A Bed of Roses

'I say, you girls,' she said suddenly, 'you've never been to my place. Come and.. no, not dine, it won't work.. come and lunch with me next week.'

Duckie smiled heavily.

'I don' min',' she said thickly.

Zoé looked suspicious for a moment.

'Can I bring Fritz?' asked Lissa.

'No, we can't have Fritz,' said Victoria smiling. 'Ladies only.'

'I'm on,' said Zoé suddenly. 'I was afraid you were going to have a lot of swells in. Hate those shows. Never do you any good and you get so crumpled.'

'You might let me bring Fritz,' said Lissa querulously.

'No men,' said Victoria firmly. 'Wednesday at one o'clock. All square?'

'Thatawright,' remarked Duckie. 'Shut it Lissa. Fritzawright. Tellm its biz.. bizness.'

With some difficulty they hoisted Duckie into a cab and sent her off to Bloomsbury. As it drove off she popped her head out.

'Carriage paid,' she spluttered, 'or C. O. D.?'

Zoé and Lissa walked away to the circus. On her little hall table, as Victoria went into her house, she found a note scrawled in pencil on some of her own notepaper. It was from Betty. It said that Farwell had been stricken down by a sudden illness and was sinking fast. His address followed.

CHAPTER X

In a bed sitting-room at the top of an old house off the Waterloo Road three women were watching by the bedside of a man. One was dressed in rusty black; she was pale faced, crowned with light hair; the other, shifting uneasily from one foot to the other, was middle-aged and very stout; her breast rolled like a billow in her half buttoned bodice. The third was beautiful, all in black, her sumptuous neck and shoulders bare. None of them moved for a moment. Then the beautiful woman threw back her cloak and her long jade earrings tinkled. The face on the pillow turned and opened its eyes.

'Victoria,' said a faint voice.

'Yes.. are you better?' Victoria bent over the bed. The face was copper coloured; every bone seemed to start out. She could hardly recognise Farwell's rough hewn features.

'Not yet.. soon,' said Farwell. He closed his eyes once more.

'What is it, Betty?' whispered Victoria.

'I don't know.. hemorrhage they say.'

'It's all up mum,' whispered the landlady in Victoria's ear. 'Been ill two days only. Doctor said he wouldn't come again.'

Victoria bent over the bed once more. She could feel the eyes of the landlady probing her personality.

'Can't you do something?' she asked savagely.

'Nothing.' Farwell opened his eyes again and faintly smiled. 'And what's the good, Victoria?'

Victoria threw herself on her knees by the side of the bed. 'Oh, you musn't!' she whispered. 'You.. the world can't spare you!'

'Oh, yes.. it can.. you know.. the world is like men.. it spends everything on luxuries.. it can't afford necessaries.'

Victoria smiled and felt as if she were going to choke. The last paradox.

'Are you in pain?' she asked.

'No, not just now… I shall be, soon. Let me speak while I can.' His voice grew firmer suddenly.

'I have asked you to come so that you may be the last thing I see; you, the fairest. I love you.'

Not one of the three women moved.

'I have not spoken before, because when I could speak we were slaves. Now you are free and I a slave. It is too late, so it is time for me to speak. For I cannot influence you.'

Farwell shut his eyes. But soon his voice rose again.

'You must never influence anybody. That is my legacy to you. You cannot teach men to stand by giving them a staff. Let the halt and the lame alone. The strong will win. You must be free. There is nothing worth while..' A shiver passed over him, his voice became muffled.

'No, nothing at all.. freedom only..'

He spoke quicker. The words could not be distinguished. Now and then he groaned.

'Wait,' whispered Betty, 'it will be over in a minute.' For two minutes they waited.

Victoria's eyes fastened on a basin by the bedside, full of reddish water. Then Farwell's face grew lighter in tone. His voice came faint as the sound of a spinet.

'There will be better times. But before then fighting.. the coming to the top of the leaders.. gold will be taken from the rich.. given to the vile.. pictures burnt.. chaos.. woman rise as a tyrant.. there will be fighting.. the coming to the top…' His voice thinned down to nothing as his wandering mind repeated his prediction. Then he spoke again.

'You are a rebel.. you will lead.. you have understood.. only by understanding are you saved. I asked you to come here to tell you to go on.. earn your freedom.. at the expense of others.'

'Why at the expense of others?' asked Betty, leaning over the bed. Farwell was hypnotising her. His eyes wandered to her face.

