Crystal turned her head wretchedly. Mrs. Lance burst out with the story of Crystal’s conversation with the Marquès, but said nothing about her own. She was determined on her vengeance of trickery.
“If only I could help you,” said Alec rhetorically. Mrs. Lance and Crystal both turned to him with wistful gratitude. Mrs. Lance said in the voice of a fashionable martyr:
“Alec dear, as you know, neither Crystal nor I have been used to such a position. I know the world, but, to my disadvantage it seems, I have known only gentlemen. And I am going,” she drawled clearly as if printing her words upon his mind, “to leave this place at once, money or no money, if we have to leave every scrap of baggage we have.”
With the palm shadows striped across her, she was like a sly tigress.
He said nothing, but her words were doing their work.
“Now you and Crystal go along and come back at ten. I am going to tell the Marquès what I think of him.”
His heart was full. “They are going. They are going,” his desolate mind said. He reached instinctively for Crystal’s hand and took it gently.
“Two good pals,” said Mrs. Lance firmly. He dropped her hand quickly and they walked away.
Mrs. Lance returned to the hotel to her rendezvous, and her revenge. When Crystal and Alec turned into the darkening streets he took her hand again. He held it as if he were holding a cold flower. And so gingerly holding her, he walked, she breaking the fragile darkness with her light and he hungrily gulping it. The night had darkened until the sky was like the great curtains of velvet drawn back for an opera. Everywhere was the glimmer of candles. All the voices of the city were loudened and made declamatory.
“Water!” shouted the watersellers, and it was divine water.
“Oranges!” And they became the fruit of Hesperides.
“Out to-morrow,” said the lottery ticket woman, and to-morrow Crystal would be out, right out, irrevocably.
The stars burned low with a tragic stillness over the jagged roofs, above the candle-flames of the processions.
The stepping of the black crowds in the streets had a softness as though they were treading the carpet of a theatre. The palms were dark, fantastic princes. Othellos waiting to choke you magnificently because of the smallest of your handkerchiefs. The pavements were slippery, and had a pearly gleam from the million drops of candles grease that blew from the candles of the hooded, barefooted nazarenos who trod slowly by.
Crystal was listless,
“Are you sorry to be going?” Alec asked.
“Yes. But how are we going? We can’t go. It is dreadful. How can we go?”
“Something will happen,” he said.
“Money doesn’t fall out of the skies.”
“Perhaps it does.”
“Oh, Alec, if all these stars were money, and we could shake them until they fell.”
“I wish I could shake them.” But he wished she did not speak with such exagggeration.
He knew that after this it was his fate to send her away because he would pay the bill. His heart thumped when he thought how large the bill would be. And he wondered if Crystal was so quiet because she knew too. Perhaps that is why she let him hold her hand. He remembered lines of Kipling’s If: “a heap of all your earnings”; he kept muttering his misquotation. Poetry made him strut. He was enclosed by the crowd. It hugged him to its wriggling hide. It swallowed Crystal and himself and digested them. People ran out of bars where electric pianos were jangling. There was the mewing of a band and the high note of a solitary bugle that cut higher and higher as though the sky were glass and the bugle a knife scoring it cruelly. And then, mounted on a platform, were the voluptuous images of the Crucifixion gleaming in the light of candles as with the sweat of a grotesque agony. The candles tinkled in their vases. A murmur passed over the heads of the people. At the sight of such pain frozen in sculpture, their eyes were satisfied. This was the summit of cruelty. One hated his neighbour. This put passion into the heart. If one could be for the flash of a second as cruel as that!
“I wonder if Mummy has murdered the Marquès,” said Crystal seriously. “It is a pity people are so funny about money.”
“We’d better go back,” said Alec, the condemned man longing to be put out of his misery. He wished he had his pipe. In a side street they met another procession, and she held Alec back.
A pretty little sighing Virgin with her stiff, panelled cloak of pearls and precious stones, was borne among her candles like a doll on a birthday cake.
“Guapa!” shouted men’s voices from the cafés, and they blew wild kisses at her.
