The Lady With Carnations

by A. J. Cronin

  Katharine shook her head. “She loves you. No, Chris! We can’t hurt Nancy. We can’t trample over her in a wild scramble for happiness. And it isn’t only that. We can’t hurt ourselves. If we’re different, as you say, if we have deeper loyalties and greater faith, we can’t betray them. Don’t you see, Chris, it’s the one thing, integrity, that’s worth keeping? It stands before everything.”

  “Not before everything!”

  Swept away by his emotion, he caught her hand and pressed it against his cheek.

  “Don’t, Chris, don’t,” she said instantly.

  He released her and stood gripping the edge of the bare oak table, his breath coming quickly, her head averted, as if he could not trust himself to look at her.

  “Why do you do that?” she said in that same dull voice. “ It only makes things more impossible.”

  He raised his eyes, suffused with tenderness, and gazed at her.

  But again she steeled herself against the wild, dark hunger in his gaze. She must, she must withstand it, or they were lost.

  There was a long, a heavy silence, such a silence as had, perhaps, never filled that barren little room in all its early history upon the silent coast of Maine. He stood before her, his cheeks grey, reading her face. Her unwavering eyes convinced him. He stared blankly at the narrow window of the room in which they stood. Minutes passed. At last he spoke.

  “Well, then, Katharine. If that’s the way you feel about it, there’s nothing more to be said. I’ll take you back to the apartment right away.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  That same afternoon at half-past three Nancy arrived back at the hotel. She had not expected to leave the theatre until five, for Bertram had called the company for a final drilling preparatory to the evening’s opening. Indeed she had told Katharine definitely she would not be home for tea. But the producer, with a characteristic gesture, had suddenly changed his mind and sent them all packing early, with strict injunctions to relax and be on their toes by eight.

  Obediently, therefore, Nancy returned to rest, and when the elevator popped her up to the tenth floor, she did not enter the apartment proper but went into her bedroom by the side door with the intention of lying down on her bed. Her entry was quiet, for her mood was abstracted, her mind completely fixed upon the impending performance. And then, suddenly, she heard voices in the sitting room.

  At the sound she stood still in the centre of her bedroom. At first her expression was one of surprise. She had not imagined that anyone was in the apartment, and the voices were those of Katharine and Madden. Then gradually her face changed. The voices came to her quite clearly, with chilling and unmistakable distinctness. Madden and Katharine apparently had arrived immediately before her, and now they were saying good-bye. It was a strange good-bye, restrained yet full of sombre meaning, and every word of it struck Nancy like a blow. Still standing motionless, she heard Madden leave the apartment. Five minutes later Katharine went out, too.

  A sound broke from Nancy’s throat that was half a sob and half a childish ejaculation of dismay. Almost dizzily she entered the living room, now void of everything but the implication of those few words she had overheard. She stared around. How usual its familiar pattern seemed—and yet how different! Chris loved Katharine. Yes, Chris, who was marrying her on Saturday, really loved Katharine. A wave of anger swept over Nancy, then passed, leaving her cold again. She flung herself on the divan, her teeth pressed into her lower lip. She saw it all—Katharine and Madden, their united effort to preserve her happiness. Her pride drew angrily away. She felt herself inadequate and cheap. She had been so sure, so egoistic and complacent. Yes, all her life she had been like that, taking things for granted, giving nothing in return. Now, as if by a lightning revelation, she saw herself, saw exactly where she stood. She burst into frantic tears.

  How long she wept she did not know, but at last the storm passed. Quietly she turned on her back, her eyes wearing a look of strangeness, her firm, slender body oddly defenceless. Her thoughts would not move consecutively, yet her capacity for feeling seemed redoubled and intensified. As by a miracle the envelope of childishness was rent from her. She was no longer petty, but mature. The room floated about her. Idly she watched the gradual passage of pale sunlight upon the opposite wall, her mind stopped by recurrent stabs of pain. Within her breast she was conscious, dully, of a slow diffusion, a kind of spiritual regeneration, which spread like the sunlight in the room and gradually brought her warmth.

