After Noon (Ertz)/Chapter 11
VENETIA, unlike Caroline, was superstitious about May as a month for weddings, but there was no help for it. Clive sailed on the thirty-first. They must marry on the thirtieth.
"And after all," she said to Charles, "it's nature's bridal month, obviously; all the trees and hedges are in white. What's good enough for nature is good enough for me."
From the twelfth to the thirtieth Charles saw little enough of her, which was not surprising. She bought clothes, went to fittings with Lydia Chalmers, finished her statue of the boy with the fish, supervised its casting, had herself, after long discussions with both Charles and Clive, who refused to give advice but were willing to state their own views, both baptised and confirmed, and finally, two days before Caroline's wedding, had her hair shingled and permanently waved.
Charles protested loudly against this piece of vandalism as he called it, but Clive said he didn't mind; he only wanted her to be comfortable. She returned from the hairdresser and sought out Charles in his room as he was dressing for dinner.
"I'm shingled, father," she said, taking off her hat.
"I see you are," said Charles. "I like it."
"Well!" she cried. "After all the fuss you made . . ."
"Fuss?" Charles said, fastening his collar. "Nonsense. I never made a fuss. You must be thinking of Clive."
Caroline made almost no preparations for her wedding beyond buying a pair of stout boots, a cheap tweed coat and skirt, and two sets of what she called plain but good underwear. She asked Charles to give her, as a wedding present, an imitation ivory toilet set, and from Venetia she requested a suit-case made of brown fibre, which she said was the lightest to carry.
"But you won't be carrying it yourself," protested Venetia. "Why don't you have a leather one? The extra weight doesn't matter."
"If I don't carry it, Phil will have to," she said. Porters were evidently not even considered by them.
They were leaving on the afternoon of the eighteenth for a walking tour of the Lake District. Their "heavy" luggage would go by train and charabanc, and they meant to carry with them only a small light bundle apiece. They were coming back for Venetia's wedding and then returning to the Lake District again for a further ten days. After that they would move into a small flat in Hampstead over some shops, which "Mother Kate" had found for them.
To Venetia it all seemed rather miserable and depressing.
"A few months ago," she told Charles, "Caroline wouldn't have dreamt of going on a walking tour for her honeymoon. I don't think she's strong enough. Phil and the Robinsons have completely changed her."
Phil, who had gone on foot over the Dolomites and had tramped over half Switzerland, had perfect faith in Caroline's ability as a walker.
"Caroline's a perfectly healthy, normal girl," he said, when Venetia begged him not to do too many miles a day. "You may be sure I'll take the greatest care of her."
Caroline shingled her hair the day before her wedding. She had strongly advised Venetia not to do it, but when Phil saw her sister's head he implored Caroline to follow suit, which she did with some reluctance. It didn't please her to follow Venetia's example in anything, and she wished fervently that she had done it first. But Phil's pleasure was her law, and she came back from a cheap and obscure hairdresser in the King's Road with her fair hair cut very short, like a boy's. She had gone Venetia one better. Phil was delighted with the result. She made him think more than ever of a Joan of Arc.
To Charles there was a certain pathos about that registry-office wedding in Henrietta Street. Venetia thought it very like obtaining a dog license, or a license for driving a car. The crudeness of it made her wince. Only Mr. and Mrs. Robinson were there, and Charles and herself. Caroline said that if Clive came she would have to ask Phil's sister and her husband, which would make too many. The party returned to Eaton Gardens afterwards for lunch. Phil was nervous and inclined to be fussy, although he smiled continually and made jokes. He had his watch beside his plate during lunch, as they had their train to catch, and reluctantly sipped the champagne which Charles insisted on giving him. He would only let Caroline put the glass to her lips.
"I don't care what his politics are," said Venetia afterwards. "What I do object to is his priggishness. I don't feel a bit happy about Caroline. They're so sententious, all of them."
"Well, it's done now," said Charles.
She pressed his hand.
"Father, you do like Clive, don't you? Really like him, I mean."
"I love him," answered Charles.
