Part 16

Dr. Favarger smiled, a smile without kindness in it. It was his daughter’s smile. She had that too, as well as his nose.

“Even then, she or you would probably have none of these fine feelings at the moment. She has suffered physically; she is irresponsible: mere brutal selfish instinct dominates her. And if she desists, if she does make an attempt to salve it, she has to watch the hapless infant”--he sneered--“through her care, surviving, but as a hopeless idiot.… Of course,” he continued, “I except cases of mere cruelty, such as baby-farming. If a woman kills or ill-treats the child of another, no natural feeling except greed of gain can possibly come into play, not even vanity----”

“Vanity?” said Adelaide.

“Yes, Mother’s vanity, a huge non-negligible factor in these matters. But in most cases it is not necessary to plead it, for nature’s broad back may easily take the blame. And when a woman of our own class, maybe, is brought before the magistrate and fined or imprisoned because she has taken a rod to the ugly duckling, or systematically ill-treated a weakly, ungracious child to the point of extinction, she might plead that she is only doing what a cat or any other perfectly normal animal does when one of her young is not up to sample, and seems obviously degenerate to her keener sense. My cat Philippa, for instance----”

Adelaide sneered. The bounder fidgeted. Ensor preserved his attitude of somewhat strained attention.

--“Had a fine litter of four the other day. I found one of them, to my uninstructed eye, as healthy as the others, on the cold stone floor for three successive mornings before it died. She had thrown it out of the nest, she had refused to feed it, she had just weeded it out. Why? It was unfit to live. And if you study these trials that come up every now and then, and observe carefully the characteristics of the little victims as described by the officers of the S.P.C.C., you will see that in most cases these brutalized children are slow, unprepossessing, unpleasant and sometimes revolting in their habits. They work up through the first few years of infancy, unpetted, neglected, marked down to develop all the successive stages of degeneracy. They are obviously better dead. No pretty, healthy, fetching child--a child like the egregious infant in _Bubbles_, say,--ever appears in court on such a plea. There Mother’s vanity comes in.…”

He would have continued, but Adelaide, whom this conversation neither pleased nor interested, rose. The bounder heaved an audible sigh of relief. Ensor, though he had been interested, even a little charmed by the old man’s manner, could not help deploring that this extremely technical and advanced conversation had not postdated the young girl’s departure.

Old Dr. Favarger left the room with Adelaide. He said to her in the hall, before he hobbled away to his own study and sleeping apartment on the ground floor--

“You have picked up a gentleman for once.”

She walked on as if he had not spoken. She always made a point of not answering her father when he girded at her. His approval of Ensor, though not unpleasing, was absolutely immaterial to her. She loved him, she meant to have him, through the door of marriage or no. She went upstairs to the drawing-room to await the two men, and flung herself down on the great yellow sofa with the black cushions, too nervous even to smoke. She was convinced, albeit for the twentieth time, that she had found the Eugenical father at last.

* * * * * * *

Wald Ensor, the gentleman according to Dr. Favarger’s acceptance, left sitting after an atrocious dinner, with a man who could not possibly fulfil the Doctor’s conditions, felt extremely uncomfortable. His annoyance grew as his messmate tended to grow familiar in conversation. A wretched artist from Chelsea, self-styled modern, with white hair and a dyed moustache, to whom the host had not vouchsafed a word all dinner! The fine old man had been annoyed by his cockney accent, presumably. He had talked, although she did not listen, psychology with Adelaide, and his pert underbred voice had broken in all the while through Dr. Favarger’s cultivated tones. Now that the host and hostess were gone, this bounder ventured to turn the analytical method on to his hostess herself, and Ensor did not know how to stop him. He fidgeted about on his Spanish leather covered chair, and made various efforts to do so, but in vain.

“Nice girl, very,” the creature went on. “With a face like an old master--one of those Primitives, don’t you know? Lots of drawing about. Pity she’s so morbid.”

Wald Ensor made a gesture of negation.

