Lady with Carnations

by A. J. Cronin

  “There’s Bertram over there, Katharine,” she murmured. “With the Brent woman and John Sidney. Bertie hasn’t got as good a table as we have. One up for you, Chris.”

  Daisy Jervis began her next song, a tough Broadway number full of sharp dissonance and sudden raucous melody. It was the hit of the moment, and everyone stopped talking, drinking, and eating to listen. The voice, brazenly amplified, held the rush and clamour of the streets, the hard glitter of modern life, its harshness, carelessness, deceit.

  Katharine listened with the rest; there was no escape from that strident, throbbing rhythm. But the thing hurt her, made her sick at heart. She glanced around the heated, luxurious room, crammed with flowers, jewels, money, rich exotic foods and wines, and with humanity, scented, oiled, bedecked in silks and shirt fronts, the men with sly, hard faces, the women beautiful, painted, metallic.

  A wave of hopelessness came upon Katharine and with it an oppressed desire for escape. She thought of Graysville, and the lovely Vermont countryside, of all the simplicities that life could offer: fresh air, plain food, and the clean sweet breath of the open country. And a painful longing, such as she had never known, came upon her to be done with artifice and to seek the ultimate realities of life in austerity and repose. It was, she reflected with sudden retrospective insight, such a longing as might have taken poor Lucie de Quercy when, returning from the worldliness of the Tudor court, she found her lover dead and her happiness destroyed.

  The lights went up. Katharine could not see Madden’s face, which was shielded by his hand, but Nancy gave a gasp of pleasure.

  “She’s good! She’s got something. And it was a cracking number!”

  Katharine took a long draught of ice water. Nancy’s remark jarred upon her. The surrounding scene became more shallow and more futile. And then, to her relief, an attendant approached and delivered the message that Miss Lorimer was wanted on the phone. Excusing herself, Katharine rose and followed the man out.

  A queer silence ensued when Nancy and Madden were left alone.

  “Katharine doesn’t seem quite herself to-night,” said Nancy at length. “But, after all, this isn’t quite her style.”

  Madden was making patterns with his fork upon the tablecloth, but now he roused himself. “ No,” he said, “it isn’t.”

  “Poor Katharine!” said Nancy. “She does her best!”

  He threw a quick glance at her. “She’s done a fair amount for you, hasn’t she?”

  “Oh, yes,” Nancy returned lightly, “ of course she has. And if I may say so, darling, she loves doing it!”

  Madden took himself in hand. He lifted his head, poured himself out another full glass of champagne, and drank it, then leaned across the table. “ Look here, Nancy,” he said in a steady tone, “ I’ve got something important to say to you. I’ve been thinking it over ever since we left Graysville. We’re going to get married, you and I, at once.”

  “Well, aren’t we?” Nancy laughed lightly.

  “Yes.” His dark eyes remained sombrely on hers. “ But you’ll notice I said at once. It must be definite between us now. All settled for the end of next week.”

  “Why, Chris!”

  “Why not?” he insisted in a firm voice. “You love me, don’t you?”

  “You know I do.”

  “Then it’s settled. A week from Saturday. When I come back from Cleveland and you get through with the opening of the show.”

  Moved and flattered by the intensity of his words, Nancy’s eyes fell. “All right,” she whispered. “It’s settled, darling.” She added: “And really I’m frightfully glad. You know, I had an awful feeling in Graysville that you’d ask me to give up the stage before we got married.”

  “Did you?”

  She nodded. “ My fault, perhaps, but I did feel a little out of sympathy up there. I felt all the time your folks were grudging me my career. And it means so much to me, darling.” Her eyes were tender now and luminous with a genuine emotion. “ Oh, I realize I haven’t done much yet. But I will, I will! And not stupid parts in stupid plays, but the real thing—Ibsen and Shaw and Shakespeare. I’ll play Ophelia some day, Chris, so that you’ll hold your breath. I know I can do it. I must do it. I’ll make you proud of me. It’s awful, darling, to have such a compulsion in one’s blood. It’s like loving you. I can’t help it. I can’t give it up. And why should I give it up? We’re two clever people in love. And we’re living in the twentieth century. There’s no reason under the sun why I shouldn’t have you and yet have my career as well. Is there, darling, is there?”

