# After Noon (Ertz)/Chapter 1

CRISES have a way of thrusting into the limelight hitherto obscure persons; and giving them, for a long or short period, a leading rôle.
This happened to Mrs. Morgan, but, the crisis over, she sank into obscurity again. She was too heavy a body to maintain an elevated position for long. Fate had made her a horrified witness of Mrs. Lester's flight from the Hotel Ampeglio in Rome with a correspondent of one of the London dailies, a Mr. Sweet, whose brief acquaintance with the Lesters had this totally unexpected dénouement.
The Lesters, whom she saw at meal times, or when she was resting after her eternal sight-seeing in the Eternal City, struck her as an ideal young couple. It seemed, altogether, an ideal little family, and the fat girl twins she thought adorable. She admired the handsome Italian nurse. She thought young Mr. Lester—he ​seemed so very young—quite charming in his devotion to the babies and to his wife. Mrs. Lester's clothes and general appearance were admirable. Mr. Sweet, introduced into the little family by Mr. Lester—they had fallen into talk over the morning paper—seemed a suitable adjunct to it. Lonely, stout, warm-hearted Mrs. Morgan took a great interest in them all, but particularly in Mr. Lester, who invariably gave her a pleasant "Good-morning."
Then one day Mrs. Morgan, having returned exhausted from St. Peter's, was resting and knitting in the lounge before lunch. She commanded, from her easy chair, a view of the hall, and she was startled to see Mrs. Lester come in with a high, excited colour and unusual haste, and to see her, after a rapid and impatient conversation with the Manager himself, go hurrying up the stairs as though her very life depended on her exertions; regal, handsome, in a fury, her figure—women had figures then—seeming to expand under the influence of some violent emotion.
Mr. Sweet was leaving that morning for Sicily. Some of his trunks were already waiting in the hall, but to that fact Mrs. Morgan attached, at the moment, no importance at all. She presently saw the nurse come in; saw her lift the babies—a heavy pair—from the pram, which, when not in use, occupied a dark corner of the hall, and saw ​her mount the stairs, a sturdy child in each arm.
Half an hour passed. She went on with her knitting. She had observed nothing out of the common except the haste and the high and angry temper of Mrs. Lester. It was nearly lunch time. She was rolling up her sock and fixing the needles in it when the sound of excited voices reached her ears. Mrs. Lester, dressed for travelling, was hurrying down the stairs followed by porters with luggage and by the nurse who was talking furiously. Mrs. Lester was answering her equally furiously in Italian. At the bottom of the stairs the woman thrust her face into that of her employer, uttered some words that will not be found in any handbook of Italian conversation, laughed scornfully, and remounted the stairs. She nearly ran into the tall figure of Mr. Sweet, who was descending them. She shook an angry fist in his face.
Mrs. Morgan's cheeks burned. She was beginning to understand. Her heart beat violently. Sock in hand she went to the window, and there, waiting in the flat, golden April sunlight, stood the station bus. Mrs. Lester's luggage, mixed indiscriminately with Mr. Sweet's luggage, was being hastily piled on the top of it.
She saw the suave Mr. Sweet, unflurried and generous, distribute largesse to the hotel servants. She did not see the Manager, who was doubtless ​keeping out of the way. Mr. Sweet handed Mrs. Lester into the bus, and the door was shut. She 'saw them both glance up and down the street and at the windows of the hotel. Mrs. Lester's eyes met hers, and she started back from the window, her cheeks scarlet. The driver used his whip and the bus lurched forward out of Mrs. Morgan's sight.
Just four minutes later Charles Lester, carrying a bouquet of roses, entered the hotel. He glanced into the lounge, saw Mrs. Morgan sitting inertly in her chair, said "Good-morning" to her, and went eagerly up the stairs. Mrs. Morgan closed her eyes and trembled.
The next day she became the central figure in that little domestic drama. Unable any longer to maintain silence she told the stricken and white-faced young man that she knew all about it, and that as she was soon returning to England herself, she would gladly accompany him and take care of the babies.
"As for that nurse," she told him, "what I say is, good riddance to bad rubbish."
