Between the three houses the shuttle raced and rattled, weaving the new woof, an iridescent fabric for Mark, drab as fustian for Olivia. Once, when the conference took place at Upper Theign, she forced herself to enter the library and took a seat by the fire. A complete silence overtook the small council. She had heard voices eager, argumentative, cheery, when she was on the farther side of the door. Now the voices were mute and the speakers at a loss. The parable of the locked window was repeated for her at that moment. Lois sat at her end of the great table, her burnished head bent studiously over her notes, Mark sat at his, and Derek where he had threatened to be, between them with no room for his long legs at all. Sir William by the fire. They all rose when she came in and that formality seemed to underline their silence. She was the intruder, the outcast.
But she persevered, and with a melancholy counterfeit of a smile she asked:
“Well, at what stage are we now, Mark?”
Mark was aghast at the thought of the intricate explanations which an answer would involve.
“Oh, my dear,” he said, closing with a decisive bang a fat volume on company law in which Hawker had been pointing out a passage, “we have come to the end for to-day, thank goodness! We have been drafting out some very technical clauses for our prospectus, and my head’s in a whirl.”
Mark’s head was never in a whirl, and he could have proffered no excuse more unfortunate. But he was aware that he had blundered, and in a haste to repair it he must make his blunder elephantine. He had had a project in his thoughts for a little while and, needing a diversion, he must needs suggest it now at a moment the most unpropitious.
“I’ve been thinking, Olivia. We ought to have a dance here this Christmas. Fill up the house with all the young people we know, and hope for snow and the appropriate conditions. Lois” — he had long since called her Lois— “can collect some of the girls who worked with her at the Admiralty, and Derek must round up the young men.”
“And I must send out the invitations,” Olivia added in a not too pleasant voice, as though that function made clear her true position in the house.
But Lois was quick to add:
“Oh, Lady Thewliss, of course I’ll do that if you’ll supply me with a list of names, and as for my friends at the Admiralty, they’re scattered anywhere now.”
Olivia never again repeated her disastrous incursion. All that she had got out of it was a knowledge that a ball was to be given at Upper Theign for Lois’ glorification and enjoyment, and a fresh confirmation that she herself was nothing but a pariah in her own house. She was pleased with the vile word. She repeated it to herself in front of her mirror.
“A pariah! That’s what you are! Not a nice thing to be, Olivia! But you are one!” She sniffed a little and then, as the best of women may do, she suddenly saw red. “And we know who has made you one, don’t we?” she cried in a low tone of fury. She would have liked at that moment to have taken the slim young spruce beauty from the library, humiliated her, punished her and thrust her out to grovel her way through the world as best she could.
But Olivia did not dwell long upon these futilities. A more practical way of release flashed one day into her mind Lois was the Adventuress — that was fixed and settled — the real genuine Vamp of which the picture palaces were then showing some examples which were assuredly very pale and second-rate compared with Lois. The real, true Vamp wasn’t white and Spanish and fluttering with black draperies. Not a bit of it! She was healthy and modish and trim and bafflingly open. Anyway, Lois was an Adventuress and Adventuresses had their price. That was the crude thought at the centre of Olivia’s reasonings.
She might never have acted upon it, however, had she not gone to a supper party at a famous club and seen Derek Crayle and Lois committing the solecism of talking joyously whilst they danced. The rest of the throng revolved gloomily with dull, set faces and compressed mouths, thinking of their steps, slow-moving dervishes, the passionless fanatics of an unending rite. These two were openly enjoying themselves. To Olivia it was as though they laughed aloud in church, and there was no doubt who was to blame for the unseemliness. Olivia, one must see, had reached in her antipathy a point where Lois could do nothing but, by the mere fact of her doing it, it became an outrage and offence.
The next morning Lois remained at the house in Grosvenor Square and Olivia, passing the library door at eleven o’clock, heard the busy clicking of the typewriter. Spurred by her memory of the unseemly dance, she opened the door and went in. She stood for a few moments behind the girl, watching the nimble movements of her fingers and the words forming in purple upon the paper. Then she said:
“You are very clever at your work, Lois.”
Lois expected bricks, not honey, and was quite taken by surprise.
“It is very kind of you to say so,” she answered and went on with her work, wondering what was to come next. “There’s a catch somewhere,” she said to herself.
“I’ve thought sometimes that a girl with your ability — and manners — and looks—”
“I shall get such a kick on the pants in a minute,” thought Lois.
“Has probably a fortune waiting for her in a country like the United States.”
“So that’s it,” reflected Lois. Aloud she said: “But I don’t know a soul in the United States.”
“Oh, that wouldn’t be a difficulty,” said Olivia. “You would go with the very best introductions.”
“And I couldn’t afford the journey, or the risk of not getting an engagement or of not being able to keep it if I did secure it.”
Olivia sat down in a chair at the side of the table.
“But that needn’t trouble you, Lois,” she said eagerly. “I’ll make an arrangement with you, on your own terms. You shan’t suffer. Just think it over and let me know what you’ld consider fair. You’ll be a tremendous success in the United States.”
Lois stopped her work and turned upon Olivia a pair of candid, grateful eyes.
“You are very generous to me, Lady Thewliss. I appreciate it very much because I had an idea that you didn’t like me at all. And if I say no to your kind thought to advance me—”
“You refuse — ?” Olivia broke in with a sharp disappointment.
“I like my work here,” Lois returned. “For a year after the War ended I had a very unhappy, anxious time, and I don’t want it again.”
“But I’ve told you—”
“I know. But when poor girls like myself find a tiny safe corner where they won’t be trampled underfoot, they’ve got to stay in it, Lady Thewliss, while they can,” Lois said gently.
Olivia was aware that she was not appearing to any advantage, whilst the girl, on the other hand, was a pattern of tact and respect. The knowledge exasperated her beyond endurance.
“You won’t go, then?” she cried.
“Not unless I am dismissed,” said Lois; and Olivia’s patience snapped like a dry twig. Her dignity failed her, she made herself small; she hated herself for her abasement and Lois, who was the cause of it, more than herself.
“But I want you to go,” she cried helplessly. It was a wail more than a cry. “If you understood the difference between this house as it is and as it was before you came! I want you out of it. It began the day you came to Upper Theign. There were you three, Mark and Derek and you sitting at that table laughing, talking, absorbed, and there was I locked out.”
“Oh, Lady Thewliss, the window was locked by accident.”
“Then, yes. But it has been locked deliberately ever since. Oh, don’t think I’m blind, please! And I must be blind and deaf too if I hadn’t noticed, when I have broken unexpectedly into your discussions, the sudden dead stop, the embarrassment which comes when a stranger interrupts friends chatting about familiar things, and the flutter of conversation to hide from the stranger that he’s in the way. A stranger — that’s what you have made of me — a stranger in my own house. And I won’t bear it! You must go. You have taken my place. You must give it b
ack to me.”
“I’ve not tried to take anyone’s place,” Lois returned with spirit. “I’ve tried to make a little one for myself — that’s all.”
“Lois, you must go.”
Olivia’s passion had died down. The words were no longer an order but a prayer spoken in a whisper from parched lips and made moving by the petition of her eyes. “I can’t go on like this.”
She felt huddled in the chair, that in spite of her wealth, her authority, her position in the world, she was no match at all for the girl who stood in front of her, nameless, poor, inconsiderable but gorgeously armoured by her youth.
Lois, however, was deeply troubled by this outburst. Somehow she should have temporised and managed to avoid it. But it had caught her unawares. And it had to be reckoned with. Let this scene be repeated, and a little more publicly, say before her father, Mark Thewliss, or before Mark Thewliss and Derek — and there could be no guarantee that with a woman in Olivia’s state of nervous exasperation it wouldn’t be repeated — and she would have to go, she would have to insist on going, and she would go before she was ready to go. She meant to go in the end, but not before she was ready.
“You must give me a little time, Lady Thewliss,” she said softly. “It wouldn’t be possible, after everyone has been so kind to me, for me to throw up a position like this without a good reason to offer. I couldn’t say straight off without a hint that I had been thinking of it, that I was going to try my luck in the United States, could I? I should have to lead up to it. Besides, I don’t think I want to go there. No! But I will leave, if you’ll give me time. That I can promise you.”
Olivia had to be content with that promise. She had carried off something, at all events, as the price of her abasement. Lois, within a measurable time, would go, and go for good. That the old, pleasant, comfortably unemotional life of other days, here and at Upper Theign, could ever quite be re-established, she was not foolish enough to dream. Mark would be wounded by the defection of Lois, Derek, too, and both no doubt would blame her. There would be estrangement in place of comradeship for a time — perhaps for a long time. But Lois would have gone, would have taken her youth and her distinction and her appeal altogether away to some region where, whatever harm they worked would not matter to her. Olivia went out of the library, leaving Lois to her work. But the work went slowly now, though Lois did not waste her time in upbraiding Olivia. Olivia Thewliss had detested her from the outset of their acquaintance. It was no more than natural that she should wish to be rid of her.
“But I shall go in my own time,” said Lois. “When I am ready.”
There would have to be a reason given — a sound, acceptable reason — for her going and for something else besides. Yes, Lois had a good deal besides her work to occupy her thoughts that morning.
XXII. THE NEW CLERK
SHE SPENT THE next morning at Brooke’s Market, and at one o’clock Derek Crayle knocked upon her door.
“I have made a discovery,” he said with so much pride that he might just have dug some pillared gallery of the Second Dynasty out of the sands of Egypt. “This is a convenient moment to show it to you. Then perhaps we might go and lunch somewhere, don’t you think?”
Lois shook a forefinger at him.
“I won’t be bullied,” said Derek. “Put that finger down!”
“I wasn’t thinking of bullying you,” replied Lois as she got up and slipped on her coat. “I was going to point out to you very respectfully, as becomes me, that you are developing with unimaginable speed all the worst qualities of the City man. Good directors don’t take their girl clerks out to luncheon.”
“I am not yet a director, and a glance at your work, Miss Perriton, shows me that you’ll never be a clerk,” said Derek.
