Pretty Lady — Chapters 24, 25 & 26
Chapter 24 THE SOLDIER
But outside she lost faith.
Half a dozen motor-cars were slumbering in a row near the door of the Guinea-Fowl, and they all stirred monstrously yet scarcely perceptibly at the sight of the woman's figure, solitary, fragile and pale in the darkness.
They seemed for an instant to lust for her; and then, recognising that she was not their prey, to sink back into the torpor of their inexhaustible patience.
The sight of them was prejudicial to the dominion of the unseen powers.
Christine admitted to herself that she had drunk a lot, that she was demented, that her only proper course was to return dutifully to the supper-party.
She wondered what, if she did not so return, she could possibly say to justify herself to G. J.
Nevertheless she went on down the street, hurrying, automatic, and reached the main thoroughfare.
It was dark with the new protective darkness.
The central hooded lamps showed like poor candles, making a series of rings of feeble illumination on the vast invisible floor of the road.
Nobody was afoot; not a soul.
The last of the motor-buses that went about killing and maiming people in the new protective darkness had long since reached its yard.
The seductive dim violet bulbs were all extinguished on the entrances of the theatres, and, save for a thread of light at some lofty window here and there, the curving facades of the street were as undecipherable as the heavens above or as the asphalte beneath.
Then Christine's ear detected a faint roar.
It grew louder; it became terrific; and a long succession of huge loaded army waggons with peering head-lamps thundered past at full speed, one close behind the next, shaking the very avenue.
The slightest misjudgment by the leading waggon in the confusion of light and darkness--and the whole convoy would have pitched itself together in a mass of iron, flesh, blood and ordnance; but the convoy went ruthlessly and safely forward till its final red tail-lamp swung round a corner and vanished.
The avenue ceased to shake.
The thunder died away, and there was silence again.
Whence and why the convoy came, and at whose dread omnipotent command?
Whither it was bound?
What it carried?
No answer in the darkness to these enigmas!...
And Christine was afraid of England.
She remembered people in Ostend saying that England would never go to war.
She, too, had said it, bitterly.
And now she was in the midst of the unmeasured city which had darkened itself for war, and she was afraid of an unloosed might....
What madness was she doing?
She did not even know the man's name.
She knew only that he was "Edgar W." She would have liked to be his _marraine_, according to the French custom, but he had never written to her.
He was still in her debt for the hotel bill and the taxi fare.
He had not even kissed her at the station.
She tried to fancy that she heard his voice calling "Christine" with frantic supplication in her ears, but she could not.
She turned into another side street, and saw a lighted doorway.
Two soldiers were standing in the veiled radiance.
She could just read the lower half of the painted notice: "All service men welcome.
Beds.
Meals.
Writing and reading rooms.
Always open."
She passed on.
One of the soldiers, a non-commissioned officer of mature years, solemnly winked at her, without moving an unnecessary muscle.
She looked modestly down.
Twenty yards further on she described near a lamp-post a tall soldier whose somewhat bent body seemed to be clustered over with pots, pans, tins, bags, valises, satchels and weapons, like the figure of some military Father Christmas on his surreptitious rounds.
She knew that he must be a poor benighted fellow just back from the trenches.
He was staring up at the place where the street-sign ought to have been.
He glanced at her, and said, in a fatigued, gloomy, aristocratic voice: "Pardon me, Madam.
Is this Denman Street?
I want to find the Denman Hostel."
Christine looked into his face.
A sacred dew suffused her from head to foot.
She trembled with an intimidated joy.
She felt the mystic influences of all the unseen powers.
She knew herself with holy dread to be the chosen of the very clement Virgin, and the channel of a miraculous intervention.
It was the most marvellous, sweetest thing that had ever happened.
It was humanly incredible, but it had happened.
"Is it you?"
she murmured in a soft, breaking voice.
The man stooped and examined her face.
She said, while he gazed at her: "Edgar!...
See--the wrist watch," and held up her arm, from which the wide sleeve of her mantle slipped away.
And the man said: "Is it you?"
She said: "Come with me.
I will look after you."
The man answered glumly: "I have no money--at least not enough for you.
And I owe you a lot of money already.
You are an angel.
I'm ashamed."
"What do you mean?"
Christine protested.
"Do you forget that you gave me a five-pound note?
It was more than enough to pay the hotel....
As for the rest, let us not speak of it.
Come with me."
"Did I?"
muttered the man.
She could feel the very clement Virgin smiling approval of her fib;
it was exactly such a fib as the Virgin herself would have told in a quandary of charity.
And when a taxi came round the corner, she knew that the Virgin disguised as a taxi-driver was steering it, and she hailed it with a firm and yet loving gesture.
The taxi stopped.