  Finally she sighed deeply and stirred. She looked at the clock—it was nearly five o’clock. Reaching out her arm, she rang calmly for tea. When it came, she drank a cup, then lit a cigarette. A moment later the door opened, and Katharine entered the room.

  “Why!” exclaimed Katharine, tipping off her hat and flinging it upon the table. “You’re back.”

  Nancy nodded composedly. “ Just got in. Have some tea.” How she could speak so calmly she did not know, yet somehow tranquillity was hers.

  She poured the tea, listening to Katharine’s account of the docking of the Europa. Upton, whom Katharine had just left at his hotel, was in the best of good spirits and looking forward tremendously to the show.

  There was a silence, then Katharine asked with a faint smile: “Since we’re talking of it, how do you feel for tonight?”

  Nancy kept her eyes upon the ceiling. “I’m perfectly all right.” She paused. “ What did you expect?”

  Katharine put down her cup. “Oh, I don’t know. I thought there might be something I could do for you.”

  Another pause. Nancy stubbed out her cigarette without turning her head. “ I don’t have to be fussed over with sherry and biscuits,” she remarked with a faintly enigmatic smile. “That belongs back in the crinoline age. Along with stage fright and burnt feathers and floods of tears and fainting attacks.” She broke off. “ I may do well. I hope so. And that’s all there is to it!”

  So Katharine had to leave it there. She was, in a sense, surprised at the detachment of Nancy’s attitude. She had been prepared for some display of first-night temperament. But Nancy evinced no sign of nervousness. She seemed, indeed, unusually quiet, almost careless of the result.

  All that Katharine now considered was Nancy’s happiness. For this reason she had no great anticipation of the play’s success or failure. That seemed to her of small moment beside the deeper issues now involved. She must attend the première for Nancy’s sake, but when it was over, she would effectively remove herself from the tragic scene of her entanglement. Her decision was made. The Pindaric sailed on Saturday. Once on board she would close this episode of heartbreaking folly. She had the conviction, sad yet certain, that Nancy and Madden, left to themselves, would solve their difficulties and soon forget her.

  Presently Katharine rose to dress. She had arranged to dine early with Upton at Pierre’s. Seven o’clock struck, and it was time for her to go. Before she left, she kissed Nancy affectionately and wished her the best of luck. Once again she was puzzled by the blankness of Nancy’s mood. “She is nervous,” thought Katharine with a little compassionate pang, “and she’s trying all she can to hide it.”

  At dinner they were a small party—only Colonel and Mrs Ogden and a Mrs Moran besides Charley and herself. Katharine had insisted she did not want a crowd since she knew that otherwise Charley, who had as many friends in Manhattan as in Mayfair, would have run up his guests to at least a score. Though nothing could remove her gnawing heartache, the dinner, with its immaculate service, its delicate food and wine, and above all its sense of social ease, blunted the edge of her pain. The Ogdens were important people— Colonel Ogden was one of the foremost bankers of New York; and Mrs Moran, thin, dark, and witty, was the wife— or, as she herself satirically declared, the polo widow—of Ralph Moran, Meadowbrook and All American International star. Katharine surmised an old affair between Charley and Mrs Moran which had now reached the nadir of ironic friendship, yet here, in this society, the fact seemed hardly out of place an
d failed unaccountably to distress her.

  Charley was surpassing himself to-night. Creating something of a record, he saw her glass replenished with champagne. Never silent for a moment, his flow of gossip and easy stories kept the table perpetually alive. Towards dessert his smile became a trifle fixed and his utterance a little insecure, but somehow that all seemed part of Charley—generous and harmless and natural. He insisted, following a conference with the wine waiter, upon a bottle of Tokay to follow up the coffee, a rare and—if Charley and the waiter were to be believed—historic vintage from the cellar of the Grand Duke Ferdinand. The rich golden liquor, full of aromatic yet mellow ethers, completed the numbing of Katharine’s lacerated sensibilities. As they rose to go, she reflected with a certain bitterness that there were moments in this dreary life when it paid to be pleasantly anaesthetized.

