Part 13

"Oh really. Yes, that would be very nice I suppose. But of course it's a big town. Don't you think Geoffrey would be happier among beautiful scenery? The Italian lakes, perhaps, or mountains if you want to be energetic."

"I don't know, I'm sure." Helen shrugged her shoulders. "Would you be happier with scenery, Geoffrey?"

"I think I'd like the Hague," he said. "For a week or so, anyhow, and then we can move on."

"You know, dear," said Mrs. Greene reasonably, "your interest in pictures is a very specialised thing. You mustn't expect Geoffrey to feel quite as you do about them. I don't think he knows very much about art."

Helen's face was grim.

"He doesn't," she answered, "but he'll learn." And her mouth shut ominously.

Mrs. Greene got up discreetly and murmuring something about dressing for dinner, went upstairs.

"Darling," said Geoffrey. "Mother thinks we are now about to quarrel fiercely, but we aren't, are we?"

"Of course not. I don't mind your not knowing anything about painting so long as you don't mind my concentrating on it a good deal."

"You know I don't. Tell me, Helen, is all this business driving you to frenzy?"

"No, not a bit. I think it's frightfully obscene, dressing up in white satin and being handed over to you at a given moment, but I can easily cope with it. Isn't there something about 'straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel'?"

"And I'm the camel," said Geoffrey sullenly.

"Yes, you are," Helen answered calmly. "And you understand the position perfectly well. You know I am marrying you quite reluctantly for the simple reason that I love you to distraction."

Geoffrey's face cleared.

"I am a fool," he said. "It's quite all right, Helen, and you're being marvellously good about all this sickening detail."

Helen shook her head.

"It's your mother who's marvellous," she said. "She really is a masterpiece. I've never seen anything so well done as her pose. She is so affectionate and maternal that anyone would think she was delighted with me. In fact she's almost coy, and yet she can't help disapproving of almost everything I say or do."

"No, that isn't true; she's approved of you quite a lot lately."

"Oh well, perhaps she has, but only because I have given way about all sorts of conventional details that go quite against the grain with me."

"Why have you, darling," Geoffrey asked curiously.

"Well, she swallowed me so magnificently in the first place that I felt I had to help to bolster up her attitude. It would be rather pathetic really, if she knew we understood her so well. She is a person who needs to be wrapped in the illusion of success."

"It's kind of you to feel like that, I think, though it would kill her to realise that you knew so much about her that you were simply being decent to her."

"Anyhow it's only a few more weeks now."

"Six weeks and three days, my dearest, and after that we won't see much of them and everything will go quite smoothly."

"Oh, no, it won't, Geoffrey," Helen's eyes flickered dangerously, "it won't go the least smoothly, it will be up and down like a very rough crossing, but perfectly lovely all the same."

"Dear heart, I'm sure of that; if only I can keep you happy."

"You needn't have any doubts, Geoffrey. I'm perfectly certain that fundamentally we're right for each other."

The next few years proved the truth of Helen's words. Their honeymoon was exhausting, awkward, and ecstatic but not, they decided, more exhausting and awkward than other people's honeymoons, and on the other hand, certainly more ecstatic.

"It's odd how you stimulate me mentally," said Helen a little while after they got home to the house in Cheyne Walk which Mrs. Rodney so often referred as "very bright of course, but rather too bizarre for my taste."

"I don't think it is odd," contradicted Geoffrey, "ever since we met we've acted as mutual goads to each other."

"Yes I know," Helen answered impatiently, "but it was different before we were married. Really you know, I didn't do any decent work between getting to know you and now. You remember that poster I was so pleased with? Well it's quite awful. I was on the wrong tack altogether but now I do know what I'm about, I entirely understand about the unity of angles."

"You don't suggest, do you, that I'm responsible for enlarging your comprehension of angles?" asked Geoffrey laughing.

"No of course not; you hadn't anything to do with it. I only mean that I'm very clear and free in my mind just now, and that is partly because of you. You don't hinder me at all, you help me."

"I'm glad," said Geoffrey, "keep free if you can; there's no need to get in a mess with things."

"I certainly won't." Helen was emphatic. "I know your wretched aunt and all sorts of people expect to be asked here just because I'm newly married and have a new house, but I simply won't do it. And I'm not going to pay any calls either."

"I don't want you to do things like that. Lavinia does it plenty enough for one family, and Hugh's wife, when he has one, is sure to be a model of propriety. But I want you to go on being Helen Guest even if you are Mrs. Geoffrey Greene. Don't fuss about my family."

"You do understand remarkably well, Geoffrey. I'd have to go my own way in any case, but I'm terribly glad you're with me in my policy of being ruthless."

