But Moyra had never done fine darning, or strained her eyes in fading light, and she intervened again, more impatiently: ‘Well, what did she do?’
Mrs Attlee once more reflected. ‘Why, she made me tell her every morning that it wasn’t true; and every morning she believed me a little less. And she asked everybody in the house, beginning with her husband, poor man – him so bewildered when you asked him anything outside of his business, or his club or his horses, and never noticing any difference in her looks since the day he’d led her home as his bride, twenty years before, maybe ...
‘But there – nothing he could have said, if he’d had the wit to say it, would have made any difference. From the day she saw the first little line around her eyes she thought of herself as an old woman, and the thought never left her for more than a few minutes at a time. Oh, when she was dressed up, and laughing, and receiving company, then I don’t say the faith in her beauty wouldn’t come back to her, and go to her head like champagne; but it wore off quicker than champagne, and I’ve seen her run upstairs with the foot of a girl, and then, before she’d tossed off her finery, sit down in a heap in front of one of her big looking-glasses – it was looking-glasses everywhere in her room – and stare and stare till the tears ran down over her powder.’
‘Oh, well, I suppose it’s always hateful growing old,’ said Moyra, her indifference returning.
Mrs Attlee smiled retrospectively. ‘How can I say that, when my own old age has been made so peaceful by all her goodness to me?’
Moyra stood up with a shrug. ‘And yet you tell me you acted wrong to her. How am I to know what you mean?’
Her grandmother made no answer. She closed her eyes, and leaned her head against the little cushion behind her neck. Her lips seemed to murmur, but no words came. Moyra reflected that she was probably falling asleep, and that when she woke she would not remember what she had been about to reveal.
‘It’s not much fun sitting here all this time, if you can’t even keep awake long enough to tell me what you mean about Mrs Clingsland,’ she grumbled.
Mrs Attlee roused herself with a start.
III
Well (she began) you know what happened in the war – I mean, the way all the fine ladies, and the poor shabby ones too, took to running to the mediums and the clairvoyants, or whatever the stylish folk call ’em. The women had to have news of their men; and they were made to pay high enough for it ... Oh, the stories I used to hear – and the price paid wasn’t only money, either! There was a fair lot of swindlers and blackmailers in the business there was. I’d sooner have trusted a gypsy at a fair ... but the women just had to go to them.
Well, my dear, I’d always had a way of seeing things; from the cradle, even. I don’t mean reading the tea leaves, or dealing the cards; that’s for the kitchen. No, no; I mean, feeling there’s things about you, behind you, whispering over your shoulder Once my mother, on the Connemara hills, saw the leprechauns at dusk; and she said they smelt fine and high, too ... Well, when I used to go from one grand house to another, to give my massage and face treatment, I got more and more sorry for those poor wretches that the soothsaying swindlers were dragging the money out of for a pack of lies; and one day I couldn’t stand it any longer, and though I knew the Church was against it, when I saw one lady nearly crazy, because for months she’d had no news of her boy at the front, I said to her: ‘If you’ll come over to my place tomorrow, I might have a word for you.’ And the wonder of it was that I had! For that night I dreamt a message came saying there was good news for her, and the next day, sure enough, she had a cable, telling her her son had escaped from a German camp ...
After that the ladies came in flocks – in flocks fairly ... you’re too young to remember, child; but your mother could tell you. Only she wouldn’t, because after a bit the priest got wind of it, and then it had to stop ... so she won’t even talk of it any more. But I always said: how could I help it? For I did see things, and hear things, at that time ... And of course the ladies were supposed to come just for the face treatment ... and was I to blame if I kept hearing those messages for them, poor souls, or seeing things they wanted me to see?
It’s no matter now, for I made it all straight with Father Divott years ago; and now nobody comes after me anymore, as you can see for yourself. And all I ask is to be left alone in my chair ...
