Sally on the Rocks, page 2
Without a moment’s hesitation Miss Maggie took up her pen and wrote:
Dear Sally,
Mr. Lovelady says he hardly ever hears from you now, but that you are still at the same address, in spite of the war. How attractive you must find Paris to remain at such a time! There’s no news. Mrs. Randal is ill, and as usual will see nobody but Mr. Lovelady. I expect she will leave all her money to cats.
By the bye, the new bank-manager is a bachelor, and simply rolling, quite fifteen hundred a year, and most of it private means. There’s influence, and he’s sure to get a big London bank. He’s about forty and gives very good dinners, and is quite presentable for a man with his prospects. His mother was an awful woman, but she’s dead. I suppose he’ll be married now. There’s a new widow, Mrs. Dalton, with a little girl, who seems the leading candidate, but it’s a ‘poor field,’ as Mr. Paton would say.
I suppose this war will do away with your livelihood. It’s not any easier when people get older, is it? I’m sure it doesn’t seem like six years since you were here and celebrated your twenty-fifth birthday. Mrs. Dalton makes out she is only twenty-seven, but I should say she was as old as you are, perhaps even older. I have very nearly got it traced. Her father was that man who shot his wife showing how to shoot rabbits, and swore it was an accident, and married a very pretty young girl soon afterwards.
What are you thinking of doing next? Dreadful how the war is taking all the marriageable men, isn’t it? We had quite an argument about it the other day at the Patons’, and Mr. Paton was rude, as usual. I said that I thought the bachelors should be saved and only the married men sent out, Mr. Paton having been married twice, as you know, and not minding if he’s married a third time either. Mrs. Paton is certainly getting on. The ‘getting on’ stage is the most trying, don’t you think? After you are past it, well, people leave you alone; but till you are you must keep on struggling. The trouble is, so few women seem to realise when it’s decent to cease struggling. They think they may as well go on for another year or two while they are about it.
Mr. Bingley is simply invaluable to Mr. Lovelady, and always at the Vicarage. He gets his money’s worth by reading the Scriptures at anybody he thinks they suit. Last week it was about women attiring themselves in an unseemly fashion; he looked at Elizabeth’s hat. I am sure you would like him if you happened to meet him, though his name is Alfred. He’s so safe, and of course there’s the house and ‘perks,’ as well as the fifteen hundred. They say he asks a blessing at every meal, even at afternoon tea, though he always takes exercise for his digestion to be on the safe side. He reads prayers at the servants morning and evening. Unfortunately another housemaid has just run away.
Mrs. Dalton goes in for being the womanly kind. The little girl is a great help. If such a nice little girl, why not an equally satisfactory little bank-manager? One knows how much he would love to have a little bank-manager—and that Mrs. Dalton would rather have a motor-car.
We want somebody to liven up things dreadfully. What a lot of exciting things must have happened during the six years you have so mysteriously disappeared from our ken! You must tell me all about them; as you know, they would be safe with me. Why shouldn’t women sow wild oats too when they get the chance? Of course, the nuisance is, they mostly don’t. Still, you were the kind to make your chances, and that’s always something.
I never knew such a Grundy-man as Mr. Bingley. Still, I must own that as far as outward appearances are concerned he has lived up to it—so far.
I have my doubts whether Mrs. Dalton’s comfortable income is anything of the sort, and not a lack of real principle. I don’t want to make a pun. She doesn’t bank here.
Lydia is mopy, as usual, but you can’t if they won’t. Grace as jolly as ever. She spends her days over pigs and manure-heaps and other disgusting details no lady ought to know exists, and reads poetry in the evening. Mr. Boliver got married soon after you left—on the rebound. He’s fatter than ever.
One thing is pretty certain: Mr. Bingley will never be disappointed in love, not only because of the fifteen hundred, etc., but because he cares for himself with that highest, holiest passion that remains faithful throughout. His mother was a woman. Such a mercy she’s dead; unfortunately her book still lives. However, as it’s the one privately-bound copy something might happen to it some time—one never knows. It’s full of advice on how not to get married.
