The Lovely Lady Part 9

On this occasion, however, it was impossible for Peter to keep Mrs.

Lessing out of the background of his consciousness, because of the part her suggestion of the morning played in new realization of himself as the rich Mr. Weatheral of Pleasanton. He credited her with sufficient knowledge of his character to have egged Julian on to the reminder as a part of the game she had played with him for the past two or three years, by which Peter was to be instated in a life more in keeping with his opportunities.

It was a game Clarice played with life everywhere, coaxing it to yield its choicest bloom to her. She had an instinct for choiceness like a hummingbird, darting here and there for sweetness. Her flutterings were never of uncertainty but such as kept her in the perfect airy poise. If she wanted marriage for Peter it was because she could imagine nothing better for anybody than a marriage like hers, and if she chose this time for letting him know that she was thinking of it, it was because in those terms she could bring closest to him his new-found possibilities.

If she could have reached Peter with the personal certainty of riches by explaining to him how far his dollars would stretch end to end, or how many acres of postage stamps he could buy with them, she might have thought less of him on that account, but she would have helped him to understanding even on those terms. You couldn't have made Clarice Lessing believe that whatever their limitations, people weren't ent.i.tled to help simply because they needed it.

It had come upon Peter by leaps and bounds during the last two or three years, both the wealth and the necessity of putting it to himself in terms of personal expression. During the first ten years of the partnership, the only use for money the simple needs of Ellen and himself had established was to put it back into the business; a use which had become almost an obligation during the time when both children and opportunity were coming to Julian faster than the cash to meet them.

It was due to the high ground that Clarice had made for them all out of what she and the children stood for, that Peter's superior cash contribution to the firm had become a privilege. They had had, he and Ellen, their stringent occasions; it had been Clarice's part to see that since they endured the pinch of poverty they should at least get something human out of it. It came out for Peter pleasantly as he walked home through the mild June evening, just how much they had had. Much, much more than they would have been able to buy with the money they might in strict equity have withdrawn from the business. Nothing, he had long admitted, that he could have purchased for his sister would have been so satisfying as what Clarice contributed, pressing the full cup of her motherhood to Ellen's thirsty lips. They might have grown sleek, he and Ellen, without exceeding a proper ratio of expenditure, and if in the end they had been a little less rich, they would still have had enough to go on being sleek and comfortable to the end. That he was still fit, as Mrs. Lessing's transparent efforts to marry him to her friends guaranteed him to be, he felt was owing greatly to the terms on which Clarice had admitted him to the adventure of bringing up a family.

That a special fitness was required for admission to Mrs. Lessing's circle he would have guessed even without the aid of print which consistently described it as Our Best Society, for it was a Best attested to by all the marks by which Clarice herself expressed the essential fineness of things.

One couldn't have told, from anything that appeared on the surface of the Lessing's social environment, that life did not proceed there as it did between Clarice and the Weatherals, by means of its subtler sympathies, and proceed, at least so far as the women were concerned, on a still higher plane of grace and harmony. It moved about her table and across the lawns of Lessing's handsome country place, with such soundless ease and perfection as it had glided for Peter through the House with the Shining Walls. Or at least so it had seemed on those occasions during the last few years when he had found himself wondrously inside it.

It had been accepted by Ellen on the mere certainty of Clarice's mother having been one of the Thatcher Inwoods, that Clarice should enlarge her social borders with Lessing's increasing means until they included people among whom Ellen would have been miserably shy and out of tune.

But not Ellen herself guessed how much of Peter's admission to its inaccessibility was owing to the returns from hardly s.n.a.t.c.hed options and long-nursed opportunities, coming in in checks of six figures.

Perhaps Clarice herself never knew. It was one of the things that went with being a Thatcher Inwood, wherever an occasion presented a handle of n.o.bility, to seize by that and maintain it in the face of any contingent smallness. Clarice wouldn't have introduced Peter to her friends if he hadn't been fit, and it was part of the social creed of women like Clarice Lessing, which takes almost the authority of religion, that he wouldn't have been in a position to be introduced if he hadn't been fit.

So it had happened for the past two years that Peter had found himself skirting the fringe of Best Society, and identifying it with the life he had lived so long, sitting with his book open on his knees in their little flat, with Ellen across the fire from him knitting white things for Julian's children. But the idea that having come into this neighbourhood of fine appreciations he was to take up his home and live there, opened more slowly. It required more than one of Clarice's swift hummingbird darts, more than the flutter of suggestion to brush its petals awake for him.