“The Virgin for me!” they shouted.
“What a woman to sleep with! She’s worth all the rest,” cried a gypsy.
Alec drew Crystal away quickly.
“Alec—” but Crystal stopped in fear. She had been going to tell him that the Marquès had called her the Virgin of the Narrow Purse.
“What were you going to say?”
“How happy she must be!” she exclaimed wistfully.
They returned to the hotel. Crystal was surprised by the hot distracted look in his face when he sent her upstairs to find her mother. She would soon know, Alec thought, as he found Don Jorge the manager and arranged to pay the Lances’ bill. He whistled at the amount a bit, but she would repay him. Mrs. Lance was a lady; he himself was not perhaps by her standards quite a gentleman, but he could not put her in the position of asking him for aid.
But Mrs. Lance was not upstairs. Crystal found the room deserted, the wardrobes empty, the trunks packed and labelled. She ran downstairs to see Alec putting an hotel receipt in his pocket, and for some reason, though she knew nothing about his generosity, she blushed. She thought, why is this ugly young man, with the big hands and hot face, paying a bill so easily and we can do nothing?
“Alec,” she said breathlessly, “Mummy isn’t there and the trunks are packed. What is happening?”
“I expect,” said Alec, dropping his mouth into a grin, “she’s gone off with the Marquès, and is leaving you with me.” Oh Lord, what a crude remark. But he had paid the bill. Hadn’t he the right to be crude?
As they stood in the corridor, Mrs. Lance came out of the patio. In her dark dress she seemed as narrow and dark as a sword. She was very pale and angry. For over an hour she had waited in the patio, starting, and re-composing herself at every swing of the door, expecting the Marquès to come. Over and over again she had rehearsed her part and worked herself into such a condition of nervous excitement that she could not sit still. The one thing that had whipped her into preparedness was the thought of her revenge. A quarter of an hour, twenty minutes, half an hour, and then no signs of him. She had called the waiter, but he had forgotten to come back with any information. At last she had gone to the office herself and had asked for the Marquès.
“He is not in his room.”
“Where is he?”
“He has gone out.”
The little monkey-like night clerk with his big yellow ears and cropped hair, grinned at her.
“He has gone out with his wife and will not be back until late.”
“I don’t believe you,” she said. “Send someone upstairs.”
“Very good.”
“No. Perhaps not. No, leave it. Don’t bother.”
And away she went back to the patio again. The little monkey of a man breathed deeply of her scent.
“How beautifully she smells,” he sighed.
“She works early,” said the page boy who had appeared. “But give me the little one.” He smacked his lips and blew a kiss. “He said to me ‘If the English lady asks for me, say I have gone out.’”
Mrs. Lance remained in the patio accumulating her rage, for she perceived she had been deceived and played with; but when she saw Alec and Crystal, she was in no mood to confess her failure.
“Have you seen the Marquès?” Alec asked.
“Seen him!” exclaimed Mrs. Lance quietly, looking straight into Alec�
��s eyes. “Have I seen him! I wished you had been there. My goodness! there has been a rumpus. I fairly wiped the floor with him.”
“Mummy was dreadful,” said Crystal.
“You weren’t there, Crystal, so what do you mean?” said Mrs. Lance, and the glitter in her eyes rode down the light in Crystal’s.
“What did you say? Was he violent?” asked Alec.
“I was very quiet with him. I merely said he was a scoundrel with the morals of a bandit and the customs of a pickpocket. I said, of course I was not surprised, because he was no doubt following the customs of his country.”
“Good. Good!!” cried Crystal, clapping her hands. “He was always talking about them.”
“I wish I had seen him,” said Alec boldly.
“I wish you had now,” said Mrs. Lance. “I do not suppose anything I said would make any difference to him. In fact I told him as much. I said I was handier with a horse-whip than the language of Cervantes.”
She gleamed with malice.
“My God!” said Alec, clenching his fists and writhing with vicarious anger. He had unconsciously imitated her scowl and the varying expressions of her face as she spoke.
