CHAPTER 7.
Azalea Deane was a much befamilied young woman, who was leaving “mile 30” behind so rapidly that it was already quite blurred in the distance. Ahead, there stretched a bleak and desolate roadway, leading right into the heart of that repository for the husks of men—Beechwood—and at the best of times, she found her journey wearisome and uninspiriting.
She did not cavil at her fate. No one ever heard Azalea complain—of poverty, obscurity, dullness or villenage. She accepted her destiny with a fine stoicism, which reflected itself in well-feigned indifference and enabled her to proceed along the same monotonous route at the same monotonous speed, with the same monotonous companions month after month, and year after year, without developing gangrene of the soul or breaking into open revolt.
“Oh, God,” she prayed each morning, before descending to the agitated atmosphere of the breakfast table, “keep me from being difficult to live with!”
And Heaven heard her prayer.
No one really knew Azalea—least of all, her family. Perhaps, no one ever really knows anyone else, a phase of ignorance which, personally, I am not inclined to deplore. Souls should be clad no less than bodies. They should be gowned with decency, and in so far as possible, loveliness; and if, now and again, the garment slips or wears thin, then should the beholder turn his eyes away, nor seek to pry into anything that may be so terrible or so sublime.
Outwardly, as Lady Denby had said, Azalea was a plain little person. She should have been dainty of form, but through some irreparable miscalculation, the Creator had dowered her with the large features, hands and feet designed for some much more ample person. Therefore, she gave no pleasure to the sensitive, artistic eye, and this was an acute grievance to her who possessed a deep and pagan love for Beauty. She was a toneless girl, with thin, straight, dun-coloured hair which she could not afford to keep marcelled. Her eyes were unarresting, as a rule; too sharp to be appealing and not lustrous enough to sparkle. Her skin had a sandy cast and usually shone. Even when rouge and the ubiquitous lip-stick assumed the respectability of universal usage, Azalea’s appearance was scarcely improved, for the former would not blend, and lay like a definite glaze upon her cheeks, while the latter only accentuated the flatness of her too-ample mouth, and made one wish that she had not tampered with it at all.
Her wardrobe was an appalling miscellany of discarded grandeur. Ladies whose clothes were too passé for their own adornment, bestowed them upon Azalea with the remark,
“You can see, my dear, that these are scarcely worn, and anyway, they are not the sort of things one could give the servants!”
She had learned to smother the hot rebellion that flared up in her heart, to thank them prettily, and to convey huge, unwieldy bundles through the streets and hold her tongue when her family commented upon the generosity of Lady This or Mrs. That. But she often wondered that her father never divined that Lady Elton’s cloth-of-gold dinner gown remodelled by her impatient and unskilled fingers, caused abrasions upon her spirit deeper than sackcloth could have produced, and blithely would she have consigned every stitch that she owned to the flames, for the joy of buying the most ordinary, commonplace, inexpensive frock at a bargain sale.
The future of the Deanes stretched behind them. The best of the family lay underground. Mr. Grenville Harrison Deane was the sole male survivor of an illustrious line that could be traced (so he declared) with an occasional hiatus, back to Alfred the Great! It was never clear to the upstarts whose genealogical tree took root in England about the time of the Conquest, or thereafter, how he arrived at his conclusion, but if antiquity of ideas was anything of a proof, then they were forced to admit that there was justification in his contention, for his views of life antedated those of Britain’s noble King.
Aloofness from fatiguing toil had rewarded him with an erectness that was impressive, and a complexion that a flapper might have envied. A Dundreary of silver gossamer caressed his cheeks, and his clear, lustrous eyes looked out from an unfurrowed setting. His chief characteristics were piety and an Eumenidean temper. The former, which should have been broad, was constricted to the dimensions of a number ten needle, and the latter, which should have been narrow, expanded to encompass impartially every one who held views divergent from his own. Particularly, was it directed against the blistering injustice of the Civil Service.
The Civil Service had served him faithfully for thirty-five years, despite his eternal villification of it. Recently, his incompetence had been recompensed by superannuation and the payment of seven-tenths of his salary—shall it be said, seven times as much as he was worth? But Mr. Deane had always fancied himself in the Premier’s place, or at least in a Ministerial capacity. Failing that, a Trade Commissionership, or even a Deputy’s post would have appeased him. Therefore, to be superannuated after thirty-five years’ inconspicuous hampering of the postal service, appeared to him as a blot upon the integrity of the Nation.
