IT was no surprise to anyone who knew Catherine that her son and daughter should disappoint her as they grew up. Her pride in their outstanding cleverness could not blind her to their failings, and she made no bones about admitting that they were not going to take after their father. They lacked his solid qualities. Before they were out of their teens she had decided against a literary career for either of them. It would merely entail a waste of time, for their work would never be other than second-rate. Trevor had better go to the Bar, where he might succeed, if only he would apply himself. And for Charlotte a husband must be found as soon as possible.
The preliminary skirmishes, consequent upon this decree, had scarcely got under way before war broke out. But this was, to Catherine, a mere postponement of the issue. If Trevor was spared to her, she would insist upon his going to the Bar as soon as the war was over, and Charlotte, temporarily employed as a V.A.D., should be taken eventually for a season in London. Nothing was to be changed, if Catherine could help it, and when peace was declared they all began again, just where they had left off four years earlier. For Trevor was among the survivors, contrary to her miserable forebodings and in answer, as she believed, to the anguished prayers which she had put up, day and night, on his behalf. He was twice wounded, had fought on most fronts, and been mentioned in despatches. She was unspeakably proud of his gallantry, but she still believed that he was mistaken in considering himself a poet.
“I feel,” she explained to Philip, “that the war ought to make no difference. Except that it’s put all these young men back in their careers, so that they will have to work all the harder to make up for the years they’ve missed. I want Trevor to lose no time in getting settled, now that he’s out of the army. It would be so bad for him to waste any more time.”
This was on the very afternoon of Trevor’s final home-coming, after his demobilisation, and Philip could not help feeling some sympathy with the boy. Catherine was probably quite right, but she was in too much of a hurry. She should give her son time to look round: it was tactless to hurl his future at his head on the very instant of his arrival.
“I think I understand how he feels, Catherine. You know, I find this return to everyday life very unsettling, myself. We’ve got so used to giving emergency values to everything we’ve almost lost any sense of permanence.”
“You’ll take Orders again, of course,” she told him.
“I suppose I shall. There doesn’t seem anything else to do.”
He had given up Orders because he wanted to join the army. And now, having spent three years in the Near East, he found himself back at Ratchet, trying, a little half-heartedly, to pick up the threads of his old life. His want of spirit annoyed Catherine; it was tiresome of him to say that he felt unsettled, just when she wanted his support in settling Trevor.
“It’s quite simple,” she proclaimed. “We’ve all got to consider where our next duty lies. During the war we developed quite a high sense of duty, and we mustn’t lose it now.”
“I agree, Catherine. But it may take us a little time to discover what those duties are.”
“But it’s obvious. We must all get back to normal ways as soon as possible. We must try to put the war behind us.”
“The world we live in is changed. It won’t be the same again. The normal conditions which we must try to establish can never be pre-war conditions.”
“We must all try,” she repeated obstinately.
“But don’t you feel yourself as though everything had come to a sort of standstill?”
She did indeed. Ever since the signing of the Armistice she had felt as though she scarcely knew what to do with herself. During the war it had all been so plain and clear. She had to be brave, to fortify herself against all possible disasters, to uphold the courage of others by a conscientious optimism, to economise in food and fuel, and to refrain from an unchristian hatred of the Germans. But the relief, now that it was all over, was almost oppressive. Ever since her secret burden of anxiety and fear had been removed she had felt quite light and giddy. She, who had gone about her war activities with so much silent determination, now pottered round the house and garden in an oddly aimless way. She forgot things. She fussed. Sometimes she told the same story twice. The future before her was immense and empty.
Time and trouble had left but little outward mark on her. She was still the same grey, upright, rather formidable woman. But it was significant that in the village they had begun lately to refer to her as “old Mrs. Frobisher.”
“Yes, I think we are all of us a little desoeuvrés,” she agreed, with a shake of the head. “But we must fight it.”
She got up and went across to peer out of the window, saying: “I thought I heard something; but it’s much too early yet of course. His train isn’t even in. Will you have some more tea, Philip?”
“No, thank you, Catherine. I really think I must be getting home, as a matter of fact.”
“Oh, you mustn’t go yet. You must stay to dinner. Trevor will want to see you.”
“Will he?” Philip looked dubious.
“Our oldest friend! Of course he will. Stay to dinner, and you’ll have a moon to ride home by. Oh, and will you excuse me, Philip. I think, if you’ve quite finished, I’ll send the tea-pot out. And then when Trevor comes he can have it fresh. No, don’t ring. I’ll take it out myself. The maids will be at tea.”
She trotted off. Really, she could not be still a moment. All day she had been like this, never able to be quiet. When she had taken the tea-pot into the kitchen, she just ran up to Trevor’s room to see if his sheets were well aired.
“Of course I shan’t say anything very much about it for the first day or two,” she was explaining as she came back. “It would spoil his welcome. To-night I want us all just to be happy together. And, of course, I want him to have a a holiday, poor boy, after all his hard time. I shall be delighted to have him here for a month or two, and perhaps we could ask some of his friends down. But I do want him to make definite plans for the future, at once.”
“A few weeks may make all the difference to the way he feels about it,” suggested Philip hopefully.
“I know, I know. I don’t want to force him. In fact, I never have coerced them. It’s useless to try.”
“Worse than useless, I’m sure.”
“Charlotte, now.” Her voice grew harsh and bitter. “I never argue with Charlotte. I just let her do as she pleases. To-night she wouldn’t stay at home, though she knew I wished it. She’s gone over to tea at Monk’s Hall, and she won’t be here when Trevor comes. It’s all just done to assert her independence: it’s the modern attitude, the belittling of family ties. I said nothing. I just let her go. One can’t coerce them.”
She said a good deal more, in the same strain, and Philip could not quite understand what she meant. For he was very sure that she intended to get her own way. But after a little while a light broke in upon him. She would not argue with her children or reproach or exhort them, but the strongest of all silent arguments was at her disposal and she meant to use it. They were without independent means, for their father had left all his property, unconditionally, to his wife. Not that she was ungenerous; she would have given her last penny to Trevor if only he would be sensible. But she considered that she owed it to Charles Frobisher not to allow his children to live in idleness upon his honourable earnings. Their allowances were dependent upon her approbation, and she did not consider this coercion.
She was outlining to Philip her own conception of her duties as a mother when the old house-dog, sleeping by the fire, broke into excited barking. There was a bustle in the hall. In an instant she was out and on the front door steps. A car purred in the darkness, while figures dodged round the headlights. Trevor’s voice was heard saying:
“Hullo, mother! Do I pay for this now, or does it all go down on a bill?”
He came into the hall, out of the windy dark, and kissed her, and never saw, in the flickering lamplight, that tears were running down her worn cheeks.
“Well, mother!” he said again. “It’s very good to be home.”
“Oh, Trevor,” she said. And then she turned from him abruptly and called out of the front door:
“Have you got a nozzle?”
“No, mum,” replied a voice from the night.
There was a good deal of lamentation. It appeared that Trevor’s car should have picked up in Ratchet a new nozzle for the garden-hose. Conflicting instructions were given. A piercing wind coursed round the hall and doors slammed. Golf-clubs and luggage were carried in from the car outside, and Catherine, pausing for a moment in her harangue about the nozzle, called out to the maids to leave the things, because Mr. Trevor would carry his own luggage upstairs. The young man, standing uncertain in all the draught and confusion, felt that his homecoming had been flat and bleak. He was repelled by his mother’s ungraciousness, and told himself that she cared more for the nozzle than anything else.
He left her still scolding at the front door, and wandered into the drawing-room, where he found Philip installed like some disagreeable, inevitable piece of furniture. The irritating, eternal past rose up around him in all its familiarity and staleness. Everything was as it always had been. On the journey he had felt a real exhilaration at the thought of getting home, and he had determined to be very charming to everyone. But he had forgotten how stupefying home could be. And really he could not see why he should have to carry his own luggage upstairs.
“Well, Trevor!”
“Well, Philip!”
They shook hands.
“Well, Cæsar! Hullo, old boy. I say! He is getting old!”
Catherine’s offer of fresh tea was refused, for he had had some on the train. He tried to be genial and to adorn the short replies which a tired man likes to give about his journey. He exerted himself to enquire after everybody. But a numbing depression had invaded him, and he set it down, perversely, to the presence of Philip. It was so typical of Philip to be there at the very beginning, such an unnecessary reminder of callow, childish rebellion.
“I suppose,” he thought, “that he’s been brought here to discuss my future. Damn him! Blast his neck! I wonder Uncle Bobbie hasn’t been dragged in too!”
And he asked how they all did at Monk’s Hall. Catherine shook her head.
“They’ve decided to sell the house, or let it,” she said. “All the land is mortgaged, and now that rubber is paying so badly, they can’t possibly afford to go on there.”
“Where will they go?”
“They thought abroad, somewhere. It’s easier to live cheaply.”
“Rough on Lise.”
“It’s a great deal harder on your uncle,” said Catherine quickly. “He was born there.”
“All the more reason for wanting to get away. Nobody should live in the house they were born in. Who are they going to sell it to?”
“That’s the difficulty. Nobody wants large houses nowadays. It’s not easy to get any price for a house that size.”
“Eespecially when it’s …” He was going to say “such a mouldy old hole,” but from respect to his mother’s feelings he modified it, and said, “… got a northern aspect.”
“The back windows face south,” said Catherine, who thought that her old home was faultlessly beautiful.
Trevor suggested that it might do for an institution of some sort; an asylum or a nursing-home. He said this partly out of mischief and partly because it really struck him as a good idea. But she took the remark simply as a tasteless joke, and the conversation languished into silence. Fortunately, it was almost time to dress for dinner, and she went off upstairs, pausing on her way to see if Trevor’s fire was burning nicely. Generally she did not allow bedroom fires, but this was an exceptional occasion, because Trevor had come through the war, and would have to unpack. And it was a very cold spring night. Her own room struck as chill as a vault, as, shivering, she took off her black stuff bodice. She hurried into her red flannel dressing-gown.
Trevor, down in the hall, would not go to dress. He wandered about vaguely, examining the books which lay on the tables and grunting at their dullness. Occasionally he muttered a remark, half to himself and half to Philip. But he got no answer. Philip’s short mood of sympathy was over, and he disliked the young man as much as ever. The moment when Catherine ran to the door had been beautiful and moving, but it had not lasted. The beauty had shivered and collapsed before Trevor’s boorishness and Catherine’s harsh disappointment.
Philip took up the Times and buried himself behind it.
“Emily sent you a message,” said Trevor at last.
This was a provocative opening. The newspaper came down at once.
“She wants to know who wrote the Catechism,” Trevor hastily improvised. “I said you’d probably know.”
“Why does she want to know that?”
“Couldn’t say. Probably she’s in love with a bishop.”
Trevor hoped that this would be black news for his companion. But Philip merely enquired how the twins were.
“The same as ever. They never vary much, do they?”
“No. I must say I was surprised, when I last saw them, to find them so little changed. One would have thought the war …”
“Yes, wouldn’t one? But the war never affected William and Emily very deeply. They didn’t take it seriously, you see. They take nothing seriously except, perhaps, a few things that the rest of the world calls nonsense. Look at William? Barring the fact that he could never remember which his right hand was, he made a very good soldier. He’s so entirely biddable. He likes doing what he’s told because it saves him trouble. But he didn’t take it seriously. You know, when they were teaching us to bayonet sacks, all the men used to curse horribly and jab away at the sacks as if they were Germans. We were encouraged to go at it like that. But old William must needs call his sack a ‘lousy lickspittle,’ which made all the men laugh just when they were getting nicely worked up. His sergeant nearly killed him.”
Philip recognised the essential levity of the Crownes in this anecdote. Long before the war he had observed, with a slight twinge of anxiety, that the twins were somehow incapable of growing up. They got taller but no older. They travelled no further from the East. It was as if they lived in a world which was free from the continual pressure of time. They put on the outward shows of maturity; they were confirmed; William’s voice broke and he bought a razor; Emily was promoted in her turn to boned stays. But these things were, to them, little more than a sort of dressing-up. At an age when most young people are stormy and rebellious, they kept the beautiful serenity of childhood. They dealt with their seniors in a spirit of acquiescence which was sometimes mistaken for commonsense. They did what they were told and they never criticised, for their grasp on the actual world around them was so slight that they could have no quarrel with it. The war came to them simply as another circumstance to which they must submit—another whim of the people set over them. William went to the front and Emily made shells, but they still waited, as they had always waited, for the time when they should be grown up and free and able to live together in London. And now they had broken away and had bought a house in Kensington. Their aunt had done her best to stop it, but she could do very little, for they were of age and had free command of their very handsome fortune. Extraordinary rumours had already drifted to Water Hythe of their enormous personal and social success, so that to Trevor and Charlotte they appeared to be the most fortunate creatures in the world. To Trevor especially, on this night of homecoming, the very different lot of William seemed a little unfair. He could have done such amusing things himself, if only he had possessed an independent income. For he feared that his mother was going to be obstinate. Everything about her welcome, with its emphasis on old times, had been depressing to him.
The sight of his room, when at last he went up to dress, was enough to sink him still further into a slough of bitterness. Not even the bright firelight could make the place agreeable to him. His mother, with misplaced zeal, had collected and carefully set out all the treasures of his boyhood, so that he might feel entirely at home. His eye was continually falling on some object which was intended to encourage him to be a boy again. Most of these relics caused him acute shame, for nothing is more disconcerting than the memory of past enthusiasms. He had grown old enough not to have enthusiasms or to go about collecting things any more. He despised himself for having bought these Medici prints; they were donnish. And his edition of Kipling appalled him.
“God! How awful home is!” he thought.
The birds’ eggs and stamps and butterflies were less compromising. Their date was further off. At fifteen he had been ashamed of them, but now they were amusing and rather pathetic. They were such small collections and so childish. He liked to think of himself as a little boy, but he could not bear to think what a callow youth he must have been. For there was nothing callow about him now. He had grown up into a good-looking, dapper, alert little man, with the reputation of a wit. That was how he thought of himself.
Charlotte, who ran in to greet him just before dinner, found him in a terrible state of depression.
“Hullo, Car”—he kissed her. “Nice sister you are! Why weren’t you here when I arrived?”
“Because family reunions are so dreadful.”
“You’ve said it. But I daresay it might have gone off better if you’d been there.”
“Didn’t it go off well?”
“No.”
“What happened?”
“I was a brute to mother.”
He grew pale with contrition.
“She won’t remember it,” said Charlotte.
“I know. But I shall. I shall be very sorry when she’s dead.”
“Oh dear! I’m always thinking that myself.”
“You? My dear, you’re a pattern daughter.”
“No, indeed I’m not. But we get on better than we did. I try to remember that she’s really devoted to us, and I avoid struggles as much as I can. I just let her talk. I say nothing. You know, the secret of getting on with them is to remember that old dogs can’t learn new tricks. They can’t change, or adapt themselves, and we mustn’t expect them to meet us halfway or understand our point of view. We must do it all.”
“I wish,” said Trevor, “that one could be born without parents. It’s a hopeless relationship. I’d thought things were better between mother and me; but now I’m afraid they’ll never really improve much.”
There had been a better understanding during the war, because the issues were so much simpler. The small irritations and disputes of their daily life had been superseded, and were forgotten in his long absence from home. He had been able to admire and appreciate her calm, courageous fortitude. But now it was clear that this state of things had no permanence.
“What happened?” asked Charlotte.
“Oh, I don’t know. We just sat about, and couldn’t think of anything to say, and got on each other’s nerves. It would have been better if Philip hadn’t been there.”
“Oh, was he?”
“Yes, my dear! And to dinner! The first night! Quite like old times, isn’t it? And, what’s more, Car, I’m quite right; he is in love with Emily. I always said so. The only civil look I got from him was when I talked about her.”
“That’s no proof.”
“With Philip it is. He’s such a cold-blooded fish. The faintest interest, in him, is equal to a violent passion in anybody else. I don’t mean that he wants to marry her, or anything carnal like that. But she’s his Blessed Damosel. And I don’t blame him, if he admires Botticelli. I daresay I’d be in love with her myself if she wasn’t my cousin. Just look at the time he took to prepare her for confirmation. It’s my belief that this has been going on ever since. He never took half so much trouble with you. He did you in a class with all the Ratchet servant girls.”
“And he’d have prepared Emily in a class too, if she hadn’t had chicken-pox.”
“Well, I’m telling you, it began then.”
“I don’t think he writes to her. He didn’t, when he was in Palestine, anyhow.”
“No, he wouldn’t. He hasn’t the gumption. There’s the gong. Run along, my girl, or you’ll be late.”
She was late, but Catherine insisted on their waiting for her, and her apologies, when she did come down, were obviously thought to be insufficient. They drank their tepid soup in a very strained atmosphere, and Trevor came to grief over his first genuine attempt to be pleasant.
“I see,” he said, “you’ve taken down the Leightons. I think it’s an enormous improvement.”
He nodded towards some bare spaces on the wall.
“They’ve gone to an exhibition,” Catherine said coldly. “I was asked to lend them. Of course they’ll be put back. I wouldn’t dream of taking them down for good.”
Trevor shrugged his shoulders rather too blatantly, and Charlotte amiably tried to mend matters by saying that the Japanese vary their pictures with the seasons, and that it was an amusing idea. He was grateful to her, and reflected that she was really grown up into a delightful creature Her old, uncouth aggressiveness was mellowing into something fine and strong. It occurred to him that she must have a very poor time of it, living in this dull place, entirely ruled by his mother, and writing novels which nobody ever read. He was sorry that she had not more of a life of her own, that she did not marry. But she was still plain, bouncing and awkward, with red cheeks and round eyes and prominent teeth; he did not suppose that she would ever get a husband. His mother ought to treat her better. A sense of grievance on Charlotte’s account reinforced his own grudge against life.
