It did not need many months in Millport to convince Teresa that idleness was not one of the snares of the city. She soon found that if any young person of the leisured classes were to attempt to “drift” she would have her aimless career brought to a standstill by some snag of “duty to the city.” No one in London had ever reminded Teresa of her civic responsibilities. On thinking it over one day after a particularly strong dose of “duty to the city,” administered by Mrs. Carpenter, she could not remember that the city of London and its chief magistrate had ever laid any personal claim to her services. She tried to imagine any such phrase as, “Have you seen the Mayor about it?” or, “What does Alderman Teazle think?” occurring in her father’s conversation at his club. It was impossible. In those days no one knew anything of her plans or her wishes but what she told them; in Millport it seemed that the very paving stones knew who was walking along and why, and that carrier sparrows flitted from chimney to chimney with little messages of information about everybody and an index of probable explanations for their conduct—all dead certain to be wrong.
Mrs. Carpenter had not trusted to the fowls of the air to inform the Fultons that Millport intended them to do their duty. She gave them a few weeks’ law, with full access to her own example. She never failed to explain in the street, in the shop, in the ladies’ club, across the family pew or on the platform that the fact of her being found where she was would mean the loss of so many heart beats to the city’s life. She would say, perhaps, “I ought not to be here, my dear, but I promised dear Mabel Somebody this little treat just to buck her up after the new arrival. Fancy! I was there just two hours before it happened, and my waifs and strays waiting for a tin of biscuits I had promised them, and Alderman McWhittock’s funeral at half-past two. I don’t know how I ever got there—but now what are you doing here? Up to the ears, I suppose, getting ready for the dance next week. What it is to be young! though I saw you resting like a wise girl at dear Emily’s party. The men are so naughty now, aren’t they? They won’t dance—absolutely won’t—except with their own old favourites. I always say to them now, ‘No, it’s no use. I am here to rest my old bones and you have just got to look in all the corners and pick out the plainest and dullest thing you can find and send her home happy.’ I condoled with Emily because I know the difficulties, and after all a dance must be a success if it is to be worth all the trouble, mustn’t it? Now what church do you go to——?” etc.
But Susie almost forestalled her remarks. She was there ready equipped by instinct before the call to battle came. Mrs. Carpenter didn’t know what to think of it. It is said that birds of prey have their own allotted beats and do not poach on their neighbours’ quarry; but they arrive, warned by some secret telegraphy wherever there is a vacancy and a corpse. Susie had evidently sensed the prevailing occupation of Millport and had descended out of the blue to fill a gap among the leaders of good works. She could not be said to “take an active part” in anything, because that was against her nature, but her name was soon in everybody’s mouth as a member of all the chief committees of private enterprises. Strangely shaped gentlemen in black used to call on her between meals with papers and she listened to them with her gentle smile of the mother was has suffered all things; she recognised them instantly when she saw them again and remembered with which particular good work they were connected; and that is really quite enough, as she herself would have said. Ladies with grown-up daughters, who are obliged to entertain a great deal and who have no head for organisation and so on, ought to leave the running about to those who will do it so much better; what the workers need is sympathy.
Evangeline and Teresa, being newcomers from a careless place of comfort, were particularly susceptible to the unfamiliar poison of depression for which there seemed no cure. The mud, the damp, the ugly streets, and indignant, tired faces, the grudging service of the working classes, the self consciousness of the well-to-do who walked everywhere in the limelight of recognition, the sharp division between those who thought everything was all right because they were comfortable and those who thought everything was all wrong because they weren’t—all this made the girls restless.
A vision of Hyde Park Corner on a sunny day used to haunt Evangeline’s mind. She contrasted the space of it, the blue sky, the buildings—“polite buildings” was the description that came to her as she recalled their appearance, perfectly groomed, keeping their private life absolutely to themselves. She felt a sudden hatred for the rows of pert little dwellings that she saw all round; “brick trimmings!” she thought with disgust as her eye fell on the oblongs and stars and cubes inlaid in musty red on a background of livid ginger. There was nothing polite about them; they seemed positively loquacious about themselves and their trimmings and the nice people that lived in them. Horrid houses, she thought.
