“That’s just what I am complaining of. Why should the Midland Supply Depôt do all these odd jobs? Hospital supplies are all very well, but when it comes to meeting all the troop-trains and supplying all the bandages, and being central Depôt for sphagnum moss, and all the rest of it — all I can say is, that it’s beyond a joke.”
Miss Bruce took instant advantage of her employer’s infelicitous final cliché to remark austerely:
“Certainly one would never dream of looking upon it as a joke, Lady Vivian. I quite feel with you about the working so fearfully hard, and keeping these strange, irregular hours, but I’m convinced that it’s perfectly unavoidable — perfectly unavoidable. Charmian owns herself that no one can possibly take her place at the Depôt, even for a day.”
This striking testimony to the irreplacableness of her daughter appeared to leave Lady Vivian cold.
“I dare say,” she said curtly. “Of course, she’s got a gift for organization, and all she’s done is perfectly marvellous, but I must say I wish she’d taken up nursing or something reasonable, like anybody else, when she could have had proper holidays and kept regular hours.”
Miss Bruce gave the secretarial equivalent for laughing the suggestion to scorn.
“As though nursing wasn’t something that anyone could do! Why, any ordinary girl can work in a hospital. But I should like to know what other woman could do Charmian’s work. Why, if she left, the whole organization would break down in a week.”
“Well,” said the goaded Lady Vivian, “the war wouldn’t go on any the longer if it did, I don’t suppose — any more than it’s going to end twenty-four hours sooner because Char has dinner at eleven o’clock every night and spends five pounds a day on postage stamps.”
Miss Bruce looked hurt, as she went on applying halfpenny stamps to the postcards that formed an increasing mountain on the writing-table in front of her.
“I suppose you’re working for her now?”
“I only wish I could do more,” said the secretary fervently. “She gives me these odd jobs because I’m always imploring her to let me do some of the mechanical work that any one can manage, and spare her for other things. But, of course, no one can really do anything much to help her.”
“I’m sorry to hear it, since she has a staff of thirty or forty people there. Pray, are they all being paid out of Red Cross funds for doing nothing at all?” inquired Lady Vivian satirically.
“Oh, of course they all do their bit. Routine work, as Charmian calls it. But she has to superintend everything — hold the whole thing together. She looks through every letter that leaves that office, and knows the workings of every single department, and they come and ask her about every little thing.”
“Yes, they do. She enjoys that.”
Lady Vivian’s tone held nothing more than reflectiveness, but the little secretary reddened unbecomingly, and said in a strongly protesting voice:
“Of course, it’s a very big responsibility, and she knows that it all rests on her.”
“Well, well,” said Lady Vivian soothingly. “No one is ever a prophet in his own country, and I suppose Char is no exception. Anyhow, she has a most devoted champion in you, Miss Bruce.”
“It has nothing to do with any — any personal liking, Lady Vivian, I assure you,” said the secretary, her voice trembling and her colour rising yet more. “I don’t say it because it’s her, but quite dispassionately. I hope that even if I knew nothing of Charmian’s own personal attractiveness and — and kindness, I should still be able to see how wonderful her devotion and self-sacrifice are, and admire her extraordinary capacity for work. Speaking quite impersonally, you know.”
Anything less impersonal than her secretary’s impassioned utterances, it seemed to Lady Vivian, would have been hard to find, and she shrugged her shoulders very slightly.
“Well, Char certainly needs a champion, for she’s making herself very unpopular in the county. All these people who ran their small organizations and war charities quite comfortably for the first six or eight months of the war naturally don’t like the way everything has been snatched away and affiliated to this Central Depôt—”
“Official co-ordination is absolutely—”
“Yes, yes, I know; that’s Char’s cri de bataille. But there are ways and ways of doing things, and I must say that some of the things she’s said and written, to perfectly well-meaning people who’ve been doing their best and giving endless time and trouble to the work, seem to me tactless to a degree.”
“She says herself that anyone in her position is bound to give offence sometimes.”
