Stephen McKenna

“ Barbara explained. "Destiny meant you to be wounded and Jim to be killed and some one else to be untouched. If Destiny didn't mean me to be burned, I could put my finger in the flame of that candle. Everything we do——"
O'Rane shook his head and laughed.
"You don't believe that, Lady Barbara. You don't believe that you've no choice whether you're good or bad, kind or unkind—that you're helpless." ”

“ There was a perceptible pause; and Sonia, finding the one-sided dialogue uninteresting, looked at her watch and began collecting her furs.
"Well, I don't think I very well can, you know," said Jack, "if you're all alone."
"Not in my own house? I must say, you are the most extraordinary person! There are men—strange as it may seem—who would give a good deal for the chance of having me to themselves at dinner."
"I'm sure of it. You're wasted on me."
Candour and conceit were so nicely matched in Jack Waring that Lady Barbara could not tell from his voice whether he was laughing at her. ”

“ Life's such a hopeless thing, if you can't control it."
"And you say that, Lady Barbara, with your brains and your looks and your health and your money——"
"Even if I've got them all, they needn't make me happy.... They don't! Sometimes I feel that, if I could give them all up, if I could make one gigantic sacrifice, I might be happy.... You're not sorry to have been fighting, are you? But I wonder what equal sacrifice a woman can make."
"Ah, to die with credit is the easiest thing in the world," O'Rane answered, as he pushed back his chair. ”

“ Jack looked at her and decided that even a formal protest would only feed her vanity. He stared abstractedly at her as though she were a horse led out for his inspection. Suddenly she smiled, and, as her face lit up with vitality and mischief, the haggard expression vanished and left her beautiful. Perhaps the smile had come in answer to an unsuspected light of admiration in his own eyes; perhaps she was a better actress than he thought and could transform herself at will; no one could gain her reputation as a coquette without earning it and working for it. ”

“ Dear Barbara, to please me, will you see your doctor before you go back to hospital?"
Barbara had so long looked on George as a kindly and comfortable bit of universal family furniture that she was startled by the unexpected softening of his voice. Perhaps he, too, felt that it was time to cultivate a heart and to fall in love. She smiled with an approach to happiness. Any hint of tenderness in a man's voice made her like a flower opening its petals to the sun. ”

“ Barbara proposed hastily. As he revealed each new stage of careful preparation, she dreaded being left alone with him. "Are you very greedy, Jack, or only hungry? I love that one-step. Why did you drag me away in the middle?"
They entered the banqueting-hall to the jig and stamp of rag-time overhead; Barbara was still humming, as she drew off her gloves and sat down opposite him at a corner-table.
"You ought to be grateful to me for getting you a table before the rush starts. I can't stand rag-time, myself. It's killed decent dancing. What are you going to eat, Babs?" ”

“ To become an outcast might be as dramatic as to rise from obscurity to a pinnacle of fame.... Napoleon owed half his place in history to St. Helena.
An undistracted fortnight at the Abbey cooled Lady Barbara's resentment and checked the more romantic flights of her imagination. Her father's judgement was clearly at fault; to run away was to admit herself in the wrong. By the time that she had got herself into perspective, the season was so near its end that she did not think it worth while to make a demonstration and to occupy her room in Berkeley Square by force. ”

“ Webster reflected with slow mind, rubbing his fingers against the pad of his thumb, as though they still felt the dead eye-lids of the girl who had at last escaped him.
"Woman's tough customer," he warned them. "Blackmail you quick as thought. And looks bad—much worse—, if any one stays away inquest."
"We'll trust that she's too much rattled," Summertown answered. "And she doesn't even know who Babs is."
"Bet your life she does," Webster answered. Seeing Lady Barbara's undisguised fear, he deliberately played on it, as his price for allowing her to escape the inquest. ”

“ Savage lighted a cigarette and shewed cavernous dark eyes and an aquiline nose set in a curiously narrow face which looked as if the cheek-bones had been crushed together.
"Madame Hilary!"
"Won't you have a cigarette?"
She held out a case, and Barbara took one to gain time. So much had happened since the meeting in Webster's room that it no longer troubled her. The woman was certainly a blackmailer, as she had almost proved when she went to Lord Crawleigh and asked for "temporary assistance." ”

“ Their tastes harmonized; every one would say that it was a most suitable alliance. And some would whisper that she had come very near to throwing herself away on Jack Waring. People ought not to be allowed to be so rich....
He strode bare-headed on to the pavement, feeling helpless and trying to persuade himself that he was only nervous. As they drove to Ross House, he watched and listened to Lancing and Barbara, envying them their ease and wondering whether it was fair for two people to exclude the third from conversation by choosing an impossible subject. ”

