Читать книгу Stinging Nettles - Bowen Marjorie - Страница 3

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§ I

LUCIE sat in the depths of the big pale-green brocade couch that filled one corner of the dressing-room, and watched the other two women changing their clothes.

She shared their depression and felt alien and even uneasy amid the cold mechanical splendours of the great hotel; they were none of them used to this atmosphere of luxury and extravagance; not one of them had ever worn any but "ready-made" evening gowns, and, though Luck herself was in orthodox attire, she shared the grim humiliation of Sophie and Aurora, who had to change from cotton-backed satin and cheap chiffon into tweeds and "useful" coats.

It was a cold February and there was a long journey before both of them, one by train, the other by tram; in each case a dark stretch of sordid travelling.

She felt very keenly for Sophie, who was very vain and had hoped a great deal from this evening.

And nothing had come of it.

Poor Sophie, she stood for one bitter moment in her Japsilk petticoat, gazing at herself in the superb pier-glass; she was, in a fleeting sort of way, lovely to look at, but she was thinking, and Lucie was thinking, that loveliness didn't seem to matter—much.

Sophie would have liked to stare longer at herself in the mirror, to pose and turn and change the attitude of her plump, rounded limbs; the tiny glass at home would seem more inadequate than ever now; but the attendant, exquisite, aloof, was holding out skirt and jumper, stockings and shoes.

Lucie, in her useless sympathy, felt that their garments looked not alone shabby but dirty compared to the white polished enamel paint, the gleaming mirrors, the sea-coloured hangings, the dressing-table strewn with gold articles.

She glanced, her brow wrinkled and her lips caught in, at Aurora; that good-natured girl was already in her walking-dress and dragging an out-of-date travelling hat over the hair she had taken such pains to arrange a few hours previously.

Mrs. Bearish, her mother, sat, cross and tired, against the wall, wrapping the pink slippers in paper and putting them in a cloth workbag she had brought for the purpose.

Lucie's glance went from her peevish figure, to the rows of sable and brocade coats hanging round the walls, to the immaculate silhouette of the maid giving disdainful attention to Sophie, and then flickered to the mirror, where she could see her own tall, pale, fair, tired reflection.

"I wish we had not come," she thought.

Mrs. Bearish folded up the wisp of a pink satin frock and put it in the bag with the narrow ill-cut slippers.

"You'll stain the stockings, putting the black shoes over them," she warned her daughter; her voice was very pleasing and cultured; though her appearance was, for this place, quite blatantly shabby, she seemed more at her ease than the younger women; she was by birth an aristocrat, her real name was Hesselquist and she was the divorced wife of a Swedish diplomat.

Lucie rose; she wanted very much to get away, back into their usual surroundings, where they could "talk it over". She glanced furtively at Sophie, who was ready now, and looked both unimportant and untidy, with her finery in a parcel under her arm.

Lucie felt unreasonably impatient; it wasn't worth doing it, like this. She put a half-crown she could ill afford on the end of the dressing-table, for the sake of the moral fillip given by the maid's added respect, despising herself for the feeble subterfuge.

"My lip-stick has melted and messed my bag up," complained Aurora, showing a handkerchief and fingers that appeared blood—stained: her Northern breed showed in her heaviness, her placid exterior.

"You don't need to put any more on now," replied Mrs. Bearish sharply. "Do be quick, or we shall miss the train."

Sophie was dangerously silent: Lucie knew she was passionately sullen and dreaded her coming mood.

"Let us go," said Lucie, her nerves on edge to see Mrs. Bearish still fidgeting with her parcels, dropping them, repacking them and searching to see if she had forgotten anything, while Aurora tried to get the smear off her fingers and to rescue the remains of the lip-stick, looking impassive and heavy in her dark worn clothes against the artificial luxury of the hotel room.

Lucie drew Sophie towards the door.

"Come home with me," she said. "We will take a taxi and have a good talk—it is so late—Aunt Lydia said you were to come back with me if you wanted to."

"Oh, mother won't bother," said the younger cousin, shortly.

"Will you come?"

"Suppose I may as well," was the vague and careless answer.

Lucie looked sadly at the pretty face, disfigured by disappointment and temper; her own mood gave a sharp edge to her critical faculties, always too alert for her own comfort.

Sophie, whose chief asset was her looks,—was Sophie "going off"? Didn't her nose look heavy and her lips thin, and weren't her eyes weary behind the dark stuff she was beginning to put on her lashes? The elder woman's mind was touched with a dreary terror—Sophie was twenty-eight, still unmarried—was it always going to be like this?

