A lady, dressed for a journey even to her gloves, was kicking a very large dressing case down the shallow polished stairs. At his exclamation she turned round and glared up at him. It was Aggie.
“What am I doing?” she echoed. “What do I look as if I’m doing? I’m getting out of this house.”
“But …”
“And I’m dragging my own box downstairs because nobody answers the bell. I’ve rung it twenty or thirty times. Either it’s out of order or else my maid is drunk. I had to pack the thing myself.”
“But Aggie …”
“Don’t mop and mow like that, Gibbie. Carry it down for me.”
“But Aggie, there’s no train.”
“No. I don’t suppose there is. I must have a car.”
“Everybody is asleep.”
“Then they must wake up.”
“But Aggie, what’s the matter? Why do you want to hurry off in the middle of the night?”
Aggie told him furiously that Syranwood was intolerable. She could not stay there an instant longer. Her bed was like a sack of potatoes and faced north, whereas anybody who cared about her must know that she could only sleep facing east. She thought that she had got hernia trying to push it round. The bell was a mile off, by the door, so that if she had had a heart attack in the middle of the night she would have had to die in her bed. She shouldn’t wonder if she was going to have another baby, and it was very bad for her to be upset. So she was going.
At this point the staircase, which had been but dimly lighted, sprang into a yellow glare, for somebody overhead had turned on the chandelier in the hall. Softly padding feet were heard and presently Lady Geraldine appeared, wrapped in the same red shawl which she had worn at the bathing pool, and wearing on her head an antique mob cap, nodding with rose-coloured ribbons. She looked infinitely older and more wizened than she had seemed by daylight.
“What is the matter with you, Aggie?” she asked severely.
Aggie explained and when she got to her probable condition, Geraldine said:
“Fiddle.”
Aggie began to cry.
“You can go if you like,” said Geraldine. “But I won’t have my servants roused. You must carry your own bag into Basingstoke.”
“It’s not a bag,” sobbed Aggie.
She began a tirade in which her own health, the mattresses of Syranwood and Laura’s morals were the main themes. Also she said that it was very unkind of Geraldine to ask all the boors and popinjays in London to meet her.
“They seem to think they’ve come here for a rest cure.”
Geraldine laughed.
“Take her bag up to her room for her, Gibbie.”
“It’s not a bag …”
“And come with me, Aggie. I’ll give you a cachet fièvre.”
“I’ve had a whole boxful of cachets fièvres.”
“Then I’d better give you an emetic, I should think. Come along.”
After a little dosing, Aggie consented to go back to her own room, though she said, before they parted:
“I shall never feel quite the same towards you again, Geraldine. You’ve been very cruel …”
“Not at all. I sympathise …”
“No you don’t. You said fiddle. It was unforgivable….”
“Well, I’m sorry. But it is fiddle, and you know it.”
“You don’t know how unhappy I am. You’ve had such a different life, Geraldine.”
“Indeed, it’s not my fault. I asked that Jug man down here especially because I was told you liked him. I can’t help it if he’s a disappointment.”
“You’ve had your life,” persisted Aggie sulkily.
She took off her hat and gloves and threw them on the floor. While Geraldine picked them up and put them away she got into a pair of lace pyjamas.
“Decorative but scratchy,” commented Geraldine, looking at them. “I should get into something more comfortable if I were you. It’s half past three.”
Her tone suggested that half past three was a final hour and Aggie began to cry again, sobbing out an incoherent story about such a touching man and a railway communication cord.
“He’s probably spending the night in the cells, poor boy. How tragic life is, Geraldine.”
“Aggie!”
Geraldine’s voice was so peremptory that Aggie stopped crying.
“Yes?”
“Don’t put up your umbrella before it rains. It’s waste of time. Look in the glass.”
“I’m hideous. I’ve been crying.”
“No you’re not. Crying never makes you hideous, or you wouldn’t do it. Look in the glass. There’s no need for all this panic.”
Aggie turned round and looked at herself in the long glass of the wardrobe, a little cautiously at first, but with renewed composure.
“The light is very dim,” she said doubtfully.
