A Bed of Roses

CHAPTER XVI

The months which followed emerged but slowly from blankness for these two who had joined their lives together. Both had a difficulty in realising, the woman that she had laid the coping stone of her career, the man that he was happy as may be an opium eater. The first days were electric, hectic. Victoria felt limp, for her nerves had been worn down by the excitement and the anxiety of making sure of her conquest. The reaction left her rather depressed than glowing with success. Jack was beyond scruples; he felt that he had passed the Rubicon. He was false to his theories and his ideals, in revolt against his upbringing. At the outset he revelled in the thought that he was cutting himself adrift from the ugly past. It was joyful to think that the pastor in his whitewashed barn would covertly select him as a text. For the first time in his fettered life he saw that the outlaw alone is free; both he and Victoria were outlaws, but she had tasted the bitterness of ostracism while he was still at the stage of welcoming it.

As the weeks wore, however, Victoria realised her position better and splendid peace flowed in upon her. She did not love Holt; she began even to doubt whether she could love any man if she could not love him, this handsome youth with the delicate soul, grace, generosity. It was not his mental weakness that repelled her, for he was virile enough; nor was it the touch of provincialism against which his intelligence struggled. It was rather that he did not attract her. He was clever enough, well read, kind, but he lacked magnetism; he had nothing of the slumberous fire which distinguished Farwell. His passion was personal, his outlook theoretical and limited; there was nothing purposeful in his ideas. He had no message for her. In no wise did he repel her, though. Sometimes she would take his face between her hands, look awhile into the blue eyes where there always lurked some wistfulness, and then kiss him just once and quickly, without knowing why.

'Why do you do that, Vicky,' he asked once.

She had not answered but had merely kissed his cheek again. She hardly knew how to tell him that she sighed because she could only consent to love him instead of offering to do so. While he was sunk in his daily growing ease she was again thinking of ultimate ends and despised herself a little for it. She had to be alone for a while before she could regain self-control, remember the terrible tyranny of man and her resolve to be free. Gentle Jack was a man, one of the oppressors, and as such he must be used as an instrument against his sex. The very ease with which she swayed him, with which she could foresee her victory, unnerved her a little. When she answered his hesitating question as to how much she needed to live, she had to force herself to lie, to trade on his enslavement by asking him for two thousand a year. She dared to name the figure, for Whitaker told her that the only son of an intestate takes two-thirds of the estate; the book had also put her on the track of the registration of joint-stock companies. A visit to Somerset House enabled her to discover that some three hundred thousand shares of Holt's Cement Works, Ltd., stood in the name of John Holt; as they were quoted in the paper something above par he could hardly be worth less than fifteen thousand a year.

She had expected to have to explain her needs, to have to exaggerate her rent, the cost of her clothes, but Holt did not say a word beyond 'all right.' She had told him it hurt her to take money from him; and that, so as to avoid the subject, she would like him to tell his bankers to pay the monthly instalments into her account. He had agreed and then talked of their trip to the South. Clearly the whole matter was repugnant to him. As neither wanted to talk about it the subject was soon almost forgotten.

They left England early in December after shutting up the house. Victoria did not care to leave it in charge of Laura, so decided to give her a three months' holiday on full pay; Augusta accompanied them. The sandy-haired German was delighted with the change in the fortunes of her mistress. She felt that Holt must be very rich, and doubted not that her dowry would derive some benefit from him. Snoo and Poo were left in Laura's charge. Victoria paid a quarter's rent in advance, also the rates; insured against burglary, and left England as it settled into the winter night.

The next three months were probably the most steadily happy she had ever known. They had taken a small house known as the Villa Mehari just outside Algiers. A French cook and a taciturn Kabyl completed their establishment. The villa was a curious compromise between East and West. Its architect had turned out similar ones in scores at Argenteuil and Saint Cloud, saving the minaret and the deep verandah which faced the balmy west. From the precipitous little garden where orange and lime trees bent beneath their fruit among the underbrush of aloes and cactus, they could see, far away, the estranging sea.