Catherine, resentful, had determined to ignore her children and their foolishness. For the greater part of the meal she talked loudly to Philip about people whom Trevor and Charlotte did not know. And Trevor revenged himself by talking in an undertone to Charlotte about people whom his mother did not know. Also he described to her the fantastic doings of the twins, with whom he had been roystering a good deal during the last few weeks.
“I don’t understand this enormous réclame they have,” said Charlotte. “After all, they’ve written nothing, only one small book of poems between them, and that wasn’t …”
“Oh, my dear Car, it’s nothing to do with their writing, I can assure you. Nobody reads that. It’s simply a success of personality; not what they’ve done, but what they are. They’re so … elusively radiant. It’s not easy to describe. Partly, of course, it’s their lineage. People naturally want to see them because they are the children of Norman Crowne.”
At the name of Crowne Catherine’s attention wandered, and she called her garden-boy Norman, when she discussed his confirmation with Philip, though his real name was Stanley.
“And of course,” pursued Trevor, “there’s a sort of naïveté about their entire freedom from self-consciousness. They are neither ashamed of l’affaire nor proud of it. They don’t make capital out of it and they don’t conceal it. People begin by admiring what seems to be a marvellous pose, and then they find out that it’s no such thing. By some miracle, the twins don’t appreciate the fact that they belong to a doomed family and all that.”
“My dear Trevor, I don’t know what you mean by a miracle.” Catherine, unable to contain herself any longer, had finally deserted Stanley. “There’s no miracle about it. It simply is that as children they came here and led a normal life, and never heard any horrid gossip. In my opinion, it’s the greatest pity that they should begin to call attention to themselves in this particular way. Especially Emily.”
“They certainly call attention to themselves,” agreed Trevor. “Partly, I suppose, because they always go about together and look so alike. Of course, either would be striking anywhere; and the double effect is quite dazzling. He is so handsome, and as for her! I’ve heard her compared to La Bella Simonetta. Which is nonsense, of course. She’s got the features, and that divine purity of outline, but she isn’t essentially compelling. There isn’t that innate sexuality …”
“I hear,” said Catherine to Philip, “that they are putting on a new fast train from Ratchet to London, instead of the old 10.49. That will be a great improvement, but …”
“It isn’t merely their beauty”—Trevor was determined to talk his mother down—“it is that the two of them seem to have, when they are together, a sort of iridescent quality which affects their surroundings. You see it all in a golden haze, don’t you know. Anyhow, they’ve become absolutely the fashion. They go everywhere. They’re a sure draw.”
For a few minutes he was drowned by the train service, but he took breath and began again when Charlotte asked him if he thought it would last.
“No, it won’t last. It can’t last. Because they can’t last. That’s their charm. That’s why everybody adores them; because they are made of something that doesn’t last. Their career is as romantic as a soap-bubble, and that’s the most romantic thing I can think of. You know how you have to watch it while it lasts. And you see all the things of your world reflected in it, only made lovely and strange and quite perfect, in a little, fragile, unreal sphere. And you see it drifting into all sorts of dangers, and just missing them, till it seems an absolute marvel that it can last so long. The whole romance of it is that you know it must come to grief. The solid, ugly things around it, the inevitable chairs and tables and fenders, are bound to collide with it sooner or later. It can reflect them beautifully, but if it touches them, it vanishes. The twins are like that. They sail past dangers. They skim over them. They keep making incredible, miraculous escapes. But they can’t always do it. Sooner or later they’ll come into direct contact with the vulgarity and snobbery and cold-heartedness that’s all around them, and then they’ll just … disappear.”
“Trevor dear! Stop talking for a minute and pass Philip the port. He hasn’t had any.”
Trevor did as he was told. He stopped talking absolutely, and did not utter another syllable until the ladies had left the room. He felt that the absurdity of the position was sufficiently obvious to everyone. He had demonstrated his own conversational powers and his mother’s want of sympathy so neatly that even Philip must be aware of it. Also he felt that he had never done better justice to his famous simile of the twins and the soap-bubble.
When the ladies had gone he apologised for the port.
“I like it,” said Philip.
“My mother gets it at the Army and Navy Stores.”
“So do I.”
A short silence followed this exchange, which Trevor thought fit to break by a direct attack.
“I suppose,” he began, “that you and my mother have been arranging my future.”
“She has been speaking of it.”
“It’s very good of you to take so much interest in me.”
“I don’t know that I do,” said Philip, cracking a walnut.
Trevor gaped.
“Your mother,” went on Philip, “likes talking about you. One na urally hears a good deal about you in her company. But I don’t know that I wouldn’t prefer it if she talked of something else.”
“Well, I’m damned!” exclaimed Trevor. “I’m sure I wish you’d tell her so. It’s been my fate through life to be talked over by relations.”
“That’s the fate of anyone who has relations.”
“Yes. But in my case it’s time it stopped.”
“Is there anything so very unique about your case?”
“My relations haven’t the right to utter a syllable. They should be sitting about in sackcloth. My career has been ruined through their mismanagement. The world they brought me up to live in has gone to pieces. I’ve got to start on my own now and make the best I can of the ruins, all on top of this incredible war of theirs. I didn’t make it. But I, and my generation, will have to pay for it.”
“Oh dear! oh dear! I’ve heard this so often, Trevor. I wonder you can’t even invent a grouse of your own.”
“The older generation can’t have it both ways. We fought for them. We risked our lives to get them out of this mess they’ve made. But they can’t expect us to come home and sit meekly at their feet, as we might have done in other circumstances. My mother simply doesn’t realise that there’s been a war. She’s immense, really! She thinks she can bully me about my future and my profession as if …”
But Philip had had enough. He got up.
“I’m afraid I must be going,” he said. “Please believe that I don’t insult you by being over-interested in your career, Trevor. I’m sure you’ll be an ornament to any profession you may adopt. And as for your remarks just now, a little solid reflection must convince you of their cheapness. If the past four years have proved your elders to be foolish and short-sighted, they haven’t proved that you are wise.”
“You’re very glib yourself, Philip.”
“I’m always hearing young men talk as you’ve been talking, and I’m tired of it. One would suppose that nobody over the age of twenty-one took part in the late war. From the beginnings of history it has been admitted that the sort of anguish which your mother has endured in these years must be a good deal worse than anything you had to put up with. If you can’t respect or comprehend the magnificent courage of such a woman, you can at least hold your tongue.”
“I suppose you think I haven’t played up? I admit it’s all fallen rather flat. I admit it’s not been heroic; not the traditional ‘return of the soldier.’ But if I’m to say my little bit, I must have some sort of cue. The first thing my mother did was to scold me for not having a nozzle. I defy anyone …”
“I think you’ve behaved abominably, if you want to know.”
Philip was unreasonably angry, and he took himself off without saying good-bye to the ladies, who, for their part, were having a little battle of their own in the drawing-room. For Catherine had caught just enough of Trevor’s conversation during dinner to make her very uneasy. She began at once, as soon as they had helped themselves to coffee:
“Who are these friends that Trevor means to go to Ireland with? I’d hoped that perhaps he might like to ask them down here for a bit, while he is making plans.”
“I … I don’t think you’d really care for these people much,” began Charlotte reluctantly.
“Who are they?”
“One of them is Nigel Cuffe; you know, the man who wrote ‘If All the World Were Paper,’ and ‘The Round Pond,’ and …”
“I couldn’t get through any of them,” said Catherine quickly. “But, of course … if he’s a friend of Trevor’s … I know he is considered a very clever writer. Who else?”
“His … his mistress.”
Charlotte felt that truth must out sometimes, and that candour was really best.
“His … Oh! … Well, yes. That would be impossible. Will you ring for coffee to go out, Charlotte?”
“It’s quite an accepted affair,” Charlotte felt bound to explain. “They live together openly, I mean. And go about together.”
“Not here. Not in my house.” Catherine was quite decided. “I don’t accept those ways. One has one’s standards. I know that people nowadays feel differently, but …”
She was dreadfully flurried and a little excited, as though Charlotte had used an obscene word. It was impossible to hope for any sensible discussion, and Charlotte reflected miserably upon the difficulty of making a plain statement to an elder. It always resulted in getting or giving a shock.
“And who,” asked Catherine presently, “is this Mrs. Van Tuyl? I don’t think I’ve heard of her before.”
She made a pretence of counting her stitches, but her voice shook a little, and Charlotte thought:
“I knew she was pricking up her ears over that, for all she pretended to be so interested in Stanley”
“I don’t know much about her,” she said at last.
