The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Bed of Roses, by W. L. George This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org Title: A Bed of Roses Author: W. L. George Release Date: August 26, 2010 [EBook #33538] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A BED OF ROSES *** Produced by the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.fadedpage.net A BED OF ROSES · · BY W. L. GEORGE AUTHOR OF 'ENGINES OF SOCIAL PROGRESS,' · · 'FRANCE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY,' &c. It's not work that any woman would do for pleasure, goodness knows; though to hear the pious people talk you would suppose it was a bed of roses. Mrs Warren's Profession · By G. Bernard Shaw. AUTHORISED EDITION BRENTANO'S · NEW YORK MCMXI THIRD EDITION CONTENTS PART I CHAPTER I CHAPTER II CHAPTER III [Pg 1] CHAPTER IV CHAPTER V CHAPTER VI CHAPTER VII CHAPTER VIII CHAPTER IX CHAPTER X CHAPTER XI CHAPTER XII CHAPTER XIII CHAPTER XIV CHAPTER XV CHAPTER XVI CHAPTER XVII CHAPTER XVIII CHAPTER XIX CHAPTER XX CHAPTER XXI CHAPTER XXII CHAPTER XXIII CHAPTER XXIV CHAPTER XXV CHAPTER XXVI PART II CHAPTER I CHAPTER II CHAPTER III CHAPTER IV CHAPTER V CHAPTER VI CHAPTER VII CHAPTER VIII CHAPTER IX CHAPTER X CHAPTER XI CHAPTER XII CHAPTER XIII CHAPTER XIV CHAPTER XV CHAPTER XVI CHAPTER XVII CHAPTER XVIII CHAPTER XIX CHAPTER XX PART I CHAPTER I 'We go.' The lascar meditatively pressed his face, brown and begrimed with coal dust, streaked here and there with sweat, against the rope which formed the rough bulwark. His dark eyes were fixed on the shore near by, between which and the ship's side the water quivered quicker and quicker in little ripples, each ripple carrying an iridescent film of grey ooze. Without joy or sadness he was bidding goodbye to Bombay, his city. Those goodbyes are often farewells for lascars who must face the Bay and the Channel. But the stoker did not care. His companion lay by his side, lazily propped up on his elbow, not deigning even to take a last look at the market place, seething still with its crowded reds and blues and golds. 'Dekko!' cried the first stoker pointing to the wharf where a white man in a dirty smock had just cast off the last rope, which came away swishing through the air. His companion did not raise his eyes. Slowly he tilted up his pannikin and let the water flow in a thin stream into his mouth, keeping the metal away from his lips. Then, careless of the land of Akbar, he let himself sink on the deck and composed himself to sleep. India was no concern of his. A few yards away a woman watched them absently from the upper deck. She was conscious of them, conscious too of the slow insistent buzzing of a gadfly. Her eyes slowly shifted to the shore, passed over the market place, stopped at the Fort. There, in the open space, a troop was drilling, white and speckless, alertly wheeling at the word of command. Her eyes were still fixed on the group as the ship imperceptibly receded from the shore, throbbing steadily as the boilers got up steam. A half-naked brown boy was racing along the wharf to gain a start and beat the vessel before she reached the military crane. The woman turned away. She was neither tall nor short: she did not attract attention overmuch but she was one of those who retain such attention as they draw. She was clad entirely in black; her face seemed to start forward intensified. Her features were regular; her mouth small. Her skin, darkened by the shadow of a broad brimmed hat, blushed still darker at the cheeks. The attraction was all in the eyes, large and grey, suggestive of energy without emotion. Her chin was square, perhaps too thick in the jaw. She turned once more and leant against the bulwark. A yard away another woman was also standing, her eyes fixed on the shore, on a figure who waited motionless on the fast receding wharf. As the steamer kept on her course the woman craned forward, saw once more and then lost sight of the lonely figure. She was small, fair, a little insignificant, and dressed all in white drill. The steamer had by now attained half speed. The shore was streaming by. The second woman turned her back on the bulwark, looked about aimlessly, then, perceiving her neighbour, impulsively went up to her and stood close beside her. The two women did not speak, but remained watching the shoals fly past. Far away a train in Kolaba puffed up sharp bursts of smoke into the blue air. There was nothing to draw the attention of the beholder in that interminable shore, low-lying and muddy, splashed here and there with ragged trees. It was a desert almost, save for a village built between two swamps. Here and then smoke arose, brown and peaty from a bonfire. In the evening light the sun's declining rays lit up with radiance the red speck of a heavy shawl on the tiny figure of a brown girl. Little by little, as the ship entered the fairway, the shore receded almost into nothingness. The two women still watched, while India merged into shadow. It was the second hour and, as the ship slowly turned towards the west, the women watched the great cocoanut trees turn into black specks upon Marla point. Then, slowly, the shore sank into the dark sea until it was gone and nothing was left of India save the vaguely paler night that tells of land and the even fainter white spears of the distant light. For a moment they stood still, side by side. Then the fair woman suddenly put her hand on her companion's arm. 'I'm cold,' she said, 'let's go below.' The dark girl looked at her sympathetically. 'Yes,' she said, 'let's, who'd have thought we wanted to see more of the beastly country than we could help. . . . I say, what's the matter, Molly?' Molly was still looking towards the light; one of her feet tapped the deck nervously; she fumbled for her handkerchief. 'Nothing, nothing,' she said indistinctly, 'come and unpack.' She turned away from her companion and quickly walked towards the gangway. The dark girl looked once more into the distance where even the searchlight had waned. 'Vic!' cried the fair girl querulously, half way up the deck. 