“Position fiddlesticks!” said Miss Vivian’s parent briskly. “Why can’t she behave like anybody else? She might be the War Office and the Admiralty rolled into one, to hear her talk sometimes. Of course, people who’ve known her ever since she was a little scrap in short petticoats aren’t going to stand it. Why, she won’t even be thirty till next month! — though, I must say, she might be sixty from the way she talks. But then she always was like that, from the time she was five years old. It worried poor Sir Piers dreadfully when he wanted to show her how to manage her hoop, and she insisted on arguing with him about the law of gravitation instead. I suppose I ought to have smacked her then.”
Miss Bruce choked, but any protest at the thought of the obviously regretted opportunity lost by Lady Vivian for the perpetration of the suggested outrage remained unuttered.
The sharp sound of the telephone-bell cut across the air.
Miss Bruce attempted to rise, but was hampered by the paraphernalia of her clerical work, and Lady Vivian said:
“Sir Piers will answer it. He is in the hall, and you know he likes telephoning, because then he can think he isn’t really getting as deaf as he sometimes thinks he is.”
Miss Bruce, respecting this rather complicated reason, sat down again, and Lady Vivian remarked dispassionately:
“Of course it’s Char, probably to say she can’t come back to dinner. You know, I specially asked her to get back early tonight because John Trevellyan is dining with us. There! what did I tell you?”
They listened to the one-sided conversation.
“Sir Piers Vivian speaking. What’s that? Oh, you’ll put me through to Miss Vivian. Very well; I’ll hold on. That you, my dear? Your mother and I are most anxious you should be back for dinner — Trevellyan is coming.... We’ll put off dinner for half an hour if that would help you.... But, my dear, he’ll be very much disappointed not to see you, and it really seems a pity, when the poor chap is just back ... he’ll be so disappointed.... Yes, yes, I see. I’m sure it’s very good of you, but couldn’t they manage without you just for once?... Very well, my dear, I’ll tell him.... It’s really very good of you, my poor dear child....”
Lady Vivian stamped her foot noiselessly as her husband’s voice reached her; but when Sir Piers had put back the receiver and come slowly into the room, she greeted him with a smile.
“Was that Char? To say she couldn’t be back in time for dinner tonight, I suppose?”
Quick-tempered, sharp-tongued woman as she was, Joanna Vivian’s voice was always gentle in speaking to her white-haired husband, twenty years her senior.
“The poor child seems to think she can’t be spared. Very good of her, but isn’t she overdoing it just a little — eh, Joanna? Aren’t they working her rather too hard?”
“It’s mostly her own doing, Piers. She’s head of this show, you know. I suppose that’s why she thinks she can’t leave it.”
“The whole thing would go to pieces without her,” thrust in the secretary, in the sudden falsetto with which she always impressed upon Sir Piers her recollection of his increasing deafness. “She supervises the whole organization, and if she’s away there isn’t any one to take her place.”
“But they don’t want to work after six o’clock,” said the old man, looking puzzled. “Ten to six — that’s office hours. She oughtn’t to want to be there after the place is shut up.”<
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“Oh, there’s no ‘close time’ for the Midland Supply Depôt,” said Miss Bruce, looking superior. “They may have orders to meet a train at any hour of the day or night, and the telephone often goes on ringing till eleven or twelve o’clock, I believe. And Charmian never leaves till everyone else has finished work.”
Sir Piers looked bewildered, and his wife said quietly:
“I’m thinking of suggesting to Char that she should sleep at the Hostel they opened last year, instead of coming back here at impossible hours every night. It really is very hard on the servants, and, besides, I don’t think we shall have enough petrol this winter for it to be possible. She could always come home for week-ends, and on the whole it would be less tiring for her to be altogether in Questerham during the week.”
“But is it necessary?” inquired Sir Piers piteously.
His wife shrugged her shoulders.
“If she’d been a boy she would be in the trenches now. I suppose we must let her do what she can, even though she’s a girl. Other parents have to make greater sacrifices than ours, Piers.”
“Yes, yes, to be sure,” he assented. “And it’s very good of the dear child to give up all her time as she does. But I’m sorry she can’t be back for dinner tonight, Joanna — very sorry. Poor Trevellyan will be disappointed.”
“Yes,” said Lady Vivian, and refrained from adding, “I hope he will be.”