The Kabyl had slung a hammock for Victoria between a gate-post and a gigantic clump of palm trees. There she passed most of her days, lazily swinging in the breeze which tumbled her black hair; while Jack, lying at her feet in the crisp rough grass, looked long at her sun-warmed beauty. The days seemed to fly, for they were hardly conscious of the recurrence of life. It was sunrise, when it was good to go into the garden and see the blue green night blush softly into salmon pink, then burst suddenly into tropical radiance: then, vague occupations, a short walk over stony paths to a café where the East and West met; unexpected food; sleep in the heat of the day under the nets beyond which the crowding flies buzzed; then the waning of the day, the heat settling more leaden; sunset, the cold snapping suddenly, the night wind carrying little puffs of dust, and the muezzin, hands aloft, droning, his face towards the East, praises of his God.

Holt was totally happy. He felt he had reached Capua, and not even a thought of his past life could disturb him. He asked for nothing now but to live without a thought, eating juicy fruit, smoking for an hour the subtle narghilé; he loved to bask in the radiance of the African sun of Victoria's beauty, which seemed to expand, to enwrap him in perfume like a heavy narcotic rose. In the early days he tried to work, to attune himself to the pageant of sunlit life. His will refused to act, and he found he could not write a line; even rhymes refused to come to him. Without an effort almost he resigned himself into the soft hands of the East. He even exaggerated his acceptance by clothing himself in a burnous and turban, by trying to introduce Algerian food, couscous, roast kid, date jam, pomegranate jelly. At times they would go into Algiers, shop in the Rue Bab-Azoum, or search for the true East in what the French called the high town. But Algiers is not the East; and they quickly returned to the Villa Mehari, stupefied by the roar of the trams, the cries of the water and chestnut vendors, all their senses offended by the cafés on the wharf where sailors from every land drank vodka, arrack, pale ale, among zouaves and chasseurs d'Afrique.

Sometimes Holt would go into Algiers by himself and remain away all day. Victoria stayed at the villa careless of flying time, desultorily reading Heine or sitting in the garden where she could play with the golden and green beetles. Her solitude was complete, for Holt had avoided the British consul and of course knew none of the Frenchmen. She watched the current of her life flow away, content to know that all the while her little fortune was increasing. England was so far as to seem in another world. Christmas was gone; and the link of a ten pound note to Betty, to help to furnish the house at Shepherd's Bush, had faded away. When she was alone, those days, she could not throw her mind back to the ugly, brutish past, so potently was the influence of the East growing upon her being. Then in the cool of the evening Jack would return, gay, and anxious to see her, to throw his arms round her and hold her to him again. Those were the days when he brought her some precious offering, aqua-marines set in hand-wrought gold, or chaplets of strung pearls.

'Jack,' she said to him one day as he lay in the grass at her feet, 'do you then love me very much?'

'Very much.' He took her hand and, raising himself upon his elbow, gravely kissed it.

'Why?'

'Because you're all the poetry of the world. Because you make me dream dreams, my Aspasia.'

She gently stroked his dark hair.

'And to think that you are one of the enemy, Jack!'

'One of the enemy? what do you mean?'

'Man is woman's enemy, Jack. Our relation is a war of sex.'

'It's not true.' Jack flushed; the idea was repulsive.

'It is true. Man dominates woman by force, by man-made law; he restricts her occupations; he limits her chances; he judges of her attire; he denies her the right to be ugly, to be old, to be coarse, to be vicious.'

'But you wouldn't – '

'I'd have everything the same, Jack.'

Holt thought for a moment.

'Yes, I suppose we do keep them down. But they're different. You see, men are men and – '

'I know the rest. But never mind, Jack dear, you're not like the others. You'll never be a conqueror.'

Then she muzzled him with her hand, and, kissing its scented palm, he thought no more of the stern game in which they were the shuttlecocks.

The spring was touching Europe with its wings; and here already the summer was bursting the seed pods, the sap breaking impatiently through the branches. All the wet warmth of the brief African blooming ran riot in thickening leaf. The objective of Jack's life, influenced as he was by the air, was Victoria and the ever more consuming love he bore her; the minutes only counted when he was by her side, watching her every movement, inhaling, touching her. All his energies seem to have been driven into this narrow channel. He was ready to move or to remain as Victoria might direct; he spoke little, he basked. Thus he agreed to extending their stay for a month; he agreed to shorten it by a fortnight when Victoria, suddenly realising that her life force was wasting away in this enervating atmosphere, decided to go home.

