Chapter II: Front Matter (2)

“I kissed him last night, when he came to me.… So you see, whether I liked it or not, I did kiss a dead man! And it’s no use minding now, is it?”

She kissed him repeatedly, with a pale semblance of passion.

The nurse took her arm gently and led her away from the bed, and she submitted to be placed in a chair.

“Miss, now you’ve done that, you’ll feel better. I should go home if I were you. Take that hansom outside. It’s the one you came in, perhaps--and you haven’t paid him?”

Alice signified a negative to this, helplessly, but allowed the nurse to pin her veil on for her. It hid her tear-stained face a little. Then the good woman led her downstairs and out on to the pavement. Sure enough, there was a hansom waiting there, and the nurse hailed the driver.

Gruffly, he turned round, and stared at them.

“And I say,” he appeared to be remarking, “and I say, who’s going to pay me my fare?”

“Why, the lady will, of course. Get in, Miss, I’ll hold your dress away from the wheel.”

But the cabman was not satisfied, nor did he address himself to the task of resuming his drooping reins. He seemed to have had a shock too.

“No, I didn’t mean her. Who’s going to pay me three bob for last night and for waiting ’ere?…”

“That’s no affair of ours,” replied the nurse cheerfully. “You must take the lady--where to, shall I say, Miss?”

Alice, crouching inside, mumbled the address of her home.

The cabman swore.

“No, I’m damned! You get out. I ain’t a-going near that blasted house again for nobody! Took a fare from there last night, I did, and drove him here, and here I may stop till Domesday, I suppose, before I sees a shilling of his money! ’Tain’t right!…”

He was obviously drunk, but not dangerous, so the nurse thought.

“Come, come!” she expostulated.

Alice, frightened, prepared to get out.

“Oh, what’s the matter?” she moaned.

“Matter! Matter’s this. I drove him here right enough, and pulls up where he told me--and my gentleman doesn’t get out, seems as if he was a-going to make a night of it in my cab. Drunk, I says to myself, and I opens the trap, meaning to take my fare and clear him out, but Lord bless me--why, there wasn’t no one there!”

“He’d got out, of course,” said Mrs. Clarkson, “while you weren’t looking.”

“‘Bilked,’ says I. And, thinks I, I’ll just come and wait here till I sees my gentleman come down those stairs again.”

“You’ll never see him come downstairs again,” said the nurse, with a flash of inspiration, “except in his coffin! Come, get on! Take the lady where she wants to go.”

She thought of it all--afterwards… but then nurses see such queer things! She had taken the cabman’s number.

THE OPERATION

“Yes, I think that might hang a day longer. I can finish up the mince for my lunch, and you must do something with the turkey legs for dinner. Let me see--and there’s fish to-day. And then--well, suppose you make a savoury?”

“Master don’t care for savouries, Ma’am!”

“A sweet, then. I don’t care. And that’s all, I think?”

Mrs. Joe Mardell, in her neat morning shirt, coquetishly finished with a man-like tie, and the severity of her attire much modified by the bows and loops of waved hair that crowned her head, turned and was about to leave the dark basement of the little house in Kirriemuir Street, West Kensington, when a door in the upper regions banged.

“There, he’s off, and I wanted a cheque!” Mrs. Mardell observed with mild irritation. She glanced at the kitchen clock with a degree of confidence she did not place in the elegant time-keeper, cased in jewels, that hung on the front of her shirt. “Why, it’s only half-past ten?”

“Master’s early gone this morning,” said the cook. “Gladys took his breakfast up only ten minutes ago.” She paused, then summoning her courage, she asked--

“Ma’am, are people usually buried on Christmas Day?”

“Why, you silly woman, it depends on what day they die. Who’s been dying?”

“I’ll swear,” said the woman eagerly, “that I saw a corpse being carried down the steps of number thirteen just over the street opposite nearly a week ago, and I reckon it back Christmas Day!… It’s been worrying me ever since. Yes, I saw the mourners and hearse and feathers and all--done quite proper. I was looking out of the front staircase window----”

“Neglecting your work, Vance? Serves you right. You saw Whiteley’s sale cart, perhaps? You were looking sideways through the red panes, and glass, you know, refracts oddly.… Who lives at number thirteen?”

“Oddly enough, Ma’am, I don’t know, though I mostly could tell you the names of everybody in the street. I might ask one of the tradespeople--should I?”

“Yes, do if you like. Brr!” She shivered affectedly, strong in the pride of her health and good looks. “It seems a cold time to choose to be put into the ground! One would sooner be cremated, this weather!”

Holding up her crisp befrilled skirts, the second wife of Joseph Mardell, the popular comic actor, who was just now drawing crowds to his Christmas extravaganza at the “Quality,” made her way up from the dark basement to the abodes of light above. Noiselessly, she let fall behind her that swing door at the top of the staircase which effectively divided the world of society from its service, and exchanged stone and oil-cloth for soft carpets and silken curtains. It was a very pretty little house--_her_ house. She admitted Joe into it. Her husband-lover, Joe. She had managed to keep him her lover. All wives should. She glanced, as she passed by, at the hat-stand in the hall. Joe had stupidly gone without his fur coat, though it was freezing. Or was it that it needed a stitch? How careless of Gladys! He had left his big umbrella too, for there it bulged in the rack, beside her own delicate silver-topped one. Careless Joe, willing enough to ignore the mere physical claims of the self he morally bowed to! Moreover, he forced every one else to do so likewise. He must have his own way, and brooked no check where his mental desires were concerned. It was perhaps the secret of his sway over men--and women.

