‘Oh, it’s so good to be home again,’ she sighed.
‘You don’t have to tell me that,’ he said, not understanding that she referred to his arms and not to his arrival.
‘D’you still like me?’
‘Rather.’
She kissed him fondly.
‘Oh, you don’t know how I’ve missed you.’
‘I was an awful flop in America,’ he said. ‘I didn’t tell you in my letters, because I thought it would only worry you. They thought me rotten.’
‘Michael,’ she cried, as though she could not believe him.
‘The fact is, I suppose, I’m too English. They don’t want me another year. I didn’t think they did, but just as a matter of form I asked them if they were going to exercise their option and they said no, not at any price.’
Julia was silent. She looked deeply concerned, but her heart was beating with exultation.
‘I honestly don’t care, you know. I didn’t like America. It’s a smack in the eye of course, it’s no good denying that, but the only thing is to grin and bear it. If you only knew the people one has to deal with! Why, compared with some of them, Jimmie Langton’s a great gentleman. Even if they had wanted me to stay I should have refused.’
Though he put a brave face on it, Julia felt that he was deeply mortified. He must have had to put up with a good deal of unpleasantness. She hated him to have been made unhappy, but, oh, she was so relieved.
‘What are you going to do now?’ she asked quietly.
‘Well, I shall go home for a bit and think things over. Then I shall go to London and see if I can’t get a part.’
She knew that it was no good suggesting that he should come back to Middlepool. Jimmie Langton would not have him.
‘You wouldn’t like to come with me, I suppose?’
Julia could hardly believe her ears.
‘Me? Darling, you know I’d go anywhere in the world with you.’
‘Your contract’s up at the end of this season, and if you want to get anywhere you’ve got to make a stab at London soon. I saved every bob I could in America, they all called me a tight-wad but I just let them talk, I’ve brought back between twelve and fifteen hundred pounds.’
‘Michael, how on earth can you have done that?’
‘I didn’t give much away, you know,’ he smiled happily. ‘Of course it’s not enough to start management on, but it’s enough to get married on, I mean we’d have something to fall back on if we didn’t get parts right away or happened to be out of a job for a few months.’
It took Julia a second or two to understand what he meant.
‘D’you mean to say, get married now?’
‘Of course it’s a risk, without anything in prospect, but one has to take a risk sometimes.’
Julia took his head in both her hands and pressed his lips with hers. Then she gave a sigh.
‘Darling, you’re wonderful and you’re as beautiful as a Greek god, but you’re the biggest damned fool I’ve ever known in my life.’
They went to a theatre that night and at supper drank champagne to celebrate their reunion and toast their future. When Michael accompanied her to her room she held up her face to his.
‘D’you want me to say good night to you in the passage? I’ll just come in for a minute.’
‘Better not, darling,’ she said with quiet dignity.
She felt like a high-born damsel, with all the traditions of a great and ancient family to keep up; her purity was a pearl of great price; she also felt that she was making a wonderfully good impression: of course he was a great gentleman, and ‘damn it all’ it behoved her to be a great lady. She was so pleased with her performance that when she had got into her room and somewhat noisily locked the door, she paraded up and down bowing right and left graciously to her obsequious retainers. She stretched out her lily white hand for the trembling old steward to kiss (as a baby he had often dandled her on his knee), and when he pressed it with his pallid lips she felt something fall upon it. A tear.
7
THE first year of their marriage would have been stormy except for Michael’s placidity. It needed the excitement of getting a part or a first night, the gaiety of a party where he had drunk several glasses of champagne, to turn his practical mind to thoughts of love. No flattery, no allurements, could tempt him when he had an engagement next day for which he had to keep his brain clear or a round of golf for which he needed a steady eye. Julia made him frantic scenes. She was jealous of his friends at the Green Room Club, jealous of the games that took him away from her, and jealous of the men’s luncheons he went to under the pretext that he must cultivate people who might be useful to them. It infuriated her that when she worked herself up into a passion of tears he should sit there quite calmly, with his hands crossed and a good-humoured smile on his handsome face, as though she were merely making herself ridiculous.
‘You don’t think I’m running after any other woman, do you?’ he asked.
‘How do I know? It’s quite obvious that you don’t care two straws for me.’
‘You know you’re the only woman in the world for me.’
‘My God!’
‘I don’t know what you want.’
‘I want love. I thought I’d married the handsomest man in England and I’ve married a tailor’s dummy.’
‘Don’t be so silly. I’m just the ordinary normal Englishman. I’m not an Italian organ-grinder.’
She swept up and down the room. They had a small flat at Buckingham Gate and there was not much space, but she did her best. She threw up her hands to heaven.
‘I might be squint-eyed and hump-backed. I might be fifty. Am I so unattractive as all that? It’s so humiliating to have to beg for love. Misery, misery.’
‘That was a good movement, dear. As if you were throwing a cricket ball. Remember that.’
She gave him a look of scorn.
‘That’s all you can think of. My heart is breaking, and you can talk of a movement that I made quite accidentally.’
But he saw by the expression of her face that she was registering it in her memory, and he knew that when the occasion arose she would make effective use of it.
‘After all love isn’t everything. It’s all very well at its proper time and in its proper place. We had a lot of fun on our honeymoon, that’s what a honeymoon’s for, but now we’ve got to get down to work.’
They had been lucky. They had managed to get fairly good parts together in a play that had proved a success. Julia had one good acting scene in which she had brought down the house, and Michael’s astonishing beauty had made a sensation. Michael with his gentlemanly push, with his breezy good-nature, had got them both a lot of publicity and their photographs appeared in the illustrated papers. They were asked to a number of parties and Michael, notwithstanding his thriftiness, did not hesitate to spend money on entertaining people who might be of service. Julia was impressed by his lavishness on these occasions. An actor-manager offered Julia the leading part in his next play, and though there was no part for Michael and she was anxious to refuse it, he would not let her. He said they could not afford to let sentiment stand in the way of business. He eventually got a part in a costume play.
They were both acting when the war broke out. To Julia’s pride and anguish Michael enlisted at once, but with the help of his father, one of whose old brother officers was an important personage at the War Office, he very soon got a commission. When he went out to France Julia bitterly regretted the reproaches she had so often heaped upon him, and made up her mind that if he were killed she would commit suicide. She wanted to become a nurse so that she could go out to France too and at least be on the same soil as he, but he made her understand that patriotism demanded that she should go on acting, and she could not resist what might very well be his dying request. Michael thoroughly enjoyed the war. He was popular in the regimental mess, and the officers of the old army accepted him almost at once, even though he was an actor, as one of themselves. It was as though the family of soldiers from which he was born had set a seal on him so that he fell instinctively into the manner and way of thinking of the professional soldier. He had tact and a pleasant manner, and he knew how to pull strings adroitly; it was inevitable that he should get on the staff of some general. He showed himself possessed of considerable organizing capacity and the last three years of the war he passed at G.H.Q. He ended it as a major, with the Military Cross and the Legion of Honour.