The House of Defence. Volume 1

A footman was markedly waiting at her elbow to get in a word edgeways.

“The carriage is round, my lady,” he said.

Lady Thurso hastily finished an egg in aspic, with which she had begun lunch.

“For me?” she said.

“Yes, my lady. It was ordered for a quarter-past two.”

Lady Thurso pressed her fingers against her eyelids for a moment.

“I can’t remember,” she said. “Go to my room quickly, and bring me a large blue engagement-book – the one with ‘Where am I?’ written on it. And bring me anything – cold mutton or bread and cheese.”

She turned to Ruby.

“And I am so hungry!” she cried. “And it is exceedingly likely I shall have to fly off without any lunch. Oh, if I were only unemployed for two hours, I should spend one in eating! Besides, I had no breakfast, and is one egg in aspic sufficient for an active female until tea-time?”

Ruby laughed.

“It wouldn’t be for this one,” she said. “But why no breakfast? Is that a new plan?”

“New? No; it’s as old as the hills, for that delightful old Professor, the one like a pink bear at the British Museum, told me the other day – ”

“Is he a hydrangea, too?” asked Jim.

“Not at all. When one goes out to lunch, he is the one person in the room whom everybody knows. Don’t interrupt. He told me that the ancient Egyptians never had any breakfast, because the word for breakfast is the same as afternoon, or something of the sort – and think how marvellous they were! I’ve been an ancient Egyptian for nearly a fortnight.”

“But they never had motor-cars,” said Jim. “It may have been that.”

“Oh, how flippant! How could we ever get anywhere without them, considering how frequently we don’t, even with them? Ah, now for the book!”

Catherine turned hurriedly over the pages of “Where am I?” and found where she was. She breathed a sigh of relief as she closed it again.

“Thank Heaven!” she said, “because otherwise I really shouldn’t have tasted food since yesterday until tea-time. Send the carriage back, please. It’s only the bazaar at St. Ursula’s, and I told them I almost certainly couldn’t go. Besides, the Princess is opening it, so I needn’t. I should only have to stand up and curtsey, and agree that the day is vile.”

“It isn’t,” said Jim.

“I know; but one can’t argue. Oh, the carriage must come back in twenty minutes,” she added to the footman.

Jim helped himself largely to the next course.

“Catherine, that is the first time you have ever disappointed me,” he said. “I thought you would always rather go somewhere and do something than sit down and be comfortable. I thought you never even wanted to be unemployed.”

“I don’t really,” said she. “I only think I do.”

“But, anyhow, you prefer to have lunch than go to St Ursula’s.”

“Ah, you don’t understand! I have got to be at the Industrial Sale at three, in order to open it myself, and I literally haven’t enough minutes to get down to St Ursula’s, and stand and grin, and get back to Portland Place by three. It couldn’t happen. My anxiety was that the quarter-past two engagement might leave me time, if I had no lunch, to get to Portland Place at three. It won’t. Hurrah!”

Lady Thurso poured herself out a glass of very hot water from a blanketed jug that stood at her elbow, and drank it in rapid sips. She never took alcohol in any form, except on those rare occasions when she was really dead beat, and had to do something energetic the next moment. But since every fad appealed to her, she, Athenian-wise, in her desire for some new thing, tried them all. She had just abandoned, in fact, the plan of drinking nothing whatever at meals, but sipping distilled water at eleven in the morning and half-past three in the afternoon. It seemed to suit her quite well, but as she was, and had always been, in perfect health already, there was nothing particular to be gained by it, whereas for other reasons the régime was inconvenient, since at those hours when she ought to be sipping distilled water she was usually very busy, and either forgot, or, as at a bazaar, was so placed that distilled water was practically unattainable. So, just for the moment, she drank hot water at meals, and found it suited her as well as everything else.

“Good gracious, what nonsense people talk,” she said, “when they speak of the idle and luxurious upper classes! Look at us all. From the King downwards, we are worked to death for the sake of the classes who revile us. I stopped in the Park the other day to listen to one of those unwashed orators of the Marble Arch. He read out from a grimy newspaper that the King had been shooting somewhere, and was to return next day ‘in a motor-car,’ said the speaker, with unspeakable irony, and there were groans. Oh, how I longed to speak, too – but I hadn’t time – and remind them that he did a far longer day’s work than any two of them put together, and would come up in a motor-car because otherwise he couldn’t open the new wing of the Ophthalmic Hospital next morning. But that is just the weak point about Socialism. I am a Socialist until I hear them talk. Good gracious, how I should welcome an Eight-Hours Bill! It would be a holiday! Eight hours! Lazy brutes!”