She thought of him, Joseph Mardell, the greatly-sought-after, and hers, with complacent affection, glancing up consciously at the branch of mistletoe which was entwined with the square glass lamp that hung over the front door. Joe had passionately kissed her under the mystic bough, a week ago, for luck, on the first night of the successful piece. And luck had come, and seemingly remained with them. The booking was splendid. And they were rehearsing a more serious play that was to follow the Christmas jollity. Joe was so busy he didn’t know where to turn for a spare five minutes. She did not complain, for if things went on like this they would be able to move out of West Kensington, where you couldn’t get a smart parlour-maid to stop with you. Gladys and her finger-nails was a sore trial.

She entered the dining-room, and her eyes sought the sideboard. Ah, Joe had had some sense after all, and had remembered to refresh the inner man before leaving, as the violated Tantalus betokened. He lay in bed late. He rarely breakfasted, and never with her. She rose at eight--on principle; she could not afford to keep actors’ hours and ruin her complexion.

She stood pensively by the small piece of Sheraton furniture before she opened a drawer and took out of it what she had come to seek. Last night’s oranges and apples beamed there on a pretty dish. Joe’s cigarette boxes, flung about, needed tidying up. The presentation silver bowl given to Joe by his fellow-actors on the occasion of his first marriage, shone in the centre with dignified lustre. They had chosen something quite different to present to him as a memento of his second venture. That was in her room now. The bowl had a dwarf fern in it now, but sometimes it ran over with punch, or was packed with roses. Another use was contemplated for it; if Joe and she were to have a baby, which, sadly enough, did not seem likely, the bowl would be used for the christening.

Mrs. Mardell took a pretty little checked duster out of a drawer, and went upstairs to her drawing-room on the first floor. She carefully picked up an iridescent bead off the carpet, the spoil of the dress she had worn last night, and placed it on an ash-tray. She then proceeded to rub up the several minute objects on her silver-table, wishing heartily that she could afford to have them lacquered, and thus dispense with her daily task. So occupied, she looked wholly pretty and half domestic, a little soubrettish, like those neat-aproned maids who flutter early about a stage-scene and usher in and lay the tables for tragedy.

There was no harm in Florence Mardell. She was a smart, novel-reading, Sandown and Ranelagh going woman, easily dressed, easily amused, a little detached, perhaps, in her interests, and careless of the more serious issues of life, but quite willing to simulate and assume social crazes as they came up. She played a good game of Bridge. She glanced at the deep Reviews as well as the _Windsor_ and _Pearson’s_, and improved her mind on the slightest opportunity. You could always get her for a subscription lecture of sorts, and she quite approved of Female Suffrage, without, however, actively concerning herself in its propaganda. She never “fagged.” She was always beautifully dressed in a severish, strapped, mock-manly style, and could wear successfully the very largest hats when they came in.

She had been the widow of an officer, and had lived at Wimbledon in a big dull house standing in its own grounds. She had first set eyes on Joe Mardell playing a strong “Macheath” in _The Beggar’s Opera_, to the most ineffective “Polly Peachum” of Julia Fitzgerald. Miss Fitzgerald was his wife; had she but known it, it might have made a difference, but very likely it would not have. Then and there she had fallen in love with the actor across the footlights, impulsively, violently, madly, and she had not rested, being of an acquisitive, pugnacious, predatory habit of mind, until she had persuaded a journalistic friend of hers and his to bring about an introduction. With her effective crown of real golden hair, waved and curled _in extremis_, her clean, fresh suburbanity, she had fascinated “Macheath.” He was known to be weak, _volage_, and full of moods. Florence was, on the contrary, strong and pertinacious, she had taken him in a mood, and let her love profit by it. With fond remorselessness she had driven him to drive his wife to divorce him. All this she had compassed in her own calm detached way, as if unconscious of the larger issues she was stirring--another woman’s happiness, a man’s honour, and an actor’s art, for Joe was a genius, and recognized to be one, in spite of, some people said because of, his strange limitations. A little man, almost a dwarf, he could play the burly Falstaff and the courtly Biron; he could write articles in the Reviews; he could hold supper-tables in a roar. Julia Mardell’s happiness had been sacrificed, for she adored, and was known to adore, her husband. To oblige him she had condescended to make use of some of the more complicated and recondite cogs of the machinery of the English law of divorce, and had tamely surrendered, without humiliating him, one of the most fascinating men of the day to another woman. Yet Julia was quite as good-looking as Florence, if in a different style. She was the full-souled, full-breasted, large-eyed Junoesque female type, and only undertook the playing of a minx like Polly Peachum to suit Joe. Such a majestic walk as hers, such dark swimming eyes were of no avail to the actress who aspired to play one of the wayward mistresses of the highwayman. It was the measure of Julia’s love and her power of self-abnegation. Joe was prepared to take the whole play on his own shoulders, only he must have a sympathetic woman to act with. He did find Julia sympathetic in those days when he loved her, and before the pretty widow from Wimbledon had leaned out of her box and shaken her golden locks at him. Then one day the two women met. Matters were arranged. Joe, susceptible, weak, hustled and busy, succumbed.… Lawyers acted for him. Julia was compliant: Florence “keen.” Joe worked on and was divorced while rehearsing a new play. He himself never knew how it all happened!

