1 Another month of outlawry went by.
The dahlias in Hyde Park died, cut down by the frost; and with the death of them there came over Aliette that keen longing for the countryside in winter-time which only English hunting people know. She used to dream about hunting; about Miracle, striding full gallop across hedged fields, steadying himself for his leap, flying his fence, landing, galloping on.
But Miracle--Hector's gift--was lost to her, as hunting was lost, and nearly every social amenity which made up existence before she met Ronnie. Between a hunting-season and a hunting-season, she had "dropped out of things"; had become one of those illegally-mated women whom our church neglects, our law despises, and our press dares only ignore.
The Aliettes of England! The women whose sole excuse for illegal matehood is love! There are half a million such in Great Britain to-day: women whose only crime is that, craving happiness, they have taken their happiness in defiance of some male.
They are of all classes, our Aliettes. You will find them alike in our West End and in our slums, in little lost cottages beneath whose windows the sea moans all day long, and in prim suburban villas where the milk-cart clatters on asphalt roads and cap-and-aproned servants gossip of a morning under the peeky laburnum. You will find them--and always with them, the one man, the mate they have chosen--in Chelsea studios, on Cornish farms and Yorkshire moorlands, in Glasgow and in Ramsgate, in a thousand stuffy apartments of Inner London, and in a hundred unsuspicious boarding-houses of that middle fringe which is neither Inner London nor Suburbia.
These women--who crave neither "free love" nor the "right to motherhood" but only the right to married happiness--are the bond-slaves of our national hypocrisy. Sometimes their own strength, sometimes death, sometimes money, sometimes the clemency of their legal owners sets them free. But, for the most part, they live, year after year, in outlawry; live uncomplaining, faithful to that mate they have taken, bringing up with loving care and a wise tenderness those children whom--even should their parents ultimately marry--our law stamps "bastard" from birth to death.
Meanwhile our priests, our politicians, our lawgivers, and all the self-righteous Pharisees who have never known the hells of unhappy marriage, harden their smug hearts; and neither man nor woman in England may claim release from a drunkard, from a lunatic, from a criminal, or from any of those thousand and one miseries which wreck the human soul.
2
Powolney Mansions--four impossible Victorian dwelling-places, converted into one impossible Georgian boarding-house of that middle fringe which is neither Inner London nor Outer Suburbia--front a quiet road half-way between the Baron's Court and West Kensington Stations.
"Queen's" being the limit of Aliette's London, it was natural enough that her deliberate mind, casting about for some less expensive abode than their hotel near the park, should remember the neighborhood, and search it for a hiding-place.
Natural enough, too, was that instinct for a hiding-place, in a woman who had no desire to parade her unmated self before the herd, and no craving for unnecessary martyrdom.
At the Mansions, six guineas a week (and three extra for Caroline Staley) provided a bed-sitting-room, complete with a double-bedstead of squeaking brass, a hard sofa, two harder chairs, a so-called armchair, a writing-table, three steel engravings of the eighteen-eighties, and a shilling-in-the-slot gas-stove. The six guineas also provided meals, served by dingily uniformed waitresses in a crowded communal dining-room--and "congenial society."
This "congenial society" did not--as the society to which Aliette had been accustomed--shift its habitat with the seasons; except for an occasional fortnight in Margate or Clacton, it clung limpet-like to the Mansions.
Moreover, as the pair discovered within three days, it was eclectic as well as cliquey--containing gentlefolk and ungentle-folk; workers and idlers; bounders and the unbounding. Of the first were two pathetic spinsters who knitted all day before the untended fire in the vast untended drawing-room, remembering, as lost souls might remember paradise, the bygone millennium of cheap eggs and cheap income-tax. Of the last were an Anglo-Indian family, looking for, and never finding, "a nice easily-run flat." Item, were three foreigners, vague creatures from vague places, who never seemed to have anything to do, and never seemed to go to bed; one prosperous commercial traveler who "liked the sociability"; one ruined squire who had furnished his own room and hoarded the remnants of a pre-war cellar in its undusted cupboard; and three mothers of no known social position, whose daughters, dingy at breakfast, grew demure by lunch-time, and--communal tea included--sallied forth with mysterious "dancing-partners" to return mouse-footed in the early dawn. An understrapper from the Belgian consulate, and a plantation overseer on leave from the Federated Malay States completed the tally of "Monsieur Mayer's guests.
"A fine gossipy lot, Miss Aliette," judged Caroline Staley, her loyalty a little strained by, though proof against, her surroundings. "While as for they maids----"
But the "congenial society" of Powolney Mansions gossiped--the aloof Aliette knew--neither more nor less than the society she had abandoned. For--try as one would to hide one's self--awkward meetings were inevitable.
