Part 28

Perhaps at first it had amused him. His teaching had not been of tolerance or humility, but of bracing self-repression and self-advancement: “There’s no such thing as can’t.” “Don’t give everything a personal application--it bores other people.” But, later on, he had been less amused and more contemptuous. Was it of Lydia’s methods?

Slowly her thoughts took her through the long-ago school days at Miss Glover’s.

Ambition had made her work, and the stimulus of admiration. But there had been human relations there too, surely. Across Lydia’s memory flittered a long, half-obliterated procession of Mollies and Doras who had walked up and down the garden with her, arm-in-arm, pouring out the stories of school quarrels, school adventures, school tragedies, that filled the horizon for them.

“You won’t repeat this to a soul, Lydia, ever, will you? I can trust you?...”

Oh, yes, Lydia could be trusted never to repeat the long, involved histories. Repeating only meant trouble for the tale-bearer. Natural shrewdness and fastidiousness combined had prevented her from making any return confidences. “Always let the other people talk about themselves.” Then they were in the weaker position at once and for ever.

Lydia had tacitly accepted the obligations of these implied friendships, but she had felt herself all the time to be vastly superior to them.

Through the school years still--to the arrival of Nathalie Palmer, the girl from Devonshire. Manners--dress--accent--all slightly different from those of the town girls at the school. Making friends with Nathalie had been eminently worth while, and her whole-hearted admiration pleasant. And Nathalie was so generous in her recognition of Lydia’s infinite superiority of brain and personality that it was possible to indulge from time to time in the occasional luxury of self-expression with her. The friendship with Nathalie had survived their shared school days, given fresh impetus, on Lydia’s side, by the consciousness that the grey-headed, distinguished-looking Rector, the devoted father of Nathalie, had approved of her clever schoolmate, and suggested that later on she should come and stay at the Devonshire Rectory.

The end of school--and a catastrophe that still loomed large on the sky-line of Lydia’s memory. Illness on the very verge of the examination that was to crown so many minor honours.

Even the pitying attention so lavishly bestowed upon her had not atoned for that calamity, especially when so much of it, unprecedentedly, had diverged from herself to Aunt Beryl, a sudden rival claimant to illness.

On and on through those old, past times--the visit to Wimbledon, and the intolerable, bouncing, boisterous Senthovens. Even Lydia had only been able to endure, garnering what profit to herself was possible from their slangy, elliptical instruction--more than mere endurance would have been impossible. And, after all, no need to assume sympathy or admiration in the case of the loud and self-satisfied Senthovens. They took tribute to their prowess for granted--wanted no demonstrations. “No nonsense about _us_!” cried they.

Nevertheless, the Senthovens had been ready enough with shouted congratulations and boastings, and had made ungrudging jubilee over Lydia’s success, to them so incomprehensible and unattainable, in the great school examination.

Lydia remembered quite well how the news had come, and rescued her from her humiliating standing as the spoil-sport of the party, who had clumsily contrived to hurt Olive Senthoven in a game of cricket. It had also distracted all the attention from Olive and her bruised face, and focussed it upon Lydia, rescuing her once and for all from the ignominy of her position amongst the Senthovens.

After school days and the Senthovens, her bid for independence and London.

Backwards still, through the days of that early, bewildering experiment. From Elena herself, that peroxide blonde of such astute experience, to the pallid young ladies in Millinery--Lydia’s personality had made conquests of them all. How freely they had giggled and gossiped before her, and eventually poured out their confidences just as recklessly as the little school-girls at Miss Glover’s!

In those days, Lydia had really admired her own diplomacy, that had so quickly established her as general favourite in a community with which she really had so little in common. Shrewd, pale-faced Rosie Graham didn’t matter. One had thought she did at first, because she had brains and acumen, and something in her very scornfulness itself was oddly alluring. A certain attraction about Miss Graham--until measured by the standard of importance applied to one’s first affair with a man.

Margoliouth. His oily and uninspired pawings--there was no other word for them, in the retrospect--had certainly roused no ardour in Lydia. It had merely been agreeable to feel herself the centre of speculation amongst the matrons and spinsters of Miss Nettleship’s boarding-house. And, competent to take care of herself, in the accepted sense of the words, Lydia had discreetly permitted the Greek’s advances, conscious all the time of the prestige accruing to her from theatre expeditions, hansom-cab drives, gifts of violets and boxes of Cadbury’s chocolates.

