A Bed of Roses Part 31

PART II

CHAPTER I

VICTORIA turned uneasily on the sofa and stretched her arms. She yawned, then sat up abruptly. Sudermann's _Katzensteg_ fell to the ground off her lap. She was in a tiny back room, so overcrowded by the sofa and easy-chair that she could almost touch a small rosewood bureau opposite.

She looked round the room lazily, then relapsed on the sofa, hugging a cushion. She snuggled her face into it, voluptuously breathing in its compactness laden with scent and tobacco smoke. Then, looking up, she reflected that she was very comfortable.

Victoria's boudoir was the back extension of the dining-room. Shut off by the folding doors, it contained within its tiny s.p.a.ce the comfort which is only found in small rooms. It was papered red with a flowered pattern, which she thought ugly, but which had just been imported from France and was quite the thing. The sofa and easy-chair were covered with obtrusively new red and white chintz; a little pile of cushions had fallen on the indeterminate Persian pattern of the carpet. Long coffee-coloured curtains, banded with chintz, shut out part of the high window, through which a little of the garden and the bare branches of a tree could be seen. Victoria took all this in for the hundredth time.

She had been sleeping for an hour; she felt smooth, stroked; she could have hugged all these pretty things, the little bra.s.s fender, the books, the Delft inkpot on the little bureau. Everything in the room was already intimate. Her eyes dwelt on the clean chintzes, on the half blinds surmounted by insertion, the bra.s.s ashtrays, the ma.s.sive silver cigarette box.

Victoria stood up, the movement changing the direction of her contemplative mood. The Gothic rosewood clock told her it was a little after three. She went to the cigarette box and lit a cigarette. While slowly inhaling the smoke, she rang the bell. On her right forefinger there was a faint yellow tinge of nicotine which had reached the nail.

'I shall have to be manicured again,' she soliloquised. 'What a nuisance. Better have it done to-day while I get my hair done too.'

'Yes, mum.' A neat dark maid stood at the door. Victoria did not answer for a second. The girl's black dress was perfectly brushed, her cap, collar, cuffs, ap.r.o.n, immaculate white.

'I'm going out now, Mary,' said Victoria. 'You'd better get my brown velvet out.'

'Yes, mum,' said the maid. 'Will you be back for dinner, mum?'

'No, I'm dining with the Major. Oh, don't get the velvet out. It's muddy out, isn't it?'

'Yes, mum. It's been raining in the morning, mum.'

'Ah, well, perhaps I'd better wear the grey coat and skirt. And my furs and toque.'

'The beaver, mum?'

'No, of course not, the white fox. And, oh, Mary, I've lost my little bag somewhere. And tell Charlotte to send me up a cup of tea at half-past three.'

Mary left the room silently. She seldom asked questions, and never expressed pleasure, displeasure or surprise.

Victoria walked up to her bedroom; the staircase was papered with a pretty blue and white pattern over a dado of white lincrusta. A few French engravings stood out in their old gold frames. Victoria stopped at the first landing to look at her favourite, after Lancret; it represented lovers surprised in a barn by an irate husband.

The bedroom occupied the entire first floor. On taking possession of the little house she had realised that, as she would have no callers, a drawing-room would be absurd, so had suppressed the folding doors and made the two rooms into one large one. In the front, between the two windows, stood her dressing-table, now covered with small bottles, some in cut gla.s.s and full of scent, others more workmanlike, marked vaseline, glycerine, skin food, bay rum. Scattered about them on the lace toilet cover, were boxes of powder, white, sepia, bluish, puffs, little sticks of cosmetics, some silver-backed brushes, some squat and short-bristled, others with long handles, with long soft bristles, one studded with short wires, another with whalebone, some clothes brushes too, b.u.t.tonhooks, silver trays, a handgla.s.s with a ma.s.sive silver handle. Right and left, two little electric lamps and above the swinging mirror, a shaded bulb shedding a candid glow.

One wall was blotted out by two inlaid mahogany wardrobes; through the open doors of one could be seen a pile of frilled linen, lace petticoats, chemises threaded with coloured ribbons. On the large arm-chair, covered with blue and white chintz, was a crumpled heap of white linen, a pair of _cafe au lait_ silk stockings. A light mahogany chair or two stood about the room. Each had a blue and white cushion. A large wash-stand stood near the mantlepiece, laden with blue and white ware. The walls were covered with blue silky paper, dotted here and there with some colour prints. These were mostly English; their nude beauties sprawled and languished slyly among bushes, listening to the pipes of Pan.

Victoria went into the back of the room, and, unhooking her cream silk dressing jacket, threw it on the bed. This was a vast low edifice of glittering brown wood, covered now by a blue and white silk bedspread with edges smothered in lace; from the head of the bed peeped out the tips of two lace pillows. By the side of the bed, on the little night table, stood two or three books, a reading lamp and a small silver basket full of sweets. An ivory bell-pull hung by the side of a swinging switch just between the pillows.

Victoria walked past the bed and looked at herself in the high looking-gla.s.s set into the wall which rose from the floor to well above her head. The mirror threw back a pleasing reflection. It showed her a woman of twenty-six, neither short nor tall, dressed in a white petticoat and mauve silk corsets. The corsets fitted well into the figure which was round and inclined to be full. Her arms and neck, framed with white frillings, were uniformly cream coloured, shadowed a little darker at the elbows, near the rounded shoulders and under the jaw; all her skin had a glow, half vigorous, half delicate. But the woman's face interested Victoria more. Her hair was piled high and black over a broad low white forehead; the cream of the skin turned faintly into colour at the cheeks, into crimson at the lips; her eyes were large, steel grey, long lashed and thrown into relief by a faintly mauve aura. There was strength in the jaw, square, hard, fine cut; there was strength too in the steadiness of the eyes, in the slightly compressed red lips.