Never a woman of easy friendships, Hector Brunton's wife before her elopement had possessed three distinct sets of cordial acquaintances--the "Moor Park lot," the "London lot," and the "Clyst Fullerford lot," as she phrased them. Of these, the "Clyst Fullerford lot" and the "Moor Park lot" (barring Colonel Sanders, the M.F.H., who, apparently untouched by gossip, greeted her, at walk with Ronnie down St. James's Street, in his cheeriest voice as "dear Mrs. Brunton") might, except for an occasional letter forwarded from Lancaster Gate via Mollie, have inhabited the moon.
And with the "London lot" one never quite knew how one stood. Bachelor barristers inevitably lifted the hat and smiled. Hugh Spillcroft, meeting one alone at Harrods, invited one to tea with him and proffered a tentative sympathy which one gently but firmly rebuffed. Mrs. Needham, also encountered on a shopping expedition, pretended the most tactful ignorance, but forbore to inquire after one's husband. Sir Siegfried and Lady Moss, passing in their Rolls-Royce, looked politically the other way. Hector's particular friends one, of course, avoided; and, since she made no overture, one also avoided--a little hurt, perhaps, at the ingratitude--Mary O'Riordan.
Taking it all round--as Julia Cavendish put it on one of those frequent afternoons when, always preannounced by telephone, the lovers came to tea with her--the situation held "little hope and less comfort."
"And it'll get worse," said that indomitable old woman; "it's bound to get worse if you persist in hiding yourselves, if you go on refusing to meet anybody. Don't you see, my dear," she turned on Aliette with a little of her former brusquerie, "that you're playing right into your husband's hands? Don't make any mistake about him. He knows exactly where you are; and, so long as there's no open scandal, so long as you remain tucked away in that abominable boarding-house, he'll leave you there. Whereas, if you'll only make the scandal an open one, public opinion will force him to act. Take it from me, the only thing to be done is to flaunt yourselves."
"Flaunt?" said Aliette.
"Yes! Flaunt yourselves!" repeated Ronnie's mother, rather pleased with the literary expression.
"I rather agree," said Ronnie. "That's the way Belfield broke Carrington. Dash it, we can't go on lying doggo forever. It isn't fair to Alie."
Since their move to Powolney Mansions, Ronnie had begun to realize the exact difference in the world's treatment of a man's "lapse" and a woman's "adultery"; to perceive that he apparently was to be allowed to go on with his avocation, scanty though the emoluments of that avocation were becoming, as though nothing had happened; that his clubs and almost every house he had visited while a bachelor were still open to him as an unmarried husband, so long as the world, officially, knew nothing of his "unmarried wife."
"Never mind me, I'm quite"--Aliette glanced round the comfortable drawing-room, so unlike the spinster-haunted wilderness of the Mansions--"resigned to my temporary fate."
"Rubbish!" retorted Julia; and went on to elaborate the plan that they should move from Baron's Court as soon as ever they could find some residence, the more expensive the better, in Inner London.
"You must be seen everywhere," she went on. "You must entertain and be entertained. In a word, Aliette--like Mrs. Carrington--must afficher herself as Mrs. Cavendish. Never mind what it costs. I'll finance you."
But Aliette's whole nature recoiled from Julia's scheme.
She, had it not been for Ronnie's career, would have been more than content to wait a year, two years, a whole lifetime for freedom. Her idea--she told them--was to take some little cottage, not too far removed from London; so that "Ronnie could come down every week-end."
Nevertheless, since any hope of freedom was tantalizing, because now, always and always stronger, there mounted in her the conviction that one day she would have a child by Ronnie, Aliette so far weakened from her resolution against "the flaunting policy" as to accept Julia's invitation, telephoned next day, to share her box for the first night of Patrick O'Riordan's "Khorassan."
3
Ronnie's "wife," though too proud to make the first move, often wondered why Mary O'Riordan, eager enough to accept her championing in a similar situation, should have taken so little trouble to reciprocate, now that reciprocation was so obviously indicated: but, dressing for the theater in the unkindly bedroom whose harsh lights made her needlessly afraid of the mirror, she decided that sheer delicacy alone had restrained her old school-friend from getting into touch; and anticipated their inevitable meeting without a qualm. It would be nervous work, displaying one's self in Julia Cavendish's box before a "first-night" audience (unwise work, thought Aliette, unwise of Ronnie and his mother to have been so persistent); but Mary's presence would at least furnish a guarantee against complete ostracism. Whatever other people might do, she could rely on Mary's visiting their box in the entr'acte, on Mary's going out of her way to demonstrate sympathy.
"Looking forward to it, darling?" interrupted Ronnie, entering with the usual perfunctory knock from the bathroom, where he had been doing his best to shave, for the second time that day, in lukewarm water.
"Not exactly." Aliette dismissed her maid.
"Why not?"
"Oh, I don't know. It seems all wrong, somehow or other. And suppose"--she hesitated--"suppose people are nasty?"
"They won't be," assured Ronnie, through the shirt into which he was struggling. "You're too sensitive about the whole thing. One or two people may snub us. But what's a snub or so, if only we can force H. B. to move?"
"But"--she hesitated again--"snubs hurt, man." Thinking of various slights already endured, her eyes suffused, and she had difficulty in keeping back the tears.
