1
Contemplating our present exalted position, and looking back on the life which brought us there, we find that there is rarely a moment in it of which we can say: This happened then. It was then that the decision was made, the career was founded, the battle was won. The decisive moment happens more often in fiction than in real life; which is not strange, for the decisive moment is also the picturesque moment.
So it is impossible to say when Percy Walsh decided that he was engaged to Chloe. Had he proposed to her in the customary way, and she accepted him, then he could have noted in his diary that at 2.35 a.m. on June 5th at the Embassy he said, ‘What about it, old girl?’ and she said, ‘Oh, all right’; this being, for a few weeks anyhow, a decisive moment in his life. But, in fact, he did not ask her to marry him. He merely let the conviction grow on him that she was going to; assuming by degrees, or, more accurately, assuming that he was assuming, the proprietary rights which are considered to be the perquisite of the engaged man. None of Chloe’s other friends was deceived, for each one knew (or thought he knew) his Chloe. And though one of them might think, ‘She couldn’t possibly fall for a man like Walsh’, and another might think, ‘She couldn’t marry Percy, if she won’t even marry me’, it was Everard who knew (or thought he knew) the real answer: which was simply that the last man to whom Chloe would ever concede rights was the man who had the right to them. If she let Percy give himself the airs of an engaged man, she couldn’t be engaged to him. She was just amused by him.
To-day Percy was going through the traditional ceremony of presenting the ‘little woman’ to his ‘people’. Superb Chloe was the little woman; the ‘people’ were Aunt Essie and the Vicar of Much Hadingham.
‘I told you how it was about this feller,’ said Percy, not untruthfully. ‘He’s no relation, if you know what I mean, but he’s the feller who christened me.’
‘Does he live with your aunt?’ asked Chloe. ‘I mean, of course, in a nice way.’
‘No, I told you, he’s the feller who christened me.’
‘But you must have been very young then, darling. You wouldn’t be talking about the old christening days years after, and saying, “Do you remember how cold the water was?” and “Do you remember——”’
‘Sorry. Did that frighten you?’
‘No.’
‘The dam feller cut right across me. A Red by the look of him. There’s a lot of that going about this side of London. That’s the worst of living in Essex. Well, as I was saying, when a feller christens you, and goes so far as to write a long letter to you at school when you’re being confirmed, a feller you’ve known all your life, mark you, and played for Essex, well, naturally, there he is. And when my people went down in the Titanic, and it was touch and go whether I went to Rugby or Harrow, and there was this feller Alfred Winghampton, practically on Aunt Essie’s doorstep, and my whole future, as you might say, tottering in the balance, well, naturally Aunt Essie turned to him and said, “What about it?” and by the mercy of God he was an old Harrovian, otherwise I might have gone to Rugby.’
‘I see, darling. How providential all round. It was just that I didn’t realize that he and Aunt Essie had brought you up together.’
‘Well, you might put it like that, but you can’t get away from the central fact that he was the feller who christened me. By the way, you’d better call her Aunt Essie straight off, I think. I mean, don’t feel that you have to wait till she asks you to, because she probably never will.’
‘Do I call him Uncle Alfred straight off?’
‘Well, that’s a point,’ said Percy, and for a mile or two he gave his mind to it.
‘What do you call him?’ asked Chloe, trying to help.
‘I call him Wing, if you get me. Short for Winghampton,’ he explained, in case she didn’t.
‘I might call him Hampton,’ said Chloe.
After another mile Percy said that perhaps, taking it all in all, she had better call him Mr Winghampton.
‘I think so too, darling,’ said Chloe comfortingly.
2
‘Well, my dear Essie,’ said the Vicar of Much Hadingham, throwing his hat to the grass and settling himself in a deck-chair next to her, ‘have you discovered the solution to your problem?’
‘What problem is that, Alfred?’
‘Whether they are actually engaged.’
‘Not from anything which Percy has written. I shall know as soon as I see her.’
‘There has been nothing in the paper.’
‘No.’
‘Perhaps the boy wished for your approval of the lady before announcing it.’
‘It is not for me to approve or disapprove. He is old enough to make up his own mind.’
‘Yes. It is hard to realize that he is nearly forty.’
‘Only when you think of him. Not when you look at him.’
‘True,’ chuckled the Vicar. ‘May I have one of your cigarettes?
‘Don’t be silly,’
As he lit one, he said, ‘One has heard of her, of course. I am told that her photograph is often in the Tatler.’