'Yes,' said Victoria to the picture, 'you mean business.' She reflected that she was fatter than she had ever been. Two months of rest had worked a revolution in her. The sudden change from toil to idleness had caused a reaction. There was something almost matronly about the soft curves of her breast. But the change was to the good. She was less interesting than the day when the Major sat face to face with her in Soho, his pulse beating quicker and quicker as her ravished beauty stimulated him by its novelty; but she was a finer animal. Indeed she realised to the full that she had never been so beautiful, that she had never been beautiful before, as men understand beauty.

The past two months had been busy as well as idle, busy that is as an idle woman's time. She had felt weary now and then, like those unfortunates who are bound to the wheel of pleasure and are compelled to 'do too much.' Major Cairns had launched out into his first experiment in pseudo-married life with an almost boyish zest. It was he who had practically compelled her to take the little house in Elm Tree Place.

'Think of it, Vic,' he had said, 'your own little den. With no prying neighbours. And your own little garden. And dogs.'

He had waxed quite sentimental over it and Victoria, full of the grat.i.tude that makes a woman cling to the fireman when he has rescued her, had helped him to build a home for the idyll. Within a feverish month he had produced the house as it stood. He had hardly allowed Victoria any choice in the matter, for he would not let her do anything.

He practically compelled her to keep to her suite at the hotel, so that she might get well. He struggled alone with the decoration, plumbing, furniture and linoleum, linen and garden. Now and then he would ring up to know whether she preferred salmon pink to _fraise ecrasee_ cushions, or he would come up to the hotel rent in twain by conflicting rugs. At last he had p.r.o.nounced the house ready, and, after supplying it with Mary and Charlotte, had triumphantly installed his new queen in her palace.

Victoria's first revelation was one of immense joy; unquestioning, and for one moment quite disinterested. It was not until a few hours had elapsed that she regained mastery over herself. She went from room to room punching cushions, pressing her hands over the polished wood, at times feeling voluptuously on hands and knees the pile of the carpets.

She almost loved Cairns at the moment. It was quite honestly that she drew him down by her side on the red and white sofa and softly kissed his cheek and drove his ragged moustache into rebellion. It was quite willingly too that she felt his grasp tighten on her and that she yielded to him. Her lips did not abhor his kisses.

Some hours later she became herself again. Cairns was good to her, but good as the grazier is to the heifer from whom he hopes to breed; she was his creature, and must be well housed, well fed, well clothed, so that his eyes might feast on her, scented so that his desire for her might be whipped into action. In her moments of cold horror in the past she had realised herself as a commodity, as a beast of burden; now she realised herself as a beast of pleasure. The only thing to remember then was to coin into gold her condescension.

Victoria looked at herself again in the gla.s.s. Yes, it was condescension. As a free woman, that is, a woman of means, she would never have surrendered to Cairns the tips of her fingers. Off the coast of Araby she had yielded to him a little, so badly did she need human sympathy, a little warmth in the cold of the lonely night. When he appeared again as the rescuer she had flung herself into his arms with an appalling fetterless joy. She had plunged her life into his as into Nirvana.

Now her head was cooler. Indeed it had been cool for a month. She saw Cairns as an average man, neither good nor evil, a son of his father and the seed thereof, bound by a strict code of honour and a lax code of morals. She saw him as a dull man with the superficial polish that even the roughest pebble acquires in the stream of life. He had found her at low water mark, stranded and gasping on the sands; he had picked her up and imprisoned her in this vivarium to which he alone had access, where he could enjoy his capture to the full.

'And the capture's business is to get as much out of the captor as possible, so as to buy its freedom back.' This was Victoria's new philosophy. She had dexterously induced Cairns to give her a thousand a year. She knew perfectly well that she could live on seven hundred, perhaps on six. Besides, she played on his pride. Cairns was after all only a big middle-aged boy; it made him swell to accompany Victoria to Sloane Street to buy a hat, to the Leicester Gallery to see the latest one-man show. She was a credit to a fellow. Thus she found no difficulty in making him buy her sables, gold purses, Whistler etchings. They would come in handy, she reflected, 'when the big bust-up came.' For Victoria was not rocking herself in the transitory, but from the very first making ready for the storm which follows on the longest stretch of fair weather.

'Yes,' said Victoria again to the mirror, 'you mean business.' The door opened and almost noiselessly closed. Mary brought in a tray covered with a clean set of silver-backed brushes, and piled up the other ready to take away. She put a water can on the washstand and parsimoniously measured into it some attar of roses. Victoria stepped out into the middle of the room and stood there braced and stiff as the maid unlaced and then tightened her stays.

'What will you wear this evening, mum?' asked Mary, as Victoria sat down in the low dressing chair opposite the swinging gla.s.s.

'This evening,' mused Victoria. 'Let me see, there's the _gris perle_.'

'No, mum, I've sent it to the cleaner's,' said Mary. Her fingers were deftly removing the sham curls from Victoria's back hair.

'You've worn it four times, mum,' she added reproachfully.

'Oh, have I? I don't think. . . . oh, that's all right, Mary.'

Victoria reflected that she would never have a well-trained maid if she finished sentences such as this. Four times! Well, she must give the Major his money's worth.

'You might wear your red Directoire, mum,' suggested Mary in the unemotional tones of one who is paid not to hear slips.

'I might. Yes. Perhaps it's a little loud for the Carlton.'

'Yes, mum,' said Mary without committing herself.

'After all, I don't think it is so loud.'

'No, mum,' said Mary in even tones. She deftly rolled her mistress'

plaits round the crown.

Victoria felt vaguely annoyed. The woman's words were anonymous.

'But what _do_ you think, Mary,' she asked.

'Oh, I think you're quite right, mum,' said Mary.