  The theatre was almost full when they arrived, and from the crush in the foyer it looked as if it would be packed to suffocation. Bertram, with his cosmopolitan reputation and international connections, had a great following in New York, which assured him—not of a claque, since on more than one occasion the gallery had taken honest exception to his ideas— but at least a first-night audience of critical and expectant friends.

  From her seat in the centre orchestra Katharine looked round the house, recognizing many celebrated first-nighters. Then all at once Katharine’s eyes fell. At the end of her own row, in a seat near Bertram’s own, was Madden. Piercing the haze of the evening, the anguish which struck into her heart was more deadly than angina. The blood left, then rushed towards her brow. Holding her programme with a hand that trembled slightly, she bent her head and made pretence of studying it. He had not seen her. He was with Bertram’s party. Where he had dined she did not know, but she knew from Nancy that he was joining her when the show was over.

  Here the lights went out, and the conversation died. With a sense of merciful reprieve, Katharine lifted her hot face and fixed her eyes upon the stage, which revealed, without much originality, the interior of the lounge in a house in Sussex. Katharine was already familiar with the play, for she had read the script on the voyage over.

  The story was concerned with a middle-aged businessman named Renton, still extravagantly in love with his wife— played by Paula Brent—a languid, rather feline creature given to sentimental amours. At the rise of the curtain she was in the middle of such an affair. Indeed, the first act was given over chiefly to the exposition of her romantic longings and Renton’s jealousy.

  It was well done, the characterization expert. Yet the audience did not immediately warm to the piece. Perhaps the first scene was played a little slowly. Paula Brent, who took the lead, was first-rate. She was Mrs Renton to the life, fair and languorous, vaguely flabby, and a little past her best, inclined to tea gowns and subdued lighting, burning glances and gentle pressures of the hand. But Paula, in the rôle, was neither new nor startling. She had done the same thing many times. There was polite applause, no more, when the first curtain fell.

  “Pretty good,” Upton remarked cheerfully. “ But we haven’t seen Nancy yet.”

  Mrs Ogden leaned across. “ Rather a disadvantage, not being on in the first act.”

  “I don’t know,” said her husband thoughtfully. “ I’m kind of waiting for the antidote to that Brent woman. She’s awfully good, I guess, but she makes me want to smack her hard.”

  The second act was set in Renton’s office on the following Monday. And here, taking the part of Madge Rogers, Renton’s secretary, Nancy came in for the first time. As she made her entry a queer thrill of mingled excitement and pride went through Katharine. She saw instantly that Colonel Ogden was right. The audience was waiting, if not for Nancy, at least for the other woman, the antidote to Mrs Renton, and the possibilities she implied. Moreover, after the first assured line that Nancy so carelessy delivered, Katharine had the conviction that she had never had a better part in her life. She was always good in ultra-modern characterization, but this part seemed made for her. Her nervousness had vanished. She took the personality of the tough, pretty little secretary and burnished it to a sharp hard glitter which almost hurt the eye. Contrasted with the sloppiness of Mrs Renton, her outline had the clean-cut edge of steel.

  She was in love with Renton. And when the simple, overworked little man, in an access of wretchedness, revealed the situation at home, she went to work on him deliberately, informing him coolly that his whole attitude was wrong. He was too soft. He ought, she declared, to retaliate in kind by going away for a brief episode with some other woman. Nothing would bring his wife more quickly to her senses. And with the utmost self-possession she offered herself as his companion in the adventure.

  “My God,” Upton whispered to Katharine, “ I’d no idea our little Nancy was as hard-boiled as that.”

  As the scene developed it was possible to sense the audience sitting up. That slight initial restiveness was gone. Instead, a definite tension filled the house. And again that quick elation took hold of Katharine. She was convinced that all along Nancy had known this to be her chance. And now she was taking it. She was putting it across, she was holding them. She struck the sensibilities of the house with her hard indifference, her passionate yet utterly selfish love for Renton, her burning aim to take everything from life that her beauty and her wits could gather.

