When she did see Queenie, at the Duchess’s ball as Goldstein had predicted, Lady Isabel was not with her. Excess of fatigue had unwillingly constrained her to stay at home, while Sir Francis, bored but courteous, escorted his eldest daughter in her stead.
They arrived late, and stood for a few minutes in the doorway, watching the kaleidoscopic scene of colour and movement in the great illuminated ballroom.
Alex’ attention was attracted by a group of men all gathered near the door, and prominent among them Goldstein, his eager, searching gaze fixed upon the broad stairway without, up and down which innumerable figures passed and re-passed. From the sudden lightning flash in his ardent black gaze, not less than from a sort of movement instantly communicated to the whole group, Alex guessed that he had focussed the object of his quest.
The announcement made at the head of the stairs was inaudible amid the crashing of dance music, but Alex recognized the entering couple in a flash.
Colonel Torrance, white-haired, with black moustache and eyebrows, upright and soldierly still, had changed less than Queenie. She looked much taller than Alex had imagined her, and her graceful outline was fuller, but she moved exquisitely.
Her very fair hair, at a time when every woman wore a curled fringe, was combed straight back from her rounded brow, leaving only the merest escaping curls at either temple, and gathered into the ultra-fashionable “jug-handle” knot on the top of her head. She wore a wreath of tiny blue forget-me-nots that deepened the tint of her grey-blue eyes, and the colour was repeated freely in the deep frills and ruchings of her white, décolletée dress, of an elaboration that Alex instinctively knew her mother would not have countenanced. Turquoises were twisted round the white, full column of her throat, and clasped her rounded arms.
Alex watched her eagerly.
Every man in the little waiting group was pressing round her, claiming first possession of her attention.
The faint, remotely smiling sweetness of Queenie’s heart-shaped mouth recalled to Alex with extraordinary vividness the schoolgirl at the Liège convent.
Goldstein, his eyes flaming, stood demonstratively waiting, with insolent security in his bearing, while she dispensed her favours right and left, always with the same chilly, composed sweetness.
The music, which had ceased, broke into the lilt of the Blue Danube, and on the instant Goldstein imperiously approached Queenie. She swayed towards him, still smiling slightly, and they drifted into the throng of dancers. Alex turned round with a sort of gasp.
What must it feel like to be the heroine of a ballroom triumph, to know that a dozen men would count the evening worth while for the privilege of dancing once with her, that they would throng in the doorway to watch and wait for her coming?
Some of them remained in the doorway still, watching her dance, the folds of her dress and her great white fan gathered into one hand, her white, heavy eyelids cast down under her pure, open forehead, and Goldstein’s arm encircling her waist as he guided her steps skilfully round the crowded room. Alex saw that Sir Francis, his double eyeglass raised, was also watching the couple.
“I wonder who that remarkably pretty woman is, of whom young Goldstein is very obviously enamoured?”
Alex felt oddly that Sir Francis supposed Queenie to be of maturer years than she in reality was.
“It’s Queenie Torrance, father. She was at school with me,” Alex repeated. “I’ve not seen her since she grew up — but she’s only about a year older than I am.”
“Indeed!”
Curiosity as to the unanimity of masculine judgment made Alex appeal to him with a question.
“Do you think she’s pretty, father?”
“Exceedingly striking — beautiful, in fact,” said Sir Francis.
Queenie was not beautiful, and Alex knew it, but the glamour of her magnetic personality was evidently as potent with older men as with young Goldstein and his contemporaries. Alex felt a curious pang, half of envy and half of wonder.
Sir Francis put down his glasses. “A pity,” he said deliberately, “that she is not — altogether—” And raised his grizzled eyebrows.
VIII
Goldstein and Queenie
Queenie Torrance spoke to Alex that night with characteristic suavity, and showed pleasure at meeting her again.
“Those old convent days seem a long way off, don’t they?” she asked, smiling a little.
Her glance, sweeping the big ballroom, seemed to appraise its glories and claim them for her own.
