Gertrude Page

“ Once Alymer raised his head and looked hard into her face. In his eyes there was an expression of utter hopelessness. She had not spoken any word of reproach or scorn, yet everything about her as she stood there erect and passionless, and without one grain of sympathy for his struggle, told him that, just as far as her natural broadness allowed her to condemn any one, she condemned him.
For a moment a sort of savage recklessness seized him. He felt suddenly he was stranded high-and-dry on a barren rock, with nothing at all any more in his world but his profession. ”

“ She would not stay to see the awakening come to Dudley, if Doris were his wife, nor struggle through the long months at the General Post Office, when the end of each day’s labour brought no welcoming smile from Basil.
She would not settle down alone in a dingy little flat as their opposite neighbour, to become a mere letter of the alphabet to God and man, surrounded by countless other cyphers of as little meaning and account. She would go away to some new, young land, with her vigour and her courage, and carve out a path with some semblance of reality and value. ”

“ And all the time Hal stood there with those resolute, set lips, as erect as a young grenadier.
But all the same he meant to have her if he could, and he remembered of old how often he had found a swift, bold attack won. So he stopped short beside her, and said:
“You know that whatever circumstances compel me to do, all my heart is yours, Hal, and you care a little bit about me. You know you do. Don’t condemn me to outer darkness. Come to me like the sensible little woman you are. No one will ever know, and I can make your life gayer and happier just as long as ever you like.” ”

“ Yet, by some equally mysterious compensation, a woman was often so fashioned that if she could feel the upward flight was won through her, she might rest statisfied even though him she loved had soared away. It was the mother-love blending strangely with the wife-love; the protecting, inspiring, unselfish, mothering instinct, lying in the soul of every true-hearted woman.
Standing gazing at the flashing river, Lorraine, in the midst of her probing, knew that it was his ultimate success and good she wanted, as well as his freshness to sweeten her own life. ”

“ Hal might be dearer than all else to Dudley, without finding herself loved in any way out of the ordinary, seeing how little he cared much about except his profession; but to be the beloved of all, to an eager, passionate, intense nature like hers, meant that in her heart she had placed him upon a pedestal, and, while fondly having her little smile over his shortcomings, yet loved him with an all-embracing love. ”

“ What a life of self-pleasing and gay-living lay open to him if he chose to take it. She knew that, if he chose it, though he might still win a certain amount of fame, it would never be the well-grounded, staunch, reliable success that she could spur him to.
And so she drew a curtain over the dangers her course might hold, and, in a light and airy way, threw over him the glow and the warm attractiveness of her many fascinations and allurements, that she might keep him free from any foolish engagement or low entanglement, to concentrate all his mind and his heart upon his work and her. ”

“ The hard face relaxed a very little, and she shrugged her shoulders.
“Oh, well, it isn’t easy to be kind,” she answered, “when you don’t stand for much else in the universe but a letter of the alphabet.” She turned back to her grate and commenced sweeping up the ashes.
Basil roused himself a little further and looked interested.
“What letter do you stand for?”
“Just G.” She gave a low, harsh laugh. “G is the letter that distinguishes my flat from the others, and it is all I stand for to God or man.” ”

“ But Dick had judged wisely in suggesting the trip down East. Anything West would merely have recalled painful memories. The East of London was new to her, and could not fail to be interesting to any one with Hal’s love of her fellows.
They went to a large parish hall, where Quin was in charge for a social evening of dancing and music. Factory girls were there in all their tawdry finery to dance; rough, boisterous youths mostly made fun of them; tired, white-faced, over-worked middle-aged women sat round the walls, laughing weakly, but forgetting the drudgery for a little while. ”

“ Ethel Hayward, returning from her holiday to the dreary, empty Holloway flat, read it in the train as she journeyed. Instantly her mind was full of Hal. She felt that in losing the one great woman friend of her life Hal would seem to have lost mother, sister, and friend in one.
She went home to the emptiness of the flat, with her heart so full of aching sympathy that some of the bitterness of her own loss was softened. On her sitting-room table was a beautiful array of flowers. ”

“ In Lorraine’s complex character, the love of success was blended with a love of the deeper and richer things of life. She was of those to whom, at times, wide spaces, and fresh breezes, and the big, sweeping, elemental things call loudly, above the noise of the world of fashion; and she knew what it was to be filled with an aching nausea of all she had practically sold her soul to win, and a yearning nostalgia for something that might satisfy the finer instincts of her nature. ”

