THIS was life; magical, undreamed of in her wildest Medlow dreams. And thanks to Lydia, she had plunged into it headlong, after a mere fortnight’s probation. There had been no disillusion. She had plunged and emerged into her kingdom. London conspired to strew her path with roses. The Barracloughs invited her to a dinner party at their home in Kensington. General Wigram offered her dinner and theatre and convened to meet her an old Indian crony, General Philimore, and his young daughter, Janet. Philimore had known her grandfather, Bagshawe of the Guides, when he was a subaltern, infinite ages ago. The world was a small place, after all. Olivia, caring little for grandfathers beyond their posthumous social guarantee, found youth’s real sympathy in Janet, who held open for her their flat in Maida Vale. Young Mauregard, after their first lunch together at the Carlton, seemed prepared to provide her with free meals and amusements for the rest of time. It is true he was madly in love with a Russian dancer, whose eccentric ways and abominable treatment of him formed the staple of the conversation which he poured into her very interested and compassionate ear. And, last, Bobbie Quinton gave her dancing lessons at the flat at the rate of a guinea apiece. Christmas caused a break in these social activities. Lydia took her off to Brighton, where, meeting various acquaintances of her chaperone and making others of her own, she motored and danced and danced and motored, and in the pursuit of these delights discovered, with a fearful joy, that she could hold her own in the immemorial conflict of sex. Sydney Rooke, having driven down for the day, occasionally flashed through the hotel, the eternal smile of youth on his dark, lined face and his gestures unceasingly polite. As he passed, the heavens opened and rained champagne and boxes of chocolate and hot-house fruits and flowers and embroidered handbags, and once, a Pekinese dog for Lydia. Once again, an automobile seemed about to fall, but at Lydia’s protests it melted in the ether.
“A dog and a rose and a glass of wine,” said she, “are a woman’s due for amusing a man. But a motor-car is profiteering. Besides, it’s bound to drive you somewhere in the end—either to the flat of shame or the country house of married respectability: it only depends on who is at the wheel.”
“I see,” said Olivia. But she didn’t. Sydney Rooke was a mystery; and Lydia’s attitude towards him was more than her inexperience could understand.
Still, there she was in the pleasant galley and she did not question what she was doing in it. In a dim way she regarded it as the inevitable rescue vessel after universal shipwreck. Her eyes were blinded by its glitter and her ears deafened by its music to the welter of the unsalved world.
Just before New Year she received a letter from Bobby Quinton. It began: “Dearest of Ladies.” Never before having been thus apostrophized, she thought it peculiarly graceful and original. The writing was refined and exquisitely clear. To his dearest of ladies the young man bewailed her absence; life was dreary without her friendship and encouragement; all this Christmastide he was the loneliest thing on earth; he suggested that there was no one to love him—no mother or sisters to whom he could apply for comfort; this terrible night life to which he, poor demobilized soldier of fortune, was condemned in order to earn his bread, weighed upon his spirits and affected his health; he envied his dearest of ladies’ sojourn by the invigorating sea; he longed for the taste of it; but such health-restoring rapture he gave her, in the most delicate way, to understand, was for fairy princesses and not for the impecunious demobbed; he counted the days till her return and prayed her to bring back a whiff of ozone on her garments to revive the ever faithful one who had the temerity to try to teach her to dance.
A most piteous epistle. Bobby Quinton, by his ingratiating ways and his deference and his wit, had effaced her original conception of the type of young men who danced at night clubs for their living. She liked him. He seemed so young and she, through her long companionship with sorrow, so old in comparison; he seemed so foolish and impossible, and she so wise; to her, remembering the helpless dependence of her father and brothers, he seemed (motherless and sisterless as he was) lost in a hostile world. Besides, he was not a nameless adventurer. His father (long since deceased) had been a Colonial Governor. He had been to one of the great public schools. In short, he had the birth and breeding of a gentleman. She slipped on a dressing-gown and went with the letter to Lydia, full of maternal purpose.
It was nine o’clock in the morning. Their rooms had a communicating door. She found Lydia daintily attired in boudoir cap and dressing-jacket, having breakfast in bed.
“The poor boy’s dying for a breath of sea air. It would do him an enormous amount of good. Do you think we—of course, it really would be me—but it would be better if it appeared to be a joint affair—do you think we could, without offending him, ask him to come down here for a couple of days as our guest?”
Lydia, who had read the letter with a smile round her lips, replied drily:
“As far as Bobby is concerned—I really think we could.”
“And as far as we are concerned,” flashed Olivia, “why should the silly fact of being a woman prevent us from helping a lame dog over a stile?”
“A he-dog,” said Lydia.
“What does it matter?” Olivia asked stoutly.
Lydia laughed in her half-cynical, tolerant way.
“Do as you like, dear. I don’t mind. You’re out for experience, not I. I’d only have you remark that our he-dog friend Bobby is sitting up and begging for the invitation——”
“Oh! Ah!” cried Olivia, with a fling of her arm, “you’re horrid!”
“Not a bit,” smiled Lydia. “I face facts, as you’ll have to do, if you want to find comfort in this matter-of-fact world. Have your Bobby down by all means. Only keep your eye on him.”
“He’s not my Bobby,” said Olivia indignantly.
“Our Bobby, then,” said Lydia, with good-natured indulgence.
So Olivia, with the little palpitation of the heart attendant on consciousness of adventurous and (in Medlow eyes, preposterous) well-doing, wrote to Bobby Quinton a letter whose gracious delicacy would not have wounded the susceptibilities of a needy Hidalgo or an impoverished Highland chieftain, and received in reply a telegram of eager acceptance.
Bobby appeared immaculately vestured, his heart overflowing with gratitude at the amazing sweetness of his two dear ladies. Never had man been blessed with such fairy godmothers. By the fresh frankness of his appreciation of their hospitality he disarmed criticism. A younger son hanging on to the court of Louis XIII never received purses of gold from his lady love with less embarrassed grace. He devoted himself to their service. He had the art of tactful effacement, and of appearance at the exact moment of welcome. He enlivened their meals with chatter and a boyish brightness that passed for wit.
To Olivia, the dearest of his dear ladies, he confided the pathetic history of his life. A sunny, sheltered corner of the Pier, both sitting side by side well wrapped in furs, conduced to intimacy. How a young man in such a precarious financial position could afford to wear a fur-lined coat with a new astrachan collar it did not strike Olivia to enquire. That he, like herself, was warm on that sun-filled morning, with the sea dancing and sparkling away beyond them, and human types around them exuding the prosperity of peace, seemed sufficient for the comfortable hour. He spoke of his early years of ease, of his modest patrimony coming to an end soon after the war broke out; of his commission in a yeomanry regiment; of his heart-break as the months went on and the chance of the regiment being sent to the front grew less and less; of his exchange into a regiment of the line; of the rotten heart that gave out after a month in France; of his grief at being invalided out of the army and his struggles and anxieties when he returned to civil life, branded as physically unfit. He had tried the stage, musical comedy, male youth in the manless chorus being eagerly welcomed; then, after a little training, he found he had the dancer’s gift. “So one thing led to another,” said he, “and that’s my history.”
“But surely,” said Olivia, “all this dancing and these late hours must be very bad for your heart.”
He smiled sadly. “What does it matter? I’m no use to anybody, and nobody cares whether I’m dead or alive.”
Olivia protested warmly. “The world is crying out for young men of three-and-twenty. You could be useful in a million ways.”
“Not a crock like me.”
“You could go into an office.”
“Yes. In at one door and out of another. Hopeless.”
He drew from a slim gold case a Turkish cigarette—Olivia, minutely hospitable, had put a box of a hundred in his room—and tapped it thoughtfully.
“After all, which is better—to carry on with life like a worm—which anyhow perisheth, as the Bible tells us—or to go out like a butterfly, with a bit of a swagger?”
“But you mustn’t talk of going out,” cried Olivia. “It’s indecent.”
Bobby lighted his cigarette. “Who would care?”
“I, for one,” she replied.
Her health and sanity revolted against morbid ideas. He stretched out his hand, and, with the tips of his fingers, touched her coat, and he bent his dark brown eyes upon her.
“Would you really?” he murmured.
She flushed, felt angry she scarce knew why, and put herself swiftly on the defensive.
“I would care for the life of any young man. After a million killed it’s precious—and every decent girl would care the same as I.”
“You’re wonderful!” he remarked.
“I’m common sense incarnate,” said Olivia.
“You are. You’re right. You’re right a thousand times,” he replied. “I’ll always remember what you have said to me this morning.”
At his surrender she disarmed. A corpulent, opulent couple passed them by, the lady wearing a cheap feathered hat and a rope of pearls outside a Kolinsky coat, the gentleman displaying on an ungloved right hand, which maintained in his mouth a gigantic cigar, an enormous ruby set in a garden border of diamonds.
“At any rate,” said Bobby, “I’m not as some other men are.”
So they laughed and discussed the profiteers and walked back to the hotel for lunch with the sharpened appetites of twenty.
When Bobby Quinton left them, Olivia reproached herself for lack of sympathy. The boy had done his best. A rotten, and crocky heart, who was she to despise? But for circumstance he might have done heroic things. Perhaps in his defiance of physical disability he was doing a heroic thing even now. Still. . . . To Lydia, in an ironically teasing mood, she declared:
“When I do fall in love, it’s not going to be with any one like Bobby Quinton. I want a man—there would be a devil of a row, of course, if he tried—but one capable of beating me.”
“Bobby would do that, right enough, if you gave him the chance,” said Lydia.
Olivia reflected for a while. “Why have you got your knife into him like that?” she asked abruptly.
“I haven’t, my dear child. If I had, do you think I would have allowed him to come down? I live and let live. By letting live, I live very comfortably and manage, with moderate means, to have a very good time.”
Olivia, already dressed for dinner, looked down on the easy, creamy, handsome, kimono-clad woman, curled up like a vast Angora cat on the hotel bedroom sofa, and once more was dimly conscious of a doubt whether the galley of Lydia Dawlish was the one for her mother’s daughter to row in.
Still, vogue la galère. When she returned to London there was little else to do. Eating and dancing filled many of her days and nights. She tried to recapture the pleasure of books which had been all her recreation for years; but, although her life was not a continuous whirl of engagements—for it requires a greater vogue as a pretty and unattached young woman than Olivia possessed to be booked for fourteen meals and seven evenings every week of the year—she found little time for solitary intelligent occupation. If she was at a loose end, Lydia’s hat shop provided an agreeable pastime. Or, as a thousand little odds and ends of dress demanded attention, there was always a sensuous hour or two to be spent at Pacotille’s and Luquin’s or Deville’s. Tea companions seldom failed. When she had no evening engagements she was glad to get to bed, soon after the dinner in the downstairs restaurant, and to sleep the sleep of untroubled youth. And all the time the spell of London still held her captive. To walk the crowded streets, to join the feminine crush before the plate-glass windows of great shops, to watch the strange birds in the ornamental water in St. James’s Park, to wander about the Abbey and the Temple Gardens, to enter on the moment’s impulse a Bond Street picture gallery or a cinema—all was a matter of young joy and thrill. She even spent a reckless and rapturous afternoon at Madame Tussaud’s. Sometimes Janet Philimore accompanied her on these excursions round the monuments of London. Janet, who had mild antiquarian tastes and a proletarian knowledge of London traffic, took her by tubes and buses to the old City churches and the Tower, and exhibited to her wondering gaze the Bank of England and the Royal Exchange and Guildhall up the narrow street. For sentimental interest, there was always Bobby Quinton, who continued to maintain himself under her maternal eye. And so the new life went on.
It was one night in April, while she was standing under the porch of a theatre, Mouregard, her escort, having gone in search of his dinner-and-theatre brougham—for those were days when taxis were scarce and drivers haughty—that she found herself addressed by a long-nosed, one-armed man, who raised his hat.
“Miss Gale—I’m sure you don’t remember me.”
For a second or two she could not place him. Then she laughed.
“Why—Major Olifant!” She shook hands. “What are you doing here? I thought you were buried among your fossils. Do tell me—how are the hot-water pipes? And how is the parrot? Myra has no faith in your bachelor housekeeping and is sure you’ve eaten him out of desperation.”
He returned a light answer. Then, touching the arm of a man standing by his side:
“Miss Gale—can I introduce Mr. Alexis Triona.”
Triona bowed, stood uncovered while he took the hand which Olivia held out.
“This is my landlady,” said Olifant.
“He is privileged beyond the common run of mortals,” said Triona.
“That’s very pretty,” laughed Olivia, with a swift, enveloping glance at the slight, inconspicuous youth who had done such wonderful things. “I’ve not thought of myself as a landlady before. I hope I don’t look like one.”