Victoria's progress to London was like the march of a conqueror. She stopped in Paris to renew her clothes. There Jack knew hours of waiting in the hired victoria while his queen was trying on frocks. He showed such a childish joy in it all that she indulged her fancy, her every whim; dresses, wraps, lace veils, furs, hats massive with ostrich feathers, aigrettes, delicate kid boots, gilt shoes, amassed in their suite. Jack egged her on; he rioted too. Often he would stop the victoria and rush into a shop if he saw something he liked in the window, and in a few minutes return with it, excitedly demanding praise. He did not seem to understand or care for money, to have any wants except cigarettes. He followed, and in his beautiful dog-like eyes devotion daily grew.

They entered London on a bustling April day. A biting east wind carried rain drops and sunshine. As it stung her face and whipped her blood, Victoria found the old fierce soul reincarnating itself in her. She opened her mouth to take in the cold English air, to bend herself for the finishing of her task.

CHAPTER XVII

It was in London that the real battle began. In Algiers the scented winds made hideous and unnatural all thoughts of gain. On arriving in London Victoria ascertained with a thrill of pleasure that her bank had received a thousand pounds since October. After disposing of a few small debts and renewing some trifles in the house, she found herself a capitalist: she had about fifteen hundred pounds of her own. The money was lying at the bank and it only struck her then that the time had come to invest it. Her interview with the manager of her branch was a delightful experience; she was almost bursting with importance, and his courteous appreciation of his increasingly wealthy client was something more than balm. It was a foretaste of the power of money. She had known poor men respected, but not poor women; now the bank manager was giving her respectful attention because she had fifteen hundred pounds.

'You might buy some industrials,' he said.

'Industrials? What are they?'

'Oh, all sorts of things. Cotton mills, iron works, trading companies, anything.'

'Cement works?' she asked with a spark of devilry.

'Yes, cement works too,' said the manager without moving a muscle.

'But do you call them safe?' she asked, returning to business.

'Oh, fairly. Of course there are bad years and good. But the debentures are mostly all right and some of the prefs.'

Victoria thought for a moment. Reminiscences of political economy told her that there were booms and slumps.

'Has trade been good lately?' she asked suddenly.

'No, not for the last two years or so. It's picking up though..'

'Ah, then we're in for a cycle of good trade. I think I'll have some industrials. You might pick me out the best.'

The manager seemed a little surprised at this knowledge of commercial crises but said nothing more, and made out a list of securities averaging six per cent net.

'And please buy me a hundred P. R. R. shares,' added Victoria.

She could have laughed at the manager's stony face because he did not see the humour of this. He merely said that he would forward the orders to a stockbroker.

Victoria felt that she had put her hand to the plough. She was scoring so heavily that she never now wished to turn back. Holt was every day growing more dreamy, more absorbed in his thoughts. He never seemed to quicken into action except when his companion touched him. He grew more silent too; the hobbledehoy was gone. He was at his worst when he had received a letter bearing the Rawsley postmark. Victoria knew of these, for Holt's need of her grew greater every day; he was now living at Elm Tree Place. He hardly left the house. He got up late and passed the morning in the boudoir, smoking cigarettes, desultorily reading and nursing the Pekingese which he now liked better. But on the days when he got letters from Rawsley, letters so bulky that they were sometimes insufficiently stamped, he would go out early and only return at night. Then, however, he returned as if he had been running, full of some nameless fear; he would strain Victoria to him and hold her very close, burying his face below the bedclothes as if he were afraid. On one of those days Victoria accidentally saw him come out of a small dissenting chapel near by. He did not see her, for he was walking away like a man possessed; she said nothing of this but understood him better, having an inkling that the fight against the Rawsley tradition was still going on.

She did not, however, allow herself to be moved by his struggle. It behoved her to hold him, for he was her last chance and the world looked rosy round her. As the spring turned into summer he became more utterly hers.

'You distil poison for me,' he said one day as they sat by the rose hung pergola.

'No, Jack, don't say that, it's the elixir of life.'

'The elixir of life. Perhaps, but poison too. To make me live is to make me die, Victoria; we are both sickening for death and to hasten the current of life is to hasten our doom.'

'Live quickly,' she whispered, bending towards him, 'did you live at all a year ago?'

'No, no.' His arms were round her and his lips insistent on hers. He frightened her a little, though. She would have to take him away. She had already confided this new trouble to Betty when the latter came to see her in April, but Betty, beyond suggesting cricket, had been too full of her own affairs. Apparently these were not going very well. Anderson & Dromo's had not granted the rise, and the marriage had been postponed. Meanwhile she was still at the P. R. R., and very, very happy. Betty too, her baby, her other baby, frightened Victoria a little. She was so rosy, so pretty now, and there was something defiant and excited about her that might presage disease. But Betty had not come near her for the last two months.

About the middle of June she took Jack away to Broadstairs. He was willing to go or stay, just as she liked. He seemed so neutral that Victoria experimented upon him by presenting him with a sheaf of unpaid bills. He looked at them languidly and said he supposed they must be paid, asked her to add them up and wrote a cheque for the full amount. Apparently he had forgotten all about the allowance, or did not care.

Broadstairs seemed to do him good. Except at the week end the Hotel Sylvester was almost empty. The sea breeze blew stiffly from the north or the east. His colour increased and once more he began to talk. Victoria encouraged him to take long walks alone along the front. She had some occupation, for two little girls who were there in charge of a Swiss governess had adopted the lovely lady as their aunt. A new sweetness had come into her life, shrill voices, the clinging of little hands. Sometimes these four would walk together, and Holt would run with the children, tumbling in the sand in sheer merriment.

'You seem all right again, Jack,' said Victoria on the tenth morning.

'Right! Rather, by jove, it's good to live, Vicky.'

'You were a bit off colour, you know.'

'I suppose I was. But now, I feel nothing can hold me. I wrote a rondeau this morning on the pier. Want to see it?'

'Of course, silly boy. Aren't you going to be the next great poet?'

She read the rondeau, scrawled in pencil on the back of a bill. It was delicate, a little colourless.

'Lovely,' she said, 'of course you'll send it to the Westminster.'

'Perhaps.. hulloa, there are the kiddies.' He ran off down the steps from the front. A minute after Victoria saw him helping the elder girl to bury her little sister in the sand.

Victoria felt much reassured. He was normal again, the half wistful, half irresponsible boy she had once known. He slept well, laughed, and his crying need for her seemed to have abated. At the end of the fortnight Victoria was debating whether she should take him home. She was in the hotel garden talking to the smaller girl, telling her a wonderful story about the fairy who lived in the telephone and said ping-pong when the line was engaged. The little girl sat upon her knee; when she laughed Victoria's heart bounded. The elder girl came through the gate leading a good-looking young woman in white by the hand.

'Oh, mummie, here's auntie,' cried the child, dragging her mother up to Victoria. The two women looked at one another.

'They tell me you have been very kind.' said the woman. Then she stopped abruptly.

'Of course, mummie, she's not really our auntie,' said the child confidentially.

Victoria put the small girl down. The mother looked at her again. She seemed so nice and refined.. yet her husband said that the initials on the trunks were different.. one had to be careful.

'Come here, Celia,' she said sharply. 'Thank you,' she added to Victoria. Then taking her little girls by the hand she took them away.

Jack willingly left Broadstairs that afternoon when Victoria explained that she was tired and that something had made her low-spirited.

'Right oh,' he said. 'Let's go back to town. I want to see Amershams and find out how those sonnets have sold.'

He then left her to wire to Augusta.

Their life in town resumed its former course, interrupted only by a month in North Devon. Jack's cure was complete; he was sunburnt, fatter; the joy of life shone in his blue eyes. Sometimes Victoria found herself growing younger by contagion, sloughing the horrible miry coat of the past. If her heart had not been atrophied she would have loved the boy whom she always treated with motherly gentleness. His need of her was so crying, so total, that he lost all his self-consciousness. He would sit unblushing by her side in the bow of a fishing smack, holding her hand and looking raptly into her grey eyes; he was indifferent to the red brown fisherman with the Spanish eyes and curly black hair who smiled as the turtle doves clustered. His need of her was as mental as it was physical; his body was whipped by the salt air to seek in her arms oblivion, but his mind had become equally dependent. She was his need.