She opened the door, and in her sombre mantle and bright trailing frock and glinting, pale shoes she got in, and the military Father Christmas with much difficulty and jingling and clinking insinuated himself after her into the vehicle, and banged to the door.
And at the same moment one of the soldiers from the Hostel ran up: "Here, mate!...
What do you want to take his money from him for, you damned w----?"
But the taxi drove off.
Christine had not understood.
And had she understood, she would not have cared.
She had a divine mission; she was in bliss.
"You did not seem surprised to meet me," she said, taking Edgar's rough hand.
"No." "Had you called out my name--'Christine'?"
"No." "You are sure?"
"Yes."
"Perhaps you were thinking of me?
I was thinking of you."
"Perhaps.
I don't know.
But I'm never surprised."
"You must be very tired?"
"Yes."
"But why are you like that?
All these things?
You are not an officer now."
"No. I had to resign my commission--just after I saw you."
He paused, and added drily: "Whisky."
His deep rich voice filled the taxi with the resigned philosophy of fatalism.
"And then?"
"Of course I joined up again at once," he said casually.
"I soon got out to the Front.
Now I'm on leave.
That's mere luck."
She burst into tears.
She was so touched by his curt story, and by the grotesquerie of his appearance in the faint light from the exterior lamp which lit the dial of the taximeter, that she lost control of herself.
And the man gave a sob, or possibly it was only a gulp to hide a sob.
And she leaned against him in her thin garments.
And he clinked and jingled, and his breath smelt of beer.
Chapter 25 THE RING
The flat was in darkness, except for the little lamp by the bedside.
The soldier lay asleep in his flannel shirt in the wide bed, and Christine lay awake next him.
His clothes were heaped on a chair.
His eighty pounds' weight of kit were deposited in a corner of the drawing-room.
On the table in the drawing-room were the remains of a meal.
Christine was thinking, carelessly and without apprehension, of what she should say to G. J.
She would tell him that she had suddenly felt unwell.
No!
That would be silly.
She would tell him that he really had not the right to ask her to meet such women as Aida and Alice.
Had he no respect for her?
Or she would tell him that Aida had obviously meant to attack her, and that the dance with Lieutenant Molder was simply a device to enable her to get away quietly and avoid all scandal in a resort where scandal was intensely deprecated.
She could tell him fifty things, and he would have to accept whatever she chose to tell him.
She was mystically happy in the incomparable marvel of the miracle, and in her care of the dull, unresponding man.
Her heart yearned thankfully, devotedly, passionately to the Virgin of the VII Dolours.
In the profound nocturnal silence broken only by the man's slow, regular breathing, she heard a sudden ring.
It was the front-door bell ringing in the kitchen.
The bell rang again and again obstinately.
G.
J.'
s party was over, then, and he had arrived to make inquiries.
She smiled, and did not move.
After a few moments she could hear Marthe stirring.
She sprang up, and then, cunningly considerate, slipped from under the bed-clothes as noiselessly and as smoothly as a snake, so that the man should not be disturbed.
The two women met in the little hall, Christine in the immodesty of a lacy and diaphanous garment, and Marthe in a coarse cotton nightgown covered with a shawl.
The bell rang once more, loudly, close to their ears.
"Are you mad?"
Christine whispered with fierceness.
"Go back to bed.
Let him ring."
Chapter 26 THE RETURN
It was afternoon in April, 1916. G.
J.
rang the right bell at the entrance of the London home of the Lechfords.
Lechford House, designed about 1840 by an Englishman of genius who in this rare instance had found a patron with the wit to let him alone, was one of the finest examples of domestic architecture in the West End.
Inspired by the formidable palaces of Rome and Florence, the artist had conceived a building in the style of the Italian renaissance, but modified, softened, chastened, civilised, to express the bland and yet haughty sobriety of the English climate and the English peerage.
People without an eye for the perfect would have correctly described it as a large plain house in grey stone, of three storeys, with a width of four windows on either side of its black front door, a jutting cornice, and rather elaborate chimneys.
It was, however, a masterpiece for the connoisseur, and foreign architects sometimes came with cards of admission to pry into it professionally.
The blinds of its principal windows were down--not because of the war; they were often down, for at least four other houses disputed with Lechford House the honour of sheltering the Marquis and his wife and their sole surviving child.
Above the roof a wire platform for the catching of bombs had given the mansion a somewhat ridiculous appearance, but otherwise Lechford House managed to look as though it had never heard of the European War.
One half of the black entrance swung open, and a middle-aged gentleman dressed like Lord Lechford's stockbroker, but who was in reality his butler, said in answer to G. J.'
s enquiry: "Lady Queenie is not at home, sir."
"But it is five o'clock," protested G. J.
, suddenly sick of Queen's impudent unreliability.
"And I have an appointment with her at five."