  Her plea, so unexpected and sincere, moved him unaccountably. His eyes were hidden, but he reached across and pressed her hand. His voice was full of sympathy as he answered:

  “I didn’t understand at first, Nancy, but I guess I do now. I thought you were just fooling around in the theatre. Now I know I was wrong. And believe me, if it doesn’t make any difference to you, then it doesn’t to me either.”

  There was a silence.

  “People have always fought over this question of marriage and career. But we’ll solve it, won’t we, Chris?”

  “Yes, we’ll solve it.”

  “Thanks, Chris,” she whispered. “That makes me love you all the more.” Another pause, then: “And you, darling? You do love me an awful lot, too?”

  His gaze lifted towards hers with that level, unwavering regard. “Yes,” he answered, “I do love you, Nancy. Haven’t I told you so a hundred times?”

  When Katharine returned, they were talking normally. It was quite late. The band was playing with that bright animation which presages the moment of its release. Madden glanced at her directly for the first time in the evening. He seemed at last to be at ease, and his tone was quietly pleasant.

  “Good news, I hope?”

  Katharine smiled faintly. “It was Breuget on the wire. Brandt just called him from Chicago, definitely confirming arrangements. He’s just had the photographs I sent him— the coloured enlargements of the Holbein—and he’s fallen hard. He’s flying to New York to-morrow and meeting me at three. All I have to do now is put the miniature in his hands, and it’s sold.”

  “Smart work!” Nancy tapped her applause upon the table. Her face was brilliant with her own happiness. “ Congratulations, darling! I’m so glad.”

  “That’s something off your mind,” Madden added. “ Yes,” Katharine said. “ It is.”

  The band was now at its final number. The time was two o’clock. People were leaving.

  “Well,” said Madden, “ I guess we all ought to be in bed.”

  Nancy laughed gaily. “Nonsense, darling! Much too early. We haven’t done celebrating.” Rising, she pulled her wrap about her. “We’ll join up with Bertram’s party and go along to Longchamps for a sandwich.”

  A shadow came over Madden’s tired face and was as quickly suppressed. Somehow Katharine sensed that he had no wish to prolong the evening. But though he made as if to speak, he did not. In the lobby outside they met Bertram and the others. Leslie Jean Marks and Gloria Bishop somehow got mixed into the party, too, and the gilt mirrors on the walls magnified their numbers and made the scene important enough, even for Nancy. Afterwards Katharine, had she wished it, had no chance to talk to Madden again. The next day, as he had planned, he left for Cleveland.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Towards three o’clock on the following afternoon Katharine went down to her office to keep her appointment with Brandt. A thin rain permeated the air, oozing from the blanket of raw vapour that hung overhead. Contrary to her custom, Katharine took a taxi, and as she slid along in the cab the texture of her consciousness seemed as grey and confusedly impenetrable as those swathes of fog outside. Memories of the night before—the night club, Daisy Jervis, the party at Longchamps, Nancy’s gaiety, and Madden’s stoic face—all whirled giddily inside her head.

  And she thought, more soberly, of Madden’s return to Cleveland, of how, shedding the unaccustomed leisure of these last weeks, he
would revert to another level of existence, mundane and practical, befitting his real position. She saw him stepping from the train, grip in hand, coat collar up and hat pulled down, his dark, serious, face turned in the direction of his business, a small one-chimneyed factory, where his staff, manager, foreman, stenographer, and perhaps half a hundred hands would turn out loyally to welcome him. How her concept rose she could not tell, yet she was convinced of its reality, as though the scene were now enacted before her eyes.

  She sighed and took a firmer grasp of her all too sensitive emotions, facing the prospect of the immediate interview with Brandt with all the vigour she could command. Once she had sold the miniature she could make her plans for a quick return to England. Nancy’s opening night—then there was nothing to keep her. Madden and Nancy would not want her any longer. She would be of small use to them, she reflected bitterly, upon their honeymoon.

