CHAPTER VI—THE DREAM IN STONE
IF some one idiosyncratic and original, some one bold to challenge the accepted order, had dared to put Mary Arden on her defense, if it had been asked what she was doing in the war, she would have replied with cool assurance that she was keeping her head about it when nothing was more easy than intemperance. Every day her post brought letters which encouraged the belief, not that she made an opportunity of war, but that she held high rank amongst home-keeping indispensables. Her letters from unknown men in the trenches were explicit that Mary Arden was the England they were fighting for—food, if she had cared to eat it, for the grossest conceit.
She was, by now, the leading musical comedy exponent of demureness, with Chown as her undroppable pilot; and Pate, Darley and a procession of stage managers who had steered less ably than that devoted pair were forgotten’ rungs on the ladder she had climbed. She kept her head about things more yeasty, in her microcosm more demoralizing, than the war; she kept her head about success and kept it about men. She rode vanity on the snaffle because she was herself ridden by ambition.
Once the ambition had been trivial, once she had aimed no higher than a house in Staithley as big as Walter Pate’s, but she had grown since then and, with her, ambition grew, rooted in something older than her vanity or than herself, rooted in the Bradshaw hatred of the Hepplestalls. Secretly she nursed her ambition to possess a great house on Staithley Edge, high, dominating the town of the Hepplestalls, a house to make the old Hall look like a cottage, a house where she would live, resuming her name of Bradshaw, eclipsing the Hepplestalls in Staithley.
In eyes accustomed to the London she had conquered, the Hepplestalls dwindled while Mary Arden, star, looked very big. There was veritable conspiracy to augment her sense of self-importance and even the newspapers, as the war degenerated into routine, gave of their restricted space to say, repeatedly, that Mary Arden was a “person.” To such an one, her ambition seemed no foolishness, but it wasn’t to be done just yet—nor by practicing such crude economies as those of her first cheese-paring tour. Dress mattered to her now; it belonged with her position like other sumptuosities inseparable from a position which was itself a symbol of extravagance. She rode the whirlwind of the war, a goddess of the Leave Front, dressing daintily as men would have her dress, but if there was lavishness at all it was for professional purposes only. It was lavishness corrected by prudence, lavishness calculated to maintain a position which was to lead her to a house in Staithley Edge. She was a careful spendthrift, and she was careful, too, in other ways. The dancing and the dining, the being seen with the right man at the right places—these were not so much the by-products of success as its buttresses; and to be expert in musical comedy acting implies expertness in the technique of being a gay companion. She exercised fastidious selectiveness, but, having chosen, gave her company at costly meals to young officers who returned to France swaggering in soul, mentioning aloud with infinite casualness that they had lunched with Mary Arden. It was tremendously the thing to do: one might be a lieutenant in France but one had carried a baton in London: and one didn’t, even when the sense of triumph led one to the mood of after-dinner boasting, hint that there was anything but her company at meals or at a dance to be had from Mary Arden. The Hepplestalls were going to find no chink in her immaculate armor when she queened it over them from her great house on the hill, but to suggest that mere pride was the motive of her continence is to do her an injustice.
Socially as well as theatrically, then, she had her vogue and nothing seemed to threaten it; yet Mr. Rossiter had the strange caprice to be not wholly satisfied with Mary Arden. As a captain of the light entertainment industry, he was doing exceedingly well out of the war; he had a high opinion of the Colonial soldiery; the young British officer was hardly behind the Colonial private in his eagerness to occupy Mr. Rossiter’s stalls, and at times when leave was suspended the civilian population filled the breach in its very natural desire for an antidote to anxiety. Surely he was captious to be finding fault anywhere, last of all with Mary Arden? But Hubert Rossiter did not hold his position by taking short views or by seeing only the obvious, and he sent for Mr. Chown to discuss with him the shortcomings of his client, Miss Arden.
“Sit down, Lexley,” he said. “Have you read that script I sent you?”
Mr. Chown produced from a neat attaché-case the typescript of Mr. Rossiter’s next play, with a nod which managed to convey, besides mere affirmation, his deep admiration of the inspired managerial judgment.
“Well, now,” said Rossiter briskly, “about Mary Arden. There’s, every musical reason why I should cast her for Teresa in this piece. She can sing the music. Leslie’s the alternative and Leslie can’t sing it. The question is, can Mary act it?”
Mr. Chown’s geese were not swans: he knew that his clients, even if they were his clients, had limitations. “I saw her in the other part as I read it, Hubert,” he fenced.
“The flapper part isn’t worth Mary’s salary. Now, is it? Seriously, I’m troubled about Mary.”
“What’s the matter with her?”
“She keeps her heart at her banker’s for one thing. Do you know she once came into this office with a ’bus ticket stuck in the cuff of her sleeve? A leading part at the Galaxy Theatre, and rides in a ’bus!”
“That wasn’t recently. Be fair, Hubert. And where do you want her to keep her heart?”
“Where she wore the ’bus ticket. On her sleeve. If she’s so fond of money, Lexley, why doesn’t she go after it? There’s plenty about.”
Chown stiffened in his chair. “As Miss Arden’s agent, Hubert,” he said severely, “I protest against that suggestion.”
Rossiter smiled blandly. “Right. You’ve done your duty to your client and to the proprieties. Now we’ll get down to facts.”
“But anyhow, Hubert, don’t forget what this girl is. She plays on her demureness. It’s Mary’s winning card.”
“A nunnery’s the place for her sort of demureness. In the theater a woman only scores by demureness when it’s known to the right people that she’s a devil off the stage.”
“No! No,” cried Chown. “You—”
“The theater is a place of illusion, my friend. In any case, Mary’s been doing flappers too long. She’s getting old.”
“You’re simply being perverse, Hubert.” Mr. Chown was genuinely angry. “Mary Arden old!”
“Then,” said Rossiter, “she began young and it comes to the same thing. What’s a play-going generation? Five years? Very well, for a generation of playgoers she’s been doing demure flappers and it’s time she did something else and time somebody else did the flappers. And can she do anything else? Can she? I’ll tell you in one word what’s the matter with Mary—virginity.”
Mr. Chown could only bow his head in sorrowing agreement. “She is immoderate,” he said gloomily and Rossiter stared at him, finding the adjective surprising until, “‘Everything in moderation, including virginity,’” quoted Chown.
“Is that your own?” asked Rossiter with relish.
But Chown disclaimed originality and even personal knowledge of his mot’s authorship. He did not read books. He read life and, especially on Thursdays, the Daily Telegraph. “The man who said it to me said it was Samuel Butler’s.”
“It’s good,” pronounced Rossiter, writing the name down. “I’ll get Drayton to write to this man Butler and see if he’ll do me a libretto. I like his flavor.”
“I’m afraid he’s dead,” said Chown.
“Oh, this war!” grieved Rossiter. “This awful war! Is it to take all our promising young men? Well, to come back to Mary. I want to cast her for Teresa and now, candidly, she being what she is, can I?”
“No,” agreed Chown.
“There it is! Waste. Constriction of her possibilities. I wish you’d make her see that it’s bad for her art. You and I have to watch over our young women like fathers. You brought this girl to me and I’ve endorsed your judgment so far: but she’s got no future if she doesn’t mend her ways. I’ve been thinking of reviving ‘The Duchess of Dantzic.’”
“For her?” gasped Chown. “Mary to play Sans-Gene?”
“She can sing it, but she can’t act it—yet. If she’s out for marriage, get her married. Marry her yourself. Do something. But a woman who shirks life will never play Sans-Gêne.” Rossiter rose to administer a friendly pat to Chown’s shoulder. “Think it over, old man,” he said earnestly. “Meantime,” he conceded graciously, “I’ll give Teresa to Leslie and Mary can flap once more. But, I warn you, it’s the last time. I’m tired of real demureness. I want real acting.”
Chown hesitated slightly, then “Do you know, I’ve a card up my sleeve about Mary,” he said.
“Then, for God’s sake, play it, my lad. Play it. It’s overdue.”
“What about giving her a character part?”
“Character? That’s not her line. You know as well as I do that we can’t monkey with the public’s expectations. An actress can afford anything except versatility.”
“Listen,” said Chown. “I picked her up in Lancashire and her accent’s amazing. I needn’t remind you that Lancashire is almost as popular on the stage as Ireland. As you said, the theater’s a place of illusion.”
“Did you notice,” asked Rossiter witheringly, “that the scene of this piece is laid in Granada?”
“Does that matter?” asked Chown blandly.
Rossiter was turning over the pages of the script. “Not a bit,” he hardily admitted. “I’ll take the chance, Lexley. We’ll make her Lancashire, and there’s a male part that’ll have to go to Lancashire too. What a pity that chap Butler was killed in the war. He’d have been just the man to write it in.”
“I don’t think he was Lancashire,” said Chown and, in his turn, “Does that matter?” asked Rossiter. “You go and have that talk with Mary and leave me to look after authors. It takes doing nowadays. Surprising what they’ll ask for doing a bit of re-writing. Makes a hole in a ten-pound note if you don’t watch it.”
Chown had a talk, rather than “that” talk, with Mary, omitting, for instance, Rossiter’s recommendation of matrimony as essential to an actress. Experience, with or without marriage lines, might tap an emotional reservoir but, in her case, the experience would certainly go with marriage and Chown had suffered too often by the retirement of his successful clients after marriage to risk advising it. He considered Rossiter incautious. “There’s a part for you in ‘Granada the Gay,’” he told her, “that is going to make you a new reputation. A Lancashire part and London will think you’re acting it. You and I know you are it, but we won’t mention that.”
“This is interesting,” said Mary Ellen with shining eyes. “I’ll work at this. I’ll show them something.”
Chown nodded, satisfied that she would, in fact, “show them” enough to silence Rossiter’s murmurings for the next two years—nobody looked for a shorter run than that from a musical comedy in war time—and Rossiter was indeed ungrudging in his admission that Mary’s demure Lancastrian, with the terrific and accurate accent coming with such rugged veracity from those pretty lips, was the success of “Granada the Gay.” People were going with scant selectiveness to all theaters alike, but there were a few, and the Galaxy among them, which had their special lure.
It was a curiosity of the time, full though the theaters were, that advance bookings were low. No one could see ahead, no one’s time was his own and perhaps that was the reason or perhaps it was only the sentiment which underlay the practice of going impulsively to theaters without the solemnity of premeditation involved in booking seats many days ahead; and the two young officers, sitting down to dinner, were not remarkable in expecting at that late hour to get stalls at any theater they pleased. “Libraries”—that curious misnomer of the ticket agencies—perhaps kept up their sleeves a parcel of certainly saleable tickets for the benefit of abrupt men in khaki, but libraries were crowded places to be avoided by those who had the officering habit of telling some one else to do the tedious little things.
“We might go on to a show after this,” said Derek Carton. “Don’t you think so, Fairy? Waiter, send a page with the theater list. I want tickets for something.”
His companion, only arrived that day from France, let his eyes stray sensuously over the appointments of the restaurant. He was to eat in a room decorated in emulation of a palace at Versailles; the chefs were French; the guests, when they were not American, were of every allied or neutral European nationality; the band played jazz music; and to the marrow of him, as he contemplated the ornate evidences of materialistic civilization, he exulted in his England. The hardship was that he couldn’t spend the whole of this leave in London: he must go, to-morrow, to Staithley. He was, he had been for six months, Sir Rupert Hepplestall, but when his father died the 1918 German push was on and leave impossible. Decidedly he must go North, this time, this once, though—oh, hang the Hepplestalls! Why couldn’t they let him go quietly, to look in decent privacy at his father’s grave? But no: they must make him a director of the firm and they must call a meeting for him to attend. Well-meaning but absurd old men who had not or who would not see that Rupert was free of Hepplestall’s now. Sincerely he mourned his father’s death, and they wouldn’t let him be simple about it, they complicated a fellow’s pilgrimage to Sir Philip’s grave by their obtuse attempt to thrust his feet into Sir Philip’s shoes.
