The Lady of the Basement Flat Part 3

Before she was twenty the scene had apparently shifted to America, where she had lived for several years, and presumably--though she never said so--had met her husband and spent her brief married life. Widowed-- childless--thirty-two. Those few words supplied all that I knew of Charmion Fane, except the obvious facts which were patent to the eye.

She was oddly undemonstrative, and for all her charm had a manner which made it impossible to approach one step nearer than she herself decreed.

Even when it came to the moment of saying good-bye, I could not tell whether she wished to continue our friendship, or would be content to let it drop as a pa.s.sing incident of travel; but to my joy she held on to my hand with a grip which was almost an appeal, and her thin, finely-cut lips twitched once and again. She looked full into my face with her strange eyes, the pupil large, the iris a light grey, ringed with an edge of black, and said simply, "I'll miss you! But--it will go on. We will always be friends." That was all, and during the two years which had pa.s.sed since that day we had met only once, for another short summer holiday, and repeated invitations to The Clough had received the same refusal--"I am not ready for visit-making."

Letters I had received in plenty, and she had sent Kathie a handsome-- really an extraordinarily handsome gift on her marriage, and to me the dearest of letters, understanding everything without being told, entering into my varying moods with exquisite comprehension. In return, I had poured out my heart, telling her of my loneliness, my difficulty about the next step, and now, at last, here came the reply.

I sent Bridget away, drank my tea at a gulp, and settled down to read in luxurious enjoyment. It was a longer letter than I had yet received, and I had a premonition that it would clear the way. But I did not realise how epoch-making it was to prove.

"Dear Evelyn Wastneys,--I've been through it, my dear, and I know! It doesn't bear talking of, so we _won't_ talk, but just pa.s.s on. What next? you ask. I have been trying to solve that problem for the last four years, and am no nearer a solution, so I can't tell you, my dear, but I have an idea which might possibly provide a half-way house for us both till the clouds lift.

"This summer I happened--literally happened!--upon a small country place about two hours' rail from town. An agent would describe it as a 'desirable gentleman's residence, comprising four entertaining rooms and eight bedrooms, gla.s.s, stabling, and grounds of four acres, artistically laid out'. But never mind the agent; take it from me that that house is ideal. Long, low, irregular rooms just waiting to be made beautiful; no set garden, but a wilderness of flowers, and a belt of real woodland; dry soil, all the sun that is to be had, and an open country-side agreeably free from villadom. I was tempted--badly tempted, but could not face settling down alone. Only last week the agent wrote to me again.

"Evelyn, we fit each other; we are friends by instinct. How would you like to take that house with me for the next two or three years, and furnish it between us with our best 'bits'?

"Understand, before we go any further--not for a moment do I suggest that we settle down to a definite home, and a jog-trot country life. I couldn't stand it for one, and I doubt whether you could either, but--we suit each other, Evelyn; there's that mysterious psychological link between us which makes it good to be together. I have a feeling that we could put in some good times in that house!

"Financially, it would be an economy--we should save storage of furniture, and have a convenient refuge in case of illness. The place is cheap, and could be run with quite a small staff, and would be a pleasant means of returning hospitalities. We could settle down for as long as it suited us--three months, two months, a few weeks, as the case might be--and then, when the impulse to roam came upon us, we should simply rise up and depart. I should never ask where you were going. If you asked me, I should not reply. Probably I should not know. On certain months of the year the house might become the exclusive property of one owner, when she might invite her own friends, and disport herself as she pleased. Again, we might devote a certain period to charity, and entertain lame dogs. There's no end to the good and the pleasure that might be got out of that house. 'Pastimes' is its name; isn't it quaint and suggestive? And on the enclosed sheet you will behold elaborate calculations of the sum which it would cost to run. The figures are _over_ the mark, for I never delude myself by under-calculating in money matters. For my own part, I can pay up, and have enough over to wander at will. Can you do the same? If not, say no at once, and the project is buried for evermore. You must not be tied. I refuse to be a party to shutting you up in the depths of the country for the whole year round. You have had enough of that. What you need now is movement, and the jostle of other lives; but if, in addition, you can afford a rest-house, a summer lodgment, a sanatorium for mind and body, and a meeting-place with a friend, then pack your box, Evelyn, come and look at Pastimes with me!