'Too late.' he said, 'you do not see.. you are a slave.. a woman has only one weapon.. otherwise, a slave.. ask.. ask Victoria.' He closed his eyes but went on speaking.

'There is not freedom for everybody.. capitalism means freedom for a few.. you must have freedom, like food.. food for the soul.. you must capture the right to respect.. a woman may not toil.. make money.'

Then again. 'I am going into the blackness.. before Death.. the Judge.. Death will judge me..'

''E's thinking of his Maker, poor genelman,' said the landlady hoarsely.

Victoria and Betty looked at one another. Agnostic or indifferent in their cooler moments, the superstition of their ancestors worked in their blood, powerfully assisted by the spectacle of this being passing step by step into an unknown. There must be life there, feeling, loving. There must be Something.

The voice stopped. Betty had seized Victoria's arm and now clutched it violently. Victoria could feel through her own body the shudders that shook the girl's frame. Then Farwell's voice rose again, louder and louder, like the upward flicker of a dying candle.

'Yes, freedom's my message, the right to live. This world into which we are evolved by a selfish act of joy, into which we are dragged unwilling with pain for our usher, it is a world which has no justification save the freedom to enjoy it as we may. I have lived a stoic, but it is a hedonist I die. Unshepherded I go into a perhaps. But I regret nothing.. all the certainties of the past are not worth the possible of the future. Behind me others tread the road that leads up the hill.'

He paused for breath. Then again his voice arose as a cry, proclaiming his creed.

'On the top of the hill. There I see the unknown land, running with milk and honey. I see a new people; beautiful young, beautiful old. Its fathers have ground the faces of the helots; they have fought and lusted, they have suffered contumely and stripes. Now they know the Law, the Law that all may keep because they are beyond the Law. They do not desire, for they have, they do not weigh, for they know. They have not feared, they have dared; they have spared no man, nor themselves. Ah! now they have opened the Golden Gates..'

The man's voice broke, he coughed, a thin stream of blood trickled from the side of his mouth. Victoria felt a film come over her eyes. She leant over him to staunch the flow. They saw one another then. Farwell's voice went down to a whisper.

'Victoria.. victorious.. my love.. never more..'

She looked into his glazing eyes.

'Beyond.' he whispered; then his head fell to one side and his jaw dropped.

Betty turned away. She was crying. The landlady wiped her hands on her apron. Victoria hesitatingly took hold of Farwell's wrist. He was dead. She looked at him stupidly for a moment, then drew her cloak round her shivering shoulders. The landlady too was crying now.

'Oh, mum, sich a nice genelman,' she moaned. 'But 'e did go on so!'

Victoria smiled pitifully. What an epitaph for a sunset! She drove away with Betty and, as the horse trotted through the deserted streets, hugged the girl in her arms. Betty was shuddering violently, and nestled close up to her. They did not speak. Everything seemed to have become loose in Victoria's mind and to be floating on a black sea. The pillar of her individualism was down. Her codes were in the melting pot; a man, the finest she had known, had confessed his love in his extremity, and before she could respond passed into the shadow. But Farwell had left her as a legacy the love of freedom for which he died, for which she was going to live.

When they arrived at Elm Tree Place, Victoria forced Betty to drink some brandy, to tell her how Farwell had sent her a message, asking her to send him Victoria, how she had waited for her.

'Oh, it was awful,' whispered Betty, 'the maid said you'd be late.. she said I mustn't wait because you might not.'

'Not come home alone?' said Victoria in a frozen voice.

'Oh, I can't bear it, I can't bear it.' Betty flung herself into her friend's arms, wildly weeping.

Victoria soothed her, made her undress. As Betty grew more collected she let drop a few words.

'Oh, so then you too are happy?' said Victoria smiling faintly.

'You love?' A burning blush rose over Betty's face.

That night, as in the old Finsbury days, they lay in one another's arms and Victoria grappled with her sorrow. Gentle, almost motherly, she watched over this young life; blushing, full of promise, preparing already to replace the dead.

CHAPTER XI

The death of Farwell seemed to leave Victoria struggling and gasping for breath, like a shipwrecked mariner who tries to secure his footing on shifting sand while waves knock him down every time he rises to his knees. Though she hardly ever saw him and though she had no precise idea that he cared for her more than does the scientist for the bacteria he observes, he had been her tower of strength. He was there, like the institutions which make up civilisation, the British Constitution, the Bank and the Established Church. Now he was gone and she saw that the temple of life was empty. He was the last link. Cairns's death had turned her out among the howling wolves; now Farwell seemed to have carried away with him her theory of life. Above all, she now knew nobody; save Betty, who counted as a charming child. It was then she began to taste more cruelly the isolation of her class.

