Читать книгу Stinging Nettles - Bowen Marjorie - Страница 8

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§ I

LUCIE kept thinking of her answer to that letter of Pio's while she was giving Mrs. Falconer supper in the great, marble, gilt and glass palace of a tea shop. She was thinking of it afterwards, when they went back to the studio to wait for Sophie.

She did not speak of it; she talked, rather rapidly, about her work.

There was quite a demand for her articles, her designs, her illustrations; Mrs. Falconer brightened into some glow of pride in her achievement, especially as Lucie had provided the ten pounds.

"You ought to have a studio and gather people round you, Lucie."

Lucie, who worked in the "spare" bedroom of the furnished flat, said nothing; she knew that she could never afford a studio.

"You have really got a wonderful career," added Mrs. Falconer.

Lucie smiled.

"I'm afraid I don't really care for a career," she said gently. "And I don't like crowds."

"You're so unsociable."

"I suppose so."

"There is no end to what a woman like you could do. You don't make the most of yourself."

Lucie's smile was unsteady now.

"It seems rather useless—doesn't it?"

"You're thinking of Pio?"

"Oh, well—" Mrs. Falconer shrugged in irritation. "How could he count?—these days—"

Lucie hated the last two words; she thought they meant nothing at all, yet they were always used as final and weighty arguments; how could "these days" be different from any other—were we not, save in shifting transient custom, the same as the citizens of Memphis, the inhabitants of Susa or Tyre?

"Pio is not so well," she said suddenly. "I ought to get home and write to him to-night."

Mrs. Falconer ignored the first part of this sentence.

"I must wait for Sophie," she said. "Perhaps she means to go on to a theatre and sleep here."

"Perhaps," assented Lucie; Sophie's plans were always vague; she never told anyone in advance what she might do or not do; the possession of the "studio" helped her to all sorts of irresponsibility and confusion of daily life.

"You're tired," added Lucie. "Go home and I'll wait for her."

How ironic the word "home" sounded to her own ears; Mrs. Falconer, who was perpetually "moving" at present occupied furnished rooms, that she did not like, at Richmond.

"I suppose? ought to be here when she returns," said Mrs. Falconer wearily speaking from some dim echo of her own girlhood's conventions, "but I suppose it doesn't matter even if she does bring the young man up—girls are so free now—"

"As free as weeds—as plentiful, as unregarded, as often trampled on by indifferent feet," said Lucie bitterly.

"I don't know. Women get a very good time now—so many doors open now." Mrs. Falconer spoke flatly; she was really old and tired.

Yes, plenty of open doors now—but open on what? Arid avenues leading to nothingness.

"Do you want me to stay?" asked Lucie, putting on her hat. "I had that letter to write and some work to finish—"

"Is Pio really ill?"

"He seems to think so."

"He was always nervous and fanciful—I don't suppose it is anything. I wish Sophie would make haste. It is horrid for you going back to that lonely flat. We must take a place together. Toby Entwhistle is coming back soon. I'm hoping he'll give Sophie a good time—"

Thus Mrs. Falconer, vaguely, wearily, yet with such notes of tenderness and affection that Lucie felt the silly tears against her lids. What a "good time" would Elizabeth Falconer have given them all had she the means!

How she would bloom and glow even now if some of this "luck" she had been waiting for all her life came her way at last.

"Toby is very fond of Sophie," she continued. "I've often wondered if it wasn't to be him, after all—"

"She saw a good deal of him during the War?"

"Yes—how long ago the War seems!"

§ II

The War—how long ago indeed, and how little difference it had made to any one of them; it was so vast it had simply passed over their heads like a huge waterfall over the sight-seers beneath.

Lucie had been chained to her work, her husband, the coming and going of the baby. Mrs. Falconer had "hunted for jobs" for which she was too old, Sophie had "picked up" officers who had danced with her, and written to her and taken her out and disappeared and worked in a remount stable just long enough to be photographed in a Stetson hat and breeches and "wangle" this picture into the press with the caption "famous young singer working in the common cause"; everything had been difficult and agitating and nightmarish, high prices pinched and Lucie's work wasn't so well paid and they all talked a great deal about the wonderful things that were just going to happen to them—"when the War broke out, my dear, and there was an end of that!" Mrs. Falconer called herself one of the "new poor" and Sophie threatened a decline if Simon Kaye was killed.