Mrs. Bearish was ready at last. Lucie gathered her cloak round her with a sensation of relief in any sort of action; her thoughts hovered uneasily round one point; she looked covertly at her own image in the mirror—saw herself at an uncommon angle, almost in profile; these great glasses, so cunningly arranged, were disconcerting; she saw no attractiveness in her frail fairness. She was graceful, but her clothes weren't right; still, she surveyed herself indifferently; she was older than Sophie, married and "done for"; it did not matter what she looked like; with Sophie now it was different.

§ II

As she moved to open the door, two women came in, almost throwing it back in her face. They carried perfume with them, personal, heavy.

They were large, and talked loudly; without taking the slightest notice of anyone, they swung to the dressing-table. The maid, instantly obsequious, waited on them silently. Lucie had seen them dancing voluptuously in the hotel ballroom; she hated them swiftly and intently, hated their opulent clothes, their rich appointments—most of all hated their odious self-assurance; their triumphant flaunting of sex.

One of them, seated at the table, gazed into the glass with an anxious scrutiny that was cruel in its eagerness, and began very skilfully to make up her face, using a hare's-fud; when she opened her mouth, her teeth showed yellow between the carmined lips.

She was hard-featured, middle-aged, yet completely at her ease and dominant. The other, laughing and smoking together continuously, ordered the maid from one service to another, while she powdered her back with a puff that had a long scarlet handle. The original texture of her skin was lost, and creams, massage and powder had destroyed any likeness to a human body, save when the powerful muscles moved as she twisted her shoulders.

Lucie's party, entirely ignored, slipped out of the room, almost shamefacedly, through the gilt doors.

§ III

The after-dinner dance given nightly to "guests" was over, and the corridors, resplendent in mirrors, gilt furniture, palms, and cream silk upholstery, were emptying.

A few men, dull, yet watchful, stood about; their glances travelled idly to the little group of women in walking costume, then, still impassive, flickered away; Lucie was glad when the street entrance was reached.

Her host stood by the fourfold plate glass door, drawing on a pair of unworn white gloves; he was talking to the only other man who had been at the incongruous dinner, a young Indian, spectacled and serious, whose greenish, chinless face was blank of all expression.

"Goodbye, and thank you so much, Mr. Sackett," said Mrs. Bearish wanly; the other dispirited women took leave of him with equal brevity. Sophie spoke to him with a rude shortness.

Mr. Sackett, a middle-aged American, plain and dull, too well dressed, smiled on them with gentle gravity, and they passed through the swing doors into the street.

The air blew keen through the arcades of the hotel; rain slashed the outer side of the pillars blanched by the electric light; London stretched before them, dark, wet and silent.

Mrs. Bearish looked back to see if the host was following to offer any courtesies. No one appeared save the opulent porter, eyeing them with gloomy apathy.

An air of profound disappointment was over all of them, so generally felt that no one needed to voice it.

"I have such a headache," said Mrs. Bearish; "and we really shall lose that train, Aurora."

"There is time enough, mother," said the girl. A group of men were leaving the hotel, and her gaze ran over them as she spoke. "We can even walk—and must—there is no chance of a 'bus on a wet night."

Mrs. Bearish accepted this; never, under any circumstances, did they take cabs.

They said goodbye to the other two, and turned away down the wet, dark length of Piccadilly.

§ IV

There was a magnificent shop at the corner of the arcade where pictures and carvings were sold. The glooming light showed a gilt and blue statue of the Madonna with a lovely baby in her arms.

Lucie thought how warm and sweet and comfortable she looked, what a fair ideal this was—worshipped, adorned, adored maternity.

In the doorway of the shop crouched a filthy woman in dreadful tatters; she was also a mother; a diseased child clutched at her greasy jacket.

Seeing the two women, she staggered up and passed on, muttering. Lucie then saw that she carried a second child, not yet born.

Now behind the expensive plate glass among the charming, luxurious objects made to divert wealthy leisure, the clean pretty Madonna smiled.

§ V

As Lucie raised her hand to a cab that was sauntering past in the bleached light of the hotel electricity, she saw Sophie glancing back furtively, and felt both sorry and impatient—after such a dreadful evening, did she still think that Peter Sackett was interested in her?—could she still be interested in him?