  Katharine gripped the arms of her seat tightly. She had never seen Nancy act better in her life. Forgetful of herself, her face faintly illumined in the dim auditorium, her lips half-parted, she willed that Nancy might have a great success.

  The act finished with Renton’s half fascinated, half-bewildered acceptance of the offer, amid a loud burst of applause which continued in increasing waves until Nancy took a curtain by herself. Then a babble of voices broke loose. People stood up, stretching their limbs, yet still excited, and demanding of each other a question which fell thrillingly on Katharine’s ear.

  “Who is she?” they asked. “Who is she?” It came from every side.

  She was Nancy Sherwood, she was Bertram’s find. The paragraphs announcing Nancy’s arrival on the Pindaric were significantly recalled. In the foyer and the lobbies the theme developed, expanded, ran to the limits of exciting conjecture. Bertram himself, his shiny face beaming above his acreage of shirt front, was surrounded by an eager, inquiring crowd. As Katharine passed him on her way back to her seat, he threw an extra smile across his shoulder.

  “Didn’t I tell you!” he murmured, then added cryptically, “and all due to that one little tooth.”

  Everyone was back before the second bell buzzed.

  “It’s so hanged exciting,” declared Charley, “you don’t have time to finish a cigar.”

  “Cigar, nothing!” exclaimed Ogden. “I want to know what’s going to happen!”

  Most of the audience was feeling that way. The general expectation was now intense. The curtain went up in perfect silence. A suite in the Beach Hotel at Littleton-on-Sea, where Renton was now spending the week-end with his secretary. Through the open window just the suggestion of summer, blue skies, and the sea beyond. But Nancy was not on the stage. Four minutes passed while Renton had a vaguely uneasy interview with the hotel manager. A definite restiveness began to develop among the audience. Then Nancy appeared. There was faint applause instantly suppressed. It was clear how completely she had captivated the house.

  She wore a beach robe, brightly striped and smart, and in every gesture there was a hint of careless paganism. Lighting a cigarette, she stretched herself at ease on the couch and contemplated, not without satisfaction, her pink lacquered toenails. Then in an offhand voice she informed Renton that his wife was going to divorce him. Renton, though staggered by the remark, clearly felt that she was joking. But she was not joking. All along she had realized that Renton’s escapade, far from reconciling his wife to him, would serve actually to afford Mrs Renton grounds for that separation, with full moral and financial honours, which she had long desired. And indeed the next mo
ment Mrs Renton entered.

  The scene which followed between the two women, Renton having temporarly collapsed, was one of the highlights of the play, strong, dramatic, and full of suspense. As conceived, in the intention of the author and the original producer, it belonged almost completely to Paula Brent in the character of Mrs Renton. She was, by every rule of logic and the theatre, the dominant, vindictive, triumphant figure. But for once logic did not prevail. Nancy, rising to the occasion through some secret, premeditated design, refused to be subordinated by the leading figure. For every thrust which she received she thrust coolly back. Her lines were not so good as Mrs Renton’s, yet she infused them with such icy venom, and winged them with such devilish malice, that they went flying home unerringly. The sense of conflict demanded by the scene was doubled and redoubled by this sudden clash of personalities. The feeling spread to the audience, became almost insupportable.

  “My God! The little devil!” whispered someone behind Katharine. “She’s stealing the play.”

  The phrase spread, an undercurrent to the tense surface of emotion. When Paula Brent took her exit, there was scant applause. Every eye remained on Nancy. With the wife out of the way, she was bringing all her influence to bear on the unhappy Renton. The obvious solution, she coolly suggested, was that he should marry her. And going into the bedroom to dress, she left him to digest her ultimatum.

  But Renton was at last aware of her hard, deliberate intention. She had set out to marry him from the first. Standing weakly there, it dawned upon him that he was the victim of those two women—his wife and his mistress. The dilemma was of their making. But he would not accept it. Quickly, on the heels of disillusionment, he pulled a revolver from his pocket and shot himself.