It was true. He had grown to love Clive, and would have had him no different. He liked his clean-cut mind, his nice humour, his frank and passionate adoration of Venetia, his contempt for the courtier type of soldier, his strong sense of justice, his fearlessness, which Charles admired all the more because he knew him to be complex and sensitive. A very strong friendship sprang up between them, which delighted Venetia almost to the point of tears. Her cup of happiness would have been full but for that voyage to India, and the two or, possibly, three years that would separate them from Charles. And yet she could have done no differently. To have allowed those thousands of miles to come between herself and Clive would have been worse than foolish; it would have been almost criminal. With every hour, with every day that passed they were growing nearer together, they rejoiced in each other more.
"Father," she said one day, "if I ever complained of the way you brought me up, I humbly apologise. Clive says practically everything that's nice about me he can trace to you, and I believe he's right."
Charles was unspeakably touched and moved. This heady praise was almost more than he could bear.
"Caroline will never say that," he remarked.
"Caroline was born with a terribly decided little character of her own, and you haven't been able to influence her much."
"She's all right," said Charles, loyally.
"Well, five years from now," said Venetia, "she'll either be enormously improved or, from our point of view, absolutely ruined. It will be one or the other. Do try to see as much of her as you can."
"I intend to," said Charles. "Even if it means seeing Phil at the same time. Even if it means seeing Mrs. Robinson. Greater love hath no man than this."
"And father, Lydia Chalmers is such a dear, and very fond of you. Do see something of her. You needn't be afraid she'll misunderstand."
"I'm not afraid of that," he said.
"I'm hoping to hear," Venetia added, "that she's married again before very long."
"To anyone in particular?" Charles asked quickly.
"No. Just to someone nice, who'll appreciate her. There's a man here now, an American, who is in love with her, I'm sure. I've met him."
"What's he like?"
"Very agreeable. Just a little elderly and staid for her, I think. A sort of spinster bachelor."
"She hasn't mentioned him to me."
"No, I don't suppose she has. And you haven't seen much of her lately, have you?"
"I only wanted to see you, my darling, and Caroline."
"Oh, father, try to like other people more. Mrs. Mallison, and Miss Brewer . . ."
"I'll go and call on them next week."
"Promise?"
"I promise."
"I'll write to you by every mail," she said, "and Clive very nearly as often. And Marie has sworn to look after you, and not let you have any household worries."
"I ought to give up this house," he said.
Venetia protested strongly.
"I must go on thinking of you here," she said.
"I think I ought to take a small bachelor flat somewhere."
"Would you rather do that?"
"Good heavens, no. But it seems absurd to live here alone, and extravagant besides."
"Your expenses will be much less when we've gone, and Marie is a good manager. Promise me you won't think of giving up the house."
"I promise," he said again.
Now that Venetia was going to leave him, she understood him better than she had ever done. He knew that Clive had much to do with that, and was grateful to him. It was satisfactory to realise that both his sons-in-law liked him, though his own feelings for them were so different. Even Phil, he thought, might strengthen the bond between himself and Caroline. He was sure he had no desire to weaken it.
He often wondered how other men felt toward their daughters. If he had had a wife who would, doubtless, have been half responsible for their upbringing, he would have minded the loss of them less, and, in all probability, he would have loved them less. Their complete dependence on him, his large responsibility toward them had dwarfed everything else in his life. His mind at this time often went back to that boarding-house in Lancaster Gate and his long struggle there with bills, with childish illnesses, and, for the first year or two, with indifferent nurses. He remembered how he had kept aloof from all his fellow lodgers, especially the women, who developed, as a rule, the most fatuous and maddening fondness for the twins, and were always wanting to kiss them and give them unwholesome sweets. He had been rude, ruthless. He had taken on a difficult job, and had carried it through to his own satisfaction. His daughters' criticisms of his education of them did not disturb him very seriously. Youth always saw where its upbringing could have been bettered. That was natural enough. What he longed for was their affection, and that he knew he had to work for. If he ever bored them with parental platitudes, he had only himself to blame. To be as unlike a parent as possible had been his chief concern. In Venetia's case he had been amply rewarded. She had always been amused and entertained by him. She had had her little rebellions and antagonisms, but they were short-lived and unimportant. She adored him now, and was profoundly grateful to him for not letting her feel, for an instant, that she was achieving her own happiness at the expense of his.
