One great source of mental nourishment that Evangeline relied on at this time was the Press. Two thirds of the things she thought about each day came from the newspapers, plain or illustrated, but not political; that is to say, not political beyond striking headlines and a short—very short—leading article. Her mind made curious pictures of these scraps of state information. Perhaps the best way of describing what she thought Parliament is, and does, is to imagine oneself very agile, very kind, very interested, perched inside the roof of an immense building, looking down on hundreds of elderly gentlemen all of one type, but some with familiar faces. We, from our perch, know that each of them has gone through a period of anxiety and expense, connected with loss of voice and terrible boredom of his supporters, who have to sit behind him on uncomfortable chairs and wish he would pull his coat down at the back before speaking. This period of trial has ended in an election—ribbon and scratch meals—and then he got a “seat” here on something or other benches (Evangeline had been at school, but she wasn’t in the serious lot, at least, not the brainy serious. Her set used only to discuss things like immortality when they felt really friendly.) Once on these “benches” men become political, and lose considerably in spiritual value, except when they call out the army and navy. Otherwise they spend their time henceforth in committing blunders (the meat blunder, the wool blunder, the tax blunder, the housing blunder, etc.), to the perpetual inconvenience of the public, until something happens to the Cabinet and a lot of well-known people who were IN become OUT, and it makes no difference at all, except as a frail raft for the drowning in conversation. But the rest of the paper is worth reading; there are things to interest everybody. The eccentric behaviour of criminals, landladies and leaders of society; adventures, and reports of shipwrecks and calves with two tails. On the last page there is often expert advice on physical fitness and the complexion.
On the morning following Teresa’s walk to the docks with her father Evangeline began to try the effects of the juice of an orange accompanied by half an hour’s deep breathing before breakfast. She had walked and deep breathed in the park, and returned full of exhilaration from the sight of the dewy grass, young tulips pushing through the heavy dun soil and the song of birds in smoke-laden trees and bushes that were budding as irrepressibly as herself. She stood on the edge of a pond and watched the ducks performing an ecstatic toilet. Their guttural sounds of pleasure and the grinding of distant tram wheels were the only sounds besides the chorus of chirping. The only people she met were a policeman on one side of the pond, and a dressmaker’s assistant on the other, and she felt that God was the friend of both as of the ducks and the Spring; they were not at all in the way. When she arrived at home a man in military uniform was standing on the doorstep. He was young and had the face of a reformer.
“Good morning,” she said. “Are you coming in?”
“Please,” he answered gravely, and said no more, while she fitted her latchkey. She led the way into the dining-room, where breakfast was laid, and looked vaguely round.
“Shall I tell my father you’re here?” she asked hesitatingly, and then, with sudden uncontrollable interest, “Are you the man that hasn’t got a wife?”
He started and frowned. He was embarrassed, and felt that the question was not one that should have been asked by a stranger. “No, I am not married,” he snapped.
“Is your name Hatton?” she asked next.
“Yes.”
“Oh, then Father told us about you. Do you want to see him?”
“Very much,” said Captain Hatton with emphasis.
“I’ll fetch him,” she said, “but do sit down and be comfortable.” She went out and called, “Father! Father!” at the bottom of the stairs. “Father! Oh, drat him! I believe he is still in the bath.” Captain Hatton, erect on the hearthrug in front of the door she had left open, heard, and winced.
“Dick—y! Dick—y!” she called next.
“Oh, do come up, Chips, if you want anything,” he heard a small weary voice say upstairs. “Father is in the bath; he’ll be out directly.”
“Well tell him to hurry up; it’s Captain Hatton,” said Evangeline, and she plunged back into the dining-room.
“I am afraid my watch must be all wrong,” he said, as he glanced round the room in hope of moral support from an accusing clock. “I thought General Fulton said breakfast at half-past eight.”
“So it is,” said Evangeline. “It is only twenty minutes to nine now. Father won’t get up if he has an interesting post. What time do you get up?”
“Oh—er—a quarter to seven usually,” he replied.
“A quarter to——? Gracious! Do you mean in the very middle of a minute like that? It seems just as if you said ‘up goes the hand of my watch, down goes my leg on the floor.’ I couldn’t do that. I have to yawn a long time first and then get out by degrees till it gets too cold not to do something about it.”