That needn’t matter to-night, though, that sour affront to the idea of leave: it was his complication not Carton’s who, good man, had met him at the station. Like Rupert, Carton had gone from Cambridge to the war, then he had lost a leg and now had a job at the War Office: and the jolly thing was that Carton hadn’t altered, he was as he used to be even to calling Rupert by that old nickname. If you have seventy-three inches you are naturally called Fairy and out there nobody ever thought of calling you anything else except on frigidly official occasions. But you were never quite sure of the home point of view; the thing called war-mind made such amazing rabid asses of the people who were not fighting and you weren’t certain even of Carton and now you were a little ashamed of having been uncertain. Of course, old Carton would not rot him about his title; of course, he would call him Fairy, he wouldn’t allude to that baronetcy of which Rupert was still so shy.
“Stop dreaming, Fairy,” said Derek, and he looked across the table to find a page-boy at Derek’s elbow and a theater-list on the table before him. “What shall it be?”
“Oh, Robey, I suppose.”
“Yes,” Derek agreed. “Usually Robey’s first choice. Just now, it’s Robey or ‘Granada the Gay,’ with a girl called Arden.”
“You’re in charge,” said Rupert. “I’ve heard of Mary Arden.”
Derek tried not to look superior. “It’s usual,” he said. “Galaxy Theater, boy,” and presently received a pink slip of paper entitling him to the occupancy of two stalls that night. Nothing would have surprised him more than not to have received it, an hour before the curtain rose on a musical comedy in the first flush of brilliant success.
They ate and mostly their talk was superficial. It preserved a superficial air when men who had been killed were spoken of and only once did there seem divergence in their points of view. Some technical point of gunnery came up and Derek, who was at the War Office, agreed that “We can’t improve it yet. But I tell you, old man, in the next war—”
“That—that was a topping Turkish Bath we went to before dinner,” said Rupert.
Derek stared. “What!” he gasped.
“I’m changing the subject,” said Rupert with a smile of forgiveness for his friend who had been home too long, too near to the newspapers and the War Office. At the Front, they didn’t talk of the next war, they were fighting the last of the wars. But he didn’t want argument with Derek to-night. “Are you through that liqueur?” he asked. “Let’s go on to this theater, shall we?”
Rossiter could not and did not expect his commissionaires to emulate the silky suppleness of cosmopolitan head waiters, but it was impressed upon them that they were not policemen on point duty but the servants of a gentleman receiving their master’s guests; he neglected nothing, “producing” the front of the house as he produced the entertainment on the stage or the business organization in his office. It was whispered to husbands that his most exquisite achievement was the ladies’ cloak-room. You might leave your restaurant savage at the bill, but by the time you had progressed from the Galaxy entrance to your stall, you were so saluted, blarneyed, caressed, that there was no misanthropy in you.
It captivated Rupert; he couldn’t, try as he would, duplicate Derek’s stylish air of matter-of-fact boredom. Yesterday he was in hell and to-morrow, very likely, he would swear if the waiter at the hotel brought up tepid tea to his bedside; but to-night he hadn’t made adjustments, to-night he was impressible by amenity. And he had read in the papers that London had grown unmannerly! Outrageous libel on an earthly paradise.
But it may be hazarded that first steps, even in paradise, are not sure-footed, and in spite of his bodily ease, and the “atmosphere” of Mr. Rossiter’s stalls and his eagerness to be amused, his mind, accustomed to the grotesque convention, war, did not immediately accept the grotesque convention, musical comedy. In a day or two he would, no doubt, be as greedy of unreality as any believer in the fantastic untruths distributed to the Press by the War Office propaganda departments, but he was too lately come to Cloud Cuckoo Land to have sloughed his sanity yet. He had yearned for color and he had it now; and the vivid glare of a Rossiter musical comedy put an intolerable strain upon his eyes, while the humor of the comedians put his brain in chancery. Home-grown jokes, he supposed, and yet their mess had fancied itself at wit. He was regretful that he had not insisted on Robey. Robey was the skilled liaison officer between Front and Leave. Robey jerked one’s thoughts irresistibly into the right groove at once; he wouldn’t have sat under Robey wilting to the dismal conviction that his first evening on leave was turning to failure.
Then, from off-stage, a girl began to speak, and Rupert sat taut in his stall. He all but rose and stood to attention as Mary Arden appeared in the character of that inapposite Lancastrian in Granada. She did not merely salt the meat for him; there was no meat but her. He thought that, then blushed at the coarseness of a metaphor which compared this girl with meat. She spoke in the dialect of Lancashire and where he had been dull to the humor of the comedians, all was crystal now. Boredom left him; the morose sentiment of a ruined evening melted like cloud in the sunshine of Mary Arden; phoenixlike leave rose again to the level of anticipation and beyond.
Tell him that he was ravished because she reminded him of Staithley, and he would not have denied that he was ravished but he would have denied very hotly that Staithley had anything to do with it. Suggest that he was seized and held because she spoke a dialect which was his as well as hers, and he would have denied knowledge of a single dialect word. But Rupert was born in Staithley where dialect, like smoke, is in the air and inescapable and Mary was calling to something so deep in him that he did not know he had it, his love of Lancashire covered up and locked beneath his school, Cambridge, the Army. She turned the key, she sent him back to the language he spoke in boyhood, not in the nursery or the schoolroom, but in emancipated hours in the garage and the stables where dialect prevailed. Obstinate in his creed of hatred of the Lancashire of the Hepplestalls, he did not know what she had done to him, but he felt for Mary the intimacy of old, tried acquaintanceship. He was unconscious of others on the stage, even as background: he was unconscious of being in a theater at all and sat gaping when the curtain cut him off from her and Derek began to push past him with an impatient “Buck up. Just time for a drink before they close. Always a scram in the bar. Come along.”
“But,” said Rupert still sitting, still stupidly resenting the intrusion of the curtain, “but—Mary Arden.”
“If that’s the trouble, I’ll take you round and introduce you afterwards. Anything, so long as we don’t miss this drink.”
