Part 25

One corner of this room was occupied by a pianola piano and a large untidy collection of classical music rolls; right and left of the fireplace the bookshelves bore an assortment of such literature as appealed in those days to animated youth, classics of every period from Plato to Shaw, and such moderns as Compton Mackenzie, Masefield, Gilbert Cannan and Ezra Pound. Back numbers of _The Freewoman_, _The New Age_, _The New Statesman_, and _The Poetry Review_ mingled on the lowest shelf. There was a neat row of philosophical textbooks in the Joan section; Joan for no particular reason was taking the moral science tripos; and a microscope stood on Peter’s table, for he was biological....

§ 3

Oswald’s domestic arrangements had at first been a grave perplexity. In Uganda he had kept house very well with a Swahili over-man and a number of “boys”; in Margate this sort of service was difficult to obtain, and the holiday needs of the children seemed to demand a feminine influence of the governess-companion type, a “lady.” A succession of refined feminine personalities had intersected these years of Oswald’s life. They were all ladies by birth and profession, they all wore collars supported by whalebone about their necks, and they all developed and betrayed a tenderness for Oswald that led to a series of flights to the Climax Club and firm but generous dismissals. Oswald’s ideas of matrimony were crude and commonplace; he could imagine himself marrying no one but a buxom young woman of three-and-twenty, and he could not imagine any buxom young woman of three-and-twenty taking a healthy interest in a man over forty with only half a face and fits of fever and fretfulness. When these ladies one after another threw out their gentle intimations he had the ingratitude to ascribe their courage to a sense of his own depreciated matrimonial value. This caused just enough indignation to nerve him to the act of dismissal. But on each occasion he spent the best part of a morning and made serious inroads upon the club notepaper before the letter of dismissal was framed, and he always fell back upon the stock lie that he was going abroad to a Kur-Ort and was going to lock up the house. On each occasion the house was locked up for three or four weeks, and Oswald lived a nomadic existence until a fresh lady could be found. Finally God sent him Mrs. Moxton.

She came in at Margate during an interregnum while Aunt Phyllis was in control. Aunt Phyllis after a reflective interview passed her on to Oswald. She was more like Britannia than one could have imagined possible; her face was perhaps a little longer and calmer and her pink chins rather more numerous.

“I understand,” she said, seating herself against Oswald’s desk, “that you are in need of some one to take charge of your household.”

“Did you—hear?” began Oswald.

“It’s the talk of Margate,” she said calmly.

“So I understand that you are prepared to be the lady——”

“I am _not_ a lady,” said Mrs. Moxton with a faint asperity.

“I beg your pardon,” said Oswald.

“I am a housekeeper,” she said, as who should say: “at least give me credit for that.” “I have had experience with a single gentleman.”

There seemed to be an idea in it.

“I was housekeeper to the late Mr. Justice Benlees for some years, until he died, and then unhappily, being in receipt of a small pension from him, I took to keeping a boarding-house. Winnipeg House. On the Marine Parade. A most unpleasant and anxious experience.” Her note of indignation returned, and the clear pink of her complexion deepened by a shade. “A torrent of Common People.”

“Exactly,” said Oswald. “I have seen them walking about the town. Beastly new yellow boots. And fast, squeaky little girls in those new floppy white hats. You think you could dispose of the boarding-house?”

Mrs. Moxton compressed her chins slightly in assent.

“It’s a saleable concern?”

“There are those,” said Mrs. Moxton with a faint sense of the marvels of God’s universe in her voice, “who would be glad of it.”

He rested his face on his hand and regarded her profile very earnestly with his one red-brown eye—from the beginning to the end of the interview Mrs. Moxton never once looked straight at him. He perceived that she was incapable of tenderness, dissimulation, or any personal relationship, a woman in profile, a woman with a pride in her work, a woman to be trusted.

“You’ll _do_,” he said.

