XV
Lady Honoret’s new discovery had sufficient shrewdness to find out for herself in a very little while the origin of that lady’s rapidly-acquired enthusiasm.
Mr. Cassela’s talk of the fifteen-year-old novelist who was to astonish the reading public that autumn, in the sequel glaringly illuminated the aspect of her own immediate success with Lady Honoret for Lydia.
It was evidently essential that a counter-discovery should mitigate the publisher’s complacency, and sustain Lady Honoret’s reputation as a connaisseuse in the literary world.
Even although the explanation did not flatter Lydia’s vanity, it did not prevent her from appraising very justly and acutely the full value to herself of the little Jewess’s patronage. She did not regret, in spite of Lady Honoret’s lamentations, that she had not taken the manuscript of her novel to Lexham Gardens that first Saturday afternoon, since she received an immediate invitation to bring it with her one afternoon the following week.
“But I only have Saturday afternoons free,” Lydia said serenely. “I work as accountant in a West End place of business all the week.”
She could not have imagined beforehand that she would ever make such an announcement during the course of an afternoon call upon Lady Honoret, but the mention of starving plumbers and Liverpool bar-maids had convinced her that such candour would prove merely an additional asset in her favour.
She was not in the least surprised when Lady Honoret said reverently:
“In a shop! Oh, how wonderful! And you find you can write? But I needn’t ask. It must find exp’ession somehow, mustn’t it—and one so often has to rise above uncongenial surroundings—unsympathetic atmosphere.... I myself ... Sir Rupert, you know—cares nothing for literature, or indeed any of the artistic side of life, and so ... and so I play B’idge,” said Lady Honoret, her mouth and eyebrows assuming angles expressive of pathos, and her small hands making a fluttering gesture of vague resignation, that embraced alike the Bridge table and the drawing-room crowded with expensive furniture.
It was a little difficult to explain to Miss Forster that Lady Honoret had actually invited Lydia by herself to lunch on Sunday week, when she was to bring the typescript of her book; but Lydia did it with all the tact that she was able to command on their way home.
“I wish you were coming too,” she said, not altogether truthfully. “I shall feel nervous without you, and of course you know them both so well.”
“Oh, very well indeed,” said Miss Forster with emphasis. “In fact, it’s what I may call an intimate friendship—I am in and out almost as though it were my own home. Sir Rupert—you don’t know him, of course—and I are tremendous pals—he always says: Now run in and out quite freely, at any hour.”
As Miss Forster illustrated Sir Rupert’s hospitable dictum with half-a-dozen hasty little steps, indicative of one running in and out quite freely, Lydia allowed her to join the omnibus that was to take them up Cromwell Road, and herself followed sedately, so that the interior, always favoured by Miss Forster’s large feathered hats, was filled when she came up, and she was obliged to exchange nods and waves with Miss Forster from the footboard and go outside, whence the conversation could naturally not be resumed.
During the week she brought Miss Forster a bunch of violets, and took pains not to appear as though she were avoiding her.
But when Sunday came, Lydia, decked in the three-cornered velvet hat, stole discreetly down the stairs and out of the front door at a moment when she knew that Miss Forster was in her own room.
She had no wish to make a parade of her success, and thereby risk exciting Miss Forster’s vexation or jealousy. Nothing was more inconvenient than such an enmity, as Lydia had long ago told herself, thinking of the “sides” taken at school by Miss Glover’s girls, or the quarrels between Gina Ryott and Marguerite Saxon at the shop, that had led to so many minor disputes and discussions.
She carried her novel in a brown-paper parcel.
Lady Honoret had assured Lydia that she would be quite, quite alone, and although at the moment Lydia had felt slightly disappointed by the announcement, it now saved her from nervousness.
“Miss Raymond!”
She had never heard her own entry into a room so announced before, and the novelty of the experience was occupying her mind as she came round the screen that guarded the drawing-room door.
With a complete shock, she discovered that quite a number of people were assembled there, dressed in such clothes as she had hitherto only associated with a few of Madame Elena’s most cherished clients.
