Part 49 (1/2)
She bustled out of the room to look after her own daughters and give Edna some advice about hers; soon after she was gone Gladys and Marjorie, the prototypes of those little girls in the front garden, strolled in to gossip with their eldest sister. Although it was nearly noon, they were only just out of bed, because they had been up late at a dance on the night before. Gladys, a girl of twenty, was very like her eldest sister at the same age. She was not quite so tall and perhaps she lacked her air of having been born to grandeur, but she was sufficiently like to make Dorothy wonder if her career would at all resemble her own.
On the whole, she thought that probably herself and Agnes had exhausted the right of the Caffyns to astonish their neighbors. Gladys and Marjorie, the latter a charming new edition of the original Dorothy, with flas.h.i.+ng deep-blue eyes, dark hair, and an Irish complexion, were already, at twenty and nineteen, too free to be ambitious. Twelve years had made a great difference to the liberty of girls in West Kensington, and Mr. Caffyn no longer objected to the young men who came to his house, mostly in uniform nowadays, which provided one more excuse for emanc.i.p.ation. Gladys and Marjorie frequently arrived home unchaperoned from dances at three o'clock in the morning, and their father did not turn a hair; perhaps he was already so white that he was incapable of showing any more marks of life's fitful fever. No doubt he had long ago given up the ladies of Lauriston Mansions, and probably at no period in his career was he more qualified to be the secretary of the Church of England Purity Society than upon the eve of his retirement from the post. Dorothy had not seen her father since that night she drove him back in her car from the Vanity. Tacitly they had been friends at once when the countess came to live at home for a while; indeed, she fancied that she could grow quite fond of him, and she was even compelled to warn herself against a slight inclination to accept his flattery a little too complacently. Mrs. Caffyn, with a perversity that is often shown by blondes upon the verge of sixty, would not go white, and her hair was of so indefinite a shade as to be quite indescribably the very expression of her own indefinite personality.
Of the boys--it was odd to hear of the boys again--Roland had long been married and already had four children. At this rate he was likely to surpa.s.s his father, whom on a larger scale he was beginning to resemble.
Roland was continually in a state of being expected to come and look the family up. He was so long in doing so that he became almost a myth to his eldest sister, and when at last, one afternoon, he did materialize with the largest mustache she had ever seen, his appearance gave her the same kind of thrill that she used to get at the Zoo, when at short intervals the sea-lion would emerge from the water and flap about among the rocks of his cage. It was obvious that Roland regarded her with a mixture of suspicion, jealousy, and disapproval, for he had not brought his wife with him, and when the countess asked him if he had also left his pipe at home, he growled out that he supposed she was far too grand for pipes. Dorothy remembered that sometimes when they were children he and she had seemed upon the path of mutual understanding, and, feeling penitent for her share in the way they had for twelve years been walking away from each other, she tried to be specially affectionate with Roland; but he was already out of earshot. He evidently was thinking that her abrupt re-entry into the family circle would probably mean a reduction in his share of any money left by their parents, because he was continually alluding to her financial state and his own. She tried to ascribe this to his position as the manager of a branch bank; but she knew in her heart that he was dividing 500 a year first by eight and then by nine and thinking what a difference to his holiday that extra 7 would make. Of Dorothy's other brothers, Cecil was in camp somewhere, and hoping to get to France soon with the R.A.M.C.; he had been married only a few months, and his wife was living in the nearest town to his quarters. Vincent, who had won a scholars.h.i.+p at Sydney Suss.e.x College, Cambridge, had already enlisted and wrote home as confidently of promotion in the near future as twelve years ago he had boasted that he would soon be in the eleven of St. James's Preparatory School.
Perhaps the most striking result of the countess's return was the impetus it gave to Mrs. Caffyn's Wednesday afternoons. The punctilious ladies came as they had been coming steadily for twelve years; but a quant.i.ty of less punctilious ladies also came and were so much over-awed by meeting a countess in a West Kensington drawing-room that they had no appet.i.te for cakes, which was just as well because otherwise the strain put upon the normal provision by so many extra visitors might have been too much for it. In addition to the Wednesday ladies, several friends of Dorothy's youth visited No. 17 in the evenings, and though by now the billiard-table was more like a neglected tennis-lawn, she played one or two games to remind her of old times, thinking how scornful she would have been twelve years ago if any one had prophesied to her such indulgence in sentiment. Among these friends of youth came Wilfred Curlew, who in outward appearance was the least changed of all. His career had been successful, if the editors.h.i.+p of a society paper can be considered success. Being a journalist, he rightly considered himself indispensable at home, and it is unlikely that his inaccurate and cheery paragraphs in _The Way of the World_ did any more to make the war ridiculous than some of the inaccurate and cheery despatches sent home from the front by generals. A slight tendency which he had formerly had toward a c.o.c.kney accent had been checked by an elocutionist who had imprisoned his voice in his throat, whence it was never allowed to stray. If Lady Clarehaven had once been a Vanity girl, Mr. Wilfred Curlew, the editor of _The Way of the World_, had once written fierce revolutionary articles about Society in _The Red Lamp_; and whereas Lady Clarehaven had long been indifferent to her past, Mr. Curlew was still sensitive about his, as sensitive as a man who oils the wheels of railway-coaches in termini would be if it were known that he had once been a train-wrecker.
