Acting on Impulse Read online

  There was no doubt about it—Maurice was attracted. During the days that followed he looked on her with mingled awe and admiration; and sometimes Helen thought that she could see a puzzled gleam in his eyes. He treated her as though she were made of sugar, which irked her exceedingly. They went for sedate little walks on tarred roads, and if a spot of rain fell, Maurice, absurdly anxious, hurried Helen homewards. He seemed always to expect her to be tired, and several times she almost let her mask fall, because she wanted so much to tell him not to be a fool. He drove her out in her car sometimes, and that was not all joy for Helen. She yearned to say: “Look here, old thing, I love you, you’re the dearest person in the world, but you don’t know a thing about cars.” But it was quite impossible to say anything of the sort, especially as she was not at all sure that Maurice still loved her. Her love for him choked her; for once, in her independent life, she hungered to feel his arms about her, and his kisses on her mouth. It did not happen. Maurice was tender, and solicitous, and admiring, but he seemed to hold himself aloof, watching her. Once he said:

  “I don’t expect the sort of house I’m after would be much in your line. You’re a town bird, aren’t you?”

  She wasn’t. She only lived in London because of her loneliness. She wanted “his sort of house,” with dogs, and horses, and a garden to tend.

  He went to look at Airedale pups, and took her with him. He was not familiar with the breed and Helen, in impotent wrath, watched him select a hopeless specimen and listen guilelessly to the breeder’s eulogies. Helen held herself in check, but her impulse was to say a few illuminating words. Instead, she murmured:

  “It seems rather a lot to give. Perhaps you’ll find one less expensive.”

  She couldn’t bear to see Maurice be swindled. Luckily he decided to think the matter over before purchasing the pup.

  She had been with the Derings for three weeks when Maurice heard of a house for sale. It seemed to be just what he desired, and as it was possible to motor there and back in a day, they arranged to go over to look at it, lunching on the way, and arriving home in time for dinner. Everything was planned when Anne, worried over the slow progress of the matchmaking, developed an intangible ailment, and declared that she did not feel “up to it.” Don, blindly obeying orders, refused to go without her, and it seemed as though the expedition must fall through. But Anne insisted that Maurice and Helen should go, and after a great deal of argument Helen agreed.

  MAURICE took Helen in her own car, wrapped her in many rugs, although the day was very mild. They lunched at a little inn on the way, and arrived at the house about four in the afternoon. It was all that was most beautiful, a long, low Tudor building set in big grounds, with a rose garden, a pleasaunce, a small farm, and tennis courts. They wandered all over it, enchanted, and could hardly bear to tear themselves away. But it was growing late and they had had no tea. They reluctantly went in search of a confectioner, and wasted fully an hour there discussing the house. Then Maurice saw that it was already six o'clock, and sprang up.

  “Oh, Helen, this is too bad of me! I’m afraid we shan’t get back till nine, and Anne said eight o’clock dinner. I’m so sorry!”

  “It doesn’t matter a bit,” she replied. “I’ve so enjoyed it. We’d better be going now, though.”

  “I’m afraid you’ll be very tired,” he said worriedly. “Do you mind having dinner on the way?”

  “Not a bit; I should love it,” she said truthfully.

  They drove back through the fast gathering dusk, and presently the darkness came, and Maurice, looking at the clock before him, under its little light, said:

  “It’s nearly eight. I think we’ll stop at the first decent inn we see. Are you quite warm?”

  The words were hardly out of his mouth when there were sundry strange sounds from the car’s interior, and they stopped in the middle of the deserted road. After a moment Maurice got out.

  “Something’s rather wrong,” he said “I didn’t think she was running very well this morning. I say, I am sorry, Helen!”

  “What is it?” she asked. A note of anxiety had crept into her voice, for this car was the pride of her heart.

  “I don’t know,” said Maurice, and groped in the engine. “Can’t see. Have you a torch?”

  “Left hand—er—I expect there is one in one of the pockets,” Helen said, clinging to her role of helpless female. Maurice came and looked for it, and drew it forth triumphantly.

