“I am going to Aldwych to call on the Prices. Will you come with me, dear Dicky? I wish you would,” said Susie.
Teresa said she would. Sometime the idea of Aldwych without David must be recognised and dealt with. She also wished her mother to forget that “a girl may regret some day” having refused a beautiful old place in the country and a really good husband “just for an idea.” Poor little Teresa supposed that any show of reluctance to go back to the house might be taken as evidence of a weak spot in her armour. Neither she nor Evangeline had ever known how much of the world their mother detected from behind her veil of misty sweetness. Anything more candid than her words and actions could hardly be imagined, and yet somehow, as Evangeline had said, omelets were mysteriously made in hats, and whether Susie or the Powers of Darkness made them none of her audience could discern. Cyril had his ideas on the subject and we have seen how deeply they wounded her.
Mrs. Price was found in the garden, talking in her best manner to one of “the county” who had called; a crushing sort of woman who made it quite clear to Mrs. Price that she had called in obedience to the tradition that “noblesse oblige.” She was known as Mrs. Archie Lake, and newcomers were supposed to be “all right” if she called on them. She had conferred the stamp of recognition on Mrs. Price for several reasons. First, “out of decency to Milly Varens”; secondly, because the Hunt was not in a very flourishing condition, and Mr. Price was reported to be rich and ambitious; thirdly, “just to see what they were like.” Someone had met Joseph Price and reported that he was quite possible and that the girls would probably have money too in the end——. Here Mrs. Lake let her train of thought lose itself because one does not think these things out in so many words. Her son was rather a worry to her, but it is impossible to make plans of that sort. The French do, but we don’t. Anyhow she called, and Susie and Teresa found her there. Mrs. Price was getting on well with her new manner. “How charming of you to come, Mrs. Fulton. Of course you know this part of the world well. And how is the General?” She did not wish Mrs. Lake to suppose that Millport was going to be allowed to track her down here, but Susie, of course, was different. She welcomed her.
“Yes, I think we have met somewhere, haven’t we?” said Mrs. Lake, raising her eyes sleepily to Susie. Mrs. Price made a mental note and tried to look a little sleepy too.
“I am sure you are enjoying the country,” Susie said to her. “Everything is looking so exquisite just now. We want to go away ourselves as soon as we can, but my husband finds it very difficult to get away. He doesn’t care for the sea and so many of his Staff have children that he likes to let them off when the schools break up and take his own holiday when the hunting begins.”
“But isn’t Millport on the sea somewhere?” asked Mrs. Lake. Mrs. Price flushed. “We hardly think of a great port like that as the seaside,” she said. “Of course when my husband’s ancestor went there first and practically built what there was it was on the sea, but that is so long ago and everything is so altered he would hardly recognise it if he were alive. There are very few people nowadays who have the courage of those pioneers who went down to the sea in ships and opened up communications with the East. My husband cares so much more for sport and racing and all that, that I tell him he is not half proud enough of the old family he comes from. Something so rugged and adventurous about the sea, isn’t there?”
“They used to import slaves, didn’t they?” Mrs. Lake inquired, looking quite vacant. “I wish they would begin again now. I am fed up with the search for servants, aren’t you?”
“Oh, but don’t you think that was terribly wrong?” said Susie. “I can’t bear to think of it. I am sure that most of the labour troubles now are largely owing to people having been so inconsiderate for others in the past. Teresa and I both work a great deal in that way, and we see so much of it.”
“Oh, really? What sort of work do you do?” asked Mrs. Lake of Teresa.
“I just sort papers in an office,” said Teresa, who would have beaten her mother at that moment.
“Really? Don’t you find you need exercise?” said Mrs. Lake. “You had better come and do some hunting in the winter. I have come to the conclusion that the working classes don’t need helping any more; they help themselves to everything they want. Do your girls hunt?” she turned to Mrs. Price.
“Oh, they are quite mad about it,” their mother replied. “Sir David sold his horses before we came. He said he didn’t understand that Mr. Price would have bought any that were good enough for the girls, but some others have been ordered, I believe, and in the meantime we have the three motors to get about in, so we are not really cut off.”
Mrs. Lake was startled almost out of her good behaviour. She regretted for a moment having called so soon, in case it should really be impossible to go on with these people, however rich they were.
“I suppose Sir David is coming back in a year or two?” she said, anxiously.
“Well, that of course, one can’t say,” Mrs. Price replied, “but my husband would have bought the place if he could and he still hopes to—if we find we can afford it, that is,” she added, recollecting certain warnings from her daughters. “We had to draw in our horns very much since the war, like everybody else.”
“Not quite everybody, do you think?” said Mrs. Lake, as she made room for the butler and footman who had come in with tea. “There are some people who have taken a place called Fable near here—perhaps you know them? I think they come from Millport or Poolchester, I forget which. He contracted for something during the war, boots or cholera belts or cigarettes or something, and not only that, but the price of whatever it was is still up. It is rather sad to see the old places go, one by one.”
