This Was Tomorrow (22 page)

“Hermione, I—want to go with Stephen,” she said, and her voice was nearly steady, although the sickness swayed within her.

“
What?
”
Hermione sat up again, with a rustle of bedclothes. “But you swore you didn’t care anything about him! You
swore
you wouldn’t marry him!”

“I—it’s different since then. I didn’t realize—I’m awfully sorry—” Her voice died away. She leaned her forehead against her bent knees. Her palms were cold and wet.

“What will all our friends think? What about Lausanne? For that matter, what about
me?
Do you intend to walk out and leave me with an expensive flat on my hands? The flat we chose together, as our headquarters for the most important effort towards world understanding that is being made today—the
only
important effort, you’ve said so yourself!”

“Perhaps I could find someone else to come and share the expense of the flat with you.”

“Someone else!” cried Hermione, through her teeth. “
Any
one
else, I suppose, to get out of it yourself! It wouldn’t matter whether
I
liked them or not, would it.
I
can live with
anybody,
so long as
you
get away with Stephen!”

“Please, Hermione, I didn’t mean—”

“What it amounts to is just that you’ve fallen in love with him yourself!” Hermione accused, getting husky and beginning to sniffle. “The only man I’ve ever cared tuppence for, but you can’t let any of them alone, you have to go on adding one more scalp to your belt! You haven’t even got the decency to
warn
me, till after you’ve made him propose, you let me go on thinking you’ll play fair as you promised, and then all of a sudden you spring it on me in cold blood that you want to go away with him! You never think of anyone but yourself—”

At this point Evadne scrambled out of bed and ran for the bathroom and threw up her dinner, while Hermione’s voice went on wildly in the bedroom, mixed now with sobs. Returning shaken and limp and chattering with cold, Evadne said sharply, “Oh, do shut up, Hermione, everyone will hear you!” and got into bed and pulled the covers over her head. Even there she could hear Hermione crying out loud, and tried to remember who had the rooms on either side of them. “All right, all right,” she said drearily, defeated once more, and raised herself on one elbow and turned off the last light. “I’ll go to Lausanne.”

A strangled silence ensued from the other bed.

“When?” said Hermione thickly.

“Whenever you like, I suppose.”

“Then we’ll leave tomorrow, after the wedding, in case you change your mind again.” Hermione was never a generous winner.

“Are you coming too?”

“What else do you expect me to do? Grovel to Stephen for his notice after you’ve gone?”

“I’d grovel to Stephen any day,” said Evadne, “if it would do any good.”

“It never does any good to grovel to a man,” said Hermione, who knew less than nothing about them, but always affected a disillusioned cynicism. “They only despise you for it. But there’s one thing about
you
—by the time we get to Lausanne
there’ll be somebody else! And the first time the lights are turned down for an Experience Meeting—”

“Hermione, stop it! You’re being horrible tonight, I can’t bear any more!”

“Then don’t take me for a fool!” said Hermione, and black silence closed on the room.

Evadne lay on her back, gazing dry-eyed into the dark. He will despise me still more for giving in to her like this, she thought. But he hasn’t any idea of what it’s like to cross her, I suppose there are people who could cope with it quite heartlessly and go their way. But I couldn’t be happy with Stephen if I had to remember her like this, bitter and lonely and hating me. You can’t build happiness by wrecking somebody else to get it. I can’t, anyway. The worst of it is, she’s getting so that even if I do what she wants, it’s wrong. Maybe it isn’t any use to try. Maybe I ought to give up on Hermione—but she was so much better for a while. I must try once more to be friends with her. It won’t wreck Stephen to do without me. Nothing wrecks Stephen. He’ll marry someone in America by and by and never know what happened here. He’ll think I didn’t really love him. I
don’t
love him enough to go to him over Hermione’s dead body. Or perhaps I love him too much. I wouldn’t be any good to him that way, I’d be haunted and guilty and ashamed. There are more important things than the way I feel about Stephen, she told herself, striving to recall the doctrines of her beleaguered faith. I must try—to find my way back to them—I must try to find—guidance for Lausanne….