“Oh, yes, she is. Talks of nothing but Eugenics and so on. Thinks of nothing but the other thing.… It’s only a mask, with these women you know, all that rot about child-bearing and being subsidized by the State and so on. She’s an erotomaniac, that’s what she is--sits about on yellow sofas and asks men to love her. They do that fast enough, she’s very good fun--but they don’t marry her.… Do you know Gertrude? Do you know why they put up with her--she’s the cook--why the dinners here are so confoundedly bad?”--

“No, I don’t, and----” Ensor expostulated. His blood boiled, he didn’t think he could stand it any longer, he wanted to throw his glass in the fellow’s face. He rose.…

The other man, nothing abashed, although their conversation had hardly lasted the canonical few minutes, rose too, saying amiably, “So! Let’s join our hostess.”

He continued amiably as they passed out--

“Cook’s bad, but can’t be parted with, don’t you know? She’s up to games of her own, is the fair Gertrude. They found a baby she’d just had in a dressing-table drawer, so Adelaide told me while she was sitting. Time for confidences, eh? Seen my portrait of her? In the New----”

They were half-way upstairs by this time. The artist opened the drawing-room door and disclosed Adelaide sitting, as he had predicted, on a yellow satin sofa, with her head resting on black satin cushions. There was room for one man beside her. The bounder slipped easily and voluptuously into that place, and Ensor with a spasm of jealous disgust, took an early opportunity of making his adieux, and left them.

He never dined in the house again. He could not bring himself to risk meeting men of that stamp.

Yet he pitied her. He admired her. Her great discontented eyes haunted him. He felt as if a white plaining woman’s hand was outstretched to him from out of a weltering sea of bounderism. Adelaide, a lady, could not really like that sort of man? No, for she liked him. She wrote continually begging him to accept her hospitality--hospitality of all kinds. She began to vary skilfully the form of her invitations, but he still refused all invitations to meals at her house.

At last she suggested that if he could not stand her cook he should take her out to dine at “some low pot house,” so she phrased it. He laughed. For he knew that if he should succumb to her blandishments, he would certainly take her to a decent fairly respectable restaurant: he would not pander to her taste for Bohemianism, but save her from herself and her friends.

As he thought it over after each fresh invitation, a taste for this form of social humanitarianism grew on him. He began to fancy the idea of rescuing this really nice girl and taking her to decent places and showing her how a decent man would behave. The girl was motherless, her father did not pretend to look after her. She had a fine generous character, was large in her ideas, she gave freely, she was kind to her own sex, and would never go back on any one. The disreputable cook, now,--he was sure that in keeping her on, poor Miss Favarger was really undertaking a work of charity. The woman had obviously had what is called a misfortune, she had possibly gone through what is also called a tragedy. Adelaide was obviously not the sort of person who would ever cast a human being out of doors, under any circumstances whatever, especially a woman in the condition in which the cook had presumably found herself. Lazy, preoccupied, indifferent, she made no excuse for her shameful tolerance, and even condescended to discuss the details of it with such worms as Ensor’s fellow guest of a few weeks ago. That was merely an error of taste, the result of her unmothered, unchaperoned state. She was at bottom a really well-bred woman. Ensor, a rover, a man who had knocked about the world and yet preserved his vast shyness and a modicum of innocence, thought he saw clearly that the time and place were out of joint with Adelaide. Her morals were mediæval, with no present parallel except perhaps one that should be found in the milieu of the South Sea Islands.

So he came to invite her to dine with him at Prince’s and even Kettner’s; she had tea with him on the slopes in Kensington Gardens; they walked together in Hyde Park on Sundays, Adelaide protesting vehemently that she hated dressing up and posing as one of the smart set. In vain Ensor assured her that to mingle casually with that select denomination at Church Parade, was not to be within a hundred miles of being “of” it: that to dine at Kettner’s with a man alone was sufficiently unconventional. Adelaide continued to protest, to beg him to take her to his flat, and to discuss sex questions in a loud voice over restaurant dinner tables. She called it Eugenics.