There was silence. Evangeline felt depressed. All her gladness in the awakening spring had gone. “Would you like to look at the paper?” she asked with a sigh. He said, “Thank you,” but as he stretched out his hand to take it from her he saw that it was not Country Life, but a lady’s paper. Doll-like faces with no noses, shameless trousseaux, ridiculous young men in black, scent bottles and wigs met his eye on the open page.
“Er—thanks very much,” he said, “I think I’ll wait for the morning paper. What time do you get it?”
“I expect it has come,” said Evangeline. “The boy generally flings it in at the kitchen window.” She rang the bell. “Breakfast, please, Strickland, and the paper if it has come,” she ordered.
“I was waiting till Mrs. Fulton came down,” said the maid severely. Evangeline sighed again. “How obstructive everyone is this morning,” she thought, but said aloud, “No, we’ll begin please, and anyhow I want the paper.”
But neither came and the silence grew heavier. She wanted to rush out of the room; she knew that her hair was untidy and two of her finger nails were grubby owing to having restored a strayed worm to what she thought a safe place on the bank of the pond, where a duck had eaten him at once to her disgust. But she could not move from the sofa where she had taken refuge with her rejected paper. The barrier of Captain Hatton’s eye stretched between her and the door and she felt that it might touch her as she ran past; if it did she would have to scream. Suddenly—“A—tish—u!”—a fearful explosion. Captain Hatton had sneezed. There was a dead silence while Evangeline held her breath and dared not look. Then again the awful sound; and again; eight times.
“I beg your pardon,” he said when all was quiet again. “Extraordinary how these attacks come on.”
The great friendly creature cheered up at once on this crumb of encouragement. “I like sneezing,” she said. “It almost takes the place of swearing. You feel better and no harm done to anybody.”
“Ah—h’m,” he agreed without enthusiasm.
“There’s Mother coming,” she said thankfully as a gentle rustle was heard in the passage. Susie came in in a soft breakfast gown that avoided conclusions with her figure. Her hair was beautifully done and her face delicately cared for. Captain Hatton, though he approved of her evidently careful toilet, took a vague dislike to her because it had not been carried through at the specified time.
“I am so sorry my husband is late,” she murmured, “I am afraid we got into bad habits in London. Everything is so late there and the morning is really the loveliest time, isn’t it? I remember once being out at six to catch a train and the birds were simply delightful. Do you sing at all?” she inquired, her eyes brimming with sympathetic interest.
“I do occasionally,” he admitted, heartily wishing that his chief would come and relieve him.
“I hope we shall often hear you,” said Mrs. Fulton. “I always think music is such a happy thing. Evangeline dear, ring the bell.”
“I have rung twice,” she said.
“Servants are very unpunctual as a race,” Mrs. Fulton observed. “I wish they would get up earlier, but I daresay they are often tired like we are.” Strickland came in with the hot dishes. “We shall want some more toast, I think, Strickland.”
“The fire’s not hot enough,” answered the maid. “The cook was late this morning.”
“Then just run up and make a little at the gas fire in the General’s dressing-room,” Susie ordered. “Will you help yourself, Captain Hatton.”
A few minutes later Cyril entered hurriedly in his dressing-gown. “I say, Sue, what the devil—hullo, Hatton, that you?—what the devil did you send that woman to make toast in my room for? I’d nothing but——”
“Cyril dear, never mind,” his wife interrupted. “The kitchen fire wasn’t quite ready; she won’t be a minute.”
“Well, I can’t go back to dress now,” he complained.
“It will teach us to be more punctual to-morrow,” said Mrs. Fulton. “We must set them a good example. Dicky ought to be down too.”
Teresa came in quietly and shut the door without looking at anyone. She was flushed and seemed preoccupied and had evidently forgotten Evangeline’s announcement of a guest. “My hair refuses to go up,” she began, turning straight to the sideboard. “I shall do it like some women I saw yesterday. The front was all in tiny plaits and the back—well, it wasn’t hairdressing, it was plumbing. You’ve been pretty hearty with the kedgeree, haven’t you?”
“Dicky, darling, I don’t think you have seen Captain Hatton,” her mother suggested. Teresa turned unconcernedly.
“I am sorry,” she apologised. “How do you do? I remember my sister did tell me you were here, but I happened to be thinking at the time and I forgot.”
“Please don’t bother,” he said. He was recovering his temper under the influence of breakfast and the sense of safety that his host brought. “You’ll see so much of me, I’m afraid, that I’d rather you did not notice it.”