There was a large signed photograph of Julia in Joe’s study now, standing unframed, concave and dusty on the mantelpiece; Joe had not dared, or cared, to give it a more polite or permanent abiding-place. Indeed, Florence had had some thoughts of removing it from its even so humble position; her friends wondered how she could possibly bear to have it there for Joe to see every day! But she was capricious. One never knew how she would take things. It was their expressed opinion which perhaps induced her to let it stay, curled up and drooping slavishly as time went on, and the dust and heat of the fire brought its proud head low.

Florence bore Julia no grudge, she should think not, indeed! Julia had been very good about it, had made no difficulties, but on the contrary, had smoothed and made easy the path of divorce for the man she loved.

That is, if she really did care for Joe. She had been so terribly callous in her interviews; so full of zeal to give him his freedom. It was hardly human, so the woman who had profited by her action thought, and certainly not very womanly. Florence could not imagine herself allowing a cold business-like lawyer to dictate her a letter bidding Joe come back to her herewith; a summons intended, of course, for ultimate publication. It disgusted Florence, this horrible business of sueing for restitution of conjugal rights! Julia’s formal petition was refused by Joe in another cold letter, equally intended for publication. Florence had actually read the two inhuman missives printed together in the daily paper. Divorce had followed in due course.

“Oh, you tamely died!” Yes, little frivolous Florence, who had never read Tennyson, would have taken the advice of the Egyptian and would have “clung to Fulvia’s waist, and thrust the dagger through her side.” She was a true woman, like Cleopatra, and knew that the elemental passions, once raised, must have full mastery. A man all to oneself or nothing! That was her philosophy.

The feelings of the man in question? The state of his affections? No matter! Florence did not see herself considering them, or taking any deadly sex insult lying down. She considered that Julia’s poor-spiritedness did really verge on meanness. She had accepted money from Joe--an allowance to enable her to leave the stage. Report said that she had grown stout. Report said that she had taken to drink. Lies probably, so generous Florence said. Nobody in Florence’s world knew anything about Julia excepting Miss Walton, who had introduced them. And though the two women had continued their intimacy, it was with the tacit agreement that the name of Julia should not be mentioned between them. There were plenty of other subjects to talk about. Miss Walton was, like everybody else, more than half in love with Joe.… Funny how they all were! Rather nice--for Joe’s wife, since Joe did not bother with any of them.…

Mrs. Mardell, after having polished the silver diligently, turned her attention to the room. She ordered the chairs, according to some abstruse social system of her own, and flicked her duster about feebly here and there. She did not feel very “fit.” Rather queer, on the contrary! All-overish! She could not have told you what it was, but she was mysteriously conscious of something excessive--something outrageous, like severe pain in wait for her. She seemed to apprehend its nearness instinctively, as a patient seated in the dentist’s chair watches the eminent practitioner’s feet moving and is aware in all his sensitive enamel of the imminent grinding of the file that has been set going.

Perhaps it was the long-continued strain of the cold that was affecting her. The frost had lasted since before Christmas, and had been very severe.…

She paused. The little clock on the mantelpiece tinkled half-past eleven. Supposing she were to give herself a slight moral fillip--go upstairs and try on her new dress, and see how it fitted, after having been “back” twice. She was sure in this way to obtain a sensation, pleasurable or otherwise.

She mounted another flight, feeling every step to be an effort. She lit the gas-stove in her room, and dismissed the dilatory housemaid, whom she found on her knees examining the pattern of the carpet. Then she dragged a tall cheval glass into position, having due regards to unbecoming cross-lights, and undressed. Her white, handsome shoulders appeared; she looked ten times prettier than she had done in the severe morning shirt and tie, and she knew it. She stood for a few minutes before the mirror, complacently admiring herself and in no hurry to don the heavily-trimmed corsage that awaited her verdict. It lay beside her, half in and half out of the flowered cardboard box, interleaved with tissue-paper, and with intersecting lines of tape winding it into its cage. Her eyes rested on it with feminine appreciation of the elaborate building of the silk lining, with its white bone cases crossing and recrossing the back of it, and the high collar which was to fit in under the very lobe of the ear. Still she deferred the pleasing moment of assumption, standing still and preening herself; soft lappets of valenciennes lace flowering out as a frame to the pink skin.…

Suddenly, taken by surprise, without a cry or a moan, she cowered and was bent, bent nearly double. Agonizing pangs shot through the framework of her body. Her eyes were glassed over with tears, and through them she stared out on the world, bewildered, peering to see from which point the next arrow of dolour would fall!

It came again, without fail it came again, this time no stabbing thrust, but a sword, driving, delving laboriously through her vitals in a lingering, painstaking manner. She was by now prepared and well frightened, and she groaned aloud. Her breasts rose and came together, as in some strange health exercise, under the laces and ribbons.…

My God! Was it----? Was the silver bowl downstairs going to be used at last?

No, it could not be. The thought was dismissed as soon as formed. A chill on the liver? The extreme cold.… What a fool she was to prance about like a peacock in front of a glass for half-an-hour half dressed! What else could she expect? That silly stove gave no heat.…

She gathered to her a dressing-gown that lay near and sat still, cowering. A long pause! She could not think. But she received no physical intimation of the recurrence of her agony.

Five minutes later she boldly rose, defying it, and tore the new dress out of its rustling ward without stopping to untie the tapes that controlled it. With a screech of tissue-paper it yielded itself into her hands, and she put it on.

Then she laughed. The pain was forgotten. She wriggled about happily.

“Yes, it still catches me… just there! They must have it back. I’ll go to Madam about it, on--let me see?--Tuesday.…”

Taking the precaution of putting her arms properly into the warm dressing-jacket this time, she wrapped the dress up again, tied the white tapes across it, put the lid on firmly, and with the little stylograph Joe had given her, methodically scored out her own name from the label, thus substituting that of the dressmaker printed all over the box.

The exertion, slight as it was, roused again the smouldering fire of pain. She sat down helplessly on her bed, giving herself up to it. Her eyes were like those of a dumb animal in the death anguish, as she stared across at her reflection of her already distorted features in the glass. Rolling to and fro, she grasped and relaxed alternately the fronts of her peignoir, knotted feverishly in her palm.

“What the _divil_ is it?” she murmured. “I feel as if my life was going!”

She did not think of calling any one--Vance or Gladys the impotent housemaid; no one could help her. She was but a poor human passage-way for these relentless throes that passed Juggernaut-like through her shrinking body. It was like a garden roller, when it was not like many scythes set on one axle turning, twisting inside her. What had she ever done to suffer so? No child of Joe’s could be so cruel and tear its mother thus!… Nay, she had not conceived, unless it was some monstrous impious growth that was rending her, and would not soften or relax till it killed her.… She really thought she was going to die!…

Presently, when all was quiet again in the tortured battleground of her body, she rose and pushed her hand through her bows of waved hair and flung it back hideously and crossed the room. Apologetically almost, for fear of provoking a recurrence of the horror, she dragged herself downstairs, and to the swing door at the head of the kitchen stairs. She now felt the need of a confidante. She must tell some one. The housemaid was too young. Vance was fairly motherly. Pushing open the door, she sat down on the top step, with her peignoir gathered round her, and stretching out her legs allowed them to hang over into the dark abyss of Vance’s domain.

By the time she felt able to raise her voice and call Vance she had decided not to confide in her. The cook would immediately “think things,” and she wanted no fuss. It was not “that” either, she only wished it was.… For then there would at least be some compensation in baby fingers to smooth pain away.

In response to her weak summons the cook appeared at the foot of the stairs. Even in the dim penumbra of a London basement, a person unpreoccupied by her own symptoms would have realized at once that Vance was discomposed--agitated in some unusual way. Her cap was hanging by one hairpin, her floury arms were nervously rubbed one against the other. But Mrs. Mardell noticed nothing in other people to-day. She addressed Vance slowly and deliberately.

“Vance, please I want you to make me a nice cup of tea--at once. I shall not be able to eat any lunch. I think I’ll wait till six, and have something with Mr. Mardell.”

“Ain’t you feeling well, Ma’am?” asked the cook spiritlessly.

“No, not very--a little all-overish. It will be nothing, only I don’t feel like eating a solid meal.”

“Nor I can’t say I feel like cooking it!” Vance observed bitterly. “I’m that upset! I’ve been across and asked.”

“Asked what?” inquired Mrs. Mardell wearily.

“About the funeral that I saw with my own eyes leaving that house on Christmas Day.… It’s not natural, I said, to go getting buried on Christmas Day----”

Mrs. Mardell interposed impatiently. “You don’t mean to say you went and asked at the house if they’d had any one die there? Really, Vance----”

“It’s no good saying that now, Ma’am; I had to know. And it’s only a Nursing Home, not a private house, so I’ve done no harm. And”--the woman’s voice grew low and hoarse--“nobody ain’t died there--not yet--that’s all!”

She put her apron to her face.

“Good gracious, Vance!” Mrs. Mardell cried. “Tell me more about it!”

“Ma’am, they’ve only got one patient there--a lady. She was going on all right, but she had a relapse this morning, just about half-past eleven, their cook said it was. She had an operation three weeks ago, and no good, and it’s got to be done all over again this afternoon at two o’clock, and they can’t tell as it will be successful, this time.”

“Well, my good woman, don’t you worry. Let’s hope that the lady will get over it. People do, you know, or there would be an end of nursing homes. I really feel so poorly myself that I can’t get up much sympathy with other people’s aches and pains. Be quick and get the kettle on, or is it boiling already?”

“Yes, Ma’am, you shall have it in a minute. Ma’am, you may not believe me, but I seen a proper funeral, and the hearse waiting, and the corpse carried out and down those steps… and the bearers with crape on their hats and so attentive, and one of them was no bigger than Master.… I thought of Master the moment I saw him.… And she was a big woman, for she took a big coffin.…”

“You are settling that it’s the woman who’s lying ill there now who has got to die, I see. What’s her name?”

“I asked, but the girl didn’t know it, only that she was an actress.”

Mrs. Mardell gathered in her legs decisively.

“Come now, Vance, don’t stand there gossiping and unhinging yourself with fancies; get me my cup of tea. I shall be all right, I expect, when once I have had something warm. Bring it to my room. I shall lie down a bit, I think.”

She rose to her feet, closed the swing door, dismissing Vance and her dreary soothsaying vision, and passed upstairs. Her day was spoilt. The pain did not seem to be going to recur, luckily, but the deadly feeling of uneasiness which had succeeded it certainly increased. Her legs were weak and could hardly carry her. People who have seen an apparition are said to feel just so. But as she reflected it was Vance, not she, who had seen the ghost!