“Of course, Sir, you will take up my references first. They are a little—old, but I think you will find them satisfactory.”

“I have no doubts about your references, Mrs. Moxton, but they shall be taken up nevertheless, duly and in order.”

“Thank you, Sir,” said Mrs. Moxton, giving him a three-quarter face, and almost looking at him in her pleasure.

And thereafter Mrs. Moxton ruled the household of Oswald according to the laws and habits of the late Mr. Justice Benlees, who had evidently been a very wise, comfortable, and intelligent man. When she came on from the uncongenial furniture at Margate to the comfort and beauty of Pelham Ford she betrayed a certain approval by expanding an inch or so in every direction and letting out two new chins, but otherwise she made no remark. She radiated decorum and a faint smell of lavender. She had, it seemed, always possessed a black-watered-silk dress and a gold chain. Even Lady Charlotte approved of her.

For some years Mrs. Moxton enabled Oswald to disregard the social difficulties that are supposed to surround feminine adolescence. Joan and Peter got along very well with Pelham Ford as their home, and no other feminine control except an occasional visit from the Stubland aunts. Then Aunt Charlotte became tiresome because Joan was growing up. “How can the gal grow up properly,” she asked, “even considering what she is, in a house in which there isn’t a lady at the head?”

Oswald reflected upon the problem. He summoned Mrs. Moxton to his presence.

“Mrs. Moxton,” he said, “when Miss Joan is here, I’ve been thinking, don’t you think she ought to be, so to speak, mistress of the place?”

“I have been wondering when you would make the change, Mr. Sydenham,” said Mrs. Moxton. “I shall be very pleased to take my orders from Miss Joan.”

And after that Mrs. Moxton used to come to Joan whenever Joan was at Pelham Ford, and tell her what orders she had to give for the day. And when Joan had visitors, Mrs. Moxton told Joan just exactly what arrangements Joan was to order Mrs. Moxton to make. In all things that mattered Mrs. Moxton ruled Joan with an obedience of iron. Her curtseys, slow, deliberate and firm, insisted that Joan was a lady—and had got to be one. She took to calling Joan “Ma’am.” Joan had to live up to it, and did. Visitors increased after the young people were at Cambridge. Junior dons from Newnham and Girton would come and chaperon their hostess, and Peter treated Oswald to a variety of samples of the younger male generation. Some of the samples Oswald liked more than others. And he concealed very carefully from Aunt Charlotte how mixed these young gatherings were, how light was the Cambridge standard of chaperonage, and how very junior were some of the junior dons from the women’s colleges.

§ 4

When children are small we elders in charge are apt to suppose them altogether plastic. There are resistances, it is true, but these express themselves at first only in tantrums, in apparently quite meaningless outbreaks; we impose our phrases and values so completely, that such spasmodic opposition seems to signify nothing. We impose our names for things, our classifications with their thousand implications, our interpretations. The child is imitative and obedient by instinct, its personality for the most part latent, warily hidden. That is “hand,” we dictate, that is “hat,” that is “pussy cat,” that is “pretty, pretty,” that is “good,” that is “nasty,” that is “ugly—Ugh!” That again is “fearsome; run away!” There is no discussion. If we know our parental business we are able to establish all sorts of habits, readinesses, dispositions in these entirely plastic days. “Time for Peter to go to bed,” uttered with gusto, becomes the signal for an interesting ritual upon which he embarks with dignity. Until some idiot visitor remarks loudly, “Doesn’t he _hate_ going to bed? I always _hated_ going to bed.” Whereupon in that matter the seeds of reflection and dissent are sown in the little mind.