"Your friend, Charmion Fane."

I threw down the letter and seized the sheet of calculations in an agony of eagerness. A glance at the final addition brought relief. Yes! I could do it--pay my full share, and still have a handsome margin left over. Once satisfied on that point, there could not be a moment's hesitation, for it would be glorious to share a house with Charmion, and to have her companionship for some months of each year. My whole life was transfixed by the prospect, and yet she was right! I could not have accepted the offer if it had meant a permanent settling down to a luxurious country life. I was too restless, too eager for experience, too anxious to discover my very own work, and to do it in my very own way.

The picture of that old English house, with its panelled rooms, set in a surrounding wealth of flowers and green, gripped hold of my imagination; but here was an odd thing. It was powerless to banish another picture, in which there was no rose and no blue, but only dull neutral tints--the picture of a bas.e.m.e.nt flat in a grey London road, with electric burners instead of sun, and for view, a vista of pa.s.sing feet belonging to bodies cut off from sight.

I could not, even for Charmion, give up the prospect of that flat, and all that it had come to mean; but--let me acknowledge it honestly--it was balm and relief to know that I could have a means of escape, and that at culminating moments of weariness, when everything seemed wry and disappointing, and the whole weight of seven storeys seemed to be pressing down on my brains, I could bang my door, turn the key, and fly off to peace and beauty, and a healing pandering to personal tastes!

Woman is a complex character, and I am no better than my kind. I feel it in me to be an angel of self-denial and patience for, say, the third of the year! I know for a certain fact that I should have a bad lapse if I tried to keep it up for the remaining thirds. Now, thanks to Charmion, the way was made easy, and I could put my hand to the plough without fear of drawing back.

I leapt out of bed in a tingle of excitement. Impossible to lie still when things were happening at such a rapid rate. The sun was shining, and, looking at a belt of trees in the distance, I could catch a faint shimmer of green. It is perhaps the most intoxicating moment of the year, when that first gleam of spring greets the eye, and this special year it held an added exhilaration, for it seemed to speak of the budding of fresh personal life.

I laughed; I sang; the depression of the last weeks fell from me like a cloak, and I faced the future glad and undismayed. With the reading of that letter had come an end to indecision. I now knew exactly what I was about to do. Write to Charmion, and fix the earliest possible date for a meeting in town. From town we would inspect Pastimes, the while I inst.i.tuted inquiries for a suitable flat. The two homes secured, I would then return to The Clough, and divide my furniture into two batches, send them off to their several destinations, and follow myself, hot foot. It would take some time to put both dwellings in order, but it would be interesting work. I love the making of interiors, and if Pastimes must be fitted beautifully to do justice to itself, still more would it be needful to turn the uninspiring "flat" into a haven of comfort and cheer.

At this precise moment my prancing brought me in front of the long mirror, and what I beheld therein brought me up with a gasp. Twenty-six is quite a venerable age, but at moments of happiness and exhilaration it has a disconcerting trick of switching back to seventeen. That smiling, bright-eyed, pink-and-white-cheeked girl in the gla.s.s, with two long pigtails of hair hanging to her waist, looked really absurdly juvenile! Given a small stretch of imagination, you might have believed that she was a flapper preparing for her last term at school; by no possible mental effort could you have placed her as a douce maiden lady, living alone in London, devoting herself to good works in a manner as adventurous as it was unusual.

Mothers of children would insinuate that I was a child myself; troubled matrons would purse their lips, and say, "I can't tell _you_, my dear.

You are too young." Certainly, oh, most certainly, men of all ages would put me down as a designing minx! In vain industry, self-sacrifice and generosity--that young face, that bright youthful colouring would nullify all my efforts.

It was true--it was true! I looked, as Aunt Eliza had pointed out, a dozen years too young for the part. People would stare, people would talk, people would advise me to go back and live with my aunts, and wait ten years.