But being a wealthy young business man who knew how to "wangle" as well as Sophie did herself, this adored object never got nearer danger than Hounslow, rather to Lucie's secret regret.

And so they had gone on, talking, talking, sometimes cheering, sometimes crying, shaken by scares, exalted by patriotic outbursts. And then it was over and hadn't really made any difference; life was the same combat among snatching desperate hoards.

§ III

Sophie returned.

She was sullen and out of humour, but smiling a little because Lucie had seen her with an admirer.

Lucie had to make cocoa; they drank this and ate "the remains of the tea" and talked about nothing, just a vague flow of emotional words from Mrs. Falconer and Sophie's short answers and Lucie's sad interjections.

Then they "cleared up" again and put out the gas and went out into the winter evening, putting on old wraps and bits of fur not fit to see the daylight, for it was very cold.

Lucie saw her aunt and cousin into a Richmond bus and then turned to wait for hers which stopped a little higher up the High Street.

She was thankful to be alone though her thoughts were poor company.

It was difficult to be serene when your life fell ruined about you, when everything round you seemed so out of proportion, distorted, grotesque, when the whole fabric of which you formed part of the pattern seemed to you pulled awry in its very warp and woof.

And Lucie was not of a soured or gloomy nature, there was nothing in her of the reformer or crazy idealist; she was easily pleased and thought the world a wonderful place.

It was just that she was an ordinary woman wanting ordinary things and therefore she was out of tune with her time, her environment, her "set."

She knew, quite well, that her soul was sick, and she thought that every woman she knew must have the same secret malady of—"nonfulflment." Yes, whether they blustered or drooped, were gay or melancholy, these swarms of unmated or wrongly mated women, "emancipated," "free," with their "careers," were just like diseased fruit, full of bitter dust round the withered core. Bus after bus passed Lucie as she stood on the curb and she took no notice of them.

How to discern behind all this the universal pattern?

How to feel it all temporary and fleeting and preserve your calm, your dignity—to find your womanhood not quite worthless, not utterly unwanted?

Sacrifice—this was supposed to be the salve for spiritual aches.

But Lucie had nothing to sacrifice.

"Inly this freedom, this dreadful freedom that I don't value at all."

She walked on, not in the direction of Chelsea.

There was that letter to answer; she might send a cable; the Strand Post Office was open till very late; all night, she thought. Quickly, for all her fatigue, she turned along Knightsbridge; her walk was of a noticeable grace and several people turned to look at her; at Sloane Street she took a bus and sat in the far corner, conning over the words of her wire.

What message could she send him that would reassure and help him?

She did not like to think of him as ill; she shuddered to think that he might die; the death of the baby had given her a horror of all death.

But he was not likely to die; he had always been very nervous about himself, making a great "fuss" about his health; she wished he had stayed in Sicily with his relations; who could be looking after him in Tuscany?

Of course his relatives expected her to go out to him; she knew what they understood by the word "wife."

And as the bus spun heavily through the empty stretch of Piccadilly, Lucie admitted to herself that this was about what she would do, and what she had known she would do, from the moment she opened her husband's letter.

She would go out and fetch him back and try again to make some sort of a home for him, or, if he was really ill, to see that he was properly nursed; it would not make any difference to anyone. Mrs. Falconer and Sophie would not like it, but all they really wanted from her was the money and she would see that they got that just the same; she had thought that there was nothing for her to sacrifice but there was—her peace and comfort, the even passage of the days; she knew that she could, if she wanted to, earn her living and look after her husband as well; she was indeed so used to standing alone, with the full financial responsibility of other people on her shoulders, that this did not trouble her at all; there was some money at the bank, some more coming in.

