I do not mean to say that Barbara regarded my brother Graham with aversion; but it simply did not make any difference to her if he came into the room. She would look at him as calmly as she would look at me—Lady Doleford was much more agitated. To Barbara I think he represented a necessary part of the scheme by which she might be perpetuated, or at least continued, as she was; but Lady Doleford was aware of responsibility. Barbara had been brought up to a great exigency, and it naturally filled all of her mind. Lady Doleford dated further back, to a time which admitted more argument, a time which was only anxious and not despairing, when it was still to be expected, by a mind naturally devout, that Providence would step in. Morally, therefore, Barbara’s was much the strongest, most unvexed position; she felt none of poor Lady Doleford’s quavers and hesitations. On the other hand, Barbara had a warmer nature than her mother, whose faint flame kindled only, I imagine, in church—Barbara was a Pavisay. The old Earl had loved horses better than his place in the world, and there might be something his daughter would love better too; it was just a possibility. Barbara wasn’t very clever; the principal thing about her was her heart, when you came to think. That was why she seemed to me to be making a real effort, with no encouragement from herself, to care about Graham, an idea suggested to her, I was perfectly certain, by Evelyn Dicey, who had begun to point out symptoms of inclination in Graham long, I am sure, before Barbara or anyone else could have noticed them.
“I know he admires her immensely,” I admitted to Evelyn, “as a little bit of the beautiful old fabric over her, chosen and cherished and yet so situated that it can be admired, rather freely; but I don’t see why that should take us so very far.”
“It isn’t only his admiration,” said Evelyn, “but it’s all so suitable.”
“I don’t see that it’s so suitable,” I said.
“Well, why should all these—affairs—be arranged with Americans?” demanded Evelyn. “Why should we come in for everything?”
It was a fine, large, generous way of putting it; very like Evelyn, but I could think of no form of acknowledgment.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Unless—well—you’re supposed to have more enterprise, aren’t you?”
“It’s quite time you cut in,” she said good-humouredly. “And you ought to remember it isn’t only desirable for itself. As Mrs. Jerry says, there’s politics in it.”
“Colonial politics?” I enquired.
“Why, yes.”
“Then it won’t come off, in this country.”
Evelyn laughed. “I see what you mean,” she said. “But, my dear Marykin, better not be too sure. You don’t know the English as well as I do, when they have anything to dispose of.”
“Evelyn,” I said, “I think you’re horrid!” but Evelyn cared no whit.
“The only reason they haven’t thought much of the Colonial market so far,” she went on cheerfully, “is because it’s been so small. Maple princes and princesses ”
“Oh, maple syrup, Evelyn! Don’t be odious!”
“Have only lately been quoted in the share lists. But prices are firm, Marykin—and rising. And Mrs. Jerry—she’s a great old operator, isn’t she?—declares that it’s a Heaven-sent way of drawing the ties of Empire closer without tinkering ”
“I know,” I said, “with the tariff. One isn’t supposed to mention it, is one, over here? They’ve got tired of it. But between you and me, of course, it doesn’t matter.”
“But Mrs. Jerome’s red-hot again, and sparing nobody,” said Evelyn. “Hadn’t you heard? She’s a fearful Let-Things-Aloner, and they’ve got hold of Billy!”
“Who have?”
“The other side—what do you call ’em—Imperialists. And now, when Billy runs for Parliament ”
“Stands,” I said.
“Stands—he’ll go to the polls all done up in the flag, and sweet he’ll look, that nice little Billy. And this innocence is all very well, Marykin, but I can tell you that it’s very generally put down to you. Mrs. Jerome says that you are the only consideration that offers the least excuse for Billy.”
“Oh, dear!” I said, when we had partly recovered; “I’m afraid I can’t offer Billy even an excuse! But I’m just as glad, on the Empire’s account. It’s safe now. But, Evelyn, Billy is one thing—Graham is another. I mean, don’t you—well, worry about Graham—since you don’t want to marry him yourself.”