She was relieved when she had the girl beside her in the stuffy darkness of the taxi, and they were hurrying along the glistening length of Piccadilly, the shining, wide, wet road, towards the furnished flat in Chelsea which was all she had of home.

Then, as she expected, Sophie Falconer broke out:

"Why did he ask us? Wasn't it awful? Dinner in the grill-room—and he yawned! Why didn't he ask me to dance? He was bored. And he brought no other men."

"I don't think he knows how to do things," said Lucie. "I shouldn't bother about him," she added feebly.

Sophie sat in fierce silence; the street lights, as they flicked past, showed her face and throat and hands white with a pearly whiteness against her dark clothes. She looked quite lovely in the blotted light and shadow so swiftly moving, save for the blight of envy and bitterness that distorted her features; sheer pity for her plight made Lucie's heart contract.

"You don't like him, so don't bother about him, Sophie," she said again. "I suppose he just asked us all out of a little sense of friendliness—nothing else."

She could not for sheer weariness expatiate on the theme; ever since her cousin Sophie had met Mr. Sackett, a hospital acquaintance of war days, at a charity féte where the girl was selling programmes, and he had at once arranged a little dinner-party in her honour at London's most expensive hotel, she had heard and seen nothing but excited speculations and excited preparations for the epoch-making event.

They did not know much about Mr. Sackett save that he was very rich and lived in Park Lane, but this was quite sufficient groundwork for the most golden dreams—those poor desperate dreams Sophie was so well used to.

Both Mrs. Bearish and Mrs. Falconer, experts in all varieties of love affairs, had been certain the man would propose to Sophie, either during or after the dinner episode; they had all been equally sure that he would bring some wealthy compatriot who would "do" for Aurora. Never had high hopes fallen so flat—Peter Sackett had taken them down to the grill-room, brought as his sole contribution, the nervous Hindu, who never opened his lips, and, without paying the least individual attention to any of the women, talked aridly and endlessly of himself.

Then he had trailed them to "watch the dancing," and had sat beside Sophie and yawned till it was time for the desperate Mrs. Bearish to give the signal for the martyrdom to end.

Lucie loathed the whole episode so intensely because it was so typical of Sophie's life, of the life she had lived herself till her marriage, of the lives of nearly all the girls and women in the half-professional, halt middle-class set of twentieth-century Bohemians in which she moved.

"Those awful women!" burst out Sophie from her dark corner. "Did you see them? and how they were dancing? They make me sick—I don't think we ought to have gone."

Lucie's honesty of nature could not allow her this solace to her discomfiture—those women, awful to her, too, were, she knew, most hateful because successful.

"Well, it is funny in a way," she said, with an effort at cheerfulness. "I mean—all these preparations, and then such a host! Mrs. Beamish looked so cross—"

"Aurora pawned her grandfather's watch to buy her frock," replied Sophie. "She got the dress in Sloane Street at a sale—it's faded, really, and the lace torn. It will take her salary for two months to get the watch back. Do you think that funny?"

Something in the dry bitterness of the girl's voice broke Lucie's control.

"Don't!" she exclaimed sharply. "It's indecent. I can't bear it, all this plotting and scheming—about—men. I don't believe, anyhow, you would have ever married that awful American—"

"That is no reason why he should not give me a good time," replied Sophie sullenly. "Besides, I might marry him—why not? Don't you suppose I'm sick of this sort of life?"

"What sort of life?" asked Lucie, as the cab jerked up against the curb and stopped. "It is life, anyhow, and as good as the next."

"I'm tired of being just respectable enough to miss all the fun," flung out Sophie defiantly. "It isn't life—we're outside everything that matters."

Lucie gave her a key.

"Run up; there will be some cocoa upstairs, in the thermos," she said, as she stepped out.

As she paid the man, she felt the wild wet wind blow from the river on her face and circling her body under the fight cloak; she was glad of it, though it made her shiver.

Even a touch of the wind could put things into proportion for Lucie Uden. "I must not be overwhelmed by this chaos round me," she told herself. "Everything is over for me—but it doesn't matter—I must remember that it doesn't matter."

She ran upstairs into the tiny flat, and straight into the living room, where Sophie Falconer was turning up the gas fire.

A few plates and cups, cake, biscuits and a thermos stood on the table which was imitation antique.

The room was quite pretty in a sort of sham way, but filmed with London dirt. All Lucie's good taste could not make a success of a furnished flat; she had very little money to spend on herself, though she was the wealthy, successful member of her set and earned several hundreds a year steadily, even during the War.