Lady Thurso paused for a moment to eat the slice of cold mutton which she had ordered. Having been a disciple of Dr. Haig for several months in the past year, she had veered round, and now ate hardly anything but meat and pulses. She felt magnificently well.

“Not long ago, too, I saw an article in some Socialistic paper,” she said, “which struck me as exceedingly forcible, and I wrote to the author, asking him to come and see me at ten one morning, and booked the engagement when I heard from him. I was interested in what he said; I wanted to know what he went on. He came on the morning in question, but at half-past ten, and what was the reason, do you think? Because he had only just got up! He told me so himself. But I was anxious to do him justice, and said I supposed he had gone to bed very late the night before. Not at all; he had been in bed by twelve. And there was I, who had not gone to bed till four, expecting and waiting for this bedridden creature! And he had written about the indolence of me! Ah, that week I had felt strong Socialistic leanings, but he cured me at once. Thurso was so funny, too. He shuffled – you know Thurso’s shuffle of disapproval – when I told him about it. Why shouldn’t I have seen the man? I was interested, until I saw him, anyhow.”

Jim considered this. He was not a person of action, but liked inquiring into motive. It was this that made Catherine almost despair of getting him to marry Ruby; he could easily spend so many years in theoretical study of the advantages and drawbacks of matrimony.

“Is that sufficient?” he asked. “May one do anything that one finds interesting?”

“Certainly, if it doesn’t injure anybody. The first rule of life is to give other people a good time if you can; the second is not to hurt them under any pretext; and the third to enjoy yourself in every other way. That is why I adore what Thurso calls “quackery” of all kinds. I love discovering the secret of life which solves everything for about ten minutes. I have – what did the pink bear say? – oh yes: the most insatiable appetite for novelties. Wasn’t it darling of him? It keeps one busy, and that, after all, is the true elixir of life. I should be miserable if I hadn’t got more to do than I can possibly manage.”

“But just now you said you would give anything for a couple of unemployed hours this afternoon,” said Ruby.

“I know, because the flesh was weak, and I was very hungry and dog-tired. I feel better now – nearly ready to begin again.”

Ruby turned her pale Botticelli face towards her.

“How you can go on, I don’t know,” she said. “You play all the time we play, and work all the time we rest. You make me feel lazy too, which I resent.”

“Darling, I will make you feel industrious this afternoon,” said Catherine, “because I want you and Jim to stop here, and criticise and alter and direct till the ballroom and this room and the staircase are all absolutely perfect. You know what I want done: I want you to see that it is done. Don’t judge by daylight only. Have the blinds and curtains drawn, and see that it looks right by electric light. I shall not be able to get home till just before dinner, and then it will be too late. English decorators are hopeless; they know as much about decoration as I know about the lunar theory. I wonder they haven’t sent some plush monkeys climbing up into spiders’ webs to hang in the windows.”

“They sent hundreds of yellow calceolarias,” said Ruby, “which is about as bad. I sent them all back. And poor Mr. Hopkinson didn’t seem to know what wild-flowers were, when I told him you wanted wild-flowers all up the staircase.”

“He knows now,” remarked Lady Thurso.

It was probable that poor Mr. Hopkinson did “know now,” for ever since morning tall flowering grasses, meadow-sweet, cornflowers, cistus, ox-eye daisies, tendrils of wild-rose, clumps of buttercups, and all the myriad herbage of rural June, had been poured into the house, and the staircase, with great boughs of hawthorn and rose overhanging the lowlier growths, was like an apotheosised lane lying between ribands of shaded hayfield. Lady Thurso, inheriting the American love of doing something which has never been done before, a thing which leads to failure in a dozen cases, and hits the bull’s-eye on the lucky thirteenth, had never been better inspired, and the staircase, a rather heavy and not very admirable feature in the house, had been gloriously transformed by the lightness and spring of this feathery decoration. But poor Mr. Hopkinson’s ignorance of what wild-flowers were had been capped by his ignorance of how wild-flowers grew, and the original order to decorate the stairs with only wild-flowers had led to his placing the poor dears in neat and orderly rows, as in a riband bed. Consequently, he and his assistant florists had, about twelve-thirty that morning, to demolish and begin all over again, having first, under Lady Thurso’s supervision, “made a salad” of all these fragrant hampers of flowers and grasses, and then stuck them “properly” – that is to say, absolutely at random – into the trays of moist clay and troughs of water that lined each side of the staircase, which would keep them alive and bright-eyed till morning.

