“Sir Gerald Shelmardine of Shelmardine Cross, Hampshire. He’s rather dreary. Will you come?”
She took him to several evening parties and his wooden coldness before a crowd was enchanting. It occurred to her that individuals wearied the man. He eyed pretty women, striking gowns, studied the decoration of ball-rooms. He confessed, “I’ll never see any of them again and shouldn’t remember them if I did. My memory for people’s no good—unless they’re interestin’ to look at. My god, look at that girl in purple. Her dressmaker ought to be hung! Skirt’s crooked all across the front.” He gave the girl in purple his rare frown then asked, “Well, where’s some place in France, on the seashore, where I can take the kids until August?”
She recommended Royan and had from him a letter describing Margot’s success among the ladies of a quiet hotel. His letters of 1912 and 1913 were full of Margot. Snapshots of the child dropped often from the thick blue envelopes. When he sent his thin book, “Modern Scenery” in the autumn of 1913 it was dedicated, “To my Daughter.” The bald prose was correct, the photographs and plates were well selected. Mark wrote: “Gurdy went over it with a fine tooth comb to see if the grammar was O. K. Mr. Carlson is not well and we have four plays to bring in by December. Spoke at a lunch of a ladies’ dramatic society yesterday. Forgot where I was and said Hell in the middle of it. They did not mind. Things seem to be changing a lot. I am pretty worried about one of our plays.”
Olive saw in the New York Herald some discussion of this play and a furious reference to it on the editorial page, signed by a clergyman. This was at Christmas time when she was entertaining her tiresome brother at Ilden’s house in Suffolk. She folded the newspaper away, meaning to explore the business. She forgot the accident in the hurry of her attempt to reach a Scotch country house where her daughter Joan died of pneumonia on New Year’s Day. The shock sent Olive into grey seclusion. Her husband was on the China station with his cruiser. She suddenly found herself worrying over the health of her son, then in the Fifth Form at Harrow, so took a cottage in Harrow village and there reflected on the nastiness of death while she wrote her next novel. The cottage was singularly dismal and the daughters of the next dwelling were pretty girls of thirteen and fourteen, with fair hair. “Sentimental analogy is the bane of life,” she wrote to her husband, “I went to town yesterday for some gloves and saw the posters of Peter Pan on a hoarding in Baker Street. Joan liked it so. So I went to the theatre and squandered five sovereigns in stalls and gave the tickets to these wretched girls who would infinitely prefer a cinema, naturally. However I managed to laugh on Saturday. The news had just reached Mark Walling by way of Ian Gail who is in the States trying to sell his worst and newest play. Mark cabled me a hundred words quite incoherent and mostly inappropriate.”
Three days later Olive came in from a walk and Mark opened the door of the stupid cottage. When she drew her hands away from his stooped face they were hot and wet.
“But, my dear boy,” she said, presently, “what blessing brought you over? In the middle of your season, too.”
“I’m in trouble. See anything in the papers about the Mayor stoppin’ a play we put on?—I don’t blame the Mayor, for a minute. Mr. Carlson wanted it.... Well, it was stopped and some of the newspapers took it up. And then Mr. Carlson had a sort of stroke. His mind’s all right but his legs are paralyzed. Won’t ever walk again.” His voice drummed suddenly as if it might break into a sob. He passed his fingers over the red hair and went on, “I’ve got him up at my house.”
“Of course,” said Olive.
“Sure. The doctors say he’ll last four or five years, maybe.—Say you’ve always said we’re a nation of prudes. Look at this,” and he dragged from a black pocket a note on formal paper. Olive read: “The Thorne School, Madison Avenue and Sixty Sixth Street. December 28th, 1913. My dear Mr. Walling, Will you be so good as to call upon me when it is possible in order to discuss Margaret’s future attendance. It seems kindest to warn you that several parents have suggested that—”
“What is this nonsense?” Olive asked, “What’s the child been doing?”