Before the Fact Page 2

  Indeed, not only did she now despise her brains: she often wished heartily that she had none.

  Intelligence, she had very soon discovered, was in her set the thing above all others which was not done. In a woman it amounted to the unforgivable crime. Kleptomania could always be excused; intelligence never. The rumour of her unfortunate brains frightened the young men away from Lina as effectually as if she had scared them off with a police rattle. The only times she had ever felt glad that she was not a complete fool were on her short and very occasional visits to Joyce, whose circle held to a table of values very different from that prevailing in Abbot Monckford; but she disliked Joyce’s literary young men so heartily that she might just as well have stayed at home.

  These families ...

  What her family had never troubled to tell Lina was that her face, if not conventionally pretty, was a hauntingly attractive one. Among our friends, even among our loves, there are very few faces which we can re-create before the eye of the mind in their fleshly absence. Lina’s was one of these.

  It was a very small face with, except for her mouth, small features: an elfish, puckish little face, which is rare among fair women. Her hair, which even her mother admitted to be a good point, was a pale, silvered gold, and her eyes a vivid blue with very long lashes, curling up at the tip. Her mouth was very red and was only thrown into prominence by the miniature effect of her other features. Her upper lip was short, and her chin very delicate and narrow, though only just holding its own against recession. She was not tall, and her undiluted Scottish ancestry had ensured that her bones, while fine, should be definite; it would have been an exaggeration to call her figure sturdy, but it was certainly not slight. Her hands were very small and very soft. She did not care for games and was no good at them, but she could walk most men off their feet.

  She came of a family of soldiers. Her father was the first McLaidlaw for heaven knew how many generations who had failed to produce a son for the army. Though a genial man, there were times when General McLaidlaw looked gloomily upon his two daughters. Lina knew and quite understood. She was no more of a snob than was good for her, but she was naïvely glad that she was descended in the direct line on her father’s side from Robert the Bruce. The fact would not, however, have deterred her from marrying a man, if she had been in love with him, before whom her parents would have thrown up their hands in horror.

  Women have not the class feeling of men. It is environment rather than instinct which sets their standard. A chorus girl who marries into the peerage can out-dowager any duchess, and a duke’s daughter can be, and frequently is, more vulgar than any shop assistant. If Lina had hesitated at all over an intimacy with a man whom her father would have called an outsider, it would have been only to make sure that there was enough in common between them to make marriage possible; that settled, she would have thought no more about it.

  For Lina now very much wanted to be married.

  She no longer despised men at all. She respected them profoundly.

  She was not happy, and she longed for happiness. She knew herself well enough to realize that she could never be happy alone. And in spite of her brains, Lina at twenty-eight was, in her heart, old-fashioned enough to take it for granted that happiness for a woman lay only in a happy marriage. Having lived all her life in the country, where people do not talk about these things, she had never realized that the percentage of happy marriages among the population of Great Britain is probably something under .0001.

  Lina now wanted to be married very much indeed.

  She nearly had been married, two years ago.

  What Lina had then considered the first, and latterly the only, love affair of her life had then dragged to an ignominious close. It had been with a man of whom her father heartily approved, a solid young landowner in a neighbouring county, of impeccable parentage and equally impeccable reputation. Indeed, the only trifling blot on his perfection was the fact that mentally he resembled one of his own prize bulls, except that the landowner could hardly recognize the significance of a piece of red rag when he saw it; but that of course did not worry General McLaidlaw, and even Lina was able to keep her eyes shut to it. For even the blot had a silver margin: the young man was as solid as one of his own bulls too. For the first time in her life Lina found herself able to lean on someone, morally, at any rate, if perhaps not spiritually; and she found the process singularly restful.

  She had fancied herself very much in love with this rock of gentility.

  When she was away from him she invested him with all sorts of qualities which secretly, though she refused to admit the doubt, she was not at all sure that he possessed. She also put into his mouth certain passionate speeches which she did quite well know that he would never utter. He would, in fact, have gone as deep a red as one of his own Devon cows at the very thought of speech at all on such topics: topics that are obviously undiscussable at all until one is decently married, and probably not to be discussed even then, only performed. When she was with him, it surprised her to find herself at times yawning with boredom.