“I expect they come from Poolchester,” said Mrs. Price. “There is a great deal of that sort of thing there. It is a manufacturing town of course.”
“But such an interesting place,” Susie intervened. “So much life. I went there once to hear some wonderful music, and the faces all looked to me so strong. No, no sugar, thanks,—Teresa, dear, will you take that cup from Mrs. Price?”
Joseph came in just then and Mrs. Lake dropped all unpleasant subjects immediately. She encouraged him and he responded gladly. He infused a quality of ease into the conversation.
“And how’s the—what d’you call it?—the welfare of the city, Miss Fulton?” he asked presently. “Still going strong, what? Fisk been shedding much blood lately?”
“What’s that?” asked Mrs. Lake curiously.
“Oh, great sport, isn’t he, Miss Fulton? Communist, what? Miss Fulton b’nevolently hands round soup and Fisk gets into it, isn’t that it? No, kait sairysly though. I hope you’re getting on. I do immensely admire what you’re doing. I couldn’t do it for m’life. The smell of the f’llers on parade used to quite upset me.”
Mrs. Lake didn’t like that. “He must learn not to say those kind of things,” she thought. “It is dreadfully bad form; but he is a nice boy in many ways; we had better make use of him.”
To Teresa the whole thing was little less than torture. Love of humanity was so alive in her that to have it wounded in sport gave her something of the hopeless misery of a child roughly handled by bigger boys. The fact that they were of her own species made her sense of isolation worse. Affectionate women fear alien sympathies more than force. They also feel it their duty to betray the whereabouts of the thing they love by fighting over it, instead of merely putting it out of range of attack and guarding all approaches as men do.
“You would have smelt just as bad yourself if you had been a private,” she said, blushing and stammering, “it is only just chance that gives you hot baths.”
“Ha! ha!” he laughed heartily. “Of course I should. You’re abs’lutely right; but then I shouldn’t have minded, don’t you see? That’s th’ whole point.”
“How do you know you wouldn’t?” she flamed out. “How do you know they don’t care? They do care. You know nothing about it. You have never talked to them.”
“Teresa, dear,” Susie remonstrated.
“No, no, please,” said Joseph. “Come on, Miss Fulton, we must finish this. I’m enjoying it ’mmensely. I love people that speak out. I——”
“Oh, do leave it alone,” said Teresa. “You don’t understand a bit.”
“Yes, I do,” he persisted. “I’m ’normously int’rested in th’ whole subject. I shall b’ sure to have to canvass for my father at the next election and what you were saying is just th’ sort of thing th’ Labour people will put up, and I shall have t’ find an answer. And there isn’t any answer, you know, except that somebody’s got t’ have money—there isn’t ’nough in th’ country for everybody—and mining and all that takes generations of training. Somebody’s got to do it, and somebody’s got t’ stay outside and watch them when they come up. Th’ question is, Who? Fisk thinks he ought t’ have a turn because he never has. I think I’m going to because I’ve got int’ the habit of it. There’s nothing in it as an argument, you see. The only way is t’ sit tight. The thing’s bound t’ settle itself in time.”
“And what is your father’s view as a Member of Parliament?” asked Mrs. Lake, who was a good deal bewildered, a little shocked and a very little amused.
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Joseph, “he doesn’t say, but I don’t think he stands much nonsense from the f’llers down at the works. But he keeps friends with the Labour Party, I b’lieve on principle. The government offered him a baronetcy last year, but that sort of thing isn’t done now, thank goodness. He said he’d be a fool t’ take it, I remember, but I forget why.”
“How can you pretend to be so silly, Joseph,” his mother interrupted. “You know your father doesn’t believe in rewards for public service of that sort. No one can ever say he has pushed himself forward.”
“No, my dear mother, that’s just what I said,” he remarked. “It’s such frightf’lly bad form t’ have titles and all that sort of thing, now. The Tories stick to it on principle, of course, but they’re frightf’lly crude in their ideas——” He was wandering on gaily as a matter of habit, relating as much as he could remember of what he heard at the houses he loved, when Mrs. Archie Lake rose.
“Don’t talk too much about crude Conservatives while you are at Aldwych, Mr. Price,” she said. “We don’t study politics down here; we just have them, and we are not likely to change. You had better come and play tennis with us next week, and leave abstruse problems alone.”
Evangeline had taken a small house by the sea for July and August. She intended to be there alone with Ivor and his nurse, except for such time as she could persuade Teresa to spend with her. Evan would come down for week ends, and perhaps a whole ten days at the end of the time. She was beginning to lose those sociable tastes that had made her so popular when she came to Drage. Her joy in living that had made her easily throw off the weight of other people’s theories of conduct was giving way under continuous fatigue. Her war against Evan’s prejudices had broken out again.
