XXVIII
They did not go down to Devonshire until the middle of the following day.
Lydia had the whole morning to herself, even after she had finished packing up her small suit-case and Jennie’s. This time Jennie had made no protest when her mother began to pack for her. She and Roland had gone out together quite early, and although Lydia thought that they had told her of their destination, she seemed able to remember nothing but the essential fact that they were to meet her at the station at one o’clock.
In the meanwhile she felt an urgent need of occupation, and remembered an apologetic request of Aunt Beryl’s.
“I don’t know whether you could ever recommend poor Maria Nettleship’s rooms to any of your friends, Lydia—but it would be a real kindness. The boarding-house has been giving her ever so much trouble lately—and then this war coming. One doesn’t know how things will be, and she hasn’t got much put by, I’m afraid. I never hear from her without she asks after you in the letter, you know. She’s never forgotten you, and if ever you’re up that way, I know it will give her real pleasure to see you. But, of course, she understands you’re busy.”
So far as Miss Nettleship was concerned, Lydia had been busy for many years.
Now, however, half curious and half listless, she found herself in the old Bloomsbury neighbourhood. Looking up at the tall house, Lydia supposed that it was unchanged, but such a lassitude had crept over her perceptions that she seemed to herself utterly incapable of summoning any vivid recollection to her mind.
Should she go in?
She felt little inclination to do so, but it would please Aunt Beryl, and anything was better than to remain alone with one’s thoughts, and expose oneself perhaps to a more active realization of certain dimly-apprehended truths. Europe was at war—Jennie was going to be married, a mere baby, to a young Canadian who cared nothing for the traditions in which she had been brought up, who upheld her ungrateful defiance of her mother, and would, if he lived, take her right away ... no one left ... Nathalie thinking of her husband and her boys.... Lady Lucy thinking of her young grandson, the only male Damerel left, gone into the fighting-line ... no one giving a thought to Lydia, save Lydia’s racked and bewildered self.
She shuddered involuntarily, and rang the door-bell.
“Miss Nettleship?”
“Will you step up into the drawing-room?” said the maid.
She preceded Lydia upstairs, pulling down the sleeves of her dress as she went.
“I’ll tell Miss Nettleship, if you’ll take a seat.”
Lydia heard her clattering downstairs again. No doubt Miss Nettleship was in the basement, supervising the activities of a successor to someone whom she had invariably alluded to in the old days as “poor old Agnes.”
Lydia actually smiled a little, as her surroundings recalled old, forgotten details of the boarding-house life.
The drawing-room was still furnished in yellow, the heavy gilding of the mirror over the mantelpiece seemed only slightly more chipped and tarnished. There was no fire, although it was cold.
The smell of distant, greasy cooking still hung in the air.
On a small shelf in a corner were some very dirty and tattered numbers of the Lady’s Realm, “Molly Bawn,” devoid of cover, and the novel written nearly twenty years ago by Lydia herself.
Time worked very few changes at Miss Nettleship’s house in Bloomsbury.
Lydia looked up when the door of the drawing-room opened, feeling sure that she would have no difficulty in recognizing Miss Nettleship, although it was nearly six years since they had last met, on one of Lydia’s infrequent expeditions to Regency Terrace.
But in effect they were strangers to her who entered the room, although a curious sense of familiarity seemed to indicate that the type was not new to her.
Both ladies were middle-aged, both looked pinched and cold and shabby, and both gave Lydia the same furtive, hesitating bow as they passed.
They took their seats on either side of the empty grate, and talked to each other in low, discontented murmurs.
“It’s too bad not to have a fire a day like this, with the dining-room smoking so that one can’t stay in the room.”
“She said she’d have the fire in here lit after midday dinner. I thought I’d tell you, Mrs. Morrison, knowing how bad your chest has been, so that we could slip out of the dining-room early, and get two nice chairs and keep warm all the afternoon. Otherwise, we know who will get the best places.”
“Oh, yes, it’s always the same. Selfish I call it. Thank you for the hint, Miss Parry. I shall make the most of it. I suppose it isn’t anywhere near dinner-time yet?”
“Oh, no! Only just gone twelve.”
“Is that all? I thought the breakfast very poor this morning, didn’t you?”
“Downright robbery, considering the money we pay. It isn’t at all the sort of thing I consider one has the right to expect in a Residential Private Hotel either.”
“The porridge burnt——”
“And all the toast finished, if one’s so much as five minutes late.... Old Mr. Kinch thinks nothing of helping himself to two pieces at once—I’ve seen him do it. And one doesn’t like to say anything.”
“Certainly not. It isn’t the food one cares about, but it’s the principle of the thing.”