  His attitude towards her was completely correct. He was kind, if a little obtuse, and most respectful. Lina wished he would not always be quite so respectful. A woman in love, even a young woman, does not want respect. She wants something a good deal warmer. And if she does not get it, she will descend from the pedestal on which she has been unwillingly placed and astonish her worshipper with a totally irrational fit of hysterics.

  Slowly Lina realized that a pillar of any sort, even of respect, though it may be solid, can be incredibly dull. Finding that she had mistaken leaning for love, she allowed the affair to fizzle out. Matters had not even reached the point of a formal engagement, for the pillar was a slow mover. He went back to his pigs and his apple trees, and Lina shed a great number of tears into her pillow, not for what had been but for what had not.

  Lina was no Samson. Within a couple of months the pillar, quite unshattered, had announced his engagement to another, and plainly a more determined, girl; and Lina had resigned herself to perpetual spinsterhood.

  During the last two years nothing had happened to shake her resignation.

  4

  It was actually ten days before Lina saw Johnnie Aysgarth again.

  The day was Sunday, and of the kind that only early April can produce. Lina, having left the Observer to her parents indoors, had taken the Sunday Times out onto the flagged terrace and settled herself in a deck chair in the sun.

  Unfortunately a part of the terrace was under observation from the drive, and though General McLaidlaw had talked for years of running a hedge of lonicera nitida across the vulnerable gap, nothing had ever been done about it. Lina looked up from James Agate’s column to find herself surrounded by Frasers.

  The Frasers were very gay, very modern, very jolly. Everyone always said: “And we must have the Frasers, of course. They make anything go.” Lina found them unbearable.

  “Get your hat on, my dear,” Mrs. Fraser said gaily. “We’ve come to drag you to church.”

  “Oh!” said Lina, jumping up. “I didn’t see you coming.”

  “We wanted to go to the front door,” giggled the eldest Miss Fraser, “but Johnnie saw you out here and insisted on coming round.”

  “Johnnie?” Lina echoed stupidly.

  Among the Frasers she now saw Johnnie Aysgarth, twinkling at her confusion. Lina blushed and hated everyone.

  Her mind groped with difficulty from James Agate, through Johnnie’s unbearably knowledgeable smile, to Mrs. Fraser.

  “Church?” she said, and felt that her conversation lacked sparkle.

  “Place where they pray, dear,” explained the youngest Miss Fraser succinctly. “You must have heard of it. Where they park the parson.” Nobody could say that the Frasers’ conversation lacked sparkle.

  “Hush, dear,” smiled Mrs. Fraser mechanically. And then to Lina: “Yes, really, Lina. The girls absolutely insist on your coming with us.”

 
; “But – I wasn’t thinking about going to church this morning,” Lina stammered.

  “Then think about it now,” said the middle Miss Fraser. “You’ve got to come, so you may as well make up your mind to it.”

  Johnnie Aysgarth said nothing. He just stood there and grinned at her. But his grin was eloquent. Every line of his face told Lina that she was going to join the party, and that he knew she was going to join the party, and she was going to join the party simply because he wished her to do so.

  Lina tried to speak calmly. “In any case, I couldn’t go to church in this frock.” Against her will she caught Johnnie’s eye. It was openly derisive. Lina’s flush deepened. Certainly the implication contained in her banality, that her Creator could bear to be worshipped by Miss McLaidlaw only in her best frock, hardly did credit to one who out of twenty-four persons had been the only one worth talking to.

  “Then change,” said the middle Miss Fraser crisply.

  “And buck up about it,” added her younger sister.

  Mrs. Fraser sank into the deck chair.

  Lina went upstairs in a fury. She knew quite well who was responsible for this preposterous invasion. The “girls” absolutely insisted, did they? Exceedingly likely! And what right had anyone to “insist”? It was insufferable.