She was invaluable. He couldn't imagine what he would have done without her on that journey to London. She played the part of nurse and temporary mother to the babies with such ferocious sympathy that Charles, whose sense of humour didn't even then desert him, was genu​inely sorry to see the last of her at Victoria Station. She was not only invaluable, she was also, in her way, extremely diverting, and Heaven knew he needed diversion just then.
Yes, he would be all right now, he assured her. He would put the babies to bed the moment he arrived; and, please God, the nurse he had written and wired for would be on hand in the morning. Caroline and Venetia, too tired to cry, were propped up one against the other in a corner of the four-wheeler, which smelt of the stables, while Charles, hat in hand, tried to thank Mrs. Morgan for all she had done for him.
The moment lingered in his memory for years. He remembered the hurrying people, the slamming and banging of train doors, the air—unexpectedly warm for April—full of the choky, acrid smell of engine smoke. He never forgot Mrs. Morgan in her bulky wraps and shapeless hat, with the tears starting from her eyes. She was returning to Aberystwith, and a life made up of small, drab things, a life that would again receive her, after a two-months' sojourn in Rome, entirely unchanged.
"Should I kiss her?" Charles asked himself. The tears had started on their way now, and he looked for a dry place on her cheeks. To kiss her seemed the only way in which he could ade​quately thank her, but doubt and shyness and those tears dismissed the impulse.
She begged him not to mention gratitude.
"A woman and a mother," she said, "couldn't have done less."
And they both thought of Brenda, who was both a woman and a mother, and who was now in Sicily with another man.
"You poor, dear boy," she said, and suddenly she lifted up her face and kissed him. Then, flicking a handkerchief from some convenient pocket, she turned away and glanced into the cab to make sure that the babies were not, at the moment, in need of her. Charles put her into her own four-wheeler and she drove off, waving to him and kissing her hand. Her moment was over.
He gave the address to his own driver, and, getting into the cab, carefully lifted a child into each arm. One of them cried a little; he was not sure in the dark which it was; but weariness soon overcame them again, and they slumbered peacefully enough against his coat. They were hardly aware, as yet, of life's changes. Comfort and discomfort were so far their most poignant experiences.
And as the cab trundled through the familiar streets, Charles, for the hundredth time since the ​day Brenda left him, looked back and reviewed his life.
He had not wanted or intended to marry at twenty-one. He had been married by one of those women to whom love and even marriage are only adventures, and, at the same time, the only adventures. She bore the romantic name of Brenda Mocatta, and was a middle-class exotic of surprising good looks who lived at Sydenham, within a mile of the Crystal Palace. Her father was a well-to-do bicycle manufacturer, and had never attempted to deny her anything she wanted. When she was twenty-five he died, and she found herself an orphan, an heiress, and something of a beauty, and she despised her surroundings. She wanted to marry a gentleman, and considered that there were none among her acquaintances.
One warm summer day she and Charles shared a third-class compartment—she preferred travelling third because she always found people to talk to—on their way to Devonshire. Charles was going to visit his mother who had a cottage near Paignton; Brenda was going to try her luck at Torquay. They fell into conversation over a book that Brenda was reading and that Charles condemned. It was called The Mighty Atom. Charles was the first "clever" man who had come her way. She was impressed by his original and emphatically stated opinions, and by his ease of ​manner. He talked to her freely, treating her, she thought, almost like another man. A thrill of excitement ran through her when he doubted the existence of an all-wise and all-seeing Providence. This she felt was dangerous and rather wicked, and to her it was altogether new. There were other kinds of wickedness to which she had accustomed herself. She had always believed that she might, at some very remote date, be punished for certain shortcomings of her own, but that time seemed so far off that she. rarely troubled herself about it. Also she meant, before that date, to turn over an entirely new leaf, and this change of heart could not, she felt, but be gratifying to the Higher Power which she had been taught to fear and to placate.
But here was a young man who didn't believe in a Heaven and rewards and punishments all round, and yet seemed willing to practise virtue for its own sake. She found him a fascinating puzzle.
She asked him if he were related to Sir Bindon Lester, whose books she had been reluctantly obliged to study at school. He said that Sir Bindon was his father's brother.
"And are you a naturalist too?" she asked.
