Looking after Joan

Front matter

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

THE HAPPY FOOL THE KING’S MEN PETER PARAGON

ETC. ETC.

Chapter I §1

I N the village of Meadwell in Sussex there was recently a letter-box which, by some strange departmental oversight, still bore the legend of Queen Victoria, though her grandson had been reigning for several years. Nor was this all. The name of Victoria, still faintly described on the letter-box of Meadwell, was also inscribed, and far more legibly, on many of its hearts and thresholds. No one knew better than Joan that, under the roof where she would sleep to-night for the last time previous to her great adventure, no other sovereign had as yet been allowed to rule. Victoria’s por¬ trait still confronted her from over the mantelpiece of her room, and downstairs in the dining-room there were engravings of Melbourne and Disraeli hanging as when her father had died.

To-morrow, however, she would be in Paris, unaccompanied by a single member of her family, living in an hotel, a free and independent person, with work of her own to do, and money of her own to spend.

It was Barbara’s doing. Twelve months pre¬ viously Joan had lost her father, an unsuccessful merchant, who had left his widow little more than the house in which she lived. Joan had, therefore, been obliged to learn some useful craft. Barbara, an experienced official, who for the last few years had served His Majesty’s Government at home and abroad, with power to recommend candidates for posts of considerable responsibility and honour, had advised a college in London in which young women of education were trained to act as secretaries and librarians and personal assistants of the great, and, at the right moment, she had come forward with a vacancy in the secretariat of an important Minister.

Thus, almost before her mother was aware of it, Joan, who had hitherto lived almost exclusively under the protection of Queen Victoria, had entered the service of King George, and almost before the full significance of this new allegiance had been realised, had found herself in possession of a pass¬ port and a first-class ticket to a foreign capital. All had happened so swiftly and so naturally, and so clearly in obedience to economic necessity, that no one at Meadwell had been able to measure the event or to question its propriety.

Anyone watching Joan in the activities of pack¬ ing her trunk and preparing to sleep for the last night in her mother’s house might reasonably have felt some misgiving at the prospect of despatching her into a world so entirely different from that of which she was at present aware. She was so obviously unfledged. The excitement in the eyes that looked back at her out of the mirror were clearly untroubled by the least alloy of reflection or experience. She was pretty, and pleasantly aware of her prettiness, but there was as yet no hint of a deliberate intention to charm. She en¬ joyed her good looks candidly for their own sake, and wore her ribbons with the harmless vanity of a baby. The smile with which she greeted herself in the looking-glass expressed a very natural pleasure in the contemplation of an agreeable object. There was no hint of the wish to attract, scarcely an intimation of sex. Her hair, which was of a pure flaxen, escaped from the comb like a fine mist in the light of her candles, enforcing with ethereal sug¬ gestions the innocence of the eyes and mouth. Here was clearly a girl who should have had a battalion of big brothers, period 1885, with side whiskers, to frighten away marauders. She was so clearly untouched and unaware. The impression that she needed protection was reinforced by the instant impression she gave that, though untouched, she was accessible, and that, though unaware, recognition was in ambush.

It will be objected that there could be no grown girl as innocent as Joan, and no village as remote as Meadwell.

The war, it is said, has brought the present unusually near, and made it difficult for any person or place to miss the spirit of the hour. Meadwell, though its letter-box had been neglected by some curious departmental oversight, had sent its men to the war, and mobilised its women for the usual services. Was it possible that there should be within its confines a girl who did not know as much about everything as was good for her ?

But innocence is not a question of knowing certain things, or even of having shared in certain experiences. It is an attitude, a quality of mind. Knowledge does not destroy, or even impair it. Experience leaves it with a bloom unfingered. It has a hundred varieties. There is an innocence that remains to the end incurious and unaware. Life passes it by, so that even the passions of birth, marriage and death are accepted without enlighten¬ ment as things that necessarily come and go. From this condition, which is merely negative, we may range through every kind and degree of innocence, finding an unexpected vestal in the heart of a mother.

