Back Aa

Tale of Triona

<h2>CHAPTER IX</h2> HERE, all in a rush of twenty-four hours, was a glut of incident for a young woman out for adventure. Triona had only made his effect on the romantically feminine within Olivia by his triumphant rescue. As to that he need have no misgivings. So once did Andromeda see young Perseus, calm and assured, deliver her from the monster. Triona’s felling of Mavenna appealed to the lingering savage woman fiercely conscious of wrong avenged; but his immediate and careless mastery of the situation struck civilized chords. She could see him dominating the sheepskin-clad tribe in the Urals (see Through Blood and Snow) until he established their independence in their mountain fastness. She could see him, masterful, resourceful, escaping from the Bolshevik prison and making his resistless way across a hostile continent. She could also appreciate, after this wonder-day at Richmond, the suppleness of his simple charm which won him food and shelter where food scarcely existed and shelter to a stranger was a matter of shooting or a bashing in of heads. As for Mavenna, her flesh still shuddered at the memory of those few moments of insult. What he said she could scarcely remember. The inextricable clutch of his great arms around her body and the detestable kisses eclipsed mere words. Unwittingly his hug had compressed her throat so that she could not scream. There had been nothing for it but the slipper unhooked by the free arm, and the doughty heel. Had she won through alone to her room, she would have collapsed—so she assured herself—from sickening horror. But the Deliverer had been there, as in a legend of Greece or Broceliande, and had saved her from the madness of the nymph terror stricken by Satyrs. The two extravagances had, in a way, counteracted each other, setting her, by the morning, in a normal equilibrium. She had tried to explain the phenomenon by referring to her having spent the night in striking a moral balance-sheet. And then had come the day, the wonderful day, in which the Deliverer had proved himself the perfect, gentle Knight. Can it be wondered that her brain swam with him? She went the next morning to Lydia’s hat shop, and, in the little room which Sydney Brooke had called her cubby hole, a nine-foot-square boudoir office, reeking with Lydia’s scent and with Heaven knows what scandals and vulgarities and vanities of post-war London, she poured out her tale of outrage. After listening with indulgent patience, Lydia remarked judicially: “I told you, my dear child, when you came to London, that the first lesson you had to learn was to take care of yourself.” Olivia flashed. She had taken care of herself well enough. But that brute Mavenna—what about him? “Everybody knows Mavenna,” replied Lydia. “No girl in her senses would have trusted herself alone with him.” “And, with that reputation, he’s a friend of yours and Sydney’s?” Lydia shrugged her plump shoulders. “Really, my dear, if one exacted certificates of lamb-like innocence, signed by a high celestial official, before you admitted anyone into the circle of your acquaintance, you might as well go and live on a desert island.” “But this man’s a beast and you’ve known it all along!” cried Olivia. “Only in one way.” “But—my God! Isn’t that enough?” Olivia stood, racked with disgust and amazement, over her mild-eyed, philosophic friend. “What would you have done if you had been in my place?” “I could never have been in your place,” said Lydia. “I should have been too wise.” “How?” “The knowledge of men, my dear, is the beginning of wisdom.” “And I ought to have known?” “Of course. At any rate, you’ll know in the future.” “I shall. You may be dead certain I shall,” declared Olivia, in her anger and excitement seizing a puckered and pleated cushion from the divan by which she stood. “And if even I—−-” “Don’t, darling; you’ll tear it,” said Lydia calmly. Olivia heaved the cushion back impatiently. “What I want to know is this. Are you and Sydney going to remain friends with Mavenna?” “I’m afraid we’ll have to,” replied Lydia. “Mavenna and Sydney are in all sorts of big things together.” “Well, when next you see him, Lydia, look well into his face and ask him what he thinks of the heel of my slipper and Mr. Triona’s fist. He’s not only a beast. He’s a worm. When I think of him picking himself up, after being knocked down by a man half his size——” She laughed a bit hysterically. “Oh—the creature is outside the pale!” Lydia shook her fair head. “I’m sorry for you, my dear. But he’s inside all right.” “Then I’m not going to be inside with him!” cried Olivia. And, like a little dark dust storm, she swirled out of the office and, through the shop, into the freedom and spaciousness of the streets. And that, for Olivia, was the end of night clubs and dancing as a serious aim in life, and a host of other vanities. A few mornings afterwards Lydia sailed into the flat and greeted Olivia as though nothing had happened. She seemed to base her philosophy of life on obliteration of the past, yesterday being as dead as a winter’s day of sixty years ago. Would Olivia lunch with Sydney and herself at some riverside club? Sydney, having collected Mauregard, would be calling for them with the car. The day was fine and warm; the prospect of the cool lawn reaching down to the plashing river allured, and she liked Mauregard. Besides, she