Madame Claire/Chapter 2
Dawson thought her mistress must have begun to write her "memoyers," she wrote so long. She said as much to Judy and Noel when they came to pay Madame Claire a visit the next day. They were much interested in the news. Judy remembered "Old Stephen," as she had called him years ago, and identified him by describing a mole that he had on one cheek. It was her first experience with moles, and for a long time after she confused that little mound on his face, with the bigger mounds the moles made in the lawn, and thought that a much smaller animal of the same species must have been to blame for it.
As a child she had an extraordinary memory—a memory that seemed to go beyond the things of this life. She came trailing clouds of glory in a way that used to alarm her mother and delight her grandmother. Millicent was quite shocked at a question of hers when she was four.
"Mummy, whose little girl was I before I was yours?"
Of course Millicent answered:
"Little silly, you've always been my little girl."
But Judy wouldn't hear of it, and shook her head till the curls flew.
When her grandmother questioned her about it, she would only repeat:
"It was another mummy under the big tree."
Millicent was convinced that she only said it to annoy.
Noel too had little peculiarities as a child. Loud music always hurt his eyes, he said, and when he heard a noisy brass band he would shut them tightly and cry out:
"It's hideous! It's so red. I hate that color."
He always saw color in music and heard music in color, and never knew that he was different from other people until he went to school, and there the boys teased him out of it. Think of the individual oddnesses that are strangled (for better or for worse) in school! Limbo must be full of childish conceits and strange gleams of knowledge.
On that particular afternoon the two of them amused their grandmother even more than usual. They had no secrets from Madame Claire, which of course is the greatest compliment the young can pay to the old.
The subject of Judy's spinsterhood was introduced by her brother. She had refused a friend of his a week before, and he pretended that the situation seriously alarmed him.
"There's not a man on the tapis at present," he told Madame Claire. "She's given poor old Pat Enderby his walking papers, and I'm hanged if I know what she's going to do now. There isn't even a nibble that I'm aware of."
"My dear boy," said Judy from the other end of the sofa, "I've got till I'm thirty-five. That's nearly eight years. If I don't find somebody by that time, I'll know I'm not intended for matrimony."
"Every woman is intended for matrimony," said her brother judicially.
"That's nonsense. And anyway," Judy defended herself, "I've no intention of rushing about looking for a husband. I'm quite content to stay single as long as I have you."
"Rot," said Noel unfeelingly. "I want a lot of nephews and nieces, and Gordon's would be such awful prigs."
"So might mine be," she retorted. "There's no telling, apparently. Who'd think that Mother was Madame Claire's daughter?"
"Well, if they were prigs, their Uncle Noel would soon knock it out of them. Besides, provided you don't marry a prig—which heaven forbid, there's no reason why they shouldn't be regular young devils."
"You seem to be well up in eugenics, Noel," observed Madame Claire, her eyes twinkling. She was sitting near the fire in an old chair with a high, carved back. She loved their nonsense, and liked to spur them on to greater absurdities.
"He thinks he is," Judy said. "But honestly, spinsterhood is fast losing its terrors for me. One ought to be proud of it, and put it after one's name, like an order of merit. I shall begin signing myself, 'Judy Pendleton, V.F.C.' Virgin From Choice. Doesn't it sound charming?"
"Horrible!" exclaimed Noel. "I certainly wouldn't advertise the fact. I think spinsterhood is awful. I believe I'd rather see you a lady of easy virtue than a spinster, Judy."
"Really, Noel!" cried Judy. "And before Madame Claire!"
"She doesn't mind," scoffed Noel. "Besides, she agrees with me. Don't you, Madame Claire?"
She appeared to consider the question.
"I think spinsterhood would be less dull, in the long run," she answered. "After all, no one is freer from ties—if that is a desirable thing—than the modern unmarried woman."
"Of course," Judy seconded her. "Noel's point of view is ridiculously young. Personally I could be quite content if I had some money of my own, freedom, and a few friends."
"Bosh," spoke man through the mouth of Noel. "If you mean to include men friends, let me tell you that men are afraid of unmarried women over thirty-five or so. They can't make them out. Neither fish, flesh, nor fowl."
Judy did not pretend to dislike men.
"That's rather a dreadful thought," said she.
Tea arrived at this point, and Noel proceeded to make absurd conversation with Dawson, who had known the brother and sister from babyhood. Absurd, at least, on his part, but perfectly serious on hers. She always asked him how his arm was, meaning, presumably, the place where they took it off.
"Splendid, thanks, Dawes," he replied. "They're going to give me a new one soon, I'm glad to say. They make wonderful artificial limbs now, that can do most anything."
"So they tell me, Mr. Noel," said Dawson, arranging the tea things.
"For instance," he went on, "the one I'm going to have knows all about raising chickens. It's trained specially. I'm thinking of going in for chicken farming, you know."
"Is that a fact, Mr. Noel?" breathed Dawson.
"Oh, yes," went on the deceiver of women. "You see, I don't know a thing about chickens, and all I'll have to do will be just to follow my arm about, so to speak. It can tell the age of a pullet to a day, just by pulling its leg. That's why they call a young hen a pullet, you know. As for eggs, it can find 'em anywhere. It doesn't matter how cleverly the old hens hide them, this arm of mine can smell 'em out as quick as winking."
Dawson gaped with astonishment.
"I never would have believed it, would you, m'lady?" exclaimed the dear old London-bred soul. "They do invent wonderful things these days, don't they now?"