“Is she married?”
“Yes. I believe her husband was something in the Dutch Legation.”
“Was? Is she a widow?”
“I think she divorced him.”
“Is she Dutch?”
“Trevor said, half French and half Polish.”
“Is she respectable?”
“Perfectly, as far as I know.”
“And is she going with them on this Irish expedition?”
“I don’t think so. She’s on the stage.”
Catherine mused. Life was getting very difficult. These Mrs. Van Tuyls, these dubious she-friends, had been, in the past, no problem at all. If they existed, it was in their own place. One never heard of them: they involved no lowering of standards. She repeated:
“Not in my house!” And then very quickly, with a little tremor: “He must choose. Trevor must choose.”
For she did not believe, she could not believe, that he would put these new friends before his own mother. If told to choose, he would mend his foolish ways.
When he came in, alone, it was Charlotte’s tact which saved the evening from complete disaster. She asked him at once to play for them. He sat down and played Bach Fugues very badly, because he was out of temper and had not practised for four years. Neither of the ladies could really have liked his performance but they thanked him, with nervous civility, in each pause. Charlotte stared at the fire and dreamed of a companion, somebody with a mind like her own, with whom she could discuss all these trying situations. She longed for company. But she was sure that she would find neither friend nor lover until she got away from Water Hythe. And perhaps not then. She knew she was ugly, and that she had better learn to like being alone.
Catherine sat bolt upright, knitting very fast. Her lips moved: she was saying to herself:
“Very well, Trevor! You must choose.”
Trevor’s sojourn at Water Hythe lasted rather less than a month. It ended in a complete breach with his mother. He returned to London, having flatly refused to become a barrister. Without delay he went to tell his troubles to his friend, Tilli Van Tuyl, and as she happened to be giving a tea-party he made a very good tale of it to amuse her guests.
“I’ve been cut off with a shilling,” he told them, “simply because I said the war was all my father’s fault.”
His hostess did not join in the laughter, because she had not quite made out who Trevor’s father could have been.
“He was a man of great influence, Trevor’s father?” she murmured to Nigel Cuffe, who was sitting next to her.
“Oh, enormous! Trevor! Tilli wants to know if your father was a man of great influence.”
“One of the greatest men of his time,” Trevor told her.
“Then he was dead before the war?”
“Dead as mutton.”
“That’s not a nice way, Cuffe, to speak of a gentleman’s father. I shall have to call you out.”
“But if he is dead, how has he made the war?”
Tilli was forced to abandon the exciting hope that Trevor’s father might have been the Crown Prince of Germany.
“He was an esprit fort, Tilli. He wrote books.”
“Ah! I understand.”
She abandoned the point, which had become dull.
“And now you are to have no money at all?”
“None at all.”
“But seriously? That is terrible!”
“Not seriously, Tilli. The truth is that his mother very rightly thinks him an idle dog and wants him to do some work.”
“I do work. My notion is that the money which my father made by prostituting his art shall be spent in keeping mine pure. Thus good shall come out of evil and the sin of the Frobishers be purged. I explained this at home. I pointed out that Milton only got £10 for ‘Paradise Lost.’”
“Surely,” jeered Cuffe, “our Trevor can beat that!”
“Only relatively,” he assured them lightly. “Only relatively. Think how the cost of living has gone up!”
Tilli remembered something of “Paradise Lost”; it was surely an immensely long poem? But vast! And it had been sold for £10! She was scandalised.
“It is terrible!” she said again, very gravely.
She was always sorry for people who were poor because she hated being poor herself. The insecure Bohemianism of her life was far from being her own choice; she hated living in a flat in a mews, like an obscure cocotte, and she longed for a big house with gold chairs. But the acquisitive, cautious French half of her was often over-ruled by the Polish element, and this had always involved her in disaster. It was upon impulse that she had divorced her husband, a sudden irrational fatigue for her life with him, rather than any of the very legitimate grievances that she might have had against him. Bitterly had she rued it since, for freedom had brought her nothing but poverty and loneliness. Still quite young, and not without charm, she found herself stranded in London, with no influential friends and no secure position on the stage.
Her attraction consisted largely of a graceful, exotic ugliness. In type she was almost Mongolian, with high cheek-bones and a flat little nose, but with enormous, mournful black eyes. Her skin was clear and pale and her straight, jet-smooth hair was cut quite short, though the mode of the Eton crop had not yet arrived. Despite her slender means she contrived to produce an effect of shabby elegance in her person and surroundings. Her flat had distinction, for it was at the end of a mews and the sitting-room window looked up the street. Any vista, even in a town, gives a sense of space, and Tilli’s little mews, with a sunset sky at the end of it, achieved sometimes a look of unexpected, delicate romance. Altogether it was not a bad flat, and several people, including Trevor, were supposed to pay the rent for it.
But the world was wrong. She had, from policy, no lover. She was ambitious, believing that she might still do well for herself, and for that end she kept herself free from petty entanglements. Up to a certain point Trevor’s attentions were permitted, because he was useful to her. He knew the town and could give her a good deal of information. And she had to have some man to pay her taxi fares. So that when the others took their departure she kept him back with a faintly possessive air.
“You go to the Martins’ to-night? I also. Stay and dine with me and we will go together”
“How about dressing?”
“Your clothes? Where are they?”
“Club. Just round the corner”
“Go now and dress. When you come back, dinner will be ready. It is better, more tranquil, than to go to a restaurant.”
The room was empty when he came back, for Tilli was still at her toilet. He was struck for the first time by the impoverished air of the place. The decorations of the flat had little intrinsic merit; they were merely intended to set off a gay crowd. It was all red, white and black, and the chairs were of club lounge wicker with many scarlet cushions. A quantity of little inlaid Indian stools were scattered about, with ash-trays on them and dirty glasses. Somebody had spilt soda-water over the black stained floor and taken the varnish off. There were holes burnt in the curtains and a fine cloud of dust lay over everything. The air smelt stale
“Poor little thing,” thought Trevor. “Hard on her to live like this! Surely, if there was anybody …”
For he believed, as a rule, in her virtue. His occasional pricking doubts had no evidence to support them, and he always dismissed them hastily with the reflection that such things were none of his business.
He went across and opened the window on all the strange cries and footfalls of the London night. Fog drifted in from the mews. He leant out and sniffed it. It was the moment, he thought, to write a poem about the buttercup fields and Water Hythe and the clean joys of boyhood. But for Art’s sake poor Tilli’s ambiguous reputation must be sacrificed The poem could have only one title: he must call it “The Harlot’s Window”
Water Hythe … Time’s Scythe … he casts it down at Water Hythe … And drowsier reaps at Water Hythe … brown bodies flashing in the sunlit stream, or white bodies in moonlight? … laughing boys … small birds in briars … rooks in elms … the cawing, twittering, lowing and bleating orchestra of a pastoral poem struck up in his head.
“Voyons, Trevor! Shut the window! Do you wish the house to be full of fog?”
She had changed her dress and was all in gold like a shining, hard, little beetle.
“I’m writing a poem,” he explained, as he drew in his head and shut the window.
“And what is it called, your poem?”
“I don’t know yet,” he said untruthfully
“It is not of me, then?”
“N-not exactly. Would you like it to be about you?”
“If it is a good poem. And then you will get £10 perhaps?”
“Not ten shillings, I should think.”
“No? But I think it is a pity that you quarrel with Madame, your mother.”
“So do I.”
She stood at the fire, warming her quick, narrow little hands, and looking at him out of the corners of her eyes.
“I do not understand it,” she said at last.
“Don’t mothers and sons quarrel in other countries?”
“They quarrel, yes! But in other countries they do not make a great history of it to the whole world. Except in the family, one does not speak of it. You English have no delicacy.”
“We are the most reticent race in the world. I only spoke of it because everybody here happened to be my friends.”
“Your friends! You call those your friends?”
“Well … Cuffe is.”
“That one! He is his own friend; nothing more. I imagine that you and your mother will appear in his next book.”
“He is rather a leper,” agreed Trevor, coolly.
“You think that everyone who laughs at your jokes is your friend.” Her voice was bitter. “I know better. I can tell you that there is no such thing as a real friend. Not one. It is my experience.”
“What about you and me, Tilli? We are real friends, aren’t we?”
She laughed, and told him to come to dinner. He followed her into the tiny dining-room, trying not to tread on the long tail of gold drapery which she dragged on the floor behind her, and they sat down on either side of a very small table. Tilli’s maid, a heavy-footed Belgian, served them with an omelette.
“Of course,” began Trevor, when he had helped himself, “you take the woman’s view. You can’t understand friendship. It’s too detached.”
“It is humbug,” she said briefly.
“Not so much as love.”
“But much worse, I assure you. In love we make no pretence of unselfishness. We do not pretend that we want nothing of each other. We know very well what it is that we want. But in friendship we deceive ourselves and each other.”