Ensor did not really enjoy these discussions, the young woman, sitting there, her elbows on the table, her hands propping her hard chin, her burning eyes fixed on him made it almost impossible for him to eat a solid British dinner, and keep his British countenance at the same time.

He could stand any amount of talk of this kind from platforms, or on the stage with the footlights between him and the exponents of the new Feeling, the New World Movement, the new Morality; here, under the shaded red lights, with discreet foreign waiters gliding about the chance commensals; the face to face discussion of such topics outraged his simple sensitiveness and ordinary sense of decency. The only thing that at all saved the situation was the girl’s astonishing absence of self-consciousness. She talked like a boy--a clever, morbid, self-conscious lad just home from college, her sedulous use of slang helped the impression. Yet all the while her eyes belied her and occasionally her voice. Now and then an outrageous note of sex bitterness pierced through her level lazy accents and brought their talk home with a rush from the plane of impersonality. With Adelaide it was when her eyes ceased to look passionate and eager but became sombre and heavy, instead: it was when her sharp grating voice grew soft and mellow and trailing that Ensor feared her most, and such moments were growing more and more frequent as their meetings went on. He stood to his guns, however, he was not one to throw even a graceless woman over.

Had he not been the most retiring, most modest of men he would have realized that Adelaide Favarger was in love with him. He would have disliked--he would have refused to realize it, for it would have forced him to formulate his own feeling for her, and that was a queer mixture of sensual pity, and revolted fascination. There were times when he thought he fully grasped what she wanted of him and was glad of her assumption that his refusal to dine with her in Portland Place represented merely a protest against the inefficiency of her cook. This theory, which at all times and all seasons she put before him, and which she had freely proffered as an explanation of his “snubbing” of her, was a convenience to him, since it effectually masked his reluctance to be the father of her eugenical child.

* * * * * * *

Like her other men friends, Ensor always saw Adelaide Favarger home after their evenings together. Unlike the others, however, he always left her punctiliously on the doorstep, as soon as her front door answered to her key and the cavernous gulf of the hall swallowed her up. No Bianca Capello business for him! She used to tease him about this, she used the romantic illustration, with a point of bitterness. She had now accepted the situation and no longer even asked him to come in. Her “Good-nights” were a miracle of sour brevity and conciseness.

One night in July they had been to the Exhibition together and had sat late listening to the band playing “Tristan.” The out-door performance represented a pale vapid reflection of the original orchestral heat and passion merely, but out there in the murky shadow-thridden radiance, in the dust-fumed air, it was effective. Adelaide had talked less than usual. The summer nights that year were long and clear. When rather late, they returned to it, satiate of romance, great, wide Portland Place seemed to sleep lonely under a Norwegian midnight. Nothing so cold even as a moonbeam shone on its raddled stones and stern house fronts, except where a tree in the garden next to Adelaide’s house hung over her steps on one side and lent it some mystery. There was a big party higher up the street and some stationary taxicabs stood waiting in the middle of the roadway, black, vague, a file of indistinguishable shapes, whence the figure of a man now and then disengaged himself, did something to his vehicle and was absorbed into the mass again. Adelaide had insisted on Ensor’s dismissing their own cab at Oxford Circus, and together they walked across the broad stone-paved expanse. The girl held her exiguous skirts tightly round her thin, airily poised legs. She knew they were fine, she knew she had a beautiful figure.

She gained the broad flat step in front of her door and turned a little sideways to the man who stood waiting for her to effect her entry and bid her a hasty good-bye as usual. He was a little bemused by “Tristan” he was looking dreamily back across the street they had just traversed, his head full of carefully conceived, adroitly moving harmonies.…

“Come in and have a drink?” Adelaide said carelessly, but her voice was rough and throaty.

The demand appeared to startle him. He thought he had cured her of all that. Her request was out of all order and he did not reply at once.…

She faced him but did not meet his eyes.…

“Why won’t you?” she asked peevishly. “Even if you won’t dine? What have I done? Why am I doomed? Cursed.…”

“My dear Miss Favarger!…”

“Miss Favarger be blowed!” She spoke like a school-girl. She caught, as a monkey does, at the lapel of his coat--fumbled at it.…

“For God’s sake,” she said, “don’t insult me so! Come in for a moment!”

II

Wald Ensor came back to his flat in Ebury Street some time in the early piping dawn and found a cablegram lying in his letter-box. It told him of the sudden death of a distant but beloved relation, out in California, a man in whose business he had a concern. A day or two later he had arranged his affairs and sailed for the other side. He had found time before he left to forward a bulky package to Miss Adelaide Favarger, containing the skin of a leopard which he had shot himself, and of which he had spoken to Adelaide. It went with her, somehow, and she had looked flattered when he said so. He had now a very friendly feeling towards her, she seemed to him, on the whole, since their mutual experience, to be a saner, worthier member of the community than before.

He did not fancy, when he stepped off this hemisphere, that he was leaving Europe for a very long time. But it was so. He married out in California. He conceived it to be out of pity in some sort, an idea of giving a girl, much buffeted by fortune, a home. But as a matter of fact Adelaide had awakened the zest of the eternal feminine in a man who had imagined himself to be a confirmed bachelor. The girl was saved, domesticated, but Wald Ensor’s attempts at civism and paternity were not blessed in the usual way. After they had been married five years his wife died in giving birth to a child, which died too. Then he drifted, bereft of his casual impetus towards a settled life. His cousin died, leaving him fairly well off. He started several adventures in the world of business, nearly all of which failed, for he had not what is called _la main heureuse_.

With an orange grove that did not pay, left on his hands, and nothing else to speak of, he came back to Europe. Temporarily crippled in his resources, he decided to lie low till matters should have righted themselves. He was too proud to take his place in society, and go out while his only dress suit was shiny at the knees. He avoided London. He did, however, call in Portland Place and found new inmates established there, and was told that old Dr. Favarger was dead and Miss Favarger gone, no one knew where, and that she had taken the cook with her.

It was in Yorkshire on a market-day, in Beverley, that he met Adelaide again.

At first sight she seemed very little altered, only he realized that he had always imagined that she was taller. She was walking with her old staccato step that suggested some congenital weakness, such as a slightly stiffened spine, on the rough cobbled stones of the market, about and among the pens and improvised folds that prisoned lowing cows and calves and indifferent, sullen bulls. She was not alone. Her companion was a beautiful girl of about fifteen, a whole head taller than herself. Perhaps that was why he thought her shrunken? There was about her a slight countrified air, which differed greatly from the exaggerated, rather meretricious style in which the old Adelaide had been used to make her points, and strive to enhance her own peculiar charm.

The two women were absorbed. They were leaning on the well-worn wooden rail, which served to pen in the unruly cattle, and watched with interest and attention the movements of a magnificent young bull, which had as nearly as possible succeeded in wrenching his neck free from the clumsy headstall that fixed him to the post. His discontented, inflamed eyes, his stubby, determined shoulder, the dull, passionate intentness on freedom manifested by his attitude seemed to fascinate the elder woman, who was expatiating on his beauties to the seemingly less interested spectator beside her.…

“Nice beast, isn’t he, Phillis?” she murmured.

“Yes, but he’ll get his head out in about a minute!” the child said nervously.

“Then it will be Hell let loose,” replied the elder woman, evidencing a sort of savage enjoyment in the spectacle of the younger one’s timidity. She continued, gloating, “He’d have the whole place cleared in no time. Shall we stay and see the racket?”

Her hand stole towards the frayed rope.…

“No, don’t undo it, Addie. Oh, I do believe you’re going to! Do let’s go home,” the child pleaded pettishly. “And Mary must be tired and cold, waiting in the car all this time.”

“Oh, damn Mary!” said Adelaide. “Who cares for Mary?”

“But I’m tired and cold too.”

“You are? Come along then, my precious--at once.”

She turned and faced Wald Ensor. The long last look with which she had enveloped the splendid, sullen, restless animal had not left her humid eyes.

Quickly she recognized him, and righted herself. She put up to her eyes, with a reminiscence of her town manner, a pince-nez that hung round her neck by a chain of antique workmanship, and said in a hard voice--

“Is that you?”

Then a marked hesitation seemed to overcome her. She raised her arm that hung languidly down at her side, as if to ward off a blow. A little collection of parcels she was holding together by a string fell to the ground. The child very properly bent to pick them up. Ensor properly, too, was about to forestall her, but a gesture from Adelaide seemed to him to be intended to prevent and forbid him doing so. There was an awkward pause.…

Then Adelaide, indicating with her pince-nez the stooping figure of the beautiful young girl, and looking carefully away, pronounced quickly--

“Wald, my daughter, Phillis.”

“How do you do?” said Wald Ensor, formally, when, her cheeks reddened with stooping, the child resumed her upright position. She was concerned because one of the parcels was missing. Perhaps it had rolled under the feet of the bull?…

“Never mind,” said her mother fondly. There was a loving pride in her voice. None of the lowing cows, untethered, but morally fast anchored to the posts where their calves were firmly bounden, their mother-love taken into strict consideration by the cunning drover, who relied on it more surely than on any rope that was ever spun of hemp, could boast a tenderer, more maternal solicitude. Ensor was touched. So the restless, theoretic Adelaide was happy and settled at last, her hopes fulfilled, her theories carried out.

Phillis, in her bucolic completeness and obvious sterling health, was a maternal production to be proud of. She had golden hair, blue eyes and a complexion of roses and again roses. There were hardly any lilies, and although she was lovely at fifteen, the chances were that she would be raddled at fifty. Ensor noticed that the bare hand that clutched the wooden rail was, unlike her mother’s, large and heavy. She probably had feet to correspond. The dark, bushy eyebrows, which struck a note of savagery in the simple, placidly sensuous countenance, suggested one coarse progenitor; Adelaide’s was an excessively refined type. He surmised that she had in effect succeeded in capturing something in the nature of a prize-fighter for a mate. Such, she had declared, was her ambition to do in the old days at any rate, something rustic, fair and Saxon.…

Adelaide released her underlip, which she had drawn in and had bitten till it bled, and spoke quickly, with a graceless, oppressive cordiality that reminded Ensor, at that moment, of the first time she had invited him to dinner in Portland Place. In her access of nervous excitement, as of one constantly expecting to be refused, she was exactly the same, uncertain, deprecating, but peremptory.

“Where are you staying, Wald? At the Antelope? Here on business? Well, you can do it from High Walls. We’ll motor you in every day. Let us go and get your things out of the Antelope. The car’s there--waiting for us----”

“Thank you-- I hardly think I----” so Ensor was saying at intervals, and continued to say. He felt annoyed, hustled, overborne by all the methods of an aggressive, overweening personality. Adelaide’s love of domineering had once been modified by youthful languor; now her masterfulness was reinforced by physical fitness. She had grown out of the delicacy of the young girl, and was well, a woman to count with.

He thought of this as he walked behind her and Phillis through the thronging market-place. She talked to him over her shoulder, hardly listening to his objections. They threaded the crowd. Fusty interested groups were collected round this or that shrewd cheap Jack. He extolled, in the clearings they willingly made for him, now yards of tawdry lace, now pieces of coarse netting warranted never to tear, now rough crockery warranted never to break. And Ensor could hardly hear Adelaide’s unmodulated voice, through the clatter of hoofs on the stone causeways as the clumsy, puzzled animals were run along them at a gallop by sweating, panting stable-boys, anxious to exhibit their paces to intending purchasers. Adelaide would stop dead every now and then and become absorbed in the contemplation of melancholy stallions with straw-plaited tails, which stood, their shiny black hocks turned outward, all adown the smooth bits of stone flagging intersecting the rough cobbles.