by Hugh Walpole
Millie and Victoria were sitting in low chairs near the band. In front of them was the sea walk along whose grassy surface people passed and repassed — beyond the grass a glittering, sparkling sea of blue and gold: above their heads a sky of stainless colour. In rows to right and left of them serried ranks of deck-chairs were packed together and every chair contained a more-or-less human being. The band could be heard now rising above the chatter, now falling out of sight altogether as though the bandsmen were plunged two or three times a minute into a deep pit, there to cool and reflect a little before swinging up again.
It was so hot and glittering a day that every one was happy — hysterically so, perhaps, because the rain was certain to return, so that they were an army holding a fort that they knew they were not strong enough to defend for long. There were boats like butterflies on the sea, and every once and again an aeroplane throbbed above the heads of the visitors and reminded them that they were living in the twentieth century.
Millie, who adored the sun and was in the nature of things almost terribly happy, drew the eyes of every passer-by towards her. She was conscious of this as she was conscious of her health, her happiness, her supreme confidence in eternal benevolence, her charity to all the world. Victoria had been, before Millie made her confession, in a state of delight with her clothes, her hat, her parasol, her publicity and her digestion. Millie’s news threw her into an oddly confused state of delight, trepidation and self-importance. She thrilled to the knowledge that there was a wonderful romance going on at her very side, but it would mean, perhaps, that she would lose Millie, and she thought it, on the whole, rather impertinent of Mr. Baxter. It hurt her, too, that this should have existed for weeks at her side and that she should have noticed nothing of it.
“Oh, my Millie, you should have told me!” she cried.
“I would have told you at once,” said Millie, “but Bunny wanted us to be quiet about it for a week or two, until his mother returned from Scotland.”
“But you could have told me,” continued Victoria. “I’m so safe and never tell anything. And why should Mr. Baxter keep it quiet as though he were ashamed of it?”
“I know,” said Millie. “I didn’t want him to. I hate secrecy and plots and mysteries. And so I told him. But it was only for a week or two. And his mother comes down from Scotland on Friday.”
“Well, I hope it will be a long engagement, darling, so that you may be quite sure before you do it. I remember a cousin of ours meeting a girl at tea in our house, proposing to her before he’d had his second cup, marrying her next morning at a registry office and separating from her a week later. He took to drink after that and married his cook, and now he has ten children and not a penny.”
The music rose into a triumphant proclamation of Sir William Gilbert’s lyric concerning “Captain Sure,” and Victoria discovered two friends of hers from the hotel, sitting quite close to her and very friendly indeed.
Although they had been at Cladgate so short a time Victoria had acquired a large and various circle of new acquaintances, a circle very different indeed from the one that filled the house in Cromwell Road. Millie was amused to see how swiftly Victoria’s wealth enabled her to change from one type of human to another. No New Art in Cladgate! No, indeed. Mostly very charming, warm-hearted people with no nonsense about them. Millie also perceived that so soon as any human creature floated into the atmosphere of Victoria’s money it changed like a chameleon. However ungrasping and unacquisitive it may have hitherto been, the consciousness that now with a little gush and patience it might obtain something for nothing had an astonishing effect.
All Victoria desired was to be loved, and by as many people as possible. Within a week the whole of visiting Cladgate adored her. It adored her so much that it was willing to eat her food, sit in her car, allow itself to be taken to the theatre free of expense, and make little suggestions about possible gifts that would be gratefully received.
All that was requested of it in return was that it should praise Victoria to her face and allow her to exercise her power of command.
Millie did not think the worse of human nature for this. She perceived that in these strange times when prices were so high and incomes so low any one would do anything for money. A certain Captain Blatt — a cheerful gentleman of any age from thirty to fifty — was quite frank with her about it. “I was quite a normal man before the war, Miss Trenchard. I was, I assure you. Stockbroking in the City and making enough to have a good time. Now I’m making nothing — and I would do anything for money. Anything. Let some one offer me a thousand pounds down and I will sell my soul for three months. One must exist, you know.”