He was forever “taking up his case” with this or that influential person. What his case was, Azalea had but a misty idea, and whether he actually took it up or merely gloated over the notion of doing so, she had no means of ascertaining. Anyway, the matter had long ago ceased to interest her.
Mrs. Deane was the type of woman now happily becoming quite extinct, who was born to be dominated, and ably fulfilled her destiny. The eldest and most unattractive daughter of a rural English divine, she had won her husband by a trick for which he never forgave her, though he realised that she was in no way responsible. He had fallen fatuously in love with Dorothea, her younger sister, and had received the parental sanction to an engagement before setting sail for “Kenneda” and a post that his name might dignify. Six months later, Dorothea, who had quite innocently intrigued the affection of a visiting curate—a nephew of the Dean of Torborough, no less—had been prodded weeping to the altar, while Fanny was trundled on a steamer and shipped to Montreal to console the palpitant bridegroom, who had not even been apprised of the fact that a substitute had been forwarded.
The agony of that trip left its mark on Fanny Deane. A kindly lie would have spared her so much—for a time, at least. But the Rev. Arthur Somerset deemed suffering a salutory need, for others, and stated the case to his first-born with unequivocal lucidity . . . One phase of a woman’s duty is to grasp the opportunity for marriage and thus clear the way for her younger sisters, who, also, must have husbands. The prospect of fulfilling this duty in St. Ethelwyn’s was slender, and Fanny was no longer young . . . Did she want to be a burden in her old age to her family? . . . Dependent upon them for a home . . . Such inconsideration in a daughter of his was unthinkable . . . And as for young Deane, the Rev. Arthur waived his preference aside with a clerical gesture calculated to display advantageously his well-kept hand . . . Any man might be proud of a wife begotten and bred by Arthur Somerset, D.D.
“You must carry it off well, Fanny,” he adjured her, at the close of the interview, “for otherwise, you will be stranded in a strange country where . . .” the alternative was painted in no mean and unromantic terms.
Fanny “carried it off” successfully enough, though by no fault or virtue of her own. Too ill, almost, to stand, she crept down the gangway, and cowered before the eager-eyed young man who did not even recognise her when she addressed him.
Ah, if she had only been told that kindly little lie, and could have raised a radiant face to his, whispering,
“Here I am, dear! It was too wonderful that you should have sent for me!”
Instead, with ashen lips and shame-filled eyes, she muttered, “Mr. Deane, they married Dorothea to a curate—she couldn’t help it—she wanted you to know! Here is your ring . . . and . . . and . . . they made me come . . . For God’s sake, don’t send me back! I’ll work for you till I drop dead . . . I’ll be your servant—anything—only, for God’s sake, don’t send me home!”
He stared at her while the devastating truth burst over him like an engulfing flood. He shook with rage, with the anguish of blighted hopes and his own impotence in escaping the net that had been spread for him, while Fanny cringed beside him praying that God would strike her dead . . .
And Heaven did not hear her prayer.
Speechless, they faced one another. After a bit, he took her roughly by the arm.
“Come, girl,” he said, “we’ll get this rotten business over, quickly. The license reads ‘Dorothea’—I suppose I’ll have to get another one. There now, for God’s sake, don’t sniffle! People are looking at us.”
To give him credit, Grenville Harrison Deane never charged her with the deception of her parents. He never referred to it in so many words. But for two and forty years, Fanny lived in connubial torment, under the shadow of this smothering humiliation, and the fear that he might some day be led to speak of it. Often, there was that in his manner, that threatened to burst into violent and comminatory reproach.
She tried to efface herself, to reduce herself to nothingness, and to spare him the reminder of her substitution. She had a way of watching him, endeavouring to divine his whims and moods, that was loathesome in its humility. Her entire life was an apology for having failed to be her sister.
Unfortunately, Fanny never suspected that the greatest need of her overlord was association with a strong-minded tyrant, who, in the guise of the clinging-vine—or any other—would have thrust upon him the unexperienced pleasure of putting his shoulder to the wheel and hearing it creak as he moved it. He would have been happy doing things, being wheedled into service; but, as matters stood, Fanny Deane would have breathed for him, had such been possible. She relieved him of every burden and responsibility, and became a substitute not only for her silly, simpering sister, but for a shabby armchair and a pair of carpet slippers. Azalea, who was the youngest of five daughters, went so far as to say that the tomb to which his mortal envelope must one day be committed, would never equal in comfort the padded sepulchre her mother provided him while living.