Charles said that one naturalist in the family was enough. He himself was a proof reader in a small publishing house. She gasped when he ​told her what his salary was. Surely, she said, he didn't mean to go on living like that. Hadn't he any ambition? Why, that wasn't living at all.
"At the moment," said the youthful Charles, "I am perfectly satisfied. I'm only twenty, and what I earn is enough for my present needs. My mother has an annuity and a hundred a year from my uncle. So we've no worries."
Brenda thought this showed a lamentable lack of spirit and said so, and they argued about ambition as young people will until the end of the journey cut their argument short. She asked Charles if he would come and lunch with her at Torquay, and named a day, for she had no intention of letting him slip out of her life, as, left to himself, he would have done.
He went, and was startled by the magnificence with which she was surrounded. She was staying at the best hotel in Torquay, under the nominal chaperonage of an invalid aunt who had a companion nurse, and took her meals in her room. Charles never met this lady, though her name, then and after, was often on Brenda's lips.
That lunch, a lunch in which champagne and early grouse played their brief and expensive part, must have cost her, Charles reckoned, over three pounds. It made him very thoughtful.
"This won't do," he told himself, after a third ​visit, and, not satisfied with telling himself, he told her. She saw that he was about to withdraw, honourably, from her life, and at once opened her attack. He was astounded, and, for he was very young, immensely flattered by her termination to place herself and her wea. his disposal. She saw in him a young and agreeable companion: well-mannered, unversed as yet in love, of good appearance, capable, with money behind him, of becoming everything she desired in a husband.
She was very handsome with her flashing brown eyes and her high colour. She brushed aside all his perfectly sincere objections, and with creditable insight into his character she pointed out to him the smallness, and—yes—the vulgarity of making money a barrier to love.
"A man with ideas like yours," she said, taunting and flattering him in one breath, "ought to be able to ignore money, or at least give it its proper value. It seems to me you're making a terrific to-do about a thing you pretend to despise."
For Charles had "advanced" views, and even in those days spoke of her money as "unearned increment." But her warmth, her generosity, her passion, overwhelmed him. It seemed useless and absurd to struggle against what seemed to be so obviously and so fortunately his fate. More​over, he was deeply in love, and she was five years his senior. In the end she won.
She hid nothing of her past from him, and he admired her for her honesty, for twenty years ago few women had the courage to be honest about themselves. They married, he at twenty-one, Brenda at twenty-six, and went to Italy for their honeymoon. And in Italy they remained, as Brenda considered it the right setting for such a love as theirs, for nearly four years, without once returning to England. She was a silly, romantic woman, seen with a coldly discerning eye, and she consumed and exploited Charles, and did her best to tame him completely. For three years he was feverishly happy, but restlessness and discontent began in the fourth year. The twins were born in Florence, but Venetia was named after the city in which they spent the early part of their honeymoon.
As babies they interested Charles very little, although their physical welfare was always of great importance to him. His love for them, he knew, would come later. Meanwhile, an Italian nurse took charge of them, and it was over this nurse that he and Brenda had their first disagreement. He wanted an English nurse for the children; Brenda wanted nothing English except an English husband. She was in love with Italy and wanted to italianise herself and all of them, and ​Charles's longing for England and for work and for a settled home exasperated her. She had had enough of Sydenham, and of all Sydenham had meant to her, and to her England, in retrospect, seemed one vast Sydenham. She wanted, and she meant to have, a villa in Florence and a flat in Rome. "And after all," she now began to ask, "whose money is it?"
It was the inevitable question.
But Charles, infatuated though he still was, made one day for the first and last time a stand. He made it, literally enough, in front of Cook's offices in Rome. He implored Brenda to agree to his going in and buying tickets for England, for all of them. It was time that they gave up this aimless wandering about the Continent. He said it was demoralising.
She laughed at him. She was not a quarrelsome woman. They had never had a real quarrel. She only laughed and said:
"Don't be a fool, Charles. You know perfectly well I've no intention of going back to England."
"I tell you I mean to buy those tickets here and now," he warned her, angry and desperate.
She looked strangely at him.
"You really mean that?"
"I do."
​"You'll be sorry for this," she said quietly, and walked away, leaving him standing there.