She had viewed as a safeguard her own perfectly distinct inward determination that Margoliouth should never be allowed, in return for these favours, to overstep the limits set by Lydia’s careful sense of discretion.

Disaster and humiliation had threatened the termination of that episode, the first hint of which had been Miss Nettleship’s plaintive and nervously-spoken warning of the Greek gentleman’s inability to meet his bills. A worse revelation, then, and a more public one, had been that of Mrs. Margoliouth’s unexpected existence. Pain had really threatened then--had hung like a descending cloud above Lydia’s humiliated head.

But her secret boast had been that, after all, she had turned that defeat into victory. The victory of a fine attitude, that had won her a great deal of admiration and a pity that was not condescending, from all the spectators of the little, sordid drama. It had also brought her an odd revelation, that she remembered still: the conviction that there was no calamity without its available compensation, in the shape of a not at all discreditable notoriety.

Through the phases of her youth still. The writing of her story, and the introduction that it had brought her, through voluble Miss Forster, to the unforgettable Lady Honoret. Certainly, her wit and determination had made the very most of that introduction, aided by the curious success that her novel had achieved. A side-issue, Lydia envisaged also the fact that she had ceased to write when success in writing had ceased to have any value for enhancing her position amongst her surroundings. The writing, like everything else, had only been a means to an end.

Backwards, through that far-away summer holiday that she had manœuvred to obtain at Nathalie’s home in Devonshire, gratifying at once her love of gratitude and her desire to justify her own careful schemings by inducing Aunt Beryl to receive Miss Nettleship in her stead at Regency Terrace.

Then the delight of making a success in her new _milieu_--of knowing that admiring Nathalie and the simple-minded Rector were full of praise and thanks for the able help that she had so soon learnt to give them. Certainly they had had the assistance that her quick brain and nimble fingers could bestow, but the things that they had given her were things of the spirit--affection, and trust, and loyal admiration, and for these they had met with no return in kind.

Was it that Lydia was incapable of them?

Joyce said that Clement had come to recognize it. With the remembrance came, shudderingly and reluctantly, but with relentless inevitability, the linking up of the past with the present.

Clement, who had puzzled and almost angered Lydia by his gradual transition during their married life, from eager confidences and ardent demonstrations to strange, apathetic reticences--Clement lived on in his daughter Jennie.

That which she had never acknowledged to herself for the sake of Clement, for whom her love had been a tepid thing, undeserving of the name, Lydia was coming to recognize for the sake of Clement’s child.

Jennie was the first person whom Lydia had loved, and as Rosie Graham had predicted long, long ago, she had “not known how to set about it.”

Loving Jennie, she had yet, as Joyce Damerel said, taken all the greater things for herself, and left Jennie only the less. For herself, the _beau rôle_, for Jennie that of foil.

Across her ravaged perceptions tore yet another recollection, one that this time seemed to summarize them all.

She heard again Grandpapa’s thin old voice, with its cynical intonation:

“You’re a situation-snatcher, Lydia--that’s what you are. A situation-snatcher.”

Grandpapa had known.

XXVII

“Mama, the telegram has come. Roland has ten days’ leave--he’ll be in London to-morrow.”

Jennie’s voice held a kind of awe in it, as though the unbelievable had come to pass.

“I’ll take you there,” said Lydia curtly.

The concession had been made on the evening in September, when Jennie, coming in from an afternoon spent with her lover, had found Lydia huddled in a chair by the window of the drawing-room, with fixed, vacant gaze and chilly hands.

But although Lydia had in no sense nor smallest degree revoked that half-spoken sanction of Jennie’s engagement, that had been inwardly forced upon her in the midst of the hour of truest misery that her life had ever known, she could derive no comfort from Jennie’s sudden, unregulated outbursts of jubilant gratitude.

“Oh, mama! You’ll take me to London!”

“I told you I would, when he got his leave. He wants the wedding immediately, of course?”

Jennie nodded.

“If he has ten days you can be married quietly in town by special licence, and--and see him off when he has to go back.”

