Poor Caroline Read online

  That was in 1926. Two years later the Smiths heard that Hugo de la Roux had been killed in a motor accident, that the boy was in America, and the girl quite alone. They decided to let bygones be bygones. Mr. Smith asked his wife to invite Agatha's child to Marshington. Somewhat to their surprise, she came, and within forty-eight hours of her arrival, the Smiths decided that they had been right in their original estimation of the catastrophe of a mixed marriage and its products. They did not like Eleanor de la Roux. They did not like her small, thin figure, her lean brown hands, nor her boyish tweed coats and tailored shirts. They did not like her disconcerting silence, nor her equally disconcerting questions. They did not like her low husky voice, with its faint suggestion of a colonial accent, and her frequent use of Afrikaans ejaculations. She was not what Mrs. Smith called an easy guest. The girls confirmed this condemnation.

  'Well, anyway, she won't be here for long. She says she's going to London to a secretarial college.'

  'Why on earth? When she has done two years at science in South Africa, why doesn't she go on with it?'

  'She says she does not want to be a vet, now.'

  'I expect she's the sort of girl who never knows what she does want.'

  'I don't like this idea of a girl at her age on her own in London,' said Mrs. Smith.

  'Well. We don't want her here, do we?' asked the practical Betty.

  'And she's of age, isn't she? And her money's all her own. She can do what she likes.'

  Eleanor was of age. She had nearly four thousand pounds of her own. She could do what she liked. She was going to London to a secretarial training school to learn shorthand, typing and business method. She did not consult the Smiths about her future. She went forward very quietly, using introductions from her university in the Transvaal, writing her letters, making her plans. She told the Smiths just as much as she thought it necessary for them to know about her business, and she sat for hours, her small hands folded in her lap, her grey eyes staring straight before her, saying nothing, doing nothing.

  'If you ask me,' concluded Betty, 'I should say she was a bit queer in the head.'

  It did not occur to the Smiths to attribute any of their cousin's eccentricity to the shock of her father's death, to her loneliness, her grief, and the disruption of all that had been her former life. They did not know of the agony which kept her wakeful night after night, feeling in her nerves the jolt of her father's car as its wheel caught in the rut, and the axle snapped, turning the whole world upside down in a crashing nightmare. They could know nothing of her torturing wonder whether her father had been stunned immediately, or whether he had lain conscious, helpless, and in pain, pinned beneath the car through the long night and through half the dusty day. The road had been lonely, and a wandering native found him late the following afternoon; and neither the Smiths nor anyone else knew that.

  Eleanor had refused to go with him on that six days' tour in the northern Transvaal. She had wanted to finish her term in the laboratories; she had wanted to play in a tennis match at Potchefstroom. Being a convivial creature, her father disliked driving alone. He enjoyed Eleanor's company. And she had not gone. And because she had not gone, he had probably drunk rather too much whisky at his last stopping-place and he had driven carelessly, and he was dead. Eleanor felt that it was all her fault. There was, it seemed to her in the weeks which followed, no remedy for remorse. Grief might soften; disappointments could be conquered; fears might be proved false. But the pain that gnawed at her mind was constant and untempered.

  She could not endure the Transvaal, because he had died there. She did not want to take her degree and train as a veterinary surgeon, because it seemed ignoble to step into the career thus taken from him. She had come to England because she was sure that she would hate it, to the Smiths because she was sure that they would hate her. Only by inflicting upon herself the discipline of discomfort could she endure her father's death.

  The Smiths had justified, indeed they had exceeded her expectations; they were as vulgar, complacent and stupid as her imagination had depicted them. But irritation can provide an antidote to sorrow, and the Smiths served their purpose.

  Two days before Eleanor left Marshington, she came down rather late to breakfast to hear her relatives sitting in judgment on a letter. The letter was, she gathered, from someone called Caroline. She heard 'Poor Caroline' this and 'Poor Caroline' that, until, for the sake of conversation rather than from any active curiosity, she asked, 'Who is this Caroline, Aunt Enid?'

  'Well, my dear, her father was your Uncle Robert's second cousin. He was a farmer at a place called Denton in the North Riding, and married beneath him, a chemist's daughter. There were two children. The elder girl, Daisy, married, I believe, a jeweller in Newcastle. We never see anything of her now. But Caroline . . .'

  'Caroline's the skeleton in our family cupboard,' cried Betty. 'She's our prize cadger, prize idiot, prize bore, and prize affliction. She lives in some place in London, on her relatives, writing stuff that nobody ever wants to read, and trying to dodge her creditors.'

  'She's an author?' inquired Eleanor, impressed.

  'Well, dear. I should hardly call her that. Authors are people who get their works published. Caroline of course did contrive to get one book into print. It was called The Path of Valour, a devotional volume. But her family had to meet the cost of publication.'

  'Fifty pounds, Mother, wasn't it, eh? eh? Fifty pounds. Eh? Couldn't read a word of it myself,' said Mr. Smith.

  'She's not a very near relation then,' observed Eleanor in

  the dry, precise voice which the Smiths found so unattractive. 'Did you know her very well?'

  'Well, I remember that after her father's death we all spent a holiday together at Hardrascliffe. Your uncle and I were first cousins, you know, Eleanor. Caroline and her sister were just grown up, but we were children. I remember so well that Caroline had a grey serge dress that we thought rather smart - with rows of black velvet round the bottom, and black buttons down the bodice. She was always rather dressy - but too short, and inclined to be plump even then.'

  'Rather go-ahead in those days, wasn't she, Mother? Frizzy fringe and rather fine eyes, and used to carry on with the officers. I remember someone teasing her about lifting her skirt to show her petticoat as she came down the steps along the sea wall. There was a young Carter, wasn't there, a bit sweet on her?'

  'Yes, but he married one of the Miss Peaks of Huntingthorpe, and Caroline had to go and be governess to some people near Selby. It was there that she first became artistic, and set up as the local poetess in the parish magazine. And then she took a situation in a private school near Malvern where she had one of those silly friendships with the head-mistress. A clever woman, that Miss - Miss - what was her name, Betty? I've told you, I know - Thurlby. Adelaide Thurlby. Newnham or Girton or something. But I never liked her from the first. She used to trail round in olive green and old gold tea frocks - Pre-Raphaelite, Caroline called them. Prehistoric, we said. And when the school failed, as of course it would, and Miss Thurlby lost all her money in it, Caroline brought her home to Doncaster where her mother was living, to have a nervous breakdown there very comfortably, though it killed Caroline's mother, we always said. At any rate, she had a stroke just then, and Miss Thurlby got engaged to the local doctor, though Caroline had rather fancied him for herself, I imagine, and then they had a quarrel or something, and Caroline had to borrow money from us to pay for her mother's funeral. She's been borrowing ever since.'

  'More coffee, please, Mother.' Mr. Smith pushed forward his cup. 'Eh, yes. Let it be a lesson to you, Eleanor. Don't fall in love with scheming school marms, and stick to one job if you want to get on, eh?'

  'Well, certainly, Caroline must have tried almost everything. She has been a school matron, and an agent for some sort of educational books, and secretary to a Rescue Home, and travelling companion to Lady Bassett-Graham's imbecile daughter, hasn't she, Mums?'

  'Yes, and it was when she came
back from Italy because Lady Bassett-Graham took a dislike to her, that she changed her name to Denton-Smyth - with a y. Smith wasn't good enough for her.'

  'Well, they does not seem to have done her much good,' said Betty. 'Has anyone waded through that letter yet?'

  'I have, nearly,' said Dorothy.

  'What's it all about?'

  'Oh, she wants my brown coat when I've finished with it, of course. She always wants something. And there's a lot of rot that doesn't seem very important about a cinema company or something.'

  'That's a new craze. Cinemas. She moves with the times. It'll be flying next.'

  'Here, Eleanor, you'd better read this. And learn what you've got to avoid in London.'

  Betty handed to Eleanor the letter headed '40 Lucretia Road, West Kensington, S.W.10.'

  'My dear, dear Enid and Robert,' Eleanor read. 'I feel that I cannot wait any longer to tell you of the great good fortune which has befallen me. The Christian Cinema Company is not only formed, but marching triumphantly along the Road to Victory.' There were eight pages of letter, and Eleanor read them all.

  §2

  Eleanor dug her fingers on to a cracked button, and the syren of her car uttered a long melancholy screech. To Eleanor its note was sweetest music. She pressed again. An errand boy fifty yards ahead nearly fell off his bicycle with surprise. Eleanor steered cautiously round the back of a bus, between two coal carts, a motor ambulance and a taxi, and found herself facing the stormy splendour of the November afternoon. She was looking due west down the Richmond Road. Above the roofs, where the road swooped down upon itself, hung the wild drama of the setting sun. It gleamed on the polished surface of the road. It gilded the metal caps of the coal hatches on the pavement, until they danced like sovereigns dropped by the passers-by. It caught the windows of the taxi, the bottles on the milkboy's bicycle, and the brass on the bonnet of Eleanor's own car. It transfused with jubilant gold the exciting frosty freshness of the November air. The whole of London rose in a golden flame round Eleanor, as she drove for the first time her new car in triumph along the Richmond Road.

  In her new car Eleanor forgot that her heart was broken.

  She had seen the car five days ago in a second-hand shop in the Edgware Road. It stood in the window, a 1925 Clyno, bearing a ticket on its bonnet - '£35. Splendid order.' She had driven a Clyno in South Africa. She knew the engine, and she could do running repairs. She walked into the shop and asked if she might have a trial run. It was good to feel a wheel under her hands again. Because it was in a motorcar that her father had met his death, motoring brought no additional pain to her. She was running the same risks that he had run. She might be killed in a motor accident herself. The possibility of death took away her desire for it. She spent a rapturous week-end overhauling the Clyno, and could hardly wait on Monday until her classes at the secretarial school were finished before she rushed round to the garage. She meant to explore South-West London before supper-time.

  She was glad that her engine was uncertain, her brakes worn, her mudguards battered. There was all the more prospect of fun ahead for her. She enjoyed tinkering with machinery. Her head was clear, her fingers firm and steady. She could apply her attention to mechanical problems with diligence. The more perplexing the problems, the better protection they brought her against sorrow. She beat back remorse by gears, sparking-plugs and carburettors.

  She drove along the Richmond Road, enjoying herself.

  To make quite sure of her lights, she tested them, turning the switch up and down. Twice it responded. The third time it clicked impotently. 'Damn!' muttered Eleanor. 'I knew the battery was a dud.'

  She looked round hopefully for a garage, slowly making her way along the darkening road.

  'Fool. You ought to have made sure about those lights.' It was only a ten-minutes' run back to her own garage, but she had no mind to turn again. She saw a slightly dilapidated establishment on her right, which was, however, far smarter than the garages of the Transvaal. She hooted and screeched her way across the road. The grease-stained mechanic speculated that he would take about half an hour to put her lights in working order.

  'But it's only a five-minutes' job,' protested Eleanor.

  'We must take orders in rotation. No "Ladies First" now that you've got the vote. It's all Equality now,' he leered.

  Eleanor drew herself up to the whole height of her five feet three inches.

  'Certainly pursue your usual routine,' she said, her small nose in the air. 'I was not asking for favours. I shall come back in half an hour.'

  She left the garage and strolled along the road. Even if she had not the car, this still was London, an unknown city, to be investigated, criticized or admired. Richmond Road was clearly no fashionable thoroughfare. Eleanor looked into shop windows displaying glass dishes on which drowsy winter bluebottles crawled, befouling pink sugared hazel nuts and Liquorice All Sorts. She inspected the garments for sale in a Court Dress Agency, wondering who wanted to buy tarnished tinsel slippers and stained georgette frocks, dripping their beads and sequins from dismal threads. A household store offered for sale jars of cheap mayonnaise sauce, soup and tintacks, piled between cracked enamel dishes and feather brooms.

  While in her car, Eleanor had felt majestic and detached from London and its people. She rode along, a stranger, regarding splendour and squalor with indifferent curiosity. Now on the pavement she felt herself part of the loitering or hurrying crowd. She read the ill-written notices pasted along a board outside a stationer's shop. 'Comfortable bed sitting-room for quiet gent. Use gas-ring. 18/-.' 'Respectable married woman wants morning work.' 'Family Bible for Sale. Best offer.' She began to worry about the people who passed by her, wondering whether the man selling shoelaces was really starving, and whether the two young girls with brightly painted faces and wiry bunches of curls protruding from scarlet tam-o'-shanters were really prostitutes 'below the age of consent.' This London was full of problems. Even without a Native question it offered work enough for Sociologists. In South Africa, Eleanor had followed her father, supporting the Labour-Nationalist Pact. She believed in Women's Franchise, and had read My Own Story, by Mrs. Pankhurst, and the Life of Josephine Butler and the first volume of Fabian Essays. But her interest in politics had been purely academic. Here, in the Richmond Road, she was no longer protected by happiness and her father's companionship from her consciousness of human misery. She could not help wondering whether she was right to plan for herself a prosperous business career, in which she was determined to 'make good,' to 'do decently,' to show her brother in America that a girl could get on as well as a boy at money-making. How far was one justified in making use of one's immunity? 'I have capital behind me, and education, and opportunities. All this ugliness and poverty can't really hurt me. I'm immune,' she told herself. 'Had one any right to be immune? Ought one not to hand over one's three thousand pounds to the I.L.P. Winter Campaigning Fund?'

  Eleanor's uneasy questioning brought her to the corner of a street. She found herself standing by the tables on which a second-hand bookseller exposed his desolate wares. Inside the shop were broken chairs, cracked dishes, fans, embroideries, toilet utensils and stained engravings. At her elbow were theological works, school books, and old faded novels, jumbled together in an open box. The books seemed to have taken on the characteristics of the neighbourhood. Once they had been full of vitality, the glory of their writers. Now, nobody wanted them. Compassion and melancholy descended upon Eleanor. She looked around her with distress, and in the fading light her eye caught the name of the street which turned beside her away from Richmond Road.

  'Lucretia Road,' she read. Lucretia Road, now where had she come upon that name before? 40 Lucretia Road, West Kensington. She remembered that breakfast with the Smiths at Marshington six weeks ago, their contemptuous dismissal of Poor Caroline as the skeleton in their family cupboard. Eleanor's instinct was always to open doors and look at skeletons.

  She glanced at her wrist-watch. A quarter of a
n hour still remained before she could return to the garage. She might as well stroll along Lucretia Road to number 40. In her mood of melancholy curiosity she liked to think that she had a relative living in this street. She was not utterly a stranger.

  Lucretia Road itself depressed her. It had evidently once known better days. The houses were large, with deep cavernous basements, and heavy porches supported on peeling plaster columns above the doors. On many porches stood flimsy erections of coloured glass, that once had been conservatories; but now discoloured clothes flapped idly there, growing damper and dirtier through misguided efforts to make them dry. Children with sore faces and dirty coats scrambled up and down the area steps or squabbled drearily in the gutter. Shabby women with slack, dispirited figures trundled prams heavily laden with bulging parcels and cross, unappetizing babies. 'Poor whites,' thought Eleanor. 'This is far worse than Johannesburg. Oh, Lord,' she groaned in spirit, 'what a country.'