“Miss Nettleship ought to stop it, you know. But of course, there it is—he’s a permanent let, and doesn’t care what he pays—naturally, she won’t risk losing him.”
“Oh, naturally. Why, they say he thinks nothing of ordering in wine for himself, and fruit out of season.”
“Of course, it’s good for the house, I suppose, seeing things delivered at the door like that from West End shops.”
Miss Forster—Mrs. Clarence—ancient Miss Lillicrap, with her heart disease—the old, forgotten ghosts all crowded back upon Lydia’s memory.
The dingy walls of the drawing-room had encompassed the same conversations about food, and lack of warmth, and grasping fellow-boarders, year in and year out.
“They say this war is going to affect the price of food, and there’ll be things we shan’t be able to get any more.”
“Ah, things we’ve been getting from Germany, I daresay that would be,” vaguely said the spinster, Miss Parry.
“I should have thought we could make anything here that the Germans could make, I must say.”
“Not at the price though,” said Miss Parry sagely. “They’ve been making a regular business of cheap trades, you know. That’s part of their cleverness.”
“Ah, I daresay. They say the Kaiser had all this war planned out as far back as the old Queen’s death. How he can sleep in his bed at night, I can’t imagine!”
“Perhaps he can’t,” said Miss Parry darkly. “I couldn’t, in his place, I know that.”
“Oh, nor could I.”
The ladies fell silent, perhaps each imagining herself in the unenviable position of the potentate under discussion. Lydia felt sure that such a flight of fancy was well within the humourless capacity of each.
When the door opened again and Miss Nettleship came in, very fat, and panting a great deal, but otherwise unchanged, Miss Parry and Mrs. Morrison watched with furtive eagerness her enthusiastic greeting of Lydia, whilst pretending to conceal themselves behind the loose sheets of an illustrated paper.
The uncertain movement made by Mrs. Morrison towards the door was forestalled by Miss Nettleship, however.
“Come into my room for a little chat,” she begged Lydia. “I’ve a sitting-room now, besides the office.”
The sitting-room was a small back bedroom, hung with cheerful red twill curtains, and almost entirely filled by an arm-chair and an old-fashioned sofa, designated by its owner as “the couch.”
“Take the couch, won’t you? It’s a nice, comfortable seat, and I’ll have the room warm in a minute.”
Miss Nettleship knelt down upon the floor, not without difficulty, and applied a match to the small gas-fire. A fierce, yapping sound ensued, and then a pale-blue flame appeared, gradually extending the length of the grate, and began to glow, sending out an amount of heat that seemed to scorch up the air in the tiny room, in spite of the shallow pan of water standing just in front of the grate. Lydia, in a strange, detached way, reflected that it was a long while since she had sat in the dry, odorous heat of a gas-fire. At Regency Terrace they made use of smoking coal, in Devonshire, most of the hearths that she knew burnt sweet-smelling wood.
Miss Nettleship assailed Lydia with a flood of eager and interested questions. She seemed to know by name and reputation everyone belonging to the family of Damerel, and inquired solicitously for Lady Lucy, anxiously for news of her grandson, and compassionately for his mother.
At Lydia’s replies she nodded her head, fixing upon her round, absorbed brown eyes, and saying from time to time: “Of course—one sees how it is, Mrs. Damerel. I quite understand.”
It all seemed curiously unchanged, even to Miss Nettleship’s old phraseology.
And Miss Nettleship’s memory! She recalled names and incidents that seemed to Lydia to have been delved out of some other life, and all with a comfortable assurance that Lydia would remember even as she herself did.
“You’ll want to hear of the people who were here in your time. Let me see now—we’d Miss Forster then, of course. Did your auntie tell you about her?—I remember I wrote to her about it when the accident happened.”
“What accident?”
“Oh, poor thing, she got run over in the street, and died in hospital—about five years ago it must have been. She’d left here, you know, and gone into rooms. But I went to the inquest, of course—naturally I did,” said Miss Nettleship with mournful pride. “She’d put on a lot of flesh, poor thing, and it was quite a shock to see how stout she’d grown. She often asked after you, you know.”
Lydia had not known. It surprised her again and again to hear of the extraordinary fidelity with which so many of these people, in their limited circles of interests, had remembered her.
“There was that old lady who had a weak heart—Miss Lillicrap—what happened to her?”
“Poor Miss Lillicrap! She was old, you see, and ill, and one couldn’t say much—but you know how it was. She lost me some very good boarders,” said Miss Nettleship, shaking her head. “It was always the same thing at the dinner-table, you see—grumbling at the food, yet taking more than her fair share. I had to tell her that her room was wanted at last, and she must leave. I never heard what happened to her, but she went away very angry, and left a lot of extras unpaid. You wouldn’t believe the way people think nothing of leaving their extras unpaid, Mrs. Damerel.”
