Smouldering Fire

by D. E. Stevenson

  Greta Bastable was a widow with a little money and expensive tastes. She had a passion for Society. Nobody knew much about her except that she was smart and amusing and went everywhere—or nearly everywhere. She lived in a small but very modern flat on the right side of the Park, and she gave parties occasionally—rather noisy parties that went on until the early hours of the morning.

  Greta was talking to M. Gaston about the new models when she saw Mrs. Hetherington Smith come in. Good, thought Greta, she can give me a lift home. Aloud she said, “That petunia model wants a touch of colour. Perhaps a rose pink spray—or orchids.” It amused her to find fault with M. Gaston’s models, and she was nearly always right in her criticisms, for her taste in clothes was impeccable. She wrote the fashion column for a big daily paper, and the Society News for a weekly, to augment her income, but not even her most intimate friends were aware of this. Greta found it gave her a freer hand to be strictly anonymous—especially for the Society News.

  M. Gaston hurried off to try the effect of the spray, and Greta made her way over to the small gold sofa where Mrs. Hetherington Smith was ensconced.

  “What luck meeting you here!” exclaimed Mrs. Hetherington Smith, who was now an adept at the patter of Society, and had long ago given up the middle-class habit of saying how do you do to her acquaintances.

  “I was thinking the same thing,” Greta said, smiling and sitting down on the sofa beside her. “I was just wondering how on earth I could cadge a lift home, and there you were—an answer to my prayers.”

  Mrs. Hetherington Smith smiled. Greta’s frankness amused her. “But I’m not,” she said. “I sent the car away. I’m going to walk home across the Park.”

  “Good God!”

  “You see, I don’t get enough exercise,” explained Mrs. Hetherington Smith apologetically. “I don’t dance, you see—”

  She broke off and her gaze wandered vaguely round the room. She wanted an afternoon frock, but these were all too flamboyant for her proportions. Greta looked at her and thought: I wonder who she is—and what she is. She looks as if she had a history—an interesting face, and yet she never says anything interesting. Is she full of secrets, or empty? I don’t think she’s empty, somehow. I wonder where they have come from—nobody seems to know. It might be interesting to find out—and lucrative . . .

  Mrs. Hetherington Smith was thinking, Now is the time to ask her, but the thing is to do it casually. I wonder why I’m nervous about it. She said, “I want an afternoon frock—that grey one is pretty, but grey doesn’t suit me.”

  “No, it wouldn’t,” agreed her companion. “But you might have something the same in navy blue. Gaston doesn’t copy his models, but he could design you something on the same lines.”

  “I might ask him, mightn’t I?” said Mrs. Hetherington Smith. “I want something simple—for Scotland. We’ve taken a place there for the season. I wondered if you could fit in a couple of weeks with us—”

  “How sweet of you!” Greta exclaimed. “I adore Scotland. Is it a big party?”

  “Oh, no!” replied her prospective hostess. “It’s quite a small place—only fourteen bedrooms, and Arthur wants most of them for his men friends. He took it because the shooting is excellent. It’s called Ardfalloch, and it’s miles from everywhere—no electric light or gas—I don’t know what the servants will say.”

  Mrs. Hetherington Smith was rather proud of this speech. It was in the right tradition, she felt; she waited for Greta’s reaction to it with interest.

  “I adore candlelight!” cried Greta enthusiastically.

  She stayed with Mrs. Hetherington Smith long enough to clinch the matter and arrange the date of her arrival, and then wandered off to find somebody less mad on the subject of exercise to give her a lift home.

  Mrs. Hetherington Smith continued to sit on the sofa; she watched the mannequins and thought her own thoughts about them. What were they like really, she wondered, when they were clad in their everyday garments. What sort of homes did they go back to?

  Suddenly a soft voice said, “Do you mind if I sit here?”

  “No, of course I don’t mind,” replied Mrs. Hetherington Smith quickly. “I may be big, but I don’t need a whole sofa to myself.” She ended with a chuckle, and then thought: I shouldn’t have said that; she took me by surprise. It certainly was a trifle out of keeping with her part. It was the sort of thing Mrs. Smith might have said, and the chuckle was pure Mrs. Smith. I’ll have to look out, she thought. I’ll have to be more careful. . . .

  The girl—or woman—who had spoken sat down on the sofa beside her, and they looked at each other. Mrs. Hetherington Smith saw a pale face, rather small featured, and dark blue eyes beneath the drooping brim of a fashionable hat. The girl—or woman—saw Mrs. Hetherington Smith. She had heard Mrs. Smith speak, but it was Mrs. Hetherington Smith that she saw—it was rather intriguing.

  “I get so tired,” she said.

  “Standing about is tiring,” agreed Mrs. Hetherington Smith. “I like walking, it is not nearly so tiring.”

  “No,” said the girl. “I like walking, too—in the country, of course.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  Mrs. Hetherington Smith thought: I’d like to talk to this girl properly. I oughtn’t to, of course, it’s not the thing, but I don’t care. There’s something interesting about her. She’s real. She’s been through things. What a sad face she has got!

  “Do you live in the country?” Mrs. Hetherington Smith enquired.

  “No. I wish I did.”

  “Perhaps you lived in the country when you were a child-—”

  “I never lived in town until I was married,” replied the girl. “I liked it at first, and then I hated it.”

  She’s married, thought Mrs. Hetherington Smith, I wonder how old she is. She looks about twenty-eight or thirty, but she said she was tired, so perhaps she’s younger than she looks. She hasn’t had her eyebrows plucked—they don’t need it—I like the colour of them—sort of chocolate colour. Is her hair that colour, too, I wonder. She’s got a lovely clear skin and her mouth is pretty—touched up a little, perhaps, but not too much. I wonder if she minds me talking to her—she doesn’t seem to. I shall go on talking to her; if she doesn’t like it she can snub me.

  “That pink frock would suit you,” she said.

  “I don’t feel like pink just now,” replied her companion, a trifle bitterly.

  “You might feel like it if you wore it,” said Mrs. Hetherington Smith. “It’s funny how different frocks can make you feel different. I nearly always wear black, because I’m big, you see; but I often wish I could wear pink—it’s cheery.” There now, she thought, I’ve done it again. This girl is having a funny effect on me. She makes me feel real.

  “But have you ever felt that you had no clothes on at all?” enquired the girl. “Have you ever felt that you wanted to muffle yourself up in a fur coat and crawl into a dark corner?”

  “Yes,” replied Mrs. Hetherington Smith simply. She had felt exactly like that at her first dinner-party, her bare shoulders had cried aloud to Heaven for a covering. But this girl couldn’t have felt that. This girl had been born to bare shoulders if Mrs. Hetherington Smith knew anything about it. She couldn’t have meant that—what did she mean then?

  “Well, if you’ve felt it—” the girl said, as if that were all there was to be said on the subject.

  “But you’re not big like me,” Mrs. Hetherington Smith pointed out. “You don’t need to worry.”

  The girl had turned away. She’s disappointed in me, thought Mrs. Hetherington Smith distractedly. I’ve said the wrong thing and she knows I haven’t understood. She’ll go away in a minute and I’ll never see her again. She spoke to me like that because she was desperate. It must be some other kind of nakedness she’s felt—not bodily nakedness. Oh dear, why wasn’t I born with brains?

  She said quietly, “I’m not clever, you know; but if you would tell me about it I think I could understand.”
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  The girl turned her head and looked at Mrs. Hetherington Smith for a minute. It was a kind face, not very clever perhaps, but full of intelligence; it was very kind, and eager, and friendly.

  “Well,” she said hesitatingly, “but not here—”

  “No, of course not here,” agreed Mrs. Hetherington Smith, rising and gathering up her bag and her sable stole.

  They went out together. It was not until she got outside that Mrs. Hetherington Smith remembered she had sent her car away. She told the commissionaire to hail a taxi. They got in and drove home to the Hetherington Smith mansion in Berkeley Square.

  Greta Bastable saw them drive off together and bit her lip reflectively. She thought: So she didn’t walk home across the park—and fancy her knowing Linda Medworth!

  * * * * *

  Tea was ready in the Hetherington Smith drawing-room—a low table, glittering with silver and china, stood before the fire. Linda Medworth drew off her gloves and sat down in the comfortable chair selected for her. Am I mad? she thought. Perhaps the strain and worry have affected my brain—I don’t even know the woman’s name. The drawing-room was just right, neither too modern, nor too old-fashioned—it was almost too right, if anything, Linda thought, and everything was rather too new. She had a moment of sheer panic, and visions of crooks and the white slave traffic swept through her mind.

  Had the woman picked her up—like that—on purpose. (There was that queer tale of Stevenson’s in which somebody had furnished a whole house for one night as a net to catch some people he wanted—she could not remember the whole story, but the furnishing of the house for one night had stuck in her mind, and the coming of the pantechnicons at dawn to take the furniture away.) Her eyes returned to her hostess’s face and the panic fled—it was a good face, kind and interested.

  “Milk or lemon?” enquired Mrs. Hetherington Smith.

  “Lemon, please.”

  “You ought to take milk. You could do with a little more flesh on your bones. Now, I take lemon because I’m big enough. It’s rather a worry to me—my size. I’m too greedy to diet properly, but I don’t mind lemon in my tea.” She thought: I’m babbling—that’s not the way to make her feel at home with me, or is it? I’m sure I don’t know.

  Linda Medworth held out her hand for the cup, and smiled at her hostess. “Do you often do this?” she enquired.

  “Do what?”

  “Pick up perfect strangers and bring them home to tea with you.”

  “Just as often as you allow yourself to be picked up by a perfect stranger and whisked off in a taxi to a strange house.”

  “How do you know I don’t often do it?”

  “Well, do you?” retorted Mrs. Hetherington Smith. “The truth is we trusted each other and here we are.”

  “Tell me why you did it,” Linda said.

  Mrs. Hetherington Smith frowned thoughtfully. It was difficult to explain why she had done it. The girl had looked as if she needed a friend, or at least somebody that she could use as a friend—an ear to which she could pour her troubles—and Mrs. Hetherington Smith was tired of being useless and ornamental and artificial. Here’s somebody I can help, she had said to herself, and she had hailed the girl off in a taxi. There were so few ways of helping people when you were rich (except of course by giving them money, which was a dull way). When you were poor it was so much easier to be useful to your neighbours—you could go in and give a hand when a new baby arrived, or when people were ill. You could be useful. Mrs. Hetherington Smith liked that. She had thought it would be easy, the girl needed a friend and she would supply the need. But it wasn’t so easy, somehow; there was a sort of undercurrent of bitterness and defiance in the girl. She couldn’t quite understand it. Perhaps the girl was regretting her impulse—perhaps she felt trapped. Mrs. Hetherington Smith retrieved a dish of crumpets from a silver stand beside the fire, and offered it to her guest. “You were going to tell me something,” she said, a trifle shyly, “and I want to hear, of course. But if you’ve changed your mind about telling me, it doesn’t matter. People often change their minds—I mean, don’t think that you’ve got to tell me because you’ve come. It’s nice for me to have you to tea like this—”

  “You don’t know who I am?”

  “No, ought I to know?”

  “I’m Linda Medworth.”

  Mrs. Hetherington Smith’s face was blank. “Well, I suppose I ought to know—but I’m afraid I don’t,” she said slowly. “You’ll have to tell me whether you’ve flown to Australia or written a novel that everyone’s talking about—”

  Linda put back her head and laughed. She had pretty white teeth and her eyes crinkled up at the corners. She looked years younger when she laughed.

  “Why, you’re quite a child!” exclaimed Mrs. Hetherington Smith in surprise.

  “I’m twenty-six,” replied Linda, sobering down rapidly. “And just at the moment I feel double that age—but never mind that. I’ve made up my mind to tell you everything—if you really want to hear—if you can be bothered with my troubles.”

  “Of course I want to hear.”

  “It’s quite long.”

  “Never mind that, my dear,” said Mrs. Hetherington Smith.

