The Best Short Stories of 1920 Part 41

"Later," said Ayling. "Just send up my things."

He crossed the foyer and entered the lounge. Here, as before in the streets, it was the changes of which he was most aware--figured hangings in place of the old red velours, the upholstery renewed on the old chairs and divans. Strangers sat here and there in the familiar nooks, strangers who looked up at him with a mild curiosity and returned to their papers or their cigars. He wandered on through the rooms, seeking--without quite saying so to himself--seeking a familiar face, and found none. Even the proportions of the rooms seemed changed; he could hardly have said just how; not much, but slightly, though, all in all, the club was the same. Names began to come back to him; memories resurrected themselves, rose out of corners to greet him as he pa.s.sed.

They began to give him a queer sense of his own unreality, as if he himself were only another memory.... Abruptly he turned, made his way back to the desk, and asked to be shown to his room. There he spent an hour puttering aimlessly, adjusting his things, putting in the time.

Then he dressed and went down to a solitary dinner. There was a great activity in the club at that hour, comings and goings, in parties of four and five. He found a kind of dolorous amus.e.m.e.nt in seeing now much more at home all the youngsters about him seemed than he. And he had been at home there when they were in the nursery doing sums.

Here and there at the tables were older men, men of his own age, and he reflected that among them might easily be some of his boyhood friends.

He would never know them now. He searched their faces for a familiar feature, watched them for a gesture he might recognize. But in the end he gave it up. "Old town," he said to himself, "old town, by Jove!

you've forgotten me!"

That night he went alone to a theater, walked back through the crowds to the club, and went immediately to bed. He was grateful to find himself suddenly very tired.

The next morning he rose late and did not leave his room until noon, when he went down to a solitary lunch. After lunch he stopped at the clerk's window and inquired about one or two old members. The clerk looked up the names. After a good deal of inquiry and fussing about, he ascertained that one of the gentlemen was in China, one was dead, and a third about whom Ayling also inquired could not be traced at all. Ayling went out and walked for a while through the streets, but was driven back to the club by the chill drizzle which suddenly began to descend.

He sat down in a chair near a window that had been his favorite.

Settled there, he remembered the position of a near-by bell, just under the window-curtain.... Yes, there it was. He rang, and a waiter came--a rotund, pink-faced, John-Bullish waiter, with little white tufts on each cheek. Ayling ordered a whisky-and-soda, and when presently the waiter brought it Ayling asked how long he had been in the service of the club.

"Thirty-five years, sir."

Ayling looked at the old man in astonishment. "Do you remember me?" he asked.

The old waiter, schooled to remember at first glance if he remembered at all, looked afresh at Ayling. "I see so many faces, sir--I couldn't just at the moment say--"

"And I suppose," said Ayling, "you've brought me whisky-and-soda here, to this very chair, no end of times. What's your name?"

"Chedsey, sir."

"Seems familiar--" He shook his head. "You don't recall a Mr.

Ayling--twenty-five or thirty years ago?"

"Ayling, sir? I recall there _was_ a member of that name.... _You're_ not Mr. Ayling, sir?"

"We're not very flattering, either of us, it seems. But then, privilege of the aged, I suppose."

"Beg pardon, sir. I'm sorry--I ought to remember you."

"We're wearing masks, Chedsey, you and I."

"You're right, sir, I'm afraid."

They regarded each other, those two, Chedsey, rotund and pink, looking down upon Ayling, long and lean, with fine wrinkles about his eyes, and hair considerably grayed, wondering, both of them, why names should be so much more enduring than they themselves had been.

It was not until Ayling had begun to ask Chedsey for news of old friends, and chanced almost at once to mention Lonsdale, that both he and the old waiter exclaimed in the same breath, "Major Lonsdale!" as if the Major's name had been a key to open the doors of both their memories.

"And you're young Mr. d.i.c.k Ayling! I remember you perfectly now!"

Chedsey beamed. How could he have failed to remember any one of those gay young friends of the major's?

"And where," asked Ayling, "is the major now?"

"Major Lonsdale, sir--has been gone seven years. Hadn't you heard?"

Lonsdale gone! Lonsdale dead! Lonsdale had begun life so brilliantly.

Ayling did feel left over and old.

"What happened?" he asked, and Chedsey, glad to talk of the major, told how he had left the club to be Major Lonsdale's man just after he came back from the Boer War. How things hadn't seemed to go well with the major after that; he lost money--just how, Chedsey didn't say, but gave one to understand that it was a misfortune beyond the major's control.

In the end he was forced to give up his house, and Chedsey came back to the club. A few years later the major was taken with pneumonia, quite suddenly, and died. Did Mr. Ayling know Major Lonsdale's wife?

"Yes," said Ayling. "What became of Mrs. Lonsdale?"

"Here in London, sir."

"Wasn't there," asked Ayling, "a child, a little girl?"