  Besides, everyone would see her there, sitting next to Johnnie Aysgarth. Probably he would try to hold her hand during the sermon, or something equally impossible. And everyone would know why she was there, and there would be talk, and people would say the most ridiculous things.

  But what made her most angry of all, as she tore off her frock, was the fact that she simply had not had the strength of mind to refuse.

  “My dear, where are you going?” asked her mother with simple wonder, encountered on the stairs five minutes later.

  Lina held out her prayer book as if it had been a snake. “To church,” she said bitterly.

  “What, all alone?”

  “No, with the Frasers.”

  “The Frasers? But I thought you didn’t like them?”

  “I loathe them,” replied Lina with conviction.

  “Well, thank you, dearest, at any rate. It was quite time one of us went,” said her parent.

  Life in the country has its obligations.

  Lina walked the half mile along the dusty road between Johnnie and Mrs. Fraser in angry silence. She refused to be appeased even by the precocity of the hedges, and allowed her neighbours to exchange comments on them over her head. Johnnie hardly spoke to her at all.

  At the church door she felt his hand on her arm. She tried to shake it off, but it held her too fast. She found herself being detained while the Frasers filed inside. Then, to her unspeakable indignation, she was turned about and marched back along the path, Johnnie’s hand tightly gripping her elbow, right under the eyes of certain other late-comers.

  “Mr. Aysgarth!” she gasped. “What in the world ...?”

  Johnnie’s eyes twinkled at her, just like those of a schoolboy who has brought off a successful prank. “You didn’t think we were really going to church, did you? We’re going for a nice long country walk – on which you’re going to apologize for being so infernally rude to me last week.”

  “I’ll do nothing of the sort!” exploded Lina. “Please let go of my arm at once.”

  “You will, and I won’t. Come along, Lina.”

  They went.

  5

  “Well, dear, who was at church?”

  “I didn’t go after all,” Lina said, helping herself to horseradish sauce from the tray at her side. “I went for a walk.”

  “With the Frasers?” asked Mrs. McLaidlaw in surprise.

  “No, with Johnnie Aysgarth.” It gave her a little thrill of excitement just to speak his name so casually.

  General McLaidlaw drew his bushy brows down over the bridge of his nose in an effort of memory. “Johnnie Aysgarth? That’s Tom Aysgarth’s youngest boy, isn’t it? Pity he’s turned out a rotter. Rough luck on Tom. Tom may have been a fool, but he was always as straight as a die. What’s this, eh? Horseradish? Didn’t know horseradish was in season now. Is it out of a bottle, eh?” asked the General suspiciously.

  “Of course not, dear,” replied Mrs. McLaidlaw, with placid untruth.

  The General helped himself and tasted a portion. “No, this is the real stuff. Tell the difference at once. Can’t stand things out of bottles. Never taste the same.”

  “Never, dear,” agreed Mrs. McLaidlaw.

  “Why do you say Johnnie Aysgarth is a rotter, Father?” Lina asked, quite calmly.

  “Because he is a rotter. Turned out of some club for cheating at cards, wasn’t he? Or ought to have been turned out. Something unpleasant, anyway. What’s he doing down here?”

  “He’s staying at Penshaze. I shouldn’t have thought Lord Middleham would have had him there if he’d ever been turned out of a club for cheating at cards.” Lina’s heart was beating so fast that she could hardly swallow.

  “Well, it might have been a woman. Something ugly, I’m sure. Good heavens,” grumbled General McLaidlaw, “can’t expect me to remember every detail about everybody, can you? Anyhow, it was something to do with a woman. Co-respondent, or something. Or ought to have been co-respondent, or something. It may have been hushed up, but—”

  “Méfie-toi,” said Lina, with a militant sparkle in her eye, “les oreilles domestiques t’écoutent.”

  “Ah! Hum!” said the General and subsided. He always subsided when his daughter addressed him in French. Lina had been at school in Paris, and the General had not.

  Lina did her best to go on with her lunch just as if this was as ordinary a Sunday as all the Sundays of her life before.

  Johnnie Aysgarth had explained everything.

  Lina saw now that she had misjudged him, quite heartlessly. The details were perhaps not quite so clear still, but Johnnie had made it perfectly plain. She had misjudged him.

  He had clung to her so closely on the day of the picnic because never in his life before had he met a girl who had attracted him so much at first sight!

  That had been very interesting to hear. And it was not blarney. Lina, skeptical, very skeptical at first, had gradually become sure that it was not blarney. Then he had avoided her afterwards because he was so afraid he had offended her. He had been afraid – yes, afraid of her. Really afraid. She had alarmed him. She was so poised, so confident, so sure of herself and her ability to handle men. She! Lina had simply had to laugh.

  Johnnie had apologized; he had explained, he had begged for forgiveness. And Lina had forgiven him. For what, had been rather glossed over; but nevertheless, with some ceremony, Johnnie had been forgiven.

  After that the morning had become almost impossibly delightful.

  Lina was to meet him again that afternoon. He was to bring his car, and they were going for a long run, with tea at some charming little inn, wherever they found a charming little inn. There would of course be no difficulty in finding a charming little inn. It was that sort of day.

  At half-past two Johnnie rang through to say that he was terribly, terribly sorry, but his cousins had arranged something or other for the afternoon and it would be quite impossible for him to take Lina out.

  She went upstairs, feeling that life held nothing more for her.

  She did not see Johnnie again for a fortnight. By the end of that time she would have gone to meet him along a mile of public road on her knees.

  6

  Actually, they became engaged about two months later.

  So far as Lina was concerned, it was not a happy engagement.

  At first she was almost unbalanced with happiness. That she, Lina McLaidlaw, Letter-box McLaidlaw, could have fascinated a man so experienced, so witty, so good-looking, so accomplished, so everything a man ought to be, as Johnnie Aysgarth seemed quite incredible. But she had fascinated him. He adored her. He told her so repeatedly, with a mischievous smile at her incredulity. And his kisses carried conviction
. Never had Lina dreamed that kisses could be so convincing. Johnnie kissed her till her jaw ached quite painfully. She was enraptured.

  All her life Lina had felt the need of someone on a pedestal in front of her, to whom she could look up as infallible. Hitherto her father had occupied this position, with a brief deposition in favour of the head mistress of her first school. Now Johnnie was firmly installed, on a bigger, brighter, and better pedestal than had ever been in use before.

  Everything Johnnie did was right.

  To Lina’s horrified joy, he treated her not at all respectfully; hardly even politely. She was clearly very much of a woman to him. It was Lina’s first experience of being a woman. Johnnie, she knew, was the first man who had found her exciting; and prim though she was, almost to prudishness, it had always disturbed her vanity and something deeper than her vanity, that other women, far less intelligent than herself and sometimes downright plain, should to her knowledge have received advances of a kind that she had never encountered. Now she was having them thrust upon her; and though there was layer upon layer of primness to be broken through before she could relish them, so that delight and repulsion were continually at war in her mind, she knew she would be very upset if they were to cease. Besides, if Johnnie made them, they were right. So that though she repulsed the more obvious of them, she did so laughingly and lightly, for all that she was, sometimes, very shocked indeed. She felt that Johnnie would despise her for being shocked.

  But they did cease, spasmodically.

  After the first fortnight or so Lina was sure that Johnnie’s ardour was cooling. He left the neighbourhood, he hardly wrote a line to her when he was away, and when he came back, as he did every now and then for two or three days at a time, he was seldom so hair-raisingly bold with her as he had been.

  Lina wept nightly into her pillow and tried to find the reason. Had she been too cold with him? Had she been idiot enough not to have hidden that she was shocked, and put him off? Had she been too outspoken in their last little quarrel? She so often said things on impulse that she would have given her right hand afterwards to recall. Had she allowed that nervous irritation of hers to fly out with even less cause than usual? It did, so often. Or had she – hopeless thought! – simply ceased to attract him?