"Nobody shall hurt you." He came quickly across the room; put his arms round her; and kissed, very tenderly, the smooth skin behind her ears, her bared shoulders.
"Oh, yes, they will. Not even you can prevent that. Women in my position are bound to get hurt. All the time! But it doesn't hurt much"--she looked up into his eyes, and smiled away the tears from her own;--"it doesn't really hurt at all so long as I've got you."
Nevertheless, as they raced through their execrable meal in the empty dining-room, Aliette knew herself face to face with an ordeal. And the ordeal waxed more and more terrible in anticipation as the electric brougham, which Julia had insisted on sending to Baron's Court for them, rolled toward Bruton Street.
She sat wordlessly, her hand clasped in Ronnie's, staring wide-eyed at the buses, the taxicabs, and the private cars which passed or overtook them. It was as though every soul in London, all the people in those buses, those taxicabs, and those private cars, were hostile to her; as though she were a woman apart from all other women, outcast indeed. She wanted to say to her man: "Must we do this unwise thing? Must we? Can't we turn back? Can't we go on hiding ourselves?" But she said nothing, only clung the closer to his responsive hand.
4
Literary folk can be peculiarly childish; which is perhaps the reason why great authors are usually little men.
One part of Julia's mind--as she waited for Ronnie and Aliette to fetch her--positively grinned with mischief in anticipation of the new adventure, "defying Society." That part of her felt very much the heroine, a female knight-errant about to do lusty tilt against the dragon "Convention." But, in the main, her mood was retrospective.
"Curious," she thought, looking back at her dead self; "curious how entirely my views have changed." And she remembered the reactionary stubbornness of her anti-divorce article for "The Contemplatory," her delight at the stir which that article had created, her delusions that it might "help to stem the flood of post-war immorality."
Now even the closing sentence, "Until humanity learns to discipline the sentimental impulse, there can be no hope of matrimonial reconstruction," rang false in the auditorium of experience. She yearned suddenly to rewrite that sentence, to substitute "the lustful impulse" for "the sentimental impulse." But the written word, alas, could not be revoked.
Then, vaguely she visioned herself writing a new article--perhaps a new book--some pronouncement, anyway, which should contradict and counteract her old doctrine. And from that, her creative mind--as though linking story to moral--started in to examine the individual case of her son and Aliette.
The front door-bell rang; and Julia heard Ronnie's voice in the hall.
"Where's Aliette?" she asked, as he entered.
"Waiting in the brougham. By Jove, mater, you look like a stage duchess."
"Do I?" She blushed a little at his chaff, knowing it merited by the super-splendor of her attire; by the sable-and-brocade opera-cloak and the black velvet thereunder, by the coronal of diamond wheat-ears which banded her graying hair, and the Louis Seize buckles on her elegant shoes. Once more the heroine of an adventure, she picked her long white gloves and her bejeweled hand-bag from the dining-room table; and followed her son, through the front door which Kate held open for them, into the brougham.
Aliette, she greeted with a rare pressure of the hand and the still rarer compliment, "You're looking radiant to-night, my dear."
Kate closed the door on the three of them; and the electric brougham rolled off through Bruton Street into Bond Street; through Bond Street into Piccadilly. Julia did not appear in the least nervous. She began to talk of Patrick O'Riordan--a little contemptuously, as was her wont when dealing with stage-folk, against whom she cherished a prejudice almost puritanical.
"Patrick O'Riordan," opined Julia, "was a poorish play-wright; but of course he had money to play with. Not his own money. Naturally. People in the theater never did speculate with their own money. Lord Letchingbury was behind the show. Dot said Letchingbury had put up ten thousand." Followed a Rabelaisian reference to Letchingbury's penchant for Mary O'Riordan, which horrified Aliette, who had always imagined Mary, except for her one lapse, virtuous; and landed them in the queue of vehicles making for the illuminated portico of the Capitol Theater.
As the brougham crawled near and nearer to the lights which blazed their one word "Khorassan," it seemed to Aliette that she was about to plunge into a stream of icy water. Her heart contracted at mere sight of the furred opera-cloaks, of the smoothly-coiffured heads and the shiny top-hats under the portico. For a moment, fear had its way with her; the impulse to flight overwhelmed her courage. Then she looked at Ronnie; and saw that his face was set, that his chin protruded ever so slightly for sign of determination. Julia Cavendish, the wheat-ears glimmering like a crown in her hair, sat bolt upright, unflinching.
All said and done--thought Aliette--the risk, the big social risk, was Julia's. If, for her sake, Julia Cavendish could dare to jeopardize her entire circle, she, Aliette, must not prove unworthy of the offering. Her red lips pursed--even as they had pursed long ago when she and Ronnie waited for hounds to give tongue beyond Parson's Brook; and, head equally high, she followed the diamond wheat-ears out of the brougham, through the crowd under the portico, and into the theater.
Passing the box-office, she saw Julia smile at an old man with drooping gray mustach............