And thy life shall hang in doubt before thee.-The Bible.
Leonie and her aunt were having tea
at the Ladies’ Union Club, of which the latter
was almost an original member.
You know the place where, arriving
on foot or with the trail of the omnibus upon you
in the shape of a two-penny ticket grasped tightly
in your right hand, you receive a stony stare as welcome
from the hall porter, and one of dead fish glassiness
from the rest of the staff.
There is a certain air of geniality
diffused around a taxi arrival, but a car!-two
or eight cylinder-owned, borrowed, or stolen,
well! there you win in honours, no matter what
kind of private address you camouflage with that of
your club.
Having cleared a way across the tobacco-laden
atmosphere, through which can be spied ladies, young
and old, inhaling and exhaling with more vigour than
grace, they had ensconced themselves in the seat for
two which lies isolated from the jumble of chairs
and couches.
That seat having the advantage of
isolation, your conversation does not gladden the
ears of your neighbour nor theirs yours.
You know what that is like-if
you don’t, well, it’s the kind that if
written would read in italics: Ayah-kitmutgar-pukka-chotar
hazri-syce, with reference, ultra-distinct
and emphatic, to Government House, Simla,
and my dear old friend, General Methuselah.
Just those little British odds-and-ends
which go to the ruling, more or less, of the land
of the peacock. Add to that the general, what
shall I say, touch-and-go attire of the majority of
the members. You know what it is like.
Lace collars over reconstructed tailor-mades;
pseudo-suede gloves, chiffon scarfs, generally ropey
and heliotrope of hue; odd-coloured jerseys affiliated
to odd-cut skirts, plus jangling oriental bracelets
and chains, and mix that with a few puckered, leather-hued
countenances and you get the club’s principal
ingredient.
Anglo-Indian.
Anyway the place is conveniently situated,
and quite bearable if you can put up with the waiter
or the somewhat overdecorated and ever-changing waitress
telling you, in front of your guest, that you “can
only ’ave cakes and bread-un-butter forrer
shilling, every-think-else-is extra.”
Cheery, when you may have been doing
your best to make an impression!
Of course every member (if she ever
gets as far as this) of every ladies’ club will
here draw her pharisaical skirts about her and edge
nearer to her neighbour.
“Did you read this”-quotes-awfully
good, isn’t it? Of course it’s meant
for the Imperatrix-the Toga-the
Ninth Century-the Spook.”
It isn’t!
It’s just typical.
Is there any one thing in any one
ladies’ club to differentiate it from its sister
establishment-especially in the canteen?
I will pay one year’s town subscription
to any woman knowing, of course, the difference between
husks and food, who will honestly declare that her
heart has not plumped to her boots after a
spur-on-the-moment invitation to a man to lunch
or dine at her club.
By spur-on-the-moment I mean when
she has not had the time to negotiate with the cook,
via the head waiter.
You do not need the menu to tell you
that plaice is here your portion; or a lightning glance
to ascertain that the exact number of your prunes
is six, and that of your guest half a dozen; or just
a sip of your coffee-well! there you begin
to talk feverishly and to press liqueurs and
cigarettes upon the suffering guest.
But to come back to the club tea-room.
“My dear,” Susan Hetth
was saying, jangling with the best, and pitching her
voice so that it literally, though slangily, beat the
band, “I really think, considering your position
and recent bereavement, that you should wear-
“Please be quiet, Auntie,”
said Leonie, who in a grey and pale mauve confection
looked like a field of statice against a pearl-grey
sky. “I came here to talk about you, not
clothes. You see I want to tell you how I have
settled things before I sail.”
Her aunt fretted with a teaspoon,
and spoke in the absurd peevish way which had been
so attractive at seventeen.
“For the last time, Leonie, I want you to listen
to me!”
“Other way round, Auntie,”
said Leonie, who had chosen the club, of all places,
for a last tete-a-tete with her relation, in
the hope that the presence of others would serve as
a dam to the flood of tears which had streamed almost
unceasingly during the last month.
“But it’s absurd, idiotic-
“Auntie, dear, we’ve been
through all that a hundred times, and a hundred million
times more won’t make me change. I will
not touch a penny of Sir Walter’s money-
“Oh! Leonie, your husband!”
“Not my husband in any sense
at all, except for the awful name. Why”-and
she spoke with sweet intense enthusiasm-“do
you know they are going to build a house in Devon
for blind babies out of my marriage settlement, and
endow it, and have resident teachers-think
of it-
Leonie broke off to manipulate the
tea-things to the rhythm of a one-step.
“And all the rest of the money,
Leonie, oh! it’s scandalous!”
“Oh, that!” said Leonie,
manoeuvring the milk out of a broken milk-jug.
“Except for Sir Walter’s special bequests,
it all goes back to the family. They’ve
almost all come to see me at the hotel, such honest,
nice people; and oh! so grateful. Mrs. Sam Hickle
is moving to Balham from the Waterloo Road to open
a fruit shop, she brought me a huge basket of vegetables,
carried it into my room herself; and a young Bert
Hickle, who has a whelk-barrow in the Borough, brought
me a whole turbot which had soaked through its newspaper
wrapping. He gave it to the page-boy to carry,
and I do wish you had seen their faces when
the tail suddenly burst through, just as the page-boy
was gingerly laying it down on a most appropriate
resting-place, a marble consol.”
