Part 31

It had been at an Anti-Suffrage meeting in West Kensington, and Aunt Phœbe had obtained access to the back row of the platform by some specious device. Among the notabilities in front Lady Charlotte Sydenham and her solicitor had figured. Lady Charlotte had entered upon that last great phase in a woman’s life, that phase known to the vulgar observer as “old lady’s second wind.” It is a phase often of great Go and determination, a joy to the irreverent young and a marvel and terror to the middle-aged. She had taken to politics, plunged into public speaking, faced audiences. It was the Insurance Act of 1912 that had first moved her to such publicity. Stung by the outrageous possibility of independent-spirited servants she had given up her usual trip to Italy in the winter and stayed to combat Lloyd George. From mere subscriptions and drawing-room conversations and committees to drawing-room meetings and at last to public meetings had been an easy series of steps for her. At first a mere bridling indignation on the platform, she presently spoke. As a speaker she combined reminiscences of Queen Elizabeth at Tilbury and Marie Antoinette on the scaffold with vast hiatuses peculiar to herself. “My good people,” she would say, disregarding the more conventional methods of opening, “have we neglected our servants or have we not? Is any shop Gal or factory Gal half so well off as a servant in a good house? Is she? I ask. The food alone! The morals! And now we are to be taxed and made to lick stamps like a lot of galley-slaves to please a bumptious little Welsh solicitor! For my part I shall discontinue all my charitable subscriptions until this abominable Act is struck off the Statute Book. Every one. And as for buying these Preposterous stamps—— Rather than lick a stamp I will eat skilly in prison. Stamps indeed. I’d as soon lick the man’s boots. That’s all I have to say, Mr. Chairman (or ’My Lord,’ or ’Mrs. Chairman,’ as the case might be). I hope it will be enough. Thank you.” And she would sit down breathing heavily and looking for eyes to meet.

For the great agitation against the Insurance Act that sort of thing sufficed, but when it came to testifying against an unwomanly clamour for votes, the argument became more complicated and interruptions difficult to handle, and after an unpleasant experience when she was only able to repeat in steadily rising tones, “I am not one of the Shrieking Sisterhood” ten times over to a derisive roomful, she decided to adopt the more feminine expedient of a spokesman. She had fallen back upon Mr. Grimes, who like all solicitors had his parliamentary ambitions, and she took him about with her in the comfortable brown car that had long since replaced the white horse, and sat beside him while he spoke and approved of him with both hands. Mr. Grimes had been addressing the meeting when Aunt Phœbe made her interruption. He had been arguing that the unfitness of women for military service debarred them from the Vote. “Let us face the facts,” he said, drawing the air in between his teeth. “Ultimately—ultimately all social organization rests upon Force.”

It was just at this moment that cries of “Order, Order,” made him aware of a feminine figure close beside him. He turned to meet the heaving wrath of Aunt Phœbe’s face. There was just an instant’s scrutiny. Then he remembered, he remembered everything, and with a wild shriek leapt clean off the platform upon the toes of the front row of the audience.

“If you _touch_ me!” he screamed....

The young man told the incident briefly and brightly.

“Thereby hangs a tale,” said Aunt Phœbe darkly, and became an allusive Sphinx for the rest of the dinner.

“I shook that man,” she said at last to Pryce.

“What—_him_?” said Pryce, staring round-eyed at the young man from Cambridge.

“No, the man at the meeting.”

“What—afterwards?” said Pryce, lost and baffled.

“No,” said Aunt Phœbe; “_before_.”

Pryce tried to look intelligent, and nodded his head very fast to conceal the fear and confusion in his mind.

Amidst all these voices and festivities sat Oswald, with a vast paper cap shaped rather like the dome of a Russian church cocked over his blind side, listening distractedly, noting this and that, saying little, thinking many things.

The banquet ended at last, and every one drifted to the library.

Affairs hovered vaguely for a time. Peter handed cigarettes about. Some one started the gramophone with a Two Step that set every one tripping. Hetty with a flush on her cheek and a light in her eyes was keeping near Peter; she seized upon him now for a dance that was also an embrace. Peter laughed, nothing loath. “Oh! but this is glorious!” panted Hetty.

“Come and dance, too, Joan,” said Wilmington.

“It’s stuffy!” said Joan.

Oswald, contemplating a retreat to his study armchair, found her presently in the hall dressed to go out with Huntley.