Teresa, though she did not know it, was distilling for herself a sort of love potion from the drabness and hostility. As she once said to her sister, the smells and the mysterious purpose behind the faces in the fog intoxicated her. All that she knew about what she felt was that an insistent passion was dragging her towards some end that she could not see. The interest that she found in her conversations with Strickland gave her a clue towards the direction from which knowledge of her desire was coming to her, and gave her relief from the excitement at the same time because Strickland had no grievance against society; she only disliked people—ladies especially—talking “through their hats” about work. For instance, she did not mind Cyril or Teresa being untidy, because “it was their place to leave things about” and she was paid to look after them. They never referred to her duties nor seemed to think about them. Mrs. Carpenter and Susie implied by their manner that they were selected by Providence to lead comfortable lives for the reason that every one of their common attributes of humanity, such as their legs and their brains, were of such superior quality that their births, their lives and their deaths must not be confused with similar occurrences in other houses. Work! Of course they knew all about work! Did they not exhaust themselves in explaining how early rising and attention to detail actually saves labour? If you clean a room thoroughly every day there is no need to turn it out once a fortnight; if you clear up as you go, wipe the plates with paper and burn it directly to avoid clogging the sink, and if you wear gloves for the roughest work and put glycerine on the hands after washing, there should be at least two clear hours in the afternoon for mending stockings or even making clothes. That was the point where Strickland became “horn mad,” as she said. “I’d sooner earn me money by being starved and scolded as me mother was,” she declared, “than have it explained that there’s nothing to complain of. I’d rather have it all wrong and keep my liberty to object.”
“But Strickland,” Teresa interrupted, “don’t you remember when you first came you said you wouldn’t be blasted by father and you were going to leave?”
“Yes,” she replied, “and so I should have if he had made out, as some do, that it was all a misunderstanding. But when I saw that it was just his way, as you said, and he wasn’t aware of it, you will understand that it was no business of mine and I didn’t object. There’s never anything personal about the General’s language, I will say that for him. It seems it’s his nature, like my brother.”
She took no notice of Evangeline, neither liked nor disliked her. “She’s a young lady that will marry,” she observed, “and change her servants and not notice who comes and goes nor how the work is done. She won’t make much of a house, but no doubt she’ll keep a housekeeper and not notice how the money goes. She’ll always be a favourite with the gentlemen. My brother’s wife is like that. You never saw such a house—and the mess! I often tidy it all up for her and it’s all the same next day. And yet he thinks the world of her and keeps out of the public house so as he can take her about. And my cousin Gladys is just the opposite; everything tidy and as it should be, but she’ll talk, talk, talk the whole day, pointing out what she’s done; and her husband has taken to drink; he can’t stand it, he says.”
Strickland was right. Evangeline was already proving her capacity for being a favourite with the gentlemen by penetrating, one by one, Captain Hatton’s well-ordered defences. Being her father’s A.D.C. he was, as he had warned them on the first morning, so much about the house that he preferred they should not notice him; but then as Cyril counter-warned him, “they were a damned noticing family.”