Lady Honoret herself looked thoroughly unfamiliar as she came towards Lydia in a large, flowery picture-hat and fluffy feather boa, manipulating a long-handled double eye-glass, which she had certainly not used during Lydia’s former visit. The unfortunate Lydia even surmised, from a certain vagueness of greeting, that her hostess had completely forgotten her identity.
“You told me to come—to bring my writing,” she stammered courageously enough. “I hope it’s the right day.”
“Oh,” said Lady Honoret, on a high, lisping note of pleased surprise, “it’s my wonderful little seamstress, who writes! Of course! I’m so glad you’ve come, dear—of course I hadn’t forgotten you.”
Little seamstress who writes!
Was this the description that Lady Honoret had by this time probably persuaded herself and her friends to be applicable to her “wonderful new discove’y”?
Lydia tried to make herself think that the term, by Lady Honoret’s peculiar standard of values, denoted a compliment. Nevertheless, she was inwardly both angry and mortified.
The long, elaborate luncheon was an ordeal that reminded her of that puzzling meal taken long ago at the hotel with Nathalie Palmer and her father. It was almost a relief, even while it humiliated her, that neither of her neighbours should address more than a few perfunctory words to her.
For the most part the conversation was general, several people all talking at once across the table—which Lydia had always been taught was Bad Manners—and most of the ladies interlarding their discourse with French words, or even whole sentences in French.
It annoyed Lydia afresh that she could not understand these, but indeed almost everything they said was to her a veritable jargon of incomprehensibility. She only gathered that they were all very clever and artistic, and had read all the books, and seen all the plays, and heard all the music, in the world, and formed critical and discerning opinions about everything.
As for Grandpapa’s Golden Rule—always to let the other people talk about themselves—nothing could be more evident than its total lack of prevalence in these cultured circles.
“You see, Wagner’s message to me is almost a personal one....”
“I must say, in my own case, the effect that he has on me is....”
“That’s exactly what I felt myself. I must tell you how it strikes me....”
Whenever any lady with a stronger voice or greater powers of determination than the others contrived to monopolize the conversation for a few minutes with personal reminiscences of her own, whatever she said was quite certain to remind each of her listeners of something very interesting about herself, about which she immediately began to tell anyone whom she could compel to keep silent.
The party consisted entirely of women.
Lydia felt thoroughly out of place and wished that she had never come.
Her only consolation was in watching another girl, younger than herself and even more unfashionably dressed, who sat silent at the other side of the table, and looked as though she felt strongly inclined to burst into tears.
Lydia wondered whether this was another “wonderful discovery.”
When lunch was at last over and they had gone into the drawing-room, which, to Lydia’s horror, they filled with the smoke of their cigarettes, and two of the most eloquent ladies had snatched up their gloves and purses and fur wraps, and declared that they must fly for the Albert Hall, and had accordingly flown, Lydia saw her unhappy-looking vis-à-vis approached by Lady Honoret.
“It seems a great shame to ask you to sing now, but if you could manage it—I do want some of these friends of mine to hear you....”
“Oh, certainly, Lady Honoret,” said the girl, turning first red and then white.
It struck Lydia that she was much too frightened to refuse.
“I think it’s a nightingale,” lisped the hostess, turning to her other guests; and dropping her voice very slightly she added, for the benefit of those nearest to her:
“Straight, straight from the heart of Stepney. Artifis’al flowers, I believe.”
“And did you find her, you wonderful thing?” inquired a guest with a deep, ardent voice.
Lady Honoret nodded her head several times, pursing up her mouth, after the fashion of a little girl.
Suddenly she struck her ringed hands together in a gesture of dismay.
“Accompaniments! Oh, Tottie, dear, will you?”
“I will,” sacramentally replied “Tottie,” who was tall and gaunt-looking.
“Then you must all come upstairs. It’s not nearly such a good room for sound as this is, but my p’ecious, p’ecious Bechstein is there.”
They all flocked out of the room and up to the first floor, where Lydia was amazed to see an even larger and more elaborately furnished room than the one downstairs, which she had supposed to be the drawing-room.
A heavy blue drapery worked in gold and scarlet with scaly dragons was reverently taken from the top of a grand piano and put on the back of a sofa, where several ladies stood transfixed with admiration in front of it, and “Tottie” took off all her rings and bracelet and a watch, and sat down upon the music-stool and got up again and altered its height, and struck three chords upon the piano, and then demanded of the pallid and bewildered-looking songstress:
“Where is your music?”
“I haven’t got any music.”
“But what about the accompaniment?”
“I always sing without anything at all,” said the girl, whiter than ever.
“Without a piano?”
“Oh, yes,” said the inhabitant of Stepney.
“Tottie” once more rose from the piano-stool, and resumed possession of her jewellery.
“Then we must all come downstairs,” said Lady Honoret cheerfully. “It’s so much better for sound downstairs.”
Lydia was astonished that nobody seemed to be angry with the poor, foolish girl who had given them all this trouble for nothing, but they all trooped downstairs again, talking as complacently as ever.
When at last they were all seated and silent, the girl, standing at the end of the room with her arms hanging straight down against her sides, began to sing in a high, clear voice a song which Lydia had never heard before and which seemed to her to have no tune whatever.
She very soon stopped listening to it.
Instead, she began to think of the singer’s evident terror of her surroundings and lack of presence of mind.
Why had she been foolish enough to let them all come up to the room where the piano was, just now, when she must have known all the time that no piano would be necessary? Lydia supposed that it was from sheer fright.
And the girl had sat with a scared, white face all through lunch, and had hardly answered the very few words occasionally addressed to her.
Lydia did not feel much pity for her fellow-victim. She was merely engaged in criticizing her very evident short-comings, and in firmly resolving to avoid them herself.
When the girl had ceased to sing, she caught up her jacket with a nervous movement and declared that she must go, without waiting for any words of thanks or praise for her song. She almost scuttled out of the room, making a sort of agitated bow from the doorway that comprised everyone in the room.
What a fool, thought Lydia impatiently.
The sight gave her a sudden, new self-confidence. After all, learning through the mistakes of other people was an easy form of education.
When Lady Honoret came and sat down beside her, Lydia looked up with a new self-possession.
“One can’t, can’t talk in a c’owd,” said the hostess plaintively, “but you must come some day when I’m quite alone. Have you brought your work?”
For an instant Lydia hesitated, giving the word its feminine connection with a needle and thimble, but she rightly concluded that Lady Honoret was referring to the typescript hidden in brown paper.
Lydia had been endeavouring to conceal the parcel all through the afternoon, not having had sufficient presence of mind to leave it with her umbrella in the hall. It was therefore with positive relief that she handed it to Lady Honoret.
“Oh, don’t look at it now!”
But her hostess was recklessly tearing at the good brown paper—“what waste of a wrapping for some future parcel” involuntarily murmured the spirit of Uncle George within Lydia—and in another moment she had pulled out Nathalie’s neat typescript.
“I think I’ll go now,” said Lydia. For the first time she felt a certain sympathy for the girl with the voice, who had rushed away after her song was over.
She stood up nervously. The eyes of Lady Honoret were glued on the pages which she was rapidly fluttering and turning, and she did not get up, although she pressed two of Lydia’s fingers with an absent sort of gesture.
“Come again—ve’y, ve’y soon, dear child. We must talk about this,” she murmured.
Lydia released her hand and looked round the room. The remaining visitors were engaged in conversation, or in scanning the pictures and miniatures on the walls.
Lydia, very upright and with her head held high, turned round and walked out of the room. Her umbrella was miraculously put into her hand by the manservant in the hall; the door was opened and shut again behind her, and she stood on the pavement of Lexham Gardens and drew a deep breath.
“My goodness gracious!” said Lydia to herself, in the tense, straightforward phraseology of Regency Terrace. “My goodness gracious! What a house, and what manners they all had!”
This was the only unvarnished expression of her opinion that Lydia permitted herself.
She gave Miss Forster a careful and rather manufactured account of the luncheon-party; she mentioned to the other girls at Elena’s that she had been introduced recently to a Lady Honoret who had twice invited her to her own house, and she wrote and told Aunt Beryl that Miss Forster’s friend, Lady Honoret, had been very kind to her, and was going to read something she had written and tell her if anything could be done with it. Lady Honoret wrote herself, and was the friend of publishers.
Inwardly, Lydia was not without fears that her volatile patroness might forget all about her, and nothing more ever be heard of the novel and its possibilities, but in less than a week she received a summons to Lexham Gardens.
This time she said nothing at all to Miss Forster, but took the Cromwell Road omnibus, when her work was over for the day.
She regretted very much that she was not wearing the three-cornered hat, but only her every-day straw.
Lady Honoret, however, greeted her with outstretched hands and an enthusiasm that quite overlooked any such minor considerations. To her real astonishment, Lydia learnt that her novel was a tiny, tiny gem, a wonderful discove’y, and the truest and purest return to the heart of Nature that Lady Honoret had read for years and years and years.
“Oh, the little b’oken heart!” breathed Lady Honoret piously, as she hung over the final pages of the typescript.
Of course, it was to go to a publisher—it would make a boom at once—it was so utterly new and young.
“But not Cassela,” said Lady Honoret thoughtfully. “I think not Cassela. He goes in so tremendously for strong things, and your idyll is such a wee, wee tender little sto’y. Besides, he’s got his discove’y—this Red Indian girl, or whatever she calls herself. This is to be all mine!”
Lady Honoret laughed in a gleeful, childish sort of way, and Lydia reflected coldly and ungratefully that a desire to outdo Mr. Cassela in the field of discoveries was probably at the bottom of her hostess’s extreme enthusiasm.
Nevertheless, she felt very much excited, and she thanked Lady Honoret warmly and eagerly before she went away.
Was her book really so very good, she wondered? She felt a suspicion that work produced so very easily was unlikely to have any great intrinsic merit.
With considerable self-control, she said nothing whatever to anyone of the hopes that she now entertained, and which occasionally rose to immense and unreasonable heights, of an immediate accession to fame and fortune.
Every day she looked eagerly and nervously for further news from Lexham Gardens.
When it came at last she was astounded.
Her book was accepted—it was to be published as soon as possible—the publisher thought well of it—she was to receive a draft agreement for her immediate consideration....
This time Lydia cast discretion to the winds. She was wildly excited, and she told everybody that she had written a novel, and that it was going to be published at once.
“Do you mean printed, dear?” said Miss Nettleship, in an awed manner. “Well, I never! The boarders will be anxious to read it—they’ll all think to see themselves.”
This was no less than the truth.
Mrs. Clarence showed the extreme of apprehension, lest she should discover herself in the central figure of Lydia’s novel, and seemed to credit the authoress with a supernatural power of insight enabling her to visualize her victim’s past, present, and future alike.
“You writing people are so penetrating,” she said anxiously to Lydia, “and there are certain passages in my life—oh, years before I ever came here—when I never thought I should live in a residential hotel, in fact, but had my own house and servants—but there have been incidents which I’ve always thought exactly like a novel. Only I couldn’t bear to see my own character dissected in cold print.”
Even Mrs. Bulteel, laughing rather nervously, said that she supposed writers were always on the look-out for copy, and they would all be afraid to open their lips in front of Miss Raymond now.
Mr. Bulteel congratulated her solemnly.
“I am afraid that I very seldom read novels myself, but we shall make a point of obtaining your book from the library. I have often been urged to write myself—some of my experiences in foreign countries would certainly make interesting reading—but, I’ve always said, a writer has to have imagination. Don’t you find that imagination is absolutely necessary to you?”
Lydia admitted that this was so.
“I believe,” Mr. Bulteel pursued his reflective way, “I believe that I could express myself in sufficiently correct English. But I lack imagination. I am a practical man, I fear.”
His fear, Lydia could not help noticing, was tinged with something that much resembled complacency.
“Perhaps, one day,” said good Mr. Bulteel, smiling, “one day, you and I might collaborate over a book.”
After that the book that Lydia and Mr. Bulteel were to write in collaboration became one of the mild, standard jokes of the boarding-house.
The congratulations which pleased Lydia least were those which she received from Miss Forster, who seemed inclined to look upon herself as the presiding genius of the situation.
“And to think it’s all come from my having told my friend Lady Honoret all about you, that time when you were so down in the mouth last Christmas!” she cried exultantly. “Why, it was her taking you up that did the whole thing, wasn’t it? I’m sure I’m delighted to have been able to do something really helpful like that for you, my dear!”
Lydia thanked Miss Forster, but without any great display of exuberance.
She did not expect any compliments from old Miss Lillicrap, nor did she receive any, but the girls at Madame Elena’s were more enthusiastic.
“I hope it ends sadly,” said Marguerite Saxon, hanging her head on one side. “I often like to weep a little weep over a story with a sad ending. I know it’s foolish to take a tale so much to heart, but I’m made that way. I get awfully absorbed in what I read. You know, when I put the book down it’s as though I’d said good-bye to real friends. That’s the way I feel, very often, about the people in the tales I read.”
Gina Ryott’s congratulations began better, but they, also, tailed off into personal reminiscences of her own. Lydia noticed it with impatience, but without any surprise.
“I can’t imagine how you afford the time to write, I must say. I’ve always thought you must be clever, Lydia. You know, the way one can tell sometimes, without any rhyme or reason—oh, so-and-so seems to be clever. That’s what I’ve often thought about you. A gentleman friend of mine always says I’m a judge of character, and somehow I think I must be. It’s just a sort of knack, somehow. One sort of sizes people up right, the minute one sets eyes on them. I always know in a second what I think of anybody.”
Lydia, after these two, heard with something like relief the practical comments of Miss Rosie Graham.
“Good for you! I hope they’re going to pay you.”
“I’m getting a royalty,” Lydia explained. “That means so much on each copy sold. I daresay it won’t be very much, especially as they say it’s a very short book, and is only going to cost three-and-six instead of six shillings. But my friend, who arranged it all for me, says it’s a very good agreement indeed for a first book.”
“My-friend-who-arranged-it-all” was Lady Honoret. Thus did Lydia now freely describe that patroness of struggling art. Nor did she do so unjustified by Lady Honoret’s further advances. Miss Forster might be invited to Bridge parties during the week, but it was Lydia who was urged to come eve’y, eve’y Sunday and spend the afternoon, and meet all the dear people who had heard about her, and would be longing to read her book. It was Lydia who was introduced to all and sundry of the frequenters of the Lexham Gardens house as the very latest and youngest novelist, and after a little while she altogether ceased to resent the label of “actually serves in a shop, my dear!” which alternated with “little seamstress, in quite a tiny way,” that formed the aside to the introductions.
It all seemed to add to her prestige with these extraordinary people.
She assimilated the new atmosphere with astonishing ease, and, being unhampered by shyness, soon acquired absolute ease in her surroundings.
Insensibly she became less interested in her work at Madame Elena’s, and although the habit of concentration still prevailed, she was conscious of relief now, when each working day came to an end.
She ceased to cultivate the little cashier, Rosie Graham, since her advances never led to any permanent success, and, moreover, she could not altogether forget Rosie’s strictures on the evening they had had supper together. Madame Elena went to Paris without leaving Lydia in charge, as she had half said she would do, and on her return seemed inclined to fall back into the old way of favouring Gina Ryott.
Early in the summer Marguerite Saxon’s roseleaf face developed a series of spots that rapidly became sores, and Madame Elena remarked them, in spite of layers of thick white powder, and told Marguerite that she need not return until they were cured.
The wretched model sobbed and cried, asserting that she had used bottle upon bottle of “stuff,” some of which must soon take effect, but as the sore places spread daily, and two clients asked what was the matter with that girl’s face, she received her dismissal, and the show-room at Elena’s knew her no more.
“She was bound to end by ruining her skin with all that paint and stuff,” said the other girls.
Lydia was not greatly interested. She examined her own clear olive complexion in the glass, and decided that the very moderate use of a small powder puff was not likely to have results that would bring upon her the disastrous fate of Marguerite Saxon, and thereupon dismissed the whole incident from her thoughts.
Full of tremulous excitement, she corrected the proofs of her novel, and waited for its appearance.