And so with most other matters. For a few years of advantage the new mind is clay and we have it to ourselves, and then, still clay, it becomes perceptibly resistant, perceptibly disposed to recover some former shape we have given it or to take an outline of its own. It discovers we are not divine and that even Dadda cannot recall the sunset. It is not only that other minds are coming in to modify and contradict our decisions. We contradict ourselves and it notes the contradiction. And old Nature begins to take an increasing share in the accumulating personality. Apart from what we give and those others give, things bubble up inside it, desires, imaginations, creative dreams. By imperceptible degrees the growing mind slips away from us. A little while ago it seemed like some open vessel into which we could pour whatever we chose; now suddenly it is closed and locked, hiding a fermentation.

Perhaps things have always been more or less so between elders and young, but in the old days of slower change what fathers and mothers had to tell the child, priest and master re-echoed, laws and institutions confirmed, the practice of every one, good or evil, endorsed in black or white. But from the break-up of the Catholic culture in England onward there has been an unceasing conflict between more and more divergent stories about life, and in the last half century that clash has enormously intensified. What began as a war of ideals became at last a chaos. Adolescence was once either an obedience or a rebellion; at the opening of the twentieth century it had become an interrogation and an experiment. One heard very much of the right of the parent to bring up children in his own religion, his own ideas, but no one ever bothered to explain how that right was to be preserved. In Ireland one found near Dublin educational establishments surrounded by ten-foot walls topped with broken glass, protecting a Catholic atmosphere for a few precious and privileged specimens of the Erse nation. Mr. James Joyce in his _Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man_, has bottled a specimen of that Catholic atmosphere for the astonishment of posterity. The rest of the youth of the changing world lay open to every wind of suggestion that blew. The parent or guardian found himself a mere competitor for the attention and convictions of his charges.

§ 5

Through childhood and boyhood and girlhood, Peter’s sex and seniority alike had conspired to give him a leadership over Joan. His seemed the richer, livelier mind, he told most of the stories and initiated most of the games; Joan was the follower. That masculine ascendancy lasted until Peter was leaving Caxton; in spite of various emancipating forces at Highmorton. Then in less than a year Joan took possession of herself.

Reserve is a necessary grace in all younger brothers and sisters. Peter spread his reveries as a peacock spreads its tail, but Joan kept her dreams discreetly private. All youth lives much in reverie; thereby the stronger minds anticipate and rehearse themselves for life in a thousand imaginations, the weaker ones escape from it. Against that early predominance of Peter, Joan maintained her self-respect by extensive secret supplements of the Bungo-Peter saga. For example she was Bungo-Peter’s “Dearest Belovèd.” Peter never suspected how Bungo-Peter and she cuddled up together at the camp fires and were very close and warm every night, until she went off to sleep....

When she was about fourteen Joan’s imagination passed out of the phase of myth and saga into the world of romance. The real world drew closer to her. Bungo-Peter vanished; Nobby shrank down to a real Uncle Nobby. Her childish reveries had disregarded possibility; now the story had to be plausible; it had to join on to Highmorton and The Ingle-Nook and Pelham Ford; its heroine had to be conceivable as the real Joan. And with the coming of reality, came moods. There were times when she felt dull, and the world looked on her with a grey and stupid face, and other times to compensate her for these dull phases, seasons of unwonted exaltation. It was as if her being sometimes drew itself together in order presently to leap and extend itself.

In these new phases of expansion she had the most perfect conviction that life, and particularly her life, was wonderful and beautiful and destined to be more and more so. She began to experience a strange, new happiness in mere existence, a happiness that came with an effect of revelation. It is hard to convey the peculiar delight that invaded her during these phases. It was almost as if the earth had just been created for her and given to her as a present. There were moments when the world was a crystal globe of loveliness about her, moments of ecstatic realization of a universal beauty. The slightest things would suffice to release this sunshine in her soul. She would discover the intensest delight in little, hitherto disregarded details, in the colour of a leaf held up to the light, or the rhythms of ripples on a pond or the touch of a bird’s feather. There were moments when she wanted to kiss the sunset, and times when she would clamber over the end wall of the garden at Pelham Ford in order to lie hidden and still, with every sense awake, in the big clump of bracken in the corner by the wood beyond. The smell of crushed bracken delighted her intensely. She wanted to be a nymph then and not a girl in clothes. And shining summer streams and lakes roused in her a passionate desire to swim, to abandon herself wholly to the comprehensive sweet silvery caress of the waters.

