“Why? What nonsense! Here, Shamrock — come out of that, sir. No, no, child — don’t feel yourself under any obligation to us. Look here, Lydia, that infernal dog will make us miss the train — how goes the enemy?”
“Quarter of an hour more.”
“Then we shall do it easy. Tell me,” said Uncle George, with an abruptness that argued a strong desire to give a fresh trend to the conversation, “what do you suppose the road’s up, just here, for — and on a holiday, too?”
“Repairs, I suppose,” said Lydia easily, well aware that whatever she supposed Uncle George had every intention of enlightening her still more completely.
“Road repairs? No, no. Now there’s a hydrant just on the other side of the street” Uncle George talked on in the old Mr. Barlow strain, and Lydia listened attentively enough to put in a few intelligent questions.
When they reached the station they had lost Shamrock altogether, but the train was not yet in.
“Not very crowded,” said Uncle George, scanning the platform. “Quite right not to go by the last train, Lydia.”
He bought her ticket, ignoring the little purse she hastily tendered, and when he had finally put her into a third-class carriage, well in the middle of the train because that was the safest place in the event of an accident, Uncle George leant in through the open window and pushed a gold piece into his niece’s palm.
“You can settle any little outstanding Sweet William with that, in case you’ve been buying fal-lals,” he whispered, and drew back hastily just as the train began to move.
They were kind! Lydia felt quite ashamed, because she was distinctly conscious of relief at going back into the broader, bigger life that she felt sure London held for her.
She had no reluctance even in returning to the shop.
The break had not been long enough to make her appreciate the luxury of idleness, and she was, besides, genuinely interested in her work and anxious for her own advancement. She knew that the Principal liked her and approved of her steady-going enthusiasm, and she was now easily first in popularity with the other girls.
Something of her affair with the Greek had penetrated to the show-room at Elena’s, and she found herself more or less exalted into the position of a wronged heroine.
Lydia did not make the mistake of taxing the tentative sympathy offered her by a recital of her story.
She remained subtly aloof, grateful for the kindness shown her and indefinably plaintive.
The girls discussed her among themselves, and Lydia, not without satisfaction, knew it.
At the boarding-house she met with a more outspoken championship.
The Bulteels invited her to the theatre one night, “to cheer her up,” And foolish, little, pink-eyed Mrs. Clarence, on the evening of Lydia’s return, nearly set the house on fire in an endeavour to have the little oil-stove in Number Seventeen all ready lit for her reception.
Miss Nettleship kissed Lydia when she welcomed her back again, and gave her a copy of Bibby’s Annual, saying affectionately: “I thought you’d like a book better than anything, dear — you quite understand, don’t you?” But the most astounding consolation of all was proffered to Lydia by Miss Forster, a week after her return.
“I’ve been talking about you this afternoon,” she suddenly informed Lydia in a very arch tone one evening.
“I hope you didn’t say anything very bad?”
“Quite the reverse, my dear girl, I can assure you.
Haven’t your ears been burning?” Both Miss Forster’s hands flew to her rather large ears, hung with dangling blue drops.
“I was telling Lady Honorct about you, and your writing and all. So much interested she was, and she suggested that I should take you to see her in Lexham Gardens one day when they’re back from the country.
They’ve just gone down to their place in Surrey for a week or two, you know. But you’d like to come and see her in Lexham Gardens one day, wouldn’t you?” Miss Forster spoke so triumphantly that the words hardly had the form of a question at all, but sounded more like a blatantly triumphant announcement of some glorious certainty. Indeed, the moment was in the nature of an apotheosis.
To see Miss Forster’s cherished and distinguished friend, Lady Honoret, whom all the boarders had so frequently heard quoted, and that at her own invitation, was sufficient to constitute an epoch.
Lydia felt it to be so. Who knew what such an introduction might lead to? “Thank you very much,” she said. “I should like to come with you very much. It’s very kind of Lady Honoret.”
