Non-combatants and Others Part 3

The callers dropped out again, one by one. John and his father went out to smoke in the garden, and to look at young trees. Dorothy went to make a cake for the hospital.

Mrs. Orme sorted, filed, and pigeon-holed case-papers about Belgians.

Alix, sitting in the window seat, said, 'Aunt Eleanor, I think I'm too far away from the School. I think I'd better go and stay in London, to be nearer.'

Mrs. Orme abstracted part of her attention from the Belgians, paused, paper in hand, and looked at her niece with her fine dark kind eyes, that were like her sister's, only different.

'Very well, child. You may be right. I'm sorry, though....' She jabbed a paper on the file, and gave more of her attention still. 'Go and stay in London.... But with whom, dear? And what does your mother think?'

'Oh, mother,' said Alix, and gave her small, crooked smile. 'Mother won't mind. She never does. I'll write to her about it, any time....

Well, I might be in rooms--alone or with some one else.'

'Not alone,' Mrs. Orme said promptly. 'You're not old enough.

Twenty-five, is it? You look less. Oh yes, I know girls do it, but I don't like it. I wouldn't let Dorothy or Margot. Who could you share them with? You've not thought of any one especial? It would have to be some one sensible, who'd look after you, or you'd get ill.... Nicholas lives with another man, doesn't he?... Wait: I've just thought of something....' She began rummaging in her desk. 'I've a letter somewhere; I kept it, I know. She looked for it. Alix thought how like she was, as she searched, to her sister Daphne; both were so often looking for papers which they knew they had kept; and both had the same short-sighted frown and graceful bend of the neck.

'Here,' said Mrs. Orme, and held up an envelope addressed in a flowing hand--the sort of hand once used by most ladies, but now chiefly by elderly and middle-aged persons of an unliterary habit.

'Emily Frampton,' said Mrs. Orme. 'No, you wouldn't know her, but she's a cousin. That is, not a cousin, but married to one. She's the widow of your cousin Laurence, who died fifteen years ago. None of us could think why ... well.' She checked herself. 'She's very nice and kind, Emily Frampton.' But so different, she meant, from their cousin Laurence. This was so. Laurence Frampton had been scholarly, humorous, keen-witted, dry-tongued, and a professor of Greek. Emily Frampton was not; which is sufficient description of her for the moment.

'She and her two girls (her own, you know; she was a widow even before she married Laurence) live at Clapton. Violette, Spring Hill, Upper Clapton, N. They're poor; they want some nice person to board with them.

She's very kind; you'd be taken care of.' Mrs. Orme puckered her wide, white forehead and looked at Alix as if she were a Belgian with a case-paper. 'Really, till your mother comes back and takes the responsibility, I can't let you go just anywhere.'

'Well--' Alix drawled a little, uncertainly. 'I don't _like_ being taken care of, Aunt Eleanor. And they sound dull.'

'Well, dear, you must settle. I own I couldn't personally live at--what's the name of the house--Geranium--Pansy--no, Violet--Violette, I mean. Those sort of people are so dreadfully out of the currents; probably know nothing about the war, except that there is one, and....'

'Well,' said Alix, more quickly, 'perhaps I'll go there, Aunt Eleanor. I think I will.'

'You'll be doing them a kindness,' said Mrs. Orme. 'And of course it will be much more convenient for you than going up to town from here every day. If you like I'll write to Mrs. Frampton to-day. We shall miss you, dear.' She screwed up her eyes affectionately at Alix, and added, 'You don't look well, child. I wish your mother would come home. You miss her.'

'It's fun when mother's home,' said Alix. 'But it's quieter when she isn't. Mother's so--so stimulating.'

'Oh, very,' said Mrs. Orme, who thought of Mrs. Sandomir as a spoilt, clever, fascinating but wrong-headed younger sister. She couldn't tell Alix how wrong-headed she found her mother, but she added kindly, 'You know, my dear, that I think she is mistaken in her present enterprise, and would be much better at home.'

'Most enterprises are mistaken. All, very likely,' said Alix, and her aunt was shocked, thinking she should not be cynical so young.

'The child's a funny outcome of Paul Sandomir and Daphne,' she reflected, and returned to her case-papers.

3

John came in. Alix noticed how cheerful and placid he looked, and how his hand, holding his pipe, shook. He sat down and began to talk about the advantages of not digging up one of the lawns for potatoes, which Margot wanted to do. His memories lay behind his watchful eyes, safely guarded. But Alix knew.

'I must write to mother,' she said, and left the room.

As she went upstairs she met Mademoiselle Verstigel coming down. Her Sunday dress was bright scarlet, with canary-coloured ribbons. She had saved it out of the wreck at home, when all seemed lost, and fled in it, like so many Belgians. She looked at Alix with her round eyes, and they too held memories. Alix stumbled at a stair. Mademoiselle caught her thin arm in her own plump one and saved her from falling. Alix hated the touch; she said, 'Oh, merci,' and gripped her stick tight and hurried on upstairs with her uneven, limping steps. She got into the schoolroom and shut the door.

'I must get away,' she said, breathing hard. 'I will go to Violette.'

PART II

VIOLETTE

CHAPTER IV

SAt.u.r.dAY MORNING AT VIOLETTE

1

Alix rode from South Kensington to Clapton in the warm mid-June night on the last bus. She had been at a birthday party in Margaretta Terrace, S.W. Bus 2 took her to the Strand end of Chancery Lane. Here she left her companion, who had rooms in Clifford's Inn, and walked up Chancery Lane to Holborn, and got the last Stamford Hill bus and rushed up Gray's Inn Road and then into the ugly, clamorous squalor of Theobald's Road, Clerkenwell and Old Street. The darkness hid the squalor and the dull sordidness of the long straight stretch of Kingsland Road. Through the night came only the flare of the street booths and the screaming of the very poor, who never seem too tired to scream.

At Stamford Hill Alix got off, and walked down Upper Clapton Road, which was quiet and dark, with lime-trees. Alix softly whistled a tune that some one had played on a violin to-night at Audrey Hillier's party. The party, and the music, and the students' talk of art-school shop, and the childish, absurd jokes, and the chocolates and cigarettes (she had eaten eighteen and smoked five) were like a stimulating, soothing drug.

A policeman at the corner of Spring Hill flashed his light over her and lit her up for a moment, hatless, cloaked, whistling softly, limping on a stick, with her queer, narrow eyes and white face.

She turned down Spring Hill, which is an inclined road running along the northern end of Springfield Park down to the river Lea. It is a civilised and polite road, though its dwellings have not the dignified opulence of the houses round the common.

Alix stopped at Violette, and let herself softly in with her latchkey.

Violette was silent and warm; the gas in the tiny hall was turned low.

The door ajar on the right showed a room also dimly lit, with a saucepan of milk ready to heat on the gas-ring, and a plate of Albert biscuits and a sense of recent occupation. It is very clear in an empty room by night what sort of people have sat and talked and occupied themselves in it by day. Their thoughts and words lie about, with their books and sewing.

There were also in this room crochet doylies on the chairs and tables, a large photograph of a stout and heavily-moustached gentleman above the piano (Mr. Tucker), a small photograph of a thin and shaven and scholarly gentleman over the writing-table (Professor Frampton), some Marcus Stones, Landseers, and other reproductions round the walls, two bright blue vases on the chimney-piece, containing some yellow flowers of the kind that age cannot wither, dry, rustling, and immortal, 'Thou seest me' illuminated in pink and gold letters, circling the picture of a monstrous eye (an indubitably true remark, for no inhabitant of the room could fail to see it), and the _Evening Thrill_ and _The Lovers'

Heritage_ (Mrs. Blankley's latest novel) lying on the table.

Alix sat on the table and smoked another cigarette. She always smoked far too many. She was pale, with heavy, sleep-shadowed eyes. She had talked and smoked and been funny all the evening.

One o'clock struck. Alix turned out the gas and went up to bed, quietly, lest she should disturb the family. She crept into the bedroom she shared with Evie, and undressed by the light that came in through the half-curtained window from the darkened lamps in the street.

The faint light showed Evie, asleep in her lovely grace, the grace as of some lithe young wild animal. Alix never tired of absorbing the various aspects of this lovely grace.

She got into bed and curled herself up. Between the half-drawn window curtains she could see the tops of the Park trees, waving and fluttering their boughs in a dark sky, where clouds drove across the waning moon.

Footsteps beat in the road outside, came near, pa.s.sed, and died. The policeman trod and retrod his allotted sphere, guarding Violette while it drifted drowsily into the summer dawn, which broke through light, whispering rain. Alix dreamed....

In Flanders, the rain sloped down on to men standing to in slippery trenches, yawning, s.h.i.+vering, listening....

2

Evie pulled back the curtain, and the yellow day broke into Alix's dreams and opened her sleepy eyes. She yawned, her thin arms, like a child's arms, stretched above her head.

'Oh, Evie,' said Alix. 'Can't be morning, is it?'