“ Barbara leant against the table in helpless amazement.
"You're more of a Philistine than my own father!" she cried.
Jack smiled imperturbably.
"And what would you think if Lord Crawleigh came to that same matinée and gave a display of juggling with billiard-balls?"
"I should die happy," Barbara answered with a gurgle of laughter; then more seriously, "But why on earth shouldn't he? If he can do it, if the thing's all right in itself, why should the professionals have the monopoly? I'm very good." ”

“ O'Rane and Mayhew were abroad.
Had he ever felt the inclination, Jack professed to be without the time or energy to take part in a social life of dinners and dances. Exchanging one pose for another, he had ceased to be the arbiter of "good form," as that is understood at Eton and New College, and was aping the manners of an older generation; the new aloofness, like the old, dispensed him from doing anything that he did not like and gratified his faint but ineradicable sense of superiority. ”

“ Jim Loring came into the smoking-room and settled himself for a comfortable talk, only to find that his companion had run away unceremoniously in mid-sentence. These people had no sense of the important; life to them was powder and patches and dance music—less than that, for they stayed up half the night to smoke furtive cigars and ostentatiously shut their ears to the dance music. And Barbara was flitting from one man to another, when their two lives were in the balance. ”

“ Loring was in the early stages of devotion to Sonia Dainton and disappeared as long and often as possible to escape his mother and sister, who were trying to avert an engagement, and Lady Dainton, who was forcing it to a head; and in his absence Arden watched Lady Barbara posing herself in the middle of the stage, methodically sharing herself among the guests and holding her own with all. It was the fruit of early years, during which she had lived consistently in public, meeting men of every profession and country, listening, remembering, learning and giving her best in return. ”

“ Lady Barbara, are you very unhappy about something? It's not curiosity; I want to help, if I can. When you're blind, you become a bit of an impressionist. [Pg 298] If any one asked me to describe you, I'm glad to say that I can still remember exactly what you used to look like, but, when I describe you to myself, I get a massing of colours, a glorious freedom of line that no one else might recognize for you. Your voice would make me crowd my canvas with red, blood red. Pain is always red to me. ”

“ Barbara gripped the seat of her chair with both hands. Greater even than fear was respect for a man who could control himself; for the first time she wished that she loved him, because he was "bigger"—to use his pet word—than she had thought; she would not mind telling him so, if it would do any good; she would not mind telling him that he was bigger than she was, but nothing could do any good now.
Jack tried to speak, and she saw that he had to sip champagne before the words would come. ”

“ The walls were advancing and retiring, the banisters swayed and the floor of the landing heaved gently like a pitching boat.
When she felt steadier, she knocked at the door and waited patiently until she heard feet shuffling in the distance. A pink-faced elderly man informed her that Mr. Waring had gone away for the Long Vacation; he spoke with a strong Cockney accent, and Barbara decided that he must be the clerk with whom she had contended by telephone and whom she had imagined to be obsequious and yet sinister, with red eyes, short hair and bitten nails, a second Uriah Heep. ”

“ If I know anything of Lady Barbara, it will be the ball of the season. Youth for ever! But it is a mad world. 'What are our girls coming to?' the oldsters ask. 'A girl giving a ball!' 'And a wonderful ball it will be,' say I. Best wishes, Lady Barbara!"
Jack assumed that Barbara must be organizing a ball for some charity and thought no more of the announcement until he met Loring at the County Club that night before dinner and was hurried into the cool and deserted billiard-room.
"I say, have you seen about my precious cousin's latest freak?" Loring began. ”

“ I shall be such a wreck to-morrow, a mere bundle of nerves! But Helen Crossleigh will never forgive me, if I disappoint her. You don't look as if you were enjoying yourself much. I believe some one who shall be nameless has cut you! I believe that's it."
He laughed shrilly and dug Jack roguishly in the ribs with the gold knob of his cane; then set a resplendent hat at a jaunty angle and fluttered through the hall, murmuring, "Taxi! Oh, some one must get me a taxi! I shall break down and cry, if I don't get a taxi." ”

“ His voice quavered in sympathy, because their tragedies had so much in common. He had never lost his heart to any one but Sonia, as Jack had lost his only to Babs Neave; they had been immune for the first thirty years of their life, and they were paying for their self-denial and their affronting indifference to woman. Jack probably enjoyed exposing his soul as little as he had done with George. ”

“ It was a new experience to find a man whom she could not twist round her finger at first meeting; if he had attended the séance, she felt that Dolly May would still be alive; he would—somehow—have intervened; perhaps he would even have persuaded her to stay at home. She would give five years of her life to have met any one with authority to stop her....
Sonia had ceased crying and was sniffing miserably at her handkerchief. The sound irritated Lady Barbara to the verge of hysteria; if the little fool could see what she looked like with pink eyes and a red nose.... ”