"Ah, Miss Peggy, sir!" It was plain that "Miss Peggy" was one of Chedsey's enthusiasms. A young lady now ... and soon to be married to a fine young gentleman of one of the best Scotch families.... She'll have a t.i.tle some day.... Picture in the _Sketch_ recently--perhaps he could find it for Mr. Ayling.

"Never mind," said Ayling, who was not thinking of Miss Peggy at all, but of her parents, young Major Harry Lonsdale, and his pretty wife.--He remembered her as a bride--Bessie, the major had called her--a graceful young creature with brown hair and brown-flecked eyes, already at that age a charming hostess in the fine old house Harry Lonsdale had inherited from his father.

"They are living in Cambridge Terrace," Chedsey was saying. "Would Mr.

Ayling like the address?"

Ayling wrote down the address Chedsey gave him, and put it away in his pocket, with no more definite idea than that some day, if opportunity offered, he might look her up, for his old friend's sake.

He began to inquire about other men--Carrington, Farnsby, Blake. Dead, all three of them--Farnsby only last spring. Was it some fate that pursued his particular friends? But those men had all, he reflected, been older than he. And yet, he recalled the words of his doctor:

"A man's as old as his arteries. You've been too long out here. Be sensible, Ayling.... Go home--take it easy--rest. You'll have a long time yet...."

Just a week later, to the day, Ayling stepped into a telephone-booth, looked up Mrs. Lonsdale's number, and telephoned. He had not counted upon loneliness.

At forty-five Bessie Lonsdale had encountered one of those universal experiences which invariably give us, as individuals, so strong a sense of surprise. She had discovered suddenly, upon completion of the task to which she had so long given her energies, that she had become the task; that she no longer had any ident.i.ty apart from it. And her consciousness of having arrived at exactly the place where hundreds before her must have arrived had only added to the strangeness of her experience.

A week ago she had seen her twenty-year-old daughter off to the north of Scotland for a month's visit to the family which she was soon to enter as a bride. It seemed to her that Peggy had never been so lovely as when she said good-by to her at the station that day, slim, fragrant, s.h.i.+ning-eyed, and looking very patrician indeed in her smart sable jacket (cut from the luxurious sable cape that had been part of her mother's trousseau), with the violets pinned into the b.u.t.tonhole. And Bessie Lonsdale had seen with pride and no twinge of jealousy the admiration in the eyes of that aristocratic, if somewhat stern-faced, old lady who was to be Peggy's mother-in-law, and who, with true Scotch propriety, had come all the way down to London to take her home with her.

"I don't like leaving you alone," Peggy had said, as they kissed each other good-by. "You're going to let yourself be dull."

And her mother had patted the soft cheek, and replied: "I'm going to enjoy every minute of it. I mean to have a good rest and get acquainted with myself."

When, a few moments later, she waved them good-by as the train moved slowly out of the station, Bessie Lonsdale had turned away with a long-drawn and involuntary sigh--a sigh of thanksgiving and relief.

Peggy at last was safe! Her happiness and her future a.s.sured. All those years of hoping and holding steady had come now to this happy end. Ever since her husband's early death Bessie Lonsdale had centered herself upon the future of her child. She had had only her few hundred a year saved from the wreck of her husband's affairs, but she had set her course, and, with an air of sailing in circles for pleasure's sake, stood clear of the rocks and shoals. She had never borrowed; she had never apologized; had never been considered a poor relation, or spoken of as pathetic or "brave." Her little flat was an achievement. It was astonis.h.i.+ng how she had managed at once so much simplicity, so much downright comfort, and so charming an atmosphere. She had done so much with so little, yet hers were not anxious rooms, like the rooms of so many women of small means. They had s.p.a.ce, repose, good cheer, even an air of luxury. It was the home of a gentlewoman who could make a little better than "the best of things." She had even entertained a little, now and then--more of late, now that Peggy's education was complete--but this at the cost of many economies in the right quarter, and many extravagances also rightly placed.

Call this "climbing" if you will, and a stress upon false values. Bessie Lonsdale gave herself to no such futile speculations as that. She was too busy at her task. She was neither so young nor so hypocritical as to pretend that these things were to be despised. She had done only what every other mother in the world wishes to do--to guide and protect her child and see her future provided for; only she had done it more efficiently than most; had brought, perhaps, a greater fitness or a greater consecration to the task. And the success of her achievement lay in the art with which she had concealed all trace of effort and strain. Peggy herself would have been first to laugh at the notion that her mother had had anything whatever to do with her falling in love with Andrew McCrae. She believed that it was by the sheer prodigality of the Fates that, besides being in love with her, romantically, as only a Scotchman can be, young Andrew McCrae was heir to one of the most substantial fortunes in all the north, and would succeed to a t.i.tle one day....

So Bessie Lonsdale had sighed her deep sigh of peace and gone back to her flat. And because she had really wanted to be alone she had sent her one faithful old servant away for a long-postponed visit to country relatives. Then she had sat down to rest, and to "get acquainted with herself." And in two days she had made her discovery. There was no "herself." She had been Peggy's mother so long that Bessie Lonsdale as a separate ent.i.ty had entirely ceased to exist.