Venetia wore white at her wedding because she had always pictured herself as being married in white, and she hated to disappoint the child she had so lately been. Clive's father, Colonel Cary, bearing his arthritic joints with a jaunty air, as the day demanded, came to church on crutches, and was discovered to be asleep before the end of the service. He was old and broken, more like Clive's grandfather than his father, but his elder sons' deaths, one in the battle of Jutland, the other at Zeebrugge, had crippled him mentally and physically. Charles, looking at him, wondered how long England would continue to reproduce his type. His life had been dedicated to obedience, given and received. The subtleties and complexities of life did not exist for him. The world consisted of good and evil, fearlessness and cowardice, good fellows and rotters. The good fellows married nice women in their own class, fought bravely, played games, cheated no one, went to church regularly, and scorned French cooking. He had a poor opinion of people who worked in the City, but otherwise had nothing against either Charles or Venetia, whose loveliness pleased him. He was a perfect specimen of his type, and Charles, when he asked himself whether its passing was for good or ill, was in doubts as to the answer.
Caroline, unbecomingly sunburned, Phil, his hair bleached and looking wilder than ever, ugly Miss Brewer, old Mrs. Mallison who had given Caroline and Venetia their coming-out ball three years before and was devoted to Charles, Rupert Hinkson and his brother Leopold and Mrs. Leopold, Lydia Chalmers, and Marie the cook were the only guests. There were no bridesmaids, and Clive had decided to dispense with a best man.
Charles, having given Venetia away, retired to his pew and tried to close his eyes and ears to the rest of the ceremony. It was too lacerating. He invited into his mind the most frivolous and unseemly thoughts. By turning his head slightly he could see Lydia, and he presently let his eyes rest on her. She was looking very pretty in a dress of fawn-coloured silk and a smart little hat with a cockade in it.
"Now how much, exactly, do I like her?" he asked himself, averting his face from the two kneeling figures at the altar. He liked her, he decided, much better than any woman he had ever known. That wasn't saying very much, perhaps, if he didn't count his three years of feverish love for Brenda. He was fond of Miss Brewer in an entirely sexless way. She had a charming personality, brains and gifts, and the hardihood to laugh at her own extreme ugliness. "The Monster," she called herself. Charles liked and admired her. Mrs. Mallison was an old coquette, a pretty, white-haired woman, who was still full of pleasing vanities. Charles would have seen more of her, but that she always teased him to come to her parties, which did not amuse him at all. Lydia, in a race with these two, led easily. She never teased him in any way. No one was so well balanced, so sane, so aware of other people's points of view. He respected her judgment, he was beginning to fear her charms. How much, he wondered, could he see of her with impunity—and immunity? Not very much. He wondered if he would continue to give small dinner parties, now that he was alone. He considered, first of all, a party of four, consisting of Lydia, Miss Brewer, Rupert Hinkson and himself. Dull, dull! No, without Venetia he preferred to be alone, entirely alone. No makeshifts. He saw himself sliding gently down, by easy stages, into a deep rut. That didn't matter. Nothing mattered very much now. . . .
He, Venetia, Clive, Rupert Hinkson and the parson went out into the vestry, while the organ played a voluntary selected by Clive.
It was over.
They all went back to the house for what Charles called "a collation." Marie had made a magnificent wedding cake. She loved Venetia, and her heart was very heavy to think that she would never live there any more. She had never been very fond of Caroline, who had no palate for food. To order food, to cook it, even to eat it intelligently required temperament, and she considered that Caroline had none. Charles had it and Venetia had it. Marie was very critical of Caroline, a little critical of Charles, whose habits she considered unnecessarily regular, but of Venetia she was not critical at all. In marrying such a "beau jeune homme" she had reached the very pinnacle of her esteem and favour. She and King, the elderly butler who often came in to wait at dinners, served the tea, Marie still wearing her out-of-door clothes which she had put on for the wedding. Everyone talked to her. She was outspoken and original, and her talk, like her food, had character.