This reassembling of his forces and hers might have been prophesied without much risk from the beginning, but the prophet would have been called cynical and pessimistic by all those genial souls who believe that the best way to prevent war is to invite the hostile parties to a picnic. They fondly suppose that because the guns are left at home there will be no fighting. Even when they look round and discover that half the party are drawn up on one side of the tablecloth with all the teapots and the other half are massed with all the buns on the other,—even then they would consider it morbid to suspect them of harbouring old grudges. It may be remembered that before Evan asked Evangeline to marry him he had reviewed and finally dismissed the remnant of his doubts about the soundness of her character. His inner voices warned him, “She is not your ideal woman; she is lax and flippant and light-headed,” but Nature laughed at and tormented him. No one knows how Nature does this work of uniting opposite temperaments, but she did it, and Evan’s misgivings retired muttering.
By the time we are now speaking of they had gathered again in a strong force. Evangeline’s gaiety and confidence and innocence with which she had routed them were now weakened by constant unexpected attacks. The anxiety of never knowing from what quarter disapproval would burst out and turn pleasure into pain made her nervous and depressed. As Ivor grew older the strain was more than doubled, for in every attack of Evan’s that she could have dodged or parried for herself she was hampered by Ivor’s little body, that would suffer equally from her blows at her husband and her husband’s at her. She dared not hide away with him, because that would at once bring about the crisis she dreaded, and Evan would claim his right to take the boy away. There was nowhere she could hide him where he would not be found by the police and given back to his father. She sat sometimes on a gate among fields that overlooked the railway line, and watched with frightened eyes the trains rush by and wondered whether any of them went far enough without a stop to take her and the child out of Evan’s reach. She thought longingly of other countries, stretches of hill and forest, new faces, new people; English-speaking they must be for Evangeline, but there are plenty of these everywhere, on the other side of the globe. She thought once what fun it would be to walk about in bright sunshine, knowing that Evan was asleep in darkness and fog just below the curve of the round world. Only there, on the other side, would she feel safe; he would never come slowly up like a fly over an orange (as she was taught at school when the hemispheres were explained) and look for her. No, she knew he would not. He would search over England, and possibly Europe, but if the police still failed in their clues he would go home at last and explain to Cyril, and retire into a blacker severity than ever with his giggly little sisters. Then she used to shake herself free from these dreams and return home tired and sad. She had looked forward eagerly to being by the sea with Teresa and Ivor, and when they were all there at last, some of her old confidence came back.
She said nothing to Teresa about the trouble in her mind, because it had increased beyond the stage of being an interesting puzzle and become grief that lies quieter untouched, except by the one who brought it and only could remove it. One great difference between Evangeline and her mother was that Susie counted differences of opinion with herself as a compliment to her higher understanding; they were treasures to be turned over and enjoyed in secret. To her daughter they were so many obstructions to love, and must be destroyed if possible; if persistently obstructive, she climbed over and fled from them.
Ivor had certainly managed to collect in himself all the elements of discord in his father’s and mother’s families. If he had inherited his mother’s joyousness and been content with that, the two of them together might have weakened Evan’s fears through lack of exercise, for his disapproval was not the natural bitterness that uses a creed as the organ of its appetite; it was his means of following the same desire as Evangeline followed, the desire to know how God works the universe. She felt that she knew how it was done and he thought he knew. But feeling is generally stronger than thought in personal affairs, so if the wretched young Ivor had left well alone and not excited his father’s reasoning powers, they might have grown soft like the Roman Legions. But unfortunately he had inherited a great deal of Susie’s mischievous tendency to stir up strife without taking part in it. He had her elusive charm and was, like her, uncommunicative; he loved natural pleasure and was indifferent to public opinion, like his mother, and was as unswerving along his own chosen path as his father. This combination of qualities made him perfectly adapted as a bone of contention, a desirable young person, belonging to both, and yet to neither of the contending parties. There, down by the sea with his devoted mother and aunt and nurse, he played and bathed and went his own way in peace, asking nothing that was unreasonable, kind-hearted, courageous and merry; the kind of child that terrifies its weaker relatives by the thought of what it has to meet in the future; of candid eyes coming upon hatred for the first time, small hands roughened by work and stained with blood from the noses of hostile neighbours with predatory instincts and a perverted sense of humour; visions perhaps, of little trousers that were designed for warmth and comfort removed with trembling fingers at the command of an ogre with a cane in a place far from home—a callous creature with lips dripping the literature of a civilisation that worshipped suffering. There is a radical difference between mothers who revere the name of Cæsar and mothers who don’t. It is not all children who work upon maternal terrors in this way, but Ivor had the gift to perfection and his unconsciousness of his own power made it the stronger.
The little party were playing on the sands one day, when two figures, one in a linen dress with a red parasol, the other in baggy tweeds, came to the edge of the cliff above them and sat down. Evangeline heard a small laugh with a familiar tone in it, and looked up. “Hullo, Dicky,” she said, “there are the Vachells; look!” Mrs. Vachell waved her hand and then said something, and presently both figures rose and came slowly down the sandhills, Mrs. Vachell with leisurely ease, her husband with the reluctance of a shy man obeying the stronger will of a wife used to society.
“I had no idea you were here,” she said. “Did I tell you of the place by any chance? There are so few people here generally. You know my husband, don’t you?” Mr. Vachell bowed. “But you two don’t count as people,” she added. “I don’t grudge you your simple pleasures. If you spend your days like this making sand pies you must have very peaceful minds. What I hate are people who put up tents and are always making tea and screaming in two inches of water.”
“Your boy seems to be having a good time,” said Mr. Vachell. Ivor was busy with a net among the small rocks that appeared at low tide.
“Yes, he loves it,” Evangeline replied. “We are so happy here.” She spread her rug hospitably, and they all sat down. Mr. Vachell and Teresa were side by side in a silence that each felt the other ought to break first, but neither was equal to the attempt.
“Is Captain Hatton with you?” asked Mrs. Vachell.
“No, not often,” Evangeline replied. “He comes for week ends sometimes.
“Your boy looks very well,” Mr. Vachell remarked.
“Yes, he is, and he is really no trouble,” said his mother. “There are some other children about, but he doesn’t seem to want them. He is the most independent creature I ever met.”
“That is a useful thing in a boy, isn’t it?”
“It is useful in anybody,” said Evangeline, sighing. “I think if everyone minded their own business like animals, and were just happy eating together and enjoying each other’s society and hopping off in between, it would be much nicer.”
Mr. Vachell’s face wrinkled into a smile, but he said nothing.
Teresa happened to look up. “What are you laughing at?” she asked.
“Your sister’s idea of living agrees with mine,” he said. They missed Mrs. Vachell’s reply, but Evangeline went on thinking aloud, incited by the sunshine and the splash of the waves. She had once said to Susie, as a child, that the sea was always telling her to speak out, but that it never said anything but “h’m” when she did, and Susie had answered, “Yes, dear, that is quite true.” She had found the sea restful herself, when pursued by the eager questioning of lovers. Evangeline went on now, “There is too much busy-bodying about morals. I think that people who like committing murder should be put on an island together and settle it among themselves; people who steal should have all their things taken away and sold for hospitals; people who say nasty things should be given vinegar tea made with bilge water, and be photographed every day and obliged to look at the proofs——”
“What about people who are stupid?” asked Mrs. Vachell.
“Oh, poor darlings, nothing about them,” said Evangeline quickly, “don’t be horrid.”
“Don’t you think most vice is stupidity?”
“No, certainly not. For instance, I am so stupid that I don’t know what two and two make, but I don’t mean an atom of harm.”
“But you may do a lot of harm by adding them up to make six. Why not try to learn?”
“I don’t believe God adds up,” said Evangeline, tracing patterns in the sand with her finger. “But then I expect He knows the answer without thinking, so that doesn’t come to anything.”
“I don’t know your husband, Mrs. Hatton,” said Mr. Vachell, “but I hope he is not passionately fond of arithmetic.”
“He has a passion for everything uncomfortable,” said Evangeline.
“Poor fellow!” observed Mr. Vachell.
“Mr. Vachell, really I don’t think you need look like that,” said Teresa. “Your study, which I saw once, is the most hauntingly uncomfortable place I was ever led into. I couldn’t go to sleep the night after I had seen it.”
“Why, what is the matter with it?” he asked, surprised.
“Everything is so dug up,” she explained. “Have you ever seen it, Chips?” she turned to her sister. “I do think when people have finished with their lives they might be allowed to get rid of them decently. To have their bones and their tears and the things they have been happy with all brought back and looked at——. Suppose someone dug up Millport thousands of years after us, and put a whole street full of people together again! Personal possessions are bad enough when the people who own them are alive; they are so full of—I don’t know what—associations. But when the owners are dead their things become perfectly horrid. I don’t think anyone ought to own anything at all. I would like them to live out of doors in tents that don’t cost anything, and to eat with their fingers——”
“I am very sorry my things worried you so much,” said Mr. Vachell. “I have always looked at them quite prosaically as history; interesting in their way. In fact, I think I could show you that they are interesting if you came and looked at them again. Some of them are very beautiful, and if people make beautiful things to please themselves they are worth keeping. The world would be very squalid by now if it had gone on as you suggest. Think of the grass all trampled down with being sat upon and nobody’s hair ever having been combed, and how dreadfully they would all quarrel and gossip with nothing to do.”
“I expect I was thinking of a world with fewer people in it,” said Teresa. “It makes me giddy when I think of arranging a government that will be fair to millions and millions of people, each one of them just a little different from any one of the others.”
“That is where historians do their humble best for you,” said he. “It does sort the masses into a few main heaps that tend to move about in definite directions, and even clear the ground by destroying one another.”
“Yes, that is a man’s only idea of deciding an argument,” said his wife. “He has never been able to understand anything more intelligent than blood. And as long as women are silly enough to go on providing children and handing them over to him the supply will be kept up and arguments will be decided in that way.”
“I am afraid I must go in and do a little work,” said he, rising with a sigh.
“Good-bye,” said his wife, “I’ll come along later.”
They sat talking until it was time to go in to tea. Evangeline began to feel her contentment in the outdoor life she loved give way gradually before the force of purpose that Mrs. Vachell brought with her. The Sphinx who looked so calm among hungry crowds had the opposite effect on Evangeline’s simple enjoyment of things as they are. The smothered rebellion that is hidden by pride so long as the enemy is overpowering may suddenly break out and inflame a peaceful party of shepherds and set them running and shouting for an end that they never contemplated or desired. Evangeline had been suffering under a sense of heavy depression when she came away to the sea. She felt herself up against an obstacle that was not to be moved because it moved with her and encircled her from all sides, closing her in and shutting out all the new joys of the future that she had seen ahead of her when Ivor was born. Every step she took was hampered by fear that she might be sending him farther away from her, some incident might arise that would strengthen Evan’s conviction that she was not fit to have the charge of him. Then when she hid her sympathy from Ivor and forced herself to suffer for the sake of keeping him with her, she could see a look of childish judgment in his eyes that placed her unjustly in the category she dreaded, that of people who have grown up and are beyond the pale of confidence from the young. If she went on pretending for his sake, she said to herself, he would become like Romulus and Remus, living in his own thoughts without a mother. The idea made her almost mad at times.
Alone with Teresa and Ivor by the sea, she had got back her confidence, her nature being of the kind that expects a trouble left behind to remain where it is without attempting pursuit. She kept no record of the occasions when this hope had been disappointed. The things Mrs. Vachell talked of that afternoon showed her something entirely new to her. She understood, to her great surprise, that all over the world were thousands of other Evangelines, suffering as she did, from the inexplicable harshness of men towards those precious, irrational gambollings of the mind, that move women to actions that are condemned as “unreasonable,” “inconsistent,” “illogical,” “false,” “silly,” and generally lacking in orderly sequence. She learned that she was not alone, fighting something sinister that had no shape and perhaps was only a disorder of her own imagination. Mrs. Vachell explained that the enemy was terribly real and powerful; the enemy of all true women whose duty it was to unite in fighting to the last drop of their blood.
“Women are not stupid,” she said in her slow, deep voice, “they are not irrational. What you see in Ivor and dread to lose—what your husband does not see—is what comes into the world by women, and your husband thinks it foolish because it is not in him. He wants to preserve his own qualities; you want to preserve yours; they are wholly contradictory, and one side or the other must impose its will.”
“But I thought men were supposed to adore women for having just what they haven’t got, just as we adore them for their physical strength and their brains.”
“So they say, and so we say, because otherwise there would be no marriages,” said Mrs. Vachell. “But it is a lie. We only love their strength for the sake of getting the better of it. They cultivate our foolishness because it gives them rest from competition, and they can sit down and plume themselves. Each wants the power, and the centuries of suffering that we have gone through have taught us to see love as the only thing worth having, while they still look on it as a pleasant fad to be indulged in when they have finished arranging who is to get the most of what belongs, by right, equally to all. It is all very pretty, you will find, if you look into it.”
“Dicky,” said Evangeline, a few days later, when she and Teresa had settled themselves under the cliff after breakfast, “I have done the most evil bit of mischief. I feel like Guy Fawkes. I have advised Mrs. Trotter to come here, and she is coming.”
“But why not?” Teresa asked in surprise.
“Don’t you know how Evan hates her? No, I suppose you wouldn’t. But he does. She is his bête noir.”
“But, then, why have you asked her?”
“I didn’t ask her. Mother wrote and said the rooms the Trotters generally go to at Broadstairs have got something the matter with them; a lodger developed some disease or other, I think. They couldn’t get in anywhere, and she wanted to know if I could get rooms here. There are rooms in those cottages down on the left by the church, nurse told me. So I think she is sure to come.”
“But that isn’t your fault,” said Teresa. “You couldn’t do anything else. Evan hasn’t bought up the whole place.”
“No, not if I had done it innocently like that,” said Evangeline, “but I didn’t. I urged her to come and made everything easy, and I have been enjoying the idea ever since. It is deliberate vice. There is Evan coming along now with Mrs. Vachell, of course. He still thinks her a very ladylike woman. Oh, Dicky! when Mrs. Trotter comes won’t she mow them both down with repartee? It will be lovely.”
“Chips,” said Teresa hesitatingly, “you—you’re not so—so kind to Evan as you are to the rest of us. You used to be so interested in making him talk, and now you so often won’t listen when he does.”
“He talks such rot,” said her sister. “I can’t be bothered with it.” There was silence for some minutes.
“I’m a pig, Dicky,” said Evangeline presently. “But if you knew how deadly it is being with someone who doesn’t understand the way women look at things——”
“Don’t talk about women as if they were all alike,” said Teresa impatiently. “It is as bad as Mrs. Carpenter. She is always saying, ‘we women are so something or other,’ and Mother says, ‘but then, don’t you think women are so something else.’ But they both give you an idea of somebody very noble and forlorn in the position of Daniel in the den of lions. I am sure that there are certain qualities in people, courage and truthfulness and meanness and greed and all the rest, and everybody has some of them in different mixtures; it doesn’t make any difference whether they are male or female or rich or poor. It is so silly trying to label people into classes and species according to their incomes or their sex. Nationality divides them up a little, I admit, but otherwise you are just asking for trouble by presupposing any vice or virtues.”
“Well, then, men should stop presupposing that women have no brains and no morals,” said Evangeline.
“I don’t believe that any woman with either has ever bothered what was presupposed about her, or had any difficulty in convincing anyone to whom it mattered,” Teresa replied.
“But that is nonsense, Dicky. You know it was only when women had to be employed in the war that they had a chance to show what they could do. Look at women doctors before they began to run their own hospitals.”
“Well, that is exactly what I have been trying to explain. It all came of that abominable system of classifying. Women were this and women were that, and it was very largely their own fault. Which sex was it that used to say, ‘My dear, that is unladylike. Don’t imitate that nasty bold girl who handles mice as if she were a navvy’? Now they are allowed to be competent or incompetent, as nature made them, and you are doing your best to rebuild the whole obstacle by saying, ‘All women are not what you think them. They are all something else. They have all got lovely, pure, high-browed minds and all men have horrid brutish ones.’ You are only changing a guerilla war into a series of pitched battles. I detest Mrs. Vachell. She looks like a martyr, and she is only a hunger striker.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean she is a rebel with no sense of adventure. She will plot against any sort of power that galls her personally, and I don’t think she uses fair means; there’s no gallantry about her. It is all spitting and kicking and causing harmless people inconvenience.”
“I think you are most unfair,” said Evangeline hotly. “She is out against all sorts of tyranny, the sort of tyranny that Evan would exercise over Ivor if he could; the tyranny of horrid vulgar people who never do a stroke of work and have no brains and simply live on enormous incomes, while women are sweated and slave-driven or forced on to the street. It has nothing to do with her personally; Mr. Vachell is the least interfering man in the world, and they are not particularly hard up.”
“Whom does she think she is going to do good to by making you fed up with Evan?”
“She doesn’t; but she has made me see why it is that he doesn’t understand children and why I have to stand up to him if I want to save Ivor. And you know, Dicky, it is such a joke, because Evan thinks her perfect and is always holding her up as a model of dignity and common sense. That is why I want Mrs. Trotter to come. It does make me so irritated to see him stalking along thinking Mrs. Vachell is listening with the deepest interest to what he says, and all the time she is boiling like a volcano, and when she looks quietest I know she is quite white hot with contempt for something he has said.”
“Then she is an abominable hypocrite,” said Teresa indignantly.
“I know,” her sister answered rather sadly, “and if I tell Evan the least little bit of truth about her he flies at me and won’t listen; just thunders me down, and yet I am really fond of him. But she hates him, and the only way she can get in the truths she wants to say is to keep so quiet that he doesn’t understand, and then little by little she undermines his ideas. It is quite wonderful to watch.”
When Mrs. Trotter came she surpassed even Evangeline’s expectations. It may be necessary to recall to the reader’s mind that on the occasion when Evan had burst out at Cyril’s dinner-table on the subject of women throwing dirt at each other the exciting cause of his anger had been Mrs. Trotter’s sarcasm on the wife of the Staff Captain, who wanted to “get into the University set,” and was alleged to have incensed her husband by too frequent references to Mr. Vachell’s brain power. Mrs. Trotter was devoted with real sisterly affection to the Staff Captain, who was an honest blue-eyed Briton, and she therefore harboured secret dislike, both of the University set and of Evan with his misplaced belief in Mrs. Vachell. The Hattons could not do other than ask her to dinner on the evening when she arrived at her lodgings, alone with the child and its nurse, as Captain Trotter was yachting with a friend. Evangeline had mischievously urged the Vachells to come in after the meal as they often did. When they arrived Evan was in one of his most taciturn moods, having been worried by his wife’s daring laughter over some misdemeanour of Ivor’s. She was comparing notes with Mrs. Trotter, whose young daughter treated her parents with fearless impertinence, the common result of insensitiveness in favourable surroundings.
“The little scamp!” Mrs. Trotter exclaimed. “He and Maisie will be great pals I expect. She doesn’t care a rap for anybody. Her father can’t say boo to a goose when she is knocking round. I tell him he had better give it up and save time.”
Evan glanced at Mrs. Vachell and saw her raise her eyebrows slightly. It soothed him to be assured that she shared his disgust and he sat down by her. “I am very sorry,” he said in a low voice. “We ought to have warned you.”
“Oh no, please,” she answered. “It is very interesting; and I am sure Evangeline enjoys it. And it is something you have got to learn some time. You may have daughters of your own in days to come, and then you will know how to save yourself needless worry by giving in at once.”
“Yes, it is appalling, isn’t it?” he agreed, supposing her to be commenting on Mrs. Trotter’s remark. “But perhaps it is good in some ways to let the thing go on as grossly and blatantly as possible. It will achieve its own destruction all the quicker.”
“How?” she asked.
“A revulsion is bound to come, and it will be all the stronger when women see what a monstrous race they have raised. They have rebelled against chastisement with whips and their children will chastise them with scorpions.”
“They will, indeed,” said Mrs. Vachell. “I am glad I have no children, though the want of them put out the sun for me so far as marriage is concerned. But it is not a world to have children in just now.”
“If you had brought them up to be like yourself they would have helped to keep the balance,” said Evan.
“Well, you shall send your daughters to me to bring up,” she said, turning her small sphinx face directly to him. “Evangeline will be engrossed in her boys. She thinks women of no importance.”
“It is not that,” said Evan, “but she thinks nothing of importance except liveliness and getting the pleasure out of everything that happens, and throwing away the rest. As soon as anything has to be bought at the price of discomfort it is worthless to her.”
“Do you think so?” said she, raising her eyebrows again. “Is your beautiful Ivor worth so little to her? You surprise me. I thought she was devoted to him.”
“So she is, but she won’t give herself the momentary pain of correcting him. It is the most fatal cowardice. I don’t know what to do to avert the end that I foresee.”
“You must have been a great deal with children,” she remarked, while she looked at him with grave inquiry. “Did you always care for them, or is it just that you understand them so well?”
“Every man knows the kind of way a boy ought to be brought up,” he replied innocently.
“And a woman, of course, understands a girl better?”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
“It is so much simpler that they should start on wholly different lines from the beginning.”
“Well, I suppose they do naturally. I know that my sisters never had the least idea what I was driving at. They were always giggling among themselves.”
“And your mother?” asked Mrs. Vachell.
“My mother was a wonderful woman,” Evan replied. His tone made it clear that discussion was barricaded along that road.
“I don’t want to persuade you to discuss her, but please answer one question truthfully. Suppose you had done something that you knew she would dislike, not because it was wrong in itself, but because she had no experience of a wish to do it herself; let us take for an instance that delightful story I heard about your taking a German’s watch to pieces and what you did with it.”
“Who told you that story?” he asked, frowning.
“The Staff Captain’s wife told my husband. It amused him and it amused her, because she has had parents who educated her between them; they didn’t believe in female sheep and male goats.”
“I find all that sort of telling of stories very offensive,” said Evan. “But if they choose to hear it it is nothing to me. There is no harm in it.”
“But your mother would have held a different opinion if she had known?”
“Why are you asking these questions, Mrs. Vachell?” She saw disappointment in his face, and knew she must pick her way delicately.
“Because you were good enough to give me some of your confidence in a difficulty and I was trying to make you understand what I think is a point of great importance to you and Evangeline and Ivor. What I say is that you were not perfectly brought up as you think, because you grew up with the idea that what was all right for you as a man would offend your mother as a woman, even to hear about. That means that all through your life you could only enjoy her society within limits, and you were either obliged to worry out every difficulty alone in your head, or else to chance it among outsiders who had not a quarter of the interest in you that she had. You must have felt very lonely, or you wouldn’t have shown me so much confidence as you have. Have you ever tried Evangeline as a confidante? She has not been brought up with many prejudices—not enough you think. And one thing more. Don’t you think that Ivor is better off than you were at his age? I am sure he is less harassed with problems and he will have a better brain than his father, because it won’t have been prematurely worn out.”
“It is no use telling me he won’t go to bits if he has no principles to fall back on,” said Evan doggedly.
“But what about Evangeline’s principles?” Mrs. Vachell persisted.
“She has none. That is the whole point. It is where we started from——”
“You two are carrying on a very long flirtation,” interrupted Mrs. Trotter from the other side of the room. “Can’t we hear what it is all about? I heard something about principles just now. Do you believe in principles, Captain Hatton?”
“Yes,” said Evan. “I hope you are pleased with the lodgings my wife found for you.”
“Yes, thank you, they are delightful. But talking of principles, do you know, Mrs. Vachell, that your friend Fisk has been making the most dreadful havoc with his principles? You see we never get rid of these students like the ordinary undergraduates are disposed of, because they don’t go down for the vacs. They are at home all the time. And he has been spending his spare time in stirring up the Welsh and the Irish and every sort of rabble in the place, and holding meetings and passing resolutions. He gets hold of the wives and tells them they ought to be dressed in velvet and silk, and have time to read and play the piano. But Mrs. Price says all that is quite inconsistent with Communism. The real Communists want everyone to live as simply as possible and earn a small amount each day and then improve their minds. But since Mr. Fisk spent those few days with the Prices he has lost all his noble ideas about garden cities and honest toil and sandals or whatever he believed in, and in place of the blood that was to be spilled in the cause of education and leisure and concerts and so on he now wants rapine, and oh! the most frightful outrages! so that everyone may change places. He and his friends are to have education and champagne and talk big, while their female relations play the gramophone and order Mrs. Price about. It is all screamingly funny. Dear me, Captain Hatton, pray don’t look at me like that. Do you think one ought not to laugh at poor silly creatures? I do find human nature so very amusing sometimes. What do you think, Professor Vachell? Do you think the universities are doing good or harm?”
“They have hardly reached an age of full-grown responsibility yet,” he replied. “When ladies and Labour have joined our deliberations for a few years we shall be able to give a better opinion.”
“Now, don’t be sarcastic,” Mrs. Trotter warned him with a finger. “That is very naughty of you. I hope it will be a long time before your beautiful cloistered calm is invaded in any such way. I can’t imagine women and tradesmen holding forth in Oxford, can you, Mrs. Vachell?”
“So long as the present generation of poor weak fools, who will risk nothing, survive it is rather difficult,” she answered quietly. Evan started slightly as she spoke. “But even though every year the percentage is less of boys who are brought up to be bullies and of girls whose intelligence is crushed, it will take a long time to destroy the tradition. Don’t worry, Mrs. Trotter. Your system will probably last your time, and if your little girl does scandalise you by learning some other trade than husband hunting, she may make up by marrying a tradesman Prime Minister.”
“I don’t think that is at all likely,” Teresa broke in. “The tradesman Prime Minister would want a perfect lady for his wife; they always do. They boast of the work that their women do when they want to compare them with what they call the idle rich; but the very first thing they want to buy for their wives and daughters is exemption from any kind of work.”
“Nonsense, my dear Teresa,” said Mrs. Vachell. “They are the keenest of all that their daughters should have ‘the schooling.’”
“Yes, but that is only so that they may not have to do housework or be ordered about in shops. They think that education for a girl means her marrying into another class and keeping a servant. They are just like us. They hate squalor and want to live like we do. They don’t care for learning in itself any more than we do——”
“I beg your pardon, Miss Fulton,” Mr. Vachell interrupted. “Do I understand that you put down my laborious work of research to a sordid hope of fitting myself to dine at Buckingham Palace, or even living there some day? You are wounding me very much.”
“No, of course not,” said Teresa. “You are quite different; you are a man. I am sure lots of men wanted to learn because they are interested. I was thinking of what they wanted for their daughters.”
“Well, what do you think the Principal wants for our excellent Emma?” he went on. “That she should marry the Prince of Wales? I don’t believe she has got the ghost of a chance, so you had better stop her while you can.”
“Don’t muddle up what I say like that,” said Teresa. “Emma only wants to stop mothers giving their babies rhubarb pie, and to persuade fathers to buy bread instead of beer; and she wants them to be clean and have time and money enough to find out what they can do.”
“But where does Maisie Trotter’s husband come in?” asked Evan, who was also grateful for the diversion that Teresa had made.
“I haven’t the least idea. I have lost sight of him. Oh, no, I remember; he was to be Prime Minister. It will be no good for Maisie to live up to him in the way of education, because his sisters will do that. He will want a pink and white princess who can detect a crumpled rose leaf under the mattress. I assure you that is what working people ask for. It is the really valuable thing that they have lost, and they are often so silly, poor darlings, and think it comes with money. You know how fussy people like the Prices are about breeding, and they spend and spend, trying to buy it somehow and knowing that they fail. It is so sad.”
“Oh, everything is sad if you notice it,” said Mrs. Trotter impatiently. “I don’t believe in pitying people for not being different from what they are. I once met a woman who said she disliked travelling in public conveyances because women’s hats were pathetic; something about the trimming; if you ever heard such nonsense! Now I’m off and thank you all very much for a pleasant evening. Anyone coming my way?”