Miss Nettleship sighed, and Lydia wondered if she was thinking of Margoliouth.
“Let me see—who else did you know? The Bulteels? Oh, yes, they went out to B.C. and I heard from Mrs. Bulteel once or twice. I believe the son, Mr. Hector, did very well out there. Mr. Bulteel died about ten years ago. But the widow and Mr. Hector stayed on in B.C. And talking of the Colonies, there’s someone you used to know gone out to Australia. Time does fly! It must be nearly five years since she was here.”
“Who?”
“A Mrs. Prince, she was, with a little boy—but she told me she’d known you before she married. It was remembering you that sent her here, when she wanted rooms in London for a bit. Graham, her maiden name was.”
“I don’t remember——”
“She was at a place of business in the West End—Elena’s it used to be called. It’s changed hands now.”
Miss Nettleship delicately refrained from recalling Lydia’s own connection with the shop.
Rosie Graham, the little cashier!
Lydia remembered well enough now. Of all those elusive figures that peopled the forgotten past, Rosie Graham had remained by far the most vivid.
“Oh! Did she go to Australia, really? Why?”
“She was married to an Australian. Ever such a nice fellow,” said Miss Nettleship, her kind face beaming. “They’d only been married a couple of years, and she wasn’t very young by any means, but they were so happy together it was a treat to see them. They’d a dear little child, too—and another one on the way. I got a card from her after they’d gone to Sydney saying the baby was a girl. I never heard any more after that, but I’m sure they’re happy. He was such a nice fellow, and they were so fond of each other.”
“I’m glad she’s happy,” said Lydia, rather to her own surprise. “I never imagined she would marry, though. I never knew she was engaged.”
“Oh, she told me they hadn’t been going together for very long before they got married. Quite well-to-do, he was, and she wouldn’t have to go out to work, though I believe the women in Australia do all their own housework always. But Mrs. Prince was as pleased as anything at going off to Sydney. I must say, I do like to see what I call a real love-match,” said Miss Nettleship in a tone of satisfaction.
Lydia looked at the stout, overworked woman, with her greying hair and the wrinkles round her brown eyes. Those inexpressive, kindly eyes, that actually seemed to look out with pleasure and interest still on a world that was narrowed to the dimensions of the Bloomsbury boarding-house.
As though in answer to her unspoken thought, Miss Nettleship turned to the eager expression of her own solicitude for Lydia and Lydia’s concerns.
“Of course, I’ve heard about your daughter going to be married. She does seem young, but that’s the way nowadays. This war! But I hope you’re pleased, Mrs. Damerel?”
“He’s a Colonial, too—a Canadian,” Lydia replied indirectly.
“So your auntie told me. Well, I’m sure he’s very lucky. But he’s out at the war, with this machine of his, isn’t he? It’ll be hard for her to see him go off again after the wedding.”
“Yes—for both of us. I—I’ve so wanted little Jennie to be happy.”
Miss Nettleship made a clicking sound with her tongue, expressive of sympathy.
“T’thk, t’thk! It is sad for all these young people, to start life like this. When one thinks of all the boys killed and wounded, and the girls working so hard, and losing their brothers and sweethearts and husbands—oh, Mrs. Damerel,” said Miss Nettleship earnestly, “sometimes I’ve thought it hard to be all alone the way I am, and just have myself to work for—but when I think of what the wives and mothers of our soldiers are going through, I realize that I may have been spared something I couldn’t have borne, and I’m thankful to have things the way they are.”
So that was Maria Nettleship’s unsubtle, uncomplicated point of view. She could be thankful because she was out of the swirling current of life’s deepest emotions, safely set aside in undistinguished security upon the bank.
Not for her the strange, twisted anguish with which Lydia resented the sight of even pain and renunciation in which she had no share. Not for her the envious craving to be once more in the grip of dramatic circumstances, to hold the centre of the stage once more, and garner experience wholesale, that might only be doled out grudgingly to a younger, more trivial generation.
Lydia left Miss Nettleship feeling that she had received only one more proof that her own spirit stood in a very desert of isolation. They none of them understood—could ever understand! It seemed to her that she lacked even the words in which to make her misery clear to them.
They none of them spoke the same language. For them “sacrifice” meant personal suffering.
For Lydia it meant standing aside, being denied the importance of personal suffering and the exploitation of it.
They thought that those were to be pitied who were bearing the brunt of pain and privation. But Lydia knew that the pity, and the pride, and the sympathy made up for all the pain and the privation.