“Not I,” Evelyn assured me. “There’s one solid advantage about being my type—money is absolutely no object. I value money,” she continued thoughtfully, “about as much as I value—punk. No, Marykin, when it comes to the gold attraction, I’m not taking any.”
“Well, that’s rice and clear,” I said.
“And this is the place,” she went on with conviction, “to make you thankful to be able to say so. It’s simply disgusting, the importance of money over here—just the dead importance of it. They don’t like talking about it any more than they do—or half so much as they do—about the food they are digesting; but it’s just as necessary to keep them morally healthy and socially alive. They’ve never had to earn it; it’s always been there, like the air, to exist by, and they’ve got to have it—it’s a matter of self-preservation. When they absolutely haven’t got it and finally can’t get it, there’s no sort of way for them to live—they become extinguished.”
“What you say, so far as it’s true,” I observed, “makes one feel awfully sorry for them. It’s a horrid position for them, poor things; and one wishes something could be done, but one must stop short of wanting them to marry one’s relations to get out of it.”
Evelyn looked at me a little ambiguously, as if she did not quite want to say what she thought she ought to say, and was rather amused at the necessity of saying it.
“Graham is a darling, honey,” she said, “but ”
“He’s a lamb,” I said. “A dear and precious lamb, just as much as anybody, and in some ways more.”
“Of course he is. But, you know, my chicken—he’s just a simple Canuck.”
“Don’t you suppose I see that too?” I demanded. “He is just a simple Canuck—and he can’t be too simple or too Canuck; and I wish they would let him alone.”
I could say things, of course, to Evelyn, that I could not say to anyone else, and say them more strongly. She understood in a hundred ways better than anyone in England could understand. She understood now, foolish as she thought the text I offered her; and she gave me in return a very tactful consolation.
“I think it’s quite as much on his side,” she said.
Then came the rescue in the fog.
It was for us the luckiest fog possible; there had not been one like it for years. It did not arrive or descend; it transpired, took place, suddenly, like a whim, obliterating all the Christmas shopping. It was more yellow and thick and sulphurous than I can describe; it extravagantly realised all the descriptions I could remember, and it had the effect upon London of a blanket over a particularly noisy parrot in a cage. London huddled on its perch and was dumb, but underneath one knew it to be alert and ready, on the smallest gleam and the shortest notice, with all its outcries.
I watched it from the flat, though it had only the variety of a very yellow night. I sat down in it, under the electric light, and poked the fire, and thought: “Now I am in the middle of a real traditional London fog—I know exactly what it looks, and tastes, and feels, and smells like;” and I wished very much that Graham would come home so that we could enjoy it together. He had gone out intending to be back soon after lunch; and though I quite realised that under the circumstances nobody’s intentions could run to time, by five o’clock I was quite certain that he had stepped over the Embankment. I sat with that conviction until half-past six, and there was nothing you could do. The only resource was constantly to tell Towse to bring tea again in half-an-hour’s time; but at last I was having it, when I heard out in the despairing depths of the streets a cart, going very slowly, but going. It was the first s
ignal. From the window I saw with thankfulness a blob of lighter yellow where the nearest street lamp stood, and heard in other streets the single cautious adventures of other carts, and shouts, with a distinct note of optimism. After that it seemed less likely that Graham had wandered into the Thames; and I was enjoying a second slice of Substitute in the relief of thinking so, when I heard the key of the door, steps and voices along the passage, and out of mystery and nowhere appeared my brother and Barbara Pavisay.
“We are grateful to you for being here—with tea,” declared Barbara. “Mr. Trent was quite sure you would be.”
She was looking extraordinarily pleased with herself, and had a lovely colour. “We have had such adventures!” she exclaimed.
“I am very grateful to you for bringing him home,” I told her. “Did you bring him home, or did he bring you?”