“But what are we to do, Alec? Words are nothing. It would have been more useful to have killed him. Man to man, Alec.…There was something undeniably possessive in her voice. She was irresistible in these moods, she knew: a powerful creature beating its wings. He could have taken her in his arms—and Crystal too, of course. He said with shaking voice:
“It’s all right. I have t-taken a g-great liberty. I hope you w-will not mind.” Then he burst out, “I’ve fixed it up.”
She shook his hand with the warm fervour of executioner parting with his prisoner.
“You have been like a mother to m-me,” he mumbled.
“I will give you a cheque. Oh— But, Alec, I have packed my cheque-book.”
“It doesn’t matter. Whenever you like …” he stumbled on.
Crystal could not quite understand this conversation. Since that miserable scene with her mother she had seemed to be standing inside herself for the first time in her life. Mechanically she looked at Alec with gratitude, but for what she did not know.
“You are a sportsman, Alec. My instinct for people is always right,” Mrs. Lance said.
He was a little disturbed by the unexpected suspicion that she had planned and foreseen this conclusion, but he pushed the unworthy thought away.
They left for London the next morning. Would there ever be an end to this sapphire sky, to this red, olive-bearded land? Crystal said:
“So you see, Mummy, we ought not to be cynical. There are good people in the world.”
But Mrs. Lance was thinking of a pretty little piece of vengeance she had managed the night before. She had gone to the Marquès’ room and left a glove there on the bed. “These wives should be warned,” she had said to herself.
On the second day they were climbing up the world to the north. The ardent lands had gone.
(II)
Mrs. Lance and Crystal stepped ashore in the drizzle of the Port of London, like buccaneer captain and beautiful captive. For brief periods in the past twenty years they had come to England from the Bermudas, from the Argentine, and from Egypt, and now when she had returned for good, Mrs. Lance led Crystal through the traffic as though she were the spoil of the Antilles, precious and captured merchandise, virgin gold. What an empire of life Mrs. Lance had discovered, sacked and pillaged! She established herself boldly like a mariner queen in a small but expensive hotel in Curzon Street, and bestowed her rich memories. To Crystal and an occasional relative who called she laughed over the raw Alec and the calamity of Seville; she dramatically revealed the wooing of the Marquès, the merry spite of her revenge, the spires of cities, the aspect of foreign mountains, the rogueries and melodramas of Egypt and the Argentine; the sulky passions of their climates, agitated the air, when she evoked them, like an incense. And into the pauses, as her speech receded from the scenes she was recreating, would flow long wakes of royal sea which tapered to the lips of those horizons where the cities and memories of words irremediably dwindled and faded. She lived in this invisible empire for days, powerful and exultant, this peacock tail of talk. She spoke to everyone in the hotel, dropped casual remarks about Cairo in the shops, broke artlessly into Arabic or Spanish in conversation, gesticulated and posed as being as foreign in England as she had asserted her Englishness abroad.
But the light of strangeness that transfigured these days soon dimmed. The replies of her relations to letters and telegrams reminded her, without enthusiasm, that now she was in a different world. And this she saw when her trustee, who happened to be in London, called and informed her tartly that her husband had avenged himself upon her by leaving her a paltry £100 a year. The grand buccaneering days were over. The trustee advanced her money for the payment of the hotel bill and recommended her to find furnished lodgings.
“There goes our house in town,” said Crystal miserably, who had lived in her mother’s dream. They waited in the room a few moments after he had gone, and then Mrs. Lance said bitterly:
“I did not know before. How quick it is. My life has gone and I am an old woman.”
And she watched Crystal as though she would drink her life. Mrs. Lance had then taken a room in Notting Hill Gate and had opened her campaign against her husband’s relations. As the object was to obtain first sympathy and the money from them, she had very rapidly quarrelled with them. They disliked her and endeavoured to get Crystal away from her. With her own relations Mrs. Lance also quarrelled by borrowing money from one to pay another. She changed her lodgings several times. Her life, which had been a succession of grandiose, transoceanic flights, rapidly became in the space of a few months in London a nervous series of sudden flittings. She and Crystal were now living in one of those broad Georgian houses which have surrendered their rooms to a cynical mixture of tenants, but whose tall windows still stand in the walls with the erect austerity of noble women who have grown old. The house was in the neighbourhood of Fitzroy Square. The room was large and scantily furnished, but Mrs. Lance had hidden the beds behind a strip of cretonne which Crystal had chosen for its gaudy design of red parrots and blue peonies. There was a penny in the slot gas meter outside the door, and water was obtained from a tap on the landing.
One had to pass through many seams of smell before arriving at the Lance’s room. From the basement rose the dank reek of wine, which became interspersed with the acrid smell of glue from the furniture maker’s benches on the ground floor. On the first floor, where the landlord, Mr. Patti lived, the reek of stale cheese from Mrs. Patti’s cooking was almost solid. To the level of the Lance’s room descended the odours of varnish and turpentine from the studios of the picture restorers above.
Mrs. Lance who, when abroad, had never ceased to abuse the foreigners among whom she was obliged to live, now deliberately sought that part of London which was quite un-English. In doing this she showed her superiority to those relatives, who were having as little to do with her as possible.
With complete inconsequence overlooking the fact that his letter had been written almost eighteen months before, Crystal one day wrote to Alec Ferguson. She wrote, with green ink on a bright blue paper in a thick uneven hand which sloped in all directions, slanting away to a scrawl at the ends of the lines:
DEAREST ALEC,
I adored your thrilling letter!! Dear Seville! I have longed to be there with you and the funny old Marquès, is he well? And the Marquèsa? I haven’t forgiven Mummy and you yet, and after all but for me we might have been there still. Perhaps it would have been better!! Eh? It is so cold here. I am shrivelled up to nothing. Everyone is so beastly and rebuking here. It isn’t Mummy’s fault that she has lost all our money, and we are dreadfully poor, but the relations have been awful. There have been such muddles. They were cross with me too because at Uncle Laurence’s there was a complication which made everything very tangled up with my
cousin. He is a glorious man, and he had the most wonderful car, but it broke down in the middle of the night, miles from anywhere, after a gorgeous dance. What caused all the trouble is because he is engaged to be married to a girl who is very You Know, and doesn’t understand him at all. He loves horses and so do I, but she can’t stand them. And then everything got frightfully tangled because they said it was my fault the car broke down!! They were awfully angry and locked him up in a room and married him off very quickly. And now they won’t speak to us, and say it is all my fault because I am going on the stage. But we must do something, and what it is doesn’t matter. The stage is awfully difficult and frightfully …You Know, but after I had finished classes at the dramatic school I went and played at a funny place in the north of London with a divine man called Fontenoy Dufaux. Mummy thought he was wonderful. But he has gone on tour now, so I am abandoned. Perhaps it is as well not to have too much art in one family!!!! There is a lovely parrot in this house just like the Marquès. Wasn’t it funny about him!! There is a man who sometimes comes here just like him. I do not think it is safe for mummy to be teaching his children, do you? After what happened, and he wants to get a divorce, but can’t. Mummy keeps saying to me that she will write to you soon? What is there between you and Mummy? Secrets! Ah, naughty Alec. Naughty, naughty! Are you being dreadfully wicked with all those Spanish girls. I expect you are, because it is a long time since you have written to your step-mother. Years and years.…”
The inconsequence of this letter was in part wilful, for Crystal knew that her mother would ask to see it. A change was taking place in the relationship between mother and daughter.
There had been this question of the stage. Mrs. Lance had at first laughed glassily at the idea of Crystal acting, not so much because it was an unsuitable occupation as because Crystal would be a very original experience for the stage. For some days Mrs. Lance had played with the plan that she herself might act.
“I was considered rather good in my young days,” she said. “I played Juliet at a charity performance when I was a girl, and fell in love with the young man who took Romeo.”
The Spanish Virgin Page 4