'All right, I'm coming,' replied the woman in black. She looked again at the pale horizon into which India had faded, at the deck before her where a little black cluster of people had formed to look their last upon the light. Then she turned and followed her companion. The cabin was on the lower deck, small, stuffy in the extreme. Its two grave-like bunks, its drop table, even its exiguous armchair promised no comfort. On the worn carpet the pattern had almost vanished; alone the official numerals on the edge stared forth. For half an hour the two women unpacked in silence; Molly knelt by the side of her trunk delving into it, dragging out garments which she tried to find room for on the scanty pegs. Her companion merely raised the lid of her trunk to ease the pressure on her clothes, and placed a small dressing-case on the drop table. Once she would have spoken but, at that moment, a faint sob came from Molly's kneeling form. She went up to her, put her arm about her neck and kissed her cheek. She undressed wearily, climbed into the upper berth. Soon Molly did likewise, after turning down the light. For a while she sighed and turned uneasily; then she became quieter, her breathing more measured, and [Pg 2] [Pg 3] [Pg 4] she slept. Victoria Fulton lay in her berth, her eyes wide open, glued to the roof a foot or so above her face. It was very like a coffin, she thought, perhaps a suitable enough habitation for her, but at present, not in the least tempting. A salutary capacity for optimism was enabling her to review the past three years and to speculate about the future. Not that either was very rosy, especially the future. The steady throb of the screw pulsated through the stuffy cabin, and blended with the silence broken only by Molly's regular breathing in the lower berth. Victoria could not help remembering other nights passed also in a stuffy little cabin, where the screw was throbbing as steadily, and when the silence was broken by breathing as regular, but a little heavier. Three years only, and she was going home. But now she was leaving behind her the high hopes she had brought with her. She was no exception to the common rule, and memories, whether bitter or sweet, had always bridged for her the gulf between wakefulness and sleep. And what could be more natural than to recall those nights, three years ago, when every beat of that steady screw was bringing her nearer to the country where her young husband was, according to his mood, going to win the V.C., trace the treasure stolen from a Begum, or become military member on the Viceroy's Council? Poor old Dicky, she thought, perhaps it was as well he did not live to see himself a major, old and embittered, with all those hopes behind him. There were no tears in her eyes when she thought of Fulton. The good old days, the officers' ball at Lympton when she danced with him half the night, the rutty lane where they met to sit on a bank of damp moss smelling of earth and crushed leaves, and the crumbling little church where she became Fulton's wife, all that was far away. How dulled it all was too by those three years during which, in the hot moist air of the plains, she had seen him degenerate, his skin lose it's freshness, his eyelids pucker and gather pouches, his tongue grow ever more bitter as he attempted to still with whisky the drunkard's chronic thirst. She could not even shudder at the thought of all it had meant for her, at the horror of seeing him become every day more stupefied, at the savage outbursts of the later days, at the last scenes, crude and physically foul. Three years had taught her brain dullness to such scenes as those. The tragedy of Fulton was a common enough thing. Heat, idleness, temporary affluence, all those things that do not let a man see that life is blessed only by the works that enable him to forget it, had played havoc with him. He had followed up his initial error of coming into the world at all by marrying a woman who neither cajoled or coerced him. With the best of intentions she had bored him to extinction. His interest in things became slender; he drank himself to death, and not even the ghost of his self lived to grieve by his bedside. In spite of everything it had not been a bad life in its way. Victoria had been the belle, in spite of Mrs Major Dartle and her peroxidised tresses. And there had been polo (Dicky always would have three ponies and refused three hundred guineas for Tagrag), and regimental dances and gymkhanas and what not. Under the sleepy sun these three years had passed, not like a flash of lightning, but slowly, dreamily, in the unending routine of marches, inspections, migrations to and from the hills. The end had come quickly. One day they carried Dick Fulton all the way from the mess and laid him under his own verandah. The fourth day he died of cirrhosis of the liver. Even Mrs Major Dartle who formally called and lit up the darkened room with the meretricious glow of her curls hinted that it was a happy release. The station in general had no doubt as to the person for whom release had come. As Victoria lay in the coffin-like berth she vainly tried to analyse her feeling for Fulton. The three years had drawn over her past something like a veil behind which she could see the dim shapes of her impressions dancing like ghostly marionettes. She knew that she had loved him with the discreet passion of an Englishwoman. He had burst in upon her ravished soul like the materialised dream of a schoolgirl; he had been adorably careless, adorably rakish. For a whole year all his foibles had been charms in so far as they made the god more human, nearer to her. Then, one night, he had returned home so drunk as to fall prostrate on the tiles of the verandah and sleep there until next morning. She had not dared to call the ayah or the butler and, as she could not rouse or lift him, she had left him lying there under some rugs and mosquito netting. During the rest of that revolutionary night she had not slept, nor had she found the relief of tears that is given most women. Hot waves of indignation flowed over her. She wanted to get up, to stamp with rage, to kick the disgraceful thing on the tiles. She held herself down, however, or perhaps the tradition of the