There was still five minutes before the carriage came, and Lady Thurso, “while the bread was yet in her mouth,” hurried out to see if Mr. Hopkinson had at length grasped the nature of her scheme. It appeared that he had. The staircase was a country lane, just as she had visualised it. And, somehow, with the adaptability that was as natural to her as is the sympathetic change of colour in a chameleon, as she stood below a clump of flowering hawthorn, she looked, for all her air of the world and patrician aspect, like some exquisite milkmaid, the embodiment of Queen Elizabeth’s ideal. But the milkmaid had the critical eye, and she looked very slowly and carefully up and down this vista of the hayfields.

She examined and re-examined.

“More buttercups in that corner,” she said – “all in a clump like sunlight – and another big bough of hawthorn – two boughs. Not twigs like that, just buttonholes, but boughs.”

She waited, sitting on the top step with Ruby, till this was done; then eagerly, but carefully, she looked at it again with her eyes half shut.

“I think it will do,” she said, “but please have all the curtains drawn, dear Ruby, and look at it by electric light. I’m not sure there is enough yellow even yet. I hope it won’t give Thurso hay-fever, for he and I will be planted here till the royal quadrille begins. He and Maud get here this afternoon.”

“And the typhoid?” asked Ruby.

“For the last week there has been no further case,” she said, “and everybody is getting better. No deaths for the last week, either. It looks as if it is all over. I was quite wrong, it seems, about the need of Thurso’s going there. It seems that he was of the utmost use in making the people obey doctors’ orders. I had not thought of that; it was stupid of me.”

This was completely characteristic of her. If she were wrong, she owned up at once. It spared one the degradation of arguing against one’s convictions.

“But I hope he will stop in town for the rest of the season,” she went on. “People already think it is odd of him to be in Scotland now; and though it matters very little what people think, it is much better that they should not think at all.”

“And Maud?” asked Ruby.

“It is from her I had all this news, though I have been writing – type-writing, I should say – to Thurso. Maud was interesting. She told me about a Mr. Cochrane, to whom Thurso let the fishing. He is a Christian Scientist, which sounds silly, but Maud says she saw him cure a bad case. She writes quite gravely, too, as if she really believed it, and she is not fanciful. I think I shall study Christian Science next August.”

“Why August?”

“Because I sha’n’t have any time in July. Oh yes, and Maud did not know that the fishing was let – so like Thurso not to tell her – and was caught by Mr. Cochrane poaching in his river. He wasn’t annoyed, it appears, though it certainly ought to have been annoying. Do you think I shall never be annoyed any more if I study Christian Science all August?”

“Oh, conceal your want of annoyance, then,” said Ruby, “and in any case don’t get the Christian Science smile. It wouldn’t suit you, and it is particularly fatiguing for others. Alice Yardly has it. That is why I can’t look at her any more.”

Lady Thurso was still not quite satisfied with her staircase, or, at any rate, she wanted to be sure that she was.

“Still more buttercups,” she proclaimed. “A hundred – two hands full of them.”

Then she detached herself again completely, and turned to Ruby.

“Oh, you must be just, Ruby,” she said. “Alice was always fatiguing, whether she smiled or not, and she is not really more fatiguing now than she used to be. Maud loves her, and so do I, and we both yawn our heads off when she is with us. It is true that she now seems to smile with a purpose, but if we didn’t know she was a Christian what’s-his-name, we shouldn’t notice the change. Her plan is to be helpful now, but she is just as helpless as ever, so it doesn’t matter. Of course, nobody can really help anybody else. We all have to help ourselves.”

“Then, why do you spend your life – ” began Ruby.

