Ever After (18 page)

As June came in, the streets of London were full of the sound of hammering, while miles of scaffolding went up for seats along the route of the Procession. Space in these was selling for as much as five pounds per person. Flags flew everywhere, shop windows were decorated, and colourful foreign uniforms appeared, the handsome East Indian troops in their bright turbans the most striking of all the visitors. The Queen’s cream-coloured Hanoverian horses were exercised in the Mall, and crowds of people gathered daily to watch the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace. The capital was very crowded, all the great houses were open, and entertaining was on a grand scale. Plague, war, or famine—and all three were abroad in the world—London was
en
fête.

A rumour went round that Victoria would not receive her Kaiser grandson because of her displeasure with his recent behaviour regarding South Africa, and therefore no other sovereigns were expected to attend the Jubilee. In most cases the Queen had indicated her choice for their representatives. The Emperor of Germany was no longer a popular toast at even the most sporting dinner parties, and the yachting carnival at Keil was boycotted by the English amateurs whom Wilhelm had thought to entertain there.

Everyone knew that Greece had intervened to try to save the Cretans from the fate of the Armenians under Turkey’s reign of massacre and terror—and on top of sticking in his highly unwelcome oar in South Africa, the Kaiser persisted in joining the Czar in open support of the Sultan, reckless of the opinion of the rest of Europe.
The
Prussian
policy
under
Frederick
the
Great
was
not
more
strictly
dictated
by
the
personal
whims
of
an
absolute
monarch
than
the
policy
of
Germany
has
been
during
the
past
weeks
of
the
Cretan
crisis,
Bracken wrote for the New York
Star.
It
is
an
unhappy
portent
of
things
to
come
which
will
surely
not
be
lost
on
the
peace
able
and
enlightened
people
of
Germany
….

The next American mail brought him that sheet of his dispatch enclosed in a letter from Cabot, who had blue-pencilled it briskly and written across the margin:
Rats.
The
German
people
love
it.
Who
told
you
they
were
enlightened?
The accompanying letter suggested further that Bracken seemed to have forgotten the salient points of a German tour made in his parents’ company a few years before, and advised him to go back to Berlin and learn his lesson again, if neccessary. Chagrined, Bracken thought back through a pleasant haze of beer-gardens and Strauss waltzes and magnificent mountain scenery, and remembered the heel-clicking Prussian officers with straight backs to their heads, and their arrogant way of walking down the street four abreast so that mere civilians must step off into the gutter to pass; remembered their meek, mute, mousy wives and the anxious, abased politeness of lesser Germans in their presence; remembered his mother’s tart comment that for all their medals and monocles and bowing from the waist and
Küss-
die
-Hand,
the Prussian attitude towards women belonged to the dark ages; remembered her disgust at their ways with muddy boots and cigar-ash and tumbłers in the drawing room, which had caused her to remark that as a class they were hardly house-broken; and he decided that he could do without a refresher course in German human nature. He also made a note to look up who it was that had said that nations generally got the Governments they deserved.

The London Season ambled forward, all its familiar landmarks gilded by the Jubilee gaiety—the Queen’s birthday, the Royal Academy with its Sargents and Abbeys, the Garden Party, Ascot, Goodwood, polo at Ranelagh enlivened by the picturesque presence of the East Indians, the yachting at Cowes—and in addition that summer the Handel Festival at the Crystal Palace, the Duchess of Devonshire’s fancy-dress ball, and the birth of the Jubilee Princess to the Duke and Duchess of York at Sandringham.