Caroline had come down early from Hampstead, where she and Phil were staying with his parents, to arrange the flowers, which she did conscientiously and stiffly. She had no feelings of tenderness toward the home she had left. She felt that she had spent a profitless and cramped youth there, though in what way it had been cramped she would have found it difficult to say. The only possible life for her was the life she was now going to live with Phil. She thought Venetia's wedding, simple as it was, all flummery, and compared it unfavourably with her own. She thought civil marriages would probably survive time's changes, but she believed the religious marriage was doomed. She also looked forward to the day when it would be exactly as easy to untie the knot as to tie it.
"As it is, it's a trap," she said. "Easy to get into, hard to get out of. It ought to be made easy both ways, or hard both ways."
She liked to imagine that she and Phil were held together by nothing but their own wish. Matrimony, however, she took to as the proverbial duck takes to the green waters of the farmyard pond. She only wished she had met and married Phil at seventeen. She loved their walking honeymoon in the sun and rain of the Lake District, the crude and simple intimacy of their life together. She was often ready to drop with weariness, but when she reached that point the inn they were aiming for was never far away. She thought his skill with maps amazing. Everything he did pleased and satisfied her; nor did the sight of his pince-nez flashing back the rays of the sun as it sank behind Helvellyn jar upon her.
She spoke a few words to Lydia, said she hoped she was enjoying herself, and added, "Do see something of father. I feel he may miss Venetia more than he realises."
"Don't you think he realises it now?" asked Lydia.
"Well, he seems in very good spirits at the moment," Caroline answered.
Lydia thought: "You've got to go through a lot, my dear, before you'll be human," but she liked Caroline in spite of that, and was amused by her. Little signs of uxoriousness on Phil's part amused her too. She noticed how he praised Caroline to the others, hovered jealously near her, and compared her in his mind, she was sure, with her less earnest, less useful sister. The moment the champagne was brought in, he was on the defensive—champagne being for him a symbol of luxury and vice—and, as at his own wedding, he again frowned at Caroline as she took up her glass.
"I think I must drink my sister's health," Lydia heard her say, and then Phil's reply in a low, urgent voice:
"Yes, I know, sweetest, but only a sip, please. You know how I hate it."
Charles went out, bareheaded, and saw Venetia and Clive into the taxi that was to take them to their hotel. He and Clive stood talking, the younger man's arm about his shoulders.
"Good-bye, Charles, old boy, bless you," Clive said.
"Not good-bye," cried Venetia, "as we're seeing him to-morrow. You'll come in plenty of time to see us off, won't you, father, so that we can talk in peace?"
Charles said there need be no fear of his not getting there in time. He thought Venetia looked pale and tired—small wonder—and he guessed, too, that she was feeling the parting as much, nearly, as he was. He kissed her again, smiled and waved his hand, shut the cab door smartly and turned away. The door of the house and the steps seemed to swim toward him on his own tears.
Venetia, as the cab drove off, flung herself into Clive's arms.
"It's hellish, having to leave him like this," she cried.
"It is," agreed Clive. "But it would have been considerably more hellish if you hadn't."
The guests drifted away. Caroline and Phil left soon after the departure of the bride and groom, as they had a train to catch; Rupert Hinkson went next, after a long talk with Lydia; then Miss Brewer, gaily dressed in bright colours that made her ugliness look picturesque, then Mrs. Mallison, after extracting a promise from Charles to come and dine, then Mr. and Mrs. Leopold Hinkson, who showed a disposition to be sympathetic; until finally only Lydia was left. As she offered her hand in good-bye Charles said:
"Don't go yet. Let's leave all this ghastly débris and go down to my room for a smoke."
The fig tree made a green wall now against the window, and the room made Lydia think of a room under the sea. They sat and talked and smoked cigarettes.
"What are you going to do to-night?" she asked him.
"God knows," said Charles. "Anything but dine here."
He had thought of the Café Royal, but discarded the idea. It would recall too vividly the misery and the futility of that other night.