Empty and exhausted, Evadne slept.

The sun shone on Sylvia as a bride, and they drove straight away from the church to the little house near Cheltenham which had been lent them for the honeymoon by a friend of Virginia’s. They were to have it for a fortnight, and then meet Stephen at Southampton to sail for New York.

Sylvia had dispensed with white satin and been married in a
blue going-away suit with a foolish hat, and carried pink roses. Jeff was driving, and for a little while there was silence in the humming car. Then he said, without taking his eyes from the road, “What’s the matter, want to go back and say it’s all a mistake?”

“I feel,” said Sylvia without any heated denials, “as though I had been climbing a long hill for years with no real hope of ever getting to the top—and then suddenly there isn’t any hill any more and the sun is shining and the wind is blowing and—I’ve
got
there!
”

“You mean you really wanted to marry this guy?”

“I really did.”

“I’ve often wondered,” Jeff began in an academic sort of way, “and of course I’ve never had a chance to do any practical research on the subject till now—but it’s often seemed to me very unlikely that any woman ever drives away from her wedding ceremony without a sudden what-have-I-done sensation.”

“Well, take a look at this one,” said Sylvia cheerfully. “It was a tough fight, Mom, but I won. Honestly, Jeff, you thought of more reasons not to marry me!”

“But amongst ’em all, I never said I didn’t love you, did I.”

“No-no, maybe not—”

“Then what are you kicking about?” he asked softly, and she laughed, and touched his hand on the wheel.

“Poor Stevie,” she said after a moment. “I feel very wicked to be so happy.”

“I’m afraid poor Stevie is right up against it,” Jeff agreed soberly.

“You know what I think?” said Sylvia. “I think Hermione is in love with him herself.”

“
What?
That viper? She wouldn’t know how to be!”

“She doesn’t know how, probably. But she watches him—I’ve seen women do it before. You see, darling, Stevie is a special case. He can’t walk across a room, or mention the time of day, without setting up vibrations all round him. It’s partly
his stage training, his stepped-up magnetism and his terrific vitality—and it’s partly just Stevie, which is why he has the rest of it. Women like Hermione, and women
not
like Hermione, for that matter, come to see the show over and over again. They sit out there in the dark, invisible and anonymous, and become the woman on the stage with him. So long as that curtain is up, all his warmth and gaiety and tenderness are for
them,
not for the woman on the stage. Stevie plays in a very special way with his leading-ladies, have you noticed?”

“Can’t say I have, no. Go on.”

“He doesn’t play long, intense love scenes—he doesn’t have to. Every word, every look, is a caress, every move he makes in a dance routine does homage to his partner. He swings her from hand to hand only to show her off better, at a new angle,
her
grace,
her
skill, his pride of
her
—and yet without him there she’d be nothing exceptional. I know, I’ve worked with him. He
makes
you dance, he makes you feel beautiful and adored. Even if you’re his sister,
playing
his sister, he builds you up and encourages you to feel terrific—and pretty soon you
are
terrific. And that comes over the footlights to the women in the audience. See what I mean?”

“Mm. He has to have something to work on, up there on the stage, though.”

“Stevie is the sweetest, most
heartening
person in the world,” said his sister. “It makes for a lot of misunderstandings. People—I mean women—just can’t believe that it doesn’t mean something special, but it’s just that he was born friendly and forgiving, and even after years in the theatre he still expects the best of everybody and brings it out of them too, in spite of themselves. By all the cynical rules, Stevie ought to be taken advantage of right and left—he isn’t careful about contracts and billing, he doesn’t elbow and climb, he doesn’t think he’s the greatest thing on earth—anybody in show business will tell you that’s the way to get no place fast. But look at him. Nobody tops him for sheer drawing power.”

“Very encouraging,” said Jeff. “Go on.”

“Well, getting back to Hermione. We both know he can’t
bear her. But
she
doesn’t know, and never will, from him. Because she can take all his charm and tact and good manners to herself, and it makes her feel good, and so she wants more. Hermione could turn into one of those pathetic women who come and worship him at matinées all through the run, if she couldn’t see him any other way. And this closer association, by accident, in the family, could be just about as fatal to her.”