"Oh, that's nothing," went on Noel mercilessly. "A chap I know lost both his legs in the war. He never was much of a sportsman, but he made up his mind he'd like to go in for golf. So they made him a specially trained pair of golf legs, and hang it all! the poor fellow has to play all day long now. The worst of it is he doesn't care much about it, now that he's had a taste of it. Bores him, he says. But those blessed legs of his, they take him off to the golf links rain or shine, every day of his life; and they won't let him off at nine holes, either. Has to play the whole blooming eighteen."
At this point, Dawson's slow mind gave birth to a faint suspicion.
"Now, Mr. Noel," she said, her plain old face red with one of her easy blushes, "I believe you're just having me on."
"Nothing of the sort," said he, looking the picture of earnest candor, "you haven't heard the half of it yet. Why, another chap I know had even worse luck than that. Nice fellow, too—has a wife and family. He lost his right arm. Well, they made a mistake with him and sent him an arm that was specially designed for another chap—a Colonel in the War Office—devil of a fellow and all that. Would you believe it, every time my friend went near a Wraf or a Waac, that arm of his nearly jumped out of its socket trying to get round the girl's waist? Awkward, wasn't it?"
Dawson's expression was almost too much for him.
"Don't look so cut up about it, Dawes," he said, reaching for a cake. "It all came out right in the end. He and the Colonel swapped arms, and so he got his own, finally. It was specially designed for spanking the kids, and as the Colonel was a bachelor it was no good to him. So they both lived happy ever after."
Dawson was on her way to the door. Before making her exit, she turned her crimson face toward Madame Claire.
"I do wish, m'lady," she said, "that you'd tell Mr. Noel there's some things that ought to be sacred. And I'll say this, Mr. Noel. The arm you want is one that'll pinch you when you tell fibs."
"Good old Dawes," commented Noel between mouthfuls. "She generally manages to get her own back."
Judy and Noel were much interested at this time in Eric's matrimonial affairs. Noel especially was convinced that he and Louise were on the verge of a smash-up.
"Something's got to happen," he said. "The tension in that house is too awful. Dining there is like sitting over a live bomb and counting the seconds."
"I can't think how Eric stands it," said Judy.
Madame Claire shook her head.
"There won't be an explosion. Nothing so dramatic. What I dread most isn't a smash-up, but a freezing-up. Like the Nortons', Judy. Do you remember how they avoided each other's eyes, and never laughed, nor even smiled? Their very faces became frozen. It was terrible."
"It would take a considerable frost to freeze Eric," Judy remarked with a laugh.
"Fortunately," assented her grandmother. "What I most admire about him is that he's always ready to discuss peace. He's always hoping for signs of friendliness from the enemy."
"She treats him like a red-headed stepson," Noel said indignantly. "If he'd only begun by beating her now and then"
Madame Claire felt bound to make out a case for her daughter-in-law.
"She married the wrong man—for her—that's all," she said.
When Noel and Judy had gone, Madame Claire sat thinking about Eric and his unfortunate marriage. He was, as she had called him in her letter, dynamic. He was as impulsive and full of the love of life as his wife was joyless and cold. His chief charm lay in his perfectly sincere interest in everything and everybody. His mind was as elastic as his muscles, which were famous at Oxford, and while his wife found most things rather tedious, to him there was nothing old under the sun.
He thought he had married a charming girl, and indeed, for a while, she had charm. During his impetuous pursuit of her—for some instinct told her that the more she eluded him, the more eagerly he would pursue—she assumed a delicate sparkle that became her well. He could even remember a day when she threw out an alluring glow at which a hopeful lover might warm his hands, but it soon died, and the sparkle with it. Love may have told her how to spread the net, but of the cage in which to keep him she knew less than nothing.
Madame Claire understood better than any one else that he felt ties of the spirit far more than he felt ties of the flesh. That peculiarity he had inherited from her, for she had often been heard to say that she loved Eric because he was Eric and not because she had borne him. She declared that her affection for Judy and Noel was entirely due to their own charm and attraction for her, and had nothing to do with the fact that they were her grandchildren.
"Though I am very glad they were," she would say, "for in that way intimacy has been made easy for us."
With her daughter Millicent she had nothing in common but the blood tie, and though she rarely confessed it, there were times when it irked her.
And so her son found it impossible to be the conventional husband who takes his wife for granted. He never took Louise for granted for a single instant, and it shocked her. He treated her with the same courtesy and studied her moods as diligently as if she had been some one else's wife. When he made her a present, which he liked to do, he expected her to show the same pleasure in the gift that she would have shown before their marriage. As for her, she would have asked for nothing better than to settle down into the take-everything-for-granted matrimonial jog-trot. When the clergyman pronounced them man and wife, he said, so far as Louise was concerned, the last word on the subject. Spiritual marriage was an undreamt of thing. She expected her husband to be faithful to her and to look up to her, because, after all, she came of one of the oldest families in England. So they were rapidly growing apart. Threads had become twisted and lines of communication broken. And there seemed no good reason for it all. There was still a spark among the cooling embers, but some wind that was needed to blow upon it had shifted and gone elsewhere.
There were no children—which was a greater sorrow to Eric than to the empty-handed Louise.
"A figurehead of a wife," Judy called her, and it was true enough.
They lived in a charming house in Brook Street, which Louise complained wasn't big enough to entertain in, and was too big to say you couldn't entertain in. She had left the furnishing of it to Eric, admitting her own deficiency in the matter of taste. She bitterly resented his unerring instinct for the best thing and the right thing; a gift, she chose to maintain, it was unmanly to possess.
"I didn't know I was marrying a decorator," she was fond of saying.