‘I don’t see the Tatler.’
‘Nor I. She is not, I understand, an actress.’
‘Nor, I believe, is Percy an actor.’
‘No, no, quite so. Well, we shall know better when we see her.’
‘What are you trying to say, Alfred?’
‘Nothing, Essie, nothing. I was just thinking aloud.’
‘You’ve been told something. Personally I never believe anything I am told.’
‘Then it’s no use my telling you,’ smiled the Vicar, ‘that you’re a very wise woman.’
‘I suppose she has a past.’
‘A present was also implied.’
‘Then if the present is not Percy, they are not engaged, and it is no concern of ours.’
‘How very true. May I help myself to a drink, or would it be more polite to wait until they arrive? You know all these things.’
‘It would be more polite to offer me one first. And then pour one for yourself. It will mellow you, so that you don’t click your tongue when you see her, and say, “Tut-tut, a woman of Belial”.’
‘Really, Essie! I don’t know which I resent most: the suggestion that I would do any such thing, or the implication that I should not wish to help you before I helped myself.’
‘Dear Alfred.’ She put out a hand which he raised gently to his lips.
‘Dear Essie.’ He drank his sherry with the air of one who was giving it his whole attention.
‘Don’t you sometimes wish,’ said Miss Walsh suddenly, ‘that you had a past?’
‘At my age, my dear, a past is all that I can hope to have—in this world.’
‘All the more reason for wishing that it were worth looking back on. When I was twenty, I had a proposal of marriage from a man who was reputed to be a heavy drinker. Yet we loved each other dearly.’
‘And you refused him for the reason that he drank?’
‘Yes. How right I was. In five years he had drunk himself into his grave.’
‘How you must have rejoiced at your escape, dear Essie.’
‘I did. But doubtless I should have rejoiced still more, had I been married to him. And for thirty-five years I have been denied the happiness of living again the ecstatic moments of those five years . . . and the happiness of not living again the agony of them. Makes you think, young Alfred.’
‘Life,’ said the Vicar, putting his hat on, and then impatiently pulling it off, and sending it with a backhand flick of the wrist twenty yards across the lawn, ‘life is very difficult. I have always thought so, and always contended so. Wherefore I merely record now that my vocation has not permitted me to build up a past of rich and exotic colouring, and that, if it had, my conscience would never have stopped saying in a reproachful voice, “How could you?”’
‘For every woman of my age who says to herself, “How could I ever!” there are ten who say, “Why did I never?”’
‘I must admit that in such (as I hold them to be) uncanonical confessions from your sex as have come my way, remorse for lost or wasted opportunities has sometimes seemed to express itself in ambiguous terms. I gather from you, however, that they were not ambiguous.’
There was another short silence, broken only by the sound of the Vicar pouring himself out a second glass of sherry.
‘On an Hellenic Tour one Spring,’ he began suddenly— and was either lost in the memory of it, or decided that he wouldn’t tell that one after all; for the story ended there, and he began again: ‘When I was; a young man of twenty, and had not yet given up all idea of entering my father’s tannery, there was a girl——’ Again he was silent; and then sighed, and said, as if he had told both stories, ‘All this, of course, was before I married Agnes.’
‘Naturally,’ said Miss Walsh.
3
One of Percy’s longer stories, if any of them may be so picked out, tells of an occasion in his boyhood, when a domestic crisis, which arose on a Sunday afternoon, demanded from him a piece of constructive work in the sanitary engineering line, of which the local expert, arriving after the crisis was over, declared that it couldn’t have been done better if the young gentleman had been a natural-born plumber himself. Perhaps this is what he should have been. As it was, he spent five days a week on the Stock Exchange, and the greater part of his week-ends on the odd jobs which Aunt Essie had put by for him. ‘Leave it for Mr Walsh,’ she would say to the handy-man or the cook, ‘he will be down on Saturday.’ So firmly was his reputation now established.
It was perhaps fortunate, then, that there was something the matter with the boiler to-day.
‘Do you mind, old girl?’ said Percy, when the symptoms had been given to him at lunch. ‘I’ll just give it the once over, while you and Aunt Essie have a heart to heart.’
‘I shall be resting this afternoon,’ said Miss Walsh. ‘I want Alfred to show Miss Marr the garden, if he will.’
‘I oughtn’t to, but I most certainly will,’ said the Vicar firmly.