§ VI

But there always had been a heavy drain on Lucie Uden's earnings—first Mrs. Falconer and Sophie, her aunt who had, somehow, brought her up from the death of her wayward mother and the disappearance from conventional society of her impossible father, and the cousin who had been like a sister in intimacy and exactions, if not in sympathy or understanding. Neither Mrs. Falconer nor Sophie made very much headway in their respective professions of journalism and music, and they were, besides, shiftless and extravagant; but Lucie loved her aunt, and thought she loved Sophie, and had never ceased to "help" the girl in her wayward and erratic career the bourne of which was devoutly supposed to be a wealthy marriage.

Then there was her young Italian husband, an incompetent engineer who had dropped out of the only work he had ever held soon after their marriage; and the baby that had lived five months...The husband was delicate, violent and melancholy; he had returned to his parents in the South, to escape an English winter. Lucie was glad of the very real excuse of her work that prevented her from accompanying him, for the three years of her marriage had proved an utter disillusion; she was completely, though without rancour, estranged from the alien nature with which she had mated; she believed that her emotional nature had died with her only child. She was thirty and felt beyond further experience. "What I haven't had, I've missed," she said to herself often enough, and she was glad to live quietly in Chelsea with her work and plans for Sophie and talks with Mrs. Falconer, and little rounds of work and diversion in a world that hardly knew her as Madame Simonetti, but was very friendly towards her as Lucie Uden, the quite well-known designer of clothes, furniture, textiles and, in fact, everything that could be covered with decoration.

§ VII

She arranged the supper deftly and quietly, glancing now and then at Sophie, who sat hunched up over the gas fire.

She had removed her hat, and her hair was untidy; there were too many pins in it and a damaged black bow; she bit her nails and pulled at her rather thin lips.

"Mrs. Bearish was very disappointed," she said gloomily.

Lucie poured the cocoa with a steady hand.

"Don't keep on about to-night," she answered, with a quick animation in her pleasant voice. "Aurora has her office job; she is all right, really."

"All right?" Sophie took up the word acidly. "Earning three pounds a week because she knows four languages—sitting in an office from nine to six—living in a wretched boarding house at Surbiton?"

"Well, who is better of?" asked Lucie softly, handing the cocoa.

"That's it—who is? There are thousands and thousands of us—all so much alike, all wanting what we can't get—all secretly fighting each other—" The girl was overwrought, and her lip quivered; the cup of cocoa that to Lucie was suddenly ridiculous, shook in her hands.

"Don't!" said the elder woman sharply.

"I know." Sophie laughed, a quivering sound very different from the trill with which she had tried, earlier in the evening, to charm the wooden Mr. Sackett. "It makes me sick...women...crowds and crowds of us...hordes ... swarms—flung about all over the place—the men sick of us—dead sick."

"Drink your cocoa," interrupted Lucie quickly. "You're cold."

§ VIII

They were silent for a moment; Sophie was seeing the two expensive women in the hotel, Lucie a dead child in its cradle; "as well, perhaps," thought the bereft woman dully, "since she, too, was a girl."

Two pictures she saw as she gazed at the flame of the gas fire.

She saw herself going into a shop in Regent Street and buying a baby's frock, "for a little girl, please, something rather expensive."

Pride and joy thrilled in her voice—for her little girl—for her baby. She bought a cream-coloured silk dress, smocked; it cost nearly three pounds; it was a ridiculous extravagance. She saw herself standing by a cot in the room of a farmhouse in Sussex; it was dawn and the marsh beneath the window looked like a map with the silver tracery of dykes. She had been up all night and felt ill.

A dead baby was in the cot wearing the cream silk smocked frock and kid shoes too large for the tiny stiff feet.

Apple blossoms lay on her pillow and an ant had crawled from it and was crossing the pinched, distorted little face.

§ IX

Over the chimney-piece hung the large engravings of a man and woman, obviously portraits, in the dress of seventy or so years ago.

"Why do you keep those hideous things there?" asked Sophie, as her restless gaze fell on these pictures.

"I don't know. There is something stable about them," answered Lucie vaguely from the depths of her sad dream.

"Ghastly! Look at the woman! What a dress! What a life! Someone's grandmother, I suppose?"

"Yes," said Lucie quietly; "she was—someone's grandmother."

"I should have hated to live in those days."

"Would you?" asked Lucie, with a queer look.