Derek led his friend to the bar, where there was opportunity for Rupert, amongst a thirsting thrusting mob, to revise his estimate of London manners in war-time. When they had secured whiskies, “You know her!” Rupert said, jealous for the first time of Derek’s enforced home-service.
“I’ve met her once,” said Derek. “That’s a good enough basis for introducing you, to an actress. But I might as well warn you. Mary’s as good as her reputation. A lot of men have wasted time making sure of that.”
“I see,” said Rupert curtly. “But you’ll introduce me.”
“Yes,” said Derek, “if you insist.” He had brought Rupert to the Galaxy because it was the thing to do, just as he had met Mary for the same reason, but he resented her strangeness. To Derek an actress who was not only notoriously but actually “straight” was simply not playing the game and he was reluctant to add Rupert to the train of her exhibited and deluded admirers. Whereas Rupert would have shrunk aghast at the temerity of his thoughts if he had realized Mary as an actress and a famous one. He was, in all modesty, seeing her possessively because she and he were alone in a crowd.
He had to mar with Lancashire this leave which had suddenly turned so glamorous; there was the more reason, then, for boldness, for grasping firmly the opportunity presented by Carton’s introduction, but it troubled him to shyness to think that he had so greatly the advantage of her. He had watched her for three hours and she hadn’t seen him yet. It seemed to him unfair.
His first impression, as her dressing-room door opened to Derek and he looked over his friend’s shoulder, was of cool white walls and chintz hangings. The gilt Empire chairs, relics of a forgotten Rossiter production, which furnished the cell-like room as if it were a great lady’s prison de luxe in bygone France, added in some indefinable way to its femininity. The hangings bulged disconcertingly over clothing.
In his stall he had established that he knew her, but this seemed too abrupt a plunge into her intimacy. She sat, with her back to him, at a table littered with mysteries, and her hair hung loosely down her white silk dressing-gown. He turned away, with burning face, only to find in that room of mirrors no place to which to turn. Carton, that lump of ice, was unaffected, and so was Mary herself who continued, messily, to remove grease-paint from her face with vaseline and a vigorous towel while she gave Carton, sideways, an oily hand. She was not incommoding herself for a man she hardly remembered.
“Weren’t there two of you when you came in?” she asked and Derek realized that Rupert had fled. “Fairy!” he called, and opened the door. “Come in, man.”
Mary laughed. “Fairy?” she said. “You’ve a quaint name. Fairy by name and nature. Fairies disappear.”
He was distressingly embarrassed. Carton had, merely instinctively, called him by the usual nickname, and was he, to escape her gay quizzing, to draw himself up grandly and to say that he wasn’t Fairy but Sir Rupert? “Fairy” set her first impressions against him, but to attempt their correction by announcing that he had a title might, by its pompousness, only turn bad to worse. Better, for the moment, let it slide. He smiled gallantly. “When I disappear again,” he said, “it will be because you tell me to.” He cursed his unreadiness to rise above the level of idiocy.
“Do you know, Miss Arden, Fairy comes from Lancashire,” said Derek, by way of magnanimously helping a lame dog over a stile.
“Does he?” said Mary listlessly. She could see in her glass without turning round his large supple frame and his handsome face which would, she thought, look better without the conventional mustache. She placed men quickly now. Well-bred, this boy, gentle. Too gentle? Probably not. Big men were apt to be gentle through very consciousness of strength, and he was graceful for all his size. “Fairy” would do: decidedly he would do to replace as her decorative companion across restaurant tables her latest cavalier who had just gone back to France.
“Oh,” he was saying, “it won’t interest Miss Arden that I come from Lancashire.”
“Well,” she said, hinting a gulf impassable between North and South, “I’m a London actress.”
“That’s the miracle of it,” he said. “Lancashire’s an old slag-heap of a county and one couldn’t be proud of it. Only, by Jove, I am, since hearing you. It’s queer, but when you spoke Lancashire it was as if I met an old friend I hadn’t seen for a long time. I know it’s awful cheek, Miss Arden, but it seemed to put me on an equality with you.”
She did not know he was a Hepplestall, she missed the poignant irony of their identities, but when Sir Rupert haltingly told her that it was “awful cheek” in him to feel on an equality with the exalted Mary Ellen Bradshaw, she had, unusually, the thought that she ought to check this absurd diffidence by blurting out that she learned her Lancashire on Staithley Streets, that she was not acting but was the real, raw thing. It was not often, these days, that Mary blushed to accept homage. She hadn’t put herself, the times, the strange perverted times, had put her on a pinnacle and, being there, she did what men seemed gratified that she should do, she looked down on them. But because she kept her head, she had not resented, she had welcomed, the one or two occasions when she had been made to feel ashamed. There was a man, now dead, whom she recalled because Rupert was making her in the same way look at herself through a diminishing-glass. He had, unlike the most, talked to her of the things they were doing over there: he had told her in a matter-of-fact way of their daily life and she had made comparisons with hers, she had dwindled to her true dimensions. And Rupert by means she couldn’t analyze was giving a similar, salutary experience. She felt shrunken before him and was happy to shrink.
Derek’s formula for the correct welcome of a fighting soldier on leave included supper at a night club, and they were wasting time on the impossible woman. “I expect you want to turn us out so that you can dress,” he cut in.
“Oh!” cried Rupert, alarmed at the idea of going so pat upon their coming. “But—yes, I suppose you must. Only I—” he took courage, if it wasn’t desperation, in both hands and added, “Will you lunch with me to-morrow at the Carlton?”
She pretended to consult a full engagement-book. “I might just manage it,” she grudged defensively. Though he shrank her and she realized being shrunk by him, he was not to think that lunch with Mary Arden was less than a high privilege.
He took that view himself. “I shall be greatly honored,” he said sincerely: then Derek hustled him away, but not to the night club. Rupert resisted that anti-climax, he who had held Mary’s hand in his, “But I’m so grateful to you, Derek,” he emphasized.
“Are you? Then don’t be ungrateful if I tell you that no one’s quite sane on leave,” and sane or not, Rupert went to bed in the elated mood of a man who knows he has created something. “Like a hen clucking over an egg,” was Derek’s private-comment on his friend.