“A four-wheeler brought us both,” said Graham. “About how far is it from Kensington High Street station?”
“Perhaps a quarter of a mile,” I said.
“Well, we have been just one hour and three-quarters doing it,” said my brother. “I think Lady Barbara will have a cup of tea, if you don’t mind, Mary.”
“I beg your pardon!” I exclaimed. “But you’re such ghosts, I forgot.”
“The man walked by the horse’s head the whole way,” explained Barbara. “Yes, please—two lumps. And, oh—muffin! How too luxurious! Your brother found me on a bench under a lamp in High Street station. I thought it was Victoria! And then I knew it wasn’t, and I was simply in despair. And suddenly he appeared out of the fog, coming up to the lamp to look at his watch. I assure you I simply clutched him. And how he induced the four-wheeler to start I don’t know; but he did, and here we are. And is there anything in the world so good as muffin!”
“It’s lucky for you both,” I told them, “that I trusted in Providence and kept tea waiting. I was certain Graham had walked over the Embankment, or been in a collision in the Underground. It must be too dreadful in the Underground in a fog. I wonder either of you got out alive.”
“It was the only place to-day where one could see two yards in front of one,” remarked Graham.
“We have been walking round and round Kensington Square,” Barbara went on. “And, oh! we kept meeting a funeral. It was lost too, and so forlorn.”
“I think it was the funeral of Kensington Square,” said Graham. “It hasn’t been what it was, you know, for some time; it’s just been pining away after Thackeray.”
“But we met it first coming into the Square,” objected Barbara.
“Let me get you another cup,” said Graham. “How thirsty they must be by now, the people in charge of that poor corpse! Which of the Louises was it that said about a lady of his Court they were burying in the rain, that she had chosen a mauvais temps pour s’en aller? I’m afraid I felt about as cynical towards our corpse, didn’t you?”
“I don’t know which it was,” said Barbara. “I didn’t think about the corpse—what would be the use? But I was sorry for the mourners.”
“It’s shocking to confess,” meditated Graham, “but I believe I enjoyed that funeral. There was something queer and drifting and Dantesque about it, always turning up in that fatal way at one’s elbow out of the fog. There must be a moral synonym for it somewhere, if we weren’t so fearfully dense.”
I tried to think of a moral synonym, but failed.
“Don’t let us talk any more about funerals,” said Barbara. “I didn’t enjoy it; it gave me the creeps. I wonder what the fog is doing now?”
I went to the window and pulled up the blind.
“It’s worse,” I announced. “The lamp at the corner has gone out again, and there isn’t a sound. You can’t possibly get home—you must spend the night. If you don’t mind sharing my room,” I said. “We would love to keep you, wouldn’t we, Graham?”
“If I may, I’ll go out at once and telegraph to Lady Doleford—or are you on the telephone?” said Graham.
“We’re not, but Aunt Agnes is,” said Barbara. “And I’m supposed to be with Aunt Agnes till to-morrow. If you could telephone Aunt Agnes But it may lift in an hour or two. May I stay and dine, and see afterwards?”
“I don’t see how it can lift,” said Graham, inspecting it. “By itself, that is. It is more likely to sink and settle in deposit on the pavements. I suppose you have fog ploughs for such a contingency, or do the citizens turn out with shovels? May I telephone that if it isn’t penetrable by ten o’clock, you will stay till to-morrow—or till it is?”
“Thank you very much!” said Barbara, and presently from the passage came my brother’s voice, enquiring, “Is that Two Three Seven Five, Victoria—the Duke of Dulwich?”
“Your aunt,” he said, coming back a few minutes later, “came to the telephone herself. She said she had ascertained that you had not arrived at an address, which I could not hear, in Hill Street, and was wondering whether it would do any good to send out the town crier.”
“Aunt Agnes always has a sense of humour,” said Barbara, “but I’m afraid she was really anxious.”