  A shiver went over her as she stepped out of the cab and passed quickly through the raw air. Breuget was waiting for her in the back office, a tiny cubbyhole with barely room for a desk, an electric grill, and a couple of chairs. He was nervous, she saw at once, though his lean form and aquiline features were strung to a pretence of polite unconcern. And with an air absurdly and pathetically festive he had brewed some coffee on his little stove which, with a plate of sweet biscuits, he now offered her by way of celebration and refreshment.

  Katharine accepted. It was good coffee, hot and strong, with the real French tang. As she drank it she studied the old man—his lined, sensitive face, his suit, shiny from repeated pressings and worn at the cuffs, his linen, spotless yet suspiciously threadbare, with a careful darn just beneath the high stiff collar, his shoes, so meticulously polished that the the tiny cracks in the uppers hardly showed—and all at once an immense compassion awoke in her. She had never given much attention to Breuget before, except to consider the usefulness of this spinsterly old gentleman to her, but now she read him with a new sympathy, seeing his fight against shabbiness, the whole deprecatory struggle for genteel existence.

  “By the way,” she remarked suddenly, “ if we put this deal across, we’re going to raise your salary.”

  Breuget coloured to the roots of his sparse grey hair. “ Oh, no, Miss Lorimer.”

  “Oh, yes, Breuget,” she answered decisively.

  He glanced at her, doglike, then looked away. “Thank you, Miss Lorimer,” he stammered. “ Thank you very much.”

  There was a silence. He looked at his watch, a thin gold-and-enamel Louis Philippe timepiece, relic of his former standing. “ I wish Mr Brandt would come.”

  “It isn’t three yet, surely?”

  “Just, Miss Lorimer.”

  “Don’t fidget, Breuget.” Her eyes smiled at him kindly, confidently, attributing his nervousness to a new cause. “ That raise is in your pocket already.”

  He said hurriedly: “ It isn’t that I’m thinking of. It’s you, Miss Lorimer. After all, it’s pretty important…” He broke off with a wan shrug.

  “Brandt’ll take it.” She spoke conclusively. “After what he said. We know him, don’t we? He keeps his word.”

  Again a silence fell, which they filled, both of them, by thinking of their famous client. Brandt was, as Katharine had declared, a man who knew what he wanted and had always got it, a short, dark, thickset figure with bespectacled yet piercing eyes, who had battled his way to fabulous wealth through the twin interests of transport and lumber. His name was a national axiom for achievement. The tale of his creations—from the great chain of lumber camps he had made in the Northwest to the new biochemical institute he had founded for humanity at San Francisco—had become almost legendary, and the computation of his treasures, which filled his castle in Spain, his palazzo in Venice, and his great baroque house near Key West, a harmonic progression in millions.

  Merely to think of him brought him in person to the room, so vivid was his personality, and it was with a start that Katharine emerged from her reverie to find herself still alone with Breuget, whose watch, ticking relentlessly, showed a quarter past three.

  “Queer, Miss Lorimer, isn’t it?” said the old man, clearing his throat. “ Shall I … shall I ring up his house?”

  Katharine made a gesture of dissent. “We mustn’t worry him. He’ll be along all right, unless he’s been held up. In that case they’d ring us.”

  “Yes, Miss Lorimer.”

  But the suspense, with all that it implied, was proving too much for Breuget. Detaching himself from his seat, he sidled imperceptibly into the front office, and, in an attitude of expectation, took up his position behind the narrow glass door, where his eye could command the section of sidewalk directly in front.

  Katharine, resting her cheek upon her palm, continued to wait, her ear, attuned to catch the door’s opening click, hearing only the roar of the traffic and the shrill calling of a newsboy outside. It came to her eventually that this calling was unusually shrill and feverish. But at the same instant Breuget burst back upon her with a paper in his hand, his aspect so disordered she thought he must have had a stroke. At first he could not speak. He stood upon the threshold swaying slightly, his eyes wild, his face chalky except for a high spot of colour on his cheekbones. At last he stammered:

  “Look, Miss Lorimer! Look!”

  She jumped up, torn by a sudden fear. “ What is it?”