She clenched her hands, and sweat broke out upon her forehead.
In the losses of her childhood, the struggle of her girlhood, in her premature widowhood, had she ever suffered as she was suffering now, when no one recognized her claims to impassioned pity any more?
Lydia knew that for the first time in all her life she was really suffering.
She felt as though something within her were being killed by agonized inches.
Something that would not die.
If once it died the suffering would be over, and she herself left shattered, no longer keenly sentient. But it would not die.
She met Jennie and Roland at the station, and they got into the train together.
On the journey, it penetrated to her understanding for the first time that the marriage was to take place on the next day but one.
“Monday? That’s the day after to-morrow.”
“But mama——” Jennie gave her a quick, alarmed glance. “We always did say Monday, if it could be managed. And I asked Aunt Joyce to see if it would be all right about the church that day, and she wired back yes. I showed you the telegram yesterday evening!”
“I’d forgotten,” said Lydia.
She saw Jennie look at Roland Valentine with a piteous, scared expression, and presently they began to talk in very low tones together, carefully avoiding a glance in her direction.
She understood that something in her looks or her manner was making them anxious.
“Mama,” Jennie whispered, when they had at length reached Clyst Milton, and while Roland was in search of a missing suit-case, “he won’t come home with us. He’s going straight to Quintmere, and we’ll only meet at church to-morrow and when we go to Grannie’s for lunch. You and I will have the evening all by ourselves to-night.”
Jennie was trying to make up, evidently, for what she thought was her mother’s pain at losing her.
She was very gentle and quiet when they parted from Roland, who came with them no further than the threshold of Lydia’s cottage.
“They’ll put up the pony in the Quintmere stables for to-night, and we can drive it back after lunch to-morrow. The man will understand. We’ll see you at church....”
Jennie slipped her hand into his.
Lydia realized that they were forgoing some of their few hours together in order that she might have Jennie to herself for one evening.
“Good night,” she said curtly, and turned abruptly into the house, leaving them alone for their brief parting in the winter darkness.
Jennie, that evening, seemed tired, and Lydia, in her own immense fatigue that was so infinitely more of the spirit than of the flesh, half unconsciously resented the slight, unwonted shadows beneath her daughter’s eyes and the pallor of her young face.
Why should Jennie, the invariably robust, elect to look tired to-night?
Then Lydia remembered how much shopping and walking and travelling and interviewing had been crowded into the last two days for the girl unaccustomed to London, and her heart smote her. If Jennie’s fatigue was physical, there was nothing to resent. She was entitled to it. Lydia followed her usual methods and said gently:
“Would you like your dinner in bed? I can bring it up to you myself, and sit with you afterwards.”
“You’re tired too, mama,” said Jennie quickly. “Much more tired than I am, I think. Let’s just have dinner early and then sit in the drawing-room over the fire, all quiet and comfy, just you and me.”
She looked at her mother wistfully, as though seeking to make instinctive amends for she knew not what.
During dinner they spoke of the wedding arrangements, of Jennie’s hastily selected trousseau, and of the rooms secured by Lady Lucy at a North Devon fishing village for the brief honeymoon.
Jennie grew excited; the slight look of strain left her round, childish face, and she talked eagerly about her plans.
“I’ll telegraph to you, mama, what day I’m coming back here. Of course, I shall go to London with Roland to—to see him off.”
Jennie’s lip suddenly quivered at the allusion, and she talked faster than ever, and in the old, rather arrogant strain, as though to reassure herself by a display of great self-confidence.
“I don’t know exactly what I shall do eventually, you know, mama. I think I ought to find some war-work, and Roland would like me to be in London, and of course it would be the best place, in case he got wounded, or when he gets leave.”
“If you were working, you would be tied down to certain hours, I suppose, like your Cousin Olive,” said Lydia. “You remember what she told us about her hospital.”
“Oh,” said Jennie airily, “I’d stipulate all about that beforehand. There must be other work besides hospital work.”
Lydia could not help wondering for what work untrained, inexperienced Jennie thought herself fitted, and she knew that something of that wonder was showing in her face.
“I must learn to do things now,” said Jennie, as though in answer to Lydia’s look, and colouring hotly as she spoke.
The defiant note had crept back into her voice, and the vexed consciousness of that animated Lydia’s reply.
“Certainly. Up to now I don’t think you’ve been very willing to be taught, have you, Jennie? But you know that you can attend classes even down here, now that they’re getting up so many of these Red Cross and other things; and if you want to learn practical, everyday usefulness, I could at least teach you housekeeping.”
Lydia was perfectly aware of forcing an issue, and some imperative desire to lessen the sudden tension of the atmosphere made her rise from the dinner-table as she spoke.
They went into the drawing-room in silence.
When they were seated on either side of the fire, Jennie with empty hands and Lydia stitching at the embroidery on some of Jennie’s new underwear, Jennie suddenly spoke.
She was never diplomatic, poor Jennie, and a far less acute hearer, and one much less familiar with her every intonation than was the observant Lydia, would have known that her hasty, nervously-spoken speech was premeditated.
“Wouldn’t it be rather fun, in a way—as I can’t have a proper home of our own with Roland till the war’s over—for me to find a tiny flat or something in London, and make it all nice and live in it, and—and you come up and stay with me, mama, when you want a day or two in London?”
“Is that your idea—or his?”
“I—I suppose both of us planned it together. I wouldn’t let Roland say anything to you about it—I wanted to tell you myself.”
Jennie looked at her mother with unconsciously imploring eyes, that beseeched her to receive at least in silence a decision which both of them knew to be epoch-making.
But Lydia herself could no longer control the bitterness that had been swelling within her for many weeks.
“You’d rather live by yourself in London, in fact, and cope with difficulties of which you haven’t the slightest idea, whilst I stay alone down here, than let us be together during these miserable times of anxiety—naturally with the understanding that I shouldn’t dream of being there when there’s the slightest chance of your having Roland at home. Is that it?”
“Oh, mama!”
“But isn’t that what you mean to tell me?”
“Oh, don’t!” said Jennie miserably.
“Don’t go on making exclamations that mean nothing. What you’re really saying is that you don’t want me to have anything to do with your new life, isn’t it?”
Lydia’s voice was iron. With every word she was lashing at her own pain as well as at Jennie’s, but some inner force beyond her own control was driving her on.
“I didn’t say, ‘not anything to do with it,’” burst childishly from Jennie. “But if it wasn’t war-time, Roland and I would be going to Canada most likely, and then I’d have to leave you, and everybody would think it perfectly natural—you know they would.”
“The cases are not parallel. I am not suggesting—and never should suggest—making a third in your married life. Those are not arrangements that can ever succeed, from anyone’s point of view. But you know perfectly well that the circumstances are not normal. Roland will be away from you until the war is over, and your natural home—the home of your childhood—is still here; I am still here—to receive and care for you until you can begin your real married life. However, you say you don’t want that care and that shelter. You prefer to be alone in London, and to let me be alone down here.”
The expression of Jennie’s face whilst her mother was speaking had hardened from the pleading apprehension of giving pain into sullen self-justification.
The tone of her voice corresponded to her look when she spoke.
“It isn’t fair to talk like that—as if I was deserting you. I can’t stay always tied to your apron-strings, mama. In fact, even if I wasn’t going to be married, I’d practically decided to go away and do some war-work somewhere, whatever you said. Oh, can’t you understand? When you were my age you went away to London and worked—and there wasn’t a war or anything then.”
“The circumstances were very different,” said Lydia coldly. “I was living with an uncle and aunt, and expense was a very serious consideration to them. You know very well that everything I have in the world is yours, and that my only wish has been to take care of you and keep you good and well and happy.”
“Then,” said Jennie swiftly, “you ought to be glad for me to do what I like, and—and what Roland and I both think is best for me. I’ve got to develop into a responsible grown-up person some time or other, I suppose—and how can I ever do it when all the time you’re shielding me from everything, and only wanting me to be, as you say, good and happy—like a little baby?”
The irrepressible gibe sprung to Lydia’s lips:
“That’s what Roland Valentine has taught you to think!”
Jennie looked straight at her mother.
“He’s given me the courage to say it,” she retorted in a voice as hard as Lydia’s own, “but I’ve been thinking it, and feeling it, for years and years. And I’ve been miserable at home.”
The unforgettable words that could never be unsaid had been spoken between them.
In a flash of unutterable misery Lydia knew that it was too late for the self-control, the pity, the abnegation, that might have saved the final, open contest that never now could be as though it had not been.
As though a veritable physical abyss yawned between them, the mother and daughter stared at one another aghast, with wretched, incredulous unhappiness.
The lines of Jennie’s young face broke first, and she burst into pitiful, tempestuous sobbing and crying.
“Mama, mama, forgive me—I didn’t mean it. Oh, don’t look like that! I was wicked and ungrateful—I didn’t mean it—I’ll do anything you like——”
But Lydia knew that her belated victory held for her no promise of good.
All night long she lay open-eyed and tearless, and for a long while she could hear at intervals from the bedroom next to her own the muffled sounds of Jennie’s unrestrained, childish crying.