In the early days, when she paced up and down fiercely in the room at Portsea Place, she had already realised that she was alone, but then she was not an outcast; the doors of society were, if not open, at any rate not locked against her. Then the busy hum of the Rosebud and the P.R.R., the back-breaking work, the hustle, the facile friendships with City beaus – all this had drawn a veil over her solitude. Now she was really alone because none knew and none would know her. Her beauty, her fine clothes, contributed to clear round her a circle as if she were a leper. At times she would talk to a woman in a park, but before a few sentences had passed her lips the woman would take in every detail of her, her clean gloves, her neat shoes, her lace handkerchief, her costly veil; then the woman's face would grow rigid, and with a curt 'good morning' she would rise from her seat and go.

Victoria found herself thrust back, like the trapper in the hands of Red Indians; like him she ran in a circle, clubbed back towards the centre every time she tried to escape. She was of her class, and none but her class would associate with her. Women such as herself gladly talked to her, but their ideas sickened her, for life had taught them nothing but the ethics of the sex-trade. Their followers too – barbers, billiard markers, shady bookmakers, unemployed potmen; who sometimes dared to foist themselves on her – filled her with yet greater fear and disgust, for they were the only class of man alternative to those on whose bounty she lived. Thus she withdrew herself away from all; sometimes a craving for society would throw her into equivocal converse with Augusta, whose one idea was the dowry she must take back to Germany. Then, tiring of her, she would snatch up Snoo and Poo and pace round and round her tiny lawn like a squirrel in its wheel.

A chance meeting with Molly emphasised her isolation, like the flash of lightning which leaves the night darker. She was standing on the steps of the Sandringham Tea House in Bond Street, looking into the side window of the photographer who runs a print shop on the ground floor. Some sprawling Boucher beauties in delicate gold frames fascinated her. She delighted in the semi-crude, semi-sophisticated atmosphere, the rotundity of the well-fed bodies, their ribald rosy flesh. As she was wondering whether they would not do for the stairs the door opened suddenly and a plump little woman almost rushed into her arms. The little woman apologised, giving her a quick look. Then the two looked at one another again.

'Victoria!' cried Molly, for it was she, with her wide open blue eyes, small nose, fair frizzy hair.

A thrill of joy and fear ran through Victoria. She felt her personality criddle up like a scorched moth, then expand like a flower under gentle dew. She was found out; the terrible female instinct was going to detect her, then to proclaim her guilt. However, bravely enough, she braced herself up and held out her hand.

'Oh, Vic, why haven't you written to me for, let me see, three years, isn't it?'

'I've been away, abroad,' said Victoria slowly. She seemed to float in another world. Molly was talking vigorously; Victoria's brain, feverishly active, was making up the story which would have to be told when Molly's cheerful egotism had had its way.

'Don't let's stay here on the doorstep,' she interrupted, 'let's go upstairs and have tea. You haven't had tea yet?'

'I should love to,' said Molly, squeezing her arm. 'Then you can tell me about yourself.'

Seated at a little table Molly finished her simple story. She had married an army chaplain, but he had given up his work in India and was now rector of Pontyberis in Wales. They had two children. Molly was up in town merely to break the journey, as she was going down to stay with her aunt in Kent. Oh, yes, she was very happy, her husband was very well.

'They're talking of making him Dean of Ffwr,' she added with unction. 'But that's enough about me. How have you been getting on, Vic? I needn't ask how you are; one only has to look at you.' Molly's eyes roved over her friend's beautiful young face, her clothes which she appraised with the skill of those poor who are learned in the fashions.

'I? Oh, I'm very well,' said Victoria hysterically.

'Yes, but how have you been getting on? Weren't you talking about having to work when you came over?'

'Yes, but I've been lucky.. a week after I got here an aunt of my mother's died of whom I never even heard before. They told me at Dick's lawyers a month later, and you wouldn't believe it, there was no will and I came in for.. well something quite comfortable.'

Molly put out her hand and stroked Victoria's.

'I'm so glad,' she said… 'Oh, you don't know how hard it is to have to work for your living. I see something of it in Wales. Oh, if you only knew..'

Victoria pressed her lips together, as if about to cry or laugh.