Captain Evan Hatton had always been shy of women because as a passionately serious little boy he had been for ever baited by a pair of lively young sisters. They meant not an atom of harm, but neither were they at all interested in abstract goodness, which together with mechanisms of any kind were Evan’s consolation for the trials of family life. He wanted with all his soul to know what made wheels (including those of the Universe) go round. Nature, which he admired, completely outwitted him there and he developed towards the Maker of the Universe the passionate respect of pertinacious inquiry incessantly baffled. He succeeded in finding out from time to time the elementary rules governing earthly wheels, but the vastness of the world (as he had glimpses of it through the life of his tame rabbits, the beauties of a well-kept garden, geography lessons and the upheaval of his own mind), kept him in a ceaseless ferment of questioning. The most industrious organ must rest sometimes; so at about fifteen years old he admitted himself beaten by the Higher Inquiry. He rested his poor mind in worship of that which he had questioned in vain, and concentrated his efforts on wheels which could be explained by those who made them. His sisters thought all this very funny indeed. They themselves approved of the Universe as a first-rate place to live in; it looked so charming, with hills and fields and woods all of nice colours. Winter, spring, summer and autumn were all nice in their way and could not be improved. The idea of tropical storms and polar silence and danger made it seem all the more cosy in England. Machinery was a delightful invention and they were glad it had been discovered, because it brought all sorts of comfort within reach and gave one’s brothers something suitable to do. They did laugh sometimes when Evan took a really good thing to pieces and couldn’t put it together again or when he got in such a bait about Emily giggling at the missionary. When the war broke out they stopped laughing at him at first. He was suddenly lifted in their estimation from the position of a dear, ridiculous creature to that of “our brother in France,” a god among Olympians—“while we have got to stick at home.” They worked creditably and humbly at home and when he came back they forgot his ribbons in the agitating question whether Emily’s cooking would still do or whether they ought not to scrape up £50 somehow and get that kitchenmaid who was leaving the club.
When they began to get used to having him at home again they noticed that what had been only serious attention to rectitude in the old days now burned hot in him as passionate morality. They were good girls, secured from evil, if he had known it, by their happy natures. They would have thought it very silly to let a man kiss them unless he were an accepted lover, properly engaged; because where would be the point in being scrubbed by a hairy face; unless it were one of the poor darling boys leaving Victoria, and then of course one would hug any stranger. That is enough. We know the girls quite well now. There is nothing at all the matter with them, quite the contrary. But their brother’s heavy sense of responsibility for their souls was as much wasted as if he had been Joan of Arc hiding an unexpurgated edition of Shakespeare from the cat. All the mistakes he had made about his sisters he repeated with every woman he met afterwards. He was wrong every time because the attention he gave to their conversation was of the same kind as he would have given to a machine that didn’t interest him—if any such machine could be imagined—a musical box perhaps. Now everyone knows what happens to even the cheapest fiddle, still more to a bird, if its music is courted in that way. His sisters saved him from disaster by affectionate amusement that asked nothing of him. He offended a great many other women, but, to return to the simile of the fiddle, their discords meant as little to him as their harmonies, so he learned nothing from his failures.
Then suddenly fate confronted him with Evangeline, who also wanted to know how wheels went round and—oh, the poor fellow! my heart bleeds for him—the wheels she was interested in were those of love and creation and human nature; and poor industrious Hatton, who only wished for righteousness and good machines, was put into her hands to take to pieces. It is, as has often been observed, a cruel world in many ways.
Evangeline’s mother had also been on the track of true love in her youth; her story has been written. But a world of difference lay between them, for Susie had wanted to possess love and had studied to be all things to all men to gain it, giving nothing in return; her daughter wanted it in order to give it away, as another lavish nature might ask for wealth to spend.
“Captain Hatton is less like an umbrella than he used to be, don’t you think?” she said one day to Teresa as they walked home through the Park. “When I go riding with him he often stops being polite and tells me about the tanks. Yesterday he told me about men out at the war who had visions. You’d never think he was that sort of man, would you?”
“I never think much about him,” said Teresa, “I just think of him as a table that Father has brought in to work at.”
“I know he doesn’t talk to everyone,” said Evangeline proudly. “He never talked to his sisters.”
“Well, what do you do to him?” Teresa asked.
“I don’t know. I just went on bravely and wouldn’t be put down. I was sure there must be something somewhere and I wanted to know what it was. He has a wonderful face, if you look at it. His eyes look so suffering sometimes, like something in a cage. I was sure he couldn’t be all ribs and the best waterproof twill really. I said to him once at the Manleys’ dance, when we were sitting out,” she went on after a pause, “‘You know we can’t always go on pretending that you are a pair of trousers and a coat and I am a bag with flounces propped up on two chairs. I’m a person and so are you. We must have heaps and heaps of things to talk about. Do, for goodness’ sake, let one of us go ahead’—I really worked myself up. I felt I just would smash into that propriety.”