  “Brandt—he’s—he won’t buy the miniature after all.” He choked out the words, his face distorted now, then, sinking into a chair, he began unashamedly to weep.

  Katharine tore open the paper he had given her, and there, sprawled in black headlines across the entire page, was the news of the aeroplane disaster which had plunged Brandt and ten others to their deaths.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Katharine walked out of the office into the thickening mist as though her one desire now were to bury herself from human sight and contact. With head erect and eyes that stared unseeingly before her, she marched down Sixty-first Street, across Madison, and arrived by a kind of dumb instinct at the open and deserted oasis of Central Park. After walking about for a few minutes, she sat down upon a bench beside the frozen lake and strove blindly to compose her thoughts.

  At first nothing reached her but the dull horror of Brandt’s sudden end. She had liked the man. In all his dealings with her he had been scrupulously just, revealing through the aura of his powers a character in essence so simple and magnanimous that she had come to regard him not only as her patron, but as her friend. And now he was gone.

  Desolation rushed upon her as she sat, a strange, solitary figure, in the forsaken park. Around her in the enshrouding gloom rose the minarets and temples of a great civilization humming with the note of multitudinous life. Yet here she was alone. Upon the icy pond before her some children had been skating, but they were long gone home, leaving only the churned rime of their skate tracks. A few water fowl, their cold wings folded over stilted legs, brooded disconsolately in the shelter of the little island. The park lamps strung like blurred beads upon an invisible chain stretched into nothingness. The rest was gloom and muffled silence.

  Gradually her own position dawned upon her. She was finished. With Brandt so tragically removed, her chances of disposing of the miniature speedily and favourably had vanished to all but an infinitesimal point of chance. Her commitments to the bank would shortly fall due. To meet them and her other obligations, she must sell out—if indeed they did not sell her out—everything she possessed: stock, lease, even the good will of the business itself. With luck she might shave the ignominious edge of bankruptcy. But, with or without such luck, she was down, beaten, ruined. This was the end of her career, the pitiful downfall of that house of cards she had built by her utmost endeavour. A pang transfixed her at the thought of her early flashing hopes, all brutally extinguished now, of her sweet transient success, all turned to ashes in her mouth.

  Then, with a swift evolution of her pain, she thought of those whom her failure would involve. Walters
and Miss Mills, Breuget—alas for poor Breuget!—and, above all, her mother would feel the shock of her collapse. Nancy, thank God, did not need her now. But the others—oh, it was too crushing to contemplate, that they must suffer because of her. She could still work, of course, and driven by that relentless, conscientious strain, direct inheritance from her puritanical father, she might well slave herself into a premature old age. But could she ever attain the affluence she had previously known? Others, and she thought of Bertram, might gaily lose and then re-make a fortune in a year. But she was different. The orbit of her star was measured rather than erratic. When it fell, it would plunge never to rise again. Besides, she had felt herself strangely defenceless lately, and vulnerable to the tear and turbulence of life. Now, indeed, at this moment, she was supremely and agonizingly conscious of her sex. She was a woman, weak and helpless, needful of a sustaining arm, of a stronger will to which she might turn, and weeping, invoke protection.

  All at once an impulse of despair flooded her, of such utter and abandoned hopelessness she was tempted to end the process of disaster by the swift surrender of life itself. So easy it would be to seek the dark, kind Lethe of oblivion. No one need know. One step, mistaken in the traffic—an accident, of course—and she would be out of her distress, asleep, and soon forgotten.

  But in the same instant a shudder of revulsion passed over her, and she thrust away the thought as though it were unclean. Courage! That had been the motto of her life, always courage, nothing else mattered, and now she must bring to her defeat a greater fortitude than she had ever known before. She rose abruptly and, tightening her coat about her, set off at a firm pace towards her apartment.

  When she arrived, Nancy was there, though on the point of leaving for rehearsal, and at once she ran forward and threw her arms around Katharine’s neck.

  “Darling Katharine,” she exclaimed, “I’m so dreadfully sorry.” She had seen the special edition, and she quickly went on: “I hope it won’t make such a frightful difference. It’s the most appalling luck. If only it had happened afterward instead of before!”