Azalea’s earliest remembrance centred round a very common occurrence—her mother kneeling in the midst of broken toys and howling children, pleading,
“Don’t cry, my darlings! We will mend them! Sh-sh-sh—Please be quiet! Don’t irritate your father.”
She lived in constant dread of irritating a man who would have kept his temper had he really been vouchsafed anything to be irritated about; and her life was one which no self-respecting dog would have endured.
No one was more surprised than Fanny Deane when her four elder girls found husbands. Naturally, perhaps, she regarded marriage as a difficult and sordid undertaking—for parents, that is to say. Many a night, as she sat beside a moaning baby, the thought that one day she might have to engineer her children into the State of Holy Wedlock was like a deadly stricture about her heart. However, Hannah, Flossie, Tottie and May all married without any fuss or flurry, in a satisfactory, chronological fashion, the Civil Service yielding up its living dead to provide their sustenance. They became the Mrs. Polduggans and Mrs. Crogganthorpes of Ottawa; that large, uneasy, imitigable body—scrabbling, straining, jostling, niggling, fighting for the power to give rather than receive—snubs!—and living largely in the hope of supplanting their superiors and lifting themselves out of the ruck composed of other women, whose husbands, like their own, were merely “something in the Government”.
But Azalea was different. Marriage, in her opinion, was neither the subliminal pinnacle of feminine felicity, as her father claimed to conceive it, nor the Open Door to Independence, as her sisters averred. Shrewd observation led her to the conclusion that of independence there was little, and feminine felicity there was none. Always interested in the dark side of life, e.g., the married side, Azalea divided the women of her acquaintance into two classes—the parasites, who slyly or seductively tapped their husbands and appropriated their material and spiritual substance without suffering the smallest compensatory impulse, and the antithetical order, who resigned themselves to a stronger will and found matrimony a state of reluctant vassalage.
Azalea dreamed sometimes of an ideal companionship, or perhaps, a companionable ideal, but the paradigmatic young men whom her sisters (with the patronage of the successful angler who has already gaffed his fish and offers to instruct the novice how to bait a hook, and cast) enticed for her selection, inflamed her disgust rather than her romanticism.
Her greatest hunger was for economic independence, and this was summarily denied her.
Mr. Deane, drenched in archaic theories, confused idleness with refinement, and work with degradation. Moreover, he would have felt a sense of incompetence, mute reproach, even contempt, had he permitted his daughters to join the restless ranks of the employed. By such a measure, would he have confessed his inability to support them as befitted women of gentle breeding, and to provide them with all the amenities that their natures craved. That one of them should possess a bank account of her own and feel at liberty to spend money without the humiliating necessity of applying to him, was a condition that smacked of positive shamelessness. It was characteristic of him that although he never wished to perform any useful task unaided by the members of his household, he never allowed them to perform the task alone.
He had a genuine horror of the modern business woman who could look him unflinching in the eye, without that sweet deference which testified to his superiority. All business women were, in his opinion, coarse; besides, economic independence resulted in their getting “out of hand”, and a woman who got out of hand, was, in Mr. Deane’s judgment, a very dangerous proposition. Therefore, he refused Azalea the freedom she craved. He immolated her self-respect (and that of the community for her, in a measure) on the altar of his vanity, and condemned her to a life of servitude far more degrading than anything she would have chosen. She was depressed under the burden of obligations that gave her little benefit and no pleasure, and she secretly despised herself for being forced to accept them.
“Do let me go away and work,” she used to entreat, “I could teach. That’s a lady’s profession.”
But her mother made vague gestures of distress that said,
“Don’t bring up this dreadful subject again! Please, my dear, be careful or you will irritate your father!”
And father, giving every promise of fulfilling this prophecy, would reply,
“So long as I live, I hope that no daughter of mine will be forced from the shelter of her home, and out amongst the ravening wolves of commerce. When I am gone . . .” he left an eloquent pause “. . . But in the meantime . . .”