CHAPTER VII—MARY AND RUPERT
RUPERT lay in bed morosely contemplating the first fact about Leave—its brutal elasticity. If he did not know, on the one hand, what he had done to deserve the acquaintanceship of Mary Arden, he did not know, on the other, that he deserved that dark intrusion on brief London days, the Staithley visit. Fortune first smiled, then apishly grimaced, but he threw off peevishness with the bed-clothes and the tang of cold water. Soberly, if intrusion was in question, then it was Mary who intruded and if he hadn’t learned, by now, to take things as they came, he had wasted his time in France.
He must go to Staithley, he must attend the conclave of the Hepplestalls, but he need not then and there make his protest articulate. Would it, indeed, be decent, coming as he would straight from his first reverent visit to his father’s grave, to fling defiance at his uncles? If they cared to read consent into an attitude studiously noncommittal, why, they must; but he wouldn’t in so many words announce his irrevocable decision never to be bondsman to Hepplestall’s; he wouldn’t by any sign of his invite a tedium of disputation which might keep him, heaven knew how long, from London and his Mary.
His Mary! That was thought which outran discretion, truth and even hope. The most he sanguinely expected of her was that she would consent, for the period of his leave, to “play” with him and, of course, there was a matter, trivial but annoying, to be set right first. That introduction under his nickname bothered him: his silence suggested that he was ashamed to acknowledge himself at the moment of being presented to an actress, and the suggestion was insulting to her. So far, and so far as the invitation to lunch went, she had accepted him as her companion “on his face,” and it might have been romantic enterprise to see if she would continue to consort with a Fairy, a man cursed with a name as grotesque as Cyrano’s nose, but he took Mary too seriously to put their playtime in jeopardy by keeping up a masquerade. The last thing he would do was to traffic on his title, but the first was to let her know that he wasn’t a Fairy! By telling a waiter to address him as Sir Rupert? He didn’t like that way. The way of an intriguer. No, he must face his dilemma, hoping to find means to bring out the truth without (God forbid!) advertising it, and in the first moments of their meeting, too.
What prevented him from telling her when she came into the restaurant and held out her hand with an “Ah, Captain Fairy,” was her disconcerting frock. It was not an unusual frock except that it was a fashionable and supreme frock and Mary had torn off two other fashionable frocks before she decided that this was an occasion for a supreme frock. It was an occasion, she admitted by stages marked by the change of frock, for her best defenses. She had welcomed medicinally the purge to pride he had unconsciously administered but he must not make a habit of it and from head to foot, within and without, she wrapped herself in dress-assurance.
“You’re stunning,” he said at sight of her, stupidly and truthfully, missing the finer excellences of her frock, disconcerted by it simply because it was a frock. Idiot, he called himself, did he expect her to come to the Carlton in a white silk dressing-gown with her hair down her shoulders? But neither on the stage nor in her dressing-room had he seen her with her hair up and he hadn’t, in that particular, been imaginative about her. He saw her now a well-dressed woman, superbly a woman, but so different from the Mary of stage-costume or of dishabille, so wonderfully more mysterious, that his illusion of knowing her very soul dropped from him and left him bankrupt of confidence in the presence of a lady charming but unknown.
They were at a table and Mary had the conversation under control long before he realized that she was still addressing him as Captain Fairy. Perhaps, after all, his assertion of himself would go best with the coffee: he resolved very firmly that he wouldn’t let it slide beyond the coffee. He became aware of subtle oppositions between them, of pleasant undercurrents in action and reaction making an electricity of their own; he sensed her evident desire to lead the conversation. Well, she would naturally play first fiddle to a Fairy, but perhaps there was something else and, if so, he could put that right without embarrassing himself. She had said last night, as if pointedly, “I’m a London actress,” thinking of him, no doubt, as a provincial.
He said, “By the way, Carton mentioned last night that I come from Lancashire. His point was, I suppose, that it would interest you because you happen to be playing a Lancashire part. I’m Lancashire by the accident of birth, but I hope I’ve outlived it in my life.”
“Oh!” said Mary, thinking of a photograph of Staithley Edge which hung on the wall of her flat almost with the significance of the ikon in a Russian peasant’s room, “oh, are you ashamed of Lancashire?”
“I’m going there this afternoon, as a matter of fact, probably for the last time. I don’t think the word is ‘ashamed,’ though. I’ve outgrown Lancashire. I shall settle in London after the war. Look here, may I tell you about it? Theoretically, I was supposed to go back to Lancashire some day, after I’d finished at Cambridge. To go back on terms I loathed, and I didn’t mean to go back. I was reading pretty hard at Cambridge, not for fun, but to get a degree—a decent degree; to have something to wave in their faces as a fairly solid reason for not going back. I thought of going to the bar, just by way of being something reasonable, but I don’t know that it matters now. I mean after the war they can’t possibly expect the things of a man that they thought it was possible, and I didn’t, to expect before. My father’s dead, too, since then. And that makes a lot of difference. I’m awfully sorry he died, but I can’t help seeing that his death liberates me. I shan’t go back to Lancashire at any price.”
He had the earnest fluency of a man talking about himself to a woman. How well she knew it! And how old, how wise, how much more experienced than the oldest war-scarred veteran of them all did she not feel when her young men poured out their simple histories to her! But she was used to the form of consultation. They put it to her, as a rule, that they sought her advice and though she knew quite well that their object was to flatter, it piqued her now that Rupert did not ask advice. He reasoned, perhaps, and his assertion was not of what he would do after the war but of what he positively would not. He was not going back to Lancashire and, “You do pay compliments,” she said a little tartly. “You bring out to lunch an actress who’s doing a Lancashire part and you tell her that Lancashire’s not good enough for you.”
“But that’s your art,” he cried, “to be so wonderfully not yourself. Seriously, Miss Arden, for you, a London actress, to be absolutely a Lancashire girl on the stage is sheer miracle. But that’s not the question and between us two, is Lancashire a place fit to live in?” So he bracketed them together, people of the great world.