It was the glance, rather than the words, to which Alex replied.
“You’re having a splendid time, aren’t you, Queenie? You like being grown-up?”
“I adore it,” said Miss Torrance, her eyes gleaming like stars.
Alex did not wonder at it.
Night after night she watched Queenie Torrance accepting as her right the homage of innumerable men, halving the favour of her dances at crowded balls where “wall-flowers” were too numerous to be rescued from oblivion by the most determined of hostesses, going down to supper on the arm of young Goldstein and lingering with him in prolonged tête-à-tête. Goldstein, at the little round table across which he leant, recklessly oblivious of comment, endeavouring, often fruitlessly, throughout a whole evening, to obtain one direct look from those widely-set, downcast eyes under their flaxen lashes.
It was not easy, Alex found, to talk to Queenie. They often met at entertainments, and once or twice in the Park, but Queenie never rode in the mornings, as Alex sometimes did, and Lady Isabel did not allow her daughter to take up the fashionable practice of bicycling in Battersea Park, at which Queenie Torrance, in the neatest and most daring of rational costumes, was reported to excel. Once Alex, as she had said before in her childish days, asked Lady Isabel:
“Mother, may I ask Queenie Torrance to tea here? We meet everywhere, and it will be so odd if I never ask her to come here. Besides, I should like to have her.”
“I’m sorry, Alex, but I’d rather you contented yourself with meetin’ her in society — if you do.”
“Why?” said Alex unwisely, urged by some mysterious unreason to provoke the answer which she already anticipated with resentment.
“She’s not the sort of girl I should care about you being friends with very much,” said Lady Isabel without heat. “I hear she’s already bein’ talked about.”
Alex knew what the words meant, uttered by her mother and her mother’s circle of intimates.
“Why is she being talked about?” Alex asked rebelliously.
“Any girl who goes in for being fast gets talked about,” said Lady Isabel severely. “And it does them no good in the long run either. Men may flirt with girls of that sort, and like to dance with them and pay them attention, but they don’t marry them. A man likes his wife to be simple and well-bred and dignified.”
“I’m sure heaps of people would like to marry Queenie.”
“How do you know?” Lady Isabel asked quickly.
Alex did not reply. She only knew that men looked at Queenie Torrance as they did not look at other women, and, true to the traditions of youth and of the race to which she belonged, the admiration of a man for a woman, to her inexperience spelt a proposal of marriage.
“I don’t want to be hard on a girl who is, after all, very young,” said Lady Isabel. “And, of course, her father doesn’t look after her. She is allowed to go to restaurants with him and every sort of thing.... It’s not the girl’s fault exactly, though I don’t like the way she dresses, and a wreath of artificial flowers, or whatever it is she wears in her hair, is thoroughly bad form. But one can’t be too particular, Alex, and I do want you to make a success of things, and have the right friends and not the wrong ones.”
The wistful anxiety in her mother’s voice, no less than in her glance at her daughter, made Alex wonder sensitively if, perhaps, she were secretly somewhat disappointed.
Certainly no overwhelming triumph had attended Alex’ social career. She was merely th
e newly-come-out daughter of a charming and popular mother, less pretty than many of the season’s débutantes, alternately embarrassingly self-conscious, or else, when she found herself at her ease, with an unbecomingly dictatorial manner. She had been led to expect, from constant veiled references to the subject, that as soon as she grew up, opportunity would be afforded her to attain the goal of every well-born girl’s destiny — that of matrimony. Girls who became engaged to be married in their first season were a success, those who had already twice, or perhaps thrice, been the round of London gaiety with no tangible result of the sort, had almost invariably to give way to a younger sister, in order that she, in her turn, might have “the chances” of which they had failed to profit.
Of young women of twenty-two or twenty-three years old, still going yearly through the season, Lady Isabel merely said matter-of-factly:
“What a pity!”
For the first time, a disquieting twinge seized Alex, lest the same words should apply to her. No one had shown her the faintest inclination to ask her in marriage, or even express any particular admiration for her. She could not imagine any of the men whom she knew falling in love with her.
At balls or dinner-parties, she made conversation with her partners. They never grew to know one another more intimately. Sometimes she had heard girls talk of looking forward to some forthcoming entertainment because they knew that their particular friends would be there.
She herself did not care. She was on the same terms with all of them — polite, impersonal, mutually rather bored and boring.
The nearest approach to intercourse other than merely surface that she attained to, was with Queenie’s most openly declared worshipper, Maurice Goldstein. His manner to all women verged upon the effusive, and Alex was secretly faintly ashamed of feeling slightly, but perceptibly, flattered at the deference which he showed her, and even at his favourite mannerism of gazing straight into her eyes as he shook hands with her on meeting or parting.
Although Lady Isabel never invited him to Clevedon Square, and sometimes spoke of him as “that dreadful young Jew who seems to get himself asked everywhere,” she did not forbid Alex to dance with him, and he was the only young man of her acquaintance who invariably asked her to keep a second dance for him later in the evening.
She felt greatly curious as to his sentiment for Queenie, partly from youth’s love of romance, partly from a desire to find out, if she could, both the cause and the effect of the process known as “falling in love.”
If she knew more about it, she felt dimly, perhaps it might happen also to her.
One night, towards the end of the season, at the last big ball she was to attend that year, Alex was taken down to supper by Maurice Goldstein.
She was surprised, and for a moment flattered, for Queenie was also present, although she had apparently vouchsafed him neither word nor look.
Goldstein gave Alex his arm and conducted her ceremoniously downstairs to the supper-room.
It was late in the evening, only four or five couples, or an occasional group of three or four, lingered at the small, round, flower-decked tables.
“Shall we come here?” said Goldstein rather morosely.
He selected a table in a remote corner, and as she took her seat, Alex perceived that they were within sight of the alcove where sat Queenie Torrance with her partner, a young Danish diplomat whom Alex knew only by sight.
“Who is that?” she asked almost involuntarily, as Goldstein’s lowering gaze followed the direction of her own.
The young man beside her needed no more to make him launch out into emphatic speech.
Alex was half frightened, as she watched the glow in his eyes and the rapid gesticulations of his hands, as though emotion had startled him into a display of the racial characteristics that he habitually concealed so carefully.
He told her crudely that he adored Queenie, and that it drove him nearly mad to see her in the company of other men.
“But why don’t you ask her to marry you?” exclaimed Alex innocently.
Goldstein stared at her.
“I have asked her fourteen times,” he said at last with a slight gasp.
“Fourteen times!” Alex was astounded.
According to her preconceived notions a proposal was carefully led up to, uttered at some propitious moment, preferably by moonlight, and then and there either definitely accepted or rejected.
“But I shouldn’t have thought you’d even seen her fourteen times,” she remarked naïvely.
“I see her every day,” Goldstein said gloomily. “It’s playing the deuce with my business. You won’t give me away, I know — you’re her friend, aren’t you? — and people are so stupid and conventional, they might talk.”
Alex remembered Lady Isabel. Was this what she had meant?
“I can always manage to see her. I know her movements, and when I can meet her, and when I may take her out to lunch or tea — some quiet place, of course.”
Alex was puzzled.
“But are you engaged?”
“Yes, a thousand times!” he answered in low, vehement tones, and then appeared to recollect himself. “She has never said no, although I can’t induce her to say yes,” he admitted; “and I have to see her surrounded and admired everywhere she goes, and have no hold on her whatever. If she would only marry me!” he made a gesture of rather theatrical despair, indicating the far corner where the young Dane still sat, oblivious of everything but Queenie, drooping over the small round table that separated them.
“Cad! he’s going to smoke,” Goldstein muttered furiously below his breath.
The room had emptied, and Alex saw Queenie deliberately glance over her shoulder, as though to make sure of being unobserved. Her eyes moved unseeingly across Alex and Maurice Goldstein. The rest of the room was empty. With a little half-shrug of her white shoulders she delicately took a cigarette from the case that the diplomat was eagerly proffering.