“I want to be married from here,” said Jennie quickly. “Just go up with you to meet him, and do, perhaps, one day’s shopping or two--while he gets the licence, and the ring and things, and we go and see the old lawyers and people--and then come back here for my wedding, and go somewhere in the country for a tiny honeymoon, till the last possible minute.”

Lydia was surprised.

“It’ll be much more tiring for you--a lot of rushing about like that.”

Her instinct was always to shield Jennie from Jennie’s self.

“Roland wants it to be like that, too.” The defiant gleam of one who expects opposition had come into Jennie’s eyes again.

“Don’t, Jennie, take that tone. I’m not saying you shan’t have it your own way. Why do you want to be married here, and not in London, which would be so much simpler?”

“It’s my home,” cried Jennie, “and, besides, I want to have all the people I can; even if I _have_ got to be married in a travelling dress, and without proper bridesmaids or anything, I may as well have _some_ fun. We don’t know any people in London.”

She spoke like a child, Lydia reflected.

And yet, when they met Roland Valentine in London twenty-four hours later, Jennie no longer spoke like a child. She was quite different--infinitely more reposeful, gentler, more womanly.

Was this the real Jennie? Lydia’s perceptions were far too acute for her not to know that it was with Roland, not with herself, that Jennie was at ease, and therefore was absolutely natural.

Roland Valentine himself pleased Lydia better than on any former occasion. He, too, was graver and more quiet, and he thanked her very earnestly for giving her consent to an immediate wedding.

They went to lawyers, to banks, to jewellers and innumerable other shops, and Roland procured the special licence, and Jennie’s strong, sunburnt finger was measured for the wedding-ring. The ring was to follow them to Devonshire by post--something was to be engraved inside the gold circlet, but Lydia was not told what it was to be.

Jennie had never been secretive or even reserved, but it never seemed to occur to her to give her mother her confidence now, any more than she had ever given it to her in the course of the last seven or eight years.

Lydia, although she had been aware of this before, had never suffered from it as she suffered now. Formerly, she might have told herself that Jennie had no confidence to bestow--that nothing lay beneath the surface. Now, she was slowly, and with infinite pain in the recognition, forced to concede to Jennie the existence of a definite and individual personality--Jennie, the potential woman, as distinct from Jennie, Lydia Damerel’s child.

On the day before that of their proposed return to Devonshire, Jennie unexpectedly demanded whether they could not “look up Aunt Evelyn and Aunt Beryl.”

“I’ve seen Roland’s relations, the only ones in England, at least, and I think he ought to see mine.”

“So he has. He’s been at Quintmere, and he knows your grandmother and Billy.”

Lydia had not the slightest desire to “look up” the Senthovens, and, once more, there was the instinctive conviction that what Jennie suggested for herself could not be the best thing for her.

“That’s just it,” said Jennie. “He says they all make him feel like an adventurer down there--it’s so old and--and sort of traditional. I know just what he means. So I want him to see what awfully ordinary sorts of relations I have, as well as people like Grannie and Aunt Joyce.”

The recollection flashed across Lydia’s mind incontinently of the care with which she, engaged to be married to Jennie’s father, had avoided any such display of relatives and their “ordinariness.”

However, Roland Valentine, the Canadian mechanic, would scarcely prove critical.

Lydia sent a prepaid telegram to Regency Terrace, and received Aunt Beryl’s laconic reply:

“Delighted.”

The short, familiar journey was thronged for Lydia, in her new mood of painful introspection, with such memories as it seemed never to have held before.

Jennie and Roland Valentine sat opposite to her in the train. They talked to one another in low tones, and every now and then looked into one another’s eyes. It seemed to Lydia that, even in the gaze of the young man who had already been at the front for more than three months, there was no apprehension of parting--only the ecstatic recognition of an immense bliss.

She felt herself overwhelmingly lonely.

Regency Terrace, as usual, looked astonishingly unchanged. One almost expected to see Grandpapa’s head at the bow window of the dining-room behind the lace curtains, to hear Shamrock’s shrill, eager barking on the steps.

Aunt Beryl wore a dark-blue skirt and a flannel blouse with a high collar, just as she had worn every winter ever since Lydia could remember her.

“Come in, dear--I’m ever so pleased to see you. How do you do, Mr. Valentine? I’m quite well, thank you. Well, Jennie, I declare!”

Aunt Beryl looked at Jennie with an open adoration that she had not conceded even to Lydia in Lydia’s younger days.

“Aunt Evelyn is in the drawing-room, and Olive. It’s a great piece of luck having Olive here. She’s doing V.A.D. work at our Belgian Hospital in King’s Road, and she’s got the afternoon off. Tell Aunt Evelyn that you think Olive’s looking better, Lydia, if you get the chance. She’s awfully down on the poor girl for wanting to do this work--says she isn’t strong enough, and will knock herself up. It’s only because we know the matron that Evelyn let her go there at all.”

Aunt Beryl shook her head, and conducted them into the drawing-room.

If Jennie wanted Roland Valentine to appreciate the fact that she possessed relations who might be described as “ordinary,” Lydia reflected that she must surely be satisfied now.

Never had the Regency Terrace household exhibited such a perfect apotheosis of the commonplace.

Olive, in a dark-blue uniform that made her look extraordinarily flat-chested, sat on a stool crouched over the fire, her face unbecomingly heated. Aunt Evelyn was in the arm-chair that had been Grandpapa’s, but it, too, had been drawn close to the narrow grate, behind which burned a piled-up mound of coal, constantly replenished by Olive from the scuttle.

Mrs. Senthoven had visibly aged, although her sister had not.

Her increasing deafness compelled her to carry an ear-trumpet, that gave her an air of infirmity, and she wore a cap over her thin, parted, white hair, and a little knitted shawl across her shoulders.

With a sort of shock, Lydia realized that Aunt Evelyn must be past sixty.

They had to shout at her, for she would not always make use of her ear-trumpet.

“Mother does hate that old trumpet of hers,” said Olive in explanation. “I tell her she ought to see some of the things our men in hospital have to put up with--artificial legs, and glass eyes, and goodness knows what-all.”

Olive could talk of nothing but the hospital.

She had only been working there a month.

“This Sister, I can tell you--Sister McGregor, as she calls herself--she’s a terror. A great, big woman, she is, and wears the scarlet and grey uniform--you know. Well, what d’you think the men call her? She’s a thumping great piece, I must tell you--as broad as she’s long, and _that’s_ saying something. Well, the men call her ‘The Thin Red Line!’ Isn’t that great, now?”

Roland Valentine shouted with laughter, and Jennie laughed too. Even Aunt Beryl, to whom Lydia felt sure that the story could not be new, displayed a sympathetic mirth, and Olive’s mother inquired querulously what the joke was?

“It’s an old one, mother,” screamed Olive. “You’ve heard it already.”

“But what _was_ it?” persisted Aunt Evelyn suspiciously.

It was Roland Valentine who picked up the trumpet and loudly repeated into it Olive’s successful anecdote.

Soon it became evident that the introduction of Roland to Jennie’s family was to be crowned with success.

The young man talked about Canada to Bob’s mother, and was shown the photograph of Bob, and Bob’s wife, and a fat boy in a kilt, who was explained as “my daughter-in-law’s only child by her first. She was a widow when Bob met her, but the boy is a nice little fellow, I believe. No second family, I’m sorry to say.”

“But mother has plenty of grandchildren,” Olive announced, half proudly and half aggressively. “Have you seen this one of pore ole Bee’s young hopefuls, Lydia?”

It was a large group. Six--seven, Swaines, ranging from the ages of fifteen to eight and a half. The girls had frizzed-out hair, and wore cheap lace collars over their stuff dresses, and the two youngest, both boys, were in velveteen suits, and one grasped a spade and the other a bucket. The photographer had indicated a sea-scape behind the group.

“Regular Swaines, aren’t they?” said Olive discontentedly. “Not a Senthoven amongst the lot of them, at least, not in appearance.”

“Why, hasn’t this fine little fellow here got a look of his auntie?” inquired Roland Valentine, indicating the least unattractive of Mrs. Swaine’s progeny.

Olive looked gratified.

“Funny you should say that. He’s my godson--Horace--and he _is_ a good bit more like our side of the family than any of the others. Not that the others take after their father in anything but looks, I will say.”

“Don’t you like him, then?” inquired Jennie innocently.

Lydia had not thought fit to enter into any details before Jennie as to the little she knew of Beatrice Senthoven’s disastrous alliance with Mr. Stanley Swaine. She had indeed systematically evaded all Jennie’s inquiries about her contemporary cousins.