It lay so deep under all the years, the power of loving. He knew almost nothing about it except that he had had it once, and that marriage without it would be unthinkable, even such a marriage as Mrs. Lessing had let him see was now possible to him. She had called with all her delicate friendly skill, on something which only now under that summons he began to miss. It was like a lost word in every sentence in which the ordinary hopes of men are to be read, and he felt that until he found it again all the help Mrs. Lessing could afford him would not enable him to think of marriage as a thing desirable in itself. It was missing in him still, when he came that night rather late to the apartment where only the j.a.panese houseboy awaited him. One of the first things he had done for Ellen with his increasing means, had been to buy back for her the house at Bloombury with the garden and a bit of the orchard. She had been there now since Decoration Day, retiring more and more into the kindly village life as a point of vantage from which to mark with pride the social distance that Peter travelled from her. It had been understood from the beginning that she wasn't to go with him. The tapping of her crutch was no more to be heard in the new gracious existence than in the House where she had never followed him. Life for Ellen was lived close at hand. There were hollyhocks and currant bushes in her garden and Julian's children overran it.

It was not Ellen then that Peter missed as he sat alone in the house that night with his back to the lowered light and his gaze seeking the river and the flitting shapes of boats that went up and down on it, freighted with young voices and laughter. He missed the Lovely Lady. He knew now why he had not been able to think of marriage in the way Clarice held it out to him, as a happy contingency of his now being as rich as he had intended to be. It was because he had not thought of her clearly for a long time.

There had been a period in the beginning of his life with Ellen, when the lady of his dreams had been so near the surface of all his thinking that she took on form and likeness from anything that was lovely and young in his neighbourhood, but as things lovely and young drifted from him with the years; and as the business took deeper and deeper hold on his attention, she had become a mere floating figment, a live fluttering spark in the very core of all his imaginings.

She had been beside him, a pleasant, indeterminate presence in the long journey she travelled from the printed page to the accompanying click of Ellen's needles. Sometimes at the opera she took on a gossamer tint from the singer's face, and longer ago than he could afford operas, he had understood that all the beauty of the world, bursting apple buds, the great curve of the surf that set the beaches trembling, derived somehow its pertinence from her. Now at the age of forty he had ceased to think very much about the Lovely Lady.

It occurred to him that this might have something to do with his failure to get a new relation to life out of his new wealth.

It had struck Peter rather forlornly during the past few years that there was little use he could put money to, except to make more money.

He could see by turning his head to the room behind him how little there was there of what he had fancied once riches would bring him. The lines of the room were good, the amount of the annual rent a.s.sured that to him, the furniture was good and the rugs expensive. Ellen believed that money in rugs was a good investment, particularly if the colours were strong and would stand fading. There were some choice things here and there, a vase and pictures which Peter had chosen for himself, though he was aware, as he took them in under the dull glow, that Ellen had arranged them in strict reference to the size of the frames, and that the whole effect failed of satisfaction. He thought his life might be somewhat like that room, full of good things but lacking the touch that should set them in fruitful order. It stole over him as persuasively as the warm growing smell of the park below him that the something missed might be the touch and presence of the Lovely Lady.

II

It was the late end of the afternoon when Peter stepped off the train at the Lessing's station and into the trap that was waiting for him. He learned from Lessing's man that the family had been kept by the tennis match at Maplemont and he was to come on to the house at his leisure.

That being the case, Peter took the reins himself and made a long detour through the dust-smelling country roads, so that it was quite six when he reached the house, and everybody dressing for the early dinner.

He made so hasty a change himself in his fear of being late, that when he came down to the living-room in a quarter of an hour there was no one there to meet him. Absorbed particles of the bright day gave off in the dusk and made it golden. There were honeysuckles on the pergola outside, and in the room beyond a girl singing a quiet air, half-trilled and half-forgotten. He heard the singer moving toward him through the vacant house, of which the doors stood open to the evening coolness, and the click of the electric b.u.t.ton as she pa.s.sed, and saw the rooms burst one by one into the bloom of shaded lights. So she came, busy with the hummed fragments of her songs, and turned the lamp full on Peter before she was aware of him, but she was not half so much disconcerted.

"You must be Mr. Weatheral," she said. "Mrs. Lessing sent me to say she expected you. I am Miss Goodward."

She gave him her hand for a gracious moment before she turned to what had brought her so early down, the arrangement of two great bowls of wild ferns and vines which a servant had just placed on either end of the low mantlepiece.

"We brought them in from Archer's Glen on the way home," she told him over her shoulder, her hands busy with deft, quick touches. She was all in white, which took a pearly l.u.s.tre from the lamps, and for the moment she was as beautiful as Peter believed her. A tiny unfinished phrase of the song floated half consciously from her lips as a bubble. "They look better so, don't you think?" As she stood off to measure the effect, it seemed to Peter that the Spirit of the House had received him; it was so men dream of home-coming, without sensible displacement of a life going on in it, lovely and secure, as a bark slips into some still pool to its moorings. He yielded himself naturally to the impersonal intimacy of her welcome and all the sordid ways of his life led up to her.