“In bazaars and industries, you mean. I hardly know. I daresay you think it is insincere – that I ought to sell the diamond palisade and the ruby plaster, or induce Thurso to do so. But I am sincere. I want to live a gorgeous life, and I will. At the same time, I am delighted to work while you rest, as you said, if my work will make some poor wretches in Caithness a little less uncomfortable. If I didn’t, I should lie awake at night, thinking about them. That would be uncomfortable for me, too, so you are quite at liberty to suppose that it is all selfishness – refined selfishness, if you like, which is the worst sort. Certainly, if I wasn’t a very hard-working woman, which I am, I should have bad dreams by day, as well as no sleep at night.”

Again she paused.

“And I’ve been talking about myself,” she said, “which you will allow is unusual. And the carriage is here, and I must go. Ruby, you see the idea of the corner, don’t you? It must be sunlight – sunlight of buttercups, bless them! Oh, to be a milkmaid, now that June is here! But otherwise don’t let them touch the staircase any more. It is so nearly what I meant it to be that it is safer not to run any risks. It is darling of you to stop and superintend these stupid people. And please, if they bring any gardenia or tuberose, make them take it away, like the calceolarias. Gardenias are so ‘powerful.’ What a heavenly expression! I am sure it was invented at Clapham. The same people say ‘carriage sweep’ and ‘soiled handkerchiefs.’ I hate the middle classes!”

Lady Thurso would probably have been much surprised if she had been told that she was a genius, because she had a dim idea that, in order to be, or, rather, have been, a genius, it was necessary to live a sordid and unsuccessful life, and to die prematurely and unnoticed in a garret. But if the stock definition of genius was at all correct, she had a very reasonable claim to the title, for her power of taking pains bordered on the infinite. It made no matter to her on what she was engaged. Whatever she did, she approached her task with the transcendent aim for perfection, and whether it was the decoration of her staircase, or the speech that she had to make at the Industrial Sale, she bestowed on it the utmost effort of which she was capable. Another gift crowned this, which, though almost as rare, is not less remunerative; for when her utmost pains had been bestowed, she could dismiss the subject from her mind, and not worry about it any more. Thus now, the moment she had left her door, the staircase decoration ceased to exist for her. She had done her best, and her connection with it was severed. The speech, too, that she would have to make in a quarter of an hour was non-existent also, since this morning she had thought it over till she knew no more to think, had written it down, and had said it aloud to herself until she was perfectly satisfied that she knew what she wanted to say, and could say it.

This being so, she abandoned herself to the joy of looking about her – a fascinating pursuit, if one looks with intelligence. It was she, in fact, who was the author of a word that had gone round London – namely, that by driving for an hour at the right time and through the right streets you could, without exchanging a word with anybody, know all that the morning papers had contained of importance, and predict all that would be in the evening sheets. In the course of such a drive you could see the leader of what had been the Opposition and was now the Government stepping into a hansom, with a face elate but anxious, at his door in Grosvenor Square. The hansom argued a sudden emergency. There was no luggage, and the probable goal was Buckingham Palace. Who, then, was the new Prime Minister? Again, in Chesham Place you could see the Russian Ambassador getting into his motor, with luggage piled on the top. Clearly, then, he was going out of town, and an amelioration in Russian affairs might reasonably be argued, since it was impossible that he should leave if the crisis were as critical as it had been yesterday. Or, again, the blinds were down where A was very ill, the blinds were still up where B was yesterday supposed to be critically ill after an operation. Therefore, A had thought worse of it, and died; B had thought better of it, and still lived. Then there was a block at Hyde Park Corner, and the royal liveries flashed by. The new Prime Minister would only just get to Buckingham Palace first.

But much as she observed, it was probable that, as far as observation went, she was more the victim than the priest, for in all the little London world which is called the great there was no one at this moment quite so important as she. She “mattered” – a thing of rare occurrence in so republican a place – and she mattered publicly, openly, superbly. In the ever-shifting kaleidoscope of London life, in which nothing, neither beauty nor blood nor wit, nor any pre-eminence, carries with it any certain distinction, she was just now the centre of the whole astounding mixture of sordidness and brilliance, of intelligence and stupidity. To-morrow or next year, as she knew quite well, it might be a music-hall artist, or a foreign king, or a twopenny philosopher, or an infant prince, or somebody who played tunes on his front teeth, who would absorb general attention, but just now it was she. She rated “general attention” at about its proper value, knowing quite well that the affection of one friend was worth all the general attention of a century; but she found that it was, as she expressed it, “rather fun.”

