Still sitting on the side of the bed and facing the looking-glass, she sought in her own reflection for traces of the spell wielded by Queenie Torrance. She had not yet outgrown the belief that beauty and the power to attract should be synonymous.
Was she as pretty as Queenie?
Her colour was bright and pure, and her hazel eyes reflected the brown lights gleaming in her soft, tumbled hair, that fell no lower than her shoulders. She reflected disconsolately on the undue prominence of the two, white front teeth that the plate which had tormented her childhood had just failed to render level with the others.
Straight brows added to the regularity of her features, only the corners of her mouth habitually drooping very slightly. The angularity which Lady Isabel so regretted was sharply manifested in the exposed collar-bones just above the open dressing-gown, and in the childishly thin arms and wrists. With an odd, detached shrewdness, she appraised the prominent attributes of her own appearance, its ungraceful immaturity.
As she got slowly into bed, she passed other, moral, attributes, in fleeting review.
Alex believed that one might be loved for one’s goodness, if not for one’s beauty. But she could not suppose herself to be good. The tradition of the nursery black sheep still clung to her.
Should love come to her, she had nothing but the force of the answer within her to bring to it, and that force she had been taught to think of in the light of an affliction to be overcome.
Yet Alex Clare fell asleep smiling a little, nursing the foolish, romantic fancies that usurped the place of realities, and unaware that the temperament which craves to give all, is often that of which least will ever be asked.
IX
Scotland
Queenie’s engagement to young Goldstein was formally announced at the beginning of the year following that one in which Alex made her début.
“A most suitable match, I should imagine,” was Lady Isabel’s emphasized comment.
Alex was romantically delighted, and hoped for an opportunity of obtaining first-hand impressions.
Queenie, however, sent only the most conventional of notes in reply to Alex’ eagerly written congratulation, and Alex had only a glimpse of her at the crowded wedding, exquisitely pale and pure under her veil, with Goldstein, his swarthy face radiant and illuminated, at her side.
Remembering the night when the young Jew had spoken to her freely of his adoration for her friend, Alex, with awkward fervour, addressed a few words of ardent congratulation to him.
He showed his remarkably white teeth in a quick smile, brilliant with triumph and happiness, and wrung her hand warmly; but alas! his eyes failed to answer her gaze, and it was obvious that no deeper issues between them held any place in his recollections.
Alex went away vaguely disappointed and humiliated.
She, who so longed for a first place, seemed doomed to relegation to the ranks. Even at home there was no longer any excitement such as that which had surrounded her launch into the great world, and Lady Isabel occasionally betrayed a hint of disappointment that no family council had as yet been required on the subject of Alex’ future, such as those which had punctuated the epoch of her own brief girlhood.
Indeed it was rather Barbara who was the centre of attention.
She still suffered from backache and general languor, consequent upon over-rapid growth during the year she had spent on the flat of her back. Old Nurse pitied and was much inclined to spoil her, dosed her religiously with a glass of port at eleven o’clock every morning, and supported her whining assertions that lessons with Mademoiselle made her ill.
“I want to go to school,” said Barbara inconsistently. “Alex went to school, so why shouldn’t I?”
“Darlin’ child, you know very well that your father won’t hear of girls goin’ to school. A convent is quite different — but I certainly shan’t send you to that sort of establishment, after the trick they played me with Alex, sendin’ her back round-shouldered, and with her hands all chapped and red and covered with chilblains. Never again,” said Lady Isabel.
Barbara sulked.
She sulked so long and so effectively that the unfortunate Mademoiselle came of her own accord to implore that Barbara might be released from the schoolroom. She was not learning anything, and her example was making little Pamela naughty and defiant.
“What a plague children are!” Lady Isabel said helplessly.
She consulted her friends, drawing a plaintively humorous picture of the recalcitrant young person, which, to the annoyance of Alex, caused a certain amount of amused sympathy to be expressed in Barbara’s favour.
At last some one suggested that she should be sent abroad. Not to a school or a convent, certainly not — every one was unanimous on that point excepting one or two ultra-Catholic old aunts of Sir Francis — but to a charming Marquise, living at Neuilly, and desirous of companionship for her only child, a girl of about the same age as Barbara.
“She will learn to speak French like a native, and have dancing and singing lessons with the Hélène child, and go to all the art galleries and places.... That girl of the Duchess went there to be finished just before she came out, and loved it, and she came back so much improved — knowing how to put on her clothes, you know ... just the sort of thing that makes all the difference.”
So spoke Lady Isabel’s enthusiastic friends.
Barbara was not consulted, but when the plans had been finally settled upon and everything arranged, she was told, in accordance with the usage of her day, that as she was so discontented and troublesome at home, her parents felt obliged, for the sake of the younger children, to send her away from them. Barbara, following her wont, said nothing at all, and did not relax her pouting expression, but once back in the schoolroom again, she jumped up and down on the sofa in a manner denoting extravagant glee.