had begun to take a humorous view of Lydia. She consented. Lydia began to talk of her wedding, fixed for the middle of July, of the clothes that she had and the clothes that she hadn’t—the ratio of the former to the latter being that of a loin-cloth to the stock of Selfridge’s. When she was serious minded, Lydia always expressed herself in terms of raiment. “And you’ll have to get some things, too, as you’re going to be bridesmaid.” “Am I?” asked Olivia, this being the first she had heard of it. “And who’s going to be best man—Mavenna?” Lydia looked aghast. So might a band of primitive Christians have received a suggestion of inviting the ghost of Pontius Pilate to a commemorative supper. “My dear child, you don’t suppose we’re going to ask that horror to the wedding?” “The other day,” Olivia remarked drily, “I understood that you and Sydney loved him dearly.” Lydia sighed. “I’m beginning to believe that you’ll never understand anything.” So the breach, if breach there were, was healed. Olivia, relating the matter to Triona at their next meeting, qualified Lydia’s attitude as one of callous magnanimity. Meanwhile her intimacy with the young man began to ripen. One evening Janet Philimore invited her to dine at the Russian circle of a great womans’ club, which was entertaining Triona at dinner. This was the first time she had seen him in his character of modest lion; the first time, too, she had been in a company of women groping, however clumsily, after ideals in unsyncopated time. The thin girl next to her, pretty enough, thought Olivia, if only she had used a powder puff to mitigate the over-assertiveness of a greasy skin, and had given less the impression of having let out her hair to a bird for nesting purposes, and had only seized the vital importance of colour—the untrue greeny daffodil of her frock not being the best for a sallow complexion—the girl next to her, Agnes Blenkiron, started a hectic conversation by enquiring what she was going to do in Baby Week. The more ignorant Olivia professed herself to be of babies and their antecedents, especially the latter, the more indignantly explicit became Miss Blenkiron. Olivia listened until she had creepy sensations around the roots of her hair and put up an instinctive hand to assure herself that it was not standing on end. Miss Blenkiron talked feminist physiology, psychology, sociological therapeutics, until Olivia’s brain reeled. Over and over again she tried to turn to her hostess, who fortunately had a pleasant male and middle-aged neighbour, but the fair lady, without mercy, had her in thrall. She learned that all the two or three thousand members of the club were instinct with these theories and their aims. She struggled to free herself from the spell. “I thought we were here to talk about Russia,” she ventured. “But we are talking about Russia.” Miss Blenkiron shed on her the lambency of her pale blue eyes. “The future of the human race lies in the hands of the millions of Russian babies lying in the bodies of millions of Russian women just waiting to be born.” A flash of the devil saved Olivia from madness. “That’s a gigantic conception,” she said. “It is,” Miss Blenkiron agreed, unhumorously, and continued her work of propaganda, so that by the time the speeches began Olivia found herself committed to the strenuous toil of a lifetime as a member of she knew not what societies. The only clear memory she retained was that of a tea engagement some Sunday in a North London garden city where Miss Blenkiron and her brother frugally entertained the advanced thinkers of the day. In spite of the sense of release from something vampiric, when the speeches hushed general conversation, she recognized that the strange talk had been revealing and stimulating, and she brought a quickened intelligence to the comprehension of the gathering. To all these women the present state of the upheaved world was of vast significance. In Lydia’s galley no one cared a pin about it, save Sydney Rooke, who cursed it for its interference with his income. But here, as was clearly conveyed in the opening remarks of the chairwoman, a novelist of distinction, every one was intellectually concerned with its infinite complexity of aspect. To them, the guest of the evening, emerging as he had done from the dizzying profundities of the whirlpool, was a figure of uncanny interest. “It’s the first-hand knowledge of men like him that is vital,” Miss Blenkiron whispered when the chairwoman sat down. “I should so much like to meet him.” “Would you?” said Olivia. “That’s easily managed. He’s a great friend of mine.” And she was subridently conscious of having acquired vast and sudden merit in her neighbour’s eyes. Triona pleased her beyond expectation. The function, so ordinary to public-dinner-going London, was new to her. She magnified the strain that commonplace, even though sincere, adulation could put upon a guest of honour. She felt a twinge of apprehension when he stood up, in his loose boyish way, and brushing his brown hair from his temples, began to speak. But in a moment or two all such feelings vanished. He spoke to this assembly of a hundred, mostly women, much as, in moments of enthusiasm, he would speak to her. And, indeed, often catching her eye, he did speak to her, subtly and flatteringly bringing her to his side. Her heart beat a bit faster when, glancing around and seeing every one hanging on his words, she realized that she alone, of all this little multitude, held a golden key to the mystery of the real man. There he talked, with the familiar sway of the shoulders, and, when seeking for a phrase, with the nervous plucking of his lips; talked in his nervous, picturesque fashion, now and then with a touch of the poet, consistently modest, only alluding to personal experience to illustrate a point or to give verisimilitude to a jest. He developed his feminist theme logically, dramatically, proving beyond argument that the future of civilization lay in the hands of the women of the civilized world. He had a great success. Woman, although she knows it perfectly well, loves to be told what she wants and the way to get it: she will never follow the way, of course, having a tortuous, thorny, and enticing way of her own; but that doesn’t matter. The principle, the end, that is the thing: it justifies any amazing means. He sat down amid enthusiastic applause. Flushed, he sought Olivia’s distant gaze and smiled. Then she felt, thrillingly, that he had been speaking for her, for her alone, and her eyes brightened and flashed him a proud message. She met him a while later in the thronged drawing-room of the club, rather a shy and embarrassed young man, heading a distinct course toward her through a swarm of kind yet predatory ladies. She admired the simple craftsmanship of his approach. “How are you going to get home?” he asked. The adorable carelessness of twenty shrugged its shoulders. “I don’t know. The Lord will provide.” “If you can’t find a taxi, will you walk?” The question implied a hope, so obvious that she laughed gaily. “There are buses also and tubes.” “In which you can’t travel alone at this time of night.” She scoffed: “Oh, can’t I?” But his manifest fear that she should encounter satyrs in train or omnibus pleased her greatly. “Father’s dining at his club close by and is calling for me. He will see that you get home safely,” said Janet Philimore. “It’s miles out of your way, dear,” said Olivia. “I’ll put myself in the hands of Mr. Triona.” So, taxis being unfindable, they walked together through the warm London night to Victoria Street. It was then that he spoke of his work, the novel just completed. Of all opinions on earth, hers was the one he most valued. If only he could read it to her and have the priceless benefit of her judgment. Secretly flattered, she modestly depreciated, however, her critical powers. He persisted, attributing to her unsuspected qualities of artistic perception. At last, not reluctantly, she yielded. He could begin the next evening. The reading took some days. Olivia, new to creative work, marvelled exceedingly at the magic of the artist’s invention. The personages of the drama, imaginary he said, lived as real beings. She regarded their creation as uncanny. “But how do you know she felt like that?” He shrugged his shoulders and smiled. “I can’t conceive her feeling otherwise.” Yet, for all her wonder, she brought her swift intelligence to the task of criticism. Not since her mother’s illness had she taken anything so seriously. She lived in the book, walking meanwhile through an unreal world. Her golden words, on the other hand, the young man captured eagerly and set down in the margin of the manuscript. Half-way through the reading, they were on terms of Christian names. Minds so absorbed in an artistic pursuit grew impatient of absurd formalities of address. They slipped almost imperceptibly into the Olivia and Alexis habit. At the end they pulled themselves up rather sharply, with blank looks at an immediate future bereft of common interest. “I’ll have to begin another, right away, so that you can be with me from the very start,” he said. “Have you an idea?” “Not yet.” “When will you have one?” He didn’t know. What man spent with the creative effort of a novel has the vitality to beget another right away? He feels that the very last drop of all that he has known and suffered and enjoyed has been used to the making of the book. For the making of another nothing is left. “I suppose I’ll have to lie fallow for a week or so,” said the young optimist. “And as soon as things begin to sprout you’ll let me know?” asked Olivia, forgetful that before harvest there must be seed time. He promised; went home and cudgelled tired brains; also cudgelled, for different reasons, an untired and restless soul. Let him make good, not ephemerally as the picturesque narrator of personal adventure, but definitely, with this novel as the creative artist—the fervent passion of his life—and he would establish himself in her eyes, in her mind, in her heart; so that treading solid ground, he could say to her: “This is what I am, and for what I am, take me. All that has gone before was but a crude foundation. I had to take such rubbish and rubble as I could find to hand.” But until then, let him regard her as a divinity beyond his reach, rendering her service and worship, but forbearing to soil her white robe with a touch as yet unhallowed. Many a time, they could have read no more that day. Just one swift movement, glance or cry on the part of the man, and the pulses of youth would have throbbed wildly together. He knew it. The knowledge was at once his Heaven and his Hell. A less sensitive human being would not have appreciated the quivering and vital equipoise. Many a time he parted from her with the farewell of comradely intimacy on his lips, and when the lift had deposited him on the street level his heart had been like lead and his legs as water, so that he stumbled out into the lamp-lit dark of night like a paralytic or a drunken man. And that which was good in him warred fiercely against temptations more sordid. As far as he knew, she was a woman of fortune. So did her dress, her habit of life, her old comfort-filled Medlow home, proclaim her. Of her social standing as the daughter of Stephen Gale who bawled out bids for yelts and rams in the Medlow market place, he knew or understood very little. Her fortune was a fact. His own, the few hundreds which he had gained by Through Blood and Snow, was rapidly disappearing. The failure of the new book meant starvation or reversion to Cherbury Mews. Married to a woman with money he could snap his fingers at crust or livery. . . . For the time he conquered. The end of the reading coincided more or less with Midsummer quarter-day. Bills from every kind of coverer or adorner of the feminine human frame fell upon her like a shower of autumn leaves. She sat at her small writing desk, jotted down the amounts, and added them up with a much sucked pencil point. The total was incredible. With fear at her heart she rushed round to her bank for a note of her balance. It had woefully decreased since January. Payment of all these bills would deplete it still more woefully. The rent of “The Towers” and the diminishing income on the deposit account were trivial items set against her expenditure. She summoned Myra. “We’re heading for bankruptcy.” “Any fool could see that,” said Myra. “What are we going to do?” “Live like Christians instead of heathens,” replied Myra. “If you would come to Chapel with me one Sunday night you could be taught how.” Here Myra failed. She belonged to a Primitive Non-Conformist Communion whose austere creed and drab ceremonial had furnished occasion for Olivia’s teasing wit since childhood. Heathendom, ever divorced from Lydian pleasures, presented infinitely more reasons for existence than Myra’s Calvinism. “It seems funny that a dear old thing like you can revel in the idea of Eternal Punishment.” “I haven’t got much else to revel in, have I?” said Myra grimly. “I suppose that’s true,” said Olivia thoughtfully. “But it isn’t my fault, is it? If you had wanted to revel, mother and I would have been the last people to prevent you. Why not begin now? Go and have a debauch at the pictures.” “You began by talking of bankruptcy,” said Myra. “And you prescribed little Bethel. I’d sooner go broke.” “You’ll have your own way, as usual,” said Myra. “And if I go broke, what’ll you do?” asked Olivia, unregenerately enjoying the conversation. “I suppose I’ll have to put you together again,” replied Myra, with no sign of emotion on her angular, withered face. Olivia leaped from her chair. “I’m a beast.” “That can’t be,” said Myra, “seeing that it was I as brought you up.” <hr class='tbk'/> That was the end of the argument. Olivia recognized in Myra every useful quality save that of the financier. She dismissed Myra from her counsels. But the state of her budget cost her a sleepless night or two. At the present rate of expenditure a couple of years would see her penniless. For the first time since her emancipation from Medlow fetters she had the feeling of signing her own death-warrant on every cheque. Heroic resolves were born of these days of depression. As a climax to her worries, came Bobby Quinton, one afternoon. What had he done to offend his dearest of ladies? Why had she stopped the dancing lessons? Why did Percy’s see her no more? “I’m fed up with Percy’s and the whole gang,” said Olivia. “Not including me, surely?” cried the young man, with a dog’s appeal in his melting brown eyes. She was kind. At first, she had not the heart to pack him off to the froth and scum of social life to which he belonged. He had the charm of unsuccessful youth so pathetic in woman’s eyes. “If you are,” said he, “I’m done for. I’ve no one to look to but you, in the wide world.” Here was responsibility for the safety of a human soul. Olivia gave him sound advice, repeating many an old argument and feeling enjoyably maternal. But when Bobby grew hysterical, and, with mutation of sex, quoted the Indian Love Lyrics and professed himself prepared to die beneath her chariot wheels, and threatened to do so if she disregarded his burning passion, she admonished him after the manner of twentieth-century maidenhood. “My good Bobby, don’t be an ass.” But Bobby persisted in being an ass, with the zeal of the dement. He became the fervent lover of the cinquecento Bandello—and, with his dark eyes and hair, looked the part. Imploring he knelt at the feet of the divinity. “That’s all very well, my dear boy,” said Olivia, unmoved by his rhapsody, “all very nice and all very beautiful. But what do you want me to do?” Of course he wanted her to marry him, there and then: to raise him from the Hell he was in to the Heaven where she had her pure habitation. With her he could do great things. He guaranteed splendid achievements. “Before a woman marries a man,” said Olivia, “she rather wants an achievement or two on account.” “Then you don’t love me, you don’t trust me?” exclaimed the infatuated young man, ruffling his sleek