Had she been more in love than Christine now was, or less?
Did it really matter whether one was in love or not?
She had been glad to be married, but not radiantly happy.
Not nearly as happy as on the evening when Duke Ayland had told her that he loved her.
Being glad to be married was not the same thing as being radiantly happy because one was marrying a man with whom one was in love.
Laura felt a pang of passionate self-pity, because she had not known that rapture, and would never know it.
In order to stifle it, she reminded herself indignantly how much less becoming her wedding dress had been than Christine’s now was. There had been a veil over her face, too, and she remembered still how insufferably it had tickled the point of her nose.
A discourse was beginning.
Laura did not hear a word of it.
She allowed Johnnie to come and sit on her lap, and saw smiles of indulgence and admiration turned upon his infantile charms, and ignored Alfred’s slightly disapproving shake of the head.
Then the procession re-formed, and the young man with the harlequin face beckoned violently to Laura and Alfred, and to Mr. and Mrs. Vulliamy, to come into the vestry.
Laura apprehended little or nothing of the brief interlude of document-signing that ensued, owing to her extreme astonishment at the fact that Jeremy, with courage and initiative, had kissed her.
Perhaps Christine had told him to do it?
Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” had resounded, Christine had taken Jeremy’s arm and had, with great presence of mind, remained stock still when Edward stood firmly on her train, and Alfred had lifted Edward off again, and Laura had found herself entering a perfectly strange motor-car with Alfred, wondering anxiously if nurse had been at hand to receive the boys. She did not see them again until after she had shaken hands with an immense number of people, all of whom seemed to arrive at the hotel very much at the same moment that she did herself.
Then she found them at the buffet, eating composedly.
Johnnie gave his mother a severe shock by remarking uncannily:
“That Mr. Ayland is here.”
“How do you know?”
“I saw him. He’s looking for you.”
“How do you know?”
“I just thought—Mummie, can I have one of those pink cakes?”
People surged in, and Laura, strangely disquieted by Johnnie’s information, temporarily lost sight of him again.
But she saw Duke Ayland.
He came up to her.
“What about this evening, Laura?”
“The Vulliamys have asked us to dinner.”
“And to-morrow?”
“To-morrow we go home.”
“Couldn’t you possibly stay on one extra day by yourself?”
“Not possibly. There are the children—and anyway, I couldn’t. But I must see you again, Duke. Would to-morrow morning be at all possible for you?”
“I’ll make it possible.”
Laura saw Mrs. La Trobe coming nearer and nearer, inexorable as Fate.
“We shan’t go till the one o’clock train. I am going to do some last shopping at the Army and Navy Stores. I’ll be at the entrance—Victoria Street—at half-past ten. I shall have about ten minutes to spare.…”
“I’ve been looking for you, Mrs. Temple,” said the contralto voice of Mrs. La Trobe. “What a coincidence, isn’t it? Jeremy, whom I’ve known ever since he was a little chap, to be marrying your sister!”
“Champagne, madam?” said the waiter.
“I suppose I must, though really, I never do—”
Under cover of Mrs. La Trobe’s smiling apologies Duke said low and rapidly:
“All right. Only it’s a perfectly certain spot for meeting everybody one’s ever met in one’s life. Wouldn’t Westminster Cathedral be-?”
Then he, too, was claimed by an acquaintance, and Laura was left in doubt as to where their rendezvous really was.
“How’s Cousin Louisa?” she asked casually of Poor Selina next moment, and then, as she waited for the voluble reply, wondered whether it would not have been kinder to let Poor Selina forget all about Queen’s Park for the day.
But Selina replied with every appearance of enthusiasm, that Cousin Louisa was wonderful. Laura found herself glancing surreptitiously at her watch. It ought soon to be time for Christine to go and change her dress.
Laura felt extraordinarily tired, and knew that very soon her fatigue would show in her face and bearing.
Suddenly, with an incredulous astonishment that momentarily revived her, she saw a slim, well-known figure towering above its neighbours, topped by the painted, insolent, undeniably lovely face of Miss Kingsley-Browne.
“Bébée!”
“Hello,” said Bébée unmoved. “How are you? Last time we met was at the A. B. Onslows’—dear people!”
Laura could think of nothing more brilliant than a bald affirmation in reply.
“Mummie is here somewhere, with Dr. Ernest Blog, a most wonderful man from America. You’ll meet him at home, this winter—”
“Shall I?”
“Christine looks topping,” said Bébée affably. “Jeremy’s frightfully lucky, as I’ve just told him. Of course, I’m rather mal-vue by his parents just at the moment, but as a matter of fact they ought to be grateful to me.”
“Honestly, Bébée, I think that they are,” said Mrs. Temple candidly, in an effort to take the wind out of Miss Kingsley-Browne’s unjustifiably inflated sails. But Bébée’s eyes, according to their wont, were roving far away, above the head of her interlocutress.
“There’s Ernest. I must go to him. Naturally, he doesn’t know anyone here.”
Laura made a desperate effort to see Ernest, but without success.
“We shall meet at home, I expect,” Miss Kingsley-Browne said without enthusiasm. “I know mummie will be dying to talk to you about the bulbs.”
Laura’s first words to her newly-married sister, when she found herself upstairs in her room, were couched in the formula familiar to them both.
“Did you see Bébée Kingsley-Browne? Could you have believed it?”
“See her? Did I not!” ejaculated Christine. “Who could fail to see a giraffe like that? Though, I must say, she looked pretty. She must have a nerve of iron.”
“She has. Poor Lady Kingsley-Browne!”
“Unfortunate woman! She was in charge of Hogg, or Blog, or whatever his name is. I saw him, following her about like a dog.”
“What is he like? Here—I’ll undo that.”
“Laura, I think Jeremy’s mother is coming up in a minute.”
“Shall I go? I shan’t mind if—”
“No, no, truly. I want you. Here she is. I think—”
Christine moved to the door, speaking rapidly over her shoulder.
“Blog, my dear, is exactly two foot high. No wonder Bébée doesn’t want to walk about arm-in-arm with him, as she did with A. B.” Then she opened the door.
Laura’s sense of confusion and bewilderment deepened more and more. She noticed vaguely how maternal Mrs. Vulliamy, in her shadowy way, had become, and how ingeniously Christine combined responsiveness with a complete absence of sentimentality in her own manner.
Soon they were down stairs again, Christine transformed, in a frock that had been the subject of numberless conversations between herself and Laura, and an opulent nutria fur coat that Jeremy had given her as one of his wedding presents, and a little brimless blue hat with silver flowers that became her.
The best man—now completely distinguishable from Jeremy, who had changed into a grey suit for travelling—was to see them off at the station.
Laura, suddenly completely exhausted, felt that she desired nothing so much as to see all the guests depart instantly.
But when they had done so, instead of thereupon becoming a person who could look as tired as she felt, Laura found that she was merely the mother of two thoroughly
over-excited little boys. It was too early to put them to bed, there was no garden into which they could be sent, and nurse displayed a strong disinclination to take them for a walk “in all that traffic” as she perversely designated Laura’s suggestion of Kensington Gardens. Eventually, Laura sent her to pack and herself undertook the charge of Edward and Johnnie.
Alfred had vanished.
There was nothing to do except to answer the tireless questions of the boys, and to cudgel her brains until she could produce a story with which to amuse them.
“Mummie, may we have wedding cake again for supper?”
“No, darling, I’m afraid not.”
Johnnie displayed unreasonable disappointment. At last they were both fetched away, to go to bed.
Alfred, as mysteriously as he had vanished, reappeared.
“Where have you been?”
“I had to have a pipe,” said Alfred. “Did you say we were dining out?”
“With the Vulliamys. I cannot imagine how we could ever have been such fools as to say we’d go,” sighed Laura.
“I expect you’re tired. It’s always the same thing, when you have the boys on your hands.…”
He spoke quite without rancour, but Laura, her nerves on edge, would have liked to scream.
Screaming, however, then as always, was impracticable, and a fresh item was added to the already long list of the repressions so much regretted by Losh on behalf of Mrs. Temple.
“I’d better go and dress,” she said instead.
“Can we get off by the eleven o’clock train to-morrow?”
“We decided on the one o’clock. I want to go to the Army and Navy Stores in the morning. There’ll just be time.”
“All right.”
Laura, without any shred of exultation left in her, contemplated the prospect of what must, in all probability, prove to be her last interview for an indefinite length of time, with Duke Ayland.
Chapter XIX
At The uninspiring hour of half-past ten next morning, Duke and Laura met in the prosaic atmosphere of Victoria Street, and with all the sense of limitation induced by the consciousness of Laura’s imminent train.
“I must be back at the hotel at a quarter to twelve,” were her first words.
“I can take you back in a taxi.”
“Meanwhile—I’m very sorry, but I must go to the groceries’ department. It won’t take a minute.”
It took several minutes, but presently it was done.
“Where do you want to go now? Isn’t there a tea place, or somewhere we can sit and talk?”
“There’s a tea-room upstairs, I believe. But we can’t sit there unless we order something.”
“Coffee. Will that do?”
Laura signed assent, and they went up in the lift.
Laura looked at herself in the glass with some dismay. She had not recovered from her fatigue, and her face showed it.
“We shall go home by the one o’clock train to-day.”
“I know,” said Ayland—as indeed he did.
The tea-room was comparatively untenanted, except by elegant waitresses, who displayed boredom at the sight of Laura, but revived when she was followed by Duke.
They tried to take a corner table, but the nearest one bore a discouraging card that said “Reserved,” and that and the combined haughty gazings of the waitresses, caused Laura to sit down at a large table laid for four in the very middle of the room.
“Do you like this?” said Duke doubtfully.
“It’ll do, and there isn’t time to change,” Laura replied feverishly.
“Darling, what’s the matter?”
Laura knew that the true answer to this inquiry was expressed in the single word Reaction, but it reminded her too much of the medical student Losh, of the books of Havelock Ellis, and of several other things that she could not bear to recollect. So she answered instead, with an inanity that shocked herself as much as she felt that it disconcerted Ayland:
“Nothing is the matter. I’m just tired after the wedding.”