"Why not dine with me?" she asked, with qualms and uncertainties unguessed by Charles.
"I thought you'd probably have another engagement. You're so busy these days."
She had been dreading that he might say, tersely, that he wanted to be alone. She was encouraged.
"I had, but I can easily put it off. I was only going to dine with someone . . . it wasn't of any importance. I think we'd be better company for each other to-night than for anyone else." She added: "I only knew Venetia for a short time, but I shall miss her horribly. There are so few people I really love, and I do love her. So don't imagine you're the only one to be pitied."
"I don't think I'm to be pitied at all," said Charles, and threw back his head. "On the contrary, I'm a damned fortunate fellow. I'm a comparatively young man, I'm to all intents and purposes a bachelor, and I have sufficient money for my needs. I mean to have a hell of a time."
His air of gaiety, which was not even intended to deceive, made him seem to her both lovable and pitiable.
"I might easily get too fond of him," she thought.
"I know," she said aloud, "doesn't it sound enviable? Millions of men would give anything to be in your place."
"I shall do all the things I've never done. Give dinner parties to fragile and fruity young women, gamble, get into the bankruptcy court, have my photograph taken at Deauville in a bathing suit and on the Lido in pyjamas, be cited as co-respondent and end by acting for the films. What have I been all these years but a domestic drudge?"
"Like me," she suggested.
"And the mournful fact is," he went on, "I've no desire to be anything else. You see in me a family man—except that I distrust and dislike matrimony. What I would really like to do would be to live the last twenty years over again."
"Oh," she cried, "if you can say that, you've been happy. The only years of my life that I want to live over again are the five years when I had Robert. I'd give the rest of my life for those."
"You poor dear," said Charles quickly, and put out a hand towards her. "I talk too much about my own troubles, but you encourage me to do it. Tell me, what are your plans?"
His sympathy caused Lydia to feel a stab of self-pity. No one, seeing her like this, realised her loss. No one could, who hadn't gone through a similar experience. She suddenly felt sore and unloved and alone.
"I think I shall go to Paris at the end of the week," she said.
The words were no sooner spoken than she realised she had said them in order to see what effect they would have on him. His expression changed. She saw his hand go to his hair and begin twisting a lock of it. It was a habit with which she was familiar, and she knew it meant, in some degree, mental agitation.
"To Paris? For how long?"
She looked away from him, out of the window. The light that filtered in through the thick leaves of the fig tree made her look pale, and gave her fair hair a greenish cast.
"I don't know. I might stay in Paris the whole of July, and then go to Brittany. Or I could visit Grace de Ferrière." In the silence that followed she got up and gave him her hand. "But I'll tell you more of my plans later. You're dining with me at the Berkeley, aren't you?"
"No," said Charles. "You're dining with me." He mentioned a hotel that had a balcony overlooking Hyde Park. "Let's say a quarter past eight. The daylight lasts for ever now."
"Yes," she said, "I love these long days, in London."
"Then why go to Paris?"
"Oh . . . for a lot of reasons." He went to the door with her. "Good-bye, for the moment."
"I'll call for you at ten past," said Charles, and stood looking after her as she walked away.
The sun was hot, and she put up an orange-coloured parasol which screened her both from Charles's eyes and from the eye of the sun. She had lost, for the moment, her usual poise, and as she walked toward Eaton Square there was misery in her heart.
"I shall walk back to the hotel," she thought. "It will do me good." She wanted to examine her feelings and take herself in hand. A tear fell suddenly from her cheek to the front of her dress, and then another and another. Angry, ashamed, biting her lip, she wiped them away. "Why am I crying? What is the matter with me?"
The matter was that she wanted Charles to love her, and that she already loved him. She knew it now. That was why she had said she was going to Paris. It had had an effect of a sort, but not the effect she had looked for. It was little consolation to her to feel, as she did feel, that he was fond of her but was fighting his fondness. He would succeed, she was afraid, only too well. As she dried her eyes she told herself that she had no intention of making it harder for him to fight it, but how stupid it was, and how irritating! He was wrong, wrong. To condemn marriage because one has been married to a worthless woman, or, at any rate, a very second-rate woman, was absurd. Angry with herself for caring, and for her tears, she presently began to feel rising up in her the spirit of battle.