“ She's made a unique position for herself; there's no one of her age, there's not an unmarried girl in England, who can compete with her—my sister Amy, Phyllis Knightrider, Sally Farwell, even Sonia, who makes the running for her; there are precious few married women, even among the political lot and semi-public hostesses, who can touch her; and, when it comes to a tussle between a girl of twenty-one and a woman like Harriet Pebbleridge, who's as solid and well-established as the Nelson Column, it's Barbara who wins. ”

“ The hall filled again with the sound of voices, and she hurried out rather than let herself be seen sitting alone and unexplained. Six young officers were hastily wrapping themselves in overcoats and golf-cloaks under the patronizing direction of Val Arden.
"They cast lots for one's raiment," he observed to Barbara, "and Summertown had the good fortune to draw one's violet-silk surtout. One could not wish it a worthier occupant. There used to be an inside pocket, and one recalls putting into it a trifle of cognac. They also serve who only stand the drinks." ”

“ Sonia Dainton and Jack Summertown were on either side of the club fender with cigarettes in their mouths; the Baroness Kohnstadt, with something of her brother Sir Adolf Erckmann's build and colouring and with all of his guttural intonation, was impressively describing Madame Hilary's powers; Lord Pennington, with a tumbler of brown brandy and soda in one hand, swayed insecurely on one arm of a chair and discharged amorous darts at a weak-mouthed girl with big eyes and a high colour, who giggled in apprehensive appreciation ”

“ Talking to her was so easy that Jack had half determined to ask if he might have supper with her. Of the rest of the evening he could dispose comfortably enough by gossiping with old Gervaise, who had been in his father's regiment, and the other veterans of the hunt. Lady Pentyre never regarded him as a dancing man in making up her numbers. It would not be half so easy to find common ground with Sally Farwell or Grace Pentyre; without meaning to be unsympathetic, he felt that Lady Barbara might have chosen any other night of the year for her headache. ”

“ Eric interrupted. "Ever since I can remember, you've sat still and let every one else revolve round you. Your people, Agnes, me——"
Jack smiled at his reflection in the window. Though his self-satisfaction annoyed women and older men, no one could remain impatient with him for long. He was always too good-tempered to provide sport and too sure of himself to mind criticism. The man who is content to do nothing starts, too, with an advantage over the man who not only wants something done but would like it done in his own way. ”

“ Club colours and college colours contended and clashed with giant brown and yellow silk handkerchiefs adorned with white bulldogs. "We might buy them a peace-offering."
"I always wonder why you're not more disliked than you are," mused Eric.
"People only dislike me until I've given them time to see that I'm right and they're wrong," explained Jack complacently. "I was very unpopular at New College my first term. They wanted me to row—just because I'd rowed at Eton. You can't row and hunt. I never did any of the things they wanted; the people here are such sheep. ”

“ If there were neither right nor wrong, Barbara had no cause for self-reproach. Destiny had arranged that Jack should come into her life; that he should anger her and that she should try to punish him; in obeying Destiny she was not to blame. But, if fatalism relieved her of responsibility, it also robbed her of resistance; she could do nothing to shield herself from anything that Destiny might have in store for her. Nothing had shielded Summertown when he came within range of the first German bullet.... ”

“ Her father's public position and private dignity were her strongest accessories. "She can always blackmail him by threatening a scandal," as Loring explained.
So long as she had her own way, Arden discovered a rule of peace and mutual affection. Lady Barbara hated to be on bad terms with any one; and her parents were humanly, if reluctantly, proud of her. Throughout his visit to House of Steynes, she dominated the party by her vitality and versatile charm. ”

“ He never loved me as I wanted to be loved.... I never feel that Jack could be gentle.... Do you know what I mean, Jim? There are some people who seem to take loving for granted. They can't waste time on the little daily tendernesses that are the glorious great tendernesses...." Her voice faded away, and she sat staring in front of her until a change of thought made her face resolute. "But it's not for me to find fault. If he wants me...."
"I wish to God I could do something to help," said Loring. ”

“ I tell you that people will not be persuaded to say to me all they know; they dare not face it. Their present and future happiness——"
"I'm not so very happy," sighed Barbara.
"You are a child. And your friends are being killed, perhaps some one whom you love——"
"I want to know," Barbara interrupted. "Everything's in such a muddle, I want to know what's going to happen...." She paused, but Mrs. Savage only shook her head. "Should I know what I was telling you? No! Lord Summertown didn't. Well, you need only tell me back the things that matter. If you ask me questions and I answer them.... ”