But with Mrs Clingsland – well, that was different. To begin with, she was the patient I liked best. There was nothing she wouldn’t do for you, if ever for a minute you could get her to stop thinking of herself ... and that’s saying a good deal, for a rich lady. Money’s an armour, you see; and there’s few cracks in it. But Mrs Clingsland was a loving nature, if only anybody’d shown her how to love ... Oh, dear, and wouldn’t she have been surprised if you’d told her that! Her that thought she was living up to her chin in love and love-making. But as soon as the lines began to come about her eyes, she didn’t believe in it anymore. And she had to be always hunting for new people to tell her she was as beautiful as ever; because she wore the others out, forever asking them: ‘Don’t you think I’m beginning to go off a little?’ – till finally fewer and fewer came to the house, and as far as a poor masseuse like me can judge, I didn’t much fancy the looks of those that did; and I saw Mr Clingsland didn’t either.
But there was the children, you’ll say. I know, I know! And she did love her children in a way; only it wasn’t their way. The girl, who was a good bit the eldest, took after her father: a plain face and plain words. Dogs and horses and athletics. With her mother she was cold and scared; so her mother was cold and scared with her. The boy was delicate when he was little, so she could curl him up, and put him into black velvet pants, like that boy in the book – little Lord Something. But when his long legs grew out of the pants, and they sent him to school, she said he wasn’t her own little cuddly baby anymore; and it riles a growing boy to hear himself talked about like that.
She had good friends left, of course; mostly elderly ladies they were, of her own age (for she was elderly now; the change had come), who used to drop in often for a gossip; but, bless your heart, they weren’t much help, for what she wanted, and couldn’t do without, was the gaze of men struck dumb by her beauty. And that was what she couldn’t get any longer, except she paid for it. And even so –!
For, you see, she was too quick and clever to be humbugged long by the kind that tried to get things out of her. How she used to laugh at the old double-chinners trotting round to the nightclubs with their boy-friends! She laughed at old ladies in love; and yet she couldn’t bear to be out of love, though she knew she was getting to be an old lady herself.
Well, I remember one day another patient of mine, who’d never had much looks beyond what you can buy in Fifth Avenue, laughing at me about Mrs Clingsland, about her dread of old age, and her craze for admiration – and as I listened, I suddenly thought: ‘Why, we don’t either of us know anything about what a beautiful woman suffers when she loses her beauty. For you and me, and thousands like us, beginning to grow old is like going from a bright warm room to one a little less warm and bright; but to a beauty like Mrs Clingsland it’s like being pushed out of an illuminated ballroom, all flowers and chandeliers, into the winter night and the snow.’ And I had to bite the words back, not to say them to my patient ...
IV
Mrs Clingsland brightened up a little when her own son grew up and went to college. She used to go over and see him now and again; or he’d come home for the holidays. And he used to take her out for lunch, or to dance at those cabaret places; and when the headwaiters took her for his sweetheart she’d talk about it for a week. But one day a hall porter said: ‘Better hurry up, mister. There’s your mother waiting for you over there, looking clean fagged out’; and after that she didn’t go round with him so much.
For a time she used to get some comfort out of telling me about her early triumphs; and I used to listen patiently, because I knew it was safer for her to talk to me than t
o the flatterers who were beginning to get round her.
You mustn’t think of her, though, as an unkind woman. She was friendly to her husband, and friendly to her children; but they meant less and less to her. What she wanted was a looking-glass to stare into; and when her own people took enough notice of her to serve as looking-glasses, which wasn’t often, she didn’t much fancy what she saw there. I think this was about the worst time of her life. She lost a tooth; she began to dye her hair; she went into retirement to have her face lifted, and then got frightened, and came out again looking like a ghost, with a pouch under one eye, where they’d begun the treatment ...
I began to be really worried about her then. She got sour and bitter towards everybody, and I seemed to be the only person she could talk out to. She used to keep me by for hours, always paying for the appointments she made me miss, and going over the same thing again and again; how when she was young and came into a ballroom, or a restaurant or a theatre, everybody stopped what they were doing to turn and look at her – even the actors on the stage did, she said; and it was the truth, I dare say. But that was over ...