It was the first time that Alex had seen a woman with a cigarette between her lips. She felt herself colouring hotly, as she watched, with involuntary fascination, Queenie’s partner carefully lighting the cigarette for her, his hand very close to her face.
She dared not look at Goldstein. The cheap vulgarity of Queenie’s display of modern freedom shocked her sincerely, nor could even her inexperience blind her to the underlying motive governing Queenie’s every gesture.
She fumbled hastily for her fan and gloves.
“Shall we come upstairs again?” she asked in a stifled voice.
Goldstein rose without a word.
Alex, venturing to cast one glance at him, saw that his face had grown white.
As he took her back to Lady Isabel, he spoke in a quick, low, dramatic voice between clenched teeth:
“You saw? She knows she is driving me frantic; but after this — it’s all over.”
Alex was frightened and yet exultant at playing even a secondary rôle in what seemed to her to be a drama of reality.
An hour later, sitting, for the time being partnerless, beside her mother, she saw Queenie re-enter the ballroom, followed by the Dane.
Queenie’s widely-set eyes were throwing a glance, innocent, appealing, the length of the long room. At once her eyelids dropped again. But in that instant Maurice Goldstein had left the wall against which he had been leaning, listless and sulky-looking, and was making his way through the lessening crowd.
Alex, wondering, saw him reach the side of the tall, white-clad figure, and claim her from the young diplomat.
He gravely offered Queenie his arm, and Alex saw them no more that night. She herself drove home to Clevedon Square beside Lady Isabel with her mind in a tumult.
She felt that for the first time she had seen love at close quarters, and although a faint but bitter regret that the experience had not been a personal one underlay all her sensations, she was full of excitement.
“No more late nights after this week,” said Lady Isabel, her voice sleepy. “A rest
will do you good, Alex. You are losing your freshness.”
Alex scarcely listened. She stood impatiently while the weary maid, whose duty it was to sit up for her mistress’s return, undid the complicated fastenings of her frock, and took the pins out of her hair.
“I’ll brush it myself,” said Alex hastily. “Good-night, mother.”
“Good-night; don’t come down till lunch-time, Alex — we are not doing anything.”
Alex carried her ball dress carefully over her arm and went up one more flight of stairs to her own room, wrapped in her pink dressing-gown, and with her hair loose on her shoulders.
Sitting on the edge of her bed and gazing at her own reflection in the big, swinging mirror, she made personal application of the small fragment of human drama that she had just witnessed.
What man would speak and think of her as Maurice Goldstein spoke and thought of Queenie Torrance?
When would any man’s ardent glance answer hers; any man make his way to her through a crowd in response to the silent summons of her eyes?
She fell into one of the idle, romantic dreams evoked by a highly-strung imagination, untempered by any light of experience. But the hero of the dream was a nebulous, shadowy figure of fiction. No man of flesh and blood held any place in the slender fabric of her fancies.
It occurred to her, more with a sense of disconcertment than of that panic which was to come later, that she did not possess the power of drawing any reality from her communion with others, and that no intimacy other than one of the surface had as yet ever resulted from any intercourse of hers with her fellow-creatures. Her nearest approach to reality had been that one-sided, irrational adoration of her schooldays for Queenie Torrance, that had met with no return, and with so much and such universal condemnation.
Alex did not doubt that the condemnation was justified. The impression left upon her adolescent mind remained ineradicable: it was wrong to attach so much importance to loving; it was different, in some mysterious, culpable way, to feel as she did — that nothing mattered except the people one loved, that nothing was so much worth while as the affection and understanding which one knew so well, from oneself, must exist, and for the bestowal of which on one’s own lonely, ardent spirit one prayed so passionately; and all these desires, being wrong and unlike other people, must at all costs be concealed and denied. Thus Alex, placing the perverted and yet unescapable interpretation of her disconsolate youth upon such experience of life as had been vouchsafed to her.
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 100