VI
It was that Easter that Hugo met Paulina Connell. He saw her first in The Tempest. She was playing Miranda, and she did it very well.
We were all there. Guy and George and Mollie and I. We all enjoyed the performance, and we all thought Miranda charming, but Hugo was bowled over.
‘Isn’t it lovely? isn’t it lovely?’ he kept saying. ‘I think that Miranda is quite perfect. She is just what Miranda should be.’
We knew that that was high praise from Hugo, for The Tempest was one of his favourite plays at this time.
We went back to Guy’s rooms in Clifford’s Inn and had coffee and biscuits, and George began to chaff Hugo about his enthusiasm for Miranda, but Hugo was serious.
‘I want to see her,’ he said. ‘I must get to know her.
How beauteous Mankind is! Oh brave new world
That has such people in’t!
Didn’t she do that divinely?’
‘I shouldn’t get to know her if I were you, Hugo,’ said George. ‘She will probably be a disillusionment. Let her remain the “stuff that dreams are made of.” ’
Mollie was laughing and I laughed too, but I didn’t like it. It gave me an odd little pain to watch Hugo as he talked about her and then I felt ashamed of myself.
Hugo did get to know Paulina. He found that Anthony Cowper knew some one who knew her, and Anthony Cowper’s friend took Hugo and him to call one Sunday afternoon.
Hugo told us all about it when they came back. She was just as lovely in private life, he said. She lived with her mother in a flat in Battersea. Her father was dead and she had one brother, called Victor, who was a professional singer. Hugo did not see him, for he was touring somewhere. Mr. Connell had been in business, Mrs. Connell said, but it was an army family—“ ‘military people, you know, and well connected.” ’
It was Anthony Cowper who reported the conversation. Hugo blushed a little and laughed.
‘So hard on dear Paulina,’ Mrs. Connell had said to Anthony, ‘to have to go on the stage—not that it was a penance at all to her, for if ever a girl had a passion for her art it was Paulina; but of course you understand, Mr. Cowper, it is not the sort of profession her father’s family would approve at all. My family is different, you see. We are all artists—artists to the finger-tips—and you understand, Mr. Cowper, to an artist social distinctions do not exist. But I do feel it hard for Paulina. . . . Yes, of course, her father’s relations do not take the interest in her which one might have expected.’
Anthony Cowper was a mimic, and he made us laugh very much when he described the interview with Mrs. Connell; and now and again he turned to Hugo and said: ‘It was just like that, Hugo, wasn’t it?’ and Hugo admitted with good humour that it was.
‘She was rather a terror,’ he agreed. ‘But Paulina was quite different, and she didn’t like it much, I thought.’
Hugo gave a tea-party in Guy’s rooms before he went back to Oxford. He invited us all to meet Paulina, and Mrs. Connell came too.
‘I had to ask her too,’ he explained, ‘for she said she did not allow Paulina to go out alone.’
Paulina was beautiful; that was true. She was very fair, with bright, golden hair, very straight and smooth and shining, and serious blue eyes. She had red lips, curved and rather like a Rossetti saint. She was dressed in white, with white furs, and she did not talk very much. She sat looking beautiful and statuesque, and made rather solemn remarks from time to time.
‘It is only in the true Socialist State that art will be duly recognized,’ she said, and at another time: ‘True art has no need for subterfuge.’
What she meant I didn’t know, for I only caught scraps of the conversation. Guy and Anthony Cowper were talking to her—but I felt convinced somehow that she didn’t really know what she meant herself that she was repeating things she had learnt from somebody else, and that annoyed me, for I had never liked that sort of person.
She always talked about Art. Once she said:
‘I live for my Art. A true artist must’; and it sounded silly. A ‘true artist’ would never have said it, I felt sure.
She was talking to Guy when she said that, and Guy was very funny with her. He looked serious too, and said:
‘Really. How interesting. I suppose it is awfully hard work to be a true artist.’
And she answered in a sombre sort of way:
‘A crucifixion at times, but one cannot escape one’s destiny.’
‘Oh no; one can’t,’ agreed Guy. ‘Awfully hard luck, isn’t it?’
Guy saw me watching them and his eyes twinkled. He had a trick of raising one eyebrow, the left, when he was amused.
Mrs. Connell said to Hugo:
‘Paulina is so sensitive—the artistic temperament all through. Modern life is very hard for the artist.’
Hugo murmured something sympathetic. He wanted to talk to Paulina.
Mollie crossed the room and talked to Mrs. Connell. I saw Mrs. Connell pouring out a long confidence, and Mollie nodding her head from time to time.
George came over to me.
‘Are you impressed, Helen?’ he asked with his wide smile. ‘Does the goddess thrill you?’
I said:
‘No, I am afraid she doesn’t. I liked her better at a distance.’
‘Poor old Hugo,’ said George. ‘He is a dear goose, you know—but I don’t think we need worry.’
I felt extraordinarily grateful to George for saying that. It seemed somehow to make it all right. I had been afraid all day, and before that day; an uncomfortable, unformulated fear that something had been going to happen to Hugo. I had not defined my feeling, and it had in an odd way become less, since Paulina came to tea, and I had seen her myself. What George said comforted me much more. It was like waking up from bad dreams. I felt suddenly very fond of George, fonder than usual.
After tea, when the Connells had gone, I walked back with George and Mollie to their flat.
‘I am rather sorry for that girl,’ said Mollie.
‘Yes, the mother is a terror,’ agreed George, answering, as he often did, what Mollie had felt and not said.
‘Is Hugo as bewitched as ever, do you think?’ Mollie asked, and George shrugged his shoulders and looked at me.
‘Helen and I have decided not to worry yet,’ he said.
She gave Hugo a big photograph of herself, with the white furs close up round her face, and a big hat pulled low over her eyes. There was a scrawling signature across it. Hugo kept it in his bedroom on his dressing-table. Guy told Mollie about it, and said:
‘I don’t like it, Mollie. If he had stuck it in his sitting-room I wouldn’t have minded it so much.’
And Mollie said:
‘But Hugo wouldn’t put even his wife out in public—his wife’s photograph, I mean.’
And I remembered how he wouldn’t have Cousin Delia’s photograph out in his study at school. He took it with him every term, and kept it in a box, ‘because it was precious.’
And I thought:
‘Well, he doesn’t put Paulina in a box; that is something.’
He wrote a lot of poetry at this time, and did not show it all to me as he used to. George saw it and said it was good.
We went to the Commemoration Ball that year, and Hugo asked us to bring Paulina.
Cousin Delia came, and we stayed at an hotel. Guy came up too, and Anthony Cowper.
Hugo danced with Paulina a great deal. He danced with me too, of course, but it was not like it used to be. Paulina looked very lovely. She wore a pale blue gown with sequins embroidered on it, that shimmered and rippled when she moved, and her hair shone like corn in the sun.
I sat with Cousin Delia for a bit and watched them dancing, and I wondered what she was thinking.
I wanted to say:
‘Paulina is very pretty, don’t you think?’ and see what she would say. But I couldn’t. Cousin Delia would always know what you were really meaning if you tried to say something else.
Once she touched my hand.
‘I like that dress of yours, dear heart,’ she said. ‘Did Mollie help you to choose it?’
Cousin Delia was very fond of Mollie, and Mollie loved her. We were all glad about that.
Guy and Mollie came up to us. I thought how pretty Mollie looked that night, more as she ought to look always, and I thought I would rather look like Mollie than Paulina, in spite of everything.
Hugo brought Paulina to Campden Hill that summer. Grandmother did not like her.
‘No, my dear Hugo,’ she said afterwards. ‘Not a suitable young woman, in my opinion. Unintelligent and pretentious. I advise you to leave her alone.’
Hugo blushed and smiled.
‘I am sorry, Aunt Gerry,’ he said. ‘I am sorry you don’t like her.’
‘It may have been a mistake to say what I did,’ she said afterwards to me, ‘but I don’t think so. Épris, I think—distinctly épris—but not inamorato.’