Victoria’s happiness was touching to behold. The Blocks, the Balaclavas and the rest were entirely forgotten. Millie had hoped, at first, that she might do something towards stemming this new tide of hungry ones. But after a warning or two she saw that she was powerless. “Why, Millie,” cried Victoria, “you’re becoming a cynic. You suspect every one. I’m sure Mrs. Norman is perfectly sweet and it’s too adorable of her to want me to be god-mother to her new darling baby. And poor Mr. Hackett! With his brother consumptive at Davos and depending entirely upon him and his old mother nearly ninety, and his business all gone to pieces because of the War, of course I must help him. What’s my money for?”
Meanwhile this same money poured forth like water. Would it one day be exhausted? Millie wrote to Dr. Brooker and asked him to keep a watch. “She’s quite hopeless just now,” she wrote, “but we’re only here for another three weeks. I suppose we must let her have her fun while she can.”
Nevertheless it was upon this same beautiful afternoon that she realized a more sinister and personally dangerous effect of Victoria’s generosity. She was sitting back in her chair, almost asleep. The world came as a coloured murmur to her, the faint rhythm of the band, the soft blue of sea and sky, the sharp note of Victoria’s voice— “Oh, really!” “Fancy indeed!” “Just think!” The warmth upon her body was like an encircling arm caressing her very gently with the little breeze that was its voice. She seemed to swing out to sea and back again, lazily, lazily, too happy, too sleepy to think, fading into unreality, into nothing but colour, soft blue swathes of colour wrapping her round. . . . Then suddenly, with a sharp outline like a black pencil drawing against a white background, she saw Bunny.
Beautifully dressed in white flannels, a straw hat pushed back a little from his forehead, he stood, some way down the green path, half-turned in her direction, searching amongst the chairs.
She noticed all the things about him that she loved — his neatness, his slim body, his dark eyes, sunburnt forehead, black moustache, his mouth even then unconsciously half-smiling, his breeding, his self-confidence.
“Ah! how I love him!” and still swaying out to sea she, from that blue distance, could adore him without fear that he would hold her cheap.
“I love him, I love him — —” Then from the very heart of the blue, sharply like the burst of a cracker in her ear, a sound snapped— “Look out! Look out! There’s danger here!”
The sound was so sharp that as one does after some terrifying nightmare she awoke with a clap of consciousness, sitting up in her chair bewildered. Had some one spoken? Had an aeroplane swooped suddenly down? Had she really slept? Everything now was close upon her, pressing her in — the metallic clash of the band, the voices, the brush of incessant footsteps upon the grass, and Bunny was coming towards her now, his eyes lit. . . . Had some one spoken?
Greetings were exchanged. Victoria could not say very much. She could only press his hand and murmur, “I’m so glad — Millie has told me. Bless you both!”
He smiled, was embarrassed, and carried Millie off for a walk. As soon as they had gone a little way he burst out, “Oh, Mill, why did you? I asked you not to.”
“I couldn’t help it. I warned you that I hate concealment. I’m very sorry, Bunny, but I can’t keep it secret any longer.”
She looked up and
saw to her amazement that he was angry. His face was puckered and he looked ten years older.
“Have you told any one else?”
“Only my mother and a great friend.”
“Friend? What friend?”
“A great friend of Henry’s — yes and of mine too,” she burst out laughing. “You needn’t worry, Bunny. He’s a dear old thing, but he’s well over forty and I’ve never been in the least in love with him.”
“He is with you, I suppose?”
Strangely his words made her heart beat a little faster. Strange because what did she care whether Peter were in love with her or no? And yet — it was nice, even now when she was swallowed up by her love for Bunny, it was pleasant to think that Peter did care — cared a little.
“Oh, he looks on me and Henry as in the schoolroom still.”
“Then why did you tell him about us?”
“I don’t know. What does it matter?”
“It matters just this much — that I asked you not to tell anybody and you’ve told every one in sight.”
