If Evangeline’s campaign against Evan Hatton’s prejudices had been a public war, the supporters of either side would have seen that the end was now drawing near. Optimists among the Evangelineites would have rubbed their hands and said that she had got the forces of his harsh morality fairly on the run; the pessimists would have prophesied (though admitting Evangeline’s strength) that the struggle would break out again as soon as peace was signed. The Evanites would either have declared that Morality was going to the dogs and was being sold by Self-interest and Pleasure, or they would have prepared to retreat, still fighting, to the height of “A Strong Man’s Influence,” and determined to reorganise for a new offensive when the enemy should be weakened by marriage.
An important battle took place during the ride that Evangeline had arranged, when Evan retreated after her flippancy on the subject of dead milliners. He called for her and brought her horse from the livery stable at eight the next morning, and they rode away in that state of silent tension which precedes an explanation when two people who care for each other have parted in offence. Evangeline tried hard to make him “start talking by himself,” as she had boasted to Teresa that he was now in the habit of doing. She tempted him with proof that she had absorbed his lecture on the magneto and was mistress of its difficulties. She threw him touching confidences about her plans in little everyday matters. But all in vain. At last her temper rose slightly.
“What is the matter with you?” she asked. “Are you angry with me?”
“I have no right to be angry with you,” he answered with emotion, “but I don’t understand you, and yet I know that you are good and could be great. Why do you pretend to be like the others and say things that are unworthy of you?”
Evangeline was overawed. “What things?” she asked timidly.
“It was a silly trifle, and I know I am a fool—but it made me hot—what you said about good milliners not associating with good people in this world. Emma Gainsborough is giving her life to God’s work as readily as the saints gave theirs—she’s a Crusader if you like—and you make paltry fun of her hat. There now! I suppose you won’t speak to me again.”
“Yes, I shall,” said Evangeline. “If you will not shut yourself up into that dreadful silence you may say anything—absolutely anything. You make me see such a long way when you talk. I read the papers by myself and get into such knots because I can’t see any connection between different things. But when you hurl me about from Emma’s hat to the Crusaders, who I thought were people who fought in nightgowns and red crosses with a feather in their helmets and defeated the heathen—why—let me see, where am I?—well you see how exhilarating it is! I feel as if my mind had been galloping miles in the fresh air in new places.”
“Great heavens, what a child you are!” he said, looking at her in wonderment. Then he smiled and held out his hand. “I’m sorry,” he said.
Evangeline shook it heartily. “So am I,” she assured him. “And will you show me how to take the car to pieces next time Father lets you off?”
“Nonsense, he won’t want it taken to pieces,” said Evan. “What’s the good of that?”
“Just to see the wheels,” she begged. “And then I should be so useful if anything went wrong.”
“No, you haven’t got any mechanical sense,” he argued. “I can see that. You understand a theory when I tell it you, but when it comes to putting it into practice you don’t think a bit. I’ve watched you learning to drive; you do it all by the book.”
“Well, what should I do it by?” she asked.
“Common sense and a thorough knowledge of the reason for everything. The fact that any part of a machine does so-and-so isn’t enough; you must know why, and what will be the result if it doesn’t act, and then you must treat it so that it will act.”
“Oh, dear,” she said. “There’s the sun coming out! Let’s gallop while there is grass.”
It is superfluous to follow this love episode any further. I have met ladies who are always passionately anxious to know “what he said” when a girl announces her engagement, and who need no encouragement to tell in return “how John did it.” But I am all against emotional indecency, and unless any private conversations in this book have to be recorded in the interests of research, or are betrayed by the genial indiscretions of sympathy, they will be omitted. Evan is the last person who would wish anything to be said of him in that moment when Nature, who had always laughed at his attempts to make her acknowledge the sovereignty of such Divine Rule as he was able to imagine, pushed Evangeline into his arms and commanded him to take her or suffer the pains of hell.
He saw no reason to refuse. But the end was not yet, though it had become inevitable. Evan had reserves. Evangeline’s gallant forces had a tough time of it before they won. Suspicion was the hardest to beat down; Evan’s sisters had helped to make that so strong. He reviewed his bonny black doubts every day, and led them out against Evangeline’s joys. But there was all the difference in the world between his sisters’ cheerfulness and hers. Their pleasure in life was that of mice in a granary, hers was that of a rush of invaders over a rich country; she wanted all there was. Her assurance that God loves His world was invincible. Evan’s doubts suffered casualties that put them out of action; but for a happy marriage they should all have been dead. The smallest remnant of a strong army is dangerous.
These battles went on unobserved by Cyril. Susie noticed and said nothing, because she knew that unasked advice to a girl precipitates a crisis, and she hoped in secret that Evangeline loved her freedom too much to do what her mother would call “anything rash,” such as binding herself in marriage before she had reviewed all likely candidates. As weeks went on she became more anxious. There was a look of settled happiness about Evangeline that was not what you would expect of a young girl, Susie said to herself. It is a mistake to wear the heart on the sleeve. One of the great joys of her own girlhood had been the security of living behind a veil of misty sweetness that allowed the public free scope for their imagination of what might be behind it and yet committed her to nothing. Misunderstandings had arisen in that way but she had not suffered and those who had done so had only their own imaginations to blame. She still made use of the veil, and the only person who made her feel nervous about it was Cyril. He had the knack of twitching it away, and never tired of the joke, which seemed to compensate him for the nothingness he exposed. In one way only, her disappointment about Evangeline’s choice was a good thing to her. She felt it as a revenge on her husband for his cynicism about women and the jibes he aimed at her about their duplicity towards men. “Perhaps he will see now,” she said to herself—her very soul bridling at the Spirit of Man—“that they do need protection after all. If he really cared for her I could have discussed it with him and he could have got another A.D.C. until this had blown over. As it is, it must just go on, and I can’t prevent it—with the man here all day while the sons of rich people are sitting on office stools, shuffling oats and sugar through their fingers. Why can’t some of them come and ride with her and show her their motors? And I suppose Dicky will marry a rent collector with a wooden leg, or a socialist who stands on a chair and wants to take away our money.” Her thoughts wandered into all sorts of bitter possibilities, not at all in keeping with the maxim that “if everyone were happy and contented everything would come right,” which she brought in so delightfully at Mrs. Carpenter’s little informal conferences on social reform. “Mrs. Fulton is so original in what she says,” was a remark constantly made. But true it was that she thought differently at the moment. Circumstances alter cases, as she so often said.
Because of this grievance of hers against him, Cyril was not told of her fears, and in due time Evangeline’s battle was won. Evan frowned on the tattered remnant of his doubts and bade them go home. He went in, his heart stumbling and stopping, to the study where Cyril was asleep after a day’s hunting, and shut the door.
Cyril came down early before dinner, and found Evangeline reading the evening paper in the drawing-room.
“Hullo,” he said.
“Hullo, dear,” she replied, and went on reading.
“So you and Hatton have fixed it up,” he began. Evangeline put down the paper, and looked up at him.
“Is that all right?” she asked. “You’re not cross, are you?”
“No, I’m not cross, my dear,” he said, as if he were thinking of something else. “I suppose you wouldn’t tell me any more, would you? Why you really want him, for instance.”
“Yes, I would, of course,” she answered readily. “I’d tell you anything—though that’s not true, because I told Dicky weeks ago that he was getting—oh well, you know—quite tame—and she thought you would be pleased, but I wouldn’t let her tell you because—I didn’t want to spoil it.”
“H’m,” said Cyril.
“I mean I liked feeling that none of you knew him properly.”
“H’m,” said Cyril again.
“Well, what’s the matter?”
“A powerful apple,” he observed. “Power, my dear child, power.”
“Oh, Father,” she sighed, “you’re not going on again about that dreadful old Eden, are you? I do wish no one had ever told you the story. You think women are always tempting men to this day.”
“So they are when it comes to marriage,” he asserted. “Don’t you make any mistake about that.”
Evangeline felt desperate, as if she were caught and entangled. “Do you mean that men never fall in love with them?” Tears gathered in her eyes. She had had some weary work at the last stand of Hatton’s doubts, and now her father, whom she loved and believed in as a friend, was going to take the top off the morning of her happiness.
Cyril understood and repented. “No,” he said, “Hatton loves you—but——” he looked at her inquiring face and decided to revise what he was going to say. “Have you ever heard of spontaneous combustion? It’s a troublesome thing, but I should have more faith in your sex if they suffered from it in their emotions. They think too hard for my taste. But that’s all. Hatton is the devil of a hard thinker himself, so you had better leave him to scratch his head, and say, ‘yes, dear,’ like your mother does when I give her the benefit of my wisdom. Then all you need is to go out and do just the opposite, and say afterwards that that was what you thought he meant. Don’t incense him at the time, is the great thing. ‘The Housewife’s Vade Mecum,’ as I read somewhere, or ‘Little Polly’s first steps in efficiency’.” He kissed her on his way across the room to turn on some more light. “Just to wish you luck, dear, and to show there’s no ill-feeling.”
He returned to the fire and drew up a chair. “I’m in favour of marriage for all, myself,” he went on, “young and old, rich and poor, never mind the reason, but get on with the event itself. The advent of little ones is, after all, the only thing that matters, as your mother explained to me. And that was you, Chips. There was a devil of a row before you turned up.”
“Oh, did you and Mother quarrel?” she asked, very much surprised.
“You can’t call a one-sided thing exactly a quarrel,” he said. “No one but a man could quarrel with me.”
“Couldn’t they?” she asked.
“No. But your mother is very powerful in the way I was describing;——”
Susie came in just then. Cyril had told her while they were dressing that Evan had “put in a claim as consort for Chips; which just bears out what I said this style of architecture would lead to when we came; except that he isn’t wealthy. In fact, he has very little except his pay.”
Susie took the line that this was “all that could be expected in a place where people think so much of money that they never leave their offices till it is time to go to bed.”
“That ought to make them all the more anxious to marry,” he remarked, “or else how can they enjoy any intellectual conversation?”
“Of course you will twist everything I say to a coarse standpoint, Cyril,” she said, “because those sort of cheap jokes are so easy to make.”
“Where’s the joke?” he asked, putting on his coat. “‘Honi soit qui mal y pense,’ as the leaders of taste remind us.”
Susie made no answer, but closed the door between their rooms, and she did not go down until dinner was announced.