After the first awkwardness of such a rencounter had worn off Dorothy found Wilfred entertaining. It was astonis.h.i.+ng to learn how accurately the failings and follies of so many of her friends and acquaintances were known to the editor, who had never met one of them. At first he pretended that he had met them; but as gradually he saw more of the countess he gave up this pretense, and finally he revealed the existence in his mind of a perpetual and abominable dread that soon or late in one of his cheery paragraphs he should make a mistake, not, of course, a mistake of fact or even an unjust imputation--that would be nothing--but a mistake of form. He was really haunted day and night by such bogies as referring to a maid of honor after marriage without her prefix, though to have suggested that her behavior with somebody else's husband was less honorable than that would no more have troubled him than to state positively that her main hobby was breeding Sealyham terriers, when it was really communicating every Sunday at St. Paul's, Knightsbridge. If in Lonsdale Road Dorothy beheld her present self, in Wilfred Curlew she saw the reflection of what she was twelve years ago, enough of which old self still existed to make her feel proud that never in her most anxious moments had she revealed to another person her own dread of making a mistake.
One day after a long talk about well-known people in society, Curlew exclaimed from the depths of his inmost being, ”If only I had you always!”
”Is this a proposal?” she laughed.
He rose and walked about the room in his agitated fas.h.i.+on; then supporting with one arm the small of his back as he used, and wrenching his voice back into his throat whence in his emotion it had nearly escaped, he paused to mutter:
”Presumptuous, I know, but sincere.”
This phrase remained in Dorothy's mind for long afterward, and in her gloomiest hours she could always smile when she repeated gently to herself, ”Presumptuous, I know, but sincere.”
Naturally, she told Curlew as kindly as she could that his proposal was far outside the remotest bounds of possibility.
”Besides,” she added, ”you'd really be much better off without my help.
Readers of your paper will always greatly prefer your view of society to my view. My view would pull your circulation down to nothing in less than no time.”
”It's true,” Curlew groaned. ”How wise you are!”
Only that morning he had received a sharp reminder from the great brain of which _The Way of the World_ was merely an inquisitive and insignificant tentacle, to say that the last three or four numbers of the paper had shown a marked falling off in their ability to provide what the public required.
”You have to admit that I am right,” Dorothy pointed out kindly.
”Yes, but if you'd marry me, in a year or two I would give up journalism and write novels. I've got a theory about the form of the English novel which I should like to put into practice.”
”I'm afraid,” said Dorothy, ”I have heard too many theories about the form of race-horses to believe much in theories of form about anything.
Form is a capricious quality.”
”It's an awful thing,” poor Wilfred groaned, ”for a man who knows he can write good stuff never to have an opportunity of doing so. I'm afraid I've sold my soul,” he murmured, in a transport of remorse.
”We all of us do that sooner or later,” she said. ”And it's only when we don't get a good price for it that we repent.”
Dorothy's faculty for aphorisms had no doubt been fostered by the respect which was accorded to her at Lonsdale Road, but she was far from talking merely for the sake of talking, and her inspiration was really the fruit of experience, not the mere flowering of words. She had, perhaps, been wiser than she had realized in coming home for a while.
Notwithstanding those two younger sisters nearly as beautiful as herself, notwithstanding the knowledge generally diffused that she was without money, her beauty and rank were still sufficiently remarkable in West Kensington to preserve her dignity. Here she ran no risks of acquiring a deeper cynicism from the behavior of old friends like Tufton, and inasmuch as misfortune had made her more truly the equal of those around her she had no temptation now to lord it over her sisters, as no doubt they had expected she would; in the homage of West Kensington she let the pleasant side of herself develop and, by a strong effort resisting an inclination to worry about the future, she resigned herself to whatever fortune had in store for her.
Dorothy was not content with waiting for all her old friends to visit her; there was one whom she herself sought out soon after she reached West Kensington. She had not seen Olive Airdale since her marriage, and she was glad she was visiting her for the first time humbly and on foot, even if Olive should think that it was only in adversity that she cared to seek out the companions of her early days. What rubbis.h.!.+ As if Olive would think anything except that she was glad to see her old friend. It was an opalescent afternoon in mid-October when Dorothy rang the bell of the little red house in Gresley Road, and Olive's welcome of her was as if the mist over London had suddenly melted to reveal that very paradise which for the fanciful wayfarer existed somewhere behind these enchanting and transfigurative autumnal airs.
”My dearest Dorothy,” she exclaimed. ”But why do you reproach yourself?
As if I hadn't always perfectly understood! I've been so worried about you. And I wish you could have met Jack--but of course he enlisted at once. You don't know him or you'd realize that of course he had to.”