  Linda’s story took a long time to tell. She found it difficult at first, for she had never told it all before—not in this kind of way. It took longer because she missed out bits of it thinking—no, I won’t tell her that—and then found that she had to tell her that because the story didn’t hang together properly without. And they got tangled up because Mrs. Hetherington Smith asked such a lot of questions and put Linda out of her stride. Linda realised before she had gone far that her new friend might not be exactly clever in the usually accepted sense of the word, but she was full of common sense, and she was comfortable—like an easy chair is comfortable—and as placid as a Gloucestershire mere on an August afternoon.

  Mrs. Hetherington Smith accepted everything she was told with perfect calm. She digested the most hair-raising statements without blinking an eyelid. At first, in the bitterness of her pain, Linda tried deliberately to shock her new friend. If she wants to hear my story, she shall hear it, she told herself. I’ll make her sit up, she thought. But Mrs. Hetherington Smith was quite unshockable. She had lived for four years in a tenement in a street off the Edgware Road and she had taken an active part in the lives of her neighbours. A good many queer things had happened to her during those four years. She had helped to separate drunken husbands and wives, and to bind up their wounds, and had made them a cup of tea afterwards and stayed to share it. She had seen a man die of carbolic acid poisoning. She had helped to deliver a baby. All these things had seemed real to Mrs. Smith and quite natural—it was not likely that anything Linda told her could shock her.

  “Tell me first of all why I ought to know your name,” Mrs. Hetherington Smith had said. It was evident to her that her guest was searching for a way to begin, and Mrs. Hetherington Smith always read the last few pages of a novel before she started on the story. She liked to know where she was, and whether to be prepared for a tragic dénouement or happiness all round.

  “Oh, that!” Linda said. “I thought everybody knew who I was—that’s why I told you I felt naked. It’s all been in the papers—Medworth v. Medworth and Stacker—photographs and paragraphs and more photographs until I thought every errand boy in London must know my face—”

  “I don’t read the papers for days, sometimes,” Mrs. Hetherington Smith explained apologetically.

  “I never knew it would be like that,” Linda continued. “If I had known how awful it would be I would have hesitated before I decided to divorce Jack. I did hesitate, of course, because you don’t divorce your husband without hesitating—”

  “No, of course not,” agreed her friend.

  “The lawyers never warned me that the publicity would be so—so appalling.”

  “Perhaps if they had, you wouldn’t have done it at all,” suggested Mrs. Hetherington Smith. I suppose I shall fi
nd out in time what it’s all about, she thought.

  “But I had to do it,” Linda said earnestly. “I had to do it because of Richard.”

  Richard, thought Mrs. Hetherington Smith—now who is Richard, I wonder. She divorced Jack because of Richard. I’m sure I got that right.

  “Well, you’re free now,” said Mrs. Hetherington Smith comfortably.

  “Yes, I’m free. I can’t help thinking about that man in the Bible who said, ‘At a great price obtained I this freedom.’ I’m free but I’m dirty. I’ve been mauled over with words till I hate myself and everybody else.”

  “Why don’t you go away for a bit?” suggested Mrs. Hetherington Smith sensibly.

  Linda threw up her head. “I’ll face it out,” she said. “I’ve done nothing to be ashamed of. People would think I was running away. I’ve been foolish and stubborn, of course, but I haven’t done anything wrong. So I’m not going to run away. I was foolish to marry Jack,” she continued. “Foolish and stubborn; I wouldn’t take advice, I wouldn’t be warned. Lots of people tried to warn me about Jack before I married him, but I was young and foolish—my head was turned. I thought I could keep him—I thought I could keep him straight—I couldn’t do either. I was nineteen when I met Jack and married him. He appealed to me because he was different from other men. He was bold and reckless and amusing; he swept me off my feet. I wouldn’t listen to anything against Jack. It was just jealousy, I thought, jealousy because he loved me. Even then he had a stream of women after him—we laughed at them together—”

  “Jack Medworth!” exclaimed Mrs. Hetherington Smith suddenly. “Why, of course—he races cars, doesn’t he? Everybody knows about him. He won the Paris Grand Prix, didn’t he?”

  Linda nodded. “It was his racing that fascinated me—I was a fool, of course, but only one amongst many. That was why there was so much publicity over the divorce, you see. Because Jack is so well known. As I said before he always has a stream of women following him about, asking for his autograph or if they may take a photograph of him—just as if he were a film star.”