Well, what could I say to her? She’d heard it all often enough. But there were people prowling about in the background that I didn’t like the look of; people, you understand, who live on weak women that can’t grow old. One day she showed me a love letter. She said she didn’t know the man who’d sent it; but she knew about him. He was a Count Somebody; a foreigner. He’d had adventures. Trouble in his own country, I guess ... She laughed and tore the letter up. Another came from him, and I saw that too – but I didn’t see her tear it up.
‘Oh, I know what he’s after,’ she said. Those kind of men are always looking out for silly old women with money ... Ah,’ says she, ‘it was different in old times. I remember one day I’d gone into a florist’s to buy some violets, and I saw a young fellow there; well, maybe he was a little younger than me – but I looked like a girl still. And when he saw me he just stopped short with what he was saying to the florist, and his face turned so white I thought he was going to faint. I bought my violets; and as I went out a violet dropped from the bunch, and I saw him stoop and pick it up, and hide it away as if it had been money he’d stolen ... Well,’ she says, ‘a few days after that I met him at a dinner, and it turned out he was the son of a friend of mine, a woman older than myself, who’d married abroad. He’d been brought up in England, and had just come to New York to take up a job there ...’
She lay back with her eyes closed, and a quiet smile on her poor tormented face. ‘I didn’t know it then, but I suppose that was the only time I’ve ever been in love ...’ For a while she didn’t say anything more, and I noticed the tears beginning to roll down her cheeks. Tell me about it, now do, you poor soul,’ I says; for I thought, this is better for her than fandangoing with that oily count whose letter she hasn’t torn up.
‘There’s so little to tell,’ she said. ‘We met only four or five times – and then Harry went down on the Titanic.’
‘Mercy,’ says I, ‘and was it all those years ago?’
‘The years don’t make any difference, Cora,’ she says. ‘The way he looked at me I know no one ever worshipped me as he did.’
‘And did he tell you so?’ I went on, humouring her; though I felt kind of guilty towards her husband.
‘Some things don’t have to be told,’ says she, with the smile of a bride. ‘If only he hadn’t died, Cora ... It’s the sorrowing for him that’s made me old before my time.’ (Before her time! And her well over fifty.)
Well, a day or two after that I got a shock. Coming out of Mrs Clingsland’s front door as I was going into it I met a woman I’d know among a million if I was to meet her again in hell – where I will, I know, if I don’t mind my steps ... You see, Moyra, though I broke years ago with all that crystal-reading, and table-rapping, and what the Church forbids, I was mixed up in it for a time (till Father Divott ordered me to stop), and I knew, by sight at any rate, most of the big mediums and their touts. And this woman on the doorstep was a tout, one of the worst and most notorious in New York; I knew cases where she’d sucked people dry selling them the news they wanted, like she was selling them a forbidden drug. And all of a sudden it came to me that I’d heard it said that she kept a foreign count, who was sucking her dry – and I gave one jump home to my own place, and sat down there to think it over.
I saw well enough what was going to happen. Either she’d persuade my poor lady that the count was mad over her beauty, and get a hold over her that way; or else – and this was worse – she’d make Mrs Clingsland talk, and get at the story of the poor young man called Harry, who was drowned, and bring her messages from him; and that might go on for ever, and bring in more money than the count ...
Well, Moyra, could I help it? I was so sorry for her, you see. I could see she was sick and fading away, and her will weaker than it used to be; and if I was to save her from those gangsters I had to do it right away, and make it straight with my conscience afterwards – if I could ...
V
I don’t believe I ever did such hard thinking as I did that night. For what was I after doing? Something that was against my Church and against my own principles; and if ever I got found out, it was all up with me – me, with my thirty years’ name of being the best masseuse in New York, and none honester, nor more respectable!
Well, then, I says to myself, what’ll happen if that woman gets hold of Mrs Clingsland? Why, one way or another, she’ll bleed her white, and then leave her without help or comfort. I’d seen households where that had happened, and I wasn’t going to let it happen to my poor lady. What I was after was to make her believe in herself again, so that she’d be in a kindlier mind towards others ... and by the next day I’d thought my plan out, and set it going.
It wasn’t so easy, neither; and I sometimes wonder at my nerve. I’d figured it out that the other woman would have to work the stunt of the young man who was drowned, because I was pretty sure Mrs Clingsland, at the last minute, would shy away from the count. Well, then, thinks I, I’ll work the same stunt myself – but how?
You see, dearie, those big people, when they talk and write to each other, they use lovely words we ain’t used to; and I was afraid if I began to bring messages to her, I’d word them wrong, and she’d suspect something. I knew I could work it the first day or the second; but after that I wasn’t so sure. But there was no time to lose, and when I went back to her next morning I said: ‘A queer thing happened to me last night. I guess it was the way you spoke to me about that gentleman – the one on the Titanic. Making me see him as clear as if he was in the room with us–’ and at that I had her sitting up in bed with her great eyes burning into me like gimlets. ‘Oh, Cora, perhaps he is! Oh, tell me quickly what happened!’
‘Well, when I was laying in my bed last night something came to me from him. I knew at once it was from him; it was a word he was telling me to bring you ...’
I had to wait then, she was crying so hard, before she could listen to me again; and when I went on she hung on to me, saving the word, as if I’d been her Saviour. The poor woman!
The message I’d hit on for that first day was easy enough. I said he’d told me to tell her he’d always loved her. It went down her throat like honey, and she just lay there and tasted it. But after a while she lifted up her head. ‘Then why didn’t he tell me so?’ says she.
‘Ah,’ says I, ‘I’ll have to try to reach him again, and ask him that.’ And that day she fairly drove me off on my other jobs, for fear I’d be late getting home, and too tired to hear him if he came again. ‘And he will come, Cora; I know he will! And you must be ready for him, and write down everything. I want every word written down the minute he says it, for fear you’ll forget a single one.’
Well, that was a new difficulty. Writing wasn’t ever my strong point; and when it came to finding the words for a young gentleman in love who’d gone down on the Titanic, you might as well have asked me to write a
Chinese dictionary. Not that I couldn’t imagine how he’d have felt; but I didn’t for Mary’s grace know how to say it for him.
But it’s wonderful, as Father Divott says, how Providence sometimes seems to be listening behind the door. That night when I got home I found a message from a patient, asking me to go to see a poor young fellow she’d befriended when she was better off – he’d been her children’s tutor, I believe – who was down and out, and dying in a miserable rooming house down here at Montclair. Well, I went; and I saw at once why he hadn’t kept this job, or any other job. Poor fellow, it was the drink; and now he was dying of it. It was a pretty bad story, but there’s only a bit of it belongs to what I’m telling you.
He was a highly educated gentleman, and as quick as a flash; and before I’d half explained, he told me what to say, and wrote out the message for me. I remember it now. ‘He was so blinded by your beauty that he couldn’t speak – and when he saw you the next time, at the dinner, in your bare shoulders and your pearls, he felt farther away from you than ever. And he walked the streets till morning, and then went home, and wrote you a letter; but he didn’t dare to send it after all.’
This time Mrs Clingsland swallowed it down like champagne. Blinded by her beauty; struck dumb by love of her! Oh, but that’s what she’d been thirsting and hungering for all these years. Only, once it had begun, she had to have more of it, and always more ... and my job didn’t get any easier.
Luckily, though, I had that young fellow to help me; and after a while, when I’d given him a hint of what it was all about, he got as much interested as I was, and began to fret for me the days I didn’t come.
But, my, what questions she asked. ‘Tell him, if it’s true that I took his breath away that first evening at dinner, to describe to you how I was dressed. They must remember things like that even in the other world, don’t you think so? And you say he noticed my pearls?’
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