“Well, I’m like that. I did keep it for three or four weeks, but I hate being deceitful. I’m proud of you and proud of your caring for me. I want people to know. Of course if there were any real reason for keeping it secret — —”
“There is a real reason. I told you. My mother — —”
“She’s coming back on Friday, so it doesn’t matter now, telling people.”
“But it does matter. People talk so.”
“But why shouldn’t they talk? There’s nothing to be ashamed of in our being engaged.”
He said nothing and they walked along in an uncomfortable silence. Then she turned to him, putting her hand through his arm.
“Now, look here, Bunny. We’re not going to have a quarrel. And if we are going to have a quarrel, I must know what it’s about. Everything must be straight between us, always. I can’t bear your not telling me what you’re thinking. I’m sensible, I can stand anything if you’ll only tell me. Is there any other reason besides your mother why you don’t want people to know that we’re engaged?”
“No, of course not — only. . . . Well, it looks so silly seeing that we have no money and — —”
“What does it matter what people say? We know, you and I, that you’re going to have a job soon. We can manage on a very little at first — —”
“It isn’t that — —” He suddenly smiled, looking young and happy again. He pressed her arm against his side. “Look here, Millie — as you’ve let the cat out of the bag, the least you can do is to help about the money side of things.”
“Help? Of course I will.”
“Well, then — why not work old Victoria for a trifle? She’s rolling in wealth and just chucks it round on all sorts of rotten people who don’t care about her a damn. She’s devoted to you. I’m sure she’d settle something on us if you asked her.”
Millie stared at him.
“Live on Victoria! Ask her for money? Oh, Bunny! I couldn’t — —”
“Why not? Everyone does — people who aren’t half so fond of her as you are.”
“Ask her to support us when we’re young and — Bunny, what an awful idea. Please — —”
“Rot! Sometimes I think, Millie, you’ve lived in a wood all your days. Everyone does it these times. We’re all pirates. She’s got more than she knows what to do with — we haven’t any, She likes you better than any one. You’ve been working for her like a slave.”
Millie moved away a little.
“You can put that out of your head, Bunny — once and for all. I shall never ask Victoria for a penny.”
“If you don’t, I will.”
“If you do, I’ll never speak to you again.”
“Very well, then, don’t.” Before she could answer he had turned and was walking rapidly away, his head up, his shoulders set.
Instantly misery swooped down upon her like an evil, monstrous bird that covered the sky, blotting out the sun with its black wings. Misery and incomprehension! So swiftly had the world changed that when the familiar figures — the men and the women so casual and uncaring — came back to her vision they had no reality to her, but were like fragments of coloured glass shaking in and out of a kaleidoscope pattern. She was soon sitting beside Victoria again.
She said: “Why, dear, where is Mr. Baxter?”
And Millie said: “He had to go back to the hotel for something.”
But Victoria just now was frying other fish. She had at her side Angela Compton, her newest and greatest friend. She had known Angela for a week and Angela had, she said, given a new impulse to her life. Miss Compton was a slim woman with black hair, very black eyebrows and red cheeks. Her features seemed to be painted on wood and her limbs too moved jerkily to support the doll-like illusion. But she was not a doll; oh dear, no, far from it! In their first half-hour together she told Millie that what she lived for was adventure— “And I have them!” she cried, her black eyes flashing. “I have them all the time. It is an extraordinary thing that I can’t move a yard without them.” It was her desire to be the centre of every party, and thoroughly to attain this enviable position she was forced, so Millie very quickly suspected, to invent tales and anecdotes when the naked truth failed her. She had been to Cladgate on several other summers and was able, therefore, to bristle with personal anecdotes. “Do you see that man over there?” she would deliriously whisper. “The one with the high collar and the side-whiskers. He looks as though butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, but one evening last summer as I was coming in — —” or “That girl! My dear. . . . Drugs — oh! I know it for a fact. Terribly sad, isn’t it? But I happen to have seen — —”
All these tales she told with the most innocent intentions in the world, being one, as she often assured her friends, who wouldn’t hurt a fly. Victoria believed every word that fell from her lips and adored to believe.