She paused half-way up the stairs to look out of the window on the first landing, whence Vance declared she had watched the lugubrious tableau. Mrs. Mardell had never gone in for knowing her neighbours, it was wiser not, or else she would have been aware of the industry that was carried on at number thirteen, a red-brick sham artistic villa, just like her own house--like every other house in the street. She could only make it out by pressing her face against the window, and then she only saw it aslant, and red, through the vicious stained glass that occupied that particular pane. Eight steps led up to the front door of it, as eight steps led up to hers. Surely it was awkward for the incoming patients--many of them, presumably, too ill to walk? She wondered what sort of cases they took there. It would depend.…

Julia, she had heard, had grown very fat--at thirty.… That indicated something abnormal, in a youngish woman!… Something that had to be removed, generally.… She laughed.… She wondered why she laughed.…

“Your tea, Ma’am!” said Vance suddenly at her elbow. “I thought I would bring it up to you myself.”

Mrs. Mardell was a little ashamed that Vance should discover her staring out of the window at the scene of her absurd cock-and-bull story. She turned and coldly bade the cook precede her to her bedroom with the tea. Vance accepted the rebuff meekly. She looked cowed and thoroughly upset, and as if no merely domestic trifle could affect her now, broken to tragic issues as she had been.

The tea, as Mrs. Mardell had expected, revived her, and enabled her to lay a nice little plan for a quiet afternoon indoors. She proposed to telephone for Miss Walton to come and sit with her for a bit. She needed something or somebody to pick her up. Of course there was Charlie Bligh, a nice boy whom both she and Joe liked; she might telephone him to come and take her out to dine, as he often did.… But no, she wasn’t looking Carlton form; it wouldn’t be fair to Charlie to ask him to take out anything that wasn’t gay and smart. Besides, it would be rather mean to leave Joe to eat his dinner all alone when she had not even said good-morning to him. She had often left him for dinner, of course, and he had never thought of objecting, verbally at least--but just now that he was so busy and overworked she felt sure that he would like her, sitting beside him at his dinner, even though she could eat nothing. She saw herself delicately invalidish, in her soft draperies, picking at some grapes.… She felt mysteriously drawn to Joe, dear Joe, who was working for her now, who never attempted to control her social movements, who took what she gave him and was always as ready to flirt with her as if he were not married to her! She had managed Joe well! No, she wouldn’t leave Joe to-night, but get Miss Walton, who would surely stay with her till Joe returned about half-past five, as usual.

Miss Walton, over the telephone, signified her willingness to come and have a good chat. Mrs. Mardell made up her mind to take things easy. She was really unwell, she had eaten nothing since breakfast, she felt empty, shaken, swelled and sore. She could not have got her exquisitely adjusted corsets on if she had tried, or endured the pressure of them round her body. A tea-gown was clearly indicated. She assumed one, and a little lace cap that went well with it. Sighing deeply, she lay down on the rose-coloured chintz sofa in the drawing-room, shaded by a soft standard lamp, breathing timorously, existing furtively, unnoticed. She hoped it would pass her by, this brooding eagle of pain waiting to tear her.

She had brought her jewel-case downstairs with her and idly toyed with her trinkets. There were three trays, lined with velvet. They twinkled with precious stones. She took every piece in order and examined them slowly, seriously. All the while, her fingers seemed to know that down at the bottom of the box lay their real objective, a thin, crumpled, tousled letter folded small and turning up at the corners. Florence Mardell had received it a few days after her marriage, and although it was only a letter from a woman, had forborne to show it to her husband.

The letter was not actually malicious or even disagreeable, but it had dismayed her, and shocked her. She had kept it in case Julia should ever choose to lay aside her extraordinary tolerance and become human again. She read it over now to remind her of what it contained. Indeed she had intended to do so when she fetched the box. The by-play with the jewellery was only a blind--self-deceiving, a sop to her superficial consciousness.

“_Now it is all over, my strivings have not been in vain, and Joe passes from me to you. You must not mind my writing to you, Florence. I think that, on the whole, you will prefer to know what I feel, and that the woman you have supplanted is not your enemy. Joe loves you, and as the woman Joe loves, you cannot be abhorrent to me. Convention forbids me to be your personal friend, your feeling possibly, and perhaps my own, for I am but a woman after all, and the open wound that was left in my life when Joe was torn from my side would be chafed and kept raw by the sight of him merged now in your life. Yes, it is better so. I cannot, will not, see him either--though Joe is not conventional.…_

“_Joe is nothing that is not splendid. I did, I do love him so passionately, that I cannot hate you, Florence, as you see. You are the fair new temple in which he worships the spirit of Beauty and Love and Life. The law has clanged the door to, none may dare to interrupt the Litany he prays there, on his knees. God bless you._

“_But oh, my dear, keep him there. Never undress the altar. No more shifting for Joe, if we women can help it. He is a great man--he must be treated like a great man. These upheavals are bad for him, from every point of view. So be practical as well as passionate, and condescend to learn from me, who failed, how not to lose him. Only approximately can you learn, for the wind of art blows its children where it listeth. You know what an artist he is, and all artists are nothing but divine children. But, Florence, on your life, don’t treat him as one. Don’t let yourself ‘mother’ him as I did and be mad enough to sink the mistress in the sister, the friend even. That was my fatal mistake, I abstracted my sexual self till I became at last the caterer for his mere physical welfare, the confidante of his passing flirtations. Oh, the bitterness of those smothered confessions, those despairing returns of him, broken, marred and dispirited, to the one who surely loved him! Do this, my dear, as I did, and then one day he’ll come to you, as he came to me, and put his head on your knee and ask you to divorce him. So you’re both ruined in your several ways. He cannot go through it a second time._

“_Now listen. You must. I know. I would have you always a little inaccessible, puzzling, capricious even. I would ask you to dare to appear selfish, if you can manage it. Preserve your delicate tangibility, punish any slight infringments of your rules, close your door to him at nights when he has been naughty or careless. What it will cost you! But it is the right way._

“_You have an enormous pull by not acting with him, believe me! One gets so common, so cheap to a man, when he is used to knocking one about all over the stage, as Katherine, say, or insulting one as Nancy. Stay away from the theatre and accept as many dinners without him as you can. Although there isn’t the very slightest chance of his losing you, don’t let him feel as convinced of that as you are yourself. You see what I mean, don’t you, Florence? I heard you were very clever, as well as a little frivolous._

“_I have thought all this out, in many sleepless nights, for your benefit and his. Yes, it is Joe that I am thinking of, and shall think of till I die. And so of you, too._

“_Oh, don’t for goodness’ sake be offended by this letter, or take a dislike to me, for whether you like it or no, you will never be quite free of me, any more. Thought, strong thought, does permeate matter and finds itself able to overthrow its mere material resistance. I have proved it, no matter how. I won’t weary you with attempted explanation. I should not fancy you were psychic. But be sure that there will be a little of me in all your relations with Joe, I shall have a word in your ménage and you must not let the thought of it make you uncomfortable. Do you suppose I could have let him go so easily, if I had not this power to console me? Take it, as the slight penalty of kidnapping a man out of the ward of a devoted woman. You see how it is, he comes away, she offers no material or spirited opposition, but he brings inevitably some of her atmosphere along with him. Joe never actually ceased to love me; he only began to love you. I never misconducted myself--funny phrase!--so I am still his true and faithful wife, bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh, and where he is, henceforth, in some sort, I am. It cannot be helped._

“_It is a good thing that I am not vindictive and that I don’t hate you, since our relation must necessarily be so close. I assure you that it will not inconvenience you, annoy you, or trouble you at all, at least not until the bands of the spirit are loosed in one of these great, bare, soul-stripped, unaccounted-for moments of life, that come to all of us sometimes. Then, you know, one can’t tell, or foresee.… The spiritual bonds and relationships assert themselves and enforce attention.… I can’t quite promise to shield you, then, to free you from the circle of the charm.… But are you so frivolous, Florence? Won’t it interest you--awe you--soothe you?_

“_Ah, don’t fear me, don’t hate me--bid your flesh comply with me.… I am only the ghost of a wife--a power of love that can’t circumscribe itself, even though it would. There is a physical lien between us, undoubtedly. I won’t drag it if I can help!… I’ll try to control--I don’t know what I am writing--something writes for me. But trust me. Julia._”

“What a cat!” said Mrs. Mardell.

She folded up the letter again and laid it at the bottom of the box. It was almost actionable, she thought, a threatening letter. Or else the letter of a mad spiritualist--utter sentimental, impossible rot. What would Charlie Bligh, or any other daylight person think of it?

Strangely enough, she had more or less taken Julia’s advice! It was sensible, and thus she supposed germane to her own character. She had not “mothered” Joe, what woman in her senses would? She needed no deserted, defeated schemer to hang about her, in the spirit, to tell her that! She knew men as Julia with all her preachments had evidently never known them, and the result of her wise treatment of Joe was that he was devoted to her, extraordinarily so, for a busy man. Of course he worked hard, too hard, harder than he had done in Julia’s time. It had happened so, success had brought its own tension and high pressure. He was not, as Julia and her friends might like to suggest, trying to drown the memory of her in a round of forced activities. He was only taking fortune at the flood and making dramatic hay while the sun of critics favour shone. Not for a moment did he regret the step he had taken, his was an essentially light nature, he never brooded, and he detested heroics. The writer of that letter, with its tedious mixture of sentimentality and preoccupation with material cares, must have bored Joe to death, in the days when she had him all to herself and could claim consecutive opportunity for worrying him. And now, of course, a masterpiece of supreme tactlessness, like all failures, she turned critic and took on herself to give good advice.

Florence Mardell laughed. The reading of the letter had acted as even a better fillip than the trying on of the dress, and had nearly made her angry.

“I suppose”--she tossed her little gold crowned head--“that it is very good of her to give me the straight tip, and volunteer to overlook my ménage, generally, like a sort of superior lady housekeeper! I am not so bad at it myself, thank you?” She worked herself up to a sneer. “Much obliged to Julia, I’m sure, for haunting me, especially as she appears willing to confine herself merely to bothering the sensible mistress of the house, and doesn’t go frightening the servants and making them give up their places. Vance wouldn’t stop a minute----”

Her brow furrowed a little as she remembered the white, frightened face of Vance that morning.