“ As for Hal herself, she hastily tumbled into bed, still chuckling in huge enjoyment over her evening.
“Those boys are just dears,” was her thought, “and I wouldn’t have missed Lady Bounce for the world. What a good thing Dudley was taken with paternal affection for that little fool Doris, and I had to have a chaperone. Heigh-ho! what a scene there will be if he hears about it; but what’s the odds so long as you’re happy? And oh dear! what will Lady Phyllis Fenton say when she finds out”; and once more the even teeth flashed an irresistible smile into the darkness. ”

“ It was not that she grudged Doris the happiness, nor the prospect of a home in which she and Dudley might together take care of Basil; but she saw ahead the tragedy of the awakening, when Dudley learnt of the shallow, selfish little heart behind Doris’s charming exterior.
That he, of all people, should be drawn to such an one was only the contradiction seen on all sides in life. Because he had that old-fashioned distrust of the independent, self-reliant woman, he must needs go to the opposite extreme, and let himself be drawn to one capable of little else in the world but ornamentation. ”

“ A moderate hit was quite expected, but not a triumph which placed her almost in the first rank, and was due not merely to her acting, but to a bigness of spirit and comprehension she had never before had an opporturnty to reveal.
It was, indeed, the justification of Hal’s devotion. Hal, by her very nature, could not love a small-minded woman. What she so unceasingly loved and admired in Lorraine was a hidden something she alone had had the perspicacity to perceive, and could so instinctively rely upon. ”

“ That there might be other traits in their place, equally admirable, did not occur to him. They ware not at any rate the traits he most admired.
Hal, on the other hand, was different in every respect. She loathed books, and learning, and what she called “dead old bones and rubbish.” But she loved human nature, and studied it in every phase she could.
Left at a very tender age to Dudley’s sole care and protection, she had to grow up without the enfolding, sympathetic love of a mother, or the gay companionship of brothers and sisters. ”

“ Why probe?... Their friendship had slipped of itself into an old companionship. What need for more? She knew instinctively he would come often to fill her lonely hours, and tell her all about his work and his doings.
And sometimes they would go out together on little jaunts. If they did, who need know, or who, at any rate, need gossip? She felt a gladness grow in her mind at the thought of the happy friendship they might have; guarded perhaps from harm by the disparity in their years, and at the same time of inestimable benefit to him, and pleasure to her. ”

“ It’s much more fun getting a few things for oneself. And when the only thing in all the world you want is your freedom, do you imagine he’ll give you that?”
Lorraine got up suddenly, thrusting her hands out before her, as if to ward off some vague fear.
“Hal, you are brutal today. What is the use of talking like that now?... Why did you go to America?... Perhaps if you hadn’t gone—”
“Give me a cigarette,” said Hal, with a little catch in her voice, “I want soothing. At the present moment you’re a greater strain than Dudley talking down at me from a pyramid of worn-out prejudices. ”

“ Yet, in spite of her soreness towards Doris, something in her evening with Ethel had unaccountably cheered and refreshed her—the kindly praise, the warm-hearted affection, the sight of the strong, womanly face, unembittered by its heavy sorrow.
Hal stood at her window, and glanced out over the City, and felt renewed in her determination to withstand Sir Edwin Crathie’s advances. She knew that he was treating her with a lack of respect he would not have dared to show a woman in his own circle. ”

“ But the love of a lifetime is not dismissed at will, and looking a little pitifully backward, though she was but twenty-eight, Ethel felt she could not remember the time when she did not love Dudley Pritchard, though it had perhaps only crystallised into the great feature of her life at the time when, in silent, heroic endeavour, he had given of all he had to win his friend back to life and health. ”

“ Lorraine found herself wondering what life would be like with her beauty and talent if there were no vulgarly extravagant, unprincipled mother in the background, no insistent need to earn money, no gnawing ambition for a fame she already began to feel might prove an empty joy.
She had not seen Hal for a year, and she felt an ache for her. In the shifting, unreliable, soul-numbing atmosphere of her stage career, she still looked upon Hal as a City of Refuge ”

“ At first Hal had declined to see him at all, but in the end Denton, with his shrewd common sense, had talked her into a kindlier mood.
When they came back from the churchyard she had gone to him in the little sitting-room, where he sat alone, with bowed head. He stood up when she came in, but he did not speak. He waited for her to say what she would, with a look of quiet misery in his eyes that touched her heart.
For the first time she saw how changed he was. There seemed nothing of the old boyishness left. Only a quiet, grave, deeply suffering man. ”

“ The strong soul accepts life silently as a field of battle, asking for energy, resource, courage, and that fine spirit which obeys the unseen general in unquestioning faith.
It was only in such a spirit, through those years of pain and mystery, that Ethel was able to witness her passionately loved brother’s martyrdom, and give all the years of her youth to earn that pour salary from a wealthy Empire, to keep some sort of a home for the three of them in the little, dingy Holloway flat. ”

