who am going to marry him.”
“Then you are going to marry him?”
“I don’t see anything else to do,” replied Lydia, and she went again over the twenty thousand a year argument. Olivia saw that her hesitations were those of a cool brain and not of an ardent spirit, and she knew that the brain had already come to a decision.
“I quite see,” said Lydia half apologetically, “that you think I ought to wait until I fall in love with a man. But I should have to wait till Doomsday. I thought I was in love with poor dear Fred. But I wasn’t. I’m not that sort. If Fred had gone on living I should have gone on letting him adore me and have been perfectly happy—so long as he didn’t expect me to adore him.”
“Doesn’t Mr. Rooke expect you to adore him?” asked Olivia.
Lydia laughed, showing her white teeth, and shook a wise and mirthful head.
“I’m convinced that was the secret of his first unhappy marriage.”
“What?”
“The poor lady adored him and bored him to frenzy.”
The clock on the mantelpiece struck the half-hour after six. Lydia rose. She must go home and dress. She was dining with Rooke at Claridge’s at eight.
“I’m so glad we’ve had this little talk,” she said. “I felt I must tell you.”
“I thought you wanted my advice,” said Olivia.
“Oh, you silly!” answered Lydia, gathering her furs around her.
They exchanged the conventional parting kiss. Olivia accompanied her to the landing. When the summoned lift appeared and its doors clashed open, Lydia said:
“You wouldn’t like to take over that hat shop at a valuation, would you?”
“Good heavens, no!” cried the astounded Olivia.
Lydia laughed and waved a grey-gloved hand and disappeared downwards, like the Lady of the Venusberg in an antiquated opera.
Olivia re-entered the flat thoughtfully, and sat down in an arm-chair by the tiny wood fire in the sitting-room grate. Lydia and Lydia’s galley, and all that it signified, disturbed her more than ever. They seemed not only to have no ideals even as ballast, but to have flung them overboard like so many curse-ridden Jonahs. To what soulless land was she speeding with them? And not only herself, but the England, of which she, as much as any individual, was a representative unit? Was it for the reaching of such a haven that her brothers had given their lives? Was it that she should reach such a haven that her mother, instinct with heroic passion, had sent Stephen Gale forth to death? Was it to guide the world on this Lydian path that Blaise Olifant had given an arm and young Triona had cheerfully endured Dantesque torturings?
Myra came in and began to remove the tea-things—Myra, gaunt, with her impassive, inexpressible face, correct in black; silk blouse, stuff skirt, silk apron. Olivia, disturbed in her efforts to solve the riddle of existence, swerved in her chair and half-humorously sought the first human aid to hand.
“Myra, tell me. Why do you go on living?”
Myra made no pause in her methodical activity.
“God put me into the world to live. It’s my duty to live,” she replied in her toneless way. “And God ordained me to live so that I should do my duty.”
“And what do you think is your duty?” Olivia asked.
“You, of all people in the world, ought to know that,” said Myra, holding the door open with her foot, so as to clear a passage for the tea-tray.
Olivia rested her elbows on the arms of the chair and put her finger-tips to her temples. She felt at once rebuked and informed with knowledge. Never before had the Sphinx-like Myra so revealed herself. Probably she had not had the opportunity, never having found herself subjected to such direct questioning. Being so subjected, she replied with the unhesitating directness of her nature. The grace of humility descended on Olivia. What fine spirit can feel otherwise than humble when confronted with the selfless devotion of a fellow-being? And further humbled was she by the implicit declaration of an ideal, noble and purposeful, such as her mind for the past few months had not conceived. This elderly, spinsterly foundling, child of naught, had, according to her limited horizon, a philosophy—nay, more—a religion of life which she unswervingly followed. According to the infinite scale whereby human values ultimately are estimated, Olivia judged herself sitting in the galley of Lydia Dawlish as of far less account than Myra, her butt and her slave from earliest infancy.
She rose and looked around the prettiness of taste and colour with which she had transformed the original dully-furnished room, and threw up her arm in a helpless gesture. What did it all mean? What was she doing there? On what was she squandering the golden hours of her youth? To what end was she using such of a mind and such of a soul as God had given her? At last, to sell herself for furs and food and silk cushions, and for the society of other women clamorous of nothing but furs and food and silk cushions, to a man like Sydney Rooke—without giving him anything in return save her outward shape for him to lay jewels on and exhibit to the uninspiring world wherein he dwelt?
Far better return to Medlow and lead the life of a clean woman.
Myra entered. “You’re not dining out to-night?”
“No, thank God!” said Olivia. “I’ll slip on any old thing and go downstairs.”
She dined in her little quiet corner of the restaurant, and after dinner took up Triona’s book, Through Blood and Snow, which she had bought that morning, her previous acquaintance with it having been made through a circulating library. In the autumn she had read and been held by its magic; but casually as she had read scores of books. But now it was instinct with a known yet baffling personality. It was two o’clock in the morning before she went to bed.