“You simply don’t believe in disinterested affection?”
She nodded, and said that if he had led her life he would Say so too. He was afraid that she was going to tell him how Van Tuyl had thrown her out of a window. It was the best-known fact about her. Everyone in their circle had told it in Confidence to everyone else. He said hastily:
“I know, my dear, I know. I daresay you’ve very good grounds for taking a gloomy view of things.”
The table was so small that their heads almost touched over t, and Tilli’s eyes, in the flame of the candles, were melancholy and enormous. Seen at close range they were most extraordinary: not bitter any more, but infinitely and mysteriously sad. Trevor gazed into them and looked quickly away, with a sense of having very nearly fallen into something. He reminded himself that she was really as stupid as an owl. He would not fall for these stale manœuvres.
“I know of cases to confute you,” he said. “I have an uncle, for instance, who has sacrificed his whole life for his mistress.”
And he told her the history of Bobbie and Lise, not so much because he thought it a case in point, but because he felt it safer to be talking. Tilli was interested: she liked listening to Trevor, because he was so handsome—just the type she most admired. She studied him while he talked and thought that she might have been madly in love with him if he had been rich.
But his circumstances put that out of the question.
“And yet,” she thought, “how easy it would be! One would have only to look at him. Already this evening he is a little disturbed. I must be discreet.”
Something in his narrative caught her attention. It seemed that he had an uncle and that the uncle was rich. There were possibilities in this. She made further investigations when they were drinking coffee by the sitting-room fire.
“It interests me very much, this story of your uncle,” she said. “He has no children at all, then?”
“None.”
“And this house … Monk’s Hall … there will be no son to live in it? That is very sad.”
“No. But, as a matter of fact, he’s having to sell his house. He’s very badly off; one of those people who can’t manage money.”
“Ah.”
Her faint hopes were dashed.
“It is very sad indeed,” she repeated earnestly.
“Isn’t it?” said Trevor. “The place has belonged to my mother’s family for seven hundred years. But it’s an ugly house outside. Like a stone box.”
“Tell me about it.”
He described it as best he could, and to her ears it did not sound ugly at all, but very solid and magnificent. She hankered after just such a house for herself, for in her fluctuating fortunes she had inhabited many elegant little flats and a great variety of gorgeous hotels, but never a country house. She had a fancy that she might like to live in the provinces, and be dowdy and arrogant and secure; but that sort of thing was only achieved by people who kept their heads. This Lise, who had owned Monk’s Hall for a little while, was obliged to give it up because her man, though capable of disinterested affection, was unable to look after his affairs or leave his property to his handsome nephew.
It all showed how careful people ought to be.
“He has no other nephews but you?” she asked.
“Only my cousin, William Crowne.”
“The son of Norman Crowne? Ah, yes. I have heard of him. But is he not very rich?”
“As rich as a Jew But that’s the Crowne side of the family, not ours.”
“And he has already a beautiful house?”
“Not very. It’s like a nursery.”
“Everyone speaks of him and his sister. Is he really like that? So handsome? So charming? So clever?”
“He’s not clever at all.”
“Not?” She raised her eyebrows. “But he has written a play.”
“He’s written dozens. They’re no good.”
“They tell me of one … an Eastern play … my friend, Eugene Baxter, was speaking of it. He wished to read it.”
“Baxter? That fat fool! Why does he want to read it?”
“Perhaps he will produce it.”
“He’d never be so frantic. It’s hopelessly undramatic.”
“He has said to me that the name of Crowne is in itself a cachet. Also he is interested in literature. It is not as a commercial success that he would wish to produce it, but to amuse himself. He wishes to bring poetry back to the drama.”
“Oh, I know he likes to pose as the Bayard of the poets, as long as he can find some fool to back him. But nobody in their senses would spend money on this.”
“Perhaps your cousin …”
“William doesn’t want to produce it. He says it isn’t written for the stage. Though what use a play is, if it isn’t meant to be acted, I don’t know. You can tell Baxter he’d better stick to revue and his own side of the Atlantic.”
“What is the subject of this play? What is it called?”
“It’s called ‘The Seven Dawns,’ or some such title. And it’s about Buddha, in one of his incarnations. A sort of miracle play. Buddhist theology hopelessly wrong, I should think. A great many very tedious, metaphysical monologues and about half a dozen lines of incredibly good blank verse. This young prince, very successful man of the world, soldier, poet, statesman, hunter and all the rest of it, gets religion and goes into some sort of contemplative order. That’s all there is to it. There are two or three pitched battles in it, if I remember, and a tiger-hunt, and a great many arguments between priests in temples.”
“Are there good parts for women?”
“I don’t remember any.”
Tilli shook her head over this. She knew that women, bazaars, and a few references to Allah and Kismet are essential in an Oriental play. She began to see why Trevor thought it a paltry piece of work. But it would be a feather in her cap to be able to say to Baxter that she had seen the Crowne play and that it had no women in it. She heard herself dropping the hint, ever so deftly:
“You waste your time, my friend. I have seen this play. It had, perhaps, half a dozen lines that will tell, but …”
Decidedly it was worth her while to talk to Trevor, for he was a most useful young man. But he must never be more. Her fatal impulses must be checked where he was concerned. She gave him a melancholy look of farewell as he helped her into her cloak, and swore to herself that in future she would see less of him. But he, unfortunately, did not divine her inward resolutions, and when he had recovered a little he, too, took an oath. He had no wish to entangle himself with any woman.
They drove to their party in Chelsea, cooped up together in the electric darkness of a taxi, and having arrived, they escaped from each other as soon as possible. Upon the doorstep they had encountered an object-lesson in the matter of entanglements, for Nigel Cuffe was waiting there with the lady whom Catherine would never invite to Water Hythe. This was a person called Sally, and everybody forgot her surname. She always had a very depressing effect on Trevor, and he thought how awful it would be to arrive at parties with her. Of course, she was particularly dank; a little, rat-faced girl with weak eyes, dumbly stupid and dressed shapelessly in the crude materials of poster-art. Tilli, beside her, was all charm, all style and intelligence. It was pitiful to see how through the evening she went about after Cuffe like a little dog, and if she could not get near him she would stand miserably aloof, patting her hair and looking so forlorn that even Trevor felt compelled at last to go and give her a kind word.
“Good evening, Sally. Shall I get you an ice?”
“Oh, thank you. If you will do.”
“When are you going to Ireland?”
“Oh, dear! We’re not going.”
“Not going? I thought it was all settled Why is that?”
“I don’t know,” said Sally, after thought.
Cuffe was a man of moods, and she comprehended very little of the cyclonic laws which governed her existence.
“How’s your puppy?”
“Oh dear! I had to get rid of him. He barked, you know.”
“You must get a kitten.”
“They say,” she volunteered, “that a dog is more faithful than a cat.”
She licked up her ice with a subdued, apologetic greediness. Trevor watched her eat, and offered to take her plate away as soon as she had finished.
“Oh, thanks. If you will do.”
He made off with it and took pains not to come back.
“God, what a woman!” he thought, as he fled upstairs. “And to think that she gets asked everywhere! It’s my belief that Nigel simply does it to test his prestige. There can be no other tie.”
Sally’s devotion was the tie, had he but known it. She loved Cuffe with one of those blind, stupid determinations which mould destiny. Her attachment to the man was so much the most positive force in his surroundings that he had come to accept it as a condition of existence. And this might have seemed less ridiculous had she been a handsome creature; she did not look like the vehicle of a strong passion.
Trevor made his way into the large room upstairs and found that the company there had acquired a new vitality, as though a quickened sense of enjoyment had descended upon them. He wondered what had happened until he heard someone say:
“The Crownes have come.”
Another voice said:
“Doesn’t she look exquisite?”
And when he caught sight of Emily, standing with William in the middle of the room, he was surprised no longer.
Her fair hair was all pulled back from her forehead and plaited with loops of pearl, so that she looked more like La Bella Simonetta than ever. She would have wished, no doubt, to add a chain of live serpents round her neck, like the picture in the Louvre, if a chain of live serpents could be got. For she still adored dressing up, and she had contrived a dress of sea-green silk, all embroidered with little flowers, which flowed round her like a river There was a sort of magnificence in all Emily’s departures from the mode which redeemed them from any taint of artistic dowdiness. She turned extravagance into phantasy; she dawned upon the dullest party with an anticipation of gaiety, a conviction of present enjoyment, which few of us preserve beyond our infancy. But it was a suppressed gaiety, because she never forgot her manners. It flitted irresistibly round the corners of her enchanting mouth, it sparkled in her eyes, it quivered in every flutter of her green draperies, but she kept it well in hand. Very sedately she was giving her “imitation of a young lady arriving at a party,” and William supported her very competently.