“And what happened?” her sister asked.
“He got red at first and didn’t answer and I got awfully frightened. Then he said in quite a natural voice, ‘If you will behave just as you like I will try not to put you off. It is very kind of you to trouble about me.’ Rather as if I were a dog that he had been asked to exercise. However it was a beginning, and now he starts off by himself. I think the great thing is that he doesn’t regard me as a girl.”
“What does he think you are, then?”
“I don’t know. A sort of inferior Tommy I should think; uneducated but harmless, and quite useless. I might be his batman, marooned with him in a desert full of baboons.”
“It sounds very unlikely,” said Teresa. “You have a very muddled head, Chips, and you read such a lot of scraps that I believe it makes you worse; but you explain yourself quite clearly. I shall be interested to-morrow when I see that stuffed back at the breakfast table. Father would be amused.”
“You are not to tell him,” said Evangeline quickly.
“I’m not going to. At least I might have if you hadn’t told me not to. Why don’t you want him to know that his man is nicer than we thought?”
“I don’t know, except that I discovered him and I don’t want to show him to people; he’s not nearly ready. And besides, he is like having a sitting-room of my own. I like a retreat that no one else knows the way to.”
“Is Hatton in the house by any chance?” Cyril asked one day when he came in to tea.
“I don’t know at all, dear,” said Susie. “I should think very likely; he generally is.”
“He’s helping Chips to wash Tricot in the bathroom,” said Teresa.
Cyril stopped in the act of filling his pipe. “H’m,” he remarked. “Hereditary instinct, I suppose. Poor fellow.”
“I know by your face that you mean something unkind, Cyril,” said his wife, “but I don’t see how even you can make out that there can be anything hereditary about washing a dog.”
“Not if there’s only one person to do it,” he replied. He was holding a match to the tobacco and went on explaining between puffs. “But when Hatton, who is a nervous fellow—begins washing poodles with your daughter—your own little girl—who isn’t generally fond of work—I seem to see the young Eve adorning herself with the leaf of experiment just as Mother did. Have you ever seen a young chicken begin to scratch the moment it leaves the egg? It isn’t imitation, because it does it just the same if it is raised in an incubator.”
Teresa looked anxiously amused as a mother does whose favourite child is not behaving well in a drawing-room, but Mrs. Fulton was smarting under old sores. She said coldly, “Perhaps you would finish washing Tricot, dear Dicky. You had better tell Captain Hatton that your father wants him.”
“Don’t be silly,” said Cyril. “I don’t want him. I told him there was nothing for him to do this afternoon and as I didn’t see him at the Polo ground and found his hat in the hall when I came in I remembered the story of Adam and thought I’d ask, that’s all.”
Teresa had gone out while he was speaking.
“May I ask if you never want the girls to marry?” Susie asked.
“Lord, no, I don’t care,” he replied, “but what’s that got to do with Hatton? I was only joking. I suppose he knows all about washing dogs. I expect he likes it. And Chips doesn’t know the business as well as you, Sue; she won’t construe a wag of the tail into an offer of marriage. Hatton is a very upright man. He’d probably consult you first and lay out his plans on paper in the approved style.”
“Well, if he did I’m sure I don’t know what I should say,” she answered thoughtfully. Cyril had once explained to a bewildered friend, “The great charm of an argument with Sue is that you never know which part of a conversation she will choose to take the trick with. You may find that the only lie you have told for years is used as an ace.”
“I mean,” she went on, “that I don’t think Evangeline ought to be encouraged to act hastily. I like Mr. Varens so much better than Evan Hatton. He will probably come into his father’s place very soon.”
“Great Scott!” exclaimed Cyril, really startled at last. “Has Varens asked her after dining here once? What in heaven’s name possesses the poor devils! But I oughtn’t to talk I suppose.”
“Don’t be so absurd, Cyril. I never said he had proposed to her. I only meant that she hadn’t had time to consider him.”
“What do you mean, ‘consider him?’”