Visions of myriad Bloomsbury lodging-houses at whose doors he had knocked after he had left the tiny room in Cherbury Mews, and of the strange middle-aged women of faded gentility whom he had interviewed within those doors, rose before Triona’s eyes, and he laughed too. For under the strong electric light of the portico, unkind to most of the other waiting women, showing up lines and hollows and artificialities of complexion, she looked as fresh and young as a child on a May morning. The open theatre wrap revealed her slender girlish figure, sketchily clad in a flame-coloured garment; and, with the light in her eyes and her little dark head proudly poised, she stood before the man’s fancy as the flame of youth.
She turned to Olifant.
“Are you in town?”
“For a few days. Getting rid of cobwebs.”
“I’d lend you quite a nice broom, if you could find time to come and see me. Besides, I do want to hear about my beloved Polly.”
“I shall be delighted,” said Olifant.
They arranged that he should come to tea at the flat the following day.
“And if so famous a person as Mr. Triona would honour me, too?”
“Dare I?” he asked.
“It’s on the fifth floor, but there’s a lift.”
She saw Mauregard hurrying up. With a “Four-thirty, then,” and a smile of adieu, she turned and joined Mauregard.
“Shall we go on to Percy’s?” asked the young Frenchman, standing at the door of the brougham.
Olivia conceived a sudden distaste for Percy’s.
“Not unless you particularly want to.”
“I? Good Lord!” said he.
“Why do you ever go, if it bores you like that?” she asked as the brougham started Victoria-wards.
“Ce que femme veut, Mauregard le veut.”
“I suppose that is why you’ve never made love to me.”
“How?” he asked, surprised out of his perfect English idiom.
“I’ve wanted you not to make love to me, and you haven’t.”
“But how could I make love to you, when I have been persecuting you with the confessions of my unhappy love affairs?”
“One can always find a means,” said Olivia. “That’s why I like you. You are such a good friend.”
“I hope so,” said he. Then, after a short silence: “Let me be frank. What is going on at the back of your clever English mind is perfectly accurate. I am tempted to make love to you every time I see you. What man, with a man’s blood in his veins, wouldn’t be tempted, no matter how much he loved another woman? But I say to myself: ‘Lucien, you are French to the marrow of your bones. It is the nature of that marrow not to offend a beautiful woman by not making love to her. But, on the other hand, the Lady Olivia whose finger-tips I am unworthy to kiss’—he touched them with his lips, however, in the most charming manner—‘is English to the marrow of her bones, and it is the nature of that marrow to be offended if a man makes obviously idle love to her.’ So, not wishing to lose my Lady Olivia, whose friendship and sympathy I value so highly, I accept with a grateful heart a position which would be incomprehensible to the vast majority of my fellow-countrymen.”
“I’m so glad we’ve had this out,” said Olivia after a pause. “I’ve been a bit worried. A girl on her own has got to take care of herself, you know. And you’ve been so beautifully kind to me——”
“It’s because I am proud to call myself your humble and devoted servant,” replied Mauregard.
Olivia went to bed contented with this frank explanation. Men had already made love to her in a manner which had ruffled her serene consciousness, and she found it, not like Lydia Dawlish, a cynical game of wit, but a disagreeable business, to parry their advances. Bobby Quinton, of course, she could put into a corner like a naughty child, whenever he became foolish. But Mauregard, consistently respectful and entertaining, had been rather a puzzle. Now that way was clear.
For a while she did not associate her meeting Blaise Olifant with her distaste for the night club. In the flush of her new existence she had almost forgotten him. There had been no reason to correspond. His rent was paid through the Trivett and Gale office. His foraminiferous pursuits did not appeal to a girl’s imagination. Now and then she gave a passing thought to what was happening in her old home, and vaguely remembered that the romantically named traveller was there as a guest. But that was all. Now, the presence of Olifant had suddenly recalled the little scene in her mother’s room, when she had suddenly decided to let him have the house; he had brought with him a breath of that room; a swift memory of the delicate water-colours and the books by the bedside, the Pensées de Pascal and The Imitation of Christ. . . . Besides, she had felt a curious attraction towards the companion, the boy with the foreign manner and the glistening eyes and the suffering-stricken face. Both men, as she conceived them, belonged to the higher intellectual type that had their being remote from the inanities of dissipation. So, impelled by a muddled set of motives, she suddenly found herself abhorring Percy’s. She read herself into a state of chastened self-approbation, and then to sleep, with Rupert Brooke’s poems.