“I knew they’d have to give in,” she chanted. “I knew they would, I knew they would.”
For a long while she teased Archie and Pamela by refusing to give them any explanation, and at the same time exciting their curiosity by her continual reference to an approaching triumphant emancipation for her, until Cedric, home for the Easter holidays, and expert in the administrations of schoolboy tortures, ruthlessly made use of them to reduce his sister to her proper position of inferiority.
Barbara was sent to Neuilly early in April, and Alex proceeded to enter upon the second phase of her social career.
It was less of a success than her first season had been.
It was assumed that she had by this time made her own friends, and her mother’s contemporaries accordingly took less pains in the matter of introductions on her behalf.
If it be true that nothing succeeds like success, it is truer still that nothing fails so completely as a failure.
When Alex had sat out four or five dances at a ball, partnerless, her conviction of her own social degradation was absolutely overwhelming. Her surroundings only interested her as a background to her own personality, and as she derived no pleasure, but only disappointment and mortification, from the majority of the functions at which she was present, her young, expressive face unconsciously advertised both her vexation and the cause of it.
Her youth and her vanity alike were in rebellion against the truth, which she more than half divined, that she, who so longed to please and to attract, was as utterly devoid of that magnetic charm possessed by other girls in a lesser, and by Queenie Goldstein in supreme, degree, as it was possible for a reasonably pretty and healthy young girl to be.
Neither her health nor her beauty improved, moreover.
Late hours, in her case, uncounteracted by the vivid sparkle of enjoyment, drew unbecoming dark circles beneath her eyes, and the physical fatigue always engendered in her by boredom was most unmistakably manifested in her slouching shoulders and mournful pallor.
“Alex a son air bête aujourd’hui.”
Memory mercilessly recalled to her the old gibe of her schoolmates sometimes, as she fe
lt, against her own will, her features stiffening into the stupid “tragedy-queen” look which had met with the mocking of her companions.
“Do try and cheer up, darlin’,” Lady Isabel sometimes said, with more impatience than compassion in her voice, as she glanced at her daughter; and the implication that her looks were betraying her feelings made Alex more wretched and self-conscious than ever.
She often saw Queenie Goldstein, as much surrounded as in the days before her marriage, and her excessive décolletage now enhanced by the jewels showered upon her by her husband.
Queenie once invited her to a dinner-party at her little house in Curzon Street, but Alex knew that she would not be allowed to go, and showed the invitation with great trepidation to her mother.
“Very impertinent of her! Why, she’s never been introduced to me. I shouldn’t dream of allowin’ any daughter of mine to go and dine with people whom I didn’t know personally, even if they were absolutely all right.”
Lady Isabel, so easy-going and tepidly affectionate towards her children, was adamant where her social creed was concerned.
“In any case, Alex, I’ve told you before that I don’t want you to go on with the acquaintance. That Goldstein woman is gettin’ herself talked about, unless I’m very much mistaken.”
Again that mysterious accusation! Alex said no more, but wondered naïvely how the phase that had been used in connection with Queenie Torrance could still be applicable to Maurice Goldstein’s wife.
Surely married women did not flirt? The term, to Alex, symbolized she knew not what of offensive coquetry, and of general “bad form.”
This belief had been inculcated into her as a precept but, nevertheless, she could not divest herself of a secret suspicion that, although Lady Isabel might have rebuked, she would not have been altogether averse from a lapse or two in that direction on the part of her daughter.
But Alex embarked upon no flirtation. The men who danced with her or took her in to dinner never seemed desirous of talking personalities. They made perfunctory remarks about the decorations of the tables, the quality of the floor and the music, and the revival of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas.
The sense that the intercourse between them must be sustained by conversation never left her for an instant.
There had been one occasion when she had actually forgotten to think of herself and of the effect she might be producing, and had joined with real interest in a discussion about books with a man a great deal older than herself, who happened to be placed next to her at a big dinner party. Lady Isabel, opposite, had glanced once or twice at her daughter’s unusually animated expression.
“You seemed to be gettin’ on very well with the man on your other side — not the one who took you down, but the oldish one,” she said afterwards in a pleased voice.
“I never found out his name,” said Alex. “He told me he wrote books. It was so interesting; we were talking about poetry a lot of the time.”
Her mother’s face lost something of its smile. “Oh, my darling!” she exclaimed in sudden flattened tones, “don’t go and get a reputation for being clever, whatever you do. People do dislike that sort of thing so much in a girl!”
Alex, her solitary triumph killed, knew that there was yet another item to be added to that invisible score of reasons for which one was loved or disliked by one’s fellow-creatures.
Without formulating the conviction to herself, she believed implicitly that in the careful simulation of those attributes which she had been told would provoke admiration or affection, lay her only chance of obtaining something of that which she craved.
Dismayed, wearied, and uncheered by success, she continued to act out her little feeble comedies.
At the end of her second season she felt very old, and very much disillusioned. This was not real life as she had thought to find it on leaving schooldays behind her.
There must be something beyond — some happy reality that should reveal the wherefore of all existence, but Alex knew not where to find it.
Morbidity was a word which had no place in the vocabulary of her surroundings, but Lady Isabel said to her rather plaintively, “You must try and look more cheerful, Alex, dear, when I take you about. Your father is quite vexed when he sees such a gloomy face. You enjoy things, don’t you?”
And Alex, in her complicated disappointment at disappointing her mother and father, answered hastily in the affirmative.
In the autumn, in Scotland, she met Noel Cardew again.
They were staying at the same house. Alex felt childishly proud of saying, when her hostess brought the young man to her side, with a word of introduction:
“Oh, but we’ve met before! I know him quite well.”
She wished that she had spoken less emphatically, at the sight of Noel’s politely non-committal smile. It was evident that he had not the faintest recollection of the meeting at his mother’s house in Devonshire. She reminded him of it rather shyly.
“Oh, yes, of course. You were at school with my young cousins. I remember you coming over to see us quite well, with your brothers. We all played hunt the slipper or something, didn’t we?”
“Hide-and-seek,” said Alex literally. She wondered why encounters which remained quite vividly in her own memory should always appear to present themselves so indistinctly and trivially to other people.
“I haven’t heard from your cousins for a long while. Are they in America?”
“Diana is in India, of course. She married, you know — a fellow in the Indian Police.”
“I remember,” said Alex, determined to ignore the tiny prick of jealousy that now habitually assailed her almost every time that she heard of the marriage of another girl.
“Are the other two married?” she made resolute inquiry.
“Oh, no. Why, Marie isn’t properly grown-up yet. They are both in America. I’ve some idea of going over to New York myself next year, and I suppose I shall stay with their people. My uncle’s at the Embassy, you know.”
“It would be splendid to see New York,” said Alex, with the old imitation of enthusiasm.
“I should like the journey as well,” young Cardew remarked. “Board ship is an awfully good way of studying human nature, I fancy, and I’m rather keen on that sort of thing. In fact, I’ve a mad idea of perhaps writing a book one of these days, probably in the form of a novel, because it’s only by gilding the pill that you can get the great B.P. to swallow it — but it’ll really be a kind of philosophy of life, you know, with a good deal about the different sides of human nature. It may sound rather ambitious, perhaps, but I believe it could be done.”
Alex assented eagerly, and wondered what the initials that he had used— “the great B.P.” — represented. She glanced at him sideways.
He was even better-looking than he had been as a boy, his sunburn of a deeper tan, and the still noticeable cast in one eye adding a certain character to the straightness of his features. He had grown a little, fair moustache, contrasting pleasantly with his light brown eyes. The boyish immaturity of the loosely knit figure was obscured to her eyes by the excellence of his carriage and his five foot eleven inches of height.
She was inwardly almost incredulously pleased when he chose the place next to hers at breakfast on the following morning, and asked whether she was going out to join the guns at lunch on the moors.
“I think so,” said Alex. She would have liked to say, “I hope so,” but something within her attached such an exaggerated importance to the words that she found herself unable to utter them.
“Well,” said Noel, “I shall look out for you, so mind you come.”
Alex’s gratification was transparently evident. She was the only girl of the party, which was a small one; and Lady Isabel, declaring herself obliged to write letters, sent her out at lunch-time under the care of her hostess.
They lunched on the moors with the five men, two of whom had only come over for the day.
Noel Cardew at once established hi
mself at Alex’ side and began to expatiate upon the day’s sport. He talked a great deal, and was as full of theories as in their schoolroom days, and Alex, on her side, listened with the same intense hope that her sympathy might continue to retain him beside her.
She answered him with eager monosyllables and ejaculations expressive of interest. Without analysing her own motives, it seemed to her to be so important that Noel Cardew should continue to address his attention exclusively to her, that she was content entirely to sink her own individuality into that of a sympathetic listener.
When she dressed for dinner that evening and looked at herself in the big mirror, it seemed to her that for the first time her own appearance was entirely satisfactory. She felt self-confident and happy, and after dinner, when the elders of the party sat down to play cards, she declared boldly that she wanted to look at the garden by moonlight.
“Rather,” said Noel Cardew.
They went out together through the open French window.
Alex held up her long-tailed white satin with one hand, and walked up and down with him under the glowing red globe of the full moon. Noel talked about his book, taking her interest for granted in a manner that flattered and delighted her.
“I think psychology is simply the most absorbing thing in the world,” he declared earnestly. “I hope you don’t fight shy of long words, do you?”
Alex uttered a breathless disclaimer.
“I’m glad. So many people seem to think that if any one says anything in words of more than two syllables it’s affectation. Oxford and that sort of thing. But, of course, you’re not like that, are you?”
He did not wait for an answer this time, but went on talking very eagerly about the scheme that he entertained for obtaining material for his book.
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 101