'But what did you do then? You only wrote once. You didn't tell me?'

'No, I only heard a month after, you know. Oh, I had a lot to do. I travelled a lot. I've been in America a good deal. In fact my home is in.. Alabama.' She plunged for Alabama, feeling sure that New York was unsafe.

'Oh, how nice,' said Molly ingenuously. 'You might have sent me picture postcards, you know.'

Skilfully enough Victoria explained that she had lost Molly's address. Her friend blissfully accepted all she said, but a few other women less ingenuous than the clergyman's wife were casting sharp glances at her. When they parted, Victoria audaciously giving her address as 'care of Mrs Ferris, Elm Tree Place,' she threw herself back on the cushions of the cab and told herself that she could not again go through with the ordeal of facing her own class. She almost hungered for the morrow, when she was to entertain the class she had adopted.

CHAPTER XII

The Fulton household had always been short of money, for Dick spent too much himself to leave anything for entertaining; thus Victoria had very little experience of lunch parties. Since she had left the Holts she hardly remembered a bourgeois meal. The little affair on the Wednesday was therefore provocative of much thought. Mutton was dismissed as common, beef in any form as coarse; Laura's suggestion (for Laura and Augusta had been called in) of a savoury sauerkraut ('mit Blutwurst, Frankfurter, Leberwurst, etc.'), was also dismissed. Both servants took a keen interest in the occasion.

'But why no gentleman come?' asked Laura, who was clearly ill-disposed to do her best for her own sex.

'In the house I was.' began Augusta.. then she froze up under Victoria's eye. Her mistress still had a strain of the prig in her.

Then Augusta suggested hors d'œuvres, smoked salmon, anchovies, olives, radishes; Laura forced forward fowl à la Milanaise to be preceded by baked John Dory cayenne. Then Augusta in a moment of inspiration thought of French beans and vegetable marrow.. stuffed with chestnuts. The three women laughed, Laura clapped her hands with the sheer joy of the creative artist.

When Victoria came into the dining-room at half-past twelve she was almost dazzled by her own magnificence. Neither the Carlton nor the Savoy could equal the blaze of her plate, the brilliant polish of her tablecloths. The dahlias blazed dark red in cut glass by the side of pale belated roses from the garden. On the sideboard fat peaches were heaped in a modern Lowestoft bowl, and amber-coloured plums lay like portly dowagers in velvet.

A few minutes before the hour Zoé and Lissa arrived together. They were nervous; not on account of Victoria's spread, for they were of the upper stratum, but because they were in a house. Accustomed to their small flats off Shaftesbury Avenue, where tiny kitchens jostled with bedroom and boudoir, they were frightened by the suggestion of a vast basement out of which floated the savoury aroma of the John Dory baking. Victoria tried to put them at their ease, took their parasols away and showed them into the boudoir. There they sat in a triangle, the hot sun blazing in upon them, stiff and starched with the formality of those who are seldom formal.

'Have a Manhattan cocktail?' asked the hostess.

'No thanks; very hot, isn't it?' said Lissa in her most refined manner. She was looking very pretty, dark, slim and snaky in her close-fitting lemon coloured frock.

'Very hot,' chimed in Zoé. She was sitting unnecessarily erect. Her flat French back seemed to abhor the easy chair. Her tight hair, her trim hands, her well boned collar, everything breathed neatness, well laced stays, a full complement of hooks and eyes. She might have been the sedate wife of a prosperous French tradesman.

'Yes, it is hot,' said Victoria.

Then the conversation flagged. The hostess tried to draw out her guests. They were obviously anxious to behave. Lissa posed for 'The Sketch,' Zoé remained très correcte.

'Do you like my pictures?' asked Victoria pointing to the French engravings.

'They are very pretty,' said Lissa.

'I am very interested in engravings,' said Zoé, looking at the rosewood clock. There was a longish pause.

'I must show you my little dogs,' cried Victoria. She must do something. She went out to the landing and opened the garden door. There she met Augusta carrying a trayful of finger bowls. She felt inspired to overturn it if only to break the ice. Snoo and Poo rushed in, but in the boudoir they also instinctively became very well-bred.

'I am very fond of dogs,' said Lissa. Snoo lay down on her back.

'She is very pretty,' remarked Zoé.

Victoria punched the dogs in the ribs, rolled them over. It was no good. They would do nothing but gently wag their tails. She felt she would like to swear, when suddenly the front door was slammed, a cheerful voice rang in the hall.