“Oh, she’s such a very kind-hearted creature. And then you know she’s tremendously interested in anyone who writes — of course, she’s literary herself, as you know.”
An imaginary pen flew with rapidity across space.
“I told her about your stories — not that you’ve let me see any of them, naughty girl — and what a plain little thing you are.”
Miss Forster laughed so heartily that no one could possibly remain in doubt as to her flattering intention in employing an adjective so obviously unsuited to her newly-adopted protégée.
The first effect of the prospect thus opened to her was to give fresh impetus to Lydia’s literary activities.
If one were presented to Lady Honoret as a struggling young writer, it would be necessary to give some proof of one’s gifts. Besides, Lydia really felt the impulse to write strong within her, and she was anxious to justify the ambition of which so many people, thanks to Margoliouth’s indiscretion, now knew.
She began to write a novel.
Her old experience with the Children’s Competition came back to her, and she had the wit to confine herself to those subjects only of which she had personal knowledge. After all, it was very easy.
The heroine developed into a slightly idealized Lydia, and the culminating episode of the very slender little story was her sudden disillusionment at the hands of a coarsened and exaggerated Margoliouth.
The event was just the one that had really happened, looked at from another and more tender point of view, and a certain gift for simplicity of expression, together with a sense of proportion that saved the tiny tragedy from any quality of absurdity, gave the effect of a curiously genuine pathos.
Lydia wrote every evening in her room, and found it astonishingly easy. She was afraid that the book would not be long enough, but did not know how to estimate its length. There were twenty chapters altogether, but she thought that they were rather short.
She laid the scene at Wimbledon, certain aspects of which she remembered perfectly well, and introduced a humorous family that faintly caricatured the Swaine establishment.
Having no acquaintance with anything masculine that seemed to her a suitable type for a hero of fiction, Lydia wisely eliminated this beau role from the scene altogether, and the story ended on a piteous little note of loneliness and bewilderment. She finished it in two months, re-read it and made hardly any alterations at all, and then sent the original manuscript to Nathalie Palmer, who owned and used a typewriter.
“Oh, Lydia!” wrote back Nathalie, just as enthusiastic as though she and Lydia had only parted the day before, “your story is lovely. I cried over the end of it — I couldn’t help it. You are clever! Of course I’ll type it; really, I look upon it as an honour, and I’m sure any publisher would be only too thankful to have such a book sent to him. All the people are so real, and you’ve written it all so beautifully....”
Nathalie’s hyperbole went on for nearly three pages, and Lydia, though she smiled a little, could not help feeling pleased. If Lady Honoret was really interested in literary attempts, as Miss Forster had said, then she should see the typescript, and perhaps be of real assistance in getting it placed in the hands of a good publisher.
Meanwhile influenza detained Lady Honoret in the country, as Lydia learnt from the loud lamentations of Miss Forster, and it was nearly the middle of April before the great occasion actually materialized.
“Lady Honoret has
asked me to take you to tea at Lexham Gardens on Saturday next,” Miss Forster announced. “She quite understands about Saturday being your only afternoon, and there’s to be no party — perhaps just a quiet game of Bridge, but she won’t expect you to play.”
This was as well, Lydia reflected, not without humour. She had learnt to play whist under the careful tuition of Uncle George, but the modern game was quite unknown to her, and she had vague recollections of having read in some of Aunt Evelyn’s fashion papers terrible warnings to girls, to the effect that it was possible for guileless beginners to lose two or three hundred pounds at a single game.
The instinct that always forbade her to acknowledge unnecessarily any ignorance or inability in herself, however, kept her silent on the subject of Bridge, and she only smiled intelligently her appreciation of Lady Honoret’s thought fulness.
“Wear your cerise, dear, with that navy blue costume, won’t you?” counselled Miss Forster solicitously.
The deep-red silk blouse was Lydia’s own favourite, and three days before she was to go to Lexham Gardens she paid a visit to the millinery room at Elena’s.
The two pale and exclusive young ladies there were always delighted to see her.