It was not all at once he saw it so. He kept watching her all that evening as one watches a perfect thing, a bird or a dancer, sensing in the slim turn of her ankle, the lithe throat, the delicate perfume that she shook from her summer draperies, so many strokes of a master hand.

She was evidently on terms with the Lessings which permitted her acceptance of him at the family valuation, but the perfection of her method was such that it never quite sunk his ident.i.ty as the junior partner in his character of Uncle Peter.

This was a nuance, if Peter had but known it, which Eunice Goodward could have no more missed than she could have eaten with her knife. She had been trained to the finer social adjustments as to a cult: Clarice's game of persuading life to present itself with a smiling countenance, played all in the key of personal relations. It was as if Nature, having tried her hand at a great many ordinary persons, each with one gift of sympathy or graciousness, had culled and compacted the best of them into Eunice Goodward; which was precisely the case except that Peter through his unfamiliarity with the Best Society couldn't be expected to know that the intelligence which had put together so much perfectness was no less calculating than that which goes to the matching of a string of pearls. All that he got from it was precisely all that he was meant to receive--namely, the conviction that she couldn't have charmed him so had she not been altogether charming.

And as yet he did not know what had happened to him. He thought, when he awoke in the morning to a new realization of the satisfactoriness of living, that the fresh air had done it, the breath of the nearby untrimmed forest, the loose-leaved roses pressed against the pane beginning to give off warm odours in the sun. Then he came out on the terrace and saw Eunice Goodward, looking like a thin slip of the morning herself, in a blue dress b.u.t.toned close to her figure with wide white b.u.t.tons and a tiny froth of white at the short sleeves and open throat.

Across her bosom it was caught with a blue stone set in dull silver, which served also to hold in place a rose that matched the morning tint of her skin. She was talking with the Lessings' chauffeur as Peter came up with her and all her accents were of dismay. They were to have driven over to Maplemont that afternoon, she explained to Peter, for the last of the tennis sets, and now Gilmore had just told her that the car must go to the shop for two or three days. She was so much more charming in the way she forgave Gilmore for her evident disappointment that he, being a young man and troubled by a sense of moral responsibility, was quite overcome by it.

"But, nonsense"; Peter was certain "there is always something can be done to cars." There was, Gilmore a.s.sured him, but it took time to do it, and to-morrow would be Sunday. "If you'd only thought to come down in the motor yourself, sir----" the chauffeur reproached him. The truth was that Peter hadn't a car of his own and Gilmore knew it. There was an electric runabout which had gone down to Bloombury with Ellen, and a serviceable roadster which was part of the office equipment, but the rich Mr. Weatheral had never taken the pains to own a private car. Now, as he hastily drew out his watch, it occurred to him that Lessing's chauffeur was a fellow of more perspicuity than he had given him credit for. The two men communicated wordlessly across the cool width of the terrace steps.

"At what hour," Peter wished to know, "would we have to leave here to reach Maplemont in good time? Then if you can be ready to leave the moment my car gets here...." He excused himself to go to the telephone; half an hour later when he joined the family at breakfast he had discovered some of the things that, besides making more money with it, can be done with money.

The knowledge suited him like his own garment, as if it had been lying ready for him to put on when the occasion required it, and now became him admirably. He perceived it to be a proper male function to produce easily and with precision whatever utterly charming young ladies might reasonably require. He appreciated Miss Goodward's acceptance of it as she came down from the house bewilderingly tied into soft veils for the afternoon's drive, as a part of her hall-marked fineness. If she couldn't help knowing, taking in the car's glittering newness from point to point, that its magnificence had materialized out of her simple wish for it, she at least didn't allow him to think it was any more than she would have expected of him. So completely did he yield himself to this new sense of the fitness of things that it came as a shock to have her, as soon as they had joined themselves to the holiday-coloured crowd that streamed and shifted under the bright boughs of Maplemont, reft from him by friendly, compelling voices, and particularly by Burton Henderson, who played singles and went about bareheaded and singularly self-possessed. It was unthinkable to Peter that, in view of her recently discovered importance in putting him at rights with himself, that he hadn't arranged with her that they were to be more together. For the moment it was almost a derogation of her charm that she shouldn't herself have recognized by some overt act her extraordinary opportunity.

And then in a moment more he perceived that she had recognized it. He had only to wait, as he saw, and he would find himself pleasantly beside her, and at each renewal of the excluding companionship, he was more subtly aware that it was accorded not to anything he was but to what she had it in her power so beautifully to make of him.

So perfectly did she strike the key with him, when, in the intervals of the afternoon's entertainment they found themselves sitting or walking together, that he could not have imagined her to have been out of it, not even in a rather long session after tea with Burton Henderson among the rhododendrons, in which it was apparent from the young man's manner that she hadn't at least been in tune with him. It occurred just as they were leaving and served in the flutter of delay it occasioned to fix the attention of all their party on Eunice coming out of the shrubbery with young Henderson in her wake, batting aimlessly at the gra.s.s-tops with the racquet which he still carried. There was an air of sulkiness about him which caused Mrs. Lessing enigmatically to say that Eunice was altogether too good to that young man. To which Lessing's "Well, if she is, he doesn't seem to appreciate," served also to confirm Peter in the role which the effect she produced on himself had created for him. He at least appreciated the way in which she had made him feel himself the Distributer of Benefits, to a degree which made it almost obligatory of her to go on with it.

Successfully as Miss Goodward had kept for Peter during the day his new relation to his wealth on the one hand and society on the other, she seemed that evening quite to have abandoned him. While the family was having coffee on the terrace after dinner, she slipped away from them to reappear lower down among the rose trees, her white dress gathering all that was left of the lingering glow. The junior partner, feeling himself never so much junior, though he knew it was but a scant year or two, sat on through Lessing's inconsequential comment on business and the day's adventures, hearing not a word; now and then his chair creaked with the intensity of his preoccupation. It grew dusk and the lamps blossomed in the house behind them; presently Clarice slipped away to the children and the evening damp fell over the rose garden. Peter could endure it no longer. He believed as he rose suddenly with a stretching movement that he meant merely to relieve the tension of sitting by pacing up and down; it was unaccountable therefore that he should find himself at the edge of the terrace. He wondered why on earth Clarice couldn't have helped him a little, and then as if in response to his deep instinctive demand upon her, he heard her call softly to her husband from the door of the house. At the sc.r.a.pe of Julian's chair on the terrace tiling, Peter cast away his cigar and hurried into the dusk of the garden.

He found her at last by the herbacious border, keeping touch with the flight of a sphinx-head moth along the tall white rockets of phlox.

Peter whipped out his handkerchief and dropped it deftly over the fluttering wings. In a moment he had stilled them in his hand. Miss Goodward cried out to him:

"You've spoiled his happy evening!"

"He's not hurt...." Peter laid the moth gently on a feathery flower head, and the tiny whispering whirr began again. "I thought you wanted him."

"I did--but not to catch him," Miss Goodward explained. "I wanted just to want him."

"Ah, I'm afraid I'm one of those people with whom to want a thing is to go after it," Peter justified himself.

"So one gathers from what one hears." She brushed him as lightly with the compliment as with the wings of a moth. "I wasn't really wanting him so much as I was wanting to _be_ him for a while. Just to pa.s.s from one lovely hour to another and nothing to pay! But we humans have always to pay something."

"Or some one pays for us."

"Well, isn't that worse ... taking it out of somebody else?"

"I'm not so sure; some people enjoy paying. It's not a bad feeling, I a.s.sure you: being able to pay. Haven't you found that out yet?"

"Not in Trethgarten Square." Mrs. Lessing had managed to let him know during the day that her guest had been reared within the sacred pale of those first families in whom the choice stock of humanness is refined by being maintained at precisely the same level for at least three generations.

"In Trethgarten Square," Peter reminded her, "we are told that you settle your account just by _being_; that you manage somehow to become something so superior and delectable that the rest of us are willing to pay for the privilege of having you about." He would have liked to add that recently, no later in fact than the evening before, he had come to think that this was so, but as she hesitated in her walk beside him, he saw that she was concerned in putting the case to herself quite as much as to him.

"It's not that exactly; more perhaps that our whole thought about life is to live it so that there won't be anything to pay. We have to manage to add things up like a column of figures with nothing to carry.

Perhaps that's why we get so little out of it."

"Don't you?"--he was genuinely surprised, "get anything out of it, I mean."

"Oh, but I'm a selfish beast, I suppose! I want more--more!" They swung as she spoke into a broad beam of yellow light raying out from the library window, and he saw by it that with the word she flung out her arms with a lovely upward motion that lifted his mood to the crest of audacity.

"If you keep on looking like that," Peter a.s.sured her, "you'll get it."

He was struck dumb immediately after with apprehension. It sounded daring, like a thing said in a book; but she took it as it came lightly off the tip of his impulse, laughing. "Yes ... the great difficulty is choosing which of so many things one really wants." They walked on then in silence, the air darkling after the sudden shaft of illumination, the light folds of her scarf brushing his sleeve. Peter was considering how he might say, without precipitation, how suddenly she had limited and defined all the things that he wanted by expressing them so perfectly in herself, when she interrupted him.