Trevor found that he was being carried towards them by a general concentric movement. He had nothing in particular to say to them, but most of his friends were talking to them or standing close to them. They were the party. He almost wished that he had arranged to arrive at the house with his cousins, so that he might become, automatically, one of this group which always collected all the attention and life in the room. But then he did not want to be perpetually gathering crumbs at William’s table. He caught Emily’s eye and nodded to her.
“Can you come to breakfast with us on Monday?” she called over somebody’s shoulder.
“When do you breakfast?”
“Eleven.”
“All right. I thought you got up early.”
“So we do. We ride first.”
“I see.”
“We’ve got something very important that must be discussed with you.”
A voice at his elbow murmured something about hoping to be introduced. He was irritably aware that Tilli had got herself close to him. Out of the tail of his eye he caught sight of Nigel pushing through the crowd, followed by Sally. Trying not to see Tilli, he began to edge his way round towards William; but she pursued him, and he began to despair of ever getting rid of her. Then a wonderful idea occurred to him, and he accosted William in a low voice:
“Look here! I want to introduce you to a friend of mine, Mrs. Van Tuyl. I wish you’d look after her a bit. She doesn’t know many people here, and I’m afraid she feels out of it. I think I told you about her once she’s a foreigner, half Polish, and had a brute of a husband who threw her out of a window.”
This had quite the right effect. William grew pale with horrified compassion. He was always extravagantly sorry for anyone who was out of it, or had had a bad time. At parties he had a way of going round and making himself charming to all the bores, so that Trevor once said that there could be no worse mark of social failure than to be seen talking to William. He saluted Tilli, when they were introduced, with a kind of hushed reverence, and asked if she would not prefer to get out of this crowd somewhere downstairs. Tilli lifted her beautiful melancholy eyes and drowned him in their infinite sadness.
“If you could, perhaps, find me a chair …” she murmured.
But it was she who found two chairs in a small recess on the stairs. When they were installed, she lost no time.
“On all sides,” she said, “I hear of your play. You will produce it? No?”
“It isn’t meant for acting,” William explained.
“Ah! The stage is so vulgar! I understand.” She shook her head. “So much that cannot be said. But it must always be so until the poets will write again for the stage. Until some man is brave enough to make the attempt. But tell me, what is it called, your play?”
“‘The Seven Dawns,’” began William. “It’s about India.”
“C’est gentil,” commented Tilli. “I also have been in the Orient. At Alexandria.”
William blinked a little at this, but he had no objection to talking of his work, and she really seemed anxious to hear all about it. So he went on, primarily intending to amuse her, if so broken and maltreated a victim could ever be amused. But presently he warmed to his subject and forgot that she had been thrown out of a window. As he talked she took stock of him and came to several conclusions. In his way, she thought, he was very good-looking, but not so handsome as his cousin. It was a pity that he should be so rich, for she suspected that he did not know how to enjoy himself expensively. But she was delighted to be seen talking to him, especially by her friend, Eugene Baxter, who gave her a searching glance as he passed them on the stairs. She indicated the broad back of the great man to William and asked if they were acquainted.
“I know him by sight,” said William, peering after Baxter with disfavour. “But I generally go away when he comes.” Tilli was silent with amazement, for she had never in her life even heard of a budding dramatist who evaded a millionaire producer on purpose.
“He’d make his fortune on the movies,” said William, standing up to get a better look. “I never saw anyone funnier Look at him being a distinguished Continental! Look at him kissing that woman’s hand!”
“He has made his fortune already,” said Tilly tartly. “In the theatre. Besides … he is my friend.”
“Oh, I’m sorry!” cried William, flushing. “I didn’t mean to be rude. But he’s rather an amusing type, isn’t he?”
“In order to produce successful plays do you think it is necessary to be svelte and élancé?”
“Oh, no. I’m sure he’s a blazing old genius in his way.”
She set him right about Baxter and had soon succeeded in making him ashamed of having mocked at physical deformity in a fellow-creature.
She spoke of Baxter’s early career, his humble beginnings and his yearnings, in the midst of commercial success, to be of real service to the drama. She admitted that he had very little literary discrimination, but she asserted that he was waiting for a lead from one of the younger men. The grossest vulgarian may sometimes cherish an ideal. And William, as she talked, was moved by a compunction which she would not have understood, but which played into her hands, the delicate, compassionate deference which a rich man pays sometimes to a poor man. If Baxter in the nightmare life which he must lead, without education, without tradition, with no shelter from the buffetings of the Philistines, had yet some hankerings after poetry, it was not for the fortunate William to despise him. He should, rather, be respected.
Down in the hall below a little group of adherents had collected round the object of this discourse. He stood in the middle of them, immense and voluble, beaming at them through his glasses with a most engaging display of childish good-humour. He had sedulously cultivated a fantastically uncouth appearance, like some huge, amusing rag doll. It was his custom to shuffle into a party for a minute or two, wave his hand in acknowledgment of the ovation which he always received, swallow a cocktail, and shuffle out again. And for the upheaval of his departure Tilli was alertly listening, as she wished to have a word with him before he went. She was by his side when he stood on the front doorstep, loudly clamouring for his car.
“Why, Tilli?” he exclaimed. “You’re not walking? Let me drive you. Where do you want to go?”
After a moment’s hesitation she was persuaded to let him give her a lift back to the mews.
“I have to-night heard all about Mr. Crowne’s play,” she told him.
“Is that so?” Baxter’s spectacles glittered in the light of a passing lamp. “What sort of play is it now? Could I do anything with it?”
“Almost. And so much will depend, naturally, on production. It must be greatly altered.”
“That goes without saying.”
“But do not say so at once,” she admonished “Say you will take it, and then … by degrees …”
“I haven’t seen it yet.”
“But you will see it. I have persuaded him to send it to you.”
“Well now, Tilli! That’s good.” Baxter patted her hand. “I’m very, very pleased if you’ve fixed that for me. I’ve wanted badly to see that play I don’t promise, mind you, to do anything with it; but I want to see it. I’ve got an idea that we might make a big hit with that play. We might do something big with it. The plot don’t matter so much, if it’s an Eastern piece. They’re all stolen from the Arabian Nights, anyway. And then you say it’s poetry; and poetry’s a big risk.”
“He is very rich,” said Tilli, looking down at her hands. “If he wished to produce this play, I think it could be arranged very easily. You would lose nothing.”
“You bet I wouldn’t. And make nothing either. But I don’t mind that. I want to cut loose once in a way; you may think I’m crazy, Tilli, but I wouldn’t mind so much if it was only a success of esteem. It’s just a sort of a kink, I guess. I’m not pleased with the sort of work I’m doing. I wouldn’t say it to anybody but you, though.”
Baxter pondered solemnly for a few minutes on the strangeness of it all, and Tilli thought it wise to applaud.
“He has already a name,” she pointed out.
“Yes, he certainly has got a name. And he’s got people talking. And it’s my experience that people are getting to like something a little serious in their drama nowadays. Personally I think it’s the war. You’ll find they appreciate a serious note where before the war they wouldn’t stand for it. And he’s got a name that’ll get people interested. I suppose you couldn’t say if there’s a desert scene? Or a bazaar scene? Or a harem scene? No? What the hell does he go calling it an Eastern piece for?”
“There is a tiger scene,” said Tilli quickly.
“Is that so? Well, I daresay I could get tigers.” Baxter looked mollified. “And I’ll want to have him put in a harem scene, something on a city roof, with a minaret, and one of those guys calling the faithful to prayer, or …”
“It’s a Buddhist play, not Mohammedan,” said Tilli, who had learnt a good deal about Eastern religions that evening.
But Baxter said serenely that it made no difference.
“You must be careful,” she admonished him. “He is not very anxious to produce this play yet. Do not make him change too much at once. Be tactful.”
“I wouldn’t be where I am, Tilli, if I wasn’t tactful. Tell me something easier.”
“I shall have a part,” she told him instantly.
Baxter was cautious, benevolent and adamant.
“I needn’t tell you,” he said slowly, “that I’d be very, very pleased to have you act. But I can’t promise. It might be there wouldn’t be a part that’d suit you.”
“There will be,” said Tilli with conviction.
Trevor, when he said that William’s house was like a nursery, meant probably to deride its taste rather than to epitomise its charm. But it really had something of the unplanned attractiveness of a nice nursery. Its decorations were haphazard and rather shabby, for the twins had been in such a hurry to move in that they would not wait for the painters and paperers, and it had never been properly done up. The furniture was, as a rule, arranged severely round the walls as though an empty space in the middle must be left for people who wanted to run about. A good many beautiful things were there, for the twins had a certain amount of taste, but nothing had been bought with reference to anything else. The chairs and tables, even the dullest of them, had each of them stood for some romantic purchase, and had acquired thereby the magic of a much-loved plaything, the vitality which distinguishes the battered contents of a nursery cupboard from the new, lifeless toys in a shop window.
