The Duchess of Wrexe, Her Decline and Death. Hugh Walpole
she might say to herself, "this half-hour of yours. Is it so bad? What definitely do you fear about it? Is it the knock at the door? Is it the crossing the room? Is it answering questions?"
So challenged her terror did fall, a little, away from her, ashamed at its inadequate cause. So she went to face every peril—"Is the danger really so bad? What exactly is it?…"
May Eversley was thin and spare, small with sharp features, pince-nez, hair brushed sternly back, and every inch of her body trained to the purpose that it was meant to fulfil. She rang her sentences on the air like coin on a plate. Meanwhile, as she explained to Rachel, she had been fighting since she was five. Her mother, Lady Eversley, was the widow of Tom Eversley, now happily deceased, once the most dissolute scamp in Europe. He had died leaving nothing but debts behind him. Since then his widow and his daughter had lived in three little rooms above a public house off Shepherd's Market, and the widow had battled to keep up the gayest of appearances. May had been, at a very early age, introduced to the struggle. "My silver mug and rattle were pawned to get a dress for mother to go to a drawing-room in. I shouldn't be here now if it weren't for an uncle, and it's the last thing he'll do for us. So back I go in two year's time—to do my damnedest."
Of course she was clear-headed—she had to be.
"There are only two sorts of people," she said to Rachel. "Like soup—thick and clear—the Clear ones get on and the Thick don't."
May obviously liked Rachel, but was amused by her. Nobody, it seemed to May, showed so nakedly her emotions as Rachel, and yet, also, nobody could produce, more suddenly, the closest of reserves. May, to whom the world had been, since she was six, a measured plain of contest, marvelled at the poignancy of Rachel's contact with it. "If she's going to be hurt as easily as this by everything, how on earth is she going to get through?"
Then, as the Munich days passed, May found, to her own delight, Rachel's keen sense of humour. Munich afforded enough food for it, and finally one discovered that Rachel smiled more readily than she trembled, but she hid her smile because, as yet, she was not sure of it.
"All she wants," May Eversley concluded, "is to be told things."
Nobody in the world could be better adapted to give out these revelations. London, to May Eversley, was an open book; moreover, the most stormy of battle-fields on which the combatants fought, were wounded, were slain, were gloriously victorious.
She told Rachel a great deal—a great deal about people, a great deal about sets and parties, a great deal about likes and dislikes. She had on her side one burning curiosity to know about Rachel's Duchess. "Is she as terrible, so tremendous as people say? Has she such a brain even now? Old Lady Grandon, who was a great friend when they were both girls, says that she wasn't clever then a bit—rather stupid and shy—but you never know. Jealousy on old Grandon's part, I expect. They say she's wonderful still."
Questions of taste never worried May Eversley, and it did not worry her now that Rachel might dislike so penetrating an inquisition. But at least May got nothing for her trouble. Rachel told her nothing.
May's final word was, "You care too much about it all—care whether it's going to hurt, whether it's going to be frightening or not. My advice to you is, just dash in, snatch what you can, and dash out again. It doesn't matter a hair-pin what anyone says. Everyone says everything in London, and nobody minds. They've all got the shortest memories."
Rachel, sitting now in her little room and thinking of Munich wondered how completely her own discovery of London would coincide with May's. May's idea of it was certainly not Aunt Adela's. Aunt Adela, Rachel thought, was far too dried and brittle to risk any sharp contact with anything. None of her uncles, she further reflected, liked sharp contacts, and yet, how continually grandmother provided them!
How comfortable all of them—Aunt Adela and the uncles—would be without their mother, and yet how proud they were of having her! For herself, Rachel faced her approaching deliverance with a tightening of all the muscles of her body. "I won't care. It shall be as May says—and there are sure to be some comfortable people about, some people who want to make it pleasant for one."
Then there was a tap at the door and Uncle John came in. Uncle John often came in about half-past five. It was a convenient time for him to come, but also, perhaps, he recognized that that approaching half-hour that Rachel was to have with his mother demanded, beforehand, some kind of easy, amiable prologue.
To-day, however, there was more in his comfortable smiling countenance than merely paying a visit warranted. He stood for a moment at the door looking over at her, rather fat but not very, his white hair, his pearl pin, his white spats all gleaming, a rosiness and a cleanliness always about him so that he seemed, at any moment of the day, to have come straight from his tub, having jumped, in his eagerness to see you, into his beautiful clothes, and hurried, all in a glow, to get to you.
"They're all chattering downstairs—chattering like anything. There's Roddy Seddon, old Lady Carloes and Crewner and some young ass Crewner's brought with him and your Uncle Dick looking bored and your Aunt Adela looking nothing at all—and so out of it I came."
He came over and sat on the broad, fat arm of her chair and looked out, in his contented, amiable way, over the light, salmon-coloured and pale, that now had persuaded Portland Place into silence. His eyes seemed to say: "Now this is how I like things—all pink and quiet and comfortable."
Rachel leant a little against his shoulder, and put her hand on his knee—
"You've had tea down there?"
"Yes, thank you—all I wanted. What have you been doing all the afternoon?"
He put his own hand down upon hers.
"Oh! Aunt Adela and I went to look at grandmother's portrait."
"Well?"
"It's as clever as it can be. To anyone who doesn't know her, it's the most wonderful likeness. It's what grandmother would like herself."
He caught the note in her voice that threatened the pink security of Portland Place. He held her hand a little tighter.
"In what way?"
"Oh, it's got the dragons and the tapestry and the purple carpet. All the coloured things that grandmother like so much and that help her so. Why, imagine her for a second in an ordinary room, in an old arm-chair with a worn-out carpet and everlastings on the mantelpiece; what would she do? The young man, whoever he is, has helped her all he can."
Rachel felt his grasp of her hand slacken a little.
"Yes, I know it's wrong of me to talk like that. But it's all so sham. It's like someone in one of those absurd fantastic novels that people write nowadays when half the characters are out of Dickens only put into a real background. I'm frightened of grandmother—you know I always have been—but sometimes I wonder whether–"
She paused.
"Whether there's anything really to be frightened of. And yet the relief when I can get off this half-hour every evening—the relief even now when I'm even grown up—oh! it's absurd!"
"Well, my dear, you're coming out, you're going to break away from all of us—you'll have your own life now to make what you like of."
"Yes, that's all very well. But I've been brought up all wrong. Most girls begin to come out when they're about ten and go on, more and more, until, when the time actually comes, well, there's simply nothing in it. I've never known anyone intimately except May, and now at the thought of crowds and crowds of people, at one moment I'd like to fly into a convent somewhere, and at the next I want to go and be rude to the lot of them—to get in quickly you know, lest they should be rude to me first."
Now that she had begun, it came out in a flood. "Oh! I shall make such a mess of it all. What on earth am I to talk about to these people? What do they want with me or I with them? What have I ever to say to anybody except you and Dr. Chris, and even with you I'm as cross as possible most of the time. Grandmother always thought me a complete fool, and so I suppose I am. If people aren't kind I can't say a word, and if they are I say far too much and blush afterwards for all the nonsense I've poured out. It doesn't matter with you and Dr. Chris because you know me, but the others! And