Of course, like everybody else, he started to walk to the sea, but, unlike them, he gave it up at once as useless. He has decided that it is a mirage. Nina, Mrs. Dalton’s little girl, is absolutely devoted to him. She’s very well brought up. I always think that widows are twice-armed, don’t you? Well, if you can’t come to cheer up poor Mr. Lovelady you can’t, but I’m sure he would be awfully pleased to see you, and so would
Your affectionate friend,
Maggie Hopkins.
P.S.—Mr. Paton says he’ll lay two to one on Mrs. Dalton any day.
This letter reached Miss Salome Lunton when she was in serious straits; things were looking grim and grey, and the shadow of the gaunt wolf lay athwart the threshold. The Paris she had known was dead, her chance of livelihood with it. A strange and rather terrible city had arisen in its place.
“They may be here to-morrow” was in the eyes of all, though on the lips of none. They had heard what had been done in Belgium; they did not even whisper what might be done in Paris; they knew.
The tense city seemed to hold its breath; any day it might become the city of dreadful deeds. The dog, who had known the whip before, bared its teeth at the menace, but was well aware how little those teeth counted. The preparations for defence—which all in their heart knew inadequate—proceeded feverishly. The beautiful trees had to go; Paris crouched like a woman robbed of her bright tresses, her crowning glory, and set her teeth against the morrow. Already the hordes were thundering at her gates.
And then—a sudden change of ‘tactics.’ On September the sixth Joffre halted his spent and retreating army, and three times were his words passed from rank to rank, and men fainting, dropping in their traces, dying of exhaustion, heard that clarion call to a desperate stand:
“Let all advance who can; let all who cannot advance die where they stand!”
All stood, and many died. The German tactics also changed. Their festivity in Paris was ‘unavoidably postponed.’
So the tragedy of the city was averted, but not the tragedy of Salome Lunton and those in like case with her. Thirteen years to build up just enough to keep body and soul together—all swept away at the sound of a drum! While nations were locked together in a strangling grip, dealing death, finding death, she had still to fight her own battle of ways and means. After thirteen years she was further from the goal than when she had started, gay and confident, at eighteen. Whatever came or went she would never sight that goal, for in a world where many were talented and a few had genius she had only a cheap mediocrity. It was not the conditions without that flung her on the scrap-heap—though they hastened that flinging—but the conditions within. The divine spark was absent.
Hers was the tragedy of doing without most of the things that made life worth living. There was luxury as an accepted standard in her blood; in her art little, and in her purse even less. Others, mushroom growths, most of them, lingered at the feast; she was sent empty away. There were times when her whole being revolted and the thing became unbearable. At such times she asked herself strange questions, terrible questions. …
Most of her life had been spent in the grey underworld, a place neither reputable nor disreputable, mainly sordid and uncomfortable. What a far, impossible climb to the world of ease and reputation, but how short and easy a step to that other world below! Emptiness in the life she knew; in the far place above, pearls and peace of mind; in the place below, diamonds and satin and laughter—and the years that the locust hath eaten.
She always looked in the glass at such times as these, though not in vanity. She was merely tracing the history of her black eyes and little pointed chin which had descended to her from countless Luntons, and remembering the history of this ancestress or that; none of them respectable. Everybody knew the Lunton tradition, that ‘the men are bad, but the women worse.’ She had only to follow that tradition, ‘go the Lunton way,’ and find the primrose path.
Flaming yellow hair, flaming black eyes, a mouth a little bitter, cheeks too sallow and thin for perfection, but cheeks that could blaze to a strange arresting beauty. A figure long and lean—too lean—but sinuous and graceful. All the assets, or nearly all, for something held back, something proud and fastidious and clean. But then her whole heart and soul held back from poverty and stress. One was too difficult, the other only too easy.
“And we Luntons always travel the easy way in the end,” she reminded herself. “I shall come to it unless another road opens before me. I will not be ground down in the very dust any longer. I will and must have money and ease—some way.”
She laughed, and then she wept. It was her pagan philosophy to live only in the present, to snatch at the pleasure of the hour lest that pleasure should never come again, but the past crushed her heart in its hand, and just for once she did not tear those fingers away. They hurt, yet it was not an agony she would willingly have foregone. If it had spoiled her life it had at least meant one month’s wild happiness, and it is not everybody who can look back even to that. Happiness! It had gone beyond that. It had been magnificent, something that had borne her aloft on radiant wings. Her heart had sung with joy; her feet had seemed scarcely to touch the earth. But it was finished.
A voice that she had stilled for six years rang through the attic studio and through her heart. “Sally Lunn, Sally Lunn,” it called lightly and laughingly, “let’s see what else we can find for tea!”
She leaned her head wearily against the dilapidated arm-chair. “Oh, Jimmy, if you could have cared more, or I less, how much easier to bear now!”
She pulled herself out of the chair, and thrust her face out of the window. Then she drew it quickly back. The wounded were being carried past. The awful pity of that procession!
Her thoughts came quickly to the things of the hour, the tragedy of nations. “To be a woman at such a time,” she thought, “useless! Just an incubus! If only I could overcome fainting at the sight of blood and be taken into a hospital! Oh, that poor boy! …”
She shuddered, choking a little as she pulled down the blind. Life finished before it was well begun; one of the most awful sights—and one of the commonest!
“I must get away or I shall go mad!” she thought.
It was then that she opened Miss Maggie’s letter.
“She can’t be so bad at heart,” she thought, almost ashamed to think how she had disliked Miss Maggie; “here she is practically making me a present of her frightful Mr. Bingley—for of course he is frightful, that sort of man always is.”
Fifteen hundred a year, a house, ‘perks,’ and prospects! A glimpse of the respectable world, and not too far a climb, surely. “I believe I could get him; I’m sure I could get him,” she thought; “just the type to fall to the unknown quantity. Possibly he has never met a girl like me before, certainly not in Little Crampton.”
She laughed at the thought of Little Crampton. She remembered it so well. How absurd she had always found it, and yet somehow so restful. Yes, she would visit Little Crampton again, not for a rest this time, but for a husband.
“Mrs. Alfred Bingley,” she thought mockingly, “wife of a man who reads prayers at the servants twice a day, and ‘asks blessings’ at afternoon tea!” The thing seemed so incongruous and so ludicrous that she began to laugh, and laughed till the tears streamed from her eyes. “Alfred Bingley! Yet what’s in a name? Doubtless the John Joneses get somebody to love them; then why not the Bingleys with fifteen hundred a year? Really, it’s rather decent of Maggie Hopkins to make me a present of the Bingley man.”
She had not quite grasped Miss Maggie’s intention. For Mr. Bingley to have fallen to Sally would have been neither interesting nor exciting. Miss Maggie’s idea was rather to dangle the rich bait before two eager fishes, and then snatch it away from both at the last moment. It was the pursuit, not the capture of the prize she sought to witness. She would have Mr. Bingley free for many a long year to come, and damsels, faint but pursuing, on his tracks. That was life—in Little Crampton.
Sally’s face softened at the reference to Mr. Lovelady, and she was ashamed and remorseful. “What a selfish beast I am,” she thought, “what a worthless little beast! I am fond of Lovey, and yet when have I ever bothered about him? Only for my own sake now and then, or because I wanted something. Why, I deserve the very worst that can happen to me, yes, the very worst! In all my life I have never thought of anybody but myself—and Jimmy; and even that was a selfish love. What a prize for Mr. Bingley!”
Her mobile face changed again. “No, I won’t—at least not if I can help it!” She would give herself another chance, postpone the evil day and the evil choice. “I’ll give London a chance. If it lets me pick up a decent living, lets me be really decent a little longer, I’ll resist the temptation. If it doesn’t—.” She did not finish the sentence, but her mouth set into grim, unlovely lines.
She went to London, telling Mr. Lovelady her intention but not her address. There were reasons for not giving that; her friends were such a ‘shady’ lot. It would hurt him, “and poor Lovey has been hurt enough, Heaven knows!” she thought pitifully.
For months of the wettest, most dreary winter she had known she gave London its chance to save her, but that city of dreadful night politely but firmly declined to do anything of the sort. Thousands were sinking to destruction; why not Sally, worthless child of worthless parents?
Sally, however, had a tenacious mind, and no wish to be swallowed up; she wanted money and ease and pleasure before the morass covered her, and she merely reread Miss Maggie’s letter.
“That woman hasn’t married him yet or I should have heard,” she thought. “It’s Fate, and why hesitate any longer? It’s either Mr. Bingley or—”
She paused, and then added quickly, “I mean, of course, it’s got to be the pious bank-manager. God help him—God help us both!”
Her laugh was not very successful.
As winter’s stern face was softening before the coy advances of spring, 1915, Sally Lunton came to Little Crampton.
She arrived dramatically, expected of none, heralded by crashes and bumps, by the boxing of an ear, the objurgations of Elizabeth, and the emphatic oath of a man.
chapter ii
“I am absolutely on the rocks, Lovey”
The Reverend Adam Lovelady was buried deep in his arm-chair and a book on his pet hobby—roses. His study was shabby, but cosy and most scrupulously clean. Elizabeth saw to that—a trifle drastically, her master thought.
A faint breeze, sweeping across from The Mountain, stirred the curtains and ran its cool fingers through the parson’s plentiful grey hair. Mr. Lovelady, an inhabitant of Little Crampton if not altogether of it, was sufficiently Cramptonian to call it a ‘sea’ breeze, and believe he could taste the salt on his lips.
Outside blackbirds and thrushes were very busy with their courting songs, and, swaying on the branches of the trees, were the first to flavour spring. If the Reverend Adam was without an Eve, for them there was a sufficiency of Eves, and a paradise without any serpent that they knew of.
During the winter Mr. Lovelady fed the birds, very wastefully, Elizabeth considered. During the other seasons they repaid him by robbing him of his seeds, green shoots, and fruit—and by their songs. The Reverend Adam considered himself their debtor.
Afar off a cock crew—Ananias; an exultant crow enough, for he still had sway over his cherished Sapphira.
At his master’s feet, as near as he could get, slumbered Old John. Old John had been Young John once, and rather a gay dog in his day. Now he was rather deaf, rather blind, very tired, and twenty years of age.
Just a peaceful, almost sleepy, English scene.
Into peace swept storm.
First a loud bump sounded in the hall, then a crash, and then another bump.
“Well, Elizabeth will see to it,” thought Mr. Lovelady, burying himself deeper in book and chair.
Elizabeth ‘saw to it’ without loss of time. It was a way she had. Her voice carried to the study.
“Young man,” she said, “if you’re a bomb-thrower come to break up the house, say so; but if you call yourself a porter delivering boxes, you just mind what you are at, or it’ll be the worse for you.”
The deliverer of the boxes laughed, an ill-advised thing to do when dealing with the drastic Elizabeth.
The Reverend Adam instinctively clapped his hand to his ear as a certain familiar sound reached him, and tried not to hear the lurid oath which followed from the aggrieved party.
“She’s doing it again. I wish she wouldn’t!” sighed Mr. Lovelady.
“You run some risks,” said the porter sullenly.
Mr. Lovelady could feel Elizabeth toss her head as she retorted, “You can treat men as you like, or ill-treat ’em, long as you ain’t married to ’em. Once you are the boot’s on the other leg.”
“And a damn good thing too!” said the porter. “She’s following. I didn’t recognise her at first owing to her new hair. You wimmin are that queer and handy at improving on nature!”
“You men are beyond improvement, being hopeless from the first!” snorted Elizabeth.
“Go on!” said the man from the station admiringly.
Then came another voice, gay and careless, and a long, low, delicious laugh.
The vicar flung down his cherished book and pitched himself into the hall. “It’s never Sally,” he cried joyfully, “Sally at last!”