By the time Percy had got into his boiler suit, and Miss Walsh into a wrapper, Chloe and the Vicar were in the rose-garden.
‘Let’s sit down, shall we?’ said Chloe. ‘I get a lot of roses sent me, and they all have very long stalks, and there is only one rose on each stalk. Of course it’s fun opening the boxes, and wondering who they are from, and arranging them, but they never seem to come from a garden, only from a friend. So it’s nice sitting here, where they grow together as they please and I only have to arrange myself in order to enjoy them.’
‘You must have been in many rose-gardens before, Miss Marr, for I suppose you are always out of London at week-ends.’
‘Yes, but I’ve never put it quite like that before,’ said Chloe, flashing a smile at him.
‘No, no,’ protested the Vicar, ‘please don’t suppose that I was doubting your sincerity. I just wondered——’ He took off his hat, and rubbed his silver head; and then, wrinkling up a puzzled face, said, almost in surprise, ‘Or was I doubting it? I suppose I was. Dear me! How quickly a thought flashes and dies, leaving a train of speech behind it; and by the time we have spoken, we have lost touch with the thought, and claim, in good faith, some other origin for our words. If you were insincere for a moment, Miss Marr, so, it seems, was I. Both my manners and my morals need your forgiveness.’
‘Now listen,’ said Chloe, putting her hand gently on his. ‘That was a very pretty speech, rather elaborately worded, rather, as it seemed, self-conscious. Well, prettiness never did anybody any harm, and some of the most delightful men I know have elaborate minds, and one way or another we are all self-conscious. So I don’t criticize it, I just record it as a clue to the sort of man you are. Well,’ said Chloe, and now she was holding his brown, wrinkled hand in her firm, cool, young one, ‘are you getting to know me from what I say, what I do, how I look; or are you just keeping an eye on me to see that I don’t hide from you the character you had already imagined for me? Now be sincere, Mr Winghampton.’ She gave his hand a friendly pressure, and left it.
‘Miss Marr,’ said the Vicar of Much Hadingham. He looked at the hand which she had held, and the brackets at the sides of his mouth deepened for a moment, but he didn’t seem to be getting nearer to words. ‘Miss Marr,’ he tried again, and again stopped. ‘Miss Marr,’ he said finally. He put his hat firmly on his head, pulled it off, and whirled it across the grass. Chloe waited.
‘I don’t know what to say.’
‘Try saying Chloe.’
‘What a good idea! What a brilliant idea!’ He leant back in the seat, looking at her, and pulling at his chin. ‘I think you’ve found the solution. Chloe!’ And then, wonderingly, ‘Chloe!’
‘Like it?’
‘Yes . . . I suppose—no, that’s absurd. No, it wouldn’t do.’
‘Why not, Alfred?’
He laughed, shaking his head at her.
‘Well, privately,’ said Chloe. ‘Or, say, at Christmas.’
‘Very well, at Christmas. You will be here at Christmas, no doubt. Percy always comes . . . No!’ he shouted suddenly. ‘You’re not engaged to Percy! That was what put me wrong. Of course! How could you possibly be!’
‘They all say that,’ said Chloe. ‘Sooner or later.’
‘Well, now I shall be sincere. I had formed some thought of you in my mind. A very dear friend of mine was saying that when elderly women expressed remorse for their past lives, they were regretting, not the worldly, or possibly illicit, pleasures which they had wilfully enjoyed, but those which they had heedlessly missed. I had assumed, Chloe, without any warrant, that when you were old, you would look back and find—shall I say?—little to regret.’
‘Very nicely said, Alfred.’ She patted his hand.
‘No, no, you mustn’t. You are not engaged to Percy?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Sensible girl. Well?’
‘I wonder. Shall I perhaps regret that I didn’t confess my sins to a clergyman, with whom I once sat in a rose-garden?’
‘No. I shall do as you asked me to do—judge you as you seem to be. Look at the roses. I sit here and thank God with all my heart for their beauty. Suppose I could also overhear them, talking to each other, saying in their velvet voices wise and lively and understanding things. Then I should thank God for a still more blessed miracle. So now I sit here, Chloe, and look at you and listen to you, and roses are all round me, and I thank God that there is so much beauty in the world.’
‘But if there were blight on the roses, you would want to spray them.’
‘Not these. They are not in my charge. I should wait until the owner of them asked me to.’