Lord Enstone’s household had returned to Gloucestershire before Jubilee Day, to Clare’s and Dinah’s disgust, and once re-established there, it did not go racketing back and forth to London as the family at Farthingale did. Virginia and Sue of course went up to see the Procession, from an expensive window in Pall Mall, and one night Bracken hired a bus, as the fashion was, and took a whole party out to see the Illuminations. The streets of the West End were festooned with coloured electric lights and silk draperies; private homes as well as shops were lighted and decorated. Bracken’s bus joined the continuous stream of vehicles which included everything from costers’ carts full of exhilarated Pearlies, to ducal carriages with two men on the box. Everything had to move at a snail’s pace, with frequent blockades, and the police behaved like gods and like angels. There was a constant exchange of witticisms between them and the
bus-drivers and the Cockney girls, most of it as good as a music hall turn. During the complete stoppages when progress became impossible, the lower classes turned the pavement into an impromptu ballroom and danced schottisches and reels to concertina music. And poor Dinah had to miss all that.

A few nights later Lady Shadwell took Virginia to a State Ball, which Sir Gratian had also been commanded to attend. Virginia wore white lace with pink ribbons and pearls, and the Prince sent his equerry to request a dance, during which His Royal Highness was more than once seen to roar with laughter, which caused some raised eyebrows at his notorious weakness for Americans, especially the pretty ones. They all went to Ascot, in the Enclosure—Virginia in embroidered white batiste over pink glacé, with a white feather boa and a large straw hat; Sue in pale green muslin with a white toque and sunshade; Bracken and the Major in morning clothes and grey toppers. And the Prince recognized Virginia again right across the Lawn, and laughed again, as though at some private joke between them. Poor Clare would have loved Ascot. Virginia tried to console her by asking her to the parties at Farthingale, and always
included
Dinah in the picnics and the informal teas.

Meanwhile Bracken reported on it all to the
Star
, and Cabot even cabled his appreciation of the account of the Procession and an article on the Colonial troops in London which reached the New York office at the end of June:
Never
better
satisfied.
Believe
you
are
surmounting
personal
trouble
superbly.
Both
send
love
. That was unprecedented from Cabot, and Bracken, who admired his father both as a man and as a boss, was warm with pride. He wanted to show the cable to Dinah, who was after all responsible for the state of mind in which he was doing his best work again, but the reference to his trouble was awkward. He put the cable away in a drawer with her note and caught a train for Upper Briarly with a feeling that he had earned a long week-end.

There were guests down from London and he found his household in a slight uproar over the fancy-dress ball which was being given at the Hall in honour of Clare’s début. Bracken had brought down with him his own costume as designed and ordered by Virginia. She had put him into an Elizabethan rig devised solely, he alleged, to advertise his physique. Virginia told him not to be vulgar, and that he went with her Mary Stuart.

“I refuse in any case to behave like the men, if you can call them that, that Mary Stuart always took up with,” said Bracken flippantly. “A worse judge of the male character has seldom if ever been known. Now, take that brute Bothwell—”

Virginia advised him to behave like Leicester and be done with it, which made him stare at her with sudden horrified suspicion.

“What sort of dress is Clare wearing?” he demanded.

“The Virgin Queen,” grinned Virginia.

Bracken was speechless. Then—

“And Dinah?” he rallied feebly. “What have you done with her?”

Virginia said they hadn’t done anything with Dinah because she wasn’t allowed to go to balls yet.

“The hell she isn’t!” Bracken exploded, quite forgetting
himself
. “If Dinah isn’t invited,
I
won’t come!”

Virginia frowned in a perplexed sort of way.

“You know, Bracken, you’ll only make trouble for her, spoiling her like this. Her people aren’t used to it.”

“It’s time she had a little spoiling, if that’s what you call it to treat her like a human being,” he retorted. “You bung yourself right over to the Hall and tell her ladyship that Dinah is coming to that ball or I stage a one-man boycott!”

“Go and tell her yourself!” Virginia suggested.

“All right, I will! Get your riding-clothes on and come along.” He took the stairs two at a time, still boiling.

“But, Bracken, Dinah hasn’t got a dress,” Virginia was objecting as she came downstairs in a riding-habit ten minutes later. “And no one has time to get her one.”

“I have. And so have you. We’ll see to it.”

“But we’d have to go all the way up to London for it!”