To-day she was the greatest comfort to Millie. She could sit there in her misery and gather around her Angela’s little scandals as protection.
“Oh, but it can’t be!” Victoria would cry, her eyes shining.
“Oh, of course, if you don’t want to believe me! I saw him staring at me days before. At last he spoke to me. We were quite alone at the moment, and I said: ‘Really I’m very sorry, but I don’t know you.’
“‘Give me just five minutes,’ he begged, ‘that’s all I ask. If you knew what it would mean to me.’ And, I knowing all the time, my dear, about the awful things he’d been doing to his wife — I let him go on for a little while, and then very quietly I said — —”
Millie stared in front of her. The impulse that she was fighting was to run after him, to find him anywhere, anywhere, to tell him that she was sorry, that it had been her fault . . . just to have his hand in hers again, to see his eyes kindly, affectionate, never, never again that fierce hostility as though he hated her and were a stranger to her, another man whom she did not know and had never seen before.
“Of course I don’t blame him for drinking. After all there have been plenty of people before now who have found that too much for them, but before everybody like that! All I know is that his brother-in-law came up (mind you that is all in the strictest confidence, and — ) and said before every one — —”
But why should she go to him? He had been in the wrong. That he should be like the others and want to plunder Victoria, poor Victoria whom she was always defending. . . .
The band played “God Save the King.” Slowly they all walked towards the hotel.
“Yes, that’s the woman I mean,” said Miss Compton. “Over there in the toque. You wouldn’t think it to look at her, would you? But I assure you — —”
Millie crept like a wounded bird into the hotel. He was waiting for her. He dragged her into a corner behind a palm.
“Millie, I didn’t mean it — I don’t know what I was about. Forgive me, darling. You must, you must. . . . I’m a brute, a cad. . . .”
Forgive him? H
appiness returned in warm floods of light and colour. Happiness. But even as he kissed her it was not, she knew, happiness of quite the old kind — no, not quite.
II
Ellen was coming. Very soon. In two days. Millie did not know why it was that she should tremble apprehensively. She was not one to tremble before anything, but it was an honest fact that she was more truly frightened of Ellen than of any one she had ever met. There was something in Ellen that frightened her, something secret and hidden.
Then of course Ellen would be nasty about Bunny. She had been already nasty about him, but she had not been aware then of the engagement. And in some strange way Millie was more afraid now of what Ellen would say about Bunny than she had been before that little quarrel of a day or two ago.
Millie, in spite of herself, thought of that little quarrel. Of course all lovers must have quarrels — quarrels were the means by which lovers came to know one another better — but he should not have gone off like that, should not have hurt her. . . . She could not as she would wish declare it to have been all her own fault. Well, then, Bunny was not perfect. Who had ever said that he was? Who was perfect when you came to that? Millie herself was far from perfect. But she wanted him to be honest. At that stage in her development she rated honesty very highly among the virtues — not unpleasant, stupid, so-called honesty, where you told your friends frankly what you thought of them for your own pleasure and certainly not theirs, but honesty among friends so that you knew exactly where you were. It was not honest of Bunny to be nice to Victoria in order to get money out of her — but Millie was beginning to perceive that Victoria, good, kind and foolish as she was, was a kind of plague-spot in the world, infecting everyone who came near her. Even Millie herself . . . ?
And with this half-formed criticism of Bunny there came most curiously a more urgent physical longing for him. Before, when he had seemed so utterly perfect, the holding of hands, kisses, embraces could wait. Everything was so safe. But now was everything so safe? If they could quarrel like that at a moment’s notice, and he could look suddenly as though he hated her, were they so safe? Bunny himself was changing a little. He was always wanting to kiss her, to lead her into dark corners, to tell her over and over again that he adored her. Their love in these last days had lost some fine quality of sobriety and restraint that it had possessed at first.