  “Good! Now we shall see!”

  He clicked the switch of the torch, and it was evident that they were not going to see at all. A frown was gathering in Helen’s eyes.

  “Of all the rotten luck!” said Maurice disgustedly. “The battery has run down.”

  And then something seemed to snap in Helen. She forgot all about her pose, and cast the rugs from her, and stepped out into the road.

  “That,” she said crisply, “is what comes of letting that fool of a chauffeur mess about with the car. I might have known it.”

  Maurice stood transfixed with amazement, staring at this suddenly transformed woman. Helen did not see his surprise. She flung off her coat and hat and demanded a match.

  “Just come and hold it for me,” she said. “In all the years I’ve driven a car never once have I come out without a spare battery. Hold the match there, will you?”

  Meekly he obeyed. He hid his astonishment, for fear of chasing this old, dear Helen away. A wild elation filled him; he wanted to hug her as he had never wanted to hug the immaculate woman who had taken her place.

  She dived into the car, and her capable hands groped here and there. Out she came, and strode to the switchboard. Then she came back again, and once more disappeared into the bonnet. When she again emerged her hair was awry, and a large smudge of grease adorned one cheek.

  “No good, I can’t see!” she said curtly. “Give me a cigarette!”

  MAURICE began to shake with inward merriment; he handed Helen his cigarette-case, and watched her sit down on the step of the car. Helen smoked rather violently for a minute.

  “This is the most putrid luck,” she presently announced. “Any ideas?”

  “One only. Push the car to the side of the road.”

  “Righto!” said Helen, and got up.

  They pushed the car as he suggested, and all the time Maurice thought: “Helen has come back!”

  “Now,” he said, “I think you'd better tuck yourself up inside while I go to the nearest village and get some sort of a convenience.”

  Helen stared at him in the light of the car lamps.

  “What did you say I’d better do?”

  “Get inside, and keep warm. You’ll be quite—”

  “Now, I ask you, Maurice, does that elegant little scheme sound like me?” she demanded.

  Maurice spoke deliberately.

  “It sounds remarkably like the you I’ve known for the past three weeks," he said.

  There was a sudden, frozen silence. Helen gulped, reddened, and turned away, horribly uncomfortable.

  “Explanations, please,” said Maurice sternly, but she saw his eyes were dancing.

  “I shall not explain anything,” she said with dignity.

  “Oh, won’t you? Shove on your coat and come along!”

  “I believe I’ll wait for you as — as you suggested,” she said.

  “I don’t. Do buck up!”

  Helen put on her coat, jammed the luckless hat on her head, and set out beside Maurice. They strode down the road for some way in silence.

  “What I want to know first,” said Maurice, “is this: what was the meaning of Rupert Arden?”

  A low chuckle came from beside him.

  “Oh, he hasn’t much meaning,” Helen answered.

  “Why did you get engaged to him?”

  “Well he had his points. Not at all a bad sort of creature. Only I got bored with him. Didn’t know one end of a dog from the other. Which reminds me. That Airedale pup. No good at all. Bad quarters, no bone, t
oo full in the eye.”

  Maurice laughed.

  “All right, we won’t have him. But we were talking of Rupert Arden.”

  “He gassed about his Art,” said Helen pensively. “Capital A.”

  “I see. But why were you engaged to him?”

  “Look here, what’s that to do with you?”

  Maurice stopped and faced her.

  “I’ll tell you what it’s got to do with me.”

  “I was engaged to him because—because I thought I liked him,” said Helen in a hurry.

  “We’ll let that pass. You will now tell me why you’ve been behaving like an animated doll for the past three weeks.”

  “I shan’t!”

  “Don’t be so bad tempered. Out with it!”

  “Oh, shut up, Maurice! Don't bully!”

  His hands were on her shoulders.

  “You, darling! And don’t you deserve to be bullied? Helen, have you ever regretted that you sent me away?”