“You can look at yourself in the dressing-table glass if you like.”
Aggie turned her fair head this way and that, stretched her long neck and smiled. All the admiration which had been poured out before her, for nearly thirty years, had given an uncanny rarity and glamour to her loveliness. She was not merely a beautiful woman. Philomena and Laura were that. She was a unique woman. There were plenty of Philomenas and Lauras. But there was only one Aggie. When people looked at her, when she looked at herself in the glass, it was this silvery aura of legend that they saw.
“But some day, you know,” she said, growing pinched again. “Some day …”
“Not yet.”
“I’ve always said that.”
“Poor Aggie.”
“If you say Poor Aggie again … I’ll burn your house down.”
Yet Geraldine, as she pattered off to her own room again, was really very sorry for poor Aggie. These first, dreadful premonitions were the worst. Nothing afterwards was quite so hard to bear. It must still be only in the middle of the night, when the ticking clocks become audible, that panic stretched out its icy paw and touched her. To-morrow, next week, some new enthusiasm would lend her wings and she would escape from time’s pursuit. But not for ever. The terror would come back, the clocks would tick louder and the pauses in the night would seem longer. She would not grow old easily: she was too vain, too spoilt, had lived too long upon the lotus food of adulation. When the last time came she would meet it without fortitude; she would clutch and struggle and become a bore.
For Geraldine it had all been easier. As the wife of Otho she had acquired great practice in endurance and the stoicism of a slave. She had known from the first that the world is a hard place and with great skill she made the best of it. Her farewells to youth had been made with serenity and grace, unmarred by any impulsive returns. But they had not been made without suffering. Even now she could never make up her mind which had given her most pain, the first love or the last: the first when she had demanded so much or the last when she had expected so little.
Her room, which took up the whole of one wing, had windows on either side of it so that she could look out on to the lawn, the garden or the stable roofs. It was a vast place, smelling faintly of camphor, and filled with sofas and chairs covered with a bird’s-eye chintz. At first sight there seemed to be no bed in it at all. Long ago there used to be a large four-poster, but when Otho died she banished it and put in a corner a small box ottoman, very hard, narrow and uncomfortable but blatantly single, as though she could not enough assert her right to sleep alone for the rest of her life. Over the mantelpiece hung a large portrait group of Otho, herself, and the Rivaz collection, painted in a manner of an eighteenth-century conversation piece. It had been done about the time that she used to lie awake listening to the clocks, but there was nothing in her portrait to indicate this. Her Titian hair was flung up from her forehead into an elaborately waved confusion which ended in a coil very far down on the back of her neck. In the approved manner of the day she presented the torso. She was presenting it to Otho who, for his part, was strenuously pointing out a fine copper beech upon the north side of the lawn. Clinging to her skirts was that infant Dominick, begotten in the swamps of Africa, whose Rivaz bull neck made him so creditable an olive branch. Mathilde, also with a bull neck, leant affectionately upon her father’s arm, and completed the foreground section of the group. The swarthy Charles, the Celtic Lionel and the golden Julian were kept busy with a pony in the rear, while Laura and Beata, red-haired like their mother, gambolled with a puppy.
There were a great many other pictures: pastel portraits of all the children, and water-colour sketches of Lough Ashe, Geraldine’s old home, done by her twin sister, Helena. And there was a small Benozzo Gozzoli, a Martyrdom of St. Stephen, which Otho had given her after Dominick was born.
Beside the ottoman couch, on a small table, a spirit lamp was burning. She had just lighted it when poor Aggie began bumping about on the stairs. It was her habit to make tea several times during the night. Even in youth she had been but a light sleeper, and now, in old age, she scarcely shut her eyes. The long hours spent alone among her pictures and chintz sofas would have been rather tedious if it had not been for these cups of tea. She seldom lay down on the bed, but would wander round the room with a rug, perching, now in one chair, now in another, like an old bird on a bough. She would doze off for a few minutes and then drink more tea until the first grey light began to struggle with the flame of her candle and she could reasonably call it morning. Then, putting on another cap and a slightly thicker shawl, she would sit down to her writing table and begin letters to her children, to Lionel in China, to Mathilde in Rome, to Dominick in Egypt, and sometimes, absently, to ‘My darling Julian’ or ‘My dearest Charles’ before she remembered that they were in Heaven. An odd, roosting nocturnal life she led up there among her chairs and sofas.
When she had drunk her tea she went impatiently to one of the windows to see whether it was night or day, and found the world midway between the two. Darkness had vanished and the light was elfin. It came from nowhere and lay over the trees and stable roofs with a bluish pallor, destroying all colour and making everything look flat. On the roof immediately below her slept Solange and Marianne in a couple of camp beds. Their bodies were shapeless lumps under the tossed army blankets and their pillows looked dingy, but their tender faces, turned up to the sky, were like sleeping flowers. The grandmother gazed down at them for a long time, pondering. A deep sigh escaped her. For Marianne asleep made her think of a garden in the early morning, when no footstep has marked the cool sparkle of the grass. Her face was smooth and blank, with its innocent eyelids, and her young breast under the blanket rose and fell serenely. But her soul was not far away, for when a little wind, the first wind of dawn, blew down from the hills and fanned her hair, she stirred and smiled in her sleep. Turning on her back she flung out a hand as if to a friend who had kissed her.
“Soon, very soon now,” sighed the old woman at the window. “Whose kisses will wake her to-morrow? The first time and the last time. What agony!”
Turning back to her room, where the candle flame still fought back the day, she settled to rest for a moment on a sofa by the writing-table. And she prayed that Marianne might not, at any rate, grow into a Laura or a Philomena, wasting the precious years. For the interval between the first time and the last is very short, and when it is gone it is gone for ever. These poor young women all talked too much. For Aggie she could find excuses, for Aggie was, as it were, making hay in the twilight. But for Philomena and Laura she had nothing but contempt. They wanted these Potts and Ushers, did they? Such names too! But why talk about it? Geraldine had never talked except perhaps a little at first when, in her inexperience, she had found it necessary to confide in Helena. She remembered going out in a boat to the summer-house on the island at Lough Ashe. It was a Sunday afternoon in September, soon after she had been married to Otho, and he had sent her on a visit home while he took a trip down the Amazon. She had enjoyed her freedom. The young cousin whom she had always wished to marry had been there and they used to row about on the lake. In those days they called it deceiving one’s husband, and she had said to Helena afterwards:
“Do you think it was quite right … on a Sunday?”
Absurd question! But she was hardly older than Marianne. And how the church bells had chimed that Sunday evening, echoing over the water and the bracken and the birch trees of the Island! The bracken was turning and the rowan berries were red, and the bells rang: Ding-dong-right-wrong-ding-dong, and Helena said:
“As long as Otho doesn’t find out.”
For her own part she had always thought it wrong to deceive anybody and she soon learnt to hold her tongue. She had given and taken a great deal of happiness when once she got past spring, that treacherous season of romantic expectation and unfulfilled promise when the sap rises in the trees and the heart is filled with melancholy and a sense of mis-spent youth. Summer is much better than spring, she thought drowsily, because it lasts longer. And Charles, pulling Julian in a little go-cart along the box-edged path of the kitchen garden, was going much faster than she could run even though they were only little boys and not yet in Heaven. She picked up her long skirts and ducked her head under the apple boughs as she ran after them, calling. And her father’s steward, Michael M’Ginty, with his grey whiskers and pot hat, stepped out from a clump of hollyhocks and said solemnly:
“Her leddyship is in the big Markay.”
Because there was a garden party for the Lord Lieutenant and a band was playing by the shores of Lough Ashe, and she must keep the children out of the way. And the cocks and hens were clucking and crowing, and the bells rang across the water: ding-dong-right-wrong——, so loudly that she woke and found that the grey dawn had turned to broad sunlight. Hens were clucking in the stable yard and the bells of Ullmer Church were ringing for an early Celebration to which, out of kindness for Mr. Comstock, she ought to go. But first she would drink some more tea. She blinked at the sunlight, innocently pleased to have slept so long.