‘Yes.’ She sighed, and gave herself a little shake; and gave him a little laugh, and said, ‘We are very serious for a summer day. Do you ever come up to London to buy yourself a new surplice?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘Shall we have lunch next time you come? I’ll drive you down to Hampton Court, and we’ll have lunch there. Would that be nice?’
‘For me, yes. But for you—why should you waste your time on an old gentleman?’
The smile she gave him seemed both to mock and to caress him.
‘I never waste any time,’ she said.
4
The Vicar returned to the vicarage after tea, possibly to revise his sermon, but was back again for dinner. In the dining-room, after the ladies had left, Percy said:
‘Well, as I was telling you, George Chater rang me up that morning. He’d got the Freddy Watsons and one or two other people coming out to dinner that night, and he wanted to know if I was free. Well, I don’t mind telling you that that struck me as a dam strange thing to do, because George Chater is not the sort of feller to ask a feller to dinner in the morning, and expect him to turn up in a white tie and tails the same evening. Well, it came out that Freddy Watson had taken a dam bad toss the day before—well, naturally, when you hear that a feller has taken a dam bad toss, you take it for granted that that’s what he’s taken, and I said, “Well, he’s been asking for it for the last two seasons,” but apparently he’d fallen off the top of a step-ladder, trying to paint the bathroom ceiling green. Dam strange thing to do, it seems to me, when your missis has £10,000 a year of her own. However, there it was, that’s what he’d done. The point was, would I take Freddy’s place, and keep the numbers right? Well, as a matter of fact, George Chater has done me one or two dam good turns. I’ve never told Aunt Essie this, but there was a time when it was all Regent Street to a raspberry ice——’
The Vicar was leaning over the deck-rail in the early morning sunlight, as the islands rose one by one from the sea—what was her name? Not Chloe . . . She was neither dark nor fair, but between, and she had violet eyes —no, that was Chloe—and he held her hand, and he thought, ‘Now I have held her hand, I shall have to ask her to marry me,’ because in those days—
‘Well, to cut a long story short, I didn’t do anything. The port was just going round again, and a feller called Carruthers was telling us a dam funny story—get me to tell you that another time, dam funny story it was about a feller he knew in the F.M.S. who was calling on the wife of a feller—oh, well, perhaps not, I was forgetting for the moment—funny thing, I was telling this story only the other day to a woman I know, and as luck would have it, I just pulled myself up in time, and I said, “Look here, old girl, I can’t tell you, but if you like to remind me to tell your husband next time I see him, and he cares to pass it on to you, that’s his look-out.” Well, to get back to what I was saying, I don’t know how it strikes you, but it always seems to me a damned uncivil thing to use another fellow’s telephone for a trunk-call. But passing all that for the moment——’
The Vicar was thirty. No, then he would have been in orders. Twenty-five, or was that too young? She must be nearly thirty herself. Very well, then, he’s thirty-two, and in the Army . . . just going into Parliament . . . his first play just coming on . . . just succeeded to the title, Lord Winghampton . . . Oh, to be young again! No, no, he was happy to be old. It was less disturbing to be old . . .
‘Well, one way and another, time went on, and by the time we’d joined the ladies, and had a round or two, and Chater had shown us a Dutch bed his Missis had picked up—damned unpatriotic, I call it, dam strange thing to do, but that’s the Bolshy side of her coming out—well, what with one thing and another——’
The Vicar, one hand in his pocket, one hand twisting the stem of his empty glass, stretched at full length in his chair, smiled happily at the ceiling.
5
In the drawing-room Miss Walsh stitched and said:
‘I always wonder who Percy will marry. I try to see her in my mind, but it’s difficult. Have you known him long?’
‘It seems a long time.’
‘Yes, it would do that. That is a very beautiful dress you’re wearing.’
‘I wondered if I was overdoing it in such a quiet, happy house, in such a quiet, happy country. I didn’t really mean to wear it, but then I suddenly felt I’d like you to see it.’
‘I’m very glad you did, my dear. I hope Maggie was helpful. Or shall I say, not unhelpful.’
‘Oh, very, thank you.’
‘I expect you usually bring your own maid.’
‘Yes, but she isn’t called Suzette. She is a dear old thing called Ellen, and has been with me for some years. We both get a little tired of each other at times, but we manage to make it up.’
‘Maggie is only a country girl, of course, but she’s clever with her fingers, and is very teachable. Do you like the country?’
‘No.’