English counties whispered to her that anything was preferable to scandal, that crises must be noiseless. When dawn came and she at last managed to arouse Fulton by flooding his head with the contents of the water jug, the hot fit was gone. She felt cold, too aloof, too far away from him to hate him, too petrified to reproach him. Fulton took no notice of the incident. He was still young and vigorous enough to shake off within a few hours the effects of the drink. Besides he seldom mentioned things that affected their relations; in the keep of his heart he hid the resentment of a culprit against the one who has caught him in the act. He confined his conversation to daily happenings; in moments of expansion he talked of the future. They did not, however, draw nearer one another; thus the evolution of their marriage tended inevitably to draw them apart. Victoria was no longer angry, but she was frightened because she had been frightened and she hated the source of her fear. Fulton, thick skinned as he was, felt their estrangement keenly. He grew to hate his wife; it almost made him wish to hurt her again. So he absented himself more often, drank more, then died. His wife was free. So this was freedom. Freedom, a word to conjure with, thought Victoria, when one is enslaved and meaning very little when one is free. She was able to do what she liked and wished to do nothing. Of [Pg 5] [Pg 6] [Pg 7] course things would smooth themselves out: they always did, even though the smoothing process might be lengthy. They must do so, but how? There were friends of course, and Ted, and thirty pounds of Consols unless they'd gone down again, as safe investments are wont to do. She would have to do some work. Rather funny, but how jolly to draw your first month's or week's salary; everybody said it was a proud moment. Of course it would have to be earned, but that did not matter: everybody had to earn what they got, she supposed, and they ought to enjoy doing it. Old Flynn, the D.C., used to say that work was a remunerative occupation you didn't like, but then he had been twenty years in India. Molly turned uneasily in her bunk and settled down again. Victoria's train of thought was broken and she could not detach her attention from the very gentle snore that came from the lower berth, a snore gentle but so insidious that it seemed to dominate the steady beat of the screw. Through the porthole, over which now there raced some flecks of spray, she could see nothing but the blackness of the sky, a blackness which at times turned to grey whenever the still inkier sea appeared. The cabin seemed black and empty, lit up faintly by a white skirt flung on a chair. Slowly Victoria sank into sleep, conscious of a half dream of England where so many unknowable things must happen. CHAPTER II 'No, Molly, I don't think it's very nice of you,' said Victoria, 'we've been out four days and I've done nothing but mope and mope; it's all very well my being a widow and all that: I'm not suggesting you and I should play hop scotch on deck with the master gunner, but for four days I've been reading a three months old Harper's and the memoirs of Mademoiselle de I don't know what, and . . .' 'But what have I done?' cried Molly. 'I'm bored,' replied Victoria, with admirable detachment, 'and what's more, I don't intend to go on being bored for another fortnight; I'm going on deck to find somebody to amuse me.' 'You can't do that,' said Molly, 'they're washing it.' 'Very well, then, I'll go and watch and sing songs to the men.' Victoria glared at her unoffending companion, her lips tightening and her jaw growing ominously squarer. 'But my dear girl,' said Molly, 'I'm awfully sorry. I didn't know you cared; come and have a game of quoits with me and old Cairns. There's a place behind the companion which I should say nobody ever does wash.' Victoria was on the point of answering that she hated quoits as she never scored and they were generally dirty, but the prospect of returning to the ancient Harper's was not alluring, so she followed Molly to the hatchway and climbed up to the upper deck still shining moist and white. Apparently they would not have to play behind the companion. Four men were leaning against the bulwarks, looking out at nothing as people do on board ship. Victoria just had time to notice a very broad flannel-clad back surmounted by a thick neck, while Molly went up to the last man and unceremoniously prodded him in the ribs. 'Wake up, Bobby,' she said, 'I'm waiting.' The men all wheeled round suddenly. The broad man stepped forward quickly and shook hands with Molly. Then he took a critical look at Victoria. The three young men struggled for an absurd little bag which Molly always dropped at the right moment. 'How do you do, Mrs Fulton,' said the broad man stretching out his hand. Victoria took it hesitatingly. 'Don't you remember me?' he said. 'My name's Cairns. Major Cairns. You know. Travancores. Met you at His Excellency's hop.' Of course she remembered him. He was so typical. Anybody could have told his profession and his rank at sight. He had a broad humorous face, tanned over freckled pink. Since he left Wellington he had grown a little in every direction and had become a large middle aged boy. Victoria took him in at one look. A square face such as that of Cairns, distinctly chubby, framing grey blue eyes, was as easily recalled as forgotten. She took in his forehead, high and likely to become higher as his hair receded; his straight aggressive nose; his little rough moustache looking like nothing so much as a ragged strip off an Irish terrier's back. While Victoria was wondering what to say, Molly, determined to show her that she was not going to leave her out, had thrust her three henchmen forward. 'This is Bobby,' she remarked. Bobby was a tall young man with a round head, bright brown eyes full of cheerfulness and hot temper. 'And Captain Alastair . . . and Mr Parker.' Alastair smiled. Smiles were his method of expression. Mr Parker bowed rather low and said nothing. He had at once conceived for Victoria the mixture of admiration and dislike that a man feels towards a woman who would not marry him if she knew where he had been to school. 