black hair. “I can’t say that I do,” replied Olivia, growing weary. “If you tell me what sort of fascination you possess, I’ll give it due consideration.” “Then I may as well go away and blow my brains out,” he cried tragically. “You might better go and use such brains as you have in doing a man’s work,” retorted Olivia. He reproached her mournfully. “How unkind you are.” “If you came here as a window-cleaner or a lift porter I might be kinder. You’re quite a nice boy,” she went on after a pause, “otherwise I shouldn’t have anything to do with you. But you haven’t begun to learn the elements of life. You’re utterly devoid of the sense of duty or responsibility. Like the criminal, you know. Oh, don’t get angry. I’m talking to you for your good. Pretending to teach idle women worthless dancing isn’t a career for a man. It’s contemptible. Every man—especially nowadays—ought to pull his weight in the world. The war’s not over. The real war is only just beginning. Instead of pulling your weight you think it’s your right to sit on a cushion, a passenger—or a Pekie dog—and let other people pull you.” “You don’t understand——” “Oh, yes I do. One has to live, and at first we take any old means to hand. But you’ve been going on at this for a couple of years and haven’t tried to get out of it. You like it, Bobby——” “I loathe it.” “You don’t,” she went on remorselessly, with her newly acquired knowledge of what a man’s life could be. “All you loathe is the work—especially when it doesn’t bring you in as much money as you want. You hate work.” Resentment gradually growing out of amusement at his presumptuous proposal had wrought her to a pitch of virtuous indignation. Here was this young man, of cultivated manners, intelligent, able-bodied, attractive, rejecting any kind of mission in existence, and—— “Look here, Bobby,” she said, rising from her chair by the tea-table and dominating him with a little gesture, “don’t get up. You sit there. You’ve asked me to marry you, because you think I’m rich. Hold your tongue,” she flashed, as he was about to speak. “I’ll take all the love and that sort of thing for granted. But if I was poor you wouldn’t have thought of it. At the back of your mind you imagine that if I married you, we could lead a life of Percy’s and the Savoy and Monte Carlo and the South Sea Islands, and you needn’t do another stroke of work all your life long.” He leaned forward in his chair protesting eagerly that it wasn’t true. He would marry her to-morrow were she penniless. She had his salvation soul and body in her hands. He hungered for work; but the coils of his present life had a strangle-hold on him. Suddenly he rose and advanced a step towards her. “Listen, Olivia. If you won’t marry me, will you help me in other ways? I’m desperate. You think you know something about the world. But you don’t. I’m up against it. It may mean prison. For the love of God lend me a couple of hundred pounds.” The ugly word prison sent a stab through her heart; but immediately afterwards the common-sense of her Gale ancestry told her either that he was lying, or, if it were true, that he deserved it. She asked coldly: “What have you been doing?” “I can’t tell you,” he said. “You must trust me.” “But I don’t and that is why I can’t lend you two hundred pounds.” “You refuse?” His soft voice became a snarl and his lip curled unpleasantly back beneath the little silky moustache. “Of course I do.” “I don’t know how you dare, after all the encouragement you’ve given me.” She stared at him aghast. “Encouragement?” “Yes. Didn’t you make me dance attendance on you at Brighton? Haven’t you brought me here over and over again? You’ve behaved damnably to me. You’ve made me waste my time. I’ve turned other women who would have only been too glad——” In horror, she flew to the door and threw it open. “Go,” she said. And speeding across the hall she threw open the flat door. “Go,” she said again. She crossed the landing and rang the lift bell and returned to the hall, where he met her and threw himself on his knees and looked up at her with wild, hunted eyes. “Forgive me, Olivia. For God’s sake forgive me. I was mad. I didn’t know what I was saying. Shut that door and I’ll tell you everything.” But Olivia passed him by into the sitting-room, and stood with her back against the door until she heard the clash of the lift gates and the retreating footsteps of Bobby Quinton. A short while ago she had nearly quarrelled with Mauregard because, in a wordy dissertation on the modern young men who lived on women, he instanced Bobby as possibly coming within the category. Now she knew that Mauregard was right. She felt sick. Also deadly ashamed of her superior attitude of well-meant reprimand. She burned with the consciousness of tongue in cheek while he listened. Well, that was the end of the Lydian galley. She did not recover till the next afternoon, when Triona called to take her to the Blenkirons’ Sunday intellectual symposium in Fielder’s Park. She welcomed him impulsively with both hands outstretched, as a justification of her faith in mankind. “You can’t tell how glad I am to see you.” “And you,” said he, kissing first one hand and then the other, “can’t tell how good I think God is to me.” <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

1 of 2

2 of 2

Update Required To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin.