Part 32

“Don’t you think so, Joan?”

“Think what?” asked Joan.

“Love’s much more _our_ business than it is theirs.”

That struck Joan. “Is it?” she asked. She had thought the shares in the business were equal and opposite.

“All this waiting for a man to discover himself in love with you; it’s rot. You may wait till Doomsday.”

“Still, they do seem to fall in love.”

“With any one. A man’s in love with women in general, but women fall in love with men in particular. We’re the choosers. Naturally. We want a man, that man and no other, and all our own. They don’t feel like that. And we have to hang about pretending they choose and trying to make them choose without seeming to try to make them. Well, we’re altering all that. When I want a man——”

Adela’s pause suggested a particular reference.

“I’ll get him somehow,” she said intently.

“If you mean to get him—if you don’t mind much the little things that happen meanwhile—you’ll get him,” said Adela, as though she repeated a creed. “But, of course, you can’t make terms. When a man knows that a woman is his, when he’s sure of it—absolutely, then she’s got him for good. Sooner or later he must come to her. I haven’t had my eyes open just for show, Joan, this last year or so.”

“Good luck, Adela,” said Joan.

Adela attempted no pretences. “It stands to reason if you love a man——” Her eyes filled with tears. “Love his very self. You can make him happy and safe. Be his line of least resistance. But the meanwhile is hard——”

Adela stitched furiously.

“That’s why you came down here?” Joan asked.

“You haven’t seen?” Adela’s preoccupation with Sopwith Greene had been the most conspicuous fact in the party. “Once or twice a gleam,” said Joan.

“Ask him to play tonight, dear,” said Adela. “Some of his own things.”

But now the last checks upon Adela’s talk were removed. She wanted to talk endlessly and unrestrainedly about love. She wanted to hear herself saying all the generosities and devotions she contemplated. “There’s no bargain in love,” said Adela. “You just watch and give.” Running through all her talk was a thread of speculation; she was obsessed by the idea of the relative blindness and casualness of love in men. “We used to dream of lovers who just concentrated upon us,” she said. “But there’s something nimmy-pimmy in a man concentrating on a woman. He ought to have a Job, something Big, his Art, his Aim—Something. One wouldn’t really respect a man who didn’t do something Big. Love’s a nuisance to a real man, a disturbance, until some woman takes care of him.”

“Couldn’t two people—take care of each other?” asked Joan.

“Oh, that’s Ideal, Joan,” said Adela as one who puts a notion aside. “A man takes his love where he finds it. On his way to other things. The easier it is to get the better he likes it. That’s why, so often, they take up with any—sort of creature. And why one needn’t be so tremendously jealous....”

Adela reflected. “_I_ don’t care a bit about him and Hetty.”

“Hetty Reinhart?”

“Everybody talked about them. Didn’t you hear? But of course you were still at school. Of course there’s that studio of hers. You know about her? Yes. She has a studio. Most convenient. She does as she pleases. It amused him, I suppose. Men don’t care as we do. They’re just amused. Men can fall in love for an afternoon—and out of it again. He makes love to her and he’s not even jealous of her. Not a bit. He doesn’t seem to mind a rap about Peter.”

She babbled on, but Joan’s mind stopped short.

“Adela,” she said, “what is this about Hetty and Peter?”

“The usual thing, I suppose, dear. You don’t seem to hear of _anything_ at Cambridge.”

“But you don’t mean——?”

“Well, I know _something_ of Hetty. And I’ve got eyes.”

“You mean to say she’s—she’s _got_ Peter?”

“It shows plainly enough.”

“_My_ Peter!” cried Joan sharply.

“You’re not an Egyptian princess,” said Adela.

“You mean—he’s gone—Peter’s gone—to her studio? That—things like that have happened?”

Adela stared at her friend. “These things _have_ to happen, Joan.”

“But he’s only a boy yet.”

“She doesn’t think he’s a boy. Why! he’s almost of age! Lot of boy about Peter!”

“But do you mean——?”

“I don’t mean anything, Joan, if you’re going to look like that. You’ve got no right to interfere in Peter’s love affairs. Why should you? Don’t we all live for experience?”

“But,” said Joan, “Peter is different.”

“No. No one is different,” said Adela.

“But I tell you he’s _my_ Peter.”

“He’s your brother, of course.”

“_No!_”

“Your half brother then. Everybody knows that, Joan—thanks to the Sheldricks. A sister can’t always keep her brothers away from other girls.”

Joan was on the verge of telling Adela that she was not even Peter’s half sister, but she restrained herself. She stuck to the thing that most concerned her now.

“It’s spoiling him,” she said. “It will make a mess of him. Why! he may think that is love, that!—slinking off to a studio. The nastiness! And she’s had a dozen lovers. She’s a common thing. She just strips herself here and shows her arms and shoulders because she’s—just that.”

“She’s really in love with him anyhow,” said Adela. “She’s gone on him. It’s amusing.”

“Love! _That_—love! It makes me sick to think of it,” said Joan.

“A man isn’t made like that,” said Adela. “Peter has to go his own way.”

“Peter,” said Joan, “who used to be the cleanest thing alive.”

“Good sisters always feel like that,” said Adela. “I know how shocked I was when first I heard of Teddy.... It isn’t the same thing to men, Joan. It isn’t indeed....”

“_Dirty_ Peter,” said Joan with intense conviction. “Of course I’ve known. Of course I’ve known. Any one could see. Only I wouldn’t know.”

She thrust the striped red stuff for her Indian dress from her.

“I shan’t be Indian Nationalism, Adela, after all. Somehow I don’t care to be. Why should I cover myself up in this way?”

“You’d look jolly.”

“No. I want something with black in it. And red. And my arms and shoulders showing. Why shouldn’t we all dress down to Hetty? She has the approval of the authorities. Aunt Phœbe applauds every stitch she takes off. Freedom—with a cap of Liberty.”

“Hetty said something about being Freedom,” hesitated Adela.

“Then I shall come as Anarchy,” said Joan, staring at the red stuff upon the table before her.

Came a pause.

“I don’t see why Peter should have all the fun in life,” said Joan.

§ 23

Joan as Anarchy made a success that evening at Pelham Ford. In the private plans of Hetty Reinhart that success had not been meant for Joan. Hetty as Freedom gave the party her lithe arms, her slender neck, and so much of her back that the two vicarage girls, who had come very correctly in powder and patches as Whig and Tory, were sure that it was partly accidental. On Hetty’s dark hair perched a Phrygian cap, and she had a tricolour skirt beneath a white bodice that was chiefly decolletage and lace. About her neck was a little band of black which had nothing to do with Freedom; it was there for the sake of her slender neck. She was much more like _La Vie Parisienne_. She was already dancing with Peter when Joan, who had delayed coming down until the music began, appeared in the doorway. Nobby, wrapped in a long toga-like garment of sun-gold and black that he alleged qualified him to represent Darkest Africa, was standing by the door, and saw the effect of Joan upon one of the Braughing boys before he discovered her beside him.

Her profile was the profile of a savage. She lifted her clear-cut chin as young savage women do, and her steady eyes regarded Hetty and Peter. Her black hair was quite unbound and thrown back from her quiet face, and there was no necklace, no bracelet, not a scrap of adornment nor enhancement upon her arms or throat. It had not hitherto occurred to Oswald that his ward had the most beautiful neck and shoulders in the world, or that Joan was as like what Dolly once had been as a wild beast is like a cherished tame one. But he did presently find these strange ideas in his mind.

Her dress was an exiguous scheme of slashes and tatters in black and bright red. She was bare ankled—these modern young people thought nothing of that—but she had white dancing shoes upon her feet.

“Joan!” said Huntley, advancing with an air of proprietorship.

“No,” said Joan with a gesture of rejection. “I don’t want to dance with any one in particular. I’m going to dance alone.”

“Well—dance!” said Huntley with a large courtly movement of a white velvet cloak all powdered with gold crosses and fleur-de-lys, that he pretended was a symbol of Reaction.

“When I choose,” said Joan. “And as I choose.”

Across the room Peter was staring at her, and she was looking at Peter. He tripped against Hetty, and for a little interval the couple was out of step. “Come on, Peter,” said Hetty, rallying him.