Joan had done most of the usual things. She had knitted and nursed, and talked with wounded soldiers. She had danced with young men at the local hall, she had even lived in Highgate for a while, going up to her classes in the City every morning and returning at night. She had seen tens of thousands of people moving about their business and pleasure, but she had so far remained in¬ curious. There were questions she had never asked. She had been content to dwell upon the surface, interested but not iniquisitive, avoiding the less obvious implications.

The surface she had seen was that of the country village, sufficiently urban to have lost its rustic character without acquiring anything very definite in return ; of the tea-shop and cheap restaurant; of the suburban train and of streets at the hour when people were crowding to and from their work. It was not a surface that tempted investigation, or put to her any disturbing or inescapable problems. She had learned little either from life in general or from her particular associates. Her friend at the college had been a dull girl, without any wish to lead or to inform.

The only vivid and surprising intrusions had indeed been due to Barbara. But Barbara had at an early date been swept away to far and sur¬ prising adventures. It was only when Barbara came on holiday to Meadwell that the old associa¬ tion was renewed, and these interventions had been too infrequent and too brief to influence her friend.

Anatomised, Joan presented a pair of dark hazel eyes, which strangely contradicted the fairness of her complexion. Under light eyebrows and flaxen hair, they gave to her face an elfin look, as though they did not altogether belong. The rest of her was commonplace feminine, a nose that wilfully avoided the classic, a full mouth closing tightly upon white teeth, a firm chin lifted upon a slender throat. It was the eyes that raised all this from confectionery to the level of a charm that would always elude the analyst. The rest of her presented a fatally sanguine type, but one felt instinctively that Joan, with eyes that suggested a startled spirit imprisoned in that fleshly white and rose, was not born to be either victim or vampire.

There came a slight knock to her door, and in a another moment her mother had entered the room. Mrs. Weaver had probably deprecated King

Edward. She had almost certainly not yet re¬ cognised King George. Quite a number of social revolutions had passed by her unregarded. She was the accepted genius of the room where Joan had slept every normal night of her young life. Some day perhaps Joan herself would present that same comfortable appearance of a good wife and mother, ample but not unwieldy, in black satin relieved with a fichu of white lace, a face that was gradually losing its features in order to present a general aspect of kindness and content. Of this, however, one could not be altogether sure. Mrs. Weaver was fair like her daughter, and of a sanguine complexion, but there could never have been anything in the least elfin in her face or character. Her eyes were a complement and not a contradiction to the rest of her, of the pale grey one would expect to find.

She came into her daughter’s room at this mo¬ ment in a mood of mild misgiving. She had just begun to realise that Joan was going to Paris. Had she not written the labels, seven or eight of them, in a round motherly hand, each with an increasing amazement that this event had really come to pass?

For Mrs. Weaver, Paris was pre-eminently a city of the primrose path. Even its cooking was perverse, transforming wholesome eggs of the barndoor fowl into ceufs d la cocotte or worse.

“ Why, Joan,” she said on entering, “ have you finished packing ? ”

She rearranged some articles in the big trunk, not because they needed it, but because, having spent most of her life in arranging things, it was difficult to refrain.

“ I hope you have got everything you really want,” she continued anxiously.

“It is so difficult to know, and anything might happen in Paris,” she concluded, looking nervously at her daughter.

“ Why, mother,” said Joan, turning from the glass which assured her that preparations for the night were complete, “ I believe you are worrying.”

“ No,” said Mrs. Weaver, “ but it’s rather an undertaking, when you come to think of it.”

Mrs. Weaver glanced at the portrait of Queen Victoria, and realised perhaps for the first time that Queen Victoria had passed away. Nevertheless, the British Government endured, and the British Government had lately got into the habit of pro¬ viding against every possible mischance. She took her daughter’s passport from the table, and read with a growing sense of security the noble phrases in which His Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State did request and require, in the name of His Majesty’s Government, all those whom it might concern to allow Miss Joan Weaver to pass freely without let or hindrance, and to afford her every assistance and protection of which she might stand in need.

Mrs. Weaver went to the bed and turned back the coverings. She ascertained that the hot water bottle was really hot.

“ Come along, Joan dear,” she said, “ and let me make you comfortable. It’s for the last time,” she added, as Joan came sensuously to rest in the warm linen.

Mrs. Weaver bent and kissed her daughter, whose arms went about her with the natural ease of long habit and practised affection. She looked a moment into the eyes of her child, finding something there so eager and curious and unfulfilled that the mother’s instinct sprang alive, sensitive and fore¬ boding. Obscurely she suffered a pang forgotten in the flesh, but in the spirit renewed. It came to her unawares, and yet was as old and inevitable as motherhood. It was as though her child were being born again into the world.

There was no reason, it might be said, why Mrs. Weaver should burst suddenly into tears, but Joan was already sufficiently a woman to understand.

“ I shall be all right, mother,” she said with im¬ mense conviction. “ Indeed I shall.”

And then Joan discovered that she too was crying.

§ 2

At seven o’clock on the evening of the following day a tall girl, not unobserved by the passengers who crowded the terminus at Waterloo, was stand¬ ing on one of the arrival platforms in an attitude of unflurried expectation. She stood erect, hands behind her back, at the extreme outward end. Joan might arrive at any moment from Meadwell. Mean¬ while Barbara, her friend, was well content. Water¬ loo was comparatively dull as a railway station, but railway stations were as champagne to Barbara. They went to her head. She became excited, though she remained as ever cool. Romance with loud puffings brought up the 6.25, or whatever it might be, in the glory and power of vented steam, bearing with it a sense of distant cities and a rushing pro¬ gress through endless vistas, till, as the monster glided to rest, the ends of the world seemed sud¬ denly accessible. Then, from many doors, men and women poured endlessly for a few brief moments, hurrying the mind into speculations of “ whence,” and “ whither,” but, in a brief while, leaving the long platform empty again, and one was free to meditate the twinkling mass of lights beckoning further monsters from regions unknown. Here one could feel that in the affairs of men there was rhythm and variety and power.

So, at least, felt Barbara. From which it will be inferred that Barbara was not quite an ordinary girl. A young woman, moved to emotion by the aspect of a large locomotive coming to rest in Waterloo, and remaining almost unaware of the marked attention paid to her good looks by the rest of the world, might almost be considered as lacking in some of the qualities of her sex.

There was, indeed, something boyish in her appearance and attitude as she stood at ease, but poised for action, on the extreme edge of the plat¬ form. But this was due less to nature than to conscious intention. Her dark brown hair, cut close in front, escaped the small hat, and curled back from her slender neck as though carved in metal. One realised why the Greeks had likened human hair to the hyacinth. A loose Burberry hung straight from shoulders which were slight and deliberately squared. But it was clear that pro¬ vidence had made no mistake. There was about her a fineness of texture, a perceptible delicacy in the lines of her figure, which was feminine in the girl where, in a boy, they would have been effemi¬ nate. There was a quick grace in the turn of her head, a soft light in her grey eyes, a purity of profile in the clear cheek and the straight but not aggressive nose, which proclaimed her sex, even though it sealed her of the kingdom of Artemis. There was just the suggestion of a bow in the small mouth, instantly flexible for tenderness or scorn. It was not, however, the bow of Cupid, but of the chaste huntress. She carried her sex like a rapier, with contempt for any whom sex might hamper or enslave.

The train came swiftly round the bend of the rails, startling the platform into clamour. Barbara stood back and raked the passing coaches with the eyes of a dropping hawk, striking her quarry as the train slipped past. She walked rapidly back towards the front, and her hand was on the door of the carriage before Joan was ready to descend. She had extricated Joan, identified her luggage, impressed a porter, and claimed a taxi, before the majority of the passengers had realised that they were in London.

“ Hungry ? ” she asked as the taxi turned to¬ wards Waterloo Bridge.

Barbara was fond of Joan, but her endearments usually took a practical turn.

“ I’m too excited to be hungry,” said Joan, fey with the sense of adventure.

“ I eat the air promise crammed,” chanted Barbara. She was a strange girl and had read “ Hamlet,”

44 I am glad you are not hungry,” she added, 44 because I want you to snatch a sandwich and come to the play. We will have supper afterwards.”

44 But, Barbara,” Joan protested, “ we have got to be up very early in the morning. Mother told me to go straight to bed.”

44 Good advice,” said Barbara, “ but you wouldn’t sleep, so mine is much more practical.”

They descended at a small hotel off the Strand, where Joan was kindly but peremptorily refreshed with hot water, clean towels, an evening blouse, a large ham sandwich and a cup of coffee.

“ And now,” said Barbara, “ we are going to lose our hearts at the Novelty Theatre.”

“ Not Denis Ainley? ” Joan exclaimed.

“ Our hearts, but not our heads,” said Barbara coolly. “ Some persons insist on losing both, which is a mistake.”

It was a bold experiment to plunge an impression¬ able girl, arrived from the seclusion of a country village, into a modern play aimed, with a seductive young actor for its principal missile, full at the susceptible hearts of the young and fair. But Barbara did not act in pure mischief. It was more in the nature of a deliberate ordeal. Henceforth she would be responsible for Joan, and Joan was about to be plunged into a world where she would encounter perils more serious than the factitious charms of a successful jeune 'premier.

A mild and rapid attack of Denis Ainley was a possible prophylactic against the serious epidemic of young officers and diplomatists to which Joan would shortly be exposed.

B

Looking at Joan between the acts, a vision of shining eyes and flushed cheeks, Barbara decided that the experiment was successful. The vac¬ cination had taken.

Two hours later, as they sat at supper in a Soho restaurant, Barbara examined her patient more at leisure. The symptoms were a slight fever, hurried breathing, acceleration of the pulse, and an un¬ usual brightness of the eye.

Barbara, having ordered supper, went straight to the point.

“ Well,” she said, “ what did you think of him ? ”

“ He is dreadfully ugly,” said Joan deceitfully.

“ Yes,” said Barbara drily.

“ And he has a most ungraceful walk,” continued Joan.

“ Yes,” said Barbara. “ It makes him all the more fascinating, doesn’t it ? ”

“ It was a most unusual play,” Joan observed.

“ Don’t be sly,” said Barbara unexpectedly. “You want to rave about him really.”

“ But it was only a play,” said Joan. “ One gets carried away.”

“ It happens,” said Barbara drily.

“ Not only in plays,” she added with a discon¬ certing abruptness. She paused a moment, and Joan wondered what might lie behind this sudden observation.

“ Of course,” said Joan with a sweet certitude of youth. “ Life isn’t in the least like that.”

“ I mean,” she continued, a little uneasy under the affectionate mockery in Barbara’s eyes, “ he would never have gone to her like that in real life.”

“ Perhaps you are right,” said Barbara wickedly. “ He would have waited to tell her about it in the morning. They always do.”

There was something like the lash of a whip in Barbara’s voice, and she fell without pause upon the waiter who had just served them with soup.

“ Take it away please,” she ordered.

“ Plait-il, Madame ? ”

“ I asked for hot soup,” she explained. “ This was hot the day before yesterday.”

The waiter was very splendidly dressed, and he had brought the soup as if he were officiating at a noble ceremony. Joan looked frightened, as though she expected an immense rebuke. To her great surprise the waiter, after an imperceptible moment of hesitation, removed the impressive bowl.

‘‘Waiters,” Barbara explained when he had withdrawn, “ always assume that in a restaurant women will stand anything, but you shall never have cold soup for supper as long as you have got me to look after you.”

The patron hurried to the table, abject beyond the resources of his limited English vocabulary. He presented Barbara with the wine list as a peace offering. Barbara ordered a bottle of Clicquot, and the patron hurried off to the kitchen to scold the waiter for his lack of perception.

“ And now,” said Barbara, “ we shall have hot soup and the better portion of a Surrey fowl, and the champagne will be just sufficiently iced.”

“ How did you learn all this? ” Joan asked.

“ Sweet are the uses of adversity,” quoted Barbara.

It rang like an incantation to the comic spirit. The tone was light, the mood a little remote, the air impersonal, but underneath it all a hint of sadness.

The late war had left Barbara an orphan at twenty-three. Her father, a successful doctor in Cavendish Square, had been unable to save money, owing partly to circumstances and partly to tem¬ perament, but he had been his daughter’s constant companion from the age of nine, when she had lost her mother, and in this way he had left her a good deal more perhaps than money could buy. At twenty-four she had been obliged to seek a living in the City, with nothing to her credit beyond her courage and a humour instinctive and immediate in its response to the necessities of the moment. She did not regret the hardship. She had a passion for life, but it was a passion almost (esthetic in its detachment, more of the mind and the imagination than of the pulses. Sensuously she was alive to the feeling of others, and gladly aware of it in herself, but her will was sovereign, and her spirit, daughter of Olympus, played with the lightnings and was not consumed.

From the City she had passed into the service of the Government, and for the last three years had led a restless international life at councils and conferences, a familar figure wherever nations might be gathered together to discuss the problems of the day. From her father she had inherited a habit of wandering, and the gift of tongues. She spoke four European languages, including Greek, which she inherited from her mother, had a thorough knowledge of delegations and committees, and was acquainted with most of the weaknesses of men in general, and of great men in particular.

But the uses of adversity, though sweet to a brave spirit, included a knowledge of good and evil. Hence, perhaps, the undercurrent of sadness in this girl of twenty-seven. A girl so immediately attractive, and so fearless of conduct could hardly escape attention. She had mismanaged her first employer, and had been obliged to dismiss him when he became too vividly aware of her charm. She had been rather more successful in Whitehall. She had acted as secretary for officials of many kinds and ages, and not all of them were immune ; but she contrived to part friends when they could not bear it any longer, and she was always so charming about it that they invariably recom¬ mended her for promotion.

She had come to the conclusion that most men were weak but not wicked, and that their weakness did not greatly matter. There was always the risk that they might be impertinent, but if one knew how to deal with the situation, they were easily made to regret it.

That Barbara was fully able to deal with any such emergencies was revealed on the entry of two elegant young men, who proposed to take supper at an adjoining table. One of them said something to the other, both smiled, and Barbara found that she and her companion had suddenly become objects of interest and speculation.

Not by a look or gesture did she indicate that she was in the least aware, but there was unmistakably a change of atmosphere. It was as if she had suddenly become insulated. An arctic chill seemed to fill the air surrounding her, in which the interest of the elegant young men perished im¬ mediately of inanition. The more sensitive of them almost perceptibly shivered.

Joan was sweetly unaware of this play of human forces in her immediate neighbourhood, but, un¬ accustomed to observation, she instinctively fid¬ geted. She was dreadfully conscious of the young men whom Barbara had not apparently seen, and her fingers mechanically re-arranged the blouse on her shoulders. For the first time she wondered whether it was altogether right to be taking supper in Soho at midnight without a chaperon.

The soup returned with a temperature beyond criticism.

“ Waiter,” Barbara began-

Joan hoped that nothing further was wrong. She was beginning to be hungry.

“ Madame? ” said the waiter.

“ There is a slight draught from the window.”

“ But that is impossible,” said the waiter deferentially. “ The curtains move not at all.”

“ Perhaps it is my imagination,” said Barbara sweetly, “ but would it be possible to have a screen ? ”

“ Certainly, Madame.”

The waiter brought the screen. Not by so much as a glance had Barbara indicated that the screen might be of any use save as a shield against a draught that did not exist. But the waiter arranged it with consummate tact, and Barbara and Joan were able to continue their supper in a privacy entirely feminine.

§ 3

On the evening of the last night which Joan had spent in Mead well, Nicholas Fayle, a bachelor of means and no permanent employment, received a telegram. Nicholas lived in a small flat in Lincoln Square, and the telegram was brought to him in his library. He read it impatiently, and looked at his housekeeper with a vexed expression.

44 Martha,” he complained, 44 this is very tire¬ some.”

44 The Government again, I’ll be bound,” said Martha.

44 The Government,” said Nicholas, 44 is always trying to improve the European situation.”

44 There is perhaps an answer,” Martha suggested.

Nicholas wrote something on a form and handed it to his housekeeper.

44 This,” he said, 44 means that we must pack at once for Paris and beyond.”

44 The usual luggage? ” Martha asked.

44 Rather more than usual. Put in all the con¬ ference suits, and do not forget the accessories. Last time you omitted to pack my Order of the British Empire, and I had to borrow my steno¬ grapher’s. Such incidents, Martha, are subversive of discipline in the Civil Service.”

Martha withdrew, leaving Nicholas to a rueful contemplation of his comfortable room, and the elaborate preparations he had made for at least three months of uninterrupted private work.

Nicholas had two absorbing affections. One was statistics. The other was English poetry. They ministered equally to his romantic temperament. Nicholas, by means of his statistics, was enabled sitting quietly in his library to survey all the king¬ doms of the world, to behold a pageant of activity, manifold, complex, astounding in its perpetual energy and variety. Indices, co-efficients, scales, schedules and graphs, as manipulated by Nicholas, had a semblance of the black art. He dealt with them as a master, knowing that anything might thereby be established, refuted, affirmed, confounded or destroyed. Such a gift was of some value to public men of the day. To the lie constitutional and the lie direct there has recently been added the lie by statistics, which has indeed become the prince of lies, comprehending and justifying all the others. Empires were being refashioned under its authority, tyrannies imposed, wars sanc¬ tified, churches destroyed, nations liberated or enslaved.

Nicholas, like the medieval alchemist, practised largely for fun. Cheerfully he put the products of his art at the disposal of any who might appeal to him for its exercise. He was one of that strange company of unattached officials, invariably sum¬ moned by telegram to the hotels and palaces of Europe, wherever the leaders of the world might be gathered together to settle the affairs of mankind.

This was a period when, after the war, the European administrations still included the mob¬ ilised skill and erudition of the universities and learned professions. Professors of military history, economists, authorities upon languages, races and religions might still be seen at the elbows of the Cabinet, helping to make or mar the settlement of Europe. Of this odd company Nicholas was no mean member.

It must not be inferred that he was unscrup¬ ulous. He was like the lawyer who places his technical skill indifferently at the disposal of his clients, and like the lawyer he could plead the benefit of a sacred extenuation : they know not what they do.

He had never realised what lay behind his figures. Migration, massacre, famine, death and disease stared from his charts neatly plotted upon squared paper, but Nicholas had never seen any of these things. He saw men in millions, which is only another way of saying that he did not see them.

There was nothing at all official in the appear¬ ance of Nicholas Fayle. His brown hair curled slightly back from a broad brow. His eyes had an inward look. They were deep and dark. His prevalent expression was serious, lightened by the play of a somewhat distant humour, but relieved still more, when his attention was engaged, by an ingenuous interest and curiosity, such as one sees on the faces of intelligent children confronted with something new. He was of medium height, had a fine strong nose, and a full mouth.

Recently he had specialised in the statistics of ethnology. He could tell you about the Tosks and the Ghegs in Albania, and how many Ruthenians lived in the Carpathians. Periodically he was summoned from his charts and his files to the greenbaize tables of the new diplomacy to exhibit his graphs, to assist in the dismemberment of old kingdoms and the creation of new ones.

Nicholas the statistician was not well known to the public. He was better known to fame by virtue of his second enthusaism.

Most people have seen, or perhaps they have even read, the anthologies of Nicholas Fayle. This evening, as he sat alone in his library after the receipt of the telegram, he could not help feeling a little vexed. It was unfortunate that a summons should come at this particular moment. He was on the point of assembling an anthology which was to be more complete, and certainly more popu¬ lar in its appeal, than any he had yet achieved— nothing less than an anthology of the English love poetry of the ages. For several weeks he had pastured happily among his books, passing in review all that had been sung in praise and acknow¬ ledgment of the power and passion of love for more than twenty generations. This anthology was to be his masterpiece. For years he had meditated the material. He ranged from the note of distant chivalry to ecstasies vibrant and fulfilled. There was no phase of the great passion which was not included, and whose music his inward ear had failed to recognise and to remember. He had a sensibility which responded at once to an imagina¬ tive stimulus. Browning or Lovelace, it was all one. He was there to meet them in fancy at the first hint of an incantation. His selection would be both choice and comprehensive, and his essay in discrimination would be a marvel of sympathy and understanding. There was but one small circum¬ stance which might to the vulgar have seemed to militate against his sure success; Nicholas had never been in love.