Collected Stories (52 page)

“It is very pleasant to meet you again, after so many years, Seabury. How did you happen to come?”

Because he had liked the place long ago, he told her.

“And I, for the same reason. I live in Paris now. Mrs. Allison tells me you have been out in China all this while. And how are things there?”

“Not so good now, Lady Longstreet, may I still call you? China is rather falling to pieces.”

“Just as here, eh? No, call me as I am known in this hotel, please. When we are alone, you may use my first name; that has survived time and change. As to change, we have got used to it. But you, coming back upon it, this Europe, suddenly … it must give you rather a shock.”

It was she herself who had given him the greatest shock of all, and in one quick, penetrating glance she seemed to read that fact. She shrugged: there was nothing to be done about it. “Chetty, where are you?” she called.

Mrs. Allison came quickly from another room and poured the coffee. Her presence warmed the atmosphere considerably. She seemed unperturbed by the grimness of her friend’s manner; and she herself was a most comfortable little person. Even her too evident
plumpness was comfortable, since she didn’t seem to mind it. She didn’t like living in Paris very well, she said; something rather stiff and chilly about it. But she often ran away and went home to see her nieces and nephews, and they were a jolly lot. Yes, she found it very pleasant here at Aix. And now that an old friend of Gabrielle’s had obligingly turned up, they would have someone to talk to, and that would be a blessing.

Madame de Couçy gave a low, mirthless laugh. “She seems to take a good deal for granted, doesn’t she?”

“Not where I am concerned, if you mean that. I should be deeply grateful for someone to talk to. Between the three of us we may find a great deal.”

“Be sure we shall,” said Mrs. Allison. “We have the past, and the present—which is really very interesting, if only you will let yourself think so. Some of the people here are very novel and amusing, and others are quite like people we used to know. Don’t you find it so, Mr. Seabury?”

He agreed with her and turned to Madame de Couçy. “May I smoke?”

“What a question to ask in these days! Yes, you and Chetty may smoke. I will take a liqueur.”

Mrs. Allison rose. “Gabrielle has a cognac so old and precious that we keep it locked in a cabinet behind the piano.” In opening the cabinet she overturned a framed photograph which fell to the floor. “There goes the General again! No, he didn’t break, dear. We carry so many photographs about with us, Mr. Seabury.”

Madame de Couçy turned to Seabury. “Do you recognize some of my old friends? There are some of yours, too, perhaps. I think I was never sentimental when I was young, but now I travel with my photographs. My friends mean more to me now than when they were alive. I was too ignorant then to realize what remarkable men they were. I supposed the world was always full of great men.”

She left her chair and walked with him about the salon and the long entrance hall, stopping before one and another; uniforms, military and naval, caps and gowns; photographs, drawings, engravings. As she spoke of them the character of her voice changed altogether,—became, indeed, the voice Seabury remembered. The hard, dry tone
was a form of disguise, he conjectured; a protection behind which she addressed people from whom she expected neither recognition nor consideration.

“What an astonishing lot they are, seeing them together like this,” he exclaimed with feeling. “How can a world manage to get on without them?”

“It hasn’t managed very well, has it? You may remember that I was a rather ungrateful young woman. I took what came. A great man’s time, his consideration, his affection, were mine in the natural course of things, I supposed. But it’s not so now. I bow down to them in admiration … gratitude. They are dearer to me than when they were my living friends,—because I understand them better.”

Seabury remarked that the men whose pictures looked down at them were too wise to expect youth and deep discernment in the same person.

“I’m not speaking of discernment; that I had, in a way. I mean ignorance. I simply didn’t know all that lay behind them. I am better informed now. I read everything they wrote, and everything that has been written about them. That is my chief pleasure.”

Seabury smiled indulgently and shook his head. “It wasn’t for what you knew about them that they loved you.”

She put her hand quickly on his arm. “Ah, you said that before you had time to think! You believe, then, that I did mean something to them?” For the first time she fixed on him the low, level, wondering look that he remembered of old: the woman he used to know seemed breathing beside him. When she turned away from him suddenly, he knew it was to hide the tears in her eyes. He had seen her cry once, a long time ago. He had not forgotten.

He took up a photograph and talked, to bridge over a silence in which she could not trust her voice. “What a fine likeness of X—! He was my hero, among the whole group. Perhaps his contradictions fascinated me. I could never see how one side of him managed to live with the other. Yet I know that both sides were perfectly genuine. He was a mystery. And his end was mysterious. No one will ever know where or how. A secret departure on a critical mission, and never an arrival anywhere. It was like him.”

Madame de Couçy turned, with a glow in her eyes such as he had
never seen there in her youth. “The evening his disappearance was announced … Shall I ever forget it! I was in London. The newsboys were crying it in the street. I did not go to bed that night. I sat up in the drawing-room until daylight; hoping, saying the old prayers I used to say with my mother. It was all one could do … Young Harney was with him, you remember. I have always been glad of that. Whatever fate was in store for his chief, Harney would have chosen to share it.”

Seabury stayed much longer with Madame de Couçy than he had intended. The ice once broken, he felt he might never find her so much herself again. They sat talking about people who were no longer in this world. She knew much more about them than he. Knew so much that her talk brought back not only the men, but their period; its security, the solid exterior, the exotic contradictions behind the screen; the deep, claret-coloured closing years of Victoria’s reign. Nobody ever recognizes a period until it has gone by, he reflected: until it lies behind one it is merely everyday life.

The next evening the Thompsons, all four of them, were to dine with Mr. Seabury at the Maison des Fleurs. Their holiday was over, and they would be leaving on the following afternoon. They would stop once more at that spot in the north, to place fresh wreaths, before they took the Channel boat.

When Seabury and his guests were seated and the dinner had been ordered, he was aware that the mother was looking at him rather wistfully. He felt he owed her some confidence, since it was she, really, who had enlightened him. He told her that he had called upon Gabrielle Longstreet last evening.

“And how is she, dear Mr. Seabury? Is she less—less forbidding than when we see her in the Square?”

“She was on her guard at first, but that soon passed. I stayed later than I should have done, but I had a delightful evening. I gather that she is a little antagonistic to the present order—indifferent, at least. But when she talks about her old friends she is quite herself.”

Mrs. Thompson listened eagerly. She hesitated and then asked: “Does she find life pleasant at all, do you think?”

Seabury told her how the lady was surrounded by the photographs and memoirs of her old friends; how she never travelled without them. It had struck him that she was living her life over again,—more understandingly than she lived it the first time.

Mrs. Thompson breathed a little sigh. “Then I know that all is well with her. You have done so much to make our stay here pleasant, Mr. Seabury, but your telling us this is the best of all. Even Father will be interested to know that.”

The stout man, who wore an ancient tail coat made for him when he was much thinner, came out indignantly. “Even Father! I like that! One of the great beauties of our time, and very popular before the divorce.”

His daughter laughed and patted his sleeve. Seabury went on to tell Mrs. Thompson that she had been quite right in surmising the companion to be a friend, not a paid attendant. “And a very charming person, too. She was one of your cleverest music-hall stars. Cherry Beamish.”

Here Father dropped his spoon into his soup. “What’s that? Cherry Beamish? But we haven’t had such another since! Remember her in that coster song, Mother? It went round the world, that did. We were all crazy about her, the boys called her Cherish Beamy. No monkeyshines for her, never got herself mixed up in anything shady.”

“Such a womanly woman in private life,” Mrs. Thompson murmured. “My Dorothy went to school with two of her nieces. An excellent school, and quite dear. Their Aunt Chetty does everything for them. And now she is with Lady Longstreet! One wouldn’t have supposed they’d ever meet, those two. But then things
are
strange now.”

There was no lull in conversation at that dinner. After the father had enjoyed several glasses of champagne he delighted his daughters with an account of how Cherry Beamish used to do the tipsy schoolboy coming in at four in the morning and meeting his tutor in the garden.

Mr. Seabury sat waiting before the hotel in a comfortable car which he now hired by the week. Gabrielle and Chetty drove out with him every day. This afternoon they were to go to Annecy by the wild road along the Echelles. Presently Mrs. Allison came down alone. Gabrille was staying in bed, she said. Last night Seabury had dined with them in their apartment, and Gabrielle had talked too much, she was afraid. “She didn’t sleep afterward, but I think she will make it up today if she is quite alone.”

Seabury handed her into the car. In a few minutes they were running past the lake of Bourget.

“This gives me an opportunity, Mrs. Allison, to ask you how it came about that you’ve become Lady Longstreet’s protector. It’s a beautiful friendship.”

She laughed. “And an amazing one? But I think you must call me Chetty, as she does, if we are to be confidential. Yes, I suppose it must seem to you the queerest partnership that war and desolation have made. But you see, she was so strangely left. When I first began to look after her a little, two years ago, she was ill in an hotel in Paris (we have taken a flat since), and there was no one, positively no one but the hotel people, the French doctor, and an English nurse who had chanced to be within call. It was the nurse, really, who gave me my cue. I had sent flowers, with no name, of course. (What would a bygone music-hall name mean to Gabrielle Longstreet?) And I called often to inquire. One morning I met Nurse Ames just as she was going out into the Champs-Élysées for her exercise, and she asked me to accompany her. She was an experienced woman, not young. She remembered when Gabrielle Longstreet’s name and photographs were known all over the Continent, and when people at home were keen enough upon meeting her. And here she was, dangerously ill in a foreign hotel, and there was no one, simply no one. To be sure, she was registered under the name of her second husband.”

Seabury interrupted. “And who was he, this de Couçy? I have heard nothing about him.”

“I know very little myself, I never met him. They had been friends a long while, I believe. He was killed in action—less than a year
after they were married. His name was a disguise for her, even then. She came from Martinique, you remember, and she had no relatives in England. Longstreet’s people had never liked her. So, you see, she was quite alone.”

Seabury took her plump little hand. “And that was where you came in, Chetty?”

She gave his fingers a squeeze. “Thank you! That’s nice. It was Nurse Ames who did it. The war made a lot of wise nurses. After Gabrielle was well enough to see people, there was no one for her to see! The same thing that had happened to her friends in England had happened over here. The old men had paid the debt of nature, and the young ones were killed or disabled or had lost touch with her. She once had many friends in Paris. Nurse Ames told me that an old French officer, blinded in the war, sometimes came to see her, guided by his little granddaughter. She said her patient had expressed curiosity about the English woman who had sent so many flowers. I wrote a note, asking whether I could be of any service, and signed my professional name. She might recognize it, she might not. We had been on a committee together during the war. She told the nurse to admit me, and that’s how it began.”

Seabury took her hand again. “Now I want you to be frank with me. Had she then, or has she now, money worries at all?”

Cherry Beamish chuckled. “Not she, you may believe! But I have had a few for her. On the whole, she’s behaved very well. She sold her place in Devonshire to advantage, before the war. Her capital is in British bonds. She seems to you harassed?”

“Sometimes.”

Mrs. Allison looked grave and was silent for a little. “Yes,” with a sight, “she gets very low at times. She suffers from strange regrets. She broods on the things she might have done for her friends and didn’t—thinks she was cold to them. Was she, in those days, so indifferent as she makes herself believe?”

Seabury reflected. “Not exactly indifferent. She wouldn’t have been so attractive if she’d been that. She didn’t take things very hard, perhaps. She used to strike me as … well, we might call it unawakened.”

“But wasn’t she the most beautiful creature then! I used to see
her at the races, and at charity bazaars, in my early professional days. After the war broke out and everybody was all mixed up, I was put on an entertainment committee with her. She wasn’t quite the Lady Longstreet of my youth, but she still had that grand style. It was the illness in Paris that broke her. She’s changed very fast ever since. You see she thought, once the war was over, the world would be just as it used to be. Of course it isn’t.”

By this time the car had reached Annecy, and they stopped for tea. The shore of the lake was crowded with young people taking their last dip for the day; sunbrowned backs and shoulders, naked arms and legs. As Mrs. Allison was having her tea on the terrace, she watched the bathers. Presently she twinkled a sly smile at her host. “Do you know, I’m rather glad we didn’t bring Gabrielle! It puts her out terribly to see young people bathing naked. She makes comments that are indecent, really! If only she had a swarm of young nieces and nephews, as I have, she’d see things quite differently, and she’d be much happier. Legs were never wicked to us stage people, and now all the young things know they are not wicked.”