“I won’t commit myself,” she said. It was not her art, it was herself, but she couldn’t answer back his candor with candor of her own and felt again at disadvantage with him. He attacked and she could not defend. She said, “Oh, I expect you’ll get what you want. You look the sort that does.” She was almost vicious about it.
“I hope I shall,” he said, gazing ingenuous admiration at her. “For instance—”
She moved sharply as if she dodged a blow. Men did queer things on leave; she had had proposals from them though she knew them as little as she knew Rupert. “For instance,” he went on imperviously, “shall I get this? Shall I get your promise to have lunch with me here on Thursday? I shall be back from Lancashire by then.”
“Yes, I’ll lunch,” she said convulsively, calling herself a fool to have misjudged him and a soppy fool, like the soppiest fool of a girl at the theater, to be so apt to think of marriage. Yet Mary thought much of marriage, not as the “soppy fools” thought, hopefully, but defensively. Marriage did not march with her dream in stone and the thought of Mary Ellen Bradshaw on Staithley Edge. She fought always for that idea, and refusals were the trophies she had won in her campaigns for it, usually easy victories, but once or twice she had not found it easy to refuse. Did Rupert jeopardize the dream? She couldn’t say and, thank God, she needn’t say. He hadn’t asked her, but she admitted apprehension, she confessed that he belonged with those very few who had made her dream appear a bleak and empty thing. This man disturbed her: she was right to be on her guard, to bristle in defense of her dream at the least sign of passion in him. But she despised herself for bristling unnecessarily, for imagining a sign which wasn’t there. He had, confoundedly, the habit of making her despise herself.
Then it happened, not what she had feared would happen but something even more disturbing.
“Ah,” he said gayly, “then that’s a bet. That’s something to look forward to while I’m at Staithley.”
Staithley! Staithley! It rang in her brain. Stammering she spoke it. “Staithley!”
“Yes,” he said. “It’s a Lancashire town. I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of it, but my people, well, we’re rather big pots up there.”
“In Staithley?” she repeated.
“Yes. We’re called Hepplestall.” He looked at her guiltily. Mary’s teeth were clenched and her bloodless hands gripped the table hard, but actress twice over, woman and Mary Arden, and modern with cosmetics, her face showed nothing of her inward storm. “That idiotic name Carton called me by—they all do it,” he protested loyally. “It’s odds on that they’ve forgotten what my real name is but I’m Rupert Hepplestall really and... oh, as a matter of form, I’m Sir Rupert Hepplestall. I—I can’t help it, you know.”
One didn’t make a scene in a restaurant. One didn’t scream in a restaurant. One didn’t go into hysterics in a restaurant. That was all she consciously thought, clutching the table till it seemed the veins in her fingers must burst. Hepplestall—and she. And Mary Ellen Bradshaw. Lunching together. Oh, it—but she was thinking and she must not think. She must repeat, over and over again, “One does not make a scene, one—”
Immensely surprised she heard herself say, “No, you can’t help it,” and as she saw him smile—the smile of a schoolboy who is “let off” a peccadillo—she concluded that she must have smiled at him.
“I’m better now I’ve got that off my chest,” he said. “I had to do it before we parted though, by George, I’ve cut it fine.” There are several ways, besides the right way, of looking at a wrist-watch. She was annoyed to find herself capable of noticing that Rupert’s was the right way. “I shall have to dash for my train. Where can I put you down? I must go now: I’ll apologize on Thursday for abruptness.”
“I’m going to the flat,” she said. “Baker Street.” He was paying the bill, getting his cap and stick, urging pace on the taxi-driver, busy in too many ways to be observant of Mary.
“Hepplestall,” she thought going up her stairs, “Hepplestall, and I’ve to act to-night.” Her bed received her.
Incongruous in youth and khaki he sat abashed amongst black-coated elders of the service at the board of Hepplestall’s.
He wanted urgently to scoff, to feel that it all didn’t matter because nothing mattered but the war, and they set the war in a perspective new to him, as passing episode reacting certainly upon the permanency, Hepple-stall’s, but reacting temporarily as the Cotton Famine had reacted in the days of the American Civil War.
He did not fail to perceive the significance of old Horace, Sir Philip’s uncle, who was seventy, with fifty years to his credit of leadership in the Service, a living link with heaven knew what remote ancestors. Perhaps old Horace in his youth had seen the Founder himself. It bridged time, it was like shaking hands with a man who had been patted on the head by Wellington, and, like Horace, Rupert was subjected to the fact of being Hepplestall. The law of his people, the dour and stable law, ran unchangeable by time.
Complacent he had not been as he bared his head before Sir Philip’s grave, but he had kept his balance.
Death, that lay outside youth’s normal thought and entered it with monstrousness, was Rupert’s known familiar and a father dead could sadden, but could not startle, a soldier who had seen comrades killed at his side. It touched him, quite unselfishly, to think that Sir Philip had gone knowing him not as rebel, not as apostate of the Hepplestalls, but as a son of whom he could be proud—Rupert the cricketer, the solid schoolboy who developed, unexpectedly but satisfactorily, into a reading man at Cambridge, and then the soldier; but he was stirred to other and far deeper feelings by the references made at the board to Sir Philip. They were not formal tributes, they were chatty reminiscences hitting Rupert the shrewder because there was nothing conventional about them, bringing home to the son how his father had seemed to other eyes than his. How little he had known Sir Philip! How carelessly he’d failed in his appreciations! And it was double-edged, because the very object of this meeting was to salute him as heir to the chieftainship, implying that in the son they saw a successor worthy of the father.
They even apologized to him for having, in his absence, appointed an interim successor. Sir Philip’s death created a situation unprecedented in the history of the firm because never before had the Head died with his son unready to take the reins, and the war aggravated the situation. Rupert’s training could not begin till the war ended; it would be many years before he took his place at the head of the table, Chairman of the Board.
Behind the training they underwent was the theory of the machine with interchangeable parts; it was assumed that the general technical knowledge they all acquired fitted each for any post to which the Service might appoint him. They did not overrate mere technique but they relied upon the quality of the Hepplestalls. If occasion called a Hepplestall, he rose to it. This occasion, the occasion of a regency, had called William Hepplestall, Sir Philip’s brother next in age to him.
William had not sought, but neither did he shirk, the burden of responsibility. “I will do my duty,” he had said. “You know me. I am not an imaginative man, and the times are difficult. But I will do my duty.”
It would, certainly, not have occurred to William in the first days of the war to convert their Dye-House from, cotton dyeing to woolen: that sort of march into foreign territory, so extraordinarily lucrative, would have occurred to none but to Sir Philip, and they understood very well that under William, or under any of them now, the control would be prudent and uninspired. They looked to Rupert as inheritor cf the Hepplestall tradition of inspiration in leadership. Calmly they made the vast assumption not only that he was coming to them but that he was coming to be, eventually, a leader to them as brilliant as Sir Philip had been.
“I shall not see it,” said old Horace, “but I do not need to see. We continue, we Hepplestalls; we serve.”
Amiably, implacably, with embarrassing deference to Sir Philip’s son, they pinned him to his doom, and in France, when he had heard of this meeting they arranged for him, he had thought of it as a comic interlude, and of himself as one who would relax from great affairs to watch these little men at play! He sat weighed down, in misery. In London he had decided that he wouldn’t argue, but he hadn’t known that he could not argue. He was oppressed to taciturnity, to speechless sulking which they took, since Rupert did everything, even sulking, pleasantly, to mean that he was overwhelmed by the renewal, through their eulogies, of his personal grief for the loss of his father. They spoke tactfully of the war, deferring to him as a soldier; they aimed with family news in gossipy vein of this and that Hepplestall in and out of the war, to put him at his ease, and soon the meeting ended. They took it as natural that he wished to spend his leave in London. It seemed they understood. They advised about trains.
Rupert escaped, miserable because he was not elated to leave that torture-chamber. He hadn’t faced the music. But he couldn’t. Altogether apart from his wish to get out of Staithley at the first possible moment, he couldn’t face that music. Their expectations of him were so massive, so serene, so sure, their line unbreakable.
In the train, he recurred to that thought of the Hepplestall line. No: he could not break it, but there might be a way round. He was going to London, where Mary was, and the point, surely the point about the training of a Hepplestall was that they caught their Hepplestalls young. They cozened them with the idea of service and sent them, willing victims, to labor with their hands in Staithley Mills—because they caught them young. Rupert was twenty-five. Cynically he “placed” that meeting now: it was a super-cozening addressed to a Hepplestall who was no longer a boy: it admitted his age and the intolerable indignities the training held for a man of his age, for a captain who had a real chance of becoming a major very soon. It was their effort, their demonstration, and he saw his way to make an effort and a counter demonstration. Clearly, they saw that it wasn’t reasonable to train a man of his years to spinning and the rest of it; then they would see the absolute impossibility of compelling a married man to undergo that training. A man couldn’t leave his wife at some Godless early morning hour to go to work with his hands, he couldn’t come home, work-stained, after a day’s consorting with the operatives, to the lady who was Lady Hepplestall.
He realized, awed by his presumptuousness, that he was thinking of Mary Arden as the lady who was Lady Hep-plestall.
He thought of her with awe because he was not seeing Mary Arden, musical comedy actress, through the elderly eyes of his uncles, still less of his aunts, but from the angle of our soldiers in France who made Mary a romantic symbol of the girls they left behind them. To marry Mary Arden would be an awfully big adventure.
She had time, while he was at Staithley, to come to terms with his disclosure. In the restaurant, when it came upon her suddenly, it had sent her, certainly, heels over head, but, soberly considered, she began to ask herself what there was in it that should disconcert her. She was Bradshaw and he a Hepplestall and she believed that without effort, merely by not discouraging him, she could make him marry her. What could be neater? What revenge more exquisite upon the Hepplestalls than Mary Ellen Bradshaw, Lady Hepplestall?
True—if she hated them. But her hatred, reexamined, seemed a visionary thing; at the most it was romantic decoration to a fact and in this mood of inquisition Mary sought facts without their trimmings. She sought her hatred of the Hepplestalls and found she had no hatred in her.
She raised her eyes to the photograph of Staithley Edge. Yes, that was authentic feeling, that passion for the Staithley hills, but she didn’t want to go there in order to take the shine out of the Hepplestalls. She had romanticized that feeling, she had made hatred the excuse for her ambition, so arbitrary in an actress with a vogue, to go back to live bleakly amongst smoke-tarnished moors. Rupert, for instance, was firmly set against return.
It was deflating, like losing a diamond ring, and she did not humble herself to the belief that the diamond had never been there. It had, in the clan-hatred of the Bradshaws, but she had been stagey about it. She had magnified a childish memory into a living vendetta and, scrutinized to-day, she saw it as a tinsel wrapping, crumbling at exposure to daylight, round her sane sweet passion for the hills: and the conclusion was that Rupert Hepplestall meant no more to her than Rupert Fairy—or little more. She had mischief enough in her to savor the thought of Mary Ellen squired in London by Sir Rupert Hepplestall and decided that if he wanted to take his orders from her for the period of his leave, she would take particular pleasure in ordering him imperiously.
She calculated, she thought, with comprehensiveness, but missed two factors, one (which she should have remembered) that Rupert had seemed lovable, the other (which she could not guess) that he returned from Staithley to begin his serious wooing. He laid siege before defenses which she had deliberately weakened by her re-orientation of her facts.
One day, before he must go back to France, he spoke outright of love. If he hadn’t, half a dozen times, declared himself, then he didn’t know what mute announcement was, but leave was running out and addressing silent questions to a sphinx left him a long way short of tangible result.
“Oh, love!” she jeered. “What’s love?”
“I can tell you that,” he said, “better than I could ten days ago. Love’s selfishness à deux. I’m one of the two and my idea of love is finding comfort in your arms.”
She thought it a good answer, so good that it brought her to her feet and to (they were in her flat) the drawer in her desk where she had hidden a photograph. Holding it to him, “Do you recognize that?” she asked. “The other day, when we were talking, I said I had no people and—”
“Was that mattering before the war? I’m sure it doesn’t matter now,” he said.
“And this photograph?”
He shook his head. “It might be any hill.”
“But it is Staithley Edge.”
For a moment he was radiant. “You got it,” he glowed, “because of me.”
“I got it because of me. Listen. I’m Mary Arden, actress. I’m twenty-five years old and I’m about as high as any one can get in musical comedy. I began in the chorus, but I’ve had a soft passage up because I was pushed by an agent who believed in me. If you think I’m more than that, you’re wrong. And I’m much less than that. I said I had no people, and it isn’t true.”
“I don’t want to know about your people. We’re you and I. We’re Mary and Rupert.”
“Yes. But we’re Mary Bradshaw and Rupert Hepplestall.”
With that, she thought, she slaughtered hope, not his alone but something that grew in her, something she was thinking of as hope because she dared not think of it as love. Now she need no longer think of it at all; she had killed it; she had met his candor with her candor, she had announced herself a Bradshaw. It was the death of hope.
Suffering herself but compassionate for the pain she must have given him, she raised her eyes to his. And the response to a lady martyring herself to truth was an indulgent smile and maddening misapprehension. “Is there anything in that? Bradshaw instead of Arden? Surely it’s usual to have a stage-name.”
“You haven’t understood. When I pretend to be Lancashire on the stage, I don’t pretend. Is that clear?”
It irked him that he couldn’t say, “As mud.” She was too passionately in earnest for him to dare the flippancies. He said, “Yes, that’s clear.”
“And Staithley in particular. I’m Staithley born and bred. Bred, I’m telling you, in Staithley Streets. My name’s Bradshaw.”
He lashed his memory, aware dimly that Bradshaw had associations for him other than the railway-guide. It was coming to him now. The Staithley Bradshaws, that sixteenth birthday interview with his father, his own disparaging of Tom Bradshaw and Sir Philip’s defense of him. His father had been right, too. Tom was in some office under the Coalition, pulling his weight like all the rest. The war had proved his sportsmanship, as it had everybody’s. He hadn’t a doubt that any of the Staithley Bradshaws who were in the army were splendid soldiers.
In the ranks, though.
One thought twice about marrying their sister. He wished she hadn’t told him, and as he wished it she was emphasizing, “I’m from the Begging Bradshaws.”
He forced a smile. “You’re a long way from them, then,” he said, and she agreed on that.
“Oh, yes,” she said, “I’m eight years from them. I don’t know them and they don’t know me. I’m Mary Arden to every one but you: only when you say your idea of love is finding comfort in my arms, I had to tell you just whose arms they are. I’m Bradshaw and I’ve sung for pennies in the Staithley Streets.”
Some of the implications he did not perceive at once, but he saw the one that mattered. His sphinx had spoken now. She “had” to tell him, and there were only two reasons why. The first was that she loved him, and the second was that she was honest in her love—“Mary,” he said, “you’ll marry me.”
“No.”
“If you want arguments about a thing that’s settled, I’ll give you them,” he said. “You don’t know what a gift you’ve brought me. You don’t know how magnificently it suits me that you’re Bradshaw.”
“Suits you!” she cried incredulously, and he told her why of all the things she might have been she was the one which definitely wiped out all possibility of his return to Staithley. They couldn’t force him there with a Bradshaw for his wife, they would be the first to cry out that it wouldn’t do: she was his master-card, Mary, whom he loved; she was Mary Arden and tremendously a catch; she was Mary Bradshaw, his sure defense against the rigid expectations of the Hepplestalls and... oh, uncounted things besides. “And I apologize,” he said, “I apologize for arguing, for dragging in the surrounding circumstance. But you tell me you’re Bradshaw as if it unmade us and I tell you it’s the best touch in the making of us.”
She wasn’t sure of that. She was idiosyncratic and peculiar herself in wishing to go back to Staithley, but she felt that her dream, though she had stripped it of romantic hate, yet stood for something sounder than his mere obstinate refusal to return. He left himself in air; he was a negative; rejecting Staithley, he had no plans of what he was to do after the war.
But that was to prejudge him, it was certainly to calculate, and she had calculated too much in her life. Caution be hanged! There was a place for wildness.
They would say, of course, that she was marrying for position. Let them say: she would, certainly, be Lady Hepplestall, but at what a discount! To be Lady Hep-plestall and not to live in Lancashire, in the one place where the significance of being Hepplestall was grasped in full! It was like marrying a king in exile, it was like receiving a rope of pearls upon condition that she never wore them. It excluded the pungent climax of Mary Ellen as Mistress of Staithley Hall.
Her dream had set, indeed, in a painted sky, but she would not linger in gaze upon its afterglow; she was not looking at sunset but at dawn, and raised her eyes to his. She discovered that she was being kissed. She had the sensation, ecstatic and poignant, surrendering and triumphant, of being kissed by the man she loved.
She had not, hitherto, conceived a high opinion of kissing. On the stage and off, it was a professional convention, fractionally more expressive than a handshake. This was radically different; this was, tinglingly, vividly, to feel, to be aware of herself and, through their lips, of him. She had the exaltation of the giver who gives without reserve, and from up there, bemused in happiness, star-high with Rupert’s kiss and her renunciations, she fell through space when he unclasped her and said with brisk assurance, “Engagement ring before lunch. License after lundi. That’s a reasonable program, isn’t it?”
Perhaps it was reasonable to a time-pressed man whose leave could now be counted by the hour. Perhaps she hadn’t seen that there is only one first kiss. It came, and no matter what the sequel held, went lonely, unmatched, unique. What passion-laden words could she expect from him to lengthen a moment that was gone?
It wasn’t he who was failing’ her, it was herself who must, pat upon their incomparable moment, be criticizing him because he was not miraculous but practical. And this was thought, a sickly thing, when her business was to feel, it was opposition when her business was surrender. The wild thing was the right thing now. She purged herself of thought.
“Yes,” she said. She was to marry. Marry. And then he would go back to France; but first he was to find comfort in her arms.