“Don’t hope for that, Hatton,” put in the General. “They’ll see everything you do. It’s a damned noticing family; except Evangeline and she’ll fall over you in the dark every time.”
Captain Hatton looked embarrassed and changed the subject. “Are you going to like being here, do you think?” he asked Susie.
“Oh, I think so,” she replied. “Of course it is quite different from London, but there must be some nice people. Do you know many people here yet?”
“I have got some friends who live a few miles out,” he said. “I have stayed with them for hunting, but I’ve been out of England for the last three years. We were sent to Germany after the armistice and I came back to go into hospital.”
“Oh, dear me, those hospitals!” she sighed. “Shall I ever forget them! I couldn’t do any actual nursing, of course, though I should have loved it; but I don’t think it was right the way women left their children. But I used to visit the poor boys and wash up. I get such touching letters from them even now. Do you remember young Digby, Cyril?”
“No, I don’t, but I could make a fair guess at him. You forget that I was in my little wooden hut at the time and couldn’t leave it even for you. I wonder if that beastly woman is out of my room. Dicky—oblige your father. Go and see if she is there, will you? I want to get dressed.”
“She is making toast, dear,” Mrs. Fulton explained. “You might ask her for it; she won’t hear the bell.”
Teresa went out and met Strickland in the passage. She was dusting the hall. “Can we have the toast, please?” Teresa asked.
“It isn’t made,” Strickland replied coldly. “I couldn’t be spoken to like that. I shall leave at the end of the month. I’m not accustomed to be blasted.” Teresa touched her on the shoulder. “Never mind Father,” she said. “We none of us do. He’s most affectionate really. Forget the toast; I’ll tell them.” She went back into the dining-room and shut the door. Mrs. Fulton was offering dainty morsels of sentiment about hospitals to Captain Hatton, who disposed of them one by one with the indifference a sea lion shows about the quality of the fish thrown into its mouth. Teresa sat down by her father and said in a low voice, “You mustn’t swear at the maids, you know. Strickland is very angry and was going to go, but I told her you are all right. I don’t know if she will recover, but you must remember that you don’t have the trouble of going to registry offices.”
“What an eternal curse women’s feelings are,” he grumbled as he pulled out a cigarette case. “I believe they grow fat on them.”
“But then, you see, your men have none at all,” she explained, “which is as bad the other way, because you can’t make them hear except by blasting and all those kinds of words that mean nothing.”
“But they do mean something,” argued her aggrieved father. “They mean, ‘You’ve damn well got to do it and look sharp.’”
“Yes, but if you say to a woman, ‘Be quick, Pansy dear,’ she does it just as well.”
Cyril roared with laughter. “Here, Hatton,” he said, “do you know what you’ve got to say to the mess sergeant the next time he keeps you waiting? ‘Be quick, Pansy dear!’ Will you try it first or shall I?” Captain Hatton laughed.
“What is Dicky saying?” asked Mrs. Fulton indulgently.
“Explaining the art of commanding those of unripe station,” said the General. “Come on to my room, Hatton, and I’ll leave you there while I get some clothes on—if they’re not all over toast and tears,” he added resentfully.
“Good heavens! What a man!” Evangeline exclaimed when the door shut behind them. “He’s like an umbrella.”
“Oh, I think he’s charming,” said her mother. “So much tact, and most interesting, I should think, when one gets to know him. Ring the bell, Dicky dear, and when she comes to clear away tell her I shall be in my sitting-room if she wants me.”
“What are we going to do with ourselves every day in this place, Chips?” Teresa asked her sister when they were alone.
“Oh, what we have done before, I suppose,” Evangeline answered carelessly. She was reading the paper that had come too late to save Captain Hatton’s temper. The Labour Party, she read, were determined to do something which she did not understand, but which foreboded discomfort to everybody including their own supporters. They seemed to do it on purpose, like schoolmistresses, for some end which no reasonable young person desires, even if it could be achieved. Who exactly were the Labour party she wondered? The paper showed their photographs; clumsy figures in impossible hats, with impossible wives whose barren heads contrasted grotesquely with the hairiness of their men’s faces. She looked over the page. An officer, recently demobilised, had committed suicide owing to the difficulty of maintaining a blue-eyed child, whose portrait was inset below his own. The “night life” of a great city was said to be “glittering with unprecedented extravagance!” A millionaire had made a unique will at a place she had never heard of, providing for the purchase of fifty elephants, which were to be presented to the Corporation, and supported by public funds for the employment of superannuated keepers.
“But you forget that I haven’t done anything except go to classes,” pursued Teresa. “I am supposed to be ‘out’ now.”
“Jolly lucky for you,” remarked her sister. “There was no coming out in my time.”
“I don’t see much difference,” said Teresa, “except that you brought your own food to parties and didn’t wear such low necks. But anyhow, what I meant was that the war is over, and we’re in a new place and we’ve got some maids, and what is the next?”
“I don’t know,” Evangeline answered slowly. “There are days when I want to burst—you know—with a pop, in the sun on a still day—like that, (she waved her hands) and then I should become something quite different. I should be full of ideas. I don’t know what they would be but that is the exciting part.”
“This is a very dirty town,” Teresa said, as she stood at the window. “I haven’t seen any people yet who looked as if they liked what they were doing.”
Evangeline’s eager interest had faded. “Haven’t you?” she said.
“No, and I don’t know what Mother will do with herself, either. I suppose there must be some ordinary ones. She’s a social success, isn’t she?”
“In a way——” Evangeline hesitated. “She’s not like an American mother in those ways, but if you notice you’ll find that you never can stop anything happening as she wants it to. I believe she conjures. She seems to sit down by a hat and take no notice of it, and then there’s an omelet in it. If Father doesn’t want the omelet, or we don’t, she says she hasn’t made it, and I spend my life trying to find out whether she has or not.”
“Well that hasn’t much to do with what I was saying,” her sister continued. “We shall drift here if we don’t look out.”
“Drift?”
“Yes, you know—I shall arrange the flowers, and you will play endless games and go to things and perhaps ‘take up’ something, and I shall shop and be polite to visitors, and I really don’t want to do anything else. I am not energetic, and I should love to live in a cottage. But everything is so hideous here, and those smells and awful faces make me sort of drunk.”
“My dear!” Evangeline sympathised with little understanding.
“Everyone has always made me feel a little drunk,” Teresa went on. “They say such stupid things; sit there gibbering and drinking tea, and yet all the people in history—anyone—Nebuchadnezzar or Cleopatra or Anne Boleyn—were in society, and all sorts of real things happened to them; they didn’t ask for it. And I believe just as much could happen to the silly people who pay calls. I often understand eating grass and letting one’s nails grow.” She paused. “And those people who are poor—they must know a lot. I want to know what it is.”
“It is like my wanting to burst, perhaps,” said Evangeline. “Except that I don’t want to know all about those horrors. I hated all that in the war, though, of course, it was so exciting being useful that one forgot the mess. I should like to be in a dangerous country with a lovely climate, and live with a man who had read everything there is. We should ride all day, and perhaps have some children who wouldn’t want clothes or governesses nor have diseases.”
“Like a cinema,” commented Teresa.
“Yes, rather. I always get so angry with the film girl who is left in a log cabin with a perfectly beautiful savage who leaves her the room to herself out of chivalry and sleeps in the stable and does all he can for her, and then the silly ass crawls screaming round the walls, and wants to go back to some odious young man in the city.”
“But the city man would be much more likely to have read everything,” her sister pointed out. “Your savage wouldn’t know any more than you do, which isn’t saying much.”
“No, I know,” she admitted with a sigh. “I don’t know what I want; perhaps both of them for different days; wet Sundays to spend with the young man who reads, and the other days, when it is sunny, to gallop about with the dangerous one.”
“I believe there is more in it than that,” said Teresa, “and meantime I am going to study Strickland. I have an idea she can tell me the things I want to know. I had better find her, by the way, and give her Mother’s message. I don’t think she takes much interest in bells.” She left Evangeline to speculate on life as digested for her by the newspaper, and went herself in search of the woman who, she felt, held some clue to the pursuit of her desire.
At the end of a week she recalled her sister’s inspired description of their mother’s behaviour. Susie had, it seemed, by some unobservable process, evolved a spiritual omelet out of the most unpromising material among the people who called on her. Most of them belonged to what Strickland, who had begun to unbend towards Teresa, assured her were “some of our leading families.”
“The Manleys are very well known,” she said. “Old Mr. Manley did a great deal of good, and was very well thought of all over the town. My grandfather used to work for him, and he always said he never wished to have a better master. I don’t know so much about the young ones. My sister lived with Mrs. James Manley, and I can’t say she enjoyed it. Everything was very near, and she left because she got run down with the work. But Mrs. Eric Manley, that called to-day, is well enough spoken of, though I don’t think much of her myself.”
“Yes,—Mrs. Carpenter,” she said, another day, when she was turning down Teresa’s bed. “I’m glad you mentioned her. She’s another of the sort I was telling you about. They’re well enough in public I suppose, but those who have to do with them when they get back know who are the real ladies and gentlemen. Now you’ll hear a great deal, I daresay, about Mrs. Carpenter, and how she goes about here and there and all she does, but I wouldn’t be the matron of some of those homes she goes to—no, I wouldn’t for all the money you could give me; and I wouldn’t be one of the inmates, either, with all the advice she gives, and she who doesn’t know what it is to have one child left on her hands for a day, let alone six or eight. I don’t say she doesn’t go about here and there, and so she should, for she’s the time and the money, but I don’t think it’s right for servants to be kept up till all hours washing dishes for those who study the poor, and up again next morning to light the fires in time for ladies to warm themselves while they telephone for the best of everything.”
“Yes,” said Teresa, looking into the fire.
“You’ll say I’m a socialist, perhaps, Miss,” Strickland added, as she was going to leave the room, “but it isn’t that. I know we can’t all do alike, and I don’t mind the General, if you’ll excuse me, now I’ve got used to his language. He’s very thoughtful in some ways, and it seems a man’s place to mess things about. But when I took in the tea, and heard Mrs. Carpenter going on at such a rate, and Mrs. Manley, too, I felt like speaking out when you mentioned her.”
“How you do gossip with the servants, dear Dicky,” said Susie, who had heard the last word on her way to her bedroom, and called to Teresa to help her to fasten her dress. “I never think it is a wise plan.”
Teresa said nothing. Although she always received her mother’s remarks with respectful affection, due to the fact that Susie never appeared cross and everything she said was incontrovertible, yet very little that was not a definitely expressed wish penetrated her thoughts. “If Mother wants anything done, of course we do it,” was the understanding between her and Evangeline, but they respected her power as a conjuror, rather than her wisdom as a prophet. Susie’s power over men had been great in her youth, and she had had much influence in the lives of women, but no one had ever counted her as friend or enemy. She had been an article of faith to some, of admiration, of liking, of amusement or indefinite irritation to others, but only her children in their nursery days had ever looked to her as a help in time of trouble. Her conjuring ability had been invaluable in the nursery and schoolroom. Her presence would always turn a crime into a bubble, and the indignant nurse or governess was compelled to see her rod break out into the delicate blossom of divine forgiveness under her outraged eyes. The impression of this gentleness remained with the girls when they grew up; but that was all. They might search the corners of the wonder-box where their recollections of her were stored, and find nothing that they could put together and call a mother.
Teresa had been surprised that day by Susie’s immediate success with the women who had called. It is true that they had come prepared to like the Fultons, but they were in no way committed; and such all-embracing eagerness to love as Evangeline showed to strangers was against their traditions. It is one of the customs of Millport before paying a call to consider first the reasons for the newcomers’ arrival. A well paid appointment gives them a good start, whereas an indefinite purpose would be thought suspicious. Second to be considered is their pedigree. If they can be traced to some source called “good connections” another point is scored in their favour. A good income comes third, and, provided the rest is satisfactory, adds greatly to their favourable chances, but this item is not so essential as it used to be. People who are not at all nice are often rich at the present time, and even furs have to be more carefully chosen than in the past, for fear they may be the outcome of too recent enterprise. But the thing that tells in the long run is “views.” The Provinces have collective “views” in a way that would be impossible in London. You must either think with the city or carry the city with you. To live in opposition to it you must be either a hermit or a fanatic; cease to love your neighbour or lose your reason. The apostle of a different creed from that of the city can carry the people with him some distance towards any end—the best or the worst—provided he uses the old ritual cunningly; but wolves and doves alike must be dressed in sheep’s clothing, or out they go.
“None of that, now, with those feathers,” the city says to the intruding dove. “I know you’re not a wolf. You don’t need to tell me what I can see. But you’ve got a beak, and I wouldn’t put it past you to get pecking at my legs.”
But they received Susie at once with open arms. She came from London, which is always nice; her parents had been born in Millport of absolutely pure wool stock, her husband had inherited money from a good old lady before the war, and Susie had only to appear in her own spotless fleece of nice feeling upon every subject—especially wine—for them to cluster round her with acclamations and summon their kind from the most distant parts of the county.