'I hope,' said Mr Parker slowly, 'that your. . . .' But he broke off suddenly, realising the mourning and feeling the ground to be unsafe. [Pg 8] [Pg 9] [Pg 10] [Pg 11] 'Mr Parker, I've been looking for you all the morning,' interjected Molly, with intuition. 'You've promised to teach me to judge my distance,' and she cleverly pushed Bobby between Mr Parker and Victoria. 'Come along, and you Bobby, you can pick the rings up.' 'Right O,' said Bobby readily. She turned towards the stern followed by the obedient Bobby and Mr Parker. Captain Alastair smiled vacuously, made as if to follow the trio, realising that it was a false start, swerved back and finally covering his confusion by sliding a few yards onwards to tell Mrs Colonel Lanning that it was blowing up for a squall. Victoria had watched the little incident with amused detachment. 'Who is Mr Parker?' she enquired. 'Met him yesterday for the first time,' said Cairns, 'and really I can't say I want to know. Might be awkward. Must be in the stores or something. Looks to me like a cross between a mute and a parson. Bit of a worm, anyhow.' 'Oh, he didn't hurt my feelings,' remarked Victoria; 'but some men never know what women have got on.' Cairns looked her over approvingly. Shoddy-looking mourning. Durzee made of course. But, Lord, what hands and eyes. 'I daresay not,' he said drily. 'I wish he'd keep away though. Let's walk up.' He took a stride or two away from Alastair. Victoria followed him. She was rather taken with his rough simplicity, the comfort of his apparent obtuseness. So like an uncle, she thought. 'Well, Mrs Fulton,' said Cairns, 'I suppose you're glad to be here, as usual.' 'As usual?' 'Yes, as usual; people are always glad to be on board. If they're going home, they're going home and if they're going out they're thinking that it's going to be full pay instead of half.' 'It hadn't struck me like that,' said Victoria with a smile, 'though I suppose I am glad to go home.' 'Funny,' said the Major, 'I never found a country like India to make people want to come to it and to make them want to get out of it when they were there. We had a sub once. You should have heard him on the dead cities. Somewhere south east of Hyderabad, he said. And native jewellery, and fakirism, and all that. He's got a liver now and the last I heard of him was that he put his shoulder out at polo.' Victoria looked out over the immense oily greenness of the water. Far away on the skyline a twirling wreath of smoke showed that some tramp steamer was passing them unseen. The world was between them; they were crawling on one side of the ball and the tramp on the other, like flies on an orange. Was that tramp, Bombay bound, carrying more than a cargo of rolling stock? Perhaps the mate had forgotten his B.S.A. fittings and was brooding, he too, over the dead cities, somewhere south-east of Hyderabad. 'No,' repeated Victoria slowly, 'it hadn't struck me like that.' Cairns looked at her curiously. He had heard of Fulton and knew of the manner of his death. He could not help thinking that she did not seem to show many signs of a recent bereavement, but then she was well rid of Fulton. Of course there were other things too. Going back as the widow of an Indian officer was all very well if you could afford the luxury, but if you couldn't, well it couldn't be much catch. So, being thirty eight or so, he prudently directed the conversation towards the customary subjects discussed on board a trooper: the abominable accommodation and the appalling incompetency of the government with regard to the catering. Victoria listened to him placidly. His ancient tittle-tattle had been made familiar to her by three years' association with his fellows, and she had learned that she need not say much, as his one wish was naturally to revile the authorities and all their work. But one item interested her. 'After all,' he said, 'I don't see why I should talk. I've had enough of it. I'm sending in my papers as soon as I've settled a small job at Perim. I'll get back to Aden and shake all that beastly Asiatic dust off my shoes.' 'Surely,' said Victoria, 'you're not going to leave the Service?' Her intonation implied that she was urging him not to commit suicide. Some women must pass twice under the yoke. 'Fed up. Simply fed up with it. Suppose I do waste another twenty years in India or Singapore or Hong Kong, how much forrarder am I? They'll retire me as a colonel or courtesy general and dump me into an England which doesn't care a hang about me with the remains of malaria, no digestion and no temper. I'll then while away my time watching the busses pass by from one of the windows of the Rag and give my daily opinion of the doings of Simla and the National Congress to men who will only listen to me so long as I stand them a whisky and soda.' 'It isn't alluring,' said Victoria, 'but it may not be as bad as that. You can do marvels in India. My husband used to say that a man could hope for anything there.' Cairns suppressed the obvious retort that Fulton's ideals did not seem to have materialised. [Pg 12] [Pg 13] [Pg 14] 'No,' he said, 'I'm not ambitious. India's steam rollered all that. When I've done with my job at Perim, which won't be much more than a couple of months, I'm going home. Don't know that I'll do anything in particular. Farm a bit, perhaps, or have some chambers somewhere near St James' and dabble in balloons or motors. Some shooting too. All that sort of thing.' 'Perhaps you are right,' said Victoria after a pause. 