She had once hoped that Char and John Trevellyan might marry; but Char’s easy contempt for her cousin’s Philistinism was only equalled by his unconcealed regret that so much prettiness should be allied to such alarming quick-wittedness.
“Miss Bruce,” she said, turning to her secretary, “I hope you will dine with us tonight. Captain Trevellyan is bringing over a brother-officer and his wife, and we shall be an odd number, since there is no hope of Char.”
“What’s that, my dear?” said Sir Piers. “I hadn’t heard that. Who is Trevellyan bringing with him?”
“Major Willoughby and his wife. She used to be Lesbia Carroll, and I knew her years ago — before she married. I shall be rather curious to see her again.”
“Are they motoring?”
“Yes, in Johnnie’s new car.”
The dressing-gong reverberated through the hall.
“They will very likely be late,” remarked Lady Vivian, “but I must go and dress at once.”
She went across the long room, a tall, upright woman with a beautiful figure, obviously better-looking at fifty-two than she could ever have been as a girl. Her hair was thick and dark, with more than a sprinkling of white, and two deep vertical lines ran from the corners of her nostrils to her rather square chin. But her blue eyes were brilliant, and deeply set under a forehead that was singularly unlined.
As Joanna Trevellyan, ungainly and devoid of beauty, she had been far too outspoken to conceal her native cleverness, and had never known popularity. As the wife of Sir Piers Vivian, the only man who had ever wished to marry her, and mistress of Plessing, her wit and shrewdness became her, and as the years went on she was even accounted good-looking.
Miss Bruce, returning to her postcards after a hurried toilet, thought that Lady Vivian looked very handsome as she came down in her black-lace evening-dress with a high amethyst comb in her hair.
“Have the evening papers come?” was her first inquiry.
“I think Sir Piers had them taken upstairs.”
Lady Vivian frowned quickly.
“How I wish he wouldn’t do that! The casualty lists depress him so dreadfully. We must try and keep off the subject of the war at dinner, Miss Bruce, or he won’t sleep all night.”
Miss Bruce said nothing, but she pursed up her lips in a manner which meant that a possibly wakeful night for Sir Piers Vivian ought not to be weighed in the balance against the universal tendency to discuss the war. That the subject was never willingly embarked upon at Plessing, except by Char Vivian, seemed to her a confession of weakness.
Lady Vivian was perfectly aware of her secretary’s point of view, and profoundly indifferent to it. She even took a rather malicious pleasure in saying lightly and yet very decidedly:
“John is safe enough, but I don’t know what Lesbia Willoughby may choose to talk about. As a girl she had the voice of a pea-hen, and never stopped chattering. So, if you can, please head her off war-talk at dinner.”
Her employer’s trenchant simile as to Mrs. Willoughby’s vocal powers could not but recur to Miss Bruce with a sense of its extreme appositeness when the guests entered.
Mrs. Willoughby billowed into the room. There was really no other word to describe that rapid, undulating, and yet buoyant advance. Tall as Lady Vivian was, and by no means slightly built, she seemed to Miss Bruce to be at once physically overpowered and almost eclipsed in the strident and voluminous greeting of her old acquaintance.
“My dear Joanna! After all these years ... how too, too delightful to see you so absolutely and utterly unchanged! Dear old days! And now we meet in the midst of all these horrors!”
The exaggeration of the look she cast round her seemed to include the drawing-room and its occupants alike in the pleasing category.
“I’m sorry you don’t like my Louis XV.,” said Lady Vivian flippantly, and turned to greet the rest of the party.
Her cousin John, who looked, even in khaki, a great deal less than his thirty years, smiled at her with steady blue eyes that bore a great resemblance to her own, and wrung her hand, saying, “This is very jolly, Cousin Joanna,” in a pleasant, rather serious voice.
“And here,” said Lesbia Willoughby piercingly— “here is my Lewis.”
Her Lewis advanced, looking not unnaturally sheepish, and Trevellyan said conscientiously:
“May I introduce Major Willoughby to you? My cousin, Lady Vivian.”
“You never told me, Joanna, that this dear thing was a cousin of yours,” shrieked Lesbia reproachfully. “I think it quite disgustingly mean of you, considering that we were girls together.”