Indeed, the whole house looked very much like a toy; it tossed its smoke to heaven from its four little chimneys with the irrepressible gaiety of a doll’s-house. It seemed almost to boast of its real knocker and real window-boxes and the lady and gentleman inside eating a real dinner off a dining-room table that would make larger or smaller in the most amusing way in the world.
Old Mattie, the housekeeper, saw to it that everything was kept very neat. She was, of course, a nurse in disguise. She had belonged to William and Emily very long ago, before they came to Water Hythe, and for many years she had lived in a little cottage where a grateful family had pensioned her off. But when the twins set up house, she came scurrying up to London to see what they were about. She took over the whole business of housekeeping; with the help of a girl she mended their clothes and fed them and kept everything very bright and clean. She made them put their things away every night in orderly rows on shelves; the house was full of shelves, crowded with tidied objects, pretty things and useful things, all ranged into one engaging matter-of-fact whole. But if Mattie had not been there it is to be feared that everything would have been left on the floor.
Trevor had a story that she came to fetch them away from parties, but this was not true. She did, however, sit up for them, and if they were very late she scolded them unmercifully:
“Your shoes is wet, Miss Emily. You’ve been walking out on the grass with your cough. Oh, I’ve no doubt you enjoyed yourselves, but you should have brought your sister home earlier, and that’s all about it. You’ve missed your beauty sleeps.”
She would brush out Emily’s bright hair and put her to bed in the beautiful bed with four golden angels on its four high posts, which William had bought for his sister as a Christmas present. And then, having slept the short, light sleep of the old, she would be up very early in the morning, long before the girl, getting ready a first cup of tea for her charges before they went riding. Emily woke every morning to her greeting:
“Seven o’clock, my lamb, and it’s raining ever so.”
“Oh! Oh dear! Then we can’t ride!”
Mattie would draw back the curtains upon bright sunshine.
“But, Mattie! It’s not raining at all.”
“It will, my lamb. Never you fear. Fine before seven, rain before eleven. And it’s been raining all night.”
“Oh, no, Mattie. Indeed it hasn’t. It was a lovely sunrise. We saw it coming back, and we went down to the river to look at it. The sky was as red as …”
“Red sky at night is the shepherd’s delight. Red sky in the morning is the shepherd’s warning. It’s a bad sign. You don’t want to go riding to-day. Not to-day. You just turn over and get some more sleep.”
“Is William awake?”
“He’s as fast as fast. Don’t you go riding this morning, my lamb. If you go on at this rate you’ll tire yourself out. You’ll be ill, and that’ll be the next thing.”
“Oh, Mattie, I had such a funny dream. I dreamt … oh, dear! … I remembered a minute ago … it was … I forget …”
“You go to sleep.”
William on his way to the bath would give a loud rap at the door, just to show that he was awake in spite of Mattie’s assertions. And at that signal all Emily’s drowsiness would be dispersed. She would leap out of bed in a tremendous hurry to begin the day. She chattered incessantly while Mattie brushed her hair, and generally fought over the question of a warm woollen vest in the cold morning air. Till at last the pair of them were dispatched to Richmond, where their horses were kept, not without a dispute on the doorstep as to who should drive the car. Mattie would settle it.
“Emily drive going and William coming back. Mind now and be careful at the corners, and don’t fall out of your motor or off your horses, and be home by eleven punctual.”
In this way they had ridden and chattered through the cold dark mornings of winter and into the spring, when the sun was a little higher up every day and Richmond Park looked greener. The almond in the villa gardens at Castlenau came out, and the crocuses and the daffodils. It was in the middle of daffodil-time that William threw the first, disturbing pebble into the clear pool of their happiness.
“I’ve got a plan,” he said one morning, as they skimmed in the early sunshine down the street.
“Oh?”
“I’ve been thinking it over for a long time, and I’ve decided that I want to produce the ‘Seven Dawns.’”
Emily nearly ran into a milk-cart.
“Oh, William! But theatres are so vulgar!”
“They needn’t be. They can’t always have been. If they are, it’s because poets won’t write for the stage. Somebody has got to do something about it. And not everybody can afford to take risks as I can. In a way it’s my duty …”
“But you never meant ‘Seven Dawns’ to be acted.”
“I was wrong. And I’ve come to see I was wrong. A play can’t be a play until it’s acted.”
“Nobody would go to see it.”
“That doesn’t signify in the least,” said William loftily.
“I mean, no manager would take it.”
“If that is the case, I shall produce it myself.”
“Do you mean … buy a theatre?” Emily’s eyes sparkled. “That would be rather fun, wouldn’t it? I’ve always longed to own a theatre. Do you remember that little toy one that Trevor and Charlotte had when we were small? I did so want to play with it, and they never would let me.”
“As a matter of fact, this man Baxter might be of use to me. He’s not so bad as he looks, by all accounts.”
“By whose accounts?”
“Well, Mrs. Van Tuyl was telling me about him.”
“That woman you met at the Martins’?”
“Yes. I ran across her last night again, and we had a long talk. You must meet her, Emmie. She … she’s a most remarkable woman. Extraordinarily intelligent, but not in the least annoying, you know. And she listens to what one says.”
“What is she like?”
“I’m telling you. She’s on the stage herself, and I really think she knows what she’s talking about.”
“I mean, what does she look like? Is she pretty?”
William could not say. After reflection he asserted that she was not at all pretty, but that she had good eyes.
“She sounds nice,” said Emily with a sudden warmth.
“She’s had a very sad history,” confided William in an awestricken voice. “Trevor told me. She was married to a horrible man who threw her out of a window.”
Emily shivered as if a coldness had come over the sun.
“Was it a very high window?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” said William.
They crossed the river by Hammersmith Bridge, where everything was glittering and newly washed in sunlight. Silver gulls darted over the tide, and the wind was almost like a sea wind. It was terrible to think that people in this same world should throw their wives out of windows. After a long pause, William began again:
“I’d like very much, if I could, to get her into the play I think she might really be rather wonderful on the stage. She wouldn’t vulgarise it. And it might be a good thing for her. I gather she’s very badly off. She lives in a mews and gets what work she can, but she’s had an awfully hard time. It’s not easy to get on when you have no friends in London. Really people are very unjust, you know. Because she has divorced her husband and lives alone they must needs say the most cruel things about her. A woman in that position is defenceless against gossip. Of course she could perfectly well have married again if she had liked, but she happens to care for her art more than anything else. That’s what people will not understand.”
“Did Trevor tell you all this?” asked Emily, surprised.
“N-no. I just gathered it.”
“But there’s no good woman’s part in the play.”
“I might manage it,” he said dauntlessly. “I’ve never been really satisfied with it, as you know. It’ll have to be altered a lot. I thought the prince might have a sister who became a nun … sort of parallel drama. She said wasn’t there a dancing-girl, or something quite small. But I don’t think that would quite do.”
“I shouldn’t like it to be altered,” said Emily firmly.
“Oh, well … it’s just an idea, you know. Nothing’s settled yet. But I see no harm in just letting Baxter see it, do you? After all, he’s an experienced man, and he might be able to criticise it in quite a valuable way.”
They put up their car and mounted their horses and were soon galloping under the trees in the park. It was, for them, the best moment of the day. The keen air, the swift movement, the sunlight and each other’s company were utterly satisfying. Their faces were solemn with delight as they sped away, raced each other, and pulled up at last to admire the view over Petersham.
“This is the best one we’ve had yet,” said Emily.
“You say that every time.”
“I know I think it every time. To-morrow I shall. And the day after that. I don’t want this day to end, and yet I want to-morrow to come. William! I’m perfectly happy.”
“So am I.”
“What did you say?”
“I said: Verweile doch, du bist so schōn. You know Faust needn’t have gone to hell if he could have ever said that at any one moment. Well, I say it every morning.”
“Just for luck. To-morrow we might fall down and break our legs and not be able to ride.”
He caught her eye and smiled. Their spirits as they trotted back were a little subdued. And as they got near to their gate of the park he gave words to her thought.
“Won’t it be horrid,” he said, “when we get married?”
“I don’t see why we ever should get married. Why can’t we always live just like this?”
“Everybody does. I’m sure we shall. We can’t go on for ever like this. Just think what a couple of mugs we shall look in sixty years’ time being dragged to the top of this hill in bath-chairs every morning.”
“Anybody looks a mug in a bath-chair, anywhere, at any time. That’s old age, not celibacy, William.”
“No, but the only consolation for being in a bath-chair, that I can see, is to have great-grandchildren to be rude to. When I’m a very old man I shall be a perfect devil to all my descendants. I can’t say that I much want children. But I should like to have grandchildren, and I desire great-grandchildren quite passionately.”
Emily laughed. The thought of their great-grandchildren had no terrors. It was too far away
“But you don’t want a wife?” she protested anxiously.
“No. Nor do you want a husband. But we shall break into matrimony one of these days. Everybody does.”