'I suppose it's as well to do what one likes. Shall we join the others?' CHAPTER III Life on a trooper is not eventful. Victoria was not so deeply absorbed in her mourning or in the pallid literature borrowed from Molly as not to notice it. Though she was not what is termed serious, the perpetual quoits on the upper deck in company with Alastair and his conversation limited by smiles, and with Mr Parker and his conversation limited by uneasiness palled about the second game. Bobby too was a cypher. It was his fate to be known as 'Bobby,' a quantity of no importance. He belonged to the modern school of squires of dames, ever ready to fetch a handkerchief, to fish when he inwardly wanted to sleep in a deck chair or to talk when he had a headache. Such men have their value as tame cats and Victoria did not avoid his cheery neighbourhood. But he was summed up in the small fact which she recalled with gentle amusement a long time after: she had never known his name. For her, as for the ship's company, he was 'Bobby,' merely Bobby. The female section too could detain none but cats and hens, as Victoria put it. She had moved too long like a tiny satellite in the orbit of Mrs Colonel So-and-So to return to the little group which slumbered all day by the funnel dreaming aloud the petty happenings of Bombay. The heavy rains at Chandraga, the simply awful things that had been said about an A.D.C. and Mrs Bryan, and the scandalous way in which a Babu had been made a judge, all this filled her with an extraordinary weariness. She felt, in the presence of these remains of her daily life, as she would when confronted for the third time with the cold leg of mutton. True there was Cairns, a man right enough and jovial in spite of his cynical assumption that nothing was worth anything. He could produce passing fair aphorisms, throw doubts on the value of success and happiness. There was nothing, however, to hold on to. Victoria had not found in him a teacher or a helper. He was merely destructive of thought and epicurean in taste. Convinced that wine, woman and song were quite valueless things, he nevertheless knew the best Rüdesheimer and had an eye for the droop of Victoria's shoulders. Cairns obviously liked Victoria. He did not shun his fellow passengers, for he considered that the dullest people are the most interesting, yet she could not help noticing from time to time that his eyes followed her round. He was a good big man and she knew that his thick hand, a little swollen and sunburnt, would be a good thing to touch. But there was in him none of that subtle magnetism that grasps and holds. He was coarse, perhaps a little vulgar at heart. Thus Victoria had roamed aimlessly over the ship, visiting even the bows where, everlastingly, a lascar seemed to brood in fixed attitudes as a Budh dreaming of Nirvana. She often wandered in the troop-deck filled with the womankind and children of the non-coms. Without disliking children she could find no attraction in these poor little faded things born to be scorched by the Indian sun. The women too, mostly yellow and faded, always recalled to her, so languid and tired were they, commonplace flowers, marigolds, drooping on their stems. Besides, the society of the upper deck found a replica on the troop deck, where it was occasionally a little shriller. There too, she could catch snatches which told of the heavy rains of Chandraga, the goings on of Lance Corporal Maccaskie's wife and the disgrace of giving Babu clerks more than fifty rupees a month. Perpetually the Indian ocean shimmered by, calm as the opaque eye of a shark, breaking at times into immense rollers that swelled hardly more than a woman's breast. And the days passed on. They were nearing Aden, though nothing on the mauve horizon told of the outpost where the filth of the East begins to overwhelm the ugliness of the West. Victoria and Cairns were leaning on the starboard bulwark. She was looking vacuously into the greying sky, conscious that Cairns was watching her. She felt with extraordinary clearness that he was gazing as if spell-bound at the soft and regular rise and fall of her skin towards the coarse black openwork of her bodice. Far away in the twilight was something long and black, hardly more than a line vanishing towards the north. 'Araby,' said Cairns. Victoria looked more intently. Far away, half veiled by the mists of night, unlit by the evening star, lay the coast. Araby, the land of manna and milk—of black-eyed women—of horses that champ strange bits. Here and there a blackened rock sprang up from the waste of sand and scrub. Its utter desolation awakened a sympathetic chord. It was lonely, as she was lonely. As the night swiftly rushed into the heavens, she let her arm rest against that of Cairns. Then his hand closed over hers. It was warm and hard; something like a pale light of companionship struggled through the solitude of her soul. They stood cold and silent while the night swallowed up the coast and all save here and there the foam tip of a wave. The man had put his arm round her and pressed her to him. She did not resist. The soft wind playing in her hair carried a straying lock into his eyes, half blinding him and making him catch his breath, so redolent was it, not with the scent of [Pg 15] [Pg 16] [Pg 17] [Pg 18] flowers, but of life, vigorous and rich in its thousand saps. He drew her closer to him and pressed his lips on her neck. Victoria did not resist. From the forepeak swathed in darkness, came the faint unearthly echoes of the stokers' song. There were no fourths; the dominant and the subdominant were absent. Strangely attuned to the western ear, the sounds sometimes boomed, sometimes fell to a whisper. The chant rose like incense into the heavens, celebrating Durga, protector of the Motherland, Lakshmi, bowered in the flower that in the water grows. Cairns had drawn Victoria close against him. He was stirred and shaken as never before. All conspired against him, the night, the fancied scents of Araby, the unresisting woman in his arms who yielded him her lips with the passivity of weariness. They did not think as they kissed, whether laying the foundation of regret or snatching from the fleeting hour a moment of thoughtless joy. Again a brass drum boomed out beyond them, softly as if touched by velvet hands. It carried the buzzing of bees, the calls of corncrakes, in every tone the rich scents of the jungle, where undergrowth rots in black water—of perfumes that burn before the gods. Then the night wind arose and swept away the crooning voices. CHAPTER IV Victoria stepped out on to the platform with a heart that bounded and yet shrank. Not even the first faint coming of the coastline had given her the almost physical shock that she experienced on this bare platform. Waterloo