The words, not to mention the gesture that accompanied them, implied somehow that caravans of voluptuous commodities assembled by his protean labours, should continue to arrive at their very door.
He was unctuously proud of her friends, and actually toadied to her in deference to her association with the aristocracy of the Capital. So did her sisters, and their husbands, and the “char”, and the tradespeople, all of whom knew that she enjoyed sufficient intimacy with Lady Elton to assist at a luncheon or dinner-party—assist, that is to say, in the kitchen. And the splendid thing about this kind of assistance was that she received no honorarium for her services. That was where she took conspicuous precedence over Mrs. Wiggin, the char, and Ellen Petrie, who “waited on all the exclusive affairs of the city”. To work without salary was Mr. Deane’s conception of a lady’s highest calling, and a means whereby she might be kept from getting out of hand.
He was supported in this attitude by one of the foremost ladies in the land, who argued that “no woman engaged in earning her own living should be presented at the Drawing Room!”
The Dillings struck a new note in the monotone of Azalea’s existence. She had never seen their like, and was profoundly touched by their genuineness, their simplicity. For the first time in her life she felt that she had come into contact with people to whom friendship is dearer than the advantageous acquaintanceship that travesties it; for the first time in her life she could show an honest affection without being suspected of having an ulterior motive. At that time, Azalea had nothing to gain from the Dillings. On the contrary, she had something to give—an ineffably joyous experience—and she delighted in the sensation of being for once the comet instead of the tail; instead of the trailer, the cart.
Towards Raymond Dilling, she was conscious of an intense maternalism. Mentally, she acknowledged him her master, but in every other respect, he was an utter child—hard, undemonstrative, cold, but, despite that, a very appealing child. And she saw with her native shrewdness that mere mentality would never gain for him the success which he deserved. Ottawa, she knew, was thronged with brilliant people whose gifts were lost to the City—to the Dominion—because they lacked the empty artifices and consequent social standing which enabled them to get a hearing. No strolling mummer in the Middle Ages needed ducal patron more sorely than does a mere genius in the Capital of Canada.
And Dilling liked Azalea. She was a new and interesting type to him who had never considered feminine psychology a topic that was worth pursuing. His wife’s friends in Pinto Plains were, he realised, estimable creatures running to fat and porcelain teeth at middle age. They were conscientious mothers, faithful to their husbands and earnest seekers after a broader knowledge than that provided by their homely tasks. But they wearied him. Whenever he encountered a group of them, his dominant wish was to escape, and he rarely failed to gratify this desire by excusing himself with some such remark as,
“I’ll just slip off and leave you ladies free to discuss the three D’s”, by which he implied (with some degree of justification, doubtless) that the conversation of women is restricted to the topics of Dress, Domestics and Disease. He hated women’s chatter.
Azalea Deane was the only woman he had ever known who possessed what he later termed a bi-sexual mind. He was never irritably conscious, as was the case with Marjorie’s other friends, of the fact that she was a woman. Even when she discussed the three D’s, there was a broad impersonality, a pleasing and quizzical tang to her remarks that he chose to arrogate to the mind of man. Before he had known her any length of time, he discovered that, unlike Marjorie she not only understood what he said, but that in some startling and inexplicable manner she divined thoughts which he had expressly refrained from putting into words.
For him, she was a novel experience, whose flavour he enjoyed rather more intensely than he was aware. Not that his emotions were even remotely touched by the personality of the girl. No! She was a mental adventure which he followed with frank curiosity and a diminishing display of patronage. Her mind was full of exhilarating surprises, and he was astounded to discover how easily she ornamented arid facts with garlands plucked from her rich imagination. She had a neat twist in the handling of them which Dilling was not slow to see and imitate. She guided him into many a pungent domain of thought, where he lost himself completely in an exciting pursuit after some winking little light, that led to the very middle of an icy stream into which he fell, spluttering, only to find Azalea calm and dry, on the opposite shore, laughing at him. He contracted the habit of reading extracts from his speeches to her, and presently, he tried the effect of an entire discourse. Now and again, he sounded her as to what he considered saying, and discovered that her enthusiastic understanding was like an extra filter to his already well-clarified intention.
He stored up particularly smart bits of political repartee to tell her, while his own triumphs of wit were laid at her feet rather than those of his bewildered wife. And all this time, the prevailing fancy that overlaid his subconscious mind, was,
“Quite a good sort, that girl! Pity she isn’t a man!”
