Their life in town resumed its former course, interrupted only by a month in North Devon. Jack's cure was complete; he was sunburnt, fatter; the joy of life shone in his blue eyes. Sometimes Victoria found herself growing younger by contagion, sloughing the horrible miry coat of the past. If her heart had not been atrophied she would have loved the boy whom she always treated with motherly gentleness. His need of her was so crying, so total, that he lost all his self-consciousness. He would sit unblushing by her side in the bow of a fishing smack, holding her hand and looking raptly into her grey eyes; he was indifferent to the red brown fisherman with the Spanish eyes and curly black hair who smiled as the turtle doves clustered. His need of her was as mental as it was physical; his body was whipped by the salt air to seek in her arms oblivion, but his mind had become equally dependent. She was his need.
Thus when they came back to town the riot continued; and Victoria, breasting the London tide, dragged him unresisting in her rear. She hated excitement in every form, excitement that is of the puerile kind. Restaurant dining, horse shows, flower shows, the Academy, tea in Bond Street, even the theatre and its most inane successes, were for her a weariness to the flesh.
'I've had enough,' she said to Jack one day. 'I'm sick of it all. I've got congestion of the appreciative sense. One day I shall chuck it all up, go and live in the country, have big dogs and a saddle horse, dress in tweeds and read the local agricultural rag.'
'Give up smoking, go to church, and play tennis with the curate, the doctor and the squire's flapper,' added Holt. 'But Vicky, why not go now?'
'No, oh, no, I can't do that.' She was frightened by her own suggestion. 'I must drain the cup of pleasure so as to be sure that it's all pain; then I'll retire and drain the cup of resignation . . . unless, as I sometimes think, it's empty.'
Jack had said nothing to this. Her wildness surprised and shocked him. She was so savage and yet so sweet.
Victoria realised that she must hold fast to the town, for there alone could she succeed. In the peace of the country she would not have the opportunities she had now. Jack was in her hands. She never hesitated to ask for money, and Jack responded without a word. Her account grew by leaps and bounds. The cashier began to ask whether she wanted to see the manager when she called at the bank. She could see, some way off but clearly, the beacons on the coast of hope.
All through Jack's moods she had suffered from the defection of Betty. On her return from Broadstairs she had written to her to come to Elm Tree Place, but had received no answer. This happened again in September; and fear took hold of her, for Betty had, ivy-like, twined herself very closely round Victoria's heart of oak. She went to Finsbury; but Betty had gone, leaving no address. She went to the P.R.R. also. The place had become ghostly, for the familiar faces had gone. The manageress was nowhere to be seen; nor was Nelly, probably by now a manageress herself. Betty was not there, and the girl who wonderingly served the beautiful lady with a tea-cake said that no girl of that name was employed at the depot. Then Victoria saw herself sitting in the churchyard of her past, between the two dear ghosts of Farwell and Betty. The customers had changed, or their faces had receded so that she knew them no more: they still played matador and fives and threes, chess too. Alone the chains remained which the ghosts had rattled. Silently she went away, turning over that leaf of her life for ever. Farwell was dead, and Betty gone—married probably—and in Shepherd's Bush, not daring to allow Victoria's foot to sully the threshold of 'First Words of Love.'
Her conviction that Betty was false had a kind of tonic effect upon her. She was alone and herself again; she realised that the lonely being is the strong being. Now, at last, she could include the last woman she had known in the category of those who threw stories. And her determination to be free grew apace.
She invented a reason every day to extract money from Holt. He, blindly desirous, careless of money, acceded to every fresh demand. Now it was a faked bill from Barbezan Soeurs for two hundred pounds, now the rent in arrear, a blue rates notice, an offhand request for a fiver to pay the servants, the vet's bill or the price of a cab. Holt drew and overdrew. If a suspicion ever entered his mind that he was being exploited, he dismissed it at once, telling himself that Victoria was rather extravagant. For a time letters from Rawsley synchronised with her fresh demands, but repetition had dulled their effects: now Holt postponed reading them; after a time she saw him throw one into the fire unread. Little by little they grew rarer. Then they ceased. Holt was eaten up by his passion, and Victoria's star rose high.