The butler's face relaxed ever so little from its occupational inhumanity of a suet pudding; the spirit of compassion seemed to inform it for an instant.
"Her ladyship went out about a quarter of an hour ago, sir."
"When d'you think she'll be back?"
The suet pudding was restored.
"That I could not say, sir."
"Damn the girl!"
said G. J.
to himself; and aloud: "Please tell her ladyship that I've called."
"Mr. Hoape, is it not, sir?"
"It is."
By the force of his raisin eyes the butler held G. J.
as he turned to descend the steps.
"There's nobody at home, sir, except Mrs. Carlos Smith.
Mrs. Carlos Smith is in Lady Queenie's apartments."
"Mrs. Carlos Smith!"
exclaimed G. J.
, who had not seen Concepcion for some seventeen months; nor heard from her for nearly as long, nor heard of her since the previous year.
"Yes, sir."
"Ask her if she can see me, will you?"
said G. J.
impetuously, after a slight pause.
He stepped on to the tessellated pavement of the outer hall.
On the raised tessellated pavement of the inner hall stood two meditative youngish footmen, possibly musing upon the problems of the intensification of the Military Service Act which were then exciting journalists and statesmen.
Beyond was the renowned staircase, which, rising with insubstantial grace, lost itself in silvery altitude like the way to heaven.
Presently G. J.
was mounting the staircase and passing statues by Canova and Thorwaldsen, and portraits of which the heads had been painted by Lawrence and the hands and draperies by Lawrence's hireling, and huger canvasses on which the heads and breasts had been painted by Rubens and everything else by Rubens's regiment of hirelings.
The guiding footman preceded him through a great chamber which he recognised as the drawing-room in its winding sheet, and then up a small and insignificant staircase; and G. J.
was on ground strange to him, for never till then had he been higher than the first-floor in Lechford House.
Lady Queenie's apartments did violence to G. J.'
s sensibilities as an upholder of traditionalism in all the arts, of the theory that every sound movement in any art must derive from its predecessor.
Some months earlier he had met for a few minutes the creative leader of the newest development in internal decoration, and he vividly remembered a saying of the grey-haired, slouch-hatted man: "At the present day the only people in the world with really vital perceptions about decoration are African niggers, and the only inspiring productions are the coloured cotton stuffs designed for the African native market."
The remark had amused and stimulated him, but he had never troubled to go in search of examples of the inspiring influence of African taste on London domesticity.
He now saw perhaps the supreme instance lodged in Lechford House, like a new and truculent state within a great Empire.
Lady Queenie had imposed terms on her family, and under threats of rupture, of separation, of scandal, Lady Queenie's exotic nest had come into existence in the very fortress of unchangeable British convention.
The phenomenon was a war phenomenon due to the war, begotten by the war; for Lady Queenie had said that if she was to do war-work without disaster to her sanity she must have the right environment.
Thus the putting together of Lady Queenie's nest had proceeded concurrently with the building of national projectile factories and of square miles of offices for the girl clerks of ministries and departments of government.
The footman left G. J.
alone in a room designated the boudoir.
G.
J.
resented the boudoir, because it was like nothing that he had ever witnessed.
The walls were irregularly covered with rhombuses, rhomboids, lozenges, diamonds, triangles, and parallelograms; the carpet was treated likewise, and also the upholstery and the cushions.
The colourings of the scene in their excessive brightness, crudity and variety surpassed G. J.'
s conception of the possible.
He had learned the value of colour before Queen was born, and in the Albany had translated principle into practice.
But the hues of the boudoir made the gaudiest effects of Regency furniture appear sombre.
The place resembled a gigantic and glittering kaleidoscope deranged and arrested.
G.
J.'
s glance ran round the room like a hunted animal seeking escape, and found no escape.
He was as disturbed as he might have been disturbed by drinking a liqueur on the top of a cocktail.
Nevertheless he had to admit that some of the contrasts of pure colour were rather beautiful, even impressive; and he hated to admit it.
He was aware of a terrible apprehension that he would never be the same man again, and that henceforth his own abode would be eternally stricken for him with the curse of insipidity.
Regaining somewhat his nerve, he looked for pictures.
There were no pictures.
But every piece of furniture was painted with primitive sketches of human figures, or of flowers, or of vessels, or of animals.
On the front of the mantelpiece were perversely but brilliantly depicted, with a high degree of finish, two nude, crouching women who gazed longingly at each other across the impassable semicircular abyss of the fireplace; and just above their heads, on a scroll, ran these words: "The ways of God are strange."
He heard movements and a slight cough in the next room, the door leading to which was ajar.
Concepcion's cough; he thought he recognised it.
Five minutes ago he had had no notion of seeing her;
now he was about to see her.
And he felt excited and troubled, as much by the sudden violence of life as by the mere prospect of the meeting.
After her husband's death Concepcion had soon withdrawn from London.
A large engineering firm on the Clyde, one of the heads of which happened to be constitutionally a pioneer, was establishing a canteen for its workmen, and Concepcion, the tentacles of whose influence would stretch to any length, had decided that she ought to take up canteen work, and in particular the canteen work of just that firm.
But first of all, to strengthen her prestige and acquire new prestige, she had gone to the United States, with a powerful introduction to Sears, Roebuck and Company of Chicago, in order to study industrial canteenism in its most advanced and intricate manifestations.
Portraits of Concepcion in splendid furs on the deck of the steamer in the act of preparing to study industrial canteenism in its most advanced and intricate manifestations had appeared in the illustrated weeklies.
The luxurious trip had cost several hundreds of pounds, but it was war expenditure, and, moreover, Concepcion had come into considerable sums of money through her deceased husband.
Her return to Britain had never been published.
Advertisements of Concepcion ceased.
Only a few friends knew that she was in the most active retirement on the Clyde.
G.
J.
had written to her twice but had obtained no replies.
One fact he knew, that she had not had a child.
Lady Queenie had not mentioned her; it was understood that the inseparables had quarrelled in the heroic manner and separated for ever.
She entered the boudoir slowly.
G.
J.
grew self-conscious, as it were because she was still the martyr of destiny and he was not.
She wore a lavender-tinted gown of Queen's; he knew it was Queen's because he had seen precisely such a gown on Queen, and there could not possibly be another gown precisely like that very challenging gown.
It suited Queen, but it did not suit Concepcion.
She looked older; she was thirty-two, and might have been taken for thirty-five.
She was very pale, with immense fatigued eyes; but her ridiculous nose had preserved all its originality.
And she had the same slightly masculine air--perhaps somewhat intensified--with an added dignity.
And G. J.
thought: "She is as mysterious and unfathomable as I am myself."
And he was impressed and perturbed.
With a faint, sardonic smile, glancing at him as a physical equal from her unusual height (she was as tall as Lady Queenie), she said abruptly and casually: "Am I changed?"
"No," he replied as abruptly and casually, clasping almost inimically her ringed hand--she was wearing Queenie's rings.
"But you're tired.
The journey, I suppose."
"It's not that.
We sat up till five o'clock this morning, talking."
"Who?"
"Queen and I." "What did you do that for?"
"Well, you see, we'd had the devil's own row--" She stopped, leaving his imagination to complete the picture of the meeting and the night talk.
He smiled awkwardly--tried to be paternal, and failed.
"What about?"
"She never wanted me to leave London.
I came back last night with only a handbag just as she was going out to dinner.
She didn't go out to dinner.
Queen is a white woman.
Nobody knows how white Queen is.
I
didn't know myself until last night."
There was a pause.
G.
J.
said: "I had an appointment here with the white woman, on business."
"Yes, I know," said Concepcion negligently.
"She'll be home soon."
Something infinitesimally malicious in the voice and gaze sent the singular idea shooting through his mind that Queen had gone out on purpose so that Concepcion might have him alone for a while.
And he was wary of both of them, as he might have been of two pagan goddesses whom he, a poor defiant mortal, suspected of having laid an eye on him for their own ends.
"_You've_ changed, anyhow," said Concepcion.
"Older?"
"No. Harder."
He was startled, not displeased.
"How--harder?"
"More sure of yourself," said Concepcion, with a trace of the old harsh egotism in her tone.
"It appears you're a perfect tyrant on the Lechford Committee now you're vice-chairman, and all the more footling members dread the days when you're in the chair.
It appears also that you've really overthrown two chairmen, and yet won't take the situation yourself."
He was still more startled, but now positively flattered by the world's estimate of his activities and individuality.
He saw himself in a new light.
"This what you were talking about until five a. m.?"
The butler entered.
"Shall I serve tea, Madam?"
Concepcion looked at the man scornfully: "Yes."
One of the minor stalwarts entered and arranged a table, and the other followed with a glittering, steaming tray in his hands, while the butler hovered like a winged hippopotamus over the operation.
Concepcion half sat down by the table, and then, altering her mind, dropped on to a vast chaise-longue, as wide as a bed, and covered with as many cushions as would have stocked a cushion shop, which occupied the principal place in front of the hearth.
The hem of her rich gown just touched the floor.
G.
J.
could see that she was wearing the transparent deep-purple stockings that Queen wore with the transparent lavender gown.
Her right shoulder rose high from the mass of the body, and her head was sunk between two cushions.
Her voice came smothered from the cushions: "Damn it!
G.
J.
Don't look at me like that."
He was standing near the mantelpiece.
"Why?"
he exclaimed.
