# After Noon (Ertz)/Chapter 3

MRS. CHALMERS had not rung Charles up without certain little doubts and anxieties. She had had his telephone number in her head for four days. She wanted, for one thing, to give Mr. Hinkson's letter plenty of time to reach him. Also she had a horror of thrusting herself upon strangers. For that reason she had refused a number of letters of introduction that might have been useful to her. Most of them, to be sure, were to Americans living in London, and she hadn't come to London to be drawn into an American circle. She didn't want to be drawn into any circle, but hoped to impinge, gradually, upon several of her own choosing.
Mr. Hinkson's account of Charles, of whom he seemed extremely fond, interested her. She liked the idea of a still young man living alone with two grown-up daughters. A less original parent would, she thought, have provided them with a stepmother. There was, to her, something valiant in his determination not to do so.
"And I think you'll get on very well with the daughters," Mr. Hinkson said.
​He always made her feel twenty, and she liked it. To a man of sixty-four there is little difference between a girl of twenty and a woman of forty, unless he despises his years, and Mr. Hinkson wore them becomingly. Charles had been wrong in his guess. There was nothing whatever of a sentimental nature between them. Mr. Hinkson found her exceedingly attractive, but he also found her astonishingly well-read, and he was more interested in books than in young women. He said, when she told him she was going to England, that he had few friends and could be of little use to her.
"Since my dear wife died," he said, "I no longer care for society. But you must meet my old friend and my brother's partner, Mr. Charles Lester." He added: "Perhaps I ought to warn you that he is shy of women. Or perhaps not so much shy as wary. I blame his unfortunate marriage for that. But he will like you."
"But are you sure?" she had asked.
"So sure," was his answer, "that I am writing to him to-night."
He had meant to write that night, but it was a week or more before he did so, and his letter missed the fast boat it should have travelled on. Mrs. Chalmers had already gone, and was much missed by him. New York astounded and alarmed him, and Mrs. Chalmers was reassuring. ​New York seemed to him—for it was his first visit, and he lived, when not in London, in a Hampshire village—all speed, noise and steel. Mrs. Chalmers read books, and liked to sit by a fire and talk, and there was no noise, nor speed, nor steel about her.
What finally drove her to the telephone was her own loneliness. The few friends she had made on her previous visit were away, and she found herself unpleasantly solitary. There was plenty to occupy her in the daytime, but rather than go out alone at night she spent her evenings reading in her sitting-room and listening to the hooting of the taxis outside in Piccadilly.
When she found that Charles had not had Mr. Hinkson's letter, she felt as though she had entered a strange house unannounced and unexpected, but Charles had hastened to her aid, and she was grateful. She looked forward to his visit with some eagerness. At best, he might prove an agreeable friend; at the worst, he would be someone to talk to.
She dined as usual in her sitting-room. She didn't mind lunching alone in public, but dinner was another matter. It was too depressing. And in spite of the fact that she was not to spend that evening alone, she fell into low spirits and told herself that she had made a mistake in coming to England unaccompanied. Her whole life, she ​was ready to persuade herself, had been a series of mistakes, beginning when she was nineteen.
At nineteen she had had to choose between marrying Edward Chalmers and going to Bryn Mawr. Her inclination had been to refuse Edward Chalmers and accept the four years at the University offered her by a rich aunt. But her sentimental mother used every argument she could think of in favour of an early marriage. It was the natural thing, she said, for a girl to marry a good man and have babies. University education ruined girls for matrimony and motherhood—she often gave talks on "Motherhood" at her club in Buffalo—and turned them out devoid of feminine charm. "Charm" was another of her subjects, and there was something very grotesque in hearing the word so often on her lips, for she was a large, tightly-corseted woman, who looked as though she were made out of blocks of wood. She had a small, pursed-up mouth and an embryonic nose. She wore severe-looking black hats, very smart and fierce. She wanted Lydia to marry young and have dear little babies. She saturated everything to do with matrimony with a syrup of sentiment.
She married them, and put them into a little house that contained every modern improvement, and took a violent and unintelligent interest in everything the young couple thought and did.
​It was five years before Lydia woke up to the fact that her mother was an intolerable meddler, whose views of life were unworthy of a child of ten. She might never have realised this fully but for her father, who saw the cruelty of certain forms of kindness. Physically, Lydia resembled him, but mentally he saw that she was in danger of being her mother's understudy.