Lois made a most unclerkly grimace at him and pulled a hat down over her hair. They went out into Leather Lane and, passing along the side of the great Prudential house which now towered where Furnival’s Inn had stood, they came out into High Holborn. Across the road the oak beams and old windows of Staple Inn wavered above the pavement. Derek took his companion by the arm and choosing a moment when the traffic opened, guided her across the street. Through the gateway of Staple Inn he led her into the second court.
“There!” he cried, inviting her admiration, “I don’t suppose a single person from Mardyke and Campion’s has ever before taken the trouble to walk into Staple Inn and discover this!”
Lois was silent. She had no enthusiasm with which to answer him.
“It must be wonderful in summer,” he urged, very definitely disappointed; and again she looked about her and made no answer.
It was, to be sure, winter now. There were no lilies dreaming on the still water of the pond; no mantle of green leaves decked out the smoky, dark brick wall of the old hall, no sunshine warmed the stones. But even on this grey day it was a place of beauty and historic peace, where an older England preached its wise and silent homily on the little fever of the passions, and the great continuous heritage of a God-protected race. “Surely,” Derek Crayle thought as he gazed ruefully into Lois’s still impressive face, “she must respond.”
And in a way, an unexpected way, she did. At the first, passionate and purposeful as she was to the finger-tips under her tranquil mien, she was vaguely moved by the ancient quiet of the court. But she was moved to discomfort and doubt. So few years back she was not. So few years yet and she would not be. Was it worth while — the bitter wrath which rankled in her breast, the dangerous stratagem, the chill of anxiety? Derek saw her face waver and then harden. She had this short, insignificant life to live. Very well! But she had to live it. She belonged to that rolling world outside the two courts, whose thunders reached her ears. She threw off the spell which the place threatened to lay upon her with a gesture of anger.
“You don’t like this court?” Derek asked.
“It has no message for me,” she answered with defiance audible in her voice. “I hate it. I shall not come here again.”
Derek Crayle was quite baffled. He was never very secure with her. He had always an uneasy impression that her easy good-humoured reticence concealed smouldering fires and alien thoughts. But she had never seemed so abstruse as she did at this disappointing hour.
Once past the gateway, however, and back in the jostle of the crowd, she turned to him with a look of remorse.
“I am sorry, Derek. I behaved like a perfect idiot,” and to make yet more amends, “Didn’t I hear something about luncheon?”
“You did.” Derek’s face resumed its cheerfulness. “We oughtn’t to go too far. We can go down to the Waldorf. There’s another place, too, I have never been to along Oxford Street — Frascati’s.”
Lois, for her part, had never been to either of those restaurants, but Frascati’s lay in the direction she meant to take after luncheon.
“I am going to choose a frock,” she said.
“For the dance at Upper Theign?”
“Yes.”
Crayle stopped a taxi and they drove accordingly to Frascati’s. That restaurant had no message for Lois any more than the second court of Staple Inn. At those two places on a day of summer twenty-five years before her birth had been decreed, but no vague sense of association wakened her curiosity. She simply hated the one and lunched in the other. The most which she owed to this unrealised pilgrimage in her mother’s footsteps was a change in her plans for that afternoon. For Derek at one moment looked at his watch — a proceeding sufficiently rare when he was in Lois’s company to provoke a question. As they sat down, however, he had no thought of time.
“We don’t lunch together as often as is good for us,” he said, “so we’ll have a real luncheon,” and he summoned the waiter.
“A couple of sidecars first,” he said.
“Very good, sir.”
“And afterwards, Lois?”
“Water for me.”
“And half a bottle of Montrachet for me.”
The waiter wrote on his order
form and handed two copies of the bill of fare to them.
“Never mind that!” said Derek. “We’re to have a good luncheon. So we’ll have grapefruit, a lobster Newburg, a minute steak with sauté potatoes, a soufflé surprise and coffee.”
Lois gasped.
“We’ll have nothing of the kind,” she cried. “We’ll have the grapefruit, yes, then cutlets and sauté potatoes and then coffee. If you think I am going to increase my circumference when I’m on my way to my dressmaker, you’ve guessed wrong, Derek.”
It was toward the conclusion of this simple meal that Derek remembered his duties and looked at his watch.
“You are full of business this afternoon?” said Lois.
“It isn’t that,” Crayle answered. “But Mark’s got a new clerk coming.”
“A new clerk!” Lois exclaimed, as she lit a cigarette. “But must you be there to receive him?”
“No. But Mark wants him to have a desk in my room for a bit. It seems he’s important, eh? I don’t know why. Mark’s rather mysterious about him.”
“Oh!”
It was an exclamation of indifference, a dismissal of the subject as a matter which did not concern her. But when they rose to go away, Lois said as she crushed the end of her cigarette in the saucer of her coffee cup:
“I think I’ll drive back with you. I left a strip of stuff of the colour I want for my dress.”
As they drove back they passed a clock, and Lois asked quickly, “What time is your new clerk expected?”
“A quarter to three.”
Lois leaned back in the corner of the cab.
“If we are not held up, you ought to be in comfortable time,” she remarked, and she, at all events, was comfortable.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 605