‘How nice to hear somebody say that. “No” is such a difficult single word for the modern generation, which always has to excuse it with an “actually” or an “as a matter of fact”.’
‘Perhaps I’m not quite the modern generation.’
Miss Walsh looked at her, and said, ‘I don’t think you’re any generation, my dear.’ She went on with her work again. ‘Why don’t you like the country?’
‘It makes me unhappy. I feel that I’m missing something.’
‘Why do you walk through the fields in gloves, missing so much and so much?’ quoted Miss Walsh to herself.
‘I shouldn’t do that,’ smiled Chloe. ‘Not unless we were going to Church. I should always wear the right things. That’s what I mean by missing. There are other things than the right things, but I’m too busy to think about them in London. In the country there is more time to think, and I feel that I want something which I’m not getting.’
‘Would you like to go to church to-morrow?’
As soon as she had said it, Miss Walsh looked up apologetically, and caught Chloe’s laughing eye; and they laughed together.
‘No, no,’ said Miss Walsh. ‘I didn’t mean “Would you like to see a clergyman, dear?”’
‘I should like to hear a clergyman; to hear this particular one. His wife is dead, I suppose.’
‘Yes. Fifteen years ago. And all his family is abroad. Where so many poor clergymen’s sons end up. Empire building. So, in a quiet, friendly way, we keep each other company.
‘I can’t help envying you both,’ said Chloe.
‘Don’t you think that when we envy other people their qualities, their lives, their possessions—we don’t mean “I wish I were you”, but “I wish I had some of the things you’ve got in addition to all I’ve got”?’
‘I think I generally mean: “I’d like to be you every Tuesday afternoon, just for a change”; and, when Tuesday came, I’d be so busy being myself, I’d say, “Let’s make it Wednesday this week, if you don’t mind”.’
‘I should like to be you,’ said Miss Walsh suddenly, ‘for one glorious year, and then come back to myself, and think about it for the rest of my life.’
‘I think you would find a year too long.’
‘I’d risk it. When you’re getting on for sixty, you would risk anything.’
‘I hope I shan’t live to sixty. I should be so terribly bad at it.’
‘Not you. You’ll be a very happy, very wise, old grandmother,’ said Miss Walsh, but she didn’t say it as if she believed it. Chloe laughed derisively, and came across to the sofa.
‘May I look?’
‘Just putting an E on a handkerchief.’
‘Is Essie short for Esther?’
‘Esmeralda,’ said Miss Walsh, getting a little colour into her cheeks.
‘Oh, how lovely!’ cried Chloe. ‘Esmeralda! You ought to flaunt it, and dress up to it.’
‘Who for, my dear?’
‘Esmeralda Walsh, of course. Who else?’
‘It’s a little late now. You should have said all this thirty years ago.’
‘I meant to, but I forgot. Now listen, Esmeralda. Where do you get your clothes? Don’t say Chelmsford.’
‘Colchester.’
‘Well, you didn’t say Chelmsford. But why not try London? Big place. Lots of shops.’
‘Wouldn’t know which was which.’
‘We’ll go together. We’ll get you all Esmeralda for the Harvest Festival. It will be a secret from Mr Winghampton until he sees you suddenly in church between two vegetable marrows. What fun! Darling, say you will?’
Chloe’s arms were round her suddenly. Miss Walsh found herself saying that she would.
6
As soon as the car turned into the road Chloe said:
‘How are you, darling, and what have you been doing with yourself over the week-end?’
Percy gave her a long and literal account of what he had been doing with himself over the week-end.
‘So that’s how it was, old girl. First the boiler, and then the garden shears, and then the egg-whisk. Coming on the top of each other like that, and the egg-whisk being absolutely virgin ground as far as I was concerned, well, it meant leaving you to the old people for longer than I liked. But there it was. How did you get on with them? They’re not very lively at the best of times, I grant you, and I have a shrewd suspicion that Wing is losing his sense of humour, so if you want an apology, old girl, you can have it.’
‘No apology needed, darling. I just wondered where you’d been staying.’
The Vicar, who had come to see them off, stood with Aunt Essie in the doorway waving good-bye. As soon as the car had turned into the road, he said:
‘Well, she is not marrying him.’
‘It wouldn’t matter,’ said Aunt Essie. ‘No man will ever hold her.’
‘She is very lovely.’
‘She is very clever,’ said Aunt Essie. ‘But I don’t mind.’