In a frenzy of impatience I seized the two long plaits, and twisted them now this way, now that. Astonishing the difference which hair-dressing can make! I have read of a heroine who pa.s.sed successfully as her own twin sister by the simple device of plainly brushed hair and puritanical garments, the sister, of course, sporting marcelle waves and Parisian costumes. I dipped my brush in the water-jug and dragged back my own hair in a plastered ma.s.s, clamping the plaits to my head. I looked like a Dutch doll! Clean and chubby, and, alas! considerably younger than before. I parted it in the middle, and glued it over my ears. I looked like a naughty schoolgirl, who had had her hair dressed by a maiden aunt. I piled the plaits in a coronet over my forehead; I looked like a portrait of a Norwegian damsel dressed for her bridal. I threw down the brush in disgust, and stamped with impatience.

No use! Not a bit of use! All the hair-dressing in the world could not make me look old, or even approximately middle-aged. The ugliest flannel blouse that was ever made, while it would certainly be hideously unbecoming, could not add one year, let alone ten, to my age.

It was a bitter blow. All that morning I went about pondering the desperate question of how to look old. Aunt Emmeline had prophesied that I should know soon enough, "with those beaked features," but I wanted to know _now_, not in any permanent, disagreeable fashion, but as a kind of sleight-of-hand trick, by which I could be mature one day and the next in blooming youth. Elderly in London, young at Pastimes. A douce, unremarkable "body" in the bas.e.m.e.nt flat, and in Surrey a lady of leisure, rings on her fingers and bells on her toes!

Aunt Eliza would have cried once more, "Oh, don't be silly!" if I had confronted her with such a problem. I said, "Don't be silly!" to myself many times over in the course of that day, but I persisted in being silly all the same. At the back of my mind lingered the conviction that if I went on thinking long enough a solution would come.

_How could I manage to look old_? I asked the question of myself every hour of the next few days. I asked it of everyone I met, and was fatuously a.s.sured that I demanded the impossible; at long last I asked it of old Bridget, whose sound common sense had come to my rescue times and again.

"Sure, my dear, your husband will manage that for you!" was Bridget's instant solution.

"Not the husband I shall choose!" I replied with easy a.s.surance.

A moment's pause was devoted to the problematical Prince Charming whose mission it would be to keep _me young_, then I asked tentatively:--

"What shall I look like, Bridget, when I am old?"

Bridget folded her arms and regarded me with a critical stare.

"Your hair will turn grey, and them fine straight brows of yours will grow thin, or maybe fall out altogether, and leave you with none. An'

you'll wear spectacles, and have lines round your eyes. But it's neither the grey hairs nor the specs that spoils the looks. It's not _them_ that's the worst!"

I stared at her open-mouthed, trembling between shrinking and curiosity.

"_It's the shape of the cheeks_!" said Bridget darkly. "Yourself now, and the ladies of your age, it's pretty, slim bits of faces you have, going to a peak at the chin. When you're old, it runs to squares and doubles. Look to your cheeks, miss, if you wants to keep young!" She unfolded her arms, stretched them at full length, and comfortably folded them again. Her broad chest heaved in a cackle of amused reminiscence.

"Sure, d'ye reminder Miss Kathleen when she play-acted the ould lady, the last Christmas party?"

Poor old Bridget! She got the surprise of her life in my reception of that simple question. Jumping out of my chair, dancing round, whooping and hurraying "like a daft thing," as she afterwards described my movements. Then to find herself at one moment enthusiastically patted on the back, and at the next to be pushed towards the door, and exhorted to hurry!--hurry!--to mount to the attic, and bring down the old tin box--well, it was disconcerting, to say the least of it, and Bridget's dignity was visibly upset. She had forgotten that all the "make ups"

which we had used for various Christmas festivals were stored away in that old tin box, and consequently could not guess that I was fired with an ambition to try on Kathie's disguise forthwith.

Ten minutes later I was standing before the gla.s.s and enthusiastically acclaiming the truth of Bridget's statement, as I stared at the reflection of a spectacled dame with grizzled eyebrows, grey hair banded smoothly over the ears, and a bulging fullness at the base of each cheek! It _was_ the cheeks that made the disguise! Spectacles and hair still left the personality of the face untouched; even the bushy eyebrows were but a partial disguise, but with the insertion of those small india-rubber pads came an utter and radical change. That chubby, square-faced woman was not Evelyn Wastneys. Never by any possibility could she see forty again. So far as propriety went, she might roam alone from one end of the world to the other. If she lived in the largest block of flats that was ever erected, her neighbours would regard her comings and goings with serene indifference. Admirable woman! She did _not_ "take the eye". I met her spectacled glance with a beam of approval.

"I have it!--I have it! I must _dress_ for the part! In London I'll be a middle-aged aunt; in Surrey, a niece--my own niece and namesake, who, of her charity, consents to receive some of her auntie's _protegees_ and give them a good time!" The wildness, the audacity of the project made to me its chief appeal. My life interest had been so sheltered, so hedged round by convention, that at times it had seemed as though there was a wall of division between me and every other human creature. It was so difficult to show oneself in one's _real_ colours, to see and know other people as they really were. But now!--oh, what a unique and exhilarating experience it would be to taste at the same time the romance of youth and the freedom of age, to witness the different sides of other characters as exhibited in their treatment of aunt and niece.

That one illuminating suggestion of Bridget's has cleared the way. From the moment of hearing there had been no real hesitation; before night fell my plans were made, and a telegram to Charmion was speeding on its way. A new life lay before me--a dual life, teeming with interest and possibility. On one hand, my fate must be to some extent bound up with that of Charmion Fane, the most interesting and, in a sense, mysterious woman I had ever met; on the other, I was plunging into the unknown, and transforming myself into a new personality, to meet the new circ.u.mstances. I stared at myself in the gla.s.s and solemnly shook my grey head.

"Evelyn, my dear, be prepared! You are going to have an adventurous time!"

CHAPTER FOUR.

A TALK IN LONDON.

The aunts expressed a mitigated approval of Charmion's proposal. Mrs Fane came of a good family, and was "very well left". Her married estate, moreover, gave her the privilege of chaperonage, so that the dual establishment might be quite a good arrangement, all things considered, "until--"

"_Until_!" echoed Aunt Eliza eloquently, nodding coyly at me, while I stared into s.p.a.ce with basilisk calm. I object to references to my problematical marriage--especially by aunts. The great "until" never arrived for them, yet they feel quite annoyed because twenty-six has found me still a spinster!

I made my journey to London with a sense of great adventure, Bridget going with me in the dual role of maid and mentor. She was the only person who was to accompany me into the new life, and experience had proved that her sound common sense might be trusted to act as a brake on the wheels of my own impetuosity. We stayed the morning in town, when I interviewed a house agent, and set him on the search for suitable flats, and then we adjourned to the West End to buy a becoming new hat. It always soothes me to buy hats. In times of doubt and depression it is an admirable tonic to the feminine mind. At three o'clock we left Waterloo for our two hours' journey, and arrived at the old-fashioned inn, which was to act as rendezvous, before half-past five.

Charmion was awaiting us in a private sitting-room, long, oak-beamed, spotlessly clean, and a trifle musty, with that faint but unmistakable mustiness which hangs about old rooms and old furniture. Tea was set out on one half of the oak dining-table. The china was of the old-fashioned white and gold order, the cups very wide at the brim and cramped at the handle, and possessing a dear little surprise rose at the base, which peeped out through a h.o.a.r frost of sugar as you drained the last gulp. Charmion laughed at my delight over that rose, but I was in the mood to be pleased, to see happy auguries in trivial happenings. I hailed that rose as a type of unexpected joys.

Charmion was dressed in business-like grey tweeds, with a soft grey felt hat slouched over her head. She looked very pale, very frail, intensely, vibratingly alive. This extraordinary contradiction between body and mind made a charm and mystery which it is difficult to express in words. One longed to protect and shield her, to tuck her up on a sofa, and tend her like a fragile child, at the very same moment that mentally one was sitting at her feet, domineered by the influence of a master mind!

I ate an enormous tea, and Charmion crumbled a piece of cake upon her plate; then we had the things taken away, and drew up to the fire, and toasted our toes, and looked into each other's eyes, and exclaimed simultaneously--"_Well_?"

Hitherto we had talked on general subjects, Kathleen's marriage, the break-up of the old home, my own journey, etcetera, but now we were free from interruption for an hour at least, and the great subject could be safely tackled.