“In the days when we were girls together,” said Lady Vivian ruthlessly, “he wasn’t born or thought of. Have they announced dinner, Miss Bruce?”
“This moment.”
“Then, do let’s go in at once. You must all be very hungry after such a drive.”
“I never eat nowadays — simply never,” proclaimed Mrs. Willoughby as she crossed the hall on Sir Piers’s arm. “I think it most unpatriotic. We’re all going to be starving quite soon, and the poor are living on simply nothing a day as it is. And one can’t bear to touch food while our poor dear boys in the trenches and in Germany are literally starving.”
Mrs. Willoughby’s voice was of a very piercing quality, and she emphasized her words by rolling round a pair of enormous and over-prominent light grey eyes as she spoke. Seated at the dinner-table, she contrived to present an appearance that almost amounted to impropriety, by merely putting a large bare elbow on the table and flinging back an elaborately dressed head set on a short neck and opulent shoulders, thickly dredged with heavily scented powder. Miss Bruce, on the opposite side of the table, eyed her with distrustful disapproval. It did not appear to her likely that she would be able to carry out Lady Vivian’s injunction that war-talk was to be avoided.
“Isn’t Char at home?” Trevellyan inquired of his hostess.
“She’s at Questerham, and the car has gone in for her, but she telephoned to say that she couldn’t get back till late. It’s this Supply Depôt of hers; she’s giving every minute of the day and night to it,” said Lady Vivian, characteristically allowing no tinge of disapproval or disappointment to colour her voice.
“Is that your delightful girl?” inquired Lesbia across the table, and pronouncing the word as though it rhymed with “curl.” “Isn’t it too wonderful to see all these young things devoting themselves? As for me, I’m literally run off my feet in town. I’m having a holiday here — just to see something of Lewis, who’s stationed in these parts indefinitely, poor dear lamb — be
cause my doctor said I was killing myself — literally killing myself.”
“Really?” said Lady Vivian placidly. “I hope you’re going to be here for some time. Are you staying—”
“Only till I’m fit to move. That moment,” said Lesbia impressively, “that very moment, I must simply dash back to London. My dear, I can’t tell you what it’s like. I never have an instant to call my own — have I, Lewis?”
“Rather not,” said Lewis hastily.
He was a small, brown-faced man, who had won his D.S.O. in South Africa, and whom no doctor could now be induced to pass for service abroad.
“Perhaps some charitable organization takes up your time,” suggested Sir Piers to Mrs. Willoughby. His deafness seldom permitted him to follow more than the drift of general conversation. “Now, Charmian, our daughter, has taken up a most creditable piece of work — most creditable — although, perhaps, she is a little inclined to overdo things just at present.”
“No one can possibly overdo war-work,” Mrs. Willoughby told him trenchantly. “Nothing that we women of England can do could ever be enough for the brave fathers, and husbands, and brothers, and sweethearts, who are risking their lives for us out there. Think of what the trenches are — just hell, as a boy said to me the other day — hell let loose!”
Sir Piers looked very much distressed, and his white head began to shake. He had only heard part of Lesbia’s discourse. Trevellyan’s boyishly fair face flushed scarlet. He had fought in Belgium, and in Flanders, until a bullet lodged in his knee, and now his next Medical Board might send him to France to rejoin his regiment. But it would have occurred to no one to suppose that the poignant description quoted by Mrs. Willoughby had ever emanated from Trevellyan.
From the head of the table Joanna Vivian said smoothly:
“You’ve made us all very curious as to your work, Lesbia. Do tell us what you do.”
Mrs. Willoughby gave her high, strident laugh.
“Everything,” was her modest claim. “Absolutely everything, my dear. Packing for prisoners three mornings a week, canteen work twice, and every Flag-day going. I can’t tell you the hours I’ve stood outside Claridge’s carrying a tray and seeing insolent wretches walk past me without buying. I’ve been so exhausted by the end of the day I’ve had to have an hour’s massage before I could drag myself out to patronize some Red Cross entertainment. But, of course, my real work is the Colonial officers. Dear, sweet things! I take them all over London!”
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 34