In the days of the Saga story, the time of the story had always been Now—and Never; but in the drama of adolescence the time of all Joan’s reveries was Tomorrow; what she dreamt of now were things that were to be real experiences in quite a little time, when she had grown just a year or so older, when she was a little taller, when she had left school, when she was really as beautiful as she hoped to be.

The world about her by example and precept, by plays and stories and poems and histories, was supplying her with a rich confusion of material for these anticipatory sketches. One main history emerged in her fifteenth year. It went on for many months. Joan of Arc was in the making of it, and Jane Shore, and Nell Gwyn. At first she was the Lady Joan, and then she became just Joan Stubland, but always she was the king’s mistress.

From the very beginning Joan had found something splendid and attractive in the word “mistress.” It had come to her first in a history lesson, and then more brightly clad in a costume novel. But it was a very glorious and noble kind of mistress that Joan had in view. Her ideas of the authority and duties of a mistress were vague; but she knew that a mistress rules by beauty. That she ruled Joan never doubted—or why should she be called mistress? And she prevailed over queens, so French history had instructed her. She made war and peace. Joan of Arc was inextricably mixed in with the vision. She was a beautiful girl, and she told the king of France what to do. At need she led armies. What else but a mistress could you call her? “Mistress of France,” magnificent phrase! Of such ideas was Joan Stubland woven. The king perhaps would do injustice, or neglect a meritorious case. Then Joan Stubland would appear, watchful and dignified. “No,” she would say. “That must not be. I am the king’s mistress.”

And she wore a kind of light armour. Without skirts. Never with skirts. Joan at fourteen already saw long skirts ahead of her, and hated them as a man might hate a swamp that he must presently cross knee-deep.

Where the king went Joan went. But he was not the current king, nor his destined successor. She had studied these monarchs in the illustrated papers—and in the news. She did not think much of them. They stood down out of Joan’s dream in favour of a younger autocrat. After all, was there not also a young prince, her contemporary, who would some day be king? But in her imagination he was not like his published portraits; instead—and this is curious—he was rather like Peter. He was as much like Peter as any one. This was all of Peter that ever got into her reveries, for there was a curious bar in her mind to Peter being thought of either as her lover or as any one not her lover. Something obscure in her composition barred any such direct imaginations about Peter.

So, contrawise to all established morality and to everything to which her properly constituted teachers were trying to shape her, a chance phrase in a history book filled the imagination of Joan with this dream of a different sort of woman’s life altogether. In which one went side by side with a man in a manly way, sharing his power, being dear and beautiful to him. Compared with such a lot who would be one of these wives? Who would stay at home and—as a consequence apparently of the religious ceremony of matrimony—have babies?

The king’s mistress story was Joan’s dominant reverie, but it was not her only one. It was, so to speak, her serial; it was always “to be continued in our next.” But her busy mind, whenever her attention was not fully occupied, was continually spinning romance; beside the serial story there were endless incidental ones. Almost always they were love stories. They were violent and adventurous in substance, full of chases, fights, and confrontations, but Joan did not stint herself of kissing and embraces. There were times when she liked tremendously to think of herself kissing. Most little girls of thirteen or fourteen are thinking with the keenest interest and curiosity about this lover business and its mysteries, and Joan was no exception. She was deeply interested to find she was almost as old as Juliet. Inspired by Shakespeare, Joan thought quite a lot about balconies and ladders—and Romeo. Some of her school contemporaries jested about these things and were very arch and sly. But she was as shy of talking about love as she was prone to love reveries. She talked of flowers and poetry and music and scenery and beautiful things as though they were things in themselves, but in her heart she was convinced that all the loveliness that shone upon her in the world was only so much intimation of the coming loveliness of love.

The outward and visible disposition of Highmorton School was all against the spirit of such dreams. The disposition of Highmorton was towards a scorn of males. What Joan knew surely to be lovely, Highmorton denounced as “soppy.” “Soppy” was a terrible word in boys’ schools and girls’ schools alike, a flail for all romance. But in the girls’ schools it was used more particularly against tender thoughts of men. Highmorton taught the revolt of women from the love of men—in favour of the love of women. The school resounded always with the achievements of the one important sex, hitherto held back by man-made laws from demonstrating an all-round superiority. The staff at Highmorton had all a common hardness of demeanour; they were without exception suffragettes, and most of them militant suffragettes. They played hockey with great violence, and let the elder girls hear them say “damn!” The ones who had any beauty aspired to sub-virile effects; they impressed small adorers as if they were sexless angels. There was Miss Oriana Frobisher (science) with the glorious wave in her golden hair and the flash of lightning in her glasses. She had done great feats with love, it was said; she had refused a professor of botany and a fabulously rich widower, and the mathematical master was “gone” on her. There was Miss Kellaway, dark and pensive, known to her worshippers as “Queen of the Night,” fragile, and yet a swift and nimble forward. Aunt Phœbe also had become a leading militant, and Aunt Phyllis, who wavered on the verge of militancy, continued the Highmorton teaching in the holidays. “Absolute equality between the sexes,” was their demand; their moderate demand, seeing what men were. Joan would have been more than human not to take the colour of so universal a teaching. And yet in her reveries there was always one man exempt from that doom of general masculine inferiority. She had no use for a dream lover—unless he was dying of consumption or, Tristram fashion, of love-caused wounds—who could not out-run, out-fence, out-wrestle and out-think her, or for a situation of asserted equality which could not dissolve into caressing devotion.

§ 6

And of these preoccupations with the empire and the duties and destinies of the empire and the collective affairs of mankind, which to Oswald were the very gist and purpose of education, Highmorton taught Joan practically nothing. Miss Jevons, the Head, would speak now and then of “loyalty to the crown” in a rather distant way—Miss Murgatroyd had been wont to do the same thing—and for the rest left politics alone. Except that there was one thing, one supreme thing, the Vote. When first little Joan heard of the Vote at Limpsfield she was inclined to think it was a flattened red round thing rather like the Venerable Bede at the top of the flagstaff. She learned little better at Highmorton. She gathered that women were going to “get the vote” and then they were to vote. They were going to vote somehow against the men and it would make the world better, but there was very little more to it than that. The ideas remained strictly personal, strictly dramatic. Wicked men like Mr. Asquith who opposed the vote were to be cast down; one of the dazzling Pankhurst family, or perhaps Miss Oriana Frobisher, was to take his place. Profound scepticisms about this vote—in her heart of hearts she called it the “old Vote,” were hidden by Joan from the general observation of the school. She had only the slightest attacks of that common schoolgirl affliction, schoolmistress love; she never idolized Miss Jevons or Miss Frobisher or Miss Kellaway. Their enthusiasm for the vote, therefore, prevented hers.

Later on it was to be different. She was to find in the vote a symbol of personal freedom—and an excellent excuse for undergraduate misbehaviour.

It is true Highmorton School presented a certain amount of history and geography to Joan’s mind, but in no way as a process in which she was concerned. She grew up to believe that in England we were out of history, out of geography, eternally blessed in a constitution that we could not better, under a crown which was henceforth for ever, so to speak, the centre of an everlasting social tea-party, and that party “politics” in Parliament and the great Vote struggle had taken the place of such real convulsions of human fortune as occurred in other countries and other times. Wars, famine, pestilence; the world had done with them. Nations, kings and people, politics, were for Joan throughout all her schooldays no more than scenery for her unending private personal romance.