'Hulloa, here's Duckie,' said Lissa.

The door opened loudly and Duckie seemed to rush in as if seated on a high wind.

'Here we are again!' cried the buxom presence in white. Every one of her frills rattled like metal. 'Late as usual. Oh, Vic, what angel pups!'

Duckie was on her knees. In a moment she had stirred up the Pekingese. They forgot their manners. They barked vociferously; and Zoé's starch was taken out of her by Poo, who rushed under her skirts. Lissa laughed and jumped up.

'Here Vic,' said Duckie ponderously, 'give us a hand, old girl. Never can jump about after gin and bitters,' she added confidentially as they helped her up.

The ice was effectually broken. They filed into the dining-room in pairs, Victoria and Lissa being slim playing the part of men. How they gobbled up the hors d'œuvres and how golden the John Dory was; the flanks of the fish shone like an old violin. Augusta flitted about quick but noisy. There was a smile on her face.

'Steady on, old love,' said Duckie to her as the maid inadvertently poured her claret into a tumbler.

'Never you mind, Gussie,' cried Zoé, bursting with familiarity, 'she'll be having it in a bucket by and by.'

Augusta laughed. What easy going herrschaft!

The talk was getting racier now. By the time they got to the dessert the merriment was rather supper than lunch-like.

'Victoria plums,' said Lissa, 'let us name them Bonne Hotesse.'

The idea was triumphant. Duckie insisted on drinking a toast in hock, for she never hesitated to mix her wines. Victoria smiled at them indulgently. The youth of all this and the jollity, the ease of it; all that was not of her old class.

'Confusion to the puritans,' she cried, and drained her glass. Snoo and Poo were fighting for scraps, for Duckie was already getting uncertain in her aim. Lissa and Zoé, like nymphs teasing Bacchus, were pelting her with plum stones, but she seemed quite unconscious of their pranks. They had some difficulty in getting her into the boudoir for coffee and liqueurs; once on the sofa she tried to go to sleep. Her companions roused her, however; the scent of coffee, acrid and stimulating, stung their nostrils; the liqueurs shone wickedly, green and golden in their glass bottles; talk became more individual, more reminiscent. Here and there a joke shot up like a rocket or stuck quivering in Duckie's placid flanks.

'Well Vic,' said Zoé, 'you are very well installée.' She slowly emptied of cigarette smoke her expanded cheeks and surveyed the comfortable little room.

'Did you do it yourself?' asked Lissa. 'It must have cost you a lot of money.'

'Oh, I didn't pay.' Victoria was either getting less reticent or the liqueur was playing her tricks. 'I began with a man who set me up here,' she added; 'he was.. he died suddenly' she went on more cautiously.

'Oh!' Zoé's eyebrows shot up. 'That's what I call luck. But why do you not have a flat? It is cheaper.'

'Yes, but more inconvenient,' said Lissa. 'Ah, Vic. I do envy you. You don't know. We're always in trouble. We are moving every month.'

'But why?' asked Victoria. 'Why must you move?'

'Turn you out. Neighbours talk and then the landlord's conscience begins to prick him,' grumbled Duckie from the sofa.

'Oh, I see,' said Victoria. 'But when they turn you out what do you do?'

'Go somewhere else, softy,' said Duckie.

'But then what good does it do?'

All the women laughed.

'Law, who cares?' said Duckie. 'I dunno.'

'It is perfectly simple,' began Zoé in her precise foreign English. 'You see the landlord he will not let flats to ladies. When the police began to watch it would cause him des ennuis. So he lets to a gentleman who sublets the flats, you see? When the trouble begins, he doesn't know.'

'But what about the man who sublets?' asked the novice.

'Him? Oh, he's gone when it begins,' said Lissa. 'But they arrest the hall porter.'

'Justice must have its way, I see,' said Victoria.

'What you call justice,' grumbled Duckie, 'I call it damned hard lines.'

For some minutes Victoria discussed the housing problem with the fat jolly woman. Duckie was in a cheerful mood. One could hardly believe, when one looked at her puffy pink face, that she had seen fifteen years of trouble.

'Landladies,' she soliloquised, 'it's worse. You take my tip Vic, you steer clear of them. You pay as much for a pigsty as a man pays for a palace. If you do badly they chuck you out and stick to your traps and what can you do? You don't call a policeman. If you do well, they raise the rent, steal your clothes, charge you key money, and don't give 'em any lip if you don't want a man set at you. Oh, Lor!'