“I merely took Mr. Varens as an instance. I don’t want her to be pushed into liking Evan Hatton just because she hasn’t had time to think of any other. Ill-considered marriages are often so regrettable.”
“If I were a woman,” said Cyril, “I should say that I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at the things you say. Unlace me, Emmeline, and give me some more tea—have you got any?” He passed his cup.
“But do you see what I mean, Cyril?” she persisted.
“Oh, I see all right,” he replied. “My eye wants shading if anything; it’s positively dazzling, the light that you throw on matters of the heart. It’s a pity you never met Darwin. He wrote on natural selection, but I’m not sure that he mastered the subject. You might——” He stopped as the door opened and Evangeline came in with Captain Hatton.
Evan glanced at his general, who was peacefully sunk in an armchair, playing with the cat. Tricot, the poodle, followed into the room and walked about shaking himself restlessly as if he missed something.
“That’s all right, old Tricot,” said Cyril. “Come here and talk to Pussy; she’s your friend.”
Tricot came in innocent confidence, and the usual recriminations between him and the cat began.
“It is funny, if you notice, that dogs are all for love and cats all for marriage,” said Cyril thoughtfully, “and the two together are always chosen to represent domestic life—at least the ill-considered domestic life that you were talking about, Sue. I suppose it’s handed on for generations.”
Evan Hatton did not hear. He was at the window with Evangeline, trying to make her understand the principle of a magneto. “Here’s Emma coming,” she announced presently from the window. “She’s getting off the tram. Do you want her, Dicky?”
“I’m going out with her,” Teresa answered. “She said she would come.”
“Where on earth to at this time?”
“She has got a place where children go after school; she said she would take me.”
“I do wish she wouldn’t wear that hat,” Evangeline said critically, watching Emma as she came up the garden path. “I wonder where good milliners go to when they die. They never seem to mix with good people in this world.”
Captain Hatton’s face reddened and he turned away from the window.
“What’s the matter?” asked Evangeline. “Are you going?”
“Yes,” he answered shortly and then he said good-bye and left the room. He nearly ran into Emma in the hall, so great was his haste and his preoccupation. “I beg your pardon,” he apologised. “How could I have been so stupid. Did I knock your hat?” for she had put up her hand to straighten it.
“Captain Hatton!” Evangeline called over the banisters, “are you coming riding before breakfast to-morrow?”
“If you wish me to,” he answered unsteadily and waited for a moment while Emma ran upstairs. But Evangeline only replied, “All right, eight o’clock then,” and disappeared, and he heard the girls’ laughter in the drawing-room. He let himself out and spent the evening and most of the night walking along the sea shore.
“That’s an unlucky hat of yours, Emma,” said Evangeline when she went back to the drawing-room. “I believe there’s a devil in it. We had one row about it before you came up.” She went off singing.
Teresa’s elusive desire had begun to show itself openly to her since she met Emma Gainsborough. She had been allowed at last behind the curtain where the faces that haunted her in the streets were no longer imaginary characters in a scene at which she looked on as a spectator. She began to know individual Tommys and Gordons and Gladyses and Victorias, Mrs. Potter and Mrs. Jason; to understand why Mr. Potter was out of work and what it meant to half-a-dozen lives when Mr. Jason brought home only a fraction of his earnings. She saw disease for the first time. She met pleasure and wit and obscenity and tragedy jostling familiarly together without prejudice or distinction, engendered by all possible unions of hunger, love, jealousy, optimism, sensuality, pride, gentleness, patience, brutality, callousness, kindness, ambition, hopelessness, fidelity, in all possible conditions of filth or heartrending strife with squalor; intelligence burning indomitably in fogs of prejudice and lies and stupidity. She had torn the veil which the faces in the street seemed to draw down between Mrs. Carpenter’s “duty to the city” and some vital secret that the city kept to itself. The passionate love of fellowship that had tormented her with its insistence and eluded her by its formlessness had taken shape in the places that Emma and her leaders were patiently trying to remake, and now she thought of little else.