station lay around her in a pall of faint yellow mist that gripped and wrenched at her throat. Through the fog a thousand ungainly shapes of stairs and signals thrust themselves, some crude in their near blackness, others fainter in the distance. It might have been a dream scene but for the uproar that rose around her from the rumble of London, the voices of a great crowd. Yet all this violence of life, the darkness, the surge of men and women, all this told her that she was once more in the midst of things. She found her belongings mechanically, fumblingly. She did not realise until then the bitterness that drove its iron into her soul. Already, when the troopship had entered the Channel she had felt a cruel pang when she realised that she must expect nothing and that nobody would greet her. She had fled from the circle near the funnel when the talk began to turn round London and waiting sisters and fathers, round the Lord Mayor's show, the play, the old fashioned Christmas. Now, as she struggled through the crowd that cried out and laughed excitedly and kissed, she knew her isolation was complete. There was nobody to meet her. The fog made her eyes smart, so they filled readily with tears. As she sat in the cab, however, and there flashed by her like beacons the lights of the stalls in the Waterloo Road, the black and greasy pavement sown with orange peel, she felt her heart beating furiously with the excitement of home coming. She passed the Thames flowing silently, swathed in its shroud of mist. Then the blackness of St James's Park through which her cab crawled timidly as if it feared things that might lurk unknown in the fogbound thickets. It was still in a state of feverish dreaming that Victoria entered her room at Curran's Private Hotel, otherwise known by a humble number in Seymour Street. 'Curran's' is much in favour among Anglo-Indians, as it is both central and cheap. It has everything that distinguishes the English hotel which has grown from a boarding-house into a superior establishment where you may stay at so much a day. The successful owner had bought up one after the other three contiguous houses and had connected them by means of a conservatory where there lived, among much pampas grass, small ferns in pots shrouded in pea-green paper and sickly plants to which no name could be attached as they mostly suggested stewed lettuce. It was impossible to walk in a straight line from one end of the coalition of buildings to the other without climbing and descending steps every one of which proclaimed the fact that the leases of the houses would soon fall in. From the three kitchens ascended three smells of mutton. The three halls were strewn with bicycles, gun cases in their last phase, sticks decrepit or dandified. The three hat racks, all early Victorian in their lines, bore a motley cargo. Dusty bowlers hustled it with heather coloured caps and top hats; one even bore a pith helmet and a clerical atrocity. Queer as Curran's is, it is comfortable enough. Victoria looked round her room, tiny in length and breadth, high however with all the dignity that befits an odd corner left over by the Victorian builder. It was distinguished by its simplicity, for the walls bore nothing whatever beyond a restrained papering of brownish roses. A small black and gold bed, a wardrobe with a white handle, a washing stand with a marble top took up all the space left by the large tin trunk which contained most of Victoria's worldly goods. So this, thought Victoria, is the beginning. She pulled aside the curtain. Before her lay Seymour Street, where alone an eye of light shone faintly from the nearest lamp post. Through the fog came the warning noise of a lorry picking its way. It was cold, cold, all this, and lonely like an island. Her meditations were disturbed by the maid who brought her hot water. 'My name is Carlotta,' said the girl complacently depositing the can upon the marble topped washstand. 'Yes?' said Victoria. 'You are a foreigner?' 'Yes. I am Italian. It is foggy,' replied the girl. Victoria sighed. It was kind of the girl to make her feel at home, to smile at her with those flashing teeth so well set in her ugly little brown face. She went to the washstand and cried out in horror at her dirt and fog begrimed face, rimmed [Pg 19] [Pg 20] [Pg 21] at the eyes, furrowed on the left by the course of that tear shed at Waterloo. 'Tell them downstairs I shan't be ready for half an hour,' she said; 'it'll take me about a week to get quite clean, I should say.' Carlotta bared her white teeth again and withdrew gently as a cat, while Victoria courageously drenched her face and neck. The scents of England, already conjured up by the fog and the mutton, rose at her still more vividly from the warm water which inevitably exhales the traditional perfume of hot painted can. Her dinner was a small affair but delightful. It was good to eat and drink once more things to which she had been accustomed for the first twenty years of her life. Her depression had vanished; she was merely hungry, and, like the healthy young animal she was, longing for a rare cut of roast beef, accompanied by the good old English potatoes boiled down to the consistency of flour and the flavour of nothing. Her companions were so normal that she could not help wondering, when her first hunger was sated and she was confronted with the apple tart of her fathers, whether she was not in the unchanging old board residence in Fulham where her mother had stayed with her whenever she came up to town, excited and conscious of being on the spree. Two spinsters of no age discussed the fog. Both were immaculate and sat rigidly in correct attitudes facing their plates. Both talked quickly and continuously in soft but high tones. They passed one another the salt with the courtesy of abbés taking pinches of snuff. A young man from the Midlands explained to the owner of the clerical hat that under certain circumstances his food would cost him more. Near by a heavy man solemnly and steadily ate, wiping at times from his beard drops of gravy and of sauce, whilst his faded wife nibbled disconsolately tiny scraps of crust. These she daintily buttered, while her four lanky girls nudged and whispered. Victoria did not stay in the conservatory after the important meal. As she passed through it, a mist of weariness gathering before her eyes, she had a vision of half a dozen men sleeping in cane chairs, or studying pink or white evening papers. The young man from the Midlands had captured another victim and was once more explaining that under certain circumstances his food would cost him more. Victoria seemed to have reached the limits of physical endurance. She fumbled as she divested herself of her clothes; she could not even collect enough energy to wash. All the room seemed filled with haze. Her tongue clove to her palate. Little tingles in her eyelids crushed them together over her pupils. She stumbled into her bed, mechanically switching off the light by her bedside. In the very act her arm lost its energy and she sank into a dreamless sleep. Next morning she breakfasted with good appetite. The fog had almost entirely lifted and sunshine soft as silver was filtering through the windows into the little dining-room. Its mahoganous ugliness was almost warmed into charm. The sideboard shone dully through its covering of coarse net. Even the stacked cruets remembered the days when they cunningly blazed in a shop window. A pleasurable feeling of excitement ran through Victoria's body, for she was going to discover London, to have adventures. As she closed the door behind her with a definite little slam she felt like a buccaneer. Buccaneering in the Edgware Road, even when it is bathed in the morning sun, soon falls flat in November. It came upon Victoria rather as a shock that her Indian clothing was rather thin. As her flying visits to town had only left in her mind a very hazy picture of Regent Street it was quite unconsciously that she entered the emporium opposite. A frigid young lady sacrificed for her benefit an abominable vicuna coat which, she said, fitted Victoria like a glove. Victoria paid the twenty seven and six with an admirable feeling of recklessness and left the shop reflecting that she looked the complete charwoman. She turned into Hyde Park, where the gentle wind was sorrowfully driving the brown and broken leaves along the rough gravel. The thin tracery of the trees imaged itself on the road like a giant cobweb. Victoria looked for a moment towards the south where the massive buildings rise, towards the east where a cathedral thrusts into the sky a tower that suspiciously recalls waterworks. She drank in the cold air with a gusto that can be understood by none save those who have learned to live in the floating moisture of the plains. She felt young and, in the sunshine, with her cheeks gaining colour as the wind whipped them, she looked in her long black coat and broad brimmed straw hat, like a quakeress in love. As she walked down towards the Achilles statue the early morning panorama of London unfolded itself before her un- understanding eyes. Girls hurried by with their satchels towards the typewriting rooms of the west; they stole a look at Victoria's face but quickly turned away from her clothes. Now and then spruce young clerks walking to the Tube slackened their pace to look twice into her grey eyes; one or two looked back, not so much in the hope of an adventure, for time could not be snatched for Venus herself on the way to the office, as to see whether they could carry away with them the flattery of having been noticed. In a sense that first day in London was for Victoria a day of revelations. Having despatched a telegram to her brother to announce her arrival she felt that the day was hers. Ted had not troubled to meet her either at Southampton or Waterloo: it was not likely that he had followed the sightings of her ship. The next day being a Saturday, however, he would probably come up from the Bedfordshire school where he proffered Latin to an ungrateful generation. Victoria's excursions to London had been so few that she had but the faintest idea of where she was to go. Knowing, however, that one cannot lose oneself in London, she walked aimlessly towards the east. It was a voyage of discovery. [Pg 22] [Pg 23] [Pg 24] Piccadilly, bathed in the pale sun, revealed itself as a land where luxury flows like rivers of milk. Victoria, being a true woman, could not pass a shop. Thus her progress was slow, so slow that when she found herself between the lions of Trafalgar Square she began to realise that she wanted her lunch. The problem of food is cruel for all women who desire more than a bun. They risk either inattention or over attention, and if they follow other women, they almost invariably discover the cheap and bad. Victoria hesitated for a moment on the steps of an oyster shop, as nervous in the presence of her first plunge into freedom as a novice at the side door of a pawnbroker. A man passed by her into the oyster shop, smoking a pipe. She felt she would never dare to sit in a room where strange men smoked pipes. Thus she stood for a moment forlorn on the pavement, until a memory of the only decent grill in town, according to Bobby, passed through her mind. A policeman sent her by bus to the New Gaiety, patronised by Bobby and his cronies. As Victoria went down the interminable underground staircase, and especially as she entered the enormous room where paper, carpets, and plate always seem new, her courage almost failed her. Indeed she looked round anxiously, half hoping that the anonymous Bobby might be revisiting his old haunts. But she was quite alone, and it was only by reminding herself that she must always be alone at meals now that she coerced herself into sitting down. She got through her meal with expedition. She felt frightfully small; the waiters were painfully courteous; a man laid aside his orange coloured newspaper, and embarrassed her with frequent side glances. She braced herself up however. 