The Love-Story of Aliette Brunton
Nevertheless, as an individual, he intended sticking to that position.
All the obstinacy, all the weakness in him combined to reject the
obvious solution. Why the devil _should_ he divorce Aliette? _He_ still
wanted Aliette--wanted her physically--craved for her with a desire so
overpowering that, at times, it drove him almost mad.
"Quite apart from your wife's reputation, you know," the admiral
returned to his oratorial quarter-deck, "you've got to consider your
own. People don't look too kindly on a man who allows his missus to live
openly with some one else. And then, both you and he being in the same
profession! Take it from me, my boy, it won't do you any good."
"It won't do _him_ any good," said Hector viciously. "If I've any
influence with the benchers, I'll get the fellow disbarred before the
year's out; and if I can't get him disbarred at least I'll take"--he
snarled--"other steps."
At the snarl, Adrian lost his temper.
"I've been trying to talk to you like a brother, Hector," he rapped out,
"not like a parson. If you came to me as a parson, I should be bound to
tell you that your attitude isn't Christian at all. It's--damn it!--it's
Hebraic. An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth."
The elder brother turned on his junior.
"Christianity," he sneered. "Is that your Christianity? Free love!"
The junior fidgeted with his white collar.
"We'll leave my Christianity out of the discussion, if you please."
The admiral, also a little hot under the shirt, intervened again.
"Christianity or no Christianity, I maintain that you're putting
yourself in the wrong. Alie's a decent enough little woman. She's always
played the game with you. Even when she ran away with this fellow, she
told you about it before she went. She _did_ tell you, didn't she?"
"Yes."
"What did _you_ say?"
"I told her she could go if she wanted to."
"You didn't try to restrain her?"
"No. I didn't."
"Why not? If you felt so strongly about her going off as you pretend to
now, why didn't you lock her up in her bedroom? Why didn't you go and
see this man Cavendish--knock his head off?"
Infuriated, Hector rose to his feet.
"I have no wish to be disrespectful, sir," he said to his father, "but
my decision is final. I refuse to discuss this matter a minute longer."
And to his brother, "As for you, Adrian, I'll thank you not to
interfere." Then he moved from the table, swung open the door, and
clumped heavily upstairs to his bedroom.
* * * * *
Left alone, the rear-admiral turned to his younger son.
"How's the new baby, Adrian?"
"Getting on splendidly, father."
"Good." The bearded lips chewed at their cigar for a full minute. "A
pity Hector's wife didn't have any kids."
"A great pity, father."
CHAPTER XVII
1
Another month of outlawry went by.
The dahlias in Hyde Park died, cut down by the frost; and with the death
of them there came over Aliette that keen longing for the countryside in
winter-time which only English hunting people know. She used to dream
about hunting; about Miracle, striding full gallop across hedged fields,
steadying himself for his leap, flying his fence, landing, galloping on.
But Miracle--Hector's gift--was lost to her, as hunting was lost, and
nearly every social amenity which made up existence before she met
Ronnie. Between a hunting-season and a hunting-season, she had "dropped
out of things"; had become one of those illegally-mated women whom our
church neglects, our law despises, and our press dares only ignore.
The Aliettes of England! The women whose sole excuse for illegal
matehood is love! There are half a million such in Great Britain to-day:
women whose only crime is that, craving happiness, they have taken their
happiness in defiance of some male.
They are of all classes, our Aliettes. You will find them alike in our
West End and in our slums, in little lost cottages beneath whose windows
the sea moans all day long, and in prim suburban villas where the
milk-cart clatters on asphalt roads and cap-and-aproned servants gossip
of a morning under the peeky laburnum. You will find them--and always
with them, the one man, the mate they have chosen--in Chelsea studios,
on Cornish farms and Yorkshire moorlands, in Glasgow and in Ramsgate, in
a thousand stuffy apartments of Inner London, and in a hundred
unsuspicious boarding-houses of that middle fringe which is neither
Inner London nor Suburbia.
These women--who crave neither "free love" nor the "right to motherhood"
but only the right to married happiness--are the bond-slaves of our
national hypocrisy. Sometimes their own strength, sometimes death,
sometimes money, sometimes the clemency of their legal owners sets them
free. But, for the most part, they live, year after year, in outlawry;
live uncomplaining, faithful to that mate they have taken, bringing up
with loving care and a wise tenderness those children whom--even should
their parents ultimately marry--our law stamps "bastard" from birth to
death.
Meanwhile our priests, our politicians, our lawgivers, and all the
self-righteous Pharisees who have never known the hells of unhappy
marriage, harden their smug hearts; and neither man nor woman in England
may claim release from a drunkard, from a lunatic, from a criminal, or
from any of those thousand and one miseries which wreck the human soul.
2
Powolney Mansions--four impossible Victorian dwelling-places, converted
into one impossible Georgian boarding-house of that middle fringe which
is neither Inner London nor Outer Suburbia--front a quiet road half-way
between the Baron's Court and West Kensington Stations.
"Queen's" being the limit of Aliette's London, it was natural enough
that her deliberate mind, casting about for some less expensive abode
than their hotel near the park, should remember the neighborhood, and
search it for a hiding-place.
Natural enough, too, was that instinct for a hiding-place, in a woman
who had no desire to parade her unmated self before the herd, and no
craving for unnecessary martyrdom.
At the Mansions, six guineas a week (and three extra for Caroline
Staley) provided a bed-sitting-room, complete with a double-bedstead of
squeaking brass, a hard sofa, two harder chairs, a so-called armchair, a
writing-table, three steel engravings of the eighteen-eighties, and a
shilling-in-the-slot gas-stove. The six guineas also provided meals,
served by dingily uniformed waitresses in a crowded communal
dining-room--and "congenial society."
This "congenial society" did not--as the society to which Aliette had
been accustomed--shift its habitat with the seasons; except for an
occasional fortnight in Margate or Clacton, it clung limpet-like to the
Mansions.
Moreover, as the pair discovered within three days, it was eclectic as
well as cliquey--containing gentlefolk and ungentle-folk; workers and
idlers; bounders and the unbounding. Of the first were two pathetic
spinsters who knitted all day before the untended fire in the vast
untended drawing-room, remembering, as lost souls might remember
paradise, the bygone millennium of cheap eggs and cheap income-tax. Of
the last were an Anglo-Indian family, looking for, and never finding, "a
nice easily-run flat." Item, were three foreigners, vague creatures from
vague places, who never seemed to have anything to do, and never seemed
to go to bed; one prosperous commercial traveler who "liked the
sociability"; one ruined squire who had furnished his own room and
hoarded the remnants of a pre-war cellar in its undusted cupboard; and
three mothers of no known social position, whose daughters, dingy at
breakfast, grew demure by lunch-time, and--communal tea
included--sallied forth with mysterious "dancing-partners" to return
mouse-footed in the early dawn. An understrapper from the Belgian
consulate, and a plantation overseer on leave from the Federated Malay
States completed the tally of "Monsieur Mayer's guests.
"A fine gossipy lot, Miss Aliette," judged Caroline Staley, her loyalty
a little strained by, though proof against, her surroundings. "While as
for they maids----"
But the "congenial society" of Powolney Mansions gossiped--the aloof
Aliette knew--neither more nor less than the society she had abandoned.
For--try as one would to hide one's self--awkward meetings were
inevitable.
Never a woman of easy friendships, Hector Brunton's wife before her
elopement had possessed three distinct sets of cordial
acquaintances--the "Moor Park lot," the "London lot," and the "Clyst
Fullerford lot," as she phrased them. Of these, the "Clyst Fullerford
lot" and the "Moor Park lot" (barring Colonel Sanders, the M.F.H., who,
apparently untouched by gossip, greeted her, at walk with Ronnie down
St. James's Street, in his cheeriest voice as "dear Mrs. Brunton")
might, except for an occasional letter forwarded from Lancaster Gate via
Mollie, have inhabited the moon.
And with the "London lot" one never quite knew how one stood. Bachelor
barristers inevitably lifted the hat and smiled. Hugh Spillcroft,
meeting one alone at Harrods, invited one to tea with him and proffered
a tentative sympathy which one gently but firmly rebuffed. Mrs. Needham,
also encountered on a shopping expedition, pretended the most tactful
ignorance, but forbore to inquire after one's husband. Sir Siegfried and
Lady Moss, passing in their Rolls-Royce, looked politically the other
way. Hector's particular friends one, of course, avoided; and, since she
made no overture, one also avoided--a little hurt, perhaps, at the
ingratitude--Mary O'Riordan.
Taking it all round--as Julia Cavendish put it on one of those frequent
afternoons when, always preannounced by telephone, the lovers came to
tea with her--the situation held "little hope and less comfort."
"And it'll get worse," said that indomitable old woman; "it's bound to
get worse if you persist in hiding yourselves, if you go on refusing to
meet anybody. Don't you see, my dear," she turned on Aliette with a
little of her former brusquerie, "that you're playing right into your
husband's hands? Don't make any mistake about _him_. He knows _exactly_
where you are; and, so long as there's no open scandal, so long as you
remain tucked away in that abominable boarding-house, he'll leave you
there. Whereas, if you'll only _make_ the scandal an open one, public
opinion will force him to act. Take it from me, the only thing to be
done is to flaunt yourselves."
"Flaunt?" said Aliette.
"Yes! Flaunt yourselves!" repeated Ronnie's mother, rather pleased with
the literary expression.
"I rather agree," said Ronnie. "That's the way Belfield broke
Carrington. Dash it, we can't go on lying doggo forever. It isn't fair
to Alie."
Since their move to Powolney Mansions, Ronnie had begun to realize the
exact difference in the world's treatment of a man's "lapse" and a
woman's "adultery"; to perceive that he apparently was to be allowed to
go on with his avocation, scanty though the emoluments of that avocation
were becoming, as though nothing had happened; that his clubs and almost
every house he had visited while a bachelor were still open to him as an
unmarried husband, so long as the world, officially, knew nothing of his
"unmarried wife."
"Never mind me, I'm quite"--Aliette glanced round the comfortable
drawing-room, so unlike the spinster-haunted wilderness of the
Mansions--"resigned to my temporary fate."
"Rubbish!" retorted Julia; and went on to elaborate the plan that they
should move from Baron's Court as soon as ever they could find some
residence, the more expensive the better, in Inner London.