Thus when they came back to town the riot continued; and Victoria, breasting the London tide, dragged him unresisting in her rear. She hated excitement in every form, excitement that is of the puerile kind. Restaurant dining, horse shows, flower shows, the Academy, tea in Bond Street, even the theatre and its most inane successes, were for her a weariness to the flesh.

'I've had enough,' she said to Jack one day. 'I'm sick of it all. I've got congestion of the appreciative sense. One day I shall chuck it all up, go and live in the country, have big dogs and a saddle horse, dress in tweeds and read the local agricultural rag.'

'Give up smoking, go to church, and play tennis with the curate, the doctor and the squire's flapper,' added Holt. 'But Vicky, why not go now?'

'No, oh, no, I can't do that.' She was frightened by her own suggestion. 'I must drain the cup of pleasure so as to be sure that it's all pain; then I'll retire and drain the cup of resignation.. unless, as I sometimes think, it's empty.'

Jack had said nothing to this. Her wildness surprised and shocked him. She was so savage and yet so sweet.

Victoria realised that she must hold fast to the town, for there alone could she succeed. In the peace of the country she would not have the opportunities she had now. Jack was in her hands. She never hesitated to ask for money, and Jack responded without a word. Her account grew by leaps and bounds. The cashier began to ask whether she wanted to see the manager when she called at the bank. She could see, some way off but clearly, the beacons on the coast of hope.

All through Jack's moods she had suffered from the defection of Betty. On her return from Broadstairs she had written to her to come to Elm Tree Place, but had received no answer. This happened again in September; and fear took hold of her, for Betty had, ivy-like, twined herself very closely round Victoria's heart of oak. She went to Finsbury; but Betty had gone, leaving no address. She went to the P.R.R. also. The place had become ghostly, for the familiar faces had gone. The manageress was nowhere to be seen; nor was Nelly, probably by now a manageress herself. Betty was not there, and the girl who wonderingly served the beautiful lady with a tea-cake said that no girl of that name was employed at the depot. Then Victoria saw herself sitting in the churchyard of her past, between the two dear ghosts of Farwell and Betty. The customers had changed, or their faces had receded so that she knew them no more: they still played matador and fives and threes, chess too. Alone the chains remained which the ghosts had rattled. Silently she went away, turning over that leaf of her life for ever. Farwell was dead, and Betty gone – married probably – and in Shepherd's Bush, not daring to allow Victoria's foot to sully the threshold of 'First Words of Love.'

Her conviction that Betty was false had a kind of tonic effect upon her. She was alone and herself again; she realised that the lonely being is the strong being. Now, at last, she could include the last woman she had known in the category of those who threw stories. And her determination to be free grew apace.

She invented a reason every day to extract money from Holt. He, blindly desirous, careless of money, acceded to every fresh demand. Now it was a faked bill from Barbezan Soeurs for two hundred pounds, now the rent in arrear, a blue rates notice, an offhand request for a fiver to pay the servants, the vet's bill or the price of a cab. Holt drew and overdrew. If a suspicion ever entered his mind that he was being exploited, he dismissed it at once, telling himself that Victoria was rather extravagant. For a time letters from Rawsley synchronised with her fresh demands, but repetition had dulled their effects: now Holt postponed reading them; after a time she saw him throw one into the fire unread. Little by little they grew rarer. Then they ceased. Holt was eaten up by his passion, and Victoria's star rose high.

All conspired to favour her fortune. Perhaps her acumen had helped her too, for she had seen correctly the coming boom. Trade rose by leaps and bounds; every day new shops seemed to open; the stalks of the Central London Railway could be seen belching clouds of smoke as they ground out electric power; the letter-box at Elm Tree Place was clogged with circulars denoting by the fury of their competition that trade was flying as on a great wind. Other signs too were not wanting: the main streets of London were blocked by lorries groaning under machinery, vegetables, stone; immense queues formed at the railway stations waiting for the excursion trains; above all, rose the sound of gold as it hissed and sizzled as if molten on the pavements, flowing into the pockets of merchants, bankers and shareholders. All the women at the Vesuvius indulged in new clothes.