“We’re going over the hill to see the sunset,” Joan explained. “It’s too stuffy in there.”

Oswald met Huntley’s large grey eye for a moment. He had an instinctive distrust of Huntley. But on the other hand, surely Joan had brains enough and fastidiousness enough not to lose her head with this—this phosphorescent fish of a novelist.

“Right-o,” said Oswald, and hovered doubtfully.

Aunt Phœbe appeared on the landing above carrying off a rather reluctant Miss Scroby to her room for a real good talk; a crash and an unmistakable giggle proclaimed a minor rag in progress in the common room across the hall in which Sydney Sheldrick was busy. The study door closed on Oswald....

Joan and Huntley passed by outside his window. He sat down in front of his fire, poked it into a magnificent blaze, lit a cigar and sat thinking. The beat of dancing, the melody of the gramophone and a multitude of less distinct sounds soaked in through the door to him.

He was, he reflected, rather like a strange animal among all this youth. They treated him as something remotely old; he was one-and-fifty, and yet this gregarious stir and excitement that brightened their eyes and quickened their blood stirred him too. He couldn’t help a feeling of envy; he had missed so much in his life. And in his younger days the pace had been slower. These young people were actually noisier, they were more reckless, they did more and went further than his generation had gone. In his time, with his sort of people, there had been the virtuous life which was, one had to admit it, slow, and the fast life which was noisily, criminally, consciously and vulgarly vicious. This generation didn’t seem to be vicious, and was anything but slow. How far did they go? He had been noting little things between Peter and this Reinhart girl. What were they up to between them? He didn’t understand. Was she manœuvring to marry the boy? She must be well on the way to thirty, twenty-six or twenty-seven perhaps, she hadn’t a young girl’s look in her eyes. Was she just amusing herself by angling for calf-love? Was she making a fool of Peter? Their code of manners was so easy; she would touch his hands, and once Peter had stroked her bare forearm as it lay upon the table. She had looked up and smiled. Leaving her arm on the table. One could not conceive of Dolly permitting such things. Was this an age of daring innocence, or what was coming to the young people?

Joan seemed more dignified than the others, but she, too, had her quality of prematurity. At her age Dolly had dressed in white with a pink sash. At least, Dolly must have been _about_ Joan’s age when first he had seen her. Eighteen—seventeen? Of course a year or so makes no end of difference just at this age....

From such meditations Oswald was roused by the tumult of a car outside. He took a wary glimpse from his window at this conveyance, and discovered that it was coloured an unusual bright chocolate colour, and had its chauffeur—a depressed-looking individual—in a livery to match. He went out into the hall to discover the large presence, the square face, the “whisker,” and the china-blue eyes of Lady Charlotte Sydenham. He knew she was in England, but he had had no idea she was near enough to descend upon them. She stood in the doorway surveying the Christmas disorder of the hall. Some one had adorned Oswald’s stuffed heads with paper caps, the white rhinoceros was particularly motherly with pink bonnet-strings under its throat, a box of cigarettes had been upset on the table amidst various hats, and half its contents were on the floor, which was also littered with scraps of torn paper from the crackers; from the open door of the library came the raucous orchestration of the gramophone, and the patter and swish of dancers.

“I thought you’d be away,” said Aunt Charlotte, a little checked by the sight of Oswald. “I’m staying at Minchings on my way to sit on the platform at Cambridge. We’re raising money to get those brave Ulstermen guns. Something has to be done if these Liberals are not to do as they like with us. They and their friends the priests. But I _knew_ there’d be a party here. And those aunts. So I came.... Who are all these young people you have about?”

“Miscellaneous friends,” said Oswald.

“You’ve got a touch of grey in your hair,” she noted.

“I must get a big blond wig,” he said.

“You might do worse.”

“You’re looking as fresh as paint,” he remarked, scrutinizing her steadfastly bright complexion. “Is that the faithful Unwin sitting and sniffing in the car? It’s a rennet face.”

“She can sit,” said Lady Charlotte. “I shan’t stay ten minutes, and she’s got a hot-water bottle and three rugs. But being so near I had to come and see what was being done with those wards of mine.”

“Former wards,” Oswald interjected.

“The Gal I passed. Where is Master Stubland? I’ll just look at him. Is he one of these people making a noise in here?”

She went to the door of the library and surveyed the scene with an aggressive lorgnette. The furniture had been thrust aside with haste and indignity, the rugs rolled up from the parquet floor, and Babs Sheldrick was presiding over the gramophone and helping and interrupting Sydney in the instruction of Wilmington, of Peter and Hetty and of Adela and Sopwith Greene in some special development of the tango. All the young people still wore their paper caps and were heated and dishevelled. In the window-seat the convalescent suffragette was showing wrist tricks to one of the young men from Cambridge. “Party!” said Lady Charlotte. “Higgledy-piggledy I call it. Which is Peter?”

Peter was indicated.

“Well, he’s grown! Who’s that fast-looking girl he’s hugging?”

Peter detached himself from Hetty and came forward.

His ancient terror of the whisker-woman still hung about him, but he made a brave show of courage. “Glad you’ve not forgotten us, Lady Charlotte,” he said.

“Not much Stubland about _him_,” she remarked to Oswald. “There’s a photograph of you before you blew your face off—”

“It’s his mother he’s like,” said Oswald, laying a hand on Peter’s shoulder.

“I never saw a family harp on themselves more than the Sydenhams,” the lady declared. “It’s like the Habsburg chin.... This one of the new improper dances, Peter?”

“_Honi soit_,” said Peter.

“People have been whipped at the cart’s tail for less. In my mother’s time no decent woman waltzed. Even—in crinolines. Now a waltz isn’t close enough for them.”

The gramophone came to an end and choked. “Thank goodness!” said Lady Charlotte.

“Won’t you dance yourself, Lady Charlotte?” said Peter, standing up to her politely.

The hard blue eye regarded him with a slightly impaired disfavour, but the old lady made no reply.

They heard the startled voice of the youth from Cambridge. “It’s _her_!”...

But the sting of the call was at its end.

“So that’s Peter,” said Lady Charlotte, as the chauffeur and Oswald assisted her back into her liver-coloured car. “I told you I saw the Gal?”

“Joan?”

“I passed her on the road half a mile from here. Came upon her and her ’gentleman friend’—I suppose she’d call him—as we turned a corner. A snap-shot so to speak. It’s the walking-out instinct. Blood will tell. I saw her, but she didn’t see me. Lost, she was, to things mundane. But it was plain enough how things were. A tiff. Some lovers’ quarrel. Wake _up_, Unwin.”

“What do you mean?”

“What I say,” said Lady Charlotte.

“That fellow Huntley!”

“_Ha!_ So now you’ll lock the stable door! What else was to be expected?”

“But this is nonsense!”

“I may be mistaken. I hope I am mistaken. I just give you my impression. I’m not a fool, Oswald, though it’s always been your pleasure to treat me as one. Time shows.”

There was a pause while rugs with loud monograms were adjusted about her.

“Well, I’m glad I came over. I wanted to see the Great Experiment. I said at the time it can’t end well. Bad in the beginnings. No woman to help him—except for those two Weird Sisters. No religion. You see? The boy’s a young Impudence. The girl’s in some mess already. What did I tell you?”

Oswald was late with his recovery.

“Look here, auntie! you keep your libellous mind off my wards.”

“Home, Parbury!” said Lady Charlotte to the chocolate-uniformed chauffeur.

She fired a parting shot.

“I warned you long ago, you’d get the Gal into a thoroughly false position....”

She was getting away after her raid with complete impunity. Never before had she scored like this. Was Oswald growing old? She made her farewell of him with a stately gesture of head and hand. She departed disconcertingly serene. A flood of belated repartee rushed into Oswald’s mind. But except for a violent smell of petrol and a cloud of smoke and a kind of big scar of chocolate on the retina nothing remained now of Lady Charlotte.

In the hall he paused before a mirror and examined that touch of grey.

§ 20

But it had not been a lovers’ quarrel that had blinded Joan to the passing automobile. It had been the astounding discovery of her real relationship to Peter. So astounding had that been that at the moment she was not only regardless of the passing traffic but oblivious of Huntley and every other circumstance of her world.

Huntley was not one of those people who love; he was a pursuing egotist with an unwarrantable scorn for the intelligence of his fellow-creatures. He liked to argue and show people that they were wrong in a calm, scornful manner; _The Pernambuco Bunshop_ was a very sarcastic work. He was violently attracted by the feminine of all ages; it fixed his attention with the vast possibilities of admiration and triumph it offered him. And he had greedy desires. Joan attracted him at first because she was admired. He saw how Wilmington coveted her. She had a prestige in her circle. She had, too, a magnetism of her own. Before he realized the slope down which he slid, he wanted her so badly that he thought he was passionately in love. It kept him awake of nights, and distracted him from his work. He did not want to marry her. That was against his principles. That was the despicable way of ordinary human beings. He lived on a higher plane. But he wanted her as a monkey wants a gold watch—he wanted this new, fresh, lovely and beautiful thing just to handle and feel as his own.

There was little charm about Huntley and less companionship. He was too arrogant for companionship. But he abounded in ideas, he knew much, and so he interested her. He talked. He pursued her with the steadfast scrutiny of his large grey eyes—and with arguments. He tried to argue and manœuvre Joan into a passionate love for him.

Well, Joan had a broad brow; she thought things over; she was amenable to ideas.

He harped on “freedom.” He carried freedom far beyond the tempered liberties of ordinary human association. Any ordinary belief was by his standards a limitation of freedom. There was a story that he had once been caught burgling a house in St. John’s Wood and had been let off by the magistrate only because the crime seemed absolutely motiveless. No doubt he had been trying to convince himself of his freedom from prejudice about the rights of property. He had an obscure idea that he could induce Joan to plunge into wild depravities merely to prove himself free from her own decent instincts. But he was ceasing to care for his argument if only he could induce her.

There was a moment when he said, “Joan, you are the one woman”—he always called her a woman—“who could make me marry her.”

“I’ll spare you,” said Joan succinctly.

“Promise me that.”

“Promise.”

“Anyhow.”

“Anyhow.”

On this Christmas afternoon he discoursed again upon freedom. “You, Joan, might be the freest of the free, if only you chose. You are absolutely your own mistress. Absolutely.”

“I have a guardian,” she said.

“You’re of age.”

“No; I’m nineteen.”

“You—it happens, were of age at eighteen, Joan.” He watched her face. He had been burning to get to this point for weeks. “Even about your birth there was freedom.”

“So _you_ know that.”

“Icy voice! To me it seems the grandest thing. When I reflect that I, alas! was born in loveless holy wedlock I grit my teeth.”

“Oh! I don’t care. But how do you know?”

“It’s fairly well known, Joan. It’s no very elaborate secret. I’ve got a little volume of your father’s poetry.”

She hesitated. “I didn’t know my father wrote poetry,” she said.

“It was all Will Sydenham ever did that was worth doing—except launch you into the world. He was a dramatic critic and something of a journalist, I believe. Stoner of the _Post_ knew him quite well. But all this is ancient history to you.”

“It isn’t. Nobody has told me.... I didn’t know.”

“But what did you think?”

“Never mind what I thought. Every one doesn’t talk with your freedom. I’ve never been told. Who was my mother?”

“Stoner says she died in hospital. Soon after you were born. He never knew her name.”

“Wasn’t it Stubland?”

“Lord, No! Why should it be?”

“But then——”

“That’s one of the things that makes you so splendidly new, Joan. You start clean in the world—like a new Eve. Without even an Adam to your name. Fatherless, motherless, sisterless, brotherless. You fall into the world like a meteor!”

She stood astonished at the way in which she had blundered. Brotherless! If Huntley had not drawn her back by the arm Lady Charlotte’s car would have touched her....

§ 21

That night some one tapped at the bedroom door of Aunt Phyllis. “Come in,” she cried, slipping into her dressing-gown, and Joan entered. She was still wearing the dress of spangled black in which she had danced with Huntley and Wilmington and Peter. She went to her aunt’s fire in silence and stood over it, thinking.

“You’re having a merry Christmas, little Joan?” said Aunt Phyllis, coming and standing beside her.

“Ever so merry, Auntie. We go it—don’t we?”

Aunt Phyllis looked quickly at the flushed young face beside her, opened her mouth to speak and said nothing. There was a silence, it seemed a long silence, between them. Then Joan asked in a voice that she tried to make offhand, “Auntie. Who was my father?”

Aunt Phyllis was deliberately matter-of-fact. “He was the brother of Dolly—Peter’s mother.”

“Where is he?”

“He was killed by an omnibus near the Elephant and Castle when you were two years old.”

“And my mother?”

“Died three weeks after you were born.”

Joan was wise in sociological literature. “The usual fever, I suppose,” she said.

“Yes,” said Aunt Phyllis.

“Do you know much about her?”

“Very little. Her name was Debenham. Fanny Debenham.”

“Was she pretty?”

“I never saw her. It was Dolly—Peter’s mother—who went to her....”

“So that’s what I am,” said Joan, after a long pause.

“Only we love you. What does it matter? Dear Joan of my heart,” and Aunt Phyllis slipped her arm about the girl’s shoulder.

But Joan stood stiff and intent, not answering her caress.

“I knew—in a way,” she said.

The thought that consumed her insisted upon utterance. “So I’m not Peter’s half-sister,” she said.

“But have you thought——?”

Joan remained purely intellectual. “I’ve thought dozens of things. And I thought at last it was that.... Why was I called Stubland? I’m not a Stubland.”

“It was more convenient. It grew up.”

“It put me out. It has sent me astray....”

She remained for a time taking in this new aspect of things so intently as to be regardless of the watcher beside her. Then she roused herself to mask her extravagant preoccupation. “You’re no relation then of mine?” she said.

“No.”

“You’ve been so kind to me. A mother....”

Aunt Phyllis was weeping facile tears. “Have I been kind, dear? Have I seemed kind? I’ve always wanted to be kind. And I’ve loved you, Joan, my dear. And love you.”

“And Nobby?”

“Nobby too.”

“You’ve been bricks to me, both of you. No end. Aunt Phœbe too. And Peter——? Does Peter know? Does he know what I am?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what he knows, Joan.”

“If it hadn’t been for the same surname. Joan Debenham.... I’ve had fancies. I’ve thought Nobby, perhaps, was my father.... Queer!... Why did you people bother yourselves about me?”

“My dear, it was the most natural thing in the world.”

“I suppose it was—for you. You’ve been so decent——”

“Every woman wants a daughter,” said Aunt Phyllis in a whisper, and then almost inaudibly; “you are mine.”

“And the tempers I’ve shown. The trouble I’ve been. All these years. I wonder what Peter knows? He must suspect. He must have ideas.... Joan Debenham—from outside.”

She stood quite still with the red firelight leaping up to light her face, and caressing the graceful lines of her slender form. She stood for a time as still as stone. Had she, after all, a stony heart? Aunt Phyllis stood watching her with a pale, tear-wet, apprehensive face. Then abruptly the girl turned and held out her arms.

“Can I ever thank you?” she cried, with eyes that now glittered with big tears....

Presently Aunt Phyllis was sitting in her chair stroking Joan’s dark hair, and Joan was kneeling, staring intently at some strange vision in the fire. “Do you mind my staying for a time?” she asked. “I want to get used to it. It’s just as though there wasn’t anything—but just here. I’ve lost my aunt—and found a mother.”

“My Joan,” whispered Aunt Phyllis. “My own dear Joan.”

“Always I have thought Peter was my brother—always. My half brother. Until today.”

§ 22

It was Adela who inflicted Joan’s second shock upon her, and drove away the last swirling whispers of adolescent imaginations and moon mist from the hard forms of reality. This visit she had seemed greatly improved to Joan; she was graver. Visibly she thought, and no longer was her rolling eye an invitation to masculine enterprise. She came to Joan’s room on Boxing Day morning to make up dresses with her for the night’s dance, and she let her mind run as she stitched. Every one was to come in fancy dress; the vicarage girls would come and the Braughing people. Every one was to represent a political idea. Adela was going to be Tariff Reform. All her clothes were to be tattered and unfinished, she said, even her shoes were to have holes. She would wear a broken earring in one ear. “I don’t quite see your point,” said Joan.

“Tariff Reform means work for all, dear,” Adela explained gently.

Days before Joan had planned to represent Indian Nationalism. It was a subject much in dispute between her and Peter, whose attitude to India and Indians seemed to her unreasonably reactionary—in view of all his other opinions. She could never let her controversies with Peter rest; the costume had been aimed at him. She was going to make up her complexion with a little brown, wear a sari, sandals on bare feet, and a band of tinsel across her forehead. She had found some red Indian curtain stuff that seemed to be adaptable for the sari. She worked now in a preoccupied manner, with her mind full of strange thoughts. Sometimes she listened to what Adela was saying, and sometimes she was altogether within herself. But every now and then Adela would pull her back to attention by a question.