“Yes, I expect we will,” he agreed serenely.

He set off on Sunbeam at such a pace that further conversation was impossible.

By the time they had reached the Hall he had got things under control again. When Nash showed them into the tapestry room, where they found Clare writing letters, Bracken was looking bland and lazy, which Virginia recognized as a bad sign and tried to head him off before he could offend Clare.

“Clare, darling, we were thinking—since it’s fancy dress and in your own house and all, why not let Dinah come to the ball?” she began pleasantly before Bracken could speak.

Clare thought it over in her deliberate way.

“She might have, I suppose. But it’s too late now to get her something to wear.”

“
Au
contraire
,” said Bracken softly. “There’s something very wrong with my doublet and I have to go back to Town and see about it in the morning. Virginia is going up with me, and we can choose something for Dinah then.”

“
Ready
made?
Where could you find anything?”

“At a theatrical costumer’s. We’ll fit it on Virginia and get it a little snug.”

“Well, it’s very good of you to trouble,” Clare said slowly. “I’m afraid you two will quite turn Dinah’s head if you keep on. She’s only fifteen, you know.”

“It’s dull for her,” Bracken said easily. “How would
you
like to be shut up with Miss French day in and day out? She’ll hear the music and see other people dressing up. I think it’s heartless not to let her come and share the fun.”

“I don’t know what Father will say,” Clare remarked doubtfully.

“Tell him your American friends, who pamper their children, insisted.”

“Well, if you’re sure you want to bother about her dress—but perhaps we could find her something here that would do and save trouble.”

“No,” said Bracken firmly, for he had been afraid of that. “Since we’re going up anyway we’ll see about it.”

“What’s wrong with your doublet?” Clare asked curiously.

“They’ve bungled it some way since I tried it on.” Bracken began to move Virginia towards the door. “Well, we’ll see you Saturday night—looking forward to it—goodbye—”

He escaped, holding Virginia by the arm.

As they rode away, Virginia looked at him thoughtfully.

“Bracken,” she said, “you’re pretty sweet.”

“Why, thanks, Ginny, nice of you to say so.”

“There’s only one thing. You may be putting ideas into Dinah’s head.”

“What sort of ideas?”

“Romantic ones.”

“Oh, stuff and nonsense, to her I’m just a shade younger than Rip Van Winkle,” he said carelessly, but his heart beat a little faster.

“Darling, just because you’re accustomed to thinking of
yourself
as being on the shelf because of Lisl, you don’t realize that you’re an absolute menace. If I weren’t your sister I’d be terribly gone on you myself.”

“Ginny, dear, spare my blushes! Or are you working up to ask me for money?”

“You may think Dinah’s only a child, but when I was fifteen I was in love with the Barlows’ coachman.”

“I fail to see the connection.”

“Well, Dinah’s at the
age
, Bracken! She’s immature, I grant you, but any time now she’ll begin to take notice.”

“I trust that in any eventuality I shall behave as well as I hope the Barlows’ coachman did!”

“Oh,
idiot
, I never even spoke to him!” Virginia laughed
helplessly
.

“Very well, there you are! I’m not just a handsome profile on the box to Dinah—how
is
my profile, by the way?”

“Divine.”

“Good. But don’t you see, I’m around under foot making an ass of myself all the time. She can’t possibly romanticize me, I’m much too commonplace—as the coachman would have been if you had known him intimately.”

“I don’t think we’re getting anywhere with the coachman, I should never have brought him up. Bracken, I want you to be happy and have everything you want and I think it’s
beastly
about Lisl—but you do underrate yourself, honestly you do. Clare has an
endless
curiosity about you.”

“Has she, indeed!” he murmured.

“—and somehow I find it rather difficult to—well, to suppress all mention of Lisl, and besides, I don’t think it’s fair to Clare.”

“But, Ginny, I’ve never made love to Clare, I’ve never even—”

“Bracken, you don’t have to make love to a girl for her to be most awfully smitten just the same!”