The clouded pearl; a novel

Front matter

finn k fopyrigM

—

NOVELS BY BERTA RUCK

Chapter I

M ARGARET VERITY, at nineteen, was what is called (as a term of reproach) “a modern girl.” To-day’s girl is broadcasted to a world’s op¬ probrium. Pilloried in the press, she is the theme of article after outraged article: “What Is Wrong with the Modern Girl?” “Why the Modern Girl Has Lost All Charm,” and “Can the Modern Girl Love?” (Answer: in the negative.)

Something too much of this. Have her middle-aged accusers no memories of their own youth? Dare they quote it as perfect? Out of their own teens and twen¬ ties does no giggling spectre raise its head? None? Ah!

At times one fancies that even now girls are merely what they always were and always will be: namely, girls.

At other times one is brought upstanding by an ex¬ ample such as my friend Mrs. Verity’s Margaret. She might have posed for the symbolic figure of deprecated modern girlhood.

Brusque, blase, and neurotic! She was all that, and

more. Not an idea in her head but of the hectic chase after amusement from morn till night—or, rather, from afternoon until morning! An annexer of men, to whom she brought no gift of young love, but simply exaspera¬ tion and disturbance! A peevish, pallid, rouging, cock¬ tail-absorbing, chain-smoking, all-night-dancing, mothersnubbing modern of the most ungirlish type—that was Margaret Verity just before “the adventure.”

I am going to tell you all I know about that adven¬ ture and of what it meant to her, but I must go back first to Margaret’s beginnings.

There was nothing the matter with those. The girl’s roots were set in simple, wholesome soil. Her “inherit¬ ances,” as North country people call them, were sound enough.

Her mother, my friend Mrs. Verity, was a dear. Not clever; she never pretended to be that. Not a firm char¬ acter; she certainly never pretended to be that! But she was as sweet as the simple flowers with which she filled the garden of her Sussex cottage. Pretty, too. The ingenuous face that artists used to call “the English rose type,” and used to paint looking wistful in a big picture hat tilted a trifle to one side, with an immense pink tulle motor veil tied round it and under the chin— that was Violet Verity when young. Clear eyes, upright figure, and good complexion. A good walker, a good tennis player (for nineteenth century standards), a good manager (of a tiny income), a good housewife and gar¬ dener. Deadly dull it sounds? Believe me, she was not dull; she was saved from that by a gift which a great many more intelligent people of stronger character just simply have not got.

The genius for loving she had.

She asked no more from heaven than some one to whom to devote her life. Heaven sent Jack Verity.

Very attractive he must have been, though I’ve only seen his portraits. They are extraordinarily like his little daughter: Margaret inherited his short, determined profile, his carriage of the head buoyantly set on a proud neck, his eyes (large, wide apart and cloudy-grey, trimmed with a good deal of brown fringe). Men voted him a thoroughly good fellow; women not only loved, but liked him. He was a sailor—of all men the most idealized of women.

One hesitates to decide that this is because sailors are so much away from home. There remains this convic¬ tion, that a sailor is of all men the most pleasant, the easiest husband.

Mrs. Verity went so far as to say that a sailor was the only possible person to marry. Other men, Violet Ver¬ ity said, were always there; taking you as a matter of course, seeing you at your worst, bringing out the most prosaic side of you. Other men make married life one monotonous long lane with no turning between the altar and the grave. Whereas with a sailor husband one knows, on the one hand, those months of love in absence, of memories, of anticipation while he is at sea. On the other hand, one has the contrast of those glorious weeks when he is at home, when one lives at concert pitch as a bride, when one puts one’s best foot foremost as a housekeeper, when one orders hot meat—even game!—for luncheon every day, when one puts on every morning a crisp clean blouse (she married in pre-jumper days), and when one can generally keep up the honeymoon atmos¬ phere.

The Veritys kept up that atmosphere for years after their baby girl arrived. Even she added to it. Pres¬ ently she was old enough to lisp an absurd ritual that her mother taught her.

“What are you, Margaret darling?” asked the mother. “Tell Daddy. (Listen, sweetheart.) What are you now?”

“A sailor’s daughter,” answered the mite, sturdy in her navy-blue morsel of a jersey, with an inch of navy serge skirt.

“Yes; and what will you be?”

“A sailor’s wife!”

“Yes! And what do you hope to be?”

“A sailor’s mummy.”

“Splendid!” laughed Jack Verity; and he caught the child up, tossed her till the brown hair danced on her head, while he shouted that music-hall ditty of his day:

“I want you to meet my girl!

Such a girl, such a girl; such a pearl!”

This was the atmosphere in which that baby began to grow up. Her young parents adored each other and her. Glorious times they all three had at the cottage, up to the very last moment of his leave.

Then he would kiss them a dozen times over “for the last time”; he’d pick up his bags, his heavy blue mackintosh, and go back to sea; and Mrs. Verity would be left to eat up the cold meats and to finish wearing the onceput-on blouses, and to save up for the next leave of the sailor sweetheart.

He went down with his ship in the late autumn of 1914.

After which you can imagine that there was only one thing that kept her caring to live:

His little girl.

In that white-walled cottage in Sussex by the sea, there, on the bleak lap of the Downs, little Margaret Verity spent the next few years of a hardy life.

The child was brought up to go out every day in any weather. There were long tramps in the rain (and this was the girl who later never put her little French-heeled foot to the earth except when she stepped from the Rolls). A bedroom without a fireplace and with windows flung open winter and summer (this was hers who afterwards grumbled if the least thing went wrong with the steam heat). One makeshift serge frock, home-knitted jerseys, a couple of “prints,” a mackintosh, thick boots, and a tarn o’ shanter—not much more in the whole of her ward¬ robe (she who afterwards never wore the same dance frock three times running, and who could not have counted the number of her other garments). She learnt to wash up, to lay the table, to do any odd jobs to lighten the work for their single servant (she who was presently the waiters’ terror and the nightmare of the chambermaids!) Every morning of her life she splashed in her icy-cold tub (yes, this same Margaret who at nineteen must wal¬ low for hours up to her chin in heavily perfumed water so hot that she emerged at last parboiled, enervated, dizzy and slack). No luxuries did she know then; no parties, no chocolates, no silk underclothes, no fragile, expensive shoes; none, even, of the comforts to which a child of her age is at this era accustomed. All this, not because my friend Mrs. Verity was any Spartan by na¬ ture, but merely because the mother and the child were at that time what people call “miserably poor.”

The widow had her pension, her cottage and garden, and that was all. She couldn’t afford a daily governess. Margaret did lessons with her mother during the few hours that she spent indoors. They grew their own vege¬ tables ; they kept hens, sold eggs; they achieved two mar¬ vellous hedges of sweet peas from which they used to pull sheaves of blossoms which they packed up and sent away, to sell, also, at eighteen pence or half a crown a long box. This money was to be saved up to get a gar¬ den hose, at four shillings a foot, which Mrs. Verity could not yet afford, and a set of French cooking pans for her kitchen. About the menu there was always a good deal of hashed mutton, steamed vegetables, and rice pudding.

They seemed to do Margaret no harm.

When she was eleven and a half I went down, to find her the picture of health and bloom.

From the beach where her mother and I sat on a break¬ water to gossip, I watched the child going in for a dip in her club costume that fitted her like a coat of dark blue paint. Her shape was still childish, but of what beauty! Tall, without a trace of gawky coltishness, she was strongly, harmoniously fashioned in every limb. I quoted: “ ‘That our sons may grow up as the young plants and our daughters be as the polished corners of the Temple!’ Both prayers have been answered in your girl.”

“She is so like Jack. She ought to be rather lovely when she grows up.”

“What are you going to do with her then?”

“She says she will earn her own living and get rich and buy us both such pretty things. She longs for pretty things! But she makes her own pleasures here: she is perfectly happy with her shell collection and her wildflower collection, and her books, and me. A profession? I suppose so. . . . It seems extraordinary,” mourned this gentle late Victorian; “we never had to think of such things . . . Margaret! Darling! You’ve been in long enough. Come in, now. Please! At once!”

“Another five minutes,” the child’s clear treble rang back over the water. “Don’t fuss, Mums.”

Already you see whose was the ruling spirit of those two.

“The darling has more character than I ever had,” the mother explained. “I wish she had more opportunities. Nobody in Jack’s family can do a thing for her (they are all too poor). There is nothing to hope for from any of my family (all far too rich). There’s only my uncle Tom, the dear old fellow who gave me away, and came all the way from South America to do it! He hasn’t too much money. Every now and then, bless him, he manages to send us a cheque. At Christmas, some¬ times, it has made all the difference.” Unsuspecting dear! Little did she foresee the difference which would be brought about to both of them by the arrival of her uncle’s next cheque!

This came just before Margaret’s twelfth birthday, with a note to say that it was to be spent just as the young woman chose in making that day a success, and with love from her affectionate old uncle.

It was for five pounds.

How often was Margaret Verity to toss away that sum on a bet, a pair of dancing shoes, a casket of some ex¬ otic scent!

What a fortune five pounds seemed to her at the time of Uncle Tom’s cheque!

The cottage could not hold her.

Hatless, she skipped out into the frosty garden (it was near Christmas). Up and down the path to the little white gate three times she skipped before she could even tell her mother what had been in that envelope.

“Five pounds. Five pounds!”

In imagination the child spent it many times over in less than five minutes.

“First of all, Mums must have a smart new hat. You must! I hate that old black velvet beast you’ve worn for centuries! And one of those ducky bead hand bags I saw in a ’vertisement instead of your leather one that’s gone all shiny and horrid where you hold it! And you’ve never had furs like other people’s mumsies in the pictures in the Tatler. Do you think a grey-squirrel muff and collar right up to your nose, or what is a sable stole? You ought to have one. I adore rich furs; I’ve never seen any . We can get you some out of all this money, so—”

“Margaret! The money isn’t to be spent on your mums at all! It’s to be spent on what you’d enjoy.”

“But that’s getting things for you!” retorted the little eager creature. I can imagine her, flinging arms about her mother’s neck and opening those great eyes (grey-blue as an English summer sky, fringed with brown back¬ ward-curling lashes that softened the brightness of her glance), starry with excitement. “Don’t be silly, Mums. Can’t I do what I like with my own five—”

“My pet, you must think of your Uncle Tom. As he said what he wished done with his cheque, you will have to spend it as he wished.”

“Tiresome old thing! Oh, no! I don’t mean that. Frightfully kind old thing! I’ll do as he wants.”

“He wants to give you what you would call a good time for your birthday. You are to choose.”

Neither of them dreamt what was to hang upon that choice of Margaret’s! Supposing she had elected to give a Christmas party for the few children of that neigh¬ bourhood, with a tiny Christmas tree, cakes made at home, and a lucky dip, with toys from the sixpenny ba¬ zaar! Even the conjuror from Brighton. . . .

She thought of this.

If she had followed those thoughts how many lives would have been different!

But with a swift shake of her head Margaret decided: “No. I don’t choose a party. That means staying here. I choose to go up to London. With my own mums of course. I haven’t been to London since that one time. When I was quite a little girl, when darling Daddy took us to the Zoo. You remember?”

“Yes, dearest; I remember.”

“We’ll go again,” planned the twelve-year-old, still un¬ sophisticated. “Do you remember how Daddy laughed because I was frightened of a ride on the camel? I said he was too tall and I would only go in the little llama cart. Daddy said a sailor’s daughter must be brave, and so I went on the camel, only the camel rolled so that I was nearly seasick! Of course, I was only a very little girl then. You remember, don’t you, Mums?”

“Yes.”

It was a knife into Violet’s heart every time the child revived memories of Jack. Yet not for worlds would she have checked them.

“So we’ll go to the Zoo in the morning and in the afternoon—oh, would it be too much? There would be enough money,” urged Margaret, “and I’ve never been, though lots of people of twelve have, and some people of eleven—”

“Been where?”

“To the theatre! to a matineei Do, do let us go to ‘Peter Pan.’ Let’s go up by the early train on Monday.”

This meant a drive of four miles to the Junction.

A piercing morning it was; skies pearl-clear over frostpowdered Downs; road like iron, corrugated into frozen ruts under the farmer’s cart wheels.

The farmer’s cart was up in good time; Margaret wasn’t.

In spite of Spartan upbringing she was no born early riser. Also, she hadn’t been able to find her best gloves, her stockings newly darned for the occasion. At the last moment she’d mislaid the pattern of wool for knitting a sailor’s muffler which she meant to match in town.

The fact is the girl had been born (like many of us) a mislayer of things, a leaver, a dropper, a forgetter. In those early days she struggled against it. . . .

Anyhow, they were behind time. At the Junction poor Mrs. Verity (who suffered agonies of flurry the moment she left her tiny well-managed home) found herself with only just time to get the two third-class tickets, to snatch up the change, to tear over the bridge, to rattle down the staircase and on to No. 4 platform for the express up to London. The guard’s whistle was at his lips, the green flag in his hand. ... It was the nearest thing in the world! Think if the Veritys hadn’t caught that train! Think if that friendly porter hadn’t explained: “In you get, m’m! Anywhere! Get in here!” Think if he hadn’t bundled them into that first-class smoking carriage just as the train was moving out! That carriage was occu¬ pied, apparently, by one man, a quantity of expensivelooking hand baggage, and a large bundle of fur rugs.

The guard banged the door to behind the Veritys.

The train gathered speed, the white plume of steam, floating out past the window. Poor Mrs. Verity, flushed, heated, and breathless, picked herself up from that rock¬ like object against which she had been flung, namely, the shoulder of her fellow-passenger, a grim-looking man who should have been wearing khaki. (This was in 1916 when one did not expect to see anybody over eighteen or under thirty-five wearing anything else.)

This man was in plain clothes particularly smartly cut, but not cut for him. Everything about him was that of the “gentleman’s gentleman”; bowler, overcoat, linen, knitted tie, dark trousers, boots—no, I beg his pardon; boot. His left boot had a thick sole, he had been in¬ valided out for a wound in the hip bone.

With fury in his face he drew himself out of Mrs. Verity’s embrace and told her, in the severest tones that had ever been addressed to her, that this carriage was reserved, madam.

Mrs. Verity, putting her shabby toque straight, re¬ plied that she knew that; that she was dreadfully sorry; that she had been thrown into the carriage by the guard, and that she and her little girl would get out at the next stop.

“There won’t be one. This train,” sternly announced the martinet in the bowler (who had, as Mrs. Verity could now see, “late Sergeant-Major, Regulars” written all over him), “this train, madam, doesn’t stop until Victoria.”

“Oh, dear; doesn’t it?” faltered Mrs. Verity, crushed— as she always was, by strangers. “I can only say I am dreadfully sorry—”

“Wallace,” broke in a voice from the other end of the compartment. This voice, rather feeble and husky, came out of what Mrs. Verity in her flurry had taken for a stack of railway rugs and spare garments belonging to the irate ex-sergeant-major “Wallace!”'

The late sergeant-major replied in the voice of a chid¬ den child: “Sir?”

“Hold your tongue, Wallace,” commanded the bundle of rugs, striving to talk loudly, “and beg the lady’s par¬ don at once.”

Here little Margaret Verity burst out laughing where she sat.

Margaret’s laugh was one of the prettiest sounds that I have ever heard. Utterly spontaneous, and so gleeful, so zestful! It seemed as if it would go on and on. Then, on a staccato note, it stopped. It stopped as though (suddenly as she had been amused) the child had become conscious that it wasn’t manners to show her amusement thus unrestrainedly. And now she blushed. Although country-bred, she had never been one of those apple¬ cheeked children who turn plum-faced in later life. Mar¬ garet’s young face was not exactly pale—that sounds un¬ healthy—it was smoothly, evenly uncoloured. It was like cream into which there has been stirred a few drops of fruit juice. When she blushed that creamy rose bloomed into an abrupt clear carmine. Most arresting, most beau¬ tiful.

One does not know whether it was the sight of that ex¬ quisite child’s blush or the sound of her gleeful laugh which first caught the attention of Wallace’s master.

He sat up; he put down the heavy fur collar, pushed up the peaked cloth cap he wore. He turned a sharp-featured fair face, the face of a quite young man, upon the child before him; and he demanded in that curious, half-simpering, half-throaty voice:

“What were you laughing at?”

“I am sorry, I oughtn’t to have,” said little Margaret, the blush not yet faded. “I was laughing at you.”

“At me?”

“I couldn’t help it. It was so funny. I mean the way you said ‘Hold your tongue’ and then ‘Beg the lady’s pardon.’ How could he if he held his tongueV 9

“Margaret, dear!” from Margaret’s mother. . . .

The young man turned towards Mrs. Verity and lifted his cap.

“So true,” he commented, “I apologize to everybody. Do you mind if I talk to you as we go up? I am bored with Wallace and myself. May I say I’m glad to have somebody else as carriage companions?”

Mrs. Verity saw at once that he would be allowed to say what he liked. He was the type of young man who can say anything without offence. He was a sahib and a soldier, or had been a soldier. Poor boy, poor boy (he was under twenty-six) ! Every bone of his face showed through parchment skin. A flush burnt on those hag¬ gard cheeks, his blue eyes shone like jewels, the brighter because they had been put in ‘with smutty fingers.’ Black, curly lashes accentuated those feverishly bright eyes. The look of them, the voice, the wrappings, the concerned devoted soldier servant—these things Mrs. Verity was not too flustered to interpret. Here was a very sick man in¬ deed. Sick, not with wounds, but from the deadliest blow that war has yet learnt to smite.

Gas!

“Oh, please—” faltered Mrs. Verity who, as she con¬ fessed, never did know what to say to “any other” young men.

Her sympathetic face spoke for her. He smiled at her, and added, to Margaret: “I loathe journeys; do you?”

“I simply adore them,” breathed the child, rising to this. “I haven’t been for any, hardly.”

“I have been for too many,” said the invalid. He tossed aside a corner of the fur rug. “I have spent half my life trapesing about—”

“Mr. Charles,” put in his servant, rising, “will you keep yourself properly wrapped up, now?”

“Wallace, you go to—you shut up. Don’t bully me. I can’t curse you above a whisper if you do. Don’t take advantage.” Wallace, having tucked the fur rug in, sank back to his place. The young gassed officer went on: “Well, I haven’t got many more journeys. It’s London, then Switzerland, this next trip.”

“Delightful,” murmured Mrs. Verity. Margaret ex¬ claimed: “Switzerland? Wouldn’t it be lovely if we could go to Switzerland! You are lucky! Toboganning and bob-sleighing and skiing and skating and all those divine things in those books about the ‘Winter Sports’—”

“But they’re packing me off to a sanatorium.”

“Oh, I see. You’re going there to get well.”

The young gassed officer shrugged his shoulders. He added: “And where’s your journey to?”

“London,” exulted the child, lighting up, bouncing in her corner seat. “London for the whole day!” Excite¬ ment took her. Joyously she babbled of the Zoo, the lunch “out,” the theatre. “Have you been to see ‘Peter Pan’? Have you been to lots of matinees, then? Do you know that this is the first time I have been inside a thea¬ tre since I was born? Isn’t it glorious? I’ve been given a very great deal of money for a birthday present, to do what I liked on my twelfth birthday. This is what we are going to do with my five pounds.”

In racing-high spirits, she rattled on so that Mrs. Ver¬ ity would not have been able to check her had she tried—

She didn’t try. She realized. Innocent, unconscious chatter from this gay little creature at the beginnings of life came as a godsend to this sad, self-centered young man setting forth on his last, his hopeless journey. Poign¬ ant indeed was the contrast of that railway-carriage group.

With all his ears he was listening, as though he drank in good cheer from her racing words. His eyes were fas¬ tened upon that vivid face opposite to him.

As he looked at the child, so the eyes of Wallace never left him.

Some time before they got to town (probably at East Croydon), the young man turned from the child to her mother.

“Frightfully rude of me,” he apologized in that pa¬ thetic whisper, “not to have introduced myself. You will forgive the vagaries of an invalid? My name is Mount—Charles Mount. If you don’t mind very much I’ll give you my card. Good Lord, I am buried before my time in this mass of fur junk. Wallace, have I got a card on me? Produce it, will you?” Wallace produced it. “Look here, I am going to write down the address of that beastly Swiss place. Pencil, Wallace. Do you think I might ask you for something?”

“Please do; if there is anything—”

“Look here, I haven’t got anybody belonging to me.

Except Archie, mj young brother. He’s in a destroyer somewhere. Not a healthy job. I’ve no one to write to me except him. Just the two of us, and he might leave me behind, you never know! Letters mean a lot to a— to me— Do you think you could allow me to have a line to say how the little girl enjoys her matinee and that sort of thing? It would be kind. Not if it’s too much trouble, but ... it would be very kind.”

What could tender-hearted Violet Verity say? She was emotioned by the whole incident. Tears softened her always soft eyes. I can imagine how her face, sweetly gentle under her hopeless toque, quivered at this; I can imagine the timid voice that promised, “Of course I’ll write, if you like letters. And will you write, Mr. Mount? and say how you—how you get to Switzerland? Here’s our address. Margaret shall write to you herself about the matinee.”

“Will you, Margaret?” said the young man.

“Oh, rather! I love writing letters. I’ve hardly any to write! I’ll write to you,” promised the child, “until you come home again.”

At Victoria, of course, there was a good deal of bus^ tie, of handing that bundle of rugs across to another platform and of finding those stacks of Mr. Mount’s ex¬ travagant luggage.

Mrs. Verity (eager to help, but, poor dear! perfectly ignorant about what to do once she left her own well-known milieu) waited by him while the grim-faced, stricken Wallace put the fear of God into every porter on the platform. Margaret danced in a narrow circle, like a terrier on a leash, watching the Christmas crowds, the vanloads of holly and mistletoe, the queues of soldier men loaded up for leave.

Mr. Mount murmured: “You’re going to have a won¬ derful day with the child.”

“Yes, I think so. I am sure she’ll enjoy it. (Why can’t I think of something comforting to say to this poor fellow?) She enjoys everything.”

“Hope she always will. Her life ought to be roses all the way. Ghastly, the inevitable way one drops into threadbare quotation, isn’t it ?” he added, as if he and Mrs. Verity were at some dinner party where they had to make talk. “Do you happen to know those other lines—

“ *—on Lethe’s shore

Old Charon, leaning on his oar, waits for my pence ?’ ”

“No. I—I am afraid I haven’t read that poem at

all—”

Here Wallace came hurtling back through the press. “Now, Mr. Charles—”

He lifted his cap. “Not good-bye. I’ll say what the gladiators used to say to Caesar; do you remember?”

Unfortunately, poor Mrs. Verity (out of her long-ago history classes) did remember.

“Hail, Caesar! We, who are about to die, salute you!”

She choked over her good-bye. But he had Margaret’s most joyous smile to take on his journey.

Six weeks after that they had their last news of Charles Mount.

He had died at that sanatorium place in Switzerland, and he had left his very considerable fortune to Miss

Margaret Verity “in gratitude for a friendship which had greatly cheered the last part of his life.”

One of those gigantic swollen fortunes of the war, made out of tinned foods or shoe leather or gramophone records—something that the soldiers had to have in masses!—had been made by the firm of Mount & Sons. The father had not lived to see it, the profits were divided between the two sons, and now the elder, Charles, left his to Miss Verity, free of legacies! Everything was to come to the child at once, without any tiresome trustee¬ ships or tyings-up until she should be twenty-one. Young Archie Mount in the destroyer had his own money. He got the family portraits, his mother’s jewelry and personal belongings. Everything else was to belong to this little stranger whom Charles had seen once, and from whom he had received perhaps half a dozen letters.

Imagine it. . . . Reams came to me from her mother to tell me of this wonderful good fortune. Wasn’t it splendid that Margaret would not have to grow up tram¬ melled and suppressed by the want of the money I After all, the darling was to have every opportunity—educa¬ tion! foreign travel! charming surroundings! She would get to know crowds of the nicest people! would make a circle of delightful friends!

In fact, life was to be roses all the way for this child of twelve.

Nine years later I saw her again.

I must say it was a shock.

Chapter II Tea In The Padded Foom

I N November I went to call on Mrs. Verity at her London house.

This was in Hill Street. One of the tall, ex¬ clusive, discreet-looking small houses of which the front door is as ceremonious as the moulded lid of some quattro¬ cento casket. What a change from the Veritys’ last front door; the ever-open, honeysuckle-garlanded porch of the cottage looking forth across the windy Downs to the sea! Mrs. Verity’s note told me Margaret had bought this Hill Street house just as it stood, as the furniture appealed to her, and that she would presently “add touches” of her own.