“Laura, I thought we were always honest with one another.”
Laura had thought so, too, until this morning, but she did not say so, because at that moment one of the languid waitresses came and looked unsmilingly down at them and said, “What can I get you, please?”
“What would you like?” Duke inquired.
“Coffee, I think,” said Laura, feeling that it would probably choke her.
“Two coffees, please. And cakes.”
“We ought not to leave here a moment later than half-past eleven.”
“It’s all right. I’ll see you’re not late.”
A most unhappy silence ensued.
Duke handed Laura his cigarette-case.
She took a cigarette without looking at him, and lit it slowly and with great care.
“Well, my dear, have you thought what’s going to happen?”
“About us?” Laura said, entirely to gain time—although with no idea as to how she would employ it when gained.
“Of course. You’re going back to the country to-day and you say you’ve no idea when you’ll come up again—and in any case, it’s damned unsatisfactory only to meet like this. I can’t stand it, Laura. I wish to God you’d come away with me altogether.”
“If I was free I would.”
“If you were free, we could be married.”
“But I’m not. And apart from anything else, I’m very fond of Alfred. It would hurt him most frightfully to think that I cared for somebody else more.…”
Duke shrugged his shoulders, the first sign of impatience that he had given.
“But leave all that out of it. There are the children,” Laura forlornly reminded him.
“Yes, I know. They settle it, of course. And as that’s so, Laura, surely you can see that we shouldn’t be doing any wrong to anybody if we took such happiness as we can get! Can’t we take one week together, to remember, out of all our lives?”
“Bleck or whayte?” said the waitress abruptly, poising two vessels above the two cups on the table.
When she had finished with them, Laura looked at her watch.
“It’s five minutes past eleven already. I mustn’t be late. Nurse isn’t quick, and I shall have to help her get the boys ready. Besides, there’s so much traffic now that it may take ages to get to the station.”
Laura had not, as might have been supposed from this speech, forgotten her own frantic desire to appear in a light other than one purely domestic, to Duke Ayland. But she had reached a stage of mental and physical fatigue in which she could no longer distinguish between the things she really wanted to say and the things she was in the habit of saying.
“Darling, please don’t fuss. I promise I won’t let you be late. I’ve never seen you like this before.”
“Sometimes I think that we’d far better never see one another again,” said Laura wildly and irrelevantly.
“Laura!”
“We shall spoil it if we go on like this. It’s been the happiest and the most beautiful thing in my life, and I don’t want, ever, to let it be anything less. If we were to do Alfred a wrong—I don’t care what you say, it is a wrong—and besides, the children——No, I couldn’t bear it. Duke, I could say good-bye to you to-day. I could find the courage to, although, heaven knows, it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. We should always remember, even when later on you marry somebody else, as of course you will. I shouldn’t have lost you altogether. And you’ll know that you’ve had something from me that no one else has ever had, or ever will have.”
Laura, at last, had spoken, with halting and belated eloquence, but with all the sincerity that was in her.
In the long, long look that she exchanged with Ayland, she felt suddenly that they had come spiritually close to one another again.
“Anything else I can bring you?” the waitress superciliously enquired.
“The bill, please.”
“How many cakes?” suspici
ously enquired the waitress.
“None.”
The bill was made out and handed to Ayland.
“Ought we to go?”
“I’m afraid so. In case it takes a minute or two to get a taxi.”
In unbroken silence they descended in the lift to the ground-floor, and in Victoria Street entered a taxi.
“We needn’t hurry now,” Duke said, and gave an order to the driver.
This time Laura surrendered herself to his embrace with no attempt at resistance. And the effect of it was to shatter the frail strength of her so recent determination.
When he had kissed her, and she lay breathless against his shoulder, her hands clasped in his, it was as though her words had meant nothing.
In real life, Laura dreamily reflected, a moment of crisis was always followed by days and nights and days of anti-climax. One had to go on. And the thing that had been real and sustaining melted imperceptibly into the thing that was expedient at the moment.…
“Don’t answer me now, angel,” whispered Duke. “You’re tired out. Think it over, and remember that I adore you, and then perhaps one day you’ll feel that you ean come to me, and give us both the most wonderful memory—”
“Perhaps,” murmured Laura, fired by his desire, and by the ardour of his love-making, and by the knowledge that she was going back to an existence in which love-making played no part at all. The emotional instant of renunciation had passed—defeated, as are all emotional instants, by sheer force of Time’s continuousness. Impossible to renounce in a crowded lift and with a train to catch. Almost equally impossible to part as lovers should part in a taxi drawn up outside a London hotel.…
Duke and Laura achieved neither one thing nor the other.
She had renounced him, but she had also half-promised to give herself to him. It was an incredible, inconsistent, and nerve-racking state of affairs.
But things, Laura knew, are like that.
She crawled upstairs, the muscles of her throat aching from a sense of constriction.
The packing was finished, and the suit-cases stood in a pile in the middle of the floor. The beds had been stripped, and the slops had not been emptied—a peculiarly dreary combination of effects.
The Way Things Are Page 24