He looked after her, expecting to see her turn and come back and say: "Oh, very well then . . ." But she did nothing of the sort. She stepped instead into an open cab that was passing, and drove away, out of his sight.
He bought the tickets—and with Brenda's money. He knew he was doing the right thing, but that he could only do the right thing in the wrong way—with money that was not really his—made him feel, for the first time, heartily sick of that state of affairs.
She'd give in, he felt certain, now that the tickets were actually bought. She'd give in and they'd go back to England and perhaps take a house in the country somewhere, near London, and he'd get a job. Work—he longed for work. He wanted to be able to make Brenda a present that she wouldn't eventually pay for. He saw himself buying a pony for the children. He made up his mind to earn, in the near future, a salary of at least a thousand a year.
"A job and a thousand a year," he told himself humorously, vexed and unhappy though he was, "will make an honest man of me."
This life that he'd been living, he decided, had been playing hell with his moral fibre. Now that he had the tickets in his pocket he dreaded re​turning to the hotel and facing Brenda. Instead he walked the streets for nearly an hour, wondering how he might best placate her. In the end he bought a bunch of fine roses at a florist's and turned his steps rapidly toward the Ampeglio.
He found the time-honoured note waiting for him, written in such haste or in such a fury, or both, that he could barely read it. She had gone off with Leonard Sweet. He understood then her recent enthusiasm for Titian, Correggio and Tintoretto, and her frequent visits to the galleries. She said that if he wanted domesticity in England he must have it with someone else. She had given him the best years of his life and paid for them too, and as he felt he couldn't make the least sacrifice for her, she was going away with someone who could and would. She didn't feel at all ashamed of what she was doing. She enclosed a cheque for a hundred pounds.
I know you'll be good to the babies. Divorce me or not, as you like. I don't care. You don't want to lead my life; and I certainly won't lead yours. Good-bye.
Brenda.
She had acted with a consistency that was almost admirable. Charles's logical mind perceived—until pain swamped all thought—that she had done exactly as she might have been expected to do. As is usually the case with blows of great ​suddenness and violence, he merely felt numb at first, and wondered that he suffered so little. But within an hour he was nearly mad with the pain of his own thoughts—a pain that was increased and inflamed by the feeling that he ought, properly, to pursue them and bring her back; that he ought, properly, to kill, or try to kill, Leonard Sweet. In Italy, especially, such acts were expected of a man in his position.
But he soon dealt firmly with these doubts. He had, first of all, to think of his children. Whatever happened, he had no intention of leaving them in the sole charge of the swarthy Adelina, whom he had never liked or trusted. He sent for her. She was full of voluble pity. The Signor could trust her with everything. Her heart bled for the Signor. She would love the little ones now not only as a nurse but as a mother. She would devote her life to them. Her black rolling eyes had too much meaning in them. Charles, disgusted and alarmed, paid her a month's wages in advance and told her he no longer needed her, as he was returning to England with the children at once, and alone.
She became abusive then; she jeered and taunted him, and called him names, and made horns with her fingers. He had to accelerate her departure by the threat of the police.
It was then that Mrs. Morgan made her nicely ​timed entry. She took the babies under her wing and gave Charles a chance to make preparations for the journey, and for their arrival in London. He was so busy during the day that he had no time to think of Brenda, but at night he lay awake and stared at the dark with wide, sleepless eyes.
He was only twenty-four—a boy still. It seemed to him incredible that such a thing should have happened to him. His experience, his knowledge of life before marriage had been very slight, and since his marriage his life had been too unusual, too romantic, to prepare him for any such catastrophe.
He didn't tell himself that she had left him for a grand passion. She had left him, he believed, for a man who would, for a few years at least, do exactly what she wanted him to do; for a newer and, therefore, more tractable lover.
For nearly four years he and Brenda had been all in all to each other. The tremendous intimacy of love and marriage that, he supposed in his inexperience, welded two people into one, had done nothing of the sort. It had left two people what they were before—entirely separate beings, pulling, as often as not, in opposite directions. The tie that he had thought unbreakable had snapped like a bit of worn silk. Even the begetting of children had made no difference. It was incredibly awful, incredibly disillusioning. Mar​riage . . . motherhood . . . fatherhood . . . all these things that he had thought sacred meant nothing.