“ Vivian blanched before the suddenness of the attack, but she held her ground.
“You absurd child, what in the world could he be to me? It is easy enough to see he has no eyes for any one but you.”
“And before I came?”
Lorraine took a step forward, and for a moment the two women faced each other squarely. The eyes of each were a little hard, the expressions a little flinty; but behind the older woman’s was a scornful, unscrupulous indifference to any moral aspect; behind the younger’s a hunted, rather pitiful hopelessness. ”

“ That it is her youth and not herself that holds the attraction is unknown to her, and a clever man may often dupe her young affections.
Lorraine, with her romantic, imaginative temperament, had grown to believe herself in love with him, and then had followed the old, sordid story of insult and her consequent disillusionment. The memories stung her now with a bitter stinging heightened by the feeling that life cared so much more for Alymer’s welfare than it had ever done for hers. ”

“ Lorraine was more contentedly gay than she had been for some time—a quiet, natural light-heartedness, born of some attainment that was giving her joy. Hal was not clever enough to actually perceive this, but she did perceive that a certain restless, anxious indecision of manner and plans had passed away. For the time being Lorraine was happy in a sense she had not been over her success. That Alymer Hermon had anything to do with it never entered Hal’s head. ”

“ The life that she passes by unheeded, leaving it only to the sunshine and wind and rain, often grows little else but rank vegetation, and develops rust and mould—never the crops that are life-giving and life-sustaining to the world; never the great thoughts, great deeds, wide sympathies, that raise mankind to the skies.
But for Dudley the harrowing was not yet finished. Perhaps, indeed, no moment of all had been quite so bitter as the sense of his utter unworthiness and utter incapability to help Ethel in her hour of direst need. ”

“ Hal, for her part, was no less interested in him, but she found little else than that she had already seen: humorous, quizzical grey eyes, a face a good deal lined, and a mouth and chin suggesting a nature fond of enjoyment and self-indulgence, which it had never seen any cause to deny itself. She saw that he was very grey about the temples, and a trifle inclined to stoutness, but tall enough and broad enough to carry it off.
A fine figure of a man, though one, she felt instinctively, belonging to a very different world to hers. ”

“ As if one-fourth of the women wage-earners, gentle or otherwise, in England today had any choice in the matter whatever. The rapidity with which a vacant place in the ranks is filled and the numbers waiting for it is surely sufficient proof of that; to say nothing of the pitiful conditions under which many, gentle and otherwise, cling to their posts long after a merciful fate should have given them the opportunity to save the remnants of their shattered health amidst country breezes.
It is useless to cry out to the woman that work and competition with men is unbecoming to her. ”

“ At the last there was a bitter scene between mother and daughter.
“If you refuse Frank Raynor now, you ruin the two of us,” was Mrs. Vivian’s angry indictment. “What can we expect from him any more? How are you ever going to get another such chance to make a hit?”
“And what if it ruins my life to marry him?” Lorraine asked.
“Such nonsense! The man can give you everything. What in the world more do you want? He is good enough looking; he could pass as a gentleman, and he is rich.”
A sudden nauseous spasm at all the ugliness of life shook Lorraine. ”

“ But Ethel could not answer to his cheeriness just yet.
“Basil, why are so many humans just mere letters of the alphabet in the general scheme?”
She had slid into a sitting posture now, and leaned her head against his arm.
“It doesn’t matter so much about the men; they can go out into the world and make friends by the way, and become something more if they wish; but what of the single women, who have to work for their living, and have nothing much to look forward to but a sort of terror as to what will become of them when they can work no more? ”

“ When things are difficult, and irritating, and disappointing, the pleasantest companion is apt to be one with so much individual regard for us at the time that we can hold forth upon our troubles without any fear of boring our listener.
When Hal had poured her tale of woe into Lorraine’s ear, she had known that Lorraine was genuinely interested and sorry—and yet, also, that something else occupied her mind at the same time. Sitting now, opposite to Sir Edwin Crathie, it was perfectly apparent for the time being that his mind was entirely at her service. ”

“ There’s too much useless, silent aching, and useless, passionate resentment over circumstances that it seems should either never have been, or should be remedied if any Guiding Hand has power. I have determination and I’m strong, Basil; the future doesn’t frighten me badly yet, but when you are gone, I feel as if the loneliness might half kill me, and as if then I ought to have the right to become a blank if I wish, since I was never consulted about becoming a letter in the great alphabet. ”