“It’s a fairly cool thing, though,” her thought resumed, “for one woman to tell another, flat, that she considers herself part of her because she happens to have adored her husband and does still, I suppose. Man and wife--no, wife and wife--are one flesh.… Ha! Ha!…”

It was two o’clock, her face changed. Arrowy tinglings, growlings as of a chained monster inside her slender frame, punctuated her words. The pain had come again.…

When Miss Walton came in she would ask her to ring up a doctor. She could not have dragged herself to the instrument now.

* * * * * * *

The front door bell rang. She heard Miss Walton’s cheery voice making inquiries about Mrs. Mardell’s health as she shook the balled snow out of her boots on to the hall mat, and plumped her umbrella into the rack. Mrs. Mardell sat still, physically incapable of rising, though she had had but a short bout of pain this time.

She had made up her mind to question Miss Walton about Julia. Julia’s affairs seemed for the moment essentially her concern. She felt no malevolence towards her in spite of the re-reading of the letter. Miss Walton, the confidante, had never been allowed to see that letter. She should see it now, if she was good and satisfactorily confidential?

“Well, dear, how are you?” Miss Walton had come in, her work-a-day nose reddened with exposure, and her hands thickened with chilblains. “I suppose you are feeling the continuous cold, like the rest of us. And you know, you little minx, that you look best in a tea gown.”

“Do I look well?”

“Well, a bit bleached, perhaps, and your eyes rather funny and starey, as if you’d been seeing ghosts?”

“Vance has, she says.”

“A ghost in West Kensington! Nonsense!”

“It was a mock funeral, Vance says,” Mrs. Mardell remarked in an even voice. “Coming out of a house in this street on Christmas Day, when there was nobody died in it, as they told her.” She looked closely at Miss Walton’s face. “Do you know any one at number thirteen? An actress, Vance says----”

“Bless her. Christmas pudding, I should say. No, I don’t know a soul in this street besides yourself----”

Mrs. Mardell, with a sigh of relief, leant back again.

“But, I say, Florence, you do look dicky,” Miss Walton continued. “What have you been doing with yourself?”

“Perhaps you’ll say it is Christmas pudding with me too,” replied Mrs. Mardell, laughing feebly. “But I don’t know--somehow, I’ve had a horrid day. I seem to have got a sudden attack of lumbago, or sciatica or something.”

“It doesn’t sound likely, at your age.”

“No, does it? But it’s pains right through me at intervals all through the day. I had a fearful bout, just before you came. I daresay it’s nothing----”

“Rheumatism, probably,” said the other. “Nothing so absurdly painful when it gets hold of one. Here’s tea--nice hot tea. It will do you good.”

“I’ve had two goes already.”

“Oh, have a third! Nothing like tea for us women! Here, let me pour it out. Your poor little hands are trembling.”

“No, I’ll manage. Sugar? I forget if you take it? And lots of milk?… Alice, how long is it since you saw Julia?”

Mrs. Mardell was surprised at the coolness of Miss Walton’s reception of the seldom pronounced name. She might have reflected that the other woman had no particular reason to be shy of it, for she had been Florence’s and Julia’s confidante during the stormy times of the divorce and had managed to be loyal and friendly to both. She now replied offhandedly to Mrs. Mardell’s question--

“Not for six months. Lost sight of the poor dear, rather.”

“And when you last saw her, how did she look?”

“Handsome, but rather too fat. I can’t say I much liked the look of that, for she’s still quite young. I always fancy it means morbid growths, and that kind of thing. Poor old Juley! One never even sees her name in the bills now, does one?”

“Retired on the allowance Joe makes her, I suppose,” said Florence Mardell bitterly. “I can’t think how she could bring herself to take his money?”

“Only that she’s poor, of course.”

“How poor?”

“One can’t tell,” replied Alice Walton, “with people like Julia. She’s Irish. She’s the kind of woman who pays a man from Douglas’s to come and wave her hair, and dry it on towels that you can’t see for the holes! You understand. She’s the sweetest, cleverest, untidiest soul alive! She took a flat in Paris with a friend, and the state of that flat, I’m told, after a week of Julia, beat even the _femme de ménage_ they got in to do for them! They never dressed or ate, but lay about all day in peignoirs and smoked cigarettes. They got in a hypnotist to talk to them about Joe, I believe. Julia makes no secret of her devotion to Joe, as I suppose you are aware?… Now, Florence, keep your feet up--there’s a good girl! You look ghastly.”

“Yes, I know. So she’s still mad on Joe? Tell me more about her. She isn’t a woman of much taste, I fancy--can’t dress a bit?”

“No, but a generous creature, full of impulses and never a mean one among them. I do admire her character, I confess.”

“So do I,” said Florence Mardell. “And so did Joe, I believe.”

“Does. He can’t help seeing her qualities, and being flattered by her immense devotion to him. Though, of course, he’s used to it--he can’t help being faskynating! He’s such a sprite and yet so strong. Julia was as big again as he was, pretty nearly. He admired her awfully, as little men do always admire big women.”

“I’m not very big, yet Joe admires me.”

“Oh--I know he does and long may he continue. He may, for Julia, that’s one thing, she’s strictly ‘hands off,’ I know. She’s never made the slightest attempt to get him ever to go and see her.”

“He wouldn’t go if she did.”

“I shouldn’t be too sure of that,” said Miss Walton, carried, by love of her subject, beyond the limits of tactfulness. “And what would it matter? Joe was truly fond of her till you came along, you little witch! And she’s never done anything to set him against her or hurt his self-love. That’s what a man minds. I don’t see how he could have refused her a thing like that, nor could you. No, give her credit for her generosity, I believe he proposed it and that she refused to see him, steadily. Nobody in theatrical circles thought for one moment you’d keep him against her. The betting was all that, if she had tried, she’d have got him back in a month.”

“No, not if she’d tried, she wouldn’t,” said Florence Mardell earnestly. “She loved him too much!”

Her lips sketched a grimace as she spoke; her hand moved to her side and her eyes filled with tears.

“What is it, dear? The pain again?”

“I was afraid of it--my body was, I mean. But it luckily doesn’t seem to mean business, this time. And I don’t believe I could feel any more,--I don’t seem to have any organs left. It’s the peace of emptiness--exhaustion! Do, dear, let me go on talking and thrashing out things. What I meant when I said that Julia loved him too much, was this, that it is a mistake to love so openly and make such a noise about it. Men don’t value affection that’s cried from the house tops. It just disgusts them. Love at breakfast, love at luncheon, love all day; it’s sure to pall. Love shouldn’t be mixed up with daily bread-getting. It should be a speciality, not a sort of smoking mixture, advertised on every passing omnibus.”

“Go on, child, you interest me. Why, you yourself simply adore Joe!”

A faun-like, tormenting expression Miss Walton had never seen there, came over Florence Mardell’s face, as, in the weak exhausted voice of a privileged invalid, she proceeded--

“I adore Joe as smart women permit themselves to adore the thing they value and mean to keep. I believe I prize Joe, not for what he is, though I’m aware he’s a genius, but for what he means to me--light and kisses and frocks and champagne. There isn’t so much of that as there would be if Julia and her allowance didn’t stop the way! I love Joe because he’s the fount of life to me, because I feel good when he is in the room, and dull when he is out of it. I happen to know that I shouldn’t feel that about him if he came to me ill and hipped and unsuccessful. Sounds mean, but it’s true. I perfectly enjoy the placards telling me that he can make a cat laugh, and critics saying he is like what Garrick used to be. An ‘abridgement’--what is it? I am quite cross with him when the notices are poor, and I don’t in the least long, then, to take his head on my shoulder and comfort him. It’s he who has to comfort me.”

“Julia had a rather different theory!”

“Yes, and Julia lost him and I got him. She called him her boy and her baby! He even told me so, saying how nice it was of her. Quite sincere! He thought so, I daresay. I knew better, as if any man liked to be made to feel small! She’d have handed the moon down to him if she’d had it in her power, and when he cried for such a little easy thing as a divorce, of course she gave it him. A fool, I call her.”

“I don’t know about that,” the friend replied, combatively. “Greater love hath no woman, than she lay down her marriage lines for her husband.”

“Well, I love him, but I couldn’t have done that! I should simply have had to stick to him just the same. And then--if he had thrown me over, nothing would ever have induced me to take money from him!”

“But if you were extravagant and nearly starving?”

“I’d have found a man to support me and buy me frills!”

“Then you couldn’t have loved him, to degrade the thing he had once set store by.”

“If Joe had left me, anything could have become of me for all I cared!… I see what you are driving at, Alice, you think I can’t feel love as Julia does, because I haven’t got beetle brows meeting over my forehead and a big contralto chest to sigh with. My way with Joe, whether I do it from self-control or inclination, comes out best. A man like Joe needs a lot of spoiling, but not from the woman he cares for. I let outsiders do it for me. I don’t cosset him, or make a point of being home every afternoon from my calls at an unearthly hour to dine with him. If a boy offers me a dinner, I accept and Joe gives me my taxi fare, and looks me over, and sees that my dress, for the other man, mind you, is all right. Nor do I wait up for him when he comes back, I just see supper’s laid out all right and the fire kept up and go to bed. I don’t make him look ridiculous by fetching him at the theatre, as some actors’ wives do. Julia, I hear, used to take parts that didn’t suit her, so as to ensure her being on the spot with him, every night. I never know where he is and I don’t go getting his pals to play detective and tell me. I may be conceited, but I do flatter myself, that wherever Joe is, he is thinking of me, and of how soon he can get back to me.”

“I think you are perfectly right,” Miss Walton replied rather sardonically. “It’s the best view to take of marriage, and for a woman married to a popular actor, the only one. Do you happen to know where Joe is, now?”

“Yes, I happen to be able to tell you. He is at the theatre, rehearsing the new play. They must be through by now, though! He’ll be here in a minute. I haven’t seen him since yesterday. We dine together at six o’clock!”

“And it’s half-past five now. Well, I must be off. Good-bye, old girl, and I wouldn’t neglect those pains if I were you. I expect it’s only rheumatism, but as a general rule internal pains should not be ignored. You look rather flushed----”

“I must go and put on some powder before Joe comes. Good-bye. Tell Gladys to come and clear away the tea as you go out.”

Mrs. Mardell was left alone, with two imperfectly drained tea-cups and some broken crumbs of cake on a Japanese tray. The spirit lamp under the kettle had gone out--she missed its cheerful flame. She was hemmed in, her knees were imprisoned by the flaps of the tea-table so that she could not lie back.… She felt disinclined to move and go upstairs for that dust of powder that was to impress Joe.… Everything was a bother… she felt very stupid, but she had no more pain, thank God!…