He voiced this latter sentiment to Azalea one evening shortly before prorogation and his return for the summer to Pinto Plains. In their sharp and peppery fashion, they had been discussing the Budget, inflated, Azalea contended, beyond all reason by the conscienceless demands of those picaresque buccaneers, Eastlake and Donahue, whose issue of private enterprise was begotten in the womb of the public treasury, when Dilling turned to her and cried,
“You’ve made out a good case, Miss Deane! You should have been a man!”
The girl’s cheeks burned a painful brick tint. But she laughed and retorted,
“By which you tactfully imply my unsuitability for the state to which it has pleased God to call me, and regret that physical limitations prevent my choosing a more adequate sphere. I confess to you in strict confidence, that frequently, I have deplored this condition, myself.”
“Come along into politics,” invited Dilling, a touch of seriousness behind his banter.
“Right-o! Just so soon as you amend the B.N.A. and offer me a refuge in the Senate,” she answered, and changed the subject.
Later that night, Marjorie hinted that he had hurt Azalea.
“Eh?” cried Dilling. “What are you talking about? Hurt her—how?”
“By what you said.”
“What did I say?”
“That she should have been a man.”
Dilling carefully twisted his collar free from the button. A violent physical action of any kind was foreign to him. Running the curved band between his fingers, he gave an abstracted thought to the possibility of wearing it again on the morrow, even while he turned to contradict his wife. “Nonsense, Marjorie, she liked it! All women like it; it’s a tribute to their mentality, my dear. One often has to say some such thing to a perfect ninny, but in this case I happen to be sincere and I think Miss Deane knew it.”
Marjorie did not contest the point. She never argued with Raymond, but once in a while she felt, as now, that his non-combatible correctness covered an error in judgment. Of course, he was sincere in paying a tribute to Azalea’s cleverness, and, of course, she knew he meant what he said. But that was the very trouble—the very barb that pierced her spirit!
In a strange and mysterious way (of which she was somewhat ashamed) Marjorie often reached perfectly amazing conclusions that were directly opposed to Raymond’s incontrovertible logic. And Azalea’s hurt was a case in point. Just why the words had stung, it was beyond Marjorie Dilling to explain. Orderly thinking and systematic juxtaposition of facts found their substitute in flashes of intuition which, throughout the ages, have stood for women in the place of reason. But she knew, without knowing how she knew, that Azalea would rather have impressed Raymond with her incomparable womanhood, than the fact that she was the possessor of a brain that should have functioned in the body of a man.
As for Azalea, she was not conscious that Marjorie had heard the echo of that discordant note, and she would have been inexpressibly surprised had she suspected it. Years of rigid discipline had taught her to conceal all the emotions she thought she had not strangled, and she was accustomed to being treated as a man when not as a nonentity. Times without number she had paid for an evening’s entertainment by escorting timourous and penurious ladies safely home in the silent watches of the night . . . a delicate assumption that she, herself, lacked sufficient fascination to stimulate brute design. On other occasions, hostesses frankly asked her to slip away quietly, “so that my husband won’t feel obliged to take you home, dear.” And once, a particularly considerate host glimpsing the blizzard that raged beyond his portal, had placed her in the care of a diminutive messenger boy, of some nine years, who struggled through the snowdrifts and sniffled that he had come from Hewitt’s Service, and please where was the parcel?
So Dilling’s words cut without producing an unendurable pain. The spot was well cocained and would ache long after the incision had been made. Azalea listened to his defence of his leader, his Party, and Messrs. Eastlake and Donahue, sensitive to a breath of discouragement beneath his words.
“I came to Ottawa expecting to find co-operation, and in its place fierce competition confronts me—competition,” he said, “within the very ranks of the Party! It may strike you as being particularly naive, but I confess that I had not expected to find this sort of friction. It puts a different complexion on politics.”
This was a tremendous admission for him to make, and in one of those flashing visions that supplemented her more leisured mental processes, Azalea saw that just as Marjorie groped along her level, so Dilling stumbled into pitfalls in his particular sphere, that a cumulus vapour of disenchantment threatened the horizon of his career, and that even as his wife bade fair to be a victim of the Social Juggernaut, so he would be crushed beneath the wheels of the political machine.
And they thought that this was The Land of Afternoon!