Joan appeared to forget Peter and every one.

There was dancing in her blood, and this evening she meant to dance. Her body felt wonderfully light and as supple as a whip under her meagre costume. There was something to be said for this semi-nudity after all. The others were dancing a two-step with such variations as they thought fit, and there was no objection whatever at Pelham Ford to solo enterprises. Joan could invent dances. She sailed out into the room to dance as she pleased.

Oswald watched her nimble steps and the whirling rhythms of her slender body. She made all the others seem overdressed and clumsy and heavy. Her face had a grave preoccupied expression.

Huntley stood for a moment or so beside Oswald, and then stepped out after her to convert her dance into a duet. He too was a skilful and inventive dancer, and the two coquetted for a time amidst the other couples.

Then Joan discovered Wilmington watching her and Huntley from the window bay. She danced evasively through Huntley’s circling entanglements, and seized Wilmington’s hand and drew him into the room.

“I can’t dance, Joan,” he said, obeying her. “You _know_ I can’t dance.”

“You have to dance,” she said, aglow and breathing swiftly. “Trust me.”

She took and left his hands and took them again and turned him about so skilfully that a wonderful illusion was produced in Wilmington’s mind and in those about him that indeed he could dance. Huntley made a crouching figure of jealousy about them; he spread himself and his cloak into fantastic rhombs—and then the music ceased....

“The Argentine Tango!” cried Huntley. “Joan, you _must_ tango.”

“Never.”

“Dance Columbine to my Harlequin then.”

“And stand on your knee? I should break it.”

“Try me,” said Huntley.

“Kneel,” said Joan. “Now take my hands. Prepare for the shock.” And she leapt lightly to his knee and posed for a second, poised with one toe on Huntley’s thigh, and was down again.

“Do it again, Joan,” he cried with enthusiasm. “Do it again.”

“Let us invent dances,” cried Aunt Phyllis. “Let us invent dances. Couldn’t we dance charades?”

“Let them dance as nature meant them to,” said Aunt Phœbe’s deepest tones. “_Madly!_”

“Shall we try that Tango we did the other night?” said Hetty, coming behind Peter.

Peter had come forward to the group in the centre of the room. Old habits were strong in him, and he had a vague feeling that this was one of the occasions when Joan ought to be suppressed. “We’re getting chaotic,” he said.

“You see, Peter, I’m Anarchy,” said Joan.

“An ordered Freedom is the best,” said Peter without reflecting on his words.

“Nobby, I want to dance with you,” said Joan.

“I’ve never danced anything but a Country Dance—you know the sort of thing in which people stand in rows—in my life,” said Oswald.

“A country dance,” cried Joan. “Sir Roger de Coverley.”

“We want to try a fox-trot we know,” complained one of the Braughing guests.

Two parties became more and more distinctly evident in the party. There was a party which centred around Hetty and the Sheldrick girls, which was all for the rather elaborately planned freak dances they had more or less learnt in London, the Bunny-Hugs, the Fox-Trot, and various Tangoes. Most of the Londoners were of this opinion, Sopwith Greene trailed Adela with him, and Huntley was full of a passionate desire to guide Joan’s feet along the Tango path. But Joan’s mind by a kind of necessity moved contrariwise to Hetty’s. Either, she argued, they must dance in the old staid ways—Oswald and the Vicarage girls applauding—or dance as the spirit moved them.

“Oh, dance your old Fox-Trots,” she cried, with a gesture that seemed to motion Huntley and Hetty together. “Have your music all rattle and rag-time like sick people groaning in trains. That’s neither here nor there. I want to dance to better stuff than that. Come along, Willy.”

She seized on Wilmington’s arm.

“But where are you going?” cried Huntley.

“I’m going to dance Chopin in the hall—to the pianola.”

“You’re going to play,” she told Wilmington.

“But you can’t,” said Peter.

Joan disappeared with her slave. A light seemed to go out from the big library as she went. “Now we can get on,” said Hetty, laying hands on her Peter.

For a time the Fox-Trot ruled. The Vicarage girls didn’t do these things, and drifted after Joan. So did Oswald. Towards the end the dancers had a sense of a cross-current of sound in the air, of some adverse influence thrown across their gymnastics. When their own music stopped, they became aware of that crying voice above the thunder, the Revolutionary Etude.

There was a brief listening pause. “Now, how the deuce,” said Huntley, “can she be dancing _that_?”

He led the way to the hall....

“I’m tired of dancing,” whispered Hetty. “Stay back. They’re all going. I want you to kiss the little corner of my mouf.”

Peter looked round quickly, and seized his privilege with unseemly haste. “Let’s see how Joan is dancing that old row,” he said....

Animation, boldness, and strict relegation of costume to its function of ornament had hitherto made Hetty the high light of this little gathering. She was now to realize how insecure is this feminine predominance in the face of fresher youth and greater boldness. And Joan was full of a pretty girl’s discovery that she may do all that she dares to do. For a time—and until it is time to pay.

Life had intoxicated Joan that night. A derision of seemliness possessed her. She was full of impulse and power. She felt able to dominate every one. At one time or other she swept nearly every man there except Oswald and Peter and Pryce into her dancing. Two of the Braughing youths fell visibly in love with her, and Huntley lost his head, badgered her too much to dance, and then was offended and sulked in a manner manifest to the meanest capacity. And she kissed Wilmington.

That was her wildest impulse. She came into the study where he was playing the pianola for her dancing. She wanted him to change the roll for the first part of the Kreutzer Sonata, and found herself alone with him. She loved him because he was so completely and modestly hers. She bent over him to take off the roll from the instrument, and found her face near his forehead. “Dear old Willy,” she whispered, and put her hand on his shoulder and brushed his eyebrows with her lips.

Then she was remorseful.

“It doesn’t mean anything, Willy,” she said.

“I know it doesn’t,” he said in a voice of the deepest melancholy.

“Only you are a dear all the same,” she said. “You are clean. You’re _right_.”

“If it wasn’t for my damned Virtues——” said Wilmington. “But anyhow. Thank you, Joan—very much. Shall I play you this right through?”

“A little slowly,” she said. “It’s marked too fast,” and went towards the open door.

Then she flitted back to him.... Her intent face came close to his. “I don’t love any one, Willy,” she said. “I’m not the sort. I just dance.”

They looked at each other.

“I love _you_,” said Wilmington, and watched her go.

But she had made him ridiculously happy....

She danced through the whole Kreutzer Sonata. The Kreutzer Sonata has always been a little dirty since Tolstoy touched it. Tolstoy pronounced it erotic. There are men who can find a lascivious import in a Corinthian capital. The Kreutzer Sonata therefore had a strong appeal to Huntley’s mind. These associations made it seem to him different from other music, just as calling this or that substance a “drug” always dignified it in his eyes with the rich suggestions of vice. He read strange significances into Joan’s choice of that little music as he watched her over the heads of the Braughing girls. But Joan just danced.

At supper she found herself drifting to a seat near Peter. She left him to his Hetty, and went up the table to a place under Oswald’s black wing. The supper at Pelham Ford was none of your stand-up affairs. Mrs. Moxton’s ideas of a dance supper were worthy of Britannia. Oswald carved a big turkey and Peter had cold game pie, and Aunt Phyllis showed a delicate generosity with a sharp carver and a big ham. There were hot potatoes and various salads, and jugs of lemonade and claret cup for every one, and whisky for the mature. Joan became a sober enquirer about African dancing.

“It’s the West Coast that dances,” said Oswald. “There’s richer music on the West Coast than all round the Mediterranean.”

“All this American music comes from the negro,” he declared. “There’s hardly a bit of American music that hasn’t colour in its blood.”

After supper Joan was the queen of the party. Adela was in love with her again, as slavish as in their schooldays, and the Sheldricks and the Braughing boys and girls did her bidding. “Let’s do something processional,” said Joan. “Let us dress up and do the Funeral March of a Marionette.”

Hetty didn’t catch on to that idea, and Peter was somehow overlooked. Most of the others scampered off to get something black and cast aside anything too coloured. Aunt Phyllis knew of some black gauze and produced it. There were black curtains in the common room, and these were seized upon by Huntley and Wilmington. They made a coffin of the big black lacquered post-box in the hall, and a bier of four alpenstocks and a drying-board from the scullery.

Joan was chief mourner, and after the Funeral March was over danced the sorrows of life before the bier to the first part of the Fifth Symphony.

Hetty and Peter sat close together and yet unusually apart upon the broad window-seat. Hetty looked tired and Peter seemed inattentive. Perhaps they had a little overdone each other’s charm that Christmas.

And only once more that evening did it happen that Peter and Joan met face to face. Nearly everybody poured out into the garden to see the guests go off. The Braughing people crowded hilariously into a car; the others walked. The weather had suddenly hardened, a clear dry cold made the paths and road very like metal, and not the littlest star was missing from the quivering assembly in the sky.

“We’ll have skating yet,” cried the Braughing party.

Adela and Joan and Wilmington and Pryce came with Huntley and Greene and the vicarage girls along the road and over the ice-bound water-splash as far as the vicarage gate. “Too cooold to say good-bye,” cried Joan. “Oh, my _poor_ bare legs!” and led a race back.

Adela was left far behind, but neither Wilmington nor Pryce would let Joan win without a struggle. The three shot in through the wide front door almost abreast, and Joan ran straight at Peter and stopped short within two feet of him.

“I’ve won!” said Joan.

Just for an instant the two looked at one another, and it seemed to Joan afterwards that she had seen something then in Peter’s eyes, something involuntary that she had caught just once before in them—when she had come upon him by chance in Petty Cury when first she had gone up to Cambridge.

A silly thing to think about! What did it matter? What did anything matter? Life was a dance, and Joan, thank heaven! could dance. Peter was just nothing at all. Nothing at all. Nothing at all.

“I wonder, Joan, how many miles you have pranced tonight!” said Aunt Phyllis, kissing her good night.

“Joan,” said Adela, “you _are_ The Loveliest.”...

For a minute or so Joan stood in front of her looking-glass, studying a flushed, candle-lit figure....

“Pah!” she said at last. “_Hetty!_” and flung her scanty clothes aside.

She caught the reflection of herself in the mirror again. She spread out her hands in a gesture to the pretty shape she saw there, and stood.

“What’s the Good of it?” she said at last.

As soon as Joan’s head touched the pillow that night she fell asleep, and she slept as soundly as a child that had been thoroughly naughty and all at sixes and sevens, and that has been well slapped and had a good cry to wind up with, and put to bed. In all the world there is no sounder sleep than that.

CHAPTER THE TWELFTH THE WORLD ON THE EVE OF WAR

§ 1

Oswald sat in the March sunshine that filled and warmed his little summerhouse, and thought about Joan and Peter....

His sudden realization of Joan’s mental maturity, the clear warning it brought to him that the task and opportunity of education was passing out of his hands, that already the reckoning of consequences was beginning for both his wards, set his mind searching up and down amidst the memories of his effort, to find where he could have slipped, where blundered and failed. He perceived now how vague had been the gesture with which he had started, when he proclaimed his intention to give them “the best education in the world.”

The best education in the world is still to seek, and while he had been getting such scraps of second best for them as he could, the world itself, nature, tradition, custom, suggestion, example and accident, had moulded them and made them. When he measured what had been done upon these youngsters by these outward things and compared it with their deliberate education, the schoolmaster seemed to him to be still no more than a half-hearted dwarf who would snare the white horses of a cataract with a noose of packthread.

“The generations running to waste—like rapids.”

But there are stronger harnessings than packthreads, and there are already engineers in the world who, by taking thought and patient work, can tame the maddest torrent that ever overawed the mind of man. In the end perhaps all torrents will be tamed, and knowledge and purpose put an end to aimless adventure. The schoolmaster will not always be a dwarf....

As our children grow beyond our control we begin to learn something of the reality of education. The world had Joan and Peter now; at the most Oswald could run and shout advice from the bank as they went down the rush. But he knew that he could have done more for them, and that with a different world he could have done infinitely more for them in their receptive years. They were the children of an age; their restless fever of impulse was but their individual share in a great fever. The whole world now was restless, out of touch with any standards, and manifestly drifting towards great changes.