By means of keeping to this policy of ruthlessness life went happily for the young Geoffrey Greenes. There was a period of stress and strain in the second year of their marriage when Helen decided that a frankly futurist style was the only one in which she could express herself sincerely. Her first attempts were almost ludicrously unsuccessful, and Geoffrey was so rash as to burst out laughing as he looked at a canvas in which a large purple cylinder placed on a still larger purple cylinder, and surmounted by a smaller cylinder of shrimp pink faintly spotted, was entitled simply "Country woman."

Helen looked at him coldly.

"Aren't you being a little crude, Geoffrey?" she asked.

"Don't mislay your sense of humour, I do implore you," he urged still laughing, "I expect this is a very important picture, but to the uninitiated eye it's very funny."

"That's just the trouble, Geoffrey. You are uninitiated--almost painfully so. I've been feeling out of sympathy with you for some time. I'm prepared to agree with you that this is bad work, though the idea is perfectly sound, but I think it's bad because of you. I'm being clogged by marriage, it's hampering me appallingly."

"You're working yourself up, Helen," said Geoffrey curtly, "I refuse to be made responsible because you do bad work."

"I'm sorry." Helen's voice was hard. "But the fact remains that indirectly you are responsible. Marriage is not conducive to good work, and I've decided to cut it out for a time anyhow. I'm quite contented to go on living in this house if you will arrange to sleep in your dressing-room and leave me entirely unmolested."

"You're unpardonable. I don't know how you dare use a word like that about me."

"I'll apologise for it if you like, it wasn't the word I meant. But I wish to be quite free and not be expected to sleep with you again."

"Certainly," Geoffrey agreed stiffly, "that is for you to decide."

Their reconciliation a few weeks later was disproportionately trivial. Helen's futurist fever had burned itself out, and she was temporarily high and dry without any interest in art.

Geoffrey came into her studio one night to find her looking ruefully at "Country Woman." She went up to him and kissed him.

"I've been a bloody fool, Geoffrey darling, I'm terribly sorry. You were quite right; it really is a ghastly picture. Let's burn it now."

"You've been awful," said Geoffrey, but his voice was kind.

"I know I have, but I swear I never will again. Come on, let's burn it."

Childishly they cut the canvas into strips, crumpled it up, and crammed it into the fire, and as Helen quoted happily "if thine eye offend thee pluck it out" the last traces of Geoffrey's resentment melted and he held her to him with a passion intensified by the past weeks of restraint. No quarrel marked the end of her next phase, which was a return to the impressionist style of her pre-marriage period.

"It's no good," she proclaimed dismally, "I'm doing rotten work."

"I hope you're not going to blame me and marriage this time?" asked Geoffrey, with a faint accent of anxiety under his light manner.

Helen smiled at him frankly.

"Good God, no," she said, "I know better now. I've got you perfectly in place, Geoffrey. You're the one absolutely necessary thing in my life that I shall probably always stick to. All this stuff," she waved an airy hand round the studio, "is variable, if you know what I mean. I can't do without it, but it changes. Heaven knows it's bad enough now, but sometime I'm going to do something good."

"Do you mean you've arranged your life in compartments, with me in one and your painting in another, and so on?"

"No I don't mean that. I did try it at one time, but it was hopeless. When I got mad with my painting, my rage overlapped out of the painting compartment into yours. But now it's different; you're separate from everything and yet at the bottom of everything. I can't explain quite what I mean, but it works all right."

"Darling, do you mean that in your mind I'm independent of the other things you care about, but in a way they are dependent on me?"

"Yes, I think that's it. Anyhow I'm happy."

"So am I, Helen, really frightfully happy."

"And what's more Geoffrey I think I'll probably be able to fit a child in too."

"Do you mean that you want one? Don't do it for me; I'm perfectly satisfied with things as they are."

Helen came over and sat beside Geoffrey on the sofa, leaning back in her corner and gazing at the fire. She was silent for a few minutes, and Geoffrey looking at the firelight playing over her bright hair wondered vaguely what she was thinking.

"I don't think I specially want one," she said at last, "at least if I do it's for pure idiotic sentimental reasons. But on the other hand I'm not sure that I won't paint better after I've had one; you can't be certain really that every possible experience isn't all to the good."

"I think probably it is," agreed Geoffrey, "Of course I like you to want one for idiotic sentimental reasons; it makes me feel surer of you; but quite apart from that there is your painting. I know you're depressed about it just now and it might start you off working again if you had a child."

"Geoffrey, you're rather sweet to me," said Helen impulsively, "I think it's touching of you to understand that having a baby might make me paint better. It's a topsy turvy idea I know, but I can't help seeing it in that way."

"Sometime I suppose you'll get used to my being able to see things from your point of view," said Geoffrey contentedly.

Helen lifted his hand and kissed it.

"I don't think I'll get too used to you, darling," she said, "I really love you very much."

The telephone rang in the hall before Geoffrey could answer her.

"Damn," she said getting up lazily, "I'm sure that's your mother, she always rings up at this time of night because she feels sure of getting us both at once."

She shut the door, and the one-sided conversation was too subdued to interrupt Geoffrey's thoughts. They were entirely pleasant. His marriage satisfied him mentally and delighted him physically. His occasional fierce quarrels with Helen seemed mere surface disturbances; they did not affect in the slightest their mutual love, though they undoubtedly eradicated in Geoffrey any tendency towards complacency.

He lay stretched out luxuriously on the sofa, and looking back, found that the storms and agonies that had preceded his engagement were dim in his memory. They belonged to a stage that was definitely over.

Helen came back into the studio, her eyes dancing.

"You needn't tell me," said Geoffrey, "I can see by your face that you've been talking to mother. What's she done now?"

"Oh, Geoffrey, it really is gorgeous. She's got the most perfect idea. You know Hugh and Jessica are coming back on Tuesday? Well, she proposes to have a party the Friday after for your grannie and great-aunt Sarah and aunt Dora and Jessica and me. All six of us do you see? And such husbands as there are, naturally."

"It sounds monstrous. Must we go?"

"Of course we must, and it isn't monstrous at all. I do wish you appreciated your mother; she'll be at her best stage-managing a thing like that. It will be a perfect puppet show; she'll pull the wires and we'll dance."

"Darling, why do you dance? Is it pure malice?"

"No it isn't. A little bit, yes. I do love to see how far she'll go. When we talk about art, for instance, I give her cues to see if she'll take them, and she does every time. Out she trots the same old clichés; it never fails. But mostly it's because I really admire her; she's so consistently unreal, she isn't a person at all, she's a peg hung with old worn out conventions and traditions, and yet she comports herself as if she were more real than any one else in the world."

"I'm her son; am I unreal too?" Geoffrey asked soberly.

"My darling, you're not."

Helen stood away from him, looking down at him serenely, her hands clasped loosely in front of her, her manner serious.

"You're real to me, just as I expect she and your father are real to each other. I'm an individualist. I suppose I'm what people would call temperamental, but I'm not entirely imbecile. I appreciate quite clearly that I have an enormous lot in common with your mother. As regards the ordinary practical things of life we do just the same as your parents did. I don't mean only things like marrying, and having children, and dying. But we're the product of the same education and very much the same kind of home. We have the same income, and move in much the same set. The differences between us are mainly superficial and illusionary. Your mother, for instance, has an illusion about motherhood and all that, and I have one about art, but we're both in the tradition of suitable wives for the male Greene."

"It _is_ odd to hear you talk like that. I should have thought that you would have passionately repudiated any sort of kinship with mother. And surely the differences between people are very sharp? Whatever you may say, you're very distinct from other people."

"Not now," said Helen positively. "When I was very young, yes, and when I'm old then I'll be Helen Guest again, but now I'm just beginning on the middle years and your mother's just getting to the end of them, but we've all the experiences of life in common, even if we do approach them from a totally different stand-point."

"I see what you mean. But you won't change will you, Helen? You won't be less yourself if you have a baby?"

"Yes, I think I'll change; I don't think I'll be less myself but anyhow you'll have to risk that."

"I don't want you any different," said Geoffrey very quietly.

Helen threw back her head and laughed.

"You don't know," she said, "I may become too awful, or I may improve enormously; the only single certain thing is that within the next year or two I'm going to do some good work."

"You're like mother in one way anyhow: in your brutally uncompromising optimism."

"And in another way too," Helen countered swiftly, "that I do most genuinely love one of the Mr. Greenes."

MRS. HUGH BECKETT GREENE

MRS. HUGH BECKETT GREENE

I

Jessica Deane wakened very early on her wedding morning and got up at once to look at the weather. The sun was slowly climbing up a clear sky, and there was a cold frostiness in the air that matched her mood. She looked out westwards over the roofs in the direction of the Greenes' house, and wondered whether Hugh were asleep or awake, and if awake whether he were feeling like her, keenly strung up, and exquisitely expectant, or only nervous and worried at the thought of dressing up to face a crowded church and a still more crowded reception.

She crossed over to the long mirror and studied her face at close range. It would be awful to have a spot on my chin, she thought anxiously, even the smallest beginning of a spot would spoil my nerve, or a bloodshot eye, or hiccups at the last minute. What appalling things might happen to destroy me to-day.

The mirror faithfully reflected back her own expression of dismay as she thought of all the depressing contingencies that might arise, and as she looked at it her face broke into a smile. Satisfied that even a close scrutiny showed no blemish, she stepped back a pace and looked at herself in detail.

My hair grows well, she thought dispassionately, I'm glad it's so fair and goes back like that off my forehead, but I think my eyes are too wide apart, and really my chin is almost negligible, it fades away to nothing. In fact twenty years ago I would have been plain, it's pure luck that my kind of face happens to be in the mode at present. It's lucky too that Hugh is so dark; we ought to look nice together.

Her mind plunged forward a few hours; and she laid a nervous hand on her heart beating so lightly and quickly under the lace of her nightgown as she thought of herself and Hugh standing at the flowered altar with rows and rows of massed curious faces behind.

Seized by a sudden desire to reassure herself by a sight of her wedding frock, Jessica went quietly into the spare bedroom where frock, train and veil were spread out on the bed. She lifted the white sheet that protected them and looked at the shining gold tissue of frock and train, and the old ivory veil lent by her godmother; then suddenly picking them up she bore them off to her room.

Of course it's desperately unlucky to try on your frock when it's quite finished--she argued with herself--but Hugh and I don't need luck and I'm not superstitious, and I would terribly like to make sure that it's as nice as I think it is. Taking off her nightgown she put on a new vest of yellow silk to match the frock, gold stockings and the pointed gold shoes that were to carry her up the aisle as Jessica Deane and down again as Jessica Greene.

Just as she slipped the frock over her head, and struggled into the long close-fitting sleeves, a voice from the doorway said, "Darling, are you mad? I heard you bumping about and thought I'd better come and see if you were having a nerve storm or something."

"Do come and help me, Drusilla, it's a frightfully difficult dress to get into. Pull it down all round will you; I just suddenly felt I had to put it on."

Jessica's face, faintly flushed from her struggle, appeared out of a swirl of gold, and she blushed deeper with embarrassment as she confronted her sister's cool, critical gaze.

"I suppose I am silly," she said defiantly, "In fact I know it's silly to be trying on my wedding dress at this unearthly hour in the morning, but brides are always allowed to behave idiotically on their wedding day."

"Not this sort of idiocy, though," said Drusilla calmly, "tears and hysterics, and changing your mind at the last minute if you like, but not just pure vanity. I think that's all right now."

Drusilla, who was kneeling to pull down the long skirt, leaned back on her heels and fingered its stiff folds.

"It's lovely," she said, "I'm glad you had it long enough to touch your toes, and I'm glad it's a picture frock too. I know they're overdone, but they do suit us, we're just the type."

She got up and stood in her green dressing-gown beside Jessica in her formal gold tissue.

"We're absurdly alike," said Jessica looking in the mirror at their two faces, with the same broad foreheads, grey eyes, pointed chins, and backward springing yellow hair, "If anything, I think you're prettier than me."

"I don't know," said Drusilla, complacently. "You vary more of course, but at your best I think you're a little better than me. Anyhow we'll both be all right to-day."

"I do hope so. You know I really feel looks matter frightfully. I feel so entirely right about Hugh, and I would like to look as dazzling as I feel, but it simply isn't possible."

"Are you really as much in love as all that?" Drusilla asked curiously.

"Yes, I am," answered Jessica, her face intent and serious, "I'm madly in love and so is Hugh, and we think we can pull off a really lovely marriage."

Drusilla sighed.

"You're a funny whole-hearted little creature," she said. "It's queer that I'm two years older than you, and I've never been the least bit in love."

"Do just get me out of this," said Jessica, but as she began to pull the long sleeves over her hands a sudden shaft of sunlight struck across the room, and lit up her yellow hair and her gold gown.

"Oh look, Drusilla, how beautifully lucky; what a proper omen."

She twisted herself so that the sun caught her shining train.

"I think it is rather lucky," Drusilla assented, "here, let me take it off before you tear it on anything."

"Drusilla, let's go and look at the presents again," said Jessica, as she carefully hung the discarded frock over a chair, and put on her dressing-gown.

"You really are crazy, I think; you've seen them a thousand times."

"Yes I know, but never in the early morning, and they'll look quite different. Besides, two came last night and I want to put them with the others in the billiard-room."

"Come on then if you must, but for goodness sake be quiet. Mother will be unhinged if she thinks you're awake so early. You're supposed to be having breakfast in bed at ten, aren't you?"

Very quietly Jessica and Drusilla crept downstairs, turning to smile at each other when a step creaked, with an expression of childish guilt for the clandestine little expedition. As they reached the bottom of the stairs the banisters cracked loudly. Jessica seized Drusilla's hand, giggled and ran across the hall into the billiard-room, where the presents in a glittering mass covered the large table and smaller tables placed round the walls.

"Do you know, I believe I'm rather excited," said Jessica, giggling again, "I never meant to be and I don't expect I will be after breakfast, but at present I feel just silly."