“Like him?” said Olive explosively. “Hark at her, Lydia! Why, he’s a bad lot, Jennie--that’s what he is--a regular scallywag. He--you know.”

An expressive pantomime of tilted-up arm and hand and a motion as of swallowing completed Olive’s terse description of her brother-in-law’s failing.

“Ah, a lot of good fellows get their lives spoilt that way,” said Valentine sympathetically--but quite matter-of-factly, thought Lydia.

“Him and Beatrice ought never to have been allowed to go about together the way they did,” said Aunt Evelyn suddenly. “I blame myself.”

“Now, now, now--tell us all about this wedding of yours, Jennie,” said Aunt Beryl, violently tactful.

“A regular war-wedding, isn’t it?” said Olive. “One of our nurses at the hospital the other day got a telegram just like that to say that her _fiasco_ was coming on leave, and they were to get married straight away. So this girl I’m telling you about, this nurse--she went straight off with twenty-four hours’ leave--that was all they’d give her, if you please--and simply came back married.”

“Only twenty-four hours!” exclaimed Jennie. “What did the husband do?”

“Oh, came down with her, of course, and stayed at the hotel.”

“Well, I think it was too bad,” Aunt Beryl remarked with finality. “Only giving her twenty-four hours like that, poor thing.”

“One’s got to think of the work,” said Olive, shaking her head. “We’re fearfully full up just now. I wonder you don’t take up nursing, Jennie--but perhaps you mean to after you’re married?”

“I don’t know,” said Jennie calmly.

Then she had had some such idea, although Lydia had definitely stated that she was not fitted for such work, and had taken it for granted that Jennie would come home to her after Roland’s return to the front.

Lydia had far too much self-command to risk a betrayal of her thought by looking at her daughter, but she knew by intuition that Jennie had shot a half-frightened, half-mischievous glance at her in schoolgirl-fashion.

“I’d like to have Jennie doing work in London somewhere,” declared Roland Valentine. “It’ll be handy for my leave, or if I get sent into hospital.”

“We might find a flat in town,” said Lydia quietly.

“There are all sorts of hostels for women-workers being opened everywhere,” said Jennie.

The implication was obvious enough.

At four o’clock Olive rose importantly. She had been glancing surreptitiously at the clock for the last ten minutes.

“Well, I suppose I must be toddling. What a bore!” she said with an affectation of reluctance. “It’s as much as my place is worth to be five minutes late in going on duty.”

“I told the girl to put a cup of tea for you in the dining-room, dear. You’ve plenty of time. (The girl I’ve got now,” said Aunt Beryl in parenthesis to Lydia, “is the best I’ve had since Gertrude left. You remember Gertrude, who got married?) How are you going, Olive?”

“By tram, I s’pose.”

“Perhaps you and Jennie would like to walk her as far as the tramway centre?” suggested Aunt Beryl, with a kindly gleam of rather pallid mirth directed at the Canadian.

“Sure! Will you, Jennie?”

“Come on, then. Goo’-bye, auntie; goo’-bye, Lydia, ole gurl. Awfully glad to have seen you--’specially in these busy days. Ta-ta!”

Olive clattered from the room, quite in the old, breezy Senthoven manner.

“She won’t be back till ten o’clock to-night, as likely as not,” moaned her mother.

“She’s looking very well on it,” declared Aunt Beryl stoutly. “Lydia, don’t you think Olive looks ever so much better for the interest?”

Lydia agreed with complete sincerity.

Aunt Beryl sat down by the fire, and there was a certain relaxation, as from a long strain, in her bearing.

“Those are the lucky ones, those that have a job. There’s poor George eating his heart out because he’s past the age for even the volunteers. It does seem hard, too. All he can do is to stay overtime at the office, doing the work of young fellows who’ve gone to the war. Lydia, that’s a fine young chap that Jennie’s got there.”

“I’m glad you like him, Aunt Beryl,” said Lydia gently.

Her tone held no hint of disagreement. To disparage her accepted son-in-law would have offended her taste, besides mitigating her claim to self-sacrificed motherhood.

“Dear little Jennie! She’s full young--but you weren’t much older when you were married yourself, Lydia.”

“Nearly three years--and Jennie is such a baby for her age!”