  SHE looked up into his face, and what she saw there made her heart bloom again.

  “Yes.”

  The grip on her shoulders tightened.

  “And you got yourself up to look like a dress-maker's model to vamp me?”

  “Here, that’ll do!” said Helen. “I’m blowed if I looked like a—”

  “Did you?”

  “Yes!”

  “I hope you're ashamed of yourself.”

  “Maurice, I’m —I’m sick of this! Let me go!”

  " I'm not going to let you go—ever. You beast, Helen, I’ve been miserable because you seemed so different. I’ve wanted you, and wanted you. I came back to try and make you love me, and instead of the old, haphazard Helen, I found a dressed-up—”

  “That’ll do,” said Helen. “I don’t want to hear any more.”

  “—a dressed up minx. And it may interest you to know, my sweetheart—”

  “No, not at all! I’m not your sweetheart! I—”

  “Drop it. It may interest you to know that it was not a fashion-plate that I wanted, but the adorable, mad creature who shoved her head into the bonnet of the car, cursed the chauffeur, and came out with a smudge of grease on one cheek. Got that?”

  “Yes, thank you. Do you mind letting me go now?”

  “I do,” he said. Then the laughter left his voice, and he drew her nearer. “Helen, all these years I’ve longed for you. Will you marry me now?”

  “No, no, no! If I hadn’t thrown myself at your head—”

  “Well?”

  “You —wouldn’t have—thought of—marrying me!”

  “If you call this throwing yourself at my head—”

  “But I did! Anyway, I won’t marry you!”

  “Dear idiot, if you’d kept up that elegancy you certainly wouldn’t have married me. I wasn’t having any. Didn’t you notice that?”

  “Oh Maurice, you brute!”

  Then she could not say anything more for quite some time, because the breath was literally crushed out of her. And presently, holding her tightly against his shoulder, Maurice asked:

  “Helen, will you, or will you not marry me?”

  Helen’s voice quivered irrepressibly.

  “May as well,” she said.

  IT was close on midnight when Anne and her husband heard a car scrunching over the gravel drive. They went out at once, in time to see Helen jump out of an aged Ford. Her hat was over one eye, her face and hands were smeared with car-grease, and she had lost her gloves. Behind her came Maurice, with a broad grin.

  “Hullo!” said Helen. “We broke down. Towed the car to Littleharbour, and left it.”

  “Helen, your face!” wailed Anne.

  “My face,” said Helen cheerfully. “The game’s up.”

  Anne looked quickly from one to the other, then held out her hands.

  “You dears!” she said. “When’s it going to be?”

  “As soon as possible,” Maurice answered. “We’re buying the house, and we shall probably breed Airedales.”

  “And I am not going to be beautiful anymore,” said Helen blissfully.

  THE END

  READING “THE OLD MAID”

  None of Heyer’s contemporary works is quite as indicative of her state of mind at this particular time of her life as is “The Old Maid.” At the ripe old age of twenty-three she was clearly terrified of living alone, of being overlooked and left on “the shelf”; this story shows us Heyer looking deep into the abyss of singledom and finding it unacceptable. She fast-forwards her writerly life, Ghost of Christmas Future-style, and sees what shifts she will be driven to if she continues on as she is, striving for literary greatness while turning down a perfectly eligible proposal from a man who has long carried a torch for her, in all her introverted eccentricity.

  Heyer gazes ahead and sees that years later, having become a spinster, she’ll have to get a makeover and put on airs and let a chauffeur drive her car, and all because she was the “toast” of literary London and didn’t want to go to Africa to follow her man.

  As it happens, Heyer eventually did end up going to Africa to follow her man, of which we are most brutally assured by her frankly upsetting non-fiction article “The Horned Beast of Africa,” which was published in London newspaper The Sphere in June 1929. She and her husband Ronald – whom she met in 1920 and married in 1925 – had been living in Tanganyika (now Tanzania), and mining engineer Ronald had also become something of a big game hunter, taking down black rhinoceros by the seeming dozen. Heyer describes his expertise with a nonchalant glee which was very much of its time – though we’ve all seen Beatrice at the Dinner and those shots of various plutocrats; people still do such things, after all – and one can’t help but think of Helen King-Eyre, and what she had to endure in her Sliding Doors version of the future, in order to not be an old maid until she was so positively ancient at thirty-six.