“She clearly was. But the telephone enabled me to wring her consent to your staying the night,” said Graham. “It gave me a kind of wringing leverage on the situation. I couldn’t hear any of the Duchess’s objections. But I was obliged to make out that if it lifted by ten, she is to send Broad for you with the electric brougham. If not, not. It won’t lift, I’m happy to prophesy.”
“I don’t think she’ll send Broad,” said Barbara. “Broad had a cold this morning, and she was dosing him with eucalyptus; I’m afraid she’ll take you at your word.”
It was quite clear and simple. Barbara wanted to stay; she liked the adventure of it—and Graham wanted to have her; he liked the part of Knight Hospitaller. My business was merely to go and tell Towse.
CHAPTER XIV
DURING the next twenty-four hours I made a discovery that complicated my feelings enormously. I discovered that I liked Barbara. Outside, the fog stood like a solid wall till the next afternoon at five o’clock. Till the next afternoon, therefore, Barbara stayed, till five o’clock; and in that time I became attached to her. It seemed then as if the fog crept into the situation as I saw it, blotting out everything except the fact that Barbara was a dear.
Perhaps you come to know a person better when she is fog-bound in your flat, with nothing but the things she arrived in. The mere chance that your slippers happen to fit her seems to do a great deal, and she has various opportunities of being more charming than a regular visitor. Barbara took them all. She was sensible, she was considerate, she was merry. At every moment, at every angle the time presented, she was unfailingly exactly right and something over, something you could only reckon as the delightful benefit of having always been exactly right.
“It’s instinctive,” Graham said when we discussed it. “She does it on a principle that has become subliminal. We see only the results.”
Graham appreciated it, enjoyed it, just as much as I did—even more, with his inveterate eye for the beautiful. And Towse, I can only say that Towse grovelled, beamingly and at once, before Lady Barbara. Merely ministering to her at breakfast, hovering, in so far as Towse could hover, with the sanctioned bacon and the traditional marmalade, was a gratification to Towse, I could see, after our uncanny trans-Atlantic habits of raw fruit and wheat biscuits. There was an immediate kinship or clanship; Towse belonged to the scullery end of the family edifice, but she belonged to it out and out; and Barbara called Towse a darling.
As a matter of fact, up in our little lighthouse, Barbara was literally out of her element and profited by it. London was drowned outside, and London was the element that defined her by pointing out her necessities. There with us she had no necessities; at least they were not in sight; she was just a very nice girl, enjoying an absurd little accident. It seemed to me more and more odd that so nice a girl could admit London’s limitations—could allow the importance of her life to be placed in the chance
that some thousands of pounds a year should arrive and be at her disposition. It was pleasant, even for that little while, to forget it.
I suppose the fact of one’s own appearance being rather insignificant made one enjoy it more, seeing Barbara sitting after dinner in the Tudor chair with the panelled back that Graham had proved only the day before not to be an imposture. He had insisted, as a matter partly of principle, partly of discipline, upon burning every “fake” that he was deceived into buying; and though we had some lovely fires, I was oppressed by the waste of money. It was very pleasant to see Barbara with her head against the warm brown panels of this, just under the bar of jewel-carving. Her hair was almost reflected in it.
“You are very becoming to that chair,” I told her.
“I’m so glad. But it would be nicer of you to say that it is becoming to me,” said Barbara.
“Do you think it would? But not so gratifying for us,” I laughed, “because the chair is ours to keep, you see.”
I had a perfectly terrified instant, for Barbara looked at the fire and burned redder and redder and redder. A sudden suspicion seized me of what might have been said in an hour and three-quarters in a four-wheeler. But Graham himself dispelled it.
“And Lady Barbara, alas! is only ours to lose,” he said cheerfully in the door.
“Do you mind his cigarette?” I asked her. “Or shall we order him back into the dining-room?”
“I love it!” said Barbara. “Peter smokes everywhere. Mother and I sometimes wish we smoked ourselves, just to be on terms with him.”
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