The movements and conjunction of these stars and planets of London life are far more inscrutable than the vagaries of the simpler constellations of the heaven, but just at this moment Catherine Thurso was the central sun round which all else revolved. There were twenty other people who had wealth, beauty, and charm in no less degree than she, though in the matter of beauty forty-nine Parises out of fifty would have awarded the golden apple to this Juno among women, and the world, for that reason or another, had chosen her to be their temporary idol. She was the person who mattered, and this was her hour. And her hour, no less than her own enjoyment of it, she used, as Thurso had said, magnificently, for it really seemed as if charity, no less than social entertainment, would collapse without her support. She made herself a slave to any scheme that helped the helpless, or encouraged the would-be worker to work, and yet all the time she lived, and intended to live, gorgeously. So, like the driver of a pair of horses, she did not suffer the social horse to be lazy or shirk its work, for she knew (and acted on the knowledge) that her social distinction brought buyers to her bazaars. She played, therefore, the brilliant woman of the world for all it was worth, in order to assist deserving objects, though she enjoyed the rôle enormously for its own sake. Both horses, charitable and social, felt her indefatigable lash, and she spurred herself on, just as she spurred on all those who surrounded her, inducing activity in them by the spectacle of her own glorious vitality.

Anyone as radically efficient as Catherine Thurso undoubtedly was has to march through life with as few impedimenta as possible, and all emotional baggage which is not likely to be needed must be firmly left behind. She had long ago realised this, and had always acted on it, so that now it was more from force of habit than by any conscious effort that she eliminated from her mind any emotion on its first appearance if it was likely to clog or hinder her energies. Worry, sorrow, regret for all that was past or irremediable, she simply threw away as one throws the envelopes of opened letters into the wastepaper basket. They were of no earthly use; they but made an unprofitable litter if they were allowed to lie about, nor did you want the drawers and compartments in your brain crammed with rubbish like this. Thus, it was but very seldom that she let her thoughts dwell on the one great thing that she had missed all her life. She had never loved. Her marriage with Thurso had, as the Press most truly announced, “been arranged,” and she had fallen in with this arrangement. Even as a girl she had wanted the sort of position and opportunity that such a marriage gave her, and she had made, certainly outwardly, and to a very considerable extent inwardly, the most splendid success of it. She had done her duty, too, as a wife in giving him three sons, and had filled her place superbly. But love had never really come to her. That, by no fault of hers, had apparently been left out of her emotional equipment, and since she was convinced that this omission was not her fault, and that it was out of her power to remedy it, she did not worry about it. But to-day, though she did not worry, she could not help wondering about a certain time now long past in her life, since it was conceivable that certain things which as yet belonged only to time long past would begin to be factors in her life in the immediate future. So now that the question of the staircase and the coming speech at the Industrial Sale were off her mind, these things occupied her somewhat insistently. There was no mystery about it all, and nothing whatever to fear either in the past or the future; but certain possibilities interested her.

Count Villars had just arrived in England, having at an extraordinarily early age – for he could be scarcely forty yet – been appointed Hungarian Ambassador to the Court of St. James; and there were quite a number of people resident in that parish who remembered very distinctly how desperately he had fallen in love with Catherine Thurso twelve years ago, when she had first come out, and, as her mother expressed it, taken “the shine” out of the rest of the girls of the year. Then, so the world still remembered, rather perplexing events had happened in rapid succession. Her engagement to young Villars had been actually supposed to have taken place, but hardly had that become news when it was contradicted, and Villars, then a junior secretary in the Embassy of which he was now the head, had been transferred elsewhere; while before the season was over Catherine Etheridge’s engagement to her present husband was formally announced, and was followed before the end of the year by her marriage. For Mrs. Etheridge had always meant that her daughter should marry Lord Raynham, as he then was; and if anybody thought that her plans were going to be interfered with by any volcanic young Austrian, however brilliant and handsome, without a penny of his own, and removed by half a dozen lives from the succession to the huge estates of Villars (those lives certainly made a lot of difference), she would show him his mistake. There were, in fact, many who thought that Mrs. Etheridge’s plans were going to be interfered with; but their mistake had been duly demonstrated to them when Catherine Etheridge so soon after became Catherine Raynham.