Leonie laughed just as the music stopped,
a ringing, happy laugh which caused people to stare
and then nudge, or kick each other surreptitiously
as they recognised her.
“It’s all settled about
you, Auntiekins. I’m paying your debts,
which aren’t so terrific, only foolish, and
giving you five hundred pounds to go on with.
That, with your own income, will be all right if only
you will live in the country instead of hanging on
to the edge of a society which doesn’t want
you. Still, you do exactly as you like, dear,
only remember that I shall only have just enough to
live on when I’ve got through the thousand pounds,
and don’t run up any more debts.”
“Why not invest the thousand,
Leonie, sensibly.” Susan Hetth’s
voice was dull, choked doubtlessly by the dust of her
castle ruins.
“I’ve got to go to India!”
“Why, for goodness sake?”
“I don’t know, Auntie, I’ve simply
got to go!”
“How silly,” said Auntie,
as she forced a cigarette inartistically into a holder,
adding abruptly, as her commonplace mind jumped at
a commonplace loop-hole, “Where is Jan Cuxson?
I should think-
Leonie answered quickly, breaking her aunt’s
words.
“I have no idea! I haven’t heard
from him since he left England.”
“Huh!” said Susan Hetth,
putting up an absolute smoke screen, “and what
will you do after the money is spent, pray?”
Leonie stared wide-eyed into the tobacco
haze. “That,” she said slowly, “is
on the knees of the gods!”
Talking being temporarily suspended
by the band in the death throes of the overture to
Zampa, the two women sat silent; one frantically
trying to solve financial problems, the other with
her head a little on one side as though trying to
catch the thread of some conversation.
A strange thing happened as the band stopped.
Leonie rose quite suddenly, with a
half-eaten cake half-way to her mouth.
“I must go!” she said
quite flatly, placing the cake on a plate and looking
at her aunt without seeing her.
“Go!” shrilled
Susan Hetth, putting her fourth cup of tea down with
an irritated slam. “Where on earth to?”
But Leonie turned and walked away
with never a word of explanation, and her aunt, with
the thrifty side of her plebeian soul uppermost, turned
to the task of getting through as much as possible
of what was left of the two teas for which two shillings
had been paid.
The porter looked hard at Leonie when
she asked for a taxi, hesitated for a moment, looked
hard again, and refrained from putting the question
hovering on his tongue.
“Seemed quite dazed like,”
he explained later to his wife in Camberwell as she
juggled with sausages, “pale as death, with a
kind of funny look round her eyes!”
“To the British Museum,”
Leonie said through the window as the taxi door closed,
and the funny look round her eyes deepened into a line
of perplexity between the eyebrows, as the cab bore
her swiftly to her destination and her destiny.
She walked swiftly up the steps to
the institution she was visiting for the first time,
and through the glass swing doors, just as though she
was hurrying to an appointment; she turned, without
hesitating, sharply to the left up the long flight
of stairs, passed through the rooms filled with relics
of Rome found in Britain, and stopped.
Just for a second she put the palm
of her ungloved hand against her forehead, sighed
quickly, with her head bent forward, then passed through
the doorway, turned to the left, stopped and said “Yes?”
And the man, in faultless western
clothes save for the white turban which with its regulation
folds outlined the pale bronze face, with a look of
satisfaction in the dark eyes, salaamed before the
beautiful woman who had looked at him questioningly.
“Allow me!” he said simply,
bending to pick up the glove she had dropped, the
smile of satisfaction deepening as he looked at her
again.
She had turned from him, and stock-still
was staring into the glass case which lined the wall.
Closer she pressed, until her nose,
flattened against the glass looked like a white cherry.
“Kali,” she read, “Kali,
the Goddess of Death. I thought-I-
Lower she leant to look at the square
stone image numbered thirty-seven.
High breasted, squatting on her crossed
legs, garlanded with skulls, with five hands, holding
a sword, a thunderbolt, a skull, a snake, a cup, and
the other two raised in blessing, the goddess leers
at you like a very old woman from behind the glass.
Leonie turned swiftly to find herself
alone; and the hunted look in her gold-flecked eyes
deepened to horror as she gathered her skirts about
her, and fled blindly through the rooms, and down the
stairs, and out of the building.
Heading straight down Museum Street
for Oxford Street, she ran across the road at the
risk of her neck and the wrath of a taxi-driver; gave
one terrified backward glance at a law-abiding student
from India, who was going to his cheery lodgings in
Bloomsbury; and fled into the tea-rooms which lure
you outside with the pretty apple-painted ware in
the window, and where inside, one beautiful little
blonde head shines like a field of ripening wheat.
Safe, she crouched down behind the
window curtain with her eyes fixed unseeingly on the
distorted figures of the Java frieze.