  But looking forty. Whatever that means.

  I really like this story. I especially like how bluff, sharp-tongued Helen, alone of all Heyer contemporary heroines, has very real agency: she has decided she wants to marry Maurice, and she single-mindedly sets about winning him in a very determined fashion. Of course, she gets terrible advice from her well-meaning friend on how to accomplish this, because there are always those who will not understand how Different and Special the “not like other girls” heroine is, and will inadvisably try to make her just like everyone else.

  It’s practically the law.

  But of course Maurice refuses to fall for these tricks, because we couldn’t respect a man who did, nor could we support one who didn’t steadfastly adore our heroine Just the Way She Is.TM

  Again: law.

  I also like how, in the fear-fuelled future fantasy that is her life, Heyer has recast herself as a darling of the literati, an acclaimed and best-selling “satirist,” not a romance novelist of any kind. It was always evident that Heyer had aspirations beyond the scope of her most popular genre playground – she wanted to be Thackeray, or Dickens, or at the very least Scott. But in “The Old Maid” she gave herself the legitimacy she craved, and even in that flight of fancy, the respect of the kinds of critics who would plague her in real life still wasn’t enough to fill a life she would consider empty without a husband to call her own.

  Whatever travails occurred after her marriage to Ronald – up to and including the wholesale slaughter of magnificent, now critically-endangered, creatures – I really hope that she continued to feel that way for as long as they both did live. Helen is brought to life so vividly here that I almost believe she is an alternate history version of Georgette, and I want her to never have felt the need to be “beautiful” in order to be happy.

  Actually, I want that for everyone. And I think Georgette would have, too.

  “LOVE”

  INTRODUCTION

  First published in 1919, The Sovereign Magazine was initially aimed at women readers. During its short life (it folded in 1927) it published mainly adventure and romance s
tories. In its earliest years it serialised swashbucklers such as Rafael Sabatini’s career-making novel, Scaramouche, Achmed Abdullah’s desert romance, Shackled, and Sapper’s The Black Gang, featuring the famous Bulldog Drummond. From 1922 there was a marked increase in the number of “weird mysteries and ghost stories,” but there were also shorts from soon-to-be famous writers including Agatha Christie, Leslie Charteris and Margery Allingham.

  The magazine favoured dramatic covers and the edition in which “Love” appeared had a particularly lurid example. It featured a wild-eyed young man about to bring an axe down on the head of a bearded assailant who has in his grasp a terrified and nearly-topless woman. Though the sketches inside the magazine were well drawn and Heyer’s historical short story had an illustration of people in Georgian dress in a sumptuous drawing-room, the magazine’s cover cannot have endeared itself to the author. It is hard to imagine Heyer being impressed with this sort of image and it is perhaps unsurprising that she never had a story in The Sovereign Magazine again.

  Published in November 1923 – the same month as her fourth novel Instead of the Thorn – “Love” would prove to be the only tragedy among Heyer’s short stories. It would also be the only one of her historical shorts published in the 1920s; she would go on to write several historical shorts in the 1930s and 1940s, most of which would eventually be included in her 1960 anthology, Pistols for Two and in the 2016 reissue, Snowdrift and Other Stories.

  “Love” was the culmination of an intense writing period for the young Heyer. Between September 1922 and October 1923 she had written and successfully published three novels, seven contemporary short stories and this historical short. She had also written the bulk of the novel that she described as “a sequel” to The Black Moth. This draft manuscript, which she had nearly finished in January 1923, would eventually become her perennial bestseller, These Old Shades (1926). At the age of just twenty, Heyer was already demonstrating her remarkable ability to slip easily from one genre to another; from historical to contemporary and back again.