No, he argued, that wasn't true. Fatherhood meant something. Those fat twin girls were his now. His to keep for ever. They depended utterly now on him. Thinking of this, his pain grew less. He lay there, staring into the dark, alone for the first time since his marriage, and made plans. And making these plans he no longer saw Brenda with her eager, over-warm brown eyes, and the curves of her full figure; he no longer saw Sweet with his suave, languid manner, his smooth hair and drooping moustache; he concentrated his mind instead upon himself and upon the children. He would have his work cut out for him, and he wasn't going to ask for help from anybody. They were his; they must depend on him. He wanted them to depend on him.
"I'll get a good nurse for them in England," he said to himself. "But I'm damned if any other woman is going to interfere. I'll accept Mrs. Morgan's help for the present, but after that I'll manage alone."
He had cause to thank Heaven for Mrs. Morgan's help, even while he found her pity a little trying. It embarrassed him and made him feel that he was very much in the position of a betrayed and deserted woman—the victim, in fact, ​of a vulgar seduction. A hideous thought. But Brenda had been so much the aggressor, the active one, that the comparison was painfully true.
And then it presently struck him that the situation was full of a mordant sort of comedy, and he laughed. To be the father, at twenty-four, of motherless twin girls is not the lot of many young men. He forgave Mrs. Morgan for her lack of tact, and decided to regard the whole situation as humourous. It was a good substitute for his feelings of the night, feelings that seemed heroic and rather ridiculous when seen by the light of day. He'd pull through somehow, and meanwhile it really was somewhat comic.
Between those moments outside Cook's offices and his arrival at Lancaster Gate he purged himself of much that had been a part of his life. He saw that if he had been a year or two older when Brenda had crossed his path he could have withstood her. He had been the victim of his own youth, and neither in the future nor at that moment need he blame himself unduly.
"And after all," he told himself as the four-wheeler trundled over the Serpentine Bridge, "to have been for nearly four years a combination of courier and hired husband to an adventuress ought to teach a man something."
Venetia—he thought it was Venetia—stirred in his arms.
​"You're in England now," he said, holding her closer, "where you belong. Before you're much older you'll come and play under these very trees. And I'll buy you a little dog and pay for it myself."
At the sight of Lancaster Gate, however, gloomy and dim in the lamplight, some of his elation departed from him. He remembered the palace in Florence where they had had a flat one winter. He thought of the sunshine and the tulips of Rome. But it was England, all the same, and they wouldn't live in Lancaster Gate in a boarding-house recommended by Mrs. Morgan for ever.
A woman of awful gentility welcomed them in the hall—but not too warmly, for her bed time was ten o'clock, and it was now long after, and the vagaries of the Channel did not exist for her. It was a monstrous house, and solemn, with high ceilings, badly lighted rooms, draughty stone passages, odorous flickering gas behind coloured globes, aspidistras, and shiny oil paintings in heavy gilt frames.
A man like a black beetle emerged from below stairs to carry up the trunks, and Charles, weary and burdened though he was, couldn't help wondering what that man's life was like, if he were married or single, and if he found existence tolerable or wholly bad.
​Miss FitzHerbert—pictures of her probable ancestors and the decline of some branch of them flashed through Charles's mind—led him upstairs, carrying the sleeping children in his arms. Their rooms were on the third floor: a large front room for children and nurse, and a narrow slice of a room at the back for himself. The children's and nurse's meals would be served in their room; Charles would, of course, take his meals in the public dining-room.
"We have only the very nicest people here," Miss FitzHerbert told him. "Ladies and gentlemen, as you will see for yourself. Only last week a cousin of Lady Montcalm's left me, after a stay of nane years. She could hardly bear to say good-goobaye."
"All I want," said Charles concisely, as he laid the babies on the bed, "is clean rooms, good plain food, and not too many extras on the bills."
He began to struggle with buttons, tapes and pins. Miss FitzHerbert did not offer to help him. She said "Good-nate," showing false teeth of amazing size and regularity, and went away, upstairs or downstairs, to some dark eerie of her own, to which Charles's mind did not follow her.