She had never, in all her life, exerted herself to attract a man. There had been no need for her to exert herself with Edward. She was his wife. Faithfulness, with him, amounted to a vice, and he had never, as the saying is, looked at another woman. Men had loved her too easily, with too little understanding. To know that Charles, who was critical, exacting and perceptive liked her, but was fighting his liking, aroused something in her that had long been dormant. It was a sort of challenge.
"I like you, but I will like you only up to a given point and stop there," was what he seemed to say to himself.
"You will like me as much as I like," something in her protested.
It wasn't that she wanted to marry him . . . but wasn't it? Didn't she?
Walking through Eaton Square toward Buckingham Gate, the trees shaded her from the sun and she put down her parasol. She went slowly, probing into her mind. She had been attracted to him from the first. She admitted that. She had said to herself more than once, "That's the sort of man I would like to marry, if I ever marry again." She looked at the houses she passed and tried to picture herself living in any one of them with Charles. She could at any moment take one and live in it alone, but that prospect did not please her. With Charles, yes. She could see not a single disagreeable feature, supposing always that she abolished his prejudices. They enjoyed each other's society, it would put an end to their loneliness, and Charles, whether he knew it or not, needed a wife.
Having dragged these thoughts into the light, she began to consider what she ought to do. What troubled her most was her frankness, which she now perceived to have been entirely spurious, that night at the Berkeley. She realised, with disgust, that he had believed her, but that she had not really believed herself.
"I'd better go to Paris," she thought, "and forget about him." The unscrupulous female in her added, "And give him a chance to find out how much he misses you."
Well, she had been over-scrupulous all her life. Why shouldn't she now employ some of the perfectly legitimate artifices by which most women brought about those things they desired? She now knew, definitely, that she wanted to marry Charles. She also knew that she could make him far happier than he would otherwise be. As for living in England, she found, as so many other American women have found, that it suited her. She felt soothed and lulled by London. Her long overstrung nerves relaxed and ceased to torture her. She could even think with less agony and bitterness of Robert's death, now that she was so far removed from the scene of her sorrow.
"He doesn't know," she said to herself, "how happy I could make him. If he doesn't marry me he'll never marry anybody, and he'll deteriorate, as men do who live alone—and women too."
As soon as she reached the Berkeley she went up to her room and telephoned to Arthur Templeton, who was, as Venetia had guessed, in love with her, but in a mild and recurrent way. He was a bachelor of fifty-five or so, a sort of social landmark in Buffalo, and even in New York. He came annually to Europe and purchased small bibelots of one sort and another, which he carried back to America with him. He had proposed to Lydia while she was still very young, before she met Edward, and again after his death, but she had never been able to take him seriously, nor could she do so now. He was fond of titles, antiques and agreeable women, was exceedingly kind and perfectly harmless. People asked his advice about choosing primitives, coffee or husbands with equal confidence. He was a delightful friend if one didn't see too much of him, but one would as soon think, Lydia always maintained, of marrying one's grandfather. He always gave her to understand that she had wrecked his life, but that was a compliment, she suspected, that he paid to others beside herself.
"That's so like you, Lydia, you heartless creature," he protested when she rang him up. "You ruin my whole life with the utmost sang-froid, and you're overwhelmed with pity for a man who's just got his daughter safely off his hands. You've no sense of values. I suppose I shall have to let you off. I've bought some enchanting Chinese pots, for a perfectly hideous price. When will you come to see them?"
Arthur Templeton and his Chinoiseries. . . ! She found Charles and his misery infinitely more attractive. She dressed for dinner with a consciousness of entering upon a new phase of her life. She had fallen in love, she admitted it, and the knowledge excited and thrilled her. It was years, years, since she had felt anything like it.
"I'm in it at last," she thought, "up to the neck. It will probably be painful, but I don't regret it. It will be infinitely better than feeling nothing at all."