'I am training,' was her uppermost thought. She then wondered whether she ought to have come to the New Gaiety at all. Fortunately it was only at the very end of her lunch that Victoria realised she was the only woman sitting alone. After this discovery her nerve failed her. She got up hurriedly, and, in her confusion, omitted to tip the waiter. At the desk the last stone was heaped on the cairn of her discomfiture when the cashier politely returned to her a quarter rupee which she had given her thinking it was a sixpence. With a sigh of satisfaction Victoria resumed her walk through London. She was a little tired already but she could think of nothing to do, nowhere to go to. She did not want to return to Curran's to sit in her box-like room, or to look at the two spinsters availing themselves of their holiday in town to play patience in the conservatory. All the afternoon, therefore, Victoria saw the sights. Covent Garden repelled her by the massiveness of its food suggestion, and especially by the choking dirt of its lanes. After Covent Garden, Savoy court yard and its announcements of intellectual plays by unknown women. Then once more, drawn by its spaciousness guessed at through Spring Gardens, Victoria walked into Saint James's Park. She rested awhile upon a seat, watching the waterfowl strut and plume themselves, the pelicans flounder heavily in the mud. She was tired. The sun was setting early. The magic slowly faded from London; Buckingham Palace lost the fictitious grace that it has when set in a blue sky. Victoria shivered a little. She felt tired. She did not know where to go. She was alone. On the seat nearest to hers two lovers sat together, hand in hand. The man's face was almost hidden by his cap and by the blue puffs of his pipe; the girl's was averted towards the ground where, with the ferule of her umbrella, she lazily drew signs. There was no bitterness in this sight for Victoria. Her romance had come and gone so long ago that she looked quite casually at these wanderers in Arcadia. She only knew that she was alone and cold. Victoria got up and walked out of the park. It was darkening, and little by little the lights of London were springing into life. By dint of many questionings she managed to regain Oxford Street, that spinal column of London without which the stranger would be lost. Then her course was easy, and it was with a peculiar feeling of luxuriousness that she resigned herself to the motor bus that jolted and shook her tired body until she reached the Arch. More slowly, and with diminished optimism, she found her way up Edgware Road, where night was now falling. The emporium was dazzling with lights. Alone the public house rivalled it and thrust its glare through the settling mist. Victoria closed the door of Curran's. At once she re-entered its atmosphere; into the warm air rose the three smells of three legs of mutton. CHAPTER V 'Mr Wren, ma'am.' Victoria turned quickly to Carlotta. The girl's face was obtrusively demure. Some years at Curran's had not dulled in her the interest that any woman subtly feels in the meeting of the sexes. 'Ask him to come in here, Carlotta,' said Victoria. 'We shan't be disturbed, shall we?' 'Oh no! ma'am,' said Carlotta, with increasing demureness. 'There is nobody, nobody. I will show the young gentleman in.' Victoria walked to the looking-glass which shyly peeped out from the back of the monumental sideboard. She re- arranged her hair and hurriedly flicked some dust from the corners of her eyes. All this for Edward, but she had not seen him for three years. As she turned round she was confronted by her brother who had gently stolen into the dining- room. Edward's every movement was unobtrusive. He put one arm round her and kissed her cheek. 'How are you, Victoria?' he said, looking her in the eyes. [Pg 25] [Pg 26] [Pg 27] [Pg 28] 'Oh, I'm alright, Ted. I'm so glad to see you.' She was genuinely glad; it was so good to have belongings once again. 'Did you have a good passage?' asked Edward. 'Pretty good until we got to Ushant and then it did blow. I was glad to get home.' 'I'm very glad to see you,' said Edward, 'very glad.' His eyes fixed on the sideboard as if he were mesmerised by the cruets. Victoria looked at him critically. Three years had not made on him the smallest impression. He was at twenty- eight what he had been at twenty-five or for the matter of that at eighteen. He was a tall slim figure with narrow pointed shoulders and a slightly bowed back. His face was pale without being unhealthy. There was nothing in his countenance to arouse any particular interest, for he had those average features that commit no man either to coarseness or to intellectuality. He showed no trace of the massiveness of his sister's chin; his mouth too was looser and hung a little open. Alone his eyes, richly grey, recalled his relationship. Straggly fair hair fell across the left side of his forehead. He peered through silver rimmed spectacles as he nervously worried his watch chain with both hands. Every movement exposed the sharpness of his knees through his worn trousers. 'Ted,' said Victoria, breaking in upon the silence, 'it was kind of you to come up at once.' 'Of course I'd come up at once. I couldn't leave you here alone. It must be a big change after the sunshine.' 'Yes,' said Victoria slowly, 'it is a big change. Not only the sunshine. Other things, you know.' Edward's hands played still more nervously with his watch chain. He had not heard much of the manner of Fulton's death. Victoria's serious face encouraged him to believe that she might harrow him with details, weep even. He feared any expression of feeling, not because he was hard but because it was so difficult to know what to say. He was neither hard nor soft; he was a schoolmaster and could deal readily enough with the pangs of Andromeda but what should he say to a live woman, his sister too? 'I understand—I—you see, it's quite awful about Dick—' he stopped, lost, groping for the proper sentiment. 'Ted,' said Victoria, 'don't condole with me. I don't want to be unkind—if you knew everything—But there, I'd rather not tell you; poor Dicky 's dead and I suppose it's wrong, but I can't be sorry.' Edward looked at her with some disapproval. The marriage had not been a success, he knew that much, but she ought not to speak like that. He felt he ought to reprove her, but the difficulty of finding words stopped him. 'Have you made any plans?' he...