She would go to Italy.

There did not appear to Luck anything heroic in this decision; heroic things had never come her way; she was acting on the dictates of a sense of duty.

It was curious how many senses Lucie had, for she had never been taught or trained in any ethics or morals; yet deep rooted in her soul were these instincts, convictions, ideals of honour and chastity, duty and sacrifice.

Often she wondered at them herself for she had grown up in an atmosphere where such things were simply unknown.

Yet Lucie knew of them and cherished them passionately, if secretly.

Sophie called her narrow-minded and Mrs. Falconer said she must have inherited a "nonconformist conscience" from some forgotten ancestor.

And Lucie, though a free-thinker, really did admire nonconformity and all it stood for.

She left the bus at the plinth of Nelson's column and crossed Trafalgar Square to the old-fashioned, dowdy Post Office that seems so jostled and overshadowed by the buildings and the buses and the scurrying crowds.

A cold wind whistled up from the river, cutting up the heavy length of Northumberland Avenue, and there were not very many people about; along the corner railing fluttered a row of newspaper placards with stabbing headlines—an indecent divorce case, a brutal murder, a political crisis, a free insurance scheme, the likeness of a woman smudged in printers' ink, lifted and dropped by the indifferent gusts of the wind from the sea.

Lucie turned into the electric glare of the post office; it was full of people and all looked tired; the floor was littered and acrid dust filled the nostrils; a shabby woman with a baby stood in front of Lucie at the telegraph form desk; as she scrawled her message the child was sick, dribbled a bit of stale milk over the mother's cheap but "smart" coat, blinked its dull eyes, as if in hopeless appeal at the pitiless radiance of the electric light.

"I wish I didn't notice these things," thought Lucie.

She wrote her cable.

COMING AT ONCE. WRITING. LOVE. LUCIE.

And handed it to the tired clerk who impassively ticked off the words, as he must have ticked off so many thousands of words, frivolous or dangerous or vital.

The act of sending this cable strengthened Lucie and gave her a certain sense of stability, gave an order to her motives and actions. She was a wife going abroad to fetch a sick husband home; she tried to make that real to herself—to cling to this fact as to a sheet anchor.

When she left the post office, the people were coming out of the theatres, and the cold streets were full of clash and hubbub, racing taxis and gorged buses, women in evening dress bending before the wind as they darted for the openings in the Underground.

Lucie remembered then how late she had sent her cable off and how annoyed Pio would be to be knocked up at night for it; she often did this foolish sort of thing and she felt vexed as she hurried homewards.

There was very little chance of a bus now so she walked.

This part of London was very familiar to her; several years of her childhood had been spent in lodgings in a street off St. Martin's Lane, and the Free Library there had been her University; she had educated herself by means of the books there, and she was more cultured than most women she met for she had been a very studious and industrious child.

Opulent motorcars passed her, flooded with pearl-coloured light, occupied by women richly dressed in entrancing arrangements of fur and feather, lace and velvet. It really did seem to Lucie, as she trudged along, that the vulgar idea, that life was a fairy tale to these people, had much foundation.

Yet that she could have used her own gifts and looks to climb into affluence with, had never occurred to her; apart from everything else, there was a shyness, a timidity, a reserve about her nature that would never permit her to make a "bid" for anything of worldly value.

By the arcades of the huge hotel where Peter Sackett had given his mournful dinner yesterday, she managed to scramble into a bus, crowded of course with women, haggard, adorned, excited, talkative after their evening's entertainment.

How tired Lucie's eyes were of faces, how tired her ears were of voices—how sick she was of this drag into and out of buses, the dust and the mud, the press, the perpetual movement, the indifference, the apathy, the fatigue, the false excitement, given off by the swarms of people and poisoning the air.

How she dreaded the blast and chatter of that journey to Italy, the discomfort and turmoil and noise of Florence, the coming back with a sick man; she was so tired—her whole body shrank from fatigue as a burnt limb from the flame.

When she reached her flat, she bathed and crept into bed.

There were always dreams.