“I swear I won’t.”
“What’ll you bet?”
“Everything I have. But if you must, please let me choose your wife. She must be very nice.”
“My wife,” said William confidently, “will be a darling. I shan’t marry anybody who isn’t a darling.”
Some of the glitter had gone from the day as they drove home. William steered this time and Emily talked, and whenever he answered they ran into things. So that it was with their usual air of having triumphantly surmounted an emergency that they drew up at their own doorstep. Trevor was just ringing the bell. He said that he had been invited to breakfast by Emily, because they had something to discuss with him.
“Oh, yes, I remember,” she cried, as they ail trooped into the hall. “We wanted to talk about Monk’s Hall. Oh! what a lot of letters!”
“Monk’s Hall?” said William. “Yes, that was another plan I had. I’d forgotten. Come into the dining-room, Trevor. I want to know what you think before I write to Uncle Bobbie. Look Will you have kidneys, or eggs and bacon, or all, or some? Or won’t you begin with porridge? And there’s grape-fruit. We always eat a large breakfast because we work from now till half-past four.”
“Oh, William, here’s a press-photographer wants to come and photograph my bed! What would Mattie say? Don’t you think it would look very bad? I’m sure no honest woman would allow such a thing. Tea or coffee, Trevor?”
“The papers are full of your bed,” said Trevor. “I read about it the day before yesterday, and how it has scenes painted on it from the lives of Cupid and Psyche, and four angels on the top of it, and how it was designed by William’s close friend, Mr. Peter Yates. It was a priceless little par; I meant to send it to you. It began with your being conspicuous among the lunchers at the Berkeley, in a panne hat, whatever that is, and then it mentioned your parentage, and finally broke out into a most voluptuous description of your bed.”
“How could they have known?” she wondered.
“These things get about,” William told them. “But it is really a nice bed, though it’s a little large for Emily. And the paintings are not very suitable for a virgin: I wanted Yates to do panels of Daphne and Apollo. But about Monk’s Hall. I’ve been thinking of buying it.”
“Buying it?” said Trevor slowly. “What for?”
“Why, Lise and Bobbie want to sell it … and I want a house in the country. If I bought it, they needn’t turn out. They could stay there and run it for me, and I could be there or not, as I liked, without any bother.”
“Isn’t it much too large?”
“I don’t know,” said William. “If I had a large house, then I could have a lot of people to stay. Peter, for instance. He has no proper workshop. I though if we took Monk’s Hall, that he could more or less live there and work in one of the barns. He could paint his beds and things a great deal better there than in a much too small attic in Bermondsey. And then the Hackbutts. You know my friends the Hackbutts? They have to live in a caravan because they can’t afford a house. They’ve had seven children in six years—two sets of twins!”
“They should read Stopes,” said Trevor without sympathy.
“Nothing they read seems to do them any good. And poor Mandy Hackbutt tries to write plays. I think they’d be good plays if he could finish them. But he says you’d never guess how difficult it is to write a play in a caravan till you’ve tried. There’d be plenty of room for them all at Monk’s Hall if they liked to come for a bit.”
“All seven children! Are you quite mad? Do you want to turn the place into an asylum?”
“Not exactly. But I thought if I did it up nicely, and Could have plenty of room for guests …”
Trevor’s bacon and eggs were growing cold on his plate. He sat with a deep frown on his face, and the twins looked at each other in dismay. They had feared that he might resent their plan of trying to buy Monk’s Hall, and they were determined to get his approval first. For they could all remember a time when he had boasted that the house should be his, though they were too delicate to mention it, and they had agreed to abandon the plan if he was not amenable. It was principally for the sake of Bobbie and Lise that they were anxious to make the purchase at all.
“I don’t know what you’re asking my advice for,” he said at last. “It’s your concern. It’s nothing to do with me.”
“You’re one of the family,” Emily told him. “It’s partly to keep it in the family that we thought of doing this. We’d rather talk it over with you before speaking to the old ones.”
“They won’t like it a bit,” he said, still thoughtful. And then he began to laugh. “Poor mother! What will she say to the seven little Hackbutts? Lise was hard enough to swallow. If you start this asylum for indigent artists …”
“I’m not … I don’t mean anything of that sort.”
“But I think you should. It’s a very good idea.”
The tempest of anger which had kept Trevor silent at first was beginning to subside. He felt cool and remote and a little malicious.
“It’s a very good idea,” he repeated. “I always meant to start a sort of colony there when I was expecting to have the place myself.”
The twins looked uncomfortable.
“And as it turns out,” he observed them with amusement, “I’m in quite as much need of shelter as the Hackbutts. More. I’ve not even got a caravan. I wonder you don’t offer to house me.”
“There’s lot’s of room!” exclaimed William. “Of course … if you’d care … ever to make use of it …”
He glanced across at Emily, who added eagerly:
“Or any of your friends. We want it to be a sort of family country house.”
Trevor laughed again. The idea was really amusing, and it would be such an excellent counter to his mother’s ultimatum if he were to settle at Monk’s Hall, of all places. For two pins he would ask Nigel and Sally to come too. And if William liked to pay for it all, so much the better. That would show that nobody was being jealous of anyone.
“I’ll think it over,” he said, as he turned to his breakfast. But you ought, you know, to regard it as a definite community, with certain stated social and artistic aims.”
“Why?” asked the twins in some dismay.
“Because it would be so interesting. I’ve always wanted to see how a plan like that would turn out. You might make a great success of it: it might be the beginning of an entirely new epoch of the arts. The community spirit has got to come back into life somehow: the world is too large and the artist gets lost in it. Since the monasteries were dissolved we have had no expressions of a group spirit….”
He talked for a long time, generally with his mouth full, and succeeded in drawing a most attractive picture of an ideal, self-supporting community, with its own art and its own laws. Bee-hives, market-gardening and hand-looms were mentioned. The profits were all to be pooled, so that no one member of the community need be harassed in his work by any thought of financial pressure. He made out quite a good case for it, and very nearly succeeded in convincing himself, though the twins remained dubious.
“We could turn the drawing-room into a common-room,” he pointed out, “with a stage and a piano. And we’d act there. Only a really strict censor must be appointed to see that only pure music is performed. We can’t let any of the inmates go whoring after Wagner.”
“All this is going much further than I meant,” objected William, gloomily.
It was a relief that Trevor should be taking it all in such good part, and he did not like immediately to throw cold water on these plans, though they sounded silly to him and he had himself a partiality for Wagner He did not know what to say.
“I’ll see about buying the house,” he suggested, “and we’ll settle all these details later.”
Trevor found his embarrassment extremely funny. He grew quite determined that William should buy Monk’s Hall, and that a great deal of comedy should be got out of it. It was not the first time that he had developed the twins’ ideas for his own ends, and if his conscience nudged him he was able to stifle it by the reflection that William ought by this time to be capable of looking after himself. The twins had everything, and he had nothing; if he did not profit by their good fortune, there were plenty of others who would.
“Yes,” he said, “you make haste and buy the house first. No, thank you, Emmie; I won’t have any more honey. I’ve really done. What magnificent breakfasts you do eat! I don’t wonder you miss out lunch. What a life! First riding, then work, then social recreation. It’s marvellous how you get it all in. It’s positively Greek. You ought to write like all the poets rolled into one, William, leading the good life so strenuously. I wonder why you don’t.”
“I do,” said William equably, for he took Trevor’s contempt of his work in perfectly good part. “And, by the way, do you know I’m thinking of producing ‘The Seven Dawns.’”
“Mercy! You’re mad! Who put that into your head?”
“Nobody put it in. I thought of it in my bath.”
“Mrs. Van Tuyl put it in,” said Emily, just a little crisply, as she gathered up her letters.
“Tilli!” Trevor gasped at this amazing sequel to his own diplomacy “She didn’t! The little vixen! Is that what she’s after? I won’t allow it. I shall have to speak to her.”
“It has nothing to do with her,” said William. “Emmie doesn’t know what she is talking about.”
“But he’s going to write a part for her.”
“She’s a daughter of the horse-leech,” cried Trevor.
“I’ve not made up my mind,” protested William, rather angrily. “And I don’t want to hear it discussed.”
“I’ll speak to her, though,” insisted Trevor.
For though he did not mind exploiting William himself, he would not countenance such ways in anyone else. He took himself off with a very long face, and when he had gone the twins had a quarrel. William accused Emily of indiscretion and prejudice, and reduced her to tears. The name of Mrs. Van Tuyl was flung between them like a missile, until Emily began almost to hate her. A shadow had fallen on the day, and no satisfactory work was done by either of them. William endeavoured vainly to graft a good woman’s part on to “The Seven Dawns,” and Emily, who was engaged upon a novel about witches in the seventeenth century, found herself compelled to burn the first seven chapters.
“It really might be a good thing,” she thought as she poked the embers, “if we all went and lived in the county.”