“In that case, she’s probably jealous of Evadne,” said Jeff.

“She could be.”

“But even so, I don’t see how she could hold Evadne back if Evadne really wanted to marry him.”

“We don’t know what goes on there, Jeff. It’s—sinister,” said Sylvia, and drew up her shoulders in something like a shiver. “Hermione really gives me the creeps. I wouldn’t live with her if you paid me.”

“You’re telling
me
,’ said Jeff grimly. “So why doesn’t Evadne get out? Why should she be immune to the effect Stephen has on women?”

“I don’t think she is. I think she’s desperately unhappy about something. I’ve dreaded for him to fall really in love like this, because heretofore it’s always been so simple for him. Easy come, easy go, and no hard feelings, he never really seemed to care much one way or the other. Evadne’s different. He’s got everything against him now, and he just doesn’t know how to bear it.”

“This is all very interesting,” said Jeff. “And if you can just explain to me
why
it has to be Evadne out of a whole world full of girls, ready, willing, and able—”

“For one thing, she needs help. You’ve said so yourself.”

“She’s past it now, I guess.”

“Oh, don’t say that, don’t give her up, Stevie hasn’t!”

“Since when has Stevie gone round rescuing maidens from minotaurs?”

“Never till now. And anyway, that first night he saw her at the Savoy he didn’t know she needed rescuing. He
says
he fell in love with her then—before he even knew who she was.”

“And tell me, Mrs. Day, do you believe in love at first sight?” Jeff inquired with a slanting look.

“It’s not our kind, Jeff. But it’s just as real to Stevie.”

“Of course I’m prejudiced about Evadne,” he admitted. “Trying to look at it impartially, I can see that she is a very pretty girl—not my type, mind you, but in her way very attractive, with a kind of nitwittedness which might appeal to the men in the white jackets who come to take you away to the Home.”

“She’d forget all that nonsense if she fell in love and got married.”

“I’ve heard Virginia say the same thing. It seems to me a naïve, rather old-fashioned view, but there may be something in it. Would it cure Hermione too?”

“He can’t marry them both. So Hermione might try to prevent him from marrying the one he wants.”

“Does he know all this?”

“He must. I suppose I must make sure, but he doesn’t talk about it. I sometimes think he might do better to leave it for now, and try again next year. Give her a chance to miss him, you know. Sometimes that works.”

“Unless Hermione pushed her at Victor, or some of his pals, to get her out of Stephen’s way.”

Sylvia shook her head.

“I somehow feel that Hermione will try to keep Evadne just where she is, which is what I like least about the whole thing. Hermione will take it out on Evadne.”

“We’re kind of lucky, aren’t we!” Jeff remarked thoughtfully. “The way things ironed out for us, I mean. If anyone had told me the last time I was in Williamsburg that today was coming I’d have said they had a touch of the sun.”

“
Who’s
lucky?” demanded Sylvia. “I’ve
worked
for this! You were harder to land than a barracuda!”

“I resent that,” said Jeff. “I’ll take that up with you later when I have both hands free.”

“There’s our turning!” cried Sylvia, pointing. “On the left. You’ve overshot it!”

“That’s because you were interfering with the driver.” Jeff came to a halt and began to back. “You’re not supposed to annoy the driver of this bus. Where? Oh, I see. Clever girl. I could think of a lot of suggestive things to say—it’s hardly safe to open your mouth about a honeymoon, for fear of being misunderstood. May I put it merely that I want my tea and a little privacy?”

“Put it how you like,” said Sylvia. “I’ll double it.”

“Have I ever mentioned to you,” said Jeff, sailing down the left-hand road, “that I love you to what they call distraction?”

It was not until a rather exhausted family began to trickle in to tea in the drawing-room at Farthingale that Evadne and Hermione were found to be missing. Inquiries brought forth the information that their car was not in the garage, and that in fact they had not returned from the church after the ceremony. Further investigations revealed a note, hitherto undiscovered on Virginia’s dressing-table, which read: