Non-combatants and Others Part 5

Kate retired to domestic duties in the back regions.

Evie, before doing the dusting, took up the _Daily Message_ and glanced through the feuilleton. It had been the same feuilleton for many weeks.

It was always headed by a synopsis and a list of characters: 'John Hargreave, a strong, quiet man of deep feeling, to whom anything underhand is abhorrent. Valerie Lascelles, a beautiful girl of nineteen, who loves John. Sylvia, her sister, exactly like Valerie in face, but not in character, for she is shallow and hard and lives abroad, the widow of a foreign count. Cyril Arbuthnot, a smart man about town, unscrupulous in his methods, who sticks at nothing.' No wonder Evie found it interesting.

Then she flicked competently round the drawing-room with a duster, calling to Florence to clear away quick, because she wanted the table for cutting out.

Alix did the lamps in the pantry.

Mrs. Frampton did accounts and wrote to Aunt Nellie, in the dining-room.

Florence cleared away, also in the dining-room.

Kate looked in in her hat and coat, with the little red books that come from shops on a Sat.u.r.day morning.

'I'd better get in a new tongue, I suppose, mother. The one we have will scarcely be sufficient for Sunday.'

'Yes, dear. Get one of the large ones.'

Kate went bill-paying.

Evie extracted incomprehensively-shaped pieces of brown paper from the pages of _Home Chat_, a weekly periodical which she took in, and began her cutting-out morning.

Alix returned from the lamps and said, 'I'm going out for the day with some people. I may go on to Nicholas in the evening, very likely.' (It may or may not have been before mentioned that Alix had a brother of that name.)

'Very well, dear. Bring your brother or some of your friends back with you afterwards, if you like. I'm sure it would be very nice if they stopped to supper. Our supper's simple, but there's always plenty for all. And the Vinneys are coming round afterwards, so we shall be a nice party. I asked them because they've got that cousin, Miss Simon, staying with them, and I thought they'd be glad of an evening's change for her.'

'That fatty in a sailor blouse,' Evie, who observed clothes, commented.

'I should think they'd be glad of a change _from_ her. She's a suffragette, and talks the weirdest stuff; she's as good as a play to listen to.... I shouldn't think your brother'd get on with the Vinneys a bit, Alix.'

'Probably not,' said Alix. 'He doesn't with most people.'

Evie looked as if she shouldn't think he did.

'What's the name of that new floor-polish, to tell Aunt Nellie?' said Mrs. Frampton, pausing in her letter.

But, as Kate was out, and as it was neither Ronuk nor Cherry Blossom (suggestions of unequal levels of intelligence from Evie and Alix), she had to leave a s.p.a.ce for it.

CHAPTER V

AFTERNOON OUT

1

Alix sat on the bus and rushed through the s.h.i.+ning summer morning down Upper Clapton Road, Lower Clapton Road, Mare Street, Hackney Road, Sh.o.r.editch, Bishopsgate, and so into the city. The noon war news leaped from placards, in black and red and green. A mile of trenches taken near Festubert--a mile of trenches lost again. Alix did not care and would not look. Anyhow it wasn't Paul's part of the line. London was damp and s.h.i.+ning under a windy blue sky. They had cleared away the bodies of those struck down last night by motor buses in the dark. What a sacrifice of life! Was it worth while?

The traffic was held up every now and then by companies of recruits swinging along, in khaki and mufti, jolly, absorbed, resolute, self-conscious, or amused. There went down Threadneedle Street the Artists' Rifles. Some looked like studio artists, pale, intelligent, sometimes spectacled, others more like pavement artists, others again suggested sign-painters. But this last was probably an illusion, as sign-painters since last August had been mostly too busy painting out and repainting names on signs to have time for soldiering. Many cla.s.ses have lost heavily by this war, such as publicans, milliners, writers, Belgians, domestic servants, university lecturers, publishers, artists, actors, and newspapers. But some have gained; among these are sheep-growers, house-agents, sugar-merchants, munition-makers, colliers, coal-owners, and sign-painters. An unequal world.

The bus waited, held up opposite a recruiting station. Alix, looking down, met the hypnotic stare of the Great Man pictured on the walls, and turned away, checking a startled giggle. Anyhow she was lame, and not the s.e.x which goes either, worse luck. (On that desperate root of bitterness she never dwelt: that way madness lay.) Her swerving eyes fell next on one of the pictures of domestic life designed and executed (so common report had it) by the same Great Man; the picture in which an innocent and reproachful infant inquires of a desperately embarra.s.sed but apparently not irate parent, 'Daddy, what did _you_ do to help when Britain fought for freedom in 1915?' Alix giggled again, and looked up at the white clouds racing across the summer sky, where was no war nor rumours of war.

2

At Bond Street she left the bus and went to Grafton Street, where there was a small exhibition of pictures by two young artists known to Alix.

Here she met by appointment three friends, her fellow-students at the art school. Their names were Nonie Maclure, Oliver Banister, and Thomas Ashe. Miss Maclure and Mr. Banister were there before her. They greeted her with 'What cheer, Joanna?'--Joanna, because in a play composed and produced recently by their combined talent, Alix had taken this part.

Alix went to speak to the exhibitors, who were standing about and failing to look detached, and began to look round, murmuring to her friends, 'What's the show like?... Oh, she's got that yellow thing in...' and so forth. Presently Mr. Thomas Ashe joined them. (It may here be mentioned, lest readers should be unfairly prejudiced against Mr.

Ashe and Mr. Banister, that one of them had a frozen lung and the other a distended aorta. They were quite good young men really, and would have preferred to go.)

They criticised and appreciated the pictures for an hour, with the interested criticism and over-appreciation usually poured forth by young persons on the works of their fellow-students and contemporaries, often at the expense of the older and staler and less in the only movement that really matters.

'That's like some of Doye's things,' said one of the young men, and the other said, 'Doye's wounded, isn't he? I saw it in the paper to-day. I hope it's not much.'

Alix said it wasn't.

'He's on his way home. I hope they send him to a hospital in town, so we can all go and see him.'

Nonie Maclure shot her a curious glance. She had never known quite how deep the intimacy between these two had gone. She sometimes wondered.

She had thought just before the war that it went very deep indeed. But in these present days Alix seemed prepared to play round at large with so many young men, and to flirt, when that was the game, with a light-handed recklessness only exceeded by Nonie herself; and Nonie, of course, was notorious.

3

They went out to lunch. The world is divided into those who have lunch in their own homes, those who have lunch in some one else's, those who have lunch in hotel restaurants, those who have lunch in nice eating-shops, those who have lunch in less nice eating-shops, such as A.B.C.'s, those who have lunch in eating-shops very far from nice, those who have lunch in handkerchiefs, and those who do not have lunch at all.

The cla.s.ses are, of course, not rigid; many people alternate from day to day between one and another of them. Alix and her friends were, most days, either in cla.s.s four or cla.s.s five. To-day they were in cla.s.s four, being out for a happy day, and they had lunch in a little place in Soho, full of orange-trees in green tubs, and suns.h.i.+ne, and maccaroni.

They found one another interesting, entertaining, and attractive. Nonie Maclure was dark and good-looking, a fitfully brilliant worker, and a consistently lively companion. Oliver Banister was gentle and fair and delicate, and indifferent to most things, only not to art or to Nonie Maclure. He had tried to get pa.s.sed for the army, but, as he was rejected, he settled down tranquilly and without the bitterness that eats the souls of so many of the medically and s.e.xually unfit. He recognised the compensations of his lot. Tommy Ashe, on the other hand, was bitter and angry like Alix; like her he would have hated the war anyhow, even if he had been fighting, being a sensitive and intelligent youth, but as it was he loathed it so much that he would never mention it unless he had to, and then only with a sneer. It was partly this that drew him to Alix and her to him. They were in the same case. So they found they could trust one another not to talk of the indecent monster.

Also he admired her unusual, delicate, ironic type. Anyhow it was the fas.h.i.+on to have some special friend among the girls at the school, and it helped one to forget. So he and Alix plunged into a flirtation not normally natural to either.

The four of them flirted and ragged and joked and were funny all the afternoon, which they spent in Richmond Park. Alix and Tommy Ashe went off together and lost the other two, and lay on the gra.s.s, and became rather more intimate than they had ever been before. When soldiers strolled by they looked the other way and pretended not to see, and talked very fast about anything that came into their heads. Sometimes the soldiers were wounded; once a party of them, in hospital blues, sat down quite near them, with two girls in V.A.D. uniform, who called the soldiers by their surnames and chaffed them. They were all being merry and funny and having a good time. One was a boy of eighteen, pink-cheeked and hilarious, with his right leg cut short just below the thigh.

'Look here, it's time we found those two people,' said Alix, sitting up.

'We must really set about it in earnest.'

So they went away, but presently they felt more like tea than finding the others, so they had some. When finally the party joined itself together, it went to Earl's Court and had a hilarious hour flip-flapping, wiggle-woggling, and joy-wheeling. It desisted at half-past six, dishevelled, battered and bruised, and separated to fulfil its respective evening engagements.

4

Alix went to see her brother Nicholas. Nicholas was a journalist, on the staff of a weekly paper which cost sixpence and with whose politics he was not in agreement. As there was no paper, weekly, sixpenny or otherwise, with whose politics he was in agreement, this was not strange. It may further be premised of Nicholas that he was twenty-seven years old, of good abilities, thought war too ridiculous a business for him to take part or lot in, was probably medically unfit to do so but would not for the world have had it proved, was completely lacking in any sense of veneration for anything, negligently put aside as absurd all forms of supernatural religion, shared rooms with a curate friend in Clifford's Inn, and had from an infant reacted so violently against the hereditary enthusiasm which nevertheless looked irrepressibly out of his eyes that he had landed himself in an unintelligent degree of cynicism in all matters.

Hither Alix went, when the evening suns.h.i.+ne lay mellow on Chancery Lane.

Alix had a curious and quite unaccountable feeling for Chancery Lane. It seemed to her romantic beyond all reason. Just now it was as some wild lane on the battle front, or like a trench which has been sh.e.l.led, for the most recent airs.h.i.+p raid had ploughed it up. A week ago it had been the scene of that wild terror and shrieking confusion which is characterised by a euphemistic press as 'no panic.'

Alix limped past the chaos quickly. An old man tried to sell her a paper. '_Star_, lady? _Globe_, _Pall Mall_, _Evening News_? British fail to hold conquered trenches....' Alix hurried by; the newsvendor turned his attention to some one else. Evening papers, of course, are interesting, and should not really be missed; they often contain so much news that is ephemeral and fades away before the morning into the light of common day; they are as perishable and never-to-be-repeated as some frail and lovely flower.

But Alix, ignoring them, reached Clifford's Inn, and climbed the narrow oak stairway to the rooms inscribed: