Before the Fact Read online

  She wondered desperately whether it would not be better, the next time he really seemed to want her, to “give herself to him” (she used the cant phrase in her thought) once and for all, marriage or no marriage. She wanted to, really. But it had been impressed on both the Miss McLaidlaws, with all a mother’s earnestness, that once a man has “got what he wants” he wants nothing more; and Lina could not bear to think that Johnnie should want nothing more of her than that – so it seemed better not to risk it.

  Both General and Mrs. McLaidlaw seemed to think that Johnnie wanted a good deal more of her.

  That was another trouble. The General voiced it with soldierly conciseness; Mrs. McLaidlaw was more inclined to hint it in solicitous questions. But her purport was just as plain as her husband’s: both Lina’s parents had conceived the preposterous fear that what Johnnie wanted really was not so much Lina herself as the fifty thousand pounds which would come to Lina, as under their grandmother’s will another equal sum would come to Joyce, on the death of their father. Lina became almost speechless with anger against her parents; but not so speechless that she was unable to say things which no daughter should even think.

  Undeterred, the General gave it as his flat, and undemanded, opinion that all the Aysgarth stock was rotten, that Johnnie was as rotten as the rest, if not a bit rottener, and whether he was after her money or not, if Lina could not do better for herself than marry an Aysgarth, then she should preferably take the veil or whatever it is that women do take when they take anything.

  Lina stood up to her father and brushed angrily aside her mother’s insinuating questions, but they made her very miserable. Not, of course, that there could be anything in them. Whatever Johnnie had been, and by his own boast he had been a bit of a rip, which Lina vaguely deplored and yet felt a little proud of – whatever Johnnie might have been, he was not that sort. Lina knew that. She knew it. And yet – why was he often so cold and uninterested with her nowadays?

  And then she would be sure that Johnnie was beginning to see through her at last. She was not what he had thought her. She was dull, for a man so used to the most accomplished and fascinating women; dull, prim, silly, provincial. Johnnie was beginning to see through her.

  Then she would cry. And having cried, she would set her teeth and say, out loud: “Well, anyhow, I’m not going to let any other woman get him. Never!” Then she would cry again.

  Then, two days later, Johnnie would kiss her so hard, and make love to her so entrancingly, and teasingly try to do such terrifyingly improper things to her, that she would forget for half-a-dozen hours all her trouble.

  The upshot was, of course, that Lina adored him so madly that not all the generals in the world, drawn up in a solid, glittering phalanx between herself and the altar, could have prevented Lina from getting to Johnnie there. Lina admitted humbly to herself that she did not know men; it did not occur to her quite how well Johnnie might know women.

  The spectre of housekeeping brooded over her. Lina, who invariably worried over her troubles in advance, was convinced that she would never make an efficient housekeeper. She would make Johnnie uncomfortable; she would forget the blacking; she would omit to order the cream for the strawberries; there would never be enough of anything in the house. She vowed passionately that she would always look through Johnnie’s shirts when they came back from the laundry. Never should a stentorian bellow echo through her house that there was a blank button missing from some blank garment. But she knew there would be.

  Then she would fall to brooding again over Johnnie’s new coldness, and ask herself for the millionth time whether he really did love her still after all or was just being chivalrous after giving his promise, and if so, whether any measures were not better tried, however desperate, and whether when a girl has lost that she really has lost all.

  Lina was a great trial to her family and her friends during her engagement. She was a great trial to herself too.

  And in any case Johnnie must have loved her after all.

  He must have loved her, because, just three months after their engagement, in early September, he married her.

  In a passion of gratitude Lina was formally bestowed on Johnnie Aysgarth, before God’s altar, by a resigned but still indignant General McLaidlaw.

  CHAPTER II

  “Darling,” Lina said tentatively, “surely it was a 50-franc note you gave the waiter, not a 100-franc one?”

  Johnnie grinned at her as he shovelled the change away into his trouser-pocket. “It was. We put one over on him there. Don’t often catch a French waiter making that sort of mistake, do you? Let’s get on before he realizes.”

  “But – you aren’t going to keep it?”

  “Of course I’m going to keep it,” Johnnie said, in genuine surprise, and stood up.

  Lina picked up her gloves and bag and followed him. She was surprised too, and bewildered. Surely it was downright dishonest to keep the extra fifty francs without saying anything? Yet Johnnie seemed to think it only an excellent joke.

  She walked in silence beside him along the boulevard. She felt somehow hurt, as if Johnnie had cheated her instead of an obscure waiter in the Café de la Paix. Because it was cheating: there was no getting away from it.

  Or wasn’t it? Johnnie would not conceivably cheat consciously, so evidently he did not consider it cheating at all. And yet ...

  Her mind went back to that rather curious incident after lunch yesterday. They had sat on talking for hours, as they often did still, although the honeymoon was now in its seventh, and last, week; and one by one the waiters had disappeared, till at last they had the room to themselves as Johnnie had marked by kissing her across the table. It was twenty minutes to four when at last she went to powder her nose, and certainly Johnnie had not paid the bill then.

  When she came back Johnnie was still alone, but with his hat and gloves in his hand; he had risen at once, and they had gone downstairs. Just as they were going out a waiter had come up to Johnnie and said something. Lina was already halfway through the door, and she had not heard very distinctly, but she had thought he was asking Johnnie if he had paid; Johnnie answered something carelessly, and followed her outside, where they had stepped straight into a taxi by the curb. Lina had happened to look back just as the taxi was starting, and had seen the waiter looking through the glass door at them with a very odd expression, certainly of doubt, almost one might have said of suspicion; he had seemed to be trying to make up his mind, in the half-second at his disposal, whether to run out onto the pavement after them or not.

  It was ridiculous, of course, because Johnnie must have paid while she was powdering her nose, but the waiter’s expression had been so strange that she asked Johnnie herself in the taxi whether he had paid, and Johnnie had said, in some surprise, that of course he had. She had thought no more about it.

  She told herself that it was ridiculous to think any more about it now.

  They were walking towards the Madeleine after their apéritif, to lunch at Voisin’s. Johnnie was finding amusement, as he always did, in the people who passed them.

  “Darling, do look at what’s coming towards us. No, this one with the fuzzy hair. What is he, do you think? An artist, or something escaped from a home? I mean, if he wants to wear a mauve tie with a scarlet shirt I suppose that’s all right, but do you think he ought to be allowed to wear purple socks too? Shall I call a gendarme, darling? I really think we ought to give him in charge for assaulting our eyesight. Hullo, hasn’t that girl’s posterior slipped from its moorings? Shall we stop her and tell her? She’d probably be grateful. I’m sure it ought to be looped up again. You tell her, darling; it’s a woman’s job.”

  “Johnnie,” said Lina, “please come back to the Café de la Paix with me and give that waiter those fifty francs back. To please me.”

  Johnnie laughed and tucked her hand under his arm. “You funny little thing! Aren’t you delighted at having put one over on those thieves for a change? I am, I can tell you. They’
re simply out to rob us at every turn; it gives me a lot of pleasure to get our own back for once.”

  “But it – it’s dishonest, darling,” Lina said, really distressed.

  “Dishonest my hat! I’ve been robbed of a good deal more than fifty francs since we came here. That’s a little back, on account.” He looked down at her, with the mischievous schoolboy’s smile that so peculiarly belonged to him. “You mustn’t be so punctilious, you infant. Besides, it makes me feel good.”

  “To cheat a waiter out of fifty francs?”

  “You funny little thing!” said Johnnie indulgently.

  But Lina did not smile back.

  After lunch Johnnie took her to the best shoe shop in Paris and bought her the most expensive pair of mules in the place, decorated with absurd and delectable flame-coloured feathers. She had mentioned, just by chance, in their bedroom that morning that she really must get a pair of mules before they left Paris.

  She had forgotten all about the fifty francs before they left the shop.

  Johnnie was wonderful.

  2

  On the whole Lina blissfully enjoyed her honeymoon.

  Johnnie was perfect: attentive, affectionate, and patient. They did not have a single cross word, and they laughed and talked inordinately. For the first time in her life Lina found herself able to talk without reserve, and she poured herself out in a flood of words which Johnnie received with at any rate apparently close attention; though from some of his irrelevancies which occasionally followed, Lina was not quite sure whether he had altogether appreciated all the subtler points she had been trying to make. But the mere talking cleared her mind of a lot of lumber that had been accumulating for years.

  For the first week or two she had tortured herself with doubt as to whether she would ever make a satisfactory wife at all.

  She was desperately anxious to find, and to give, complete fulfilment in marriage; but, try as she might at first, she simply could not see what all the fuss was about. It all seemed to her, to say the least, remarkably overrated. With characteristic despair she had decided within the first three days that she never would be satisfactory; that there was something lacking in her which would make her always useless as a wife. It never occurred to her that the conflicting emotions which possessed her might be something that she was sharing with every other bride that had ever been. Her case was unique. No one before could ever have experienced feelings so bewilderingly contradictory and so intense.

  Johnnie was very kind to her, and very gentle, and her adoration for him increased in ratio with the conviction of her own insufficiency. The knowledge that he must be finding her so inadequate, though he never even hinted as much, distressed her unbearably. When he was asleep she lay and cried for hours by his side. Always she had supposed herself passionate; now, put to the test, it appeared that she was not; worse, she could not even begin to understand what passion was. It became clear to her that she had not distinguished between mental and physical passion, taking it for granted that the presence of the one implied the possession of the other. As a wife it was plain that she could never be a success.

  Previous experience reinforced this pessimism. She thought she realized now why she had never been approached in this way before. Other men had instinctively recognized her inadequacy. Only Johnnie had been chivalrously mistaken.

  She tried to say something of all this to Johnnie, and to apologize for her shortcomings; but Johnnie did not seem to understand what was worrying her. It was borne in upon her that Johnnie could not be quite so perceptive, nor even quite so sensitive, as she had imagined. The ideal lover should know the inside of his mistress’s mind as well as he knows his own; for how otherwise can he anticipate her thoughts and fulfil her wishes in advance? Johnnie either did not realize the immensity of the trouble that overshadowed them both, or else was inclined to laugh it away, which Lina could not bear.

  In the same way she was secretly a good deal upset by Johnnie’s proficiency in his love-making. She told herself, and she had told Johnnie too, that it did not matter to her in the least what he had done before he met her. But it did matter. She found herself jealous, sometimes bitterly jealous, of all the women Johnnie had loved before he loved her.

  “I’m being ridiculous,” she told herself, with tears in her eyes. “It’s a fatal mistake to be proprietary. I won’t be proprietary.”

  But she was proprietary. She felt proprietary. Johnnie was hers now, as she was his; and she wished fervently that he could have come to her clean, as she had to him. And yet all the time she could not help thinking how wonderful it was of him to have had so much success and experience.

  Johnnie thought so too.

  On the whole, however, Lina enjoyed her honeymoon.

  Of one thing it was impossible to accuse Johnnie, and that was niggardliness. He spent with an unconscious prodigality that left Lina quite aghast.

  It was Johnnie’s instinct, as it was his upbringing, to go only to the most expensive restaurants and hotels, as it was his instinct to order the most expensive dishes and wines when he got there. He probably did not realize it, but to Lina he seemed to take it for granted that the most expensive things had been prepared for him personally, and it simply never occurred to him to put up with the second best.

  In the same way nothing was too good for Johnnie’s wife. A sheaf of fresh flowers arrived every morning at their suite for her; she had only to mention the most passing wish for a thing and the thing was hers at the first opportunity. Lina, whose own tastes were simple, did not know whether to cry over Johnnie’s extravagance, or smile at the unconscious arrogance that prompted it. Johnnie seemed more boyish to her than ever in his prodigality.

  She remonstrated with him continually, but he only laughed and called her a little provincial; and Lina, who was very conscious of her provincialism in Johnnie’s presence, had to laugh too. Johnnie could always make her laugh. That, Lina knew, is the greatest bond of all between two people, to be ready to laugh at the same things. And they did laugh, enormously. Lina told Johnnie that he had laughed his way through their honeymoon from beginning to end; as indeed he did, and sometimes in the wrong places.

  Once or twice Lina did persuade him to let her take him to some unpretentious little restaurant on the left bank that she remembered from her schooldays, where, in her own private opinion, the food was just as good as in the expensive places and just about ten times less in price; but Johnnie never seemed at home there. In return Johnnie taught her a great deal about drink. Lina thought she drank more on her honeymoon than in all her life before. Sometimes, too, she felt she needed it.

  In public, to Lina’s delight, he was just as attentive and affectionate to her as in private. Any qualms Lina had felt by her wedding day that Johnnie might not be really in love with her, vanished before this open love-making, so Johnnie-like and so un-English. Obviously he adored her, and did not mind the world knowing so. Lina felt little curls of joy twisting through her body when he took her hand across a restaurant table and kissed it right under the waiter’s nose. Nobody but Johnnie could have done a thing like that.

  Already he had a pet name for her. “Monkeyface,” he called her sometimes, because he said that when she was eating she made faces exactly like a monkey; and he would always sit on the opposite side of the table so that he could watch her and crow with delight.

  “Your little jaw pounces on every mouthful as if it hadn’t seen food for a week. Do you know you eat in little snaps? You do. You funny little monkeyface!”

  “My family used to call me ‘letter-box,’ ” Lina would feel constrained to point out, in the way that one is forced to mention something derogatory about one’s self before another person’s praise.

  “ ‘Letter-box!’ ” Johnnie would echo indignantly. “You’ve got the sweetest, most adorable, wickedest little mouth any woman ever had – and what’s more, I’m going to kiss it this instant.”

  “Johnnie, you can’t. Not here!”

&nbs
p; “Can’t I?” Johnnie would retort with his most mischievous smile; and it was made plain that he could.

  Then Lina would vow passionately to herself that she would be an adequate wife, if only Johnnie would go on loving her like this.

  And almost before she knew it had happened, she found that she was an adequate wife after all. It just happened, like that. Johnnie congratulated his pupil, and Lina found herself so happy that it seemed almost sinful; as if one were snatching all the happiness there was in the world, and leaving none over for anyone else.

  After that the honeymoon wildly surpassed even the most entrancing versions of itself that Lina had lived through, when her fancies took that turn, for the last dozen years.

  They got back to England in the last week of October.

  CHAPTER III

  Johnnie leaned back in his chair, crossed one leg over the other, rubbed its silk-covered ankle, and laughed as if this was all the greatest joke in the world. “Not a cent!” he repeated. “I thought you’d better know,” he added.

  “Well, I should hope so,” Lina said tartly. And after a pause, as calmly as she could: “What do you intend to do about it?” Already she saw them begging their bread, from house to house.

  “Oh, I don’t know. I expect something will turn up. It always does.”

  Lina was too upset even to retort with Mr. Micawber.

  Johnnie had just broken the news to her that, after six weeks in their new home, he had no money left: not a penny, for them to live on.

  “But why did you take this house? It’s far bigger than we need. What on earth possessed you?” In her voice dismay was sharpening rapidly into irritation.