The climax came when Lydia's little son, Robert, died. He died because Mrs. Weston was at that time beginning to be a convert to a gentleman named Orpheus Kruperstein, who combined the teachings of Mrs. Eddy, Buddha, Zoroaster, and Tolstoi, with vegetarianism and deep breathing. His slogan was: "Let Nature do it!" in all matters concerning the health of his pupils. Mrs. Weston, a beginner and an enthusiast, interposed her wooden bulk between ailing child and doctor until it was just too late. Her reign ended then for ever. Father and daughter revolted, and with violence. Even Edward Chalmers, who had been Mrs. Weston's stoutest ally, turned against her.
Within a year of this calamity Mr. Weston died, and his widow left Buffalo for a six months' sojourn in California, where she received, as the "Well-known Eastern Club woman," much notice in the society columns of the newspapers. She went to Los Angeles and rented a bungalow, and ​her visit lengthened into a year, at the end of which time she married a "Well-known Club man" and settled down in that city.
Lydia was free of her overwhelming, overbearing mother, but she had lost her son and her father, and Edward, her mother's creature, could hardly console her for their loss. But she kept her house in Buffalo—a newer, larger house with far more modern conveniences—bright and attractive, and dressed herself with care, and was a good wife to him, and when he was away on business she read books and studied philosophy, to which she had been introduced by her father, and her outlook on life kept shifting and shifting. Edward never knew it, but for the first five years of his married life he was married to one woman, and for the last seven to two. But his perceptions were not acute.
She began leading, then, a blameless double life. Her smiles, her interest in her husband's affairs—which were flourishing amazingly—her small talk, her philosophical acceptance of her life, remained, or appeared to remain, the same. She had a certain affection for Edward, enough to make her play her part painstakingly, but not one atom of love. Nor did she fall in love with anyone else, for there was no one sufficiently different to capture her imagination.
How long she could have gone on playing this ​rôle is problematical. One day, returning late from the office in his car, and hurrying, like a good husband, in order not to keep dinner waiting overlong, Edward skidded into a lamp-post and was instantly killed.
When this happened it seemed to Lydia inevitable that it should have happened. It seemed to her to have been from the beginning of time, and she, in turning over the pages of her life, had merely come to it, as she was bound to come.
He left everything of which he died possessed "to my beloved wife, Lydia, the best friend and the finest companion and wife a man ever had. Our marriage has been a true union of souls, and if I pre-decease her, I wish her to know how completely happy she has made me."
This affected her very deeply and painfully. She remembered the day on which he had made the will, or remade it, and how bored and restless she had been. She hardly knew whether to thank God she had made him happy, or mourn to think how mistaken he had been in looking upon their marriage as "a true union of souls."
It seemed to her, then, that she had played her rôle far too well. She felt that she had cheated and deceived him. She was almost convinced that it would have been fairer and more honest to have let him see how far apart they were, even though the knowledge had hurt him and spoilt ​the calm of their married life. She hated herself for those years of smiling acquiescence and for those wifely pretences, when all the time she had been perfectly conscious of acting convincingly and well.
She was ashamed. "A true union of souls!" She thought she would never cease to feel ashamed.
She was thirty-two when he died, with the best years of her life in front of her, and very little idea of what to do with them. She sold the house in Buffalo and moved, with some of her furniture, to a flat in New York. She had been so often visited by death that for some time she found she was unable to free herself from the shadow of it. She lived, therefore, somewhat austerely, and made a few musical and literary friends, and almost persuaded herself that she was content. And then in a fit of restlessness she made up her mind that she must go abroad. She had hoped for some strong motive for the journey, or for the right companion, but as time provided her with neither, she let the flat and prepared to make the journey by herself.
She had been in London a week now, and wondered if it would perhaps be wiser to go to Paris, where she had a few friends. She thought she would prefer London, but her loneliness was becoming oppressive. It wasn't that she missed ​Edward; she refused to deceive herself about that. She missed something that she had never had a vital interst. At fifty she thought she might find it in books. At thirty-six she still looked for it in a man, and a husband.
She had never found friendships with men satisfactory. One was generally, in the end, forced to take them or leave them, a friend being, as a rule, a man who had not yet fallen in love. And having no liking for secrecy or intrigue, there remained only a husband, and all good husbands, she felt, must resemble Edward, while a bad one would only spoil her life. She liked women well enough, but found little satisfaction in their society alone.
She thought seriously while she was waiting for Charles Lester, with Mr. Galsworthy's latest novel in her hands, of taking a small house in London and perhaps adopting a boy. She was a little in love with London, in spite of her soli tary state, and she thought that if she had a house to look after and a child to think of and probably love, she might not want anything more.
She decided that it was all very difficult and went on with her book. At a quarter-past nine Charles was announced.