“I wanted to look at the new models, if you’ll let me,” Lydia confided to them. “You see I want to make a rather special hat for myself for a tea-party I’m going to, and I thought I might get some ideas here.”
They were effusively sympathetic.
“Of course, dear — what about this tricorne? It’s absolutely new in, and that Lady St. Ogg who was in this morning — you know, dear, the Countess — she as nearly as possible bought it for Lady Moira Pring.
They got that flame-coloured toque in the end, but they were awfully taken with this one — said black velours was always so distinguished. It’ll be gone tomorrow, I’m certain.”
“It’s lovely,” said Lydia, “and I know it would suit me — I love that shape.”
“Slip it on, dear,” said the Senior assistant. “There’ll be no one in here just now, and, anyway, we should hear the bell. Ivy here can keep an eye on the entrance.”
Lydia carefully put on the little black velvet hat — a plain three-cornered shape, with a tiny edging of gold braid gathered into a small gold cockade laid against the severe line above the left profile.
“Oh, it’s heavenly!” she breathed, sincerely ecstatic.
“But I couldn’t ever copy anything like that — I should have to get a shape.”
The millinery young ladies exchanged glances.
“Look here, dear, I don’t see why we shouldn’t do it for you. Oh, it’ll take no time at all — you’ll just want to get the velvet, and the braid, and some wire. Only don’t you ever let on to a soul — or wear the hat when old Peroxide is within a hundred miles. It’ll be all right in a month or two — that shape will be as common as dirt — but she’d spot it in a second if you came out with it now.”
Lydia, enraptured, felt herself repaid over and over again for the studied courtesy which she had always been so careful to employ towards the two millinery girls.
They disclaimed her thanks, and promised that the hat should be forthcoming on Saturday morning.
“And mark my words, dear — it’ll pay you over and over again, if you’ve got the cash to get really good velours. You know, the real stuff, not cheap imitation that spots the first time you put it on.”
Lydia took the advice, and though the materials cost her more money than she had meant to spend, the hat on Saturday morning was almost indistinguishable from the model.
Lydia felt that its beauty would obscure the plainness of her dark coat and skirt and distract attention from her complete absence of jewellery.
Like most girls of the class to which she belonged, Lydia concentrated rather upon her dress than upon accessories which she regarded as minor ones. Consequently, although her black stockings were of vegetable silk, her buckled shoes were down at heel, and showed cracks across their patent leather tips, and her dark gloves were very much worn at the finger ends, and no longer looked clean, although she had only worn them on Sundays, she experienced a slight feeling of mortification at the sight of Miss Forster’s very tight white-kid gloves, and elaborate fur muff and stole; but, after all, the day was much too mild for furs, and Lydia felt certain that Miss Forster had only put them on because they were becoming.
Miss Forster looked very sharply indeed at Lydia’s hat, but she said nothing about it, and somehow this unusual reticence seemed to imply an almost unwilling amount of astonished admiration.
Lydia felt subtly flattered.
“Now there’s nothing to be nervous of,” Miss Forster said kindly, as the omnibus jolted them along the Cromwell Road. “Lady H. is every bit as simple as you or me, and she’s so keen to see you. I told her all about your writing, and one of her great specialties is to discover new talent, you know. She’s always on the look-out for it.”
They got out at the corner of Lexham Gardens at last, and Miss Forster hurried along with short, quicksteps.
“Have you ever been in one of these big Kensington houses before? Lovely, they are, and so roomy. Lady Honoret always says she feels right out of town here — but Sir Rupert likes it.”
Lydia was inclined to agree with Sir Rupert.
The flight of stone steps in front of the house led up to a door that was painted a bright, glaring blue; there was a brass knocker shaped like a lion’s head, and yellow flowers blazed from the window boxes on the first and second floors.
A manservant opened the door, and they were ushered into the drawing-room, which was on the left of the entrance-hall.
“Miss Forster!” She had only given her own name, rather to Lydia’s vexation.
The hostess, who rustled forward in an elaborate tea-gown, upset Lydia’s preconceived ideas of the literary Lady Honoret altogether.
She was small and slight, with a fuzz of curly dark hair arranged in a heavy fringe on her forehead; her nose was wide and retrousse, and her small white teeth rather prominent. Her neck was slung with a pearl necklace, and with various chains from which dangled two or three lockets and charms, and she wore a number of glittering rings on her small, gesticulating white hands.
When she greeted Miss Forster, Lydia was rather surprised that they did not kiss one another, but only shook hands.
“And is this the little writer?” Lady Honoret exclaimed, in a high voice that held some indefinable suggestion of a lisp. “I’m so ve’y glad to see you, and we must have a long, long talk about your work. Perhaps I can be of use to you — I write myself.”
“Oh, yes, I know,” said Lydia boldly.
Lady Honoret smiled and nodded, as though taking it for granted that of course everyone knew she wrote, and introduced to Lydia an elderly gentleman in a grey frock-coat, with whom Miss Forster had already vigorously shaken hands.
Lydia observed that he withdrew his fingers from that hearty clasp with an expression that almost amounted to a wince, and that he only acknowledged her own presence by a bow so deep that it revealed the baldness on the top of his dark head. She inclined to think, however, that he was only middle-aged, in spite of the baldness, and of a certain width of outline at the waist of his beautiful coat.
“Mr. Cassela.”
“You must be careful what you say to Mr. Cassela,” Lady Honoret said, laughing.
“Dear lady!” Mr. Cassela protested in a voice quite as high as, and a good deal more affected than, that of his hostess.
“Miss Raymond writes. I’m not sure that you’re not the first publisher to have the honour of her acquaintance. Ah, tea! and I behold toast! Don’t you adore buttered toast?”
“I adore it indeed,” said the publisher gravely; “but nothing — nothing, to my mind, can equal the love of my childhood — the wonderful Sally Lunn. Ah, dear lady, you are too young to look back with that passion of voluptuous regret that one bestows upon the vanished gastronomic delights of infancy! I have
the most rapturous recollections of a Sally Lunn making its periodic appearance upon the nursery tea-table of my youth — and yet I fear — I terribly fear — that a Sally Lunn to-day would leave me cold — quite cold.”
“May you never meet one,” breathed Lady Honoret.
“It might be too, too sad and disillusioning. You must live on the beautiful memory of the past. I once had a passion for green bull’s-eyes. I remember it perfectly.”
“But surely — surely,” said the publisher anxiously, “that can still live — crystallized and matured, as it were, into the most transcendental expression of which the bull’s-eye is capable — crime de menthe.”
He raised his white, rather puffy hands as he spoke, in a gesture of almost sacramental solemnity.
“I adore creme de menthe, for its lovely, lovely eme’ald colour,” said Lady Honoret. “Green is a sacred colour — and quite my favourite in the world.”
“The sacred colour of vernal youth,” replied the publisher. “Now a deep rich purple is to me the sacred colour — that purple that holds all passion in the heart of it. The child, of course” — he suddenly waved a hand at Lydia— “the palest blush rose — or even pure white? Yes, I think it can still claim white — the white of a white violet, bien entendu — not the heavy, sensual white of the magnolia.”
“And you?” He abruptly turned to Miss Forster.
“My colour? Oh, blue — blue — blue. Certainly, blue.”
It was as though, by her breezy repetitions, Miss Forster strove to disguise her lack of the picturesque hyperbole of which the other two were making use in their strange conversation.
Lydia listened to them with complete bewilderment, and a gradual, invading sensation of contempt. Talk like this was silly, and they seemed to be as much in earnest as though the fate of an empire were being discussed.
“Blue is so mystical,” Lady Honoret observed. “I’m told that I’m a mystic. And yet it’s a ve’y, ve’y ext’ordinary thing, I never wear blue. It seems to me so cold.
I shrink from it, in some ext’aordinary way. It devitalizes me. I suppose I have a dual personality.”
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 163