Before the Fact (2 page)

But she had read it. And very bitterly she now resented it.

She began to change for dinner, trying to reason herself into calm.

She was twenty-eight, she reminded herself; not eighteen. What on earth did it matter that a man should have tried on her the hackneyed methods which appeared to be successful with others – and had failed? Nothing. But it
was
annoying, for all that. He should have had the intelligence to realize that she was not the same as other women.

Her nervous exasperation grew.

Johnnie Aysgarth was intolerable. Women had told him for so long that he was irresistible that he believed it. He took it for granted. He traded on it. He considered it made him fascinating to say things which anyone else would not say: to walk up to a girl and talk to her as if he had known her all his life. Did other women really fall for such crude methods? Lina felt herself a Pharisee among her own sex.

“‘It’s you I want to look at, not the view.’”

Insufferable!

“‘I decided as soon as I saw you that you were the only person here’” – No! – “ ‘in this outfit, worth talking to.’”

As she dressed, Lina went over and over the conversation.

It was perfectly clear to her now. What a fool she was to have been taken in at the time. At first he had called her pretty, because he thought she would like that; then he had shifted his attack and said she was interesting to talk to. And that really had got home. Right until after lunch she had been taken in by that. Interesting to talk to!

She could picture Johnnie recounting the scene to a friend.

She did picture it. “Oh, they’ve all got their weakness. I made a bit of a false start, but I soon got round that. I just let her think she was interesting. That’s the line, my boy. If they’re not pretty, they always think they’re interesting. Good Lord, they’ll believe anything you tell ’em in that line; and love you for it.”

She pictured too what the Barnards must have said to him.

“Oh, Lina McLaidlaw. She’s terribly clever. We’re all terrified of her. Her sister married Cecil Witton, you know. Yes, the author. Lina often goes to stay there. She knows all sorts of writers and people. We always feel terribly out of it when she talks about Wells and Edgar Wallace and all those clever people. She’s far too clever for us.” In the country it is the worst social misdemeanour to be clever.

And Johnnie had said: “You watch. She’ll be flirting with me before tea-time.”

He had probably made a bet on it. Hadn’t someone once told her that Johnnie Aysgarth was always ready to make a bet about anything?

Lina pulled her second stocking off with a tug that was positively vicious.

Well, if he had made a bet on it, he had lost. She had not flirted with him. And he had not had the sense to see that she was not of the kind that likes flirting, that she detested the idea of flirting, that she never had flirted in her life. He was just a fool, like the rest of the young men. Rather a different kind of fool, perhaps, but a fool all the same.

Well, what did it matter? He was going to marry one of the rich Barnards. Good luck to him – and her! She would probably never see him again.

She did not see him for so long that she began seriously to fear that she really never would see him again.

As she had reminded herself, Lina was twenty-eight. As she found out, among other things, during the next few days, Johnnie Aysgarth was twenty-seven.

She had said nothing less than the truth when she told him that she knew she was not pretty. She did know it. Her family had informed her of that fact so often and so earnestly that not even the toughest doubt could remain with her. To underline it, they not infrequently called her “Letter-box,” in pleasant allusion to her mouth.

Lina’s younger sister, Joyce, was the pretty one. That had been rubbed into both girls from a very early age. There were no brothers. Joyce, rather against her father’s wish, had married an author who was also a dilettante, or a dilettante who was also an author. At any rate, he had plenty of money of his own besides what Joyce would bring him. Since marrying Joyce he had become quite famous, whether as a result of Joyce’s prettiness or not. Joyce and he lived in London, in a big house in Hampstead, and Lina envied her sister whole-heartedly.

“No, my dear,” had been the burden of Mrs. McLaidlaw’s observations to her elder daughter ever since the latter was out of her ’teens. “No, Joyce has got the looks, and one can’t expect two pretty ones in the same family. You’ve got nothing but your hair and your eyelashes, so you’ll just have to rely on your brains.” Mrs. McLaidlaw belonged to the era when a girl’s assets were reckoned entirely in terms of husband-catching.

Lina had always known that she was supposed to be intelligent.

At eighteen she had been extremely pleased with herself about it. She had joined feminist movements, taken them, as well as herself, very seriously, read a great many pamphlets and even written some, and despised her family and her neighbours in by no means a quiet way. She had despised mere prettiness too, she had despised men, she had despised most things except Lina McLaidlaw.

By twenty-eight her views had very much changed.

Bored at home, longing for escape, and yet never quite able to take the drastic step of leaving it on her own initiative, she had found that her values had been, for a woman, mistaken ones. Her mother’s firm ideas about feminine objectives, and still more her family’s outspoken comments, had had their effect. Lina, always impressionable, arrived at the other extreme. She came, quite imperceptibly, to despise her mind, which was very much above the feminine average, and embraced the idea that the only thing worth having for a woman was looks. Not being pretty she was therefore, as a woman, a failure.

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.

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.”