Chapter THE TENTH: A Searching of Schoolmasters (4)

In addition Peter had acquired from Oswald, rather by way of example than precept, a very definite persuasion, and Joan had acquired a persuasion that was perhaps not quite so clearly and deeply cut, that to make it respectable there ought to be something in one’s life in the nature of special work. In Oswald’s case it was his African interest. Peter thought that his own work might perhaps be biological. But that one’s work ought to join on to the work of the people or that all the good work in the world should make one whole was a notion that had not apparently entered Peter’s mind. Oswald with his dread of preachments was doubtful about any deliberate dissertations in the matter. He got Peter to begin the _Martyrdom of Man_, which had so profoundly affected his own life, but Peter expressed doubts about the correctness of Reade’s Egyptian history, and put the book aside and did not go on reading it.

At times Oswald tried to say something to Joan and Peter of his conception of the Empire as a great human enterprise, playing a dominating part in the establishment of a world peace and a world civilization, and giving a form and direction and pride to every life within it. But these perpetual noises of royalty in its vulgarest, most personal form, the loyalist chatter of illiterate women and the clamour of the New Imperialism to “tax the foreigner” and exploit the empire for gain, drowned his intention while it was still unspoken in his mind. There were moments when he could already ask himself whether this empire he had shaped his life to serve, this knightly empire of his, enlightened, righteous, and predominant, was anything better than a dream—or a lie.

§ 16

When Joan left Highmorton she came into the market-place of ideas. She began to read the newspaper. She ceased to be a leggy person with a skirt like a kilt and a dark shock of hair not under proper control; instead, she became visibly a young lady, albeit a very young young lady, and suddenly all adult conversation was open to her.

Under the brotherly auspices of Peter she joined the Cambridge University Fabian Society. Peter belonged to it, but he explained that he didn’t approve of it. He was in it for its own good. She also took a place in two suffrage organizations, and subscribed to three suffrage papers. Tel Wymark, who was also in Newton Hall, introduced her to the Club of Strange Faiths, devoted to “the impartial examination of all religious systems.” And she went under proper escort to the First Wednesday in Every Month Teas in Bunny Cuspard’s rooms. Bunny was an ex-collegiate student, he had big, comfortable rooms in Siddermorton Street, and these gatherings of his were designed to be discussions, very memorable discussions of the most advanced type, about this and that. As a matter of fact they consisted in about equal proportions of awkward silences, scornful treatment of current reputations, and Bunny, in a loose, inaccurate way, spilling your tea or handing you edibles. Bunny’s cakes and sandwiches were wonderful; in that respect he was a born hostess. Junior dons and chance visitors to Cambridge would sometimes drift in to Bunny’s intellectual feasts, and here it was that Joan met young Winterbaum again.

Young Winterbaum was rather a surprise. He had got his features together astonishingly since the days of Miss Murgatroyd’s school; he had grown a moustache, much more of a moustache than Peter was to have for years yet, and was altogether remarkably grown up and a man of the world. “Funny lot,” he remarked to Joan when he had sat down beside her. “Why do _you_ come to Cambridge?”

“My people make me come up here,” he explained; “family considerations, duty to the old country, loyalty to the old college, and all that. But I’d rather be painting. It’s the only live thing just now. You up to anything?”

“Ears and eyes and mouth wide open,” said Joan.

“This show isn’t worth it. Do you ever drift towards Chelsea?”

Joan said she went to Hampstead now and then; she stayed sometimes with the Sheldricks, who were in a congested house on Downshire Hill now, and sometimes with Miss Jepson. Henceforth, now that she was no longer under the Highmorton yoke, she hoped to be in London oftener.

“Did you see the Picasso show?” asked Winterbaum.

She had not.

“You missed something,” said young Winterbaum, just like old times. “Picasso, Mancini; these are the gods of my idolatry....”

Bunny Cuspard interrupted clumsily with some specially iced cakes. Joan, accepting a cake, discovered Wilmington talking absent-mindedly to her chaperon and looking Pogroms at Winterbaum. So Joan, pleased rather than excited by this chance evidence of a continuing interest, lifted up a face of bright recognition and smiled and nodded to Wilmington....

§ 17

It was the ambition of Mrs. Sheldrick and her remaining daughters—some of them had married—to make their home on Downshire Hill “a little bit of the London _Quartier Latin_.”

Mr. Sheldrick had worn out the large, loose, tweed suit that had held him together for so long, he had gone to pieces altogether and was dead and buried, and the Sheldricks were keeping a home together by the practice of decorative arts and promiscuous hospitalities. Mrs. Sheldrick was writing a little in the papers of the weaker among the various editors who lived within her social range; little vague reviews and poems she wrote, with a quiet smile, that were not so much allusive as with an air of having recently had a flying visit from an allusion that was unable to stay. Sydney Sheldrick was practising sculpture, and Babs was attending the London School of Dramatic Art, to which Adela Murchison had also found her way. Antonia, the eldest, was in business, making djibbah-like robes.

There was downstairs and the passage and staircase and upstairs, a sitting-room in front, and a sort of oriental lounge (that later in the evening became the bedroom of Antonia and Babs) behind. It had all been decorated in the most modern style by Antonia in a very blue blue that seemed a little threadbare in places and very large, suggestive shapes of orange, with a sort of fringe of black and white chequers and a green ceiling with harsh pink stars. And the chairs, except for the various ottomans and cosy corners which were in faded blue canvas, had been painted bright pink or grey.

Into this house they gathered, after nine and more particularly on Saturdays, all sorts of people who chanced to be connected by birth, marriage, misfortune, or proclivity with journalism or the arts. Hither came Aunt Phœbe Stubland, and read a paper called insistently: _Watchman, What of the Night? What of it?_ and quite up to its title; and hither too came Aunt Phyllis Stubland, quietly observant. But quite a lot of writers came. And in addition there were endless conspirators. There was Mrs. O’Grady, the beautiful Irish patriot, who was always dressed like a procession of Hibernians in New York, and there was Patrick Lynch, a long, lax black object, ending below in large dull boots, and above in a sad white face under wiry black hair, grieving for ever that grief for Ireland—_Cathleen ni Houlihan_ and all the rest of it—that only these long, black, pale Irishmen can understand. And there was Eric Schmidt, who was rare among Irish patriots because of his genuine knowledge of Erse. All these were great conspirators. Then there was Mrs. Punk, who had hunger-struck three times, and Miss Corcoran-Deeping the incendiary. And American socialists. And young Indians. And one saw the venerable figure of Mr. Woodjer, very old now and white and deaf and nervous and indistinct, who had advocated in several beautiful and poetical little volumes a new morality that would have put the wind up of the Cities of the Plain. And Winterbaum drifted in, but cautiously, as doubting whether it wasn’t just “a bit too marginal,” to bring away his two frizzy-haired sisters, very bright-eyed and eager, rapid-speaking and _au fait_, and wonderfully bejewelled for creatures so young. They were going in for dancing; they did Spanish dances, stupendously clicking down their red heels with absolute precision together; they took the Sheldricks on the way to the Contangos or the Mondaines or the Levisons, or even to the Hoggenheimers; they glittered at Downshire Hill like birds of Paradise, and had the loveliest necks and shoulders and arms. Outside waited young Winterbaum’s coupé—a very smart little affair in black and cream, with an electric starter wonderfully fitted.

Here too came young Huntley, who had written three novels before he was twenty-two, and who was now thirty and quite well known, not only as a novelist of reputation, but as a critic eminently unpopular with actor managers; a blond young man with a strong profile, a hungry, scornful expression and a greedy, large blue eye that wandered about the crush as if it sought something, until it came to rest upon Joan. Thereafter Mr. Huntley’s other movements and conversation were controlled by a resolution to edge towards and overshadow and dominate Joan with the profile as much as possible.

Joan, by various delicacies of perception, was quite aware of these approaches without seeming at any time to regard Huntley directly; and by a subtlety quite imperceptible to him she drifted away from each advance. She did not know who he was, and though the profile interested her, his steadfast advance towards her seemed to be premature. Until suddenly an apparently quite irrelevant incident spun her mind round to the idea of encouraging him.

The incident was the arrival of Peter.

Early in the afternoon he had vanished from Mrs. Jepson’s, where he and Joan were staying; he had not come in to dinner, and now suddenly he appeared conspicuously in this gathering of the Sheldricks’, conspicuously in the company of Hetty Reinhart, who was to Joan, for quite occult reasons, the most detestable of all his large circle of detestable friends. That alone was enough to tax the self-restraint of an exceedingly hot-tempered foster sister. (So this was what Peter had been doing with his time! This had been his reason for neglecting his own household! At the _Petit Riche_, or some such place—with _her_! A girl with a cockney accent! A girl who would stroke your arm as soon as speak to you!...) But though the larger things in life strain us, it is the smaller things that break us. What finally turned Joan over was a glance, a second’s encounter with Peter’s eye. Hetty had sailed forward with that extraordinary effect of hers of being a grown-up, experienced woman, to greet Mrs. Sheldrick, and Peter stood behind, disregarded. (His expression of tranquil self-satisfaction was maddening.) His eye went round the room looking, Joan knew, for two people. It rested on Joan.

The question that Peter was asking Joan mutely across the room was in effect this: “Are you behaving yourself, Joan?”

Then, not quite reassured by an uncontrollable scowl, Peter looked away to see if some one else was present. Some one else apparently wasn’t present, and Joan was unfeignedly sorry.

He was looking for Mir Jelalludin, the interesting young Indian with the beautifully modelled face, whom Joan had met and talked to at the Club of Strange Faiths. At the Club of Strange Faiths one day she had been suddenly moved to make a short speech about the Buddhist idea of Nirvana, which one of the speakers had described as extinction. Making a speech to a little meeting was not a very difficult thing for Joan; she had learnt how little terrible a thing is to do in the Highmorton debating society, where she had been sustained by a grim determination to score off Miss Frobisher. She said that she thought the real intention was not extinction at all, but the escape of the individual consciousness after its living pilgrimage from one incarnate self to another into the universal consciousness. That was the very antithesis of extinction; one lost oneself indeed, but one lost oneself not in darkness and non-existence, but in light and the fullness of existence. There was all the difference between a fainting fit and ecstasy between these two conceptions. And it was true of experience that one was least oneself, least self-conscious and egotistical at one’s time of greatest excitement.

Mir Jelalludin received these remarks with earnest applause. He made as if to speak after her, rose in his place, and then hastily sat down. Afterwards he came and spoke to her, quite modestly and simply, without the least impertinence.

He explained, with a pleasant staccato accent and little slips in his pronunciation that suggested restricted English conversation and much reading of books, how greatly he had been wanting to say just what she had said, “so bew-ti-fully,” but he had been restrained by “impafction of the pronunsation. So deefi’clt, you know.” One heard English people so often not doing justice to Indian ideas so that it was very pleasant to hear them being quite sympathetically put.

There was something very pleasing in the real intellectual excitement that had made him speak to her, and there was something very pleasing to the eye in the neat precision with which his brown features were chiselled and the decisive accuracy of every single hair on his brow. He was, he explained, a Moslem, but he was interested in every school of Indian thought. He was afraid he was not very orthodox, and he showed a smile of the most perfect teeth. There had always been a tendency to universalism in Indian thought, that affected even the Moslem. Did she know anything of the Brahmo Somaj? Had she read any novel of Chatterji’s? There was at least one great novel of his the English ought to read, the _Ananda Math_. No one could understand Indian thought properly who had not read it. He had a translation of it into English—which he would lend her.

Would she be interested to read it?

Might he send it to her?

Joan’s chaperon was a third year girl who put no bar upon these amenities. Joan accepted the book and threw out casually that she sometimes went to Bunny Cuspard’s teas. If Mr. Jelalludin sent her Chatterji’s book she could return it to Bunny Cuspard’s rooms.

It was in Bunny Cuspard’s room that Peter had first become aware of this exotic friendship. He discovered his Joan snugly in a corner listening to an explanation of the attitude of Islam towards women. It had been enormously misrepresented in Christendom. Mr. Jelalludin was very earnest in his exposition, and Joan listened with a pleasant smile and regarded him pleasantly and wished that she could run her fingers just once along his eyebrow without having her motives misunderstood.

But at the sight of his Joan engaged in this confabulation Peter suddenly discovered all the fiercest traits of race pride. He fretted about the room and was rude to other people and watched a book change hands, and waited scarcely twenty seconds after the end of Joan’s conversation before he came up to her.

“I say, Joan,” he said, “you can’t go chumming with Indians anyhow.”

“Peter,” she said, “we’ve chummed with India.”

“Oh, nonsense! Not socially. Their standards are different.”

“I hope they are,” said Joan. “The way you make these Indian boys here feel like outcasts is disgraceful.”

“They’re different. The men aren’t uncivil to them. But it isn’t for you——”

“It’s for all English people to treat them well. He’s a charming young man.”

“It isn’t _done_, Joan.”

“It’s going to be, Petah.”

“You’re meeting him again?”

“If I think proper.”

“Oh!” said Peter, baffled for the time. “All _right_, Joan.”

A fierce exchange of notes followed. “Don’t you understand the fellow’s a polygamist?” Peter wrote. “He keeps his women in purdah. No decent woman could be talked to in India as he talked to you. Not even an introduction. Personally, I’ve no objection to any friends you make provided they are decent friends....”

“He isn’t a polygamist,” Joan replied. “I’ve asked him. And every one says he’s a first-rate cricketer. As for decent friends, Peter——”

The issue had been still undecided when they came down for the Christmas vacation.

So far Joan had maintained her positions without passion. But now suddenly her indignation at Peter’s interference flared to heaven. That he should come here, hot from Soho, to tyrannize over _her_! Indians indeed! As if Hetty Reinhart wasn’t worse than a Gold Coast nigger!...

The only outward manifestation of this wild storm of resentment had been her one instant’s scowl at Peter. Thereafter Joan became again the quiet, intelligently watchful young woman she had been all that evening. But now she turned herself through an angle of about thirty degrees towards Huntley, who was talking to old Mrs. Jex, the wonder of Hampstead, who used to know George Eliot and Huxley, the while he was regarding Joan with sidelong covetousness. Joan lifted her eyes towards him with an expression of innocent interest. The slightly projecting blue eyes seemed to leap in response.

Mrs. Jex was always rather inattentive to her listener when she was reciting her reminiscences, and Huntley was able to turn away from her quietly without interrupting the flow.

The Sheldrick circle scorned the formalities of introductions. “Are you from the Slade school?” said Huntley.

“Cambridge,” said Joan.

“My name’s Gavan Huntley.”

But this was going to be more amusing than Joan had expected. This was a real live novelist—Joan’s first. Not a fortnight ago she had read _The Pernambuco Bunshop_, and thought it rather clever and silly.

“Not _the_ Gavan Huntley?” she said.

His face became faintly luminous with satisfaction. “Just Gavan Huntley,” he said with a large smile.

“The Pernambuco Bunshop?” she said.

“Guilty,” he pleaded, smiling still more naïvely.

One had expected something much less natural in a novelist.

“I _loved_ it,” said Joan, and Huntley was hers to do what she liked with. Joon’s idea of a proper conversation required it to be in a corner. “Do Sheldricks never sit down?” she asked. “I’ve been standing all the evening.”

“They can’t,” he said confidentially. “They’re the other sort of Dutch doll, the cheap sort, that hasn’t got joints at the knees.”

“Antonia sometimes leans against the wall.”

“Her utmost. The next thing would be to sit on the floor with her legs straight out. I’ve seen her do that. But there is a sort of bench on the staircase landing.”

Thither they made their way, and there presently Peter found them.

He found them because he was making for that very corner in the company of Sydney Sheldrick. “Hullo!” said Sydney. “That you, Joan?”

“We’ve taken this corner for the evening,” said Huntley, laying a controlling hand on Joan’s pretty wrist.

Joan and Peter regarded each other darkly.

“There ought to be more seats about somewhere,” said Sydney. “Come up to the divan, old Peter....”

Of course Peter must object to Huntley. They were scarcely out of the Sheldricks’ house when he began. “That man Huntley’s a bad egg, Joan. Everybody knows it.”

For a time they disputed about Huntley.

“Peter,” said Joan, with affected calm, “is there any man, do you think, to whom so—so untrustworthy a girl as I am might safely talk?”

Peter seemed to consider. “There’s chaps like Troop,” he said.

“Troop!” said Joan, relying on her intonation.

“It isn’t that you’re untrustworthy,” said Peter.

“Fragile?”

“It’s the look and tone of things.”

“I wonder how you get these ideas.”

“What ideas?”

“Of how I behave in a corner with Jelalludin or Gavan Huntley.”

“I haven’t suggested anything.”

“You’ve suggested everything. Do you think I collect stray kisses like Sydney Sheldrick? Do you think I’m a dirty little—little—cocotte like Hetty Reinhart?”

“_Joan!_”

“_Well_,” said Joan savagely, and said no more.

Peter came to the defence of Hetty belatedly. “How can you say such things of Hetty?” he asked. “What can you know about her?”

“Pah! I can smell what she is across a room. Do you think I’m an absolute young fool, Peter?”

“You’ve got no right, Joan——”

“Why argue, Peter, why argue? When things are plain. Can’t you go your own way, Peter”—Joan was annoyed to find suddenly that she was weeping. Tears were running down her face. But the road was dark, and perhaps if she gave no sign Peter would not see. “You go your own way, Peter, go your own way, and let me go mine.”

Peter was silent for a little while. Then compunction betrayed itself in his voice.

“It’s you I’m thinking of, Joan. I can’t bear to see you make yourself cheap.”

“Cheap! And _you_?”

“I’m different. I’m altogether different. A man is.”

Silence for a time. Joan seemed to push back her hair, and so smeared the tears from her face.

“We interfere with each other,” she said at last. “We interfere with each other. What is the good of it? You’ve got to go your way and I’ve got to go mine. We used to have fun—lots of fun. _Now_....”

She couldn’t say any more for a while.

“I’m going my own way, Peter. It’s a different way——Leave me alone. Keep off!”

They said no more. When they got in they found Miss Jepson sitting by the fire, and she had got them some cocoa and biscuits. The headache that had kept her from the Sheldrick festival had lifted, and Joan plunged at once into a gay account of the various people she had seen that evening—saving and excepting Gavan Huntley. But Peter stood by the fireplace, silent, looking down into the fire, sulking or grieving. All the while that Joan rattled on to Miss Jepson she was watching him with almost imperceptible glances and wondering whether he sulked or grieved. Did he feel as she felt? If he sulked—well, confound him! But what if this perplexing dissension hurt him as much as it was hurting her!

§ 18

Joan had long since lost that happiness, that perfect assurance, that intense appreciation of the beauty in things which had come to her with early adolescence. She was troubled and perplexed in all her ways. She was full now of stormy, indistinct desires and fears, and a gnawing, indefinite impatience. No religion had convinced her of a purpose in her life, neither Highmorton nor Cambridge had suggested any mundane devotion to her, nor pointed her ambitions to a career. The only career these feminine schools and colleges recognized was a career of academic successes and High School teaching, intercalated with hunger strikes for the Vote, and Joan had early decided she would rather die than teach in a High School. Nor had she the quiet assurance her own beauty would have given her in an earlier generation of a discreet choice of lovers and marriage and living “happily ever afterwards.” She had a horror of marriage lurking in her composition; Mrs. Pybus and Highmorton had each contributed to that; every one around her spoke of it as an entire abandonment of freedom. Moreover there was this queerness about her birth—she was beginning to understand better now in what that queerness consisted—that seemed to put her outside the customary ceremonies of veil and orange blossoms. Why did they not tell her all about it—what her mother was and where her mother was? It must be a pretty awful business, if neither Aunt Phyllis nor Aunt Phœbe would ever allude to it. It would have to come out—perhaps some monstrous story—before she could marry. And who could one marry? She could not conceive herself marrying any of these boys she met, living somewhere cooped up in a little house with solemn old Troop, or under the pursuing eyes, the convulsive worship, of Wilmington. She had no object in life, no star by which to steer, and she was full of the fever of life. She was getting awfully old. She was eighteen. She was nineteen. Soon she would be twenty.

All her being, in her destitution of any other aim that had the slightest hold upon her imagination, was crying out for a lover.

It was a lover she wanted, not a husband; her mind made the clearest distinction between the two. He would come and unrest would cease, confusion would cease and beauty would return. Her lover haunted all her life, an invisible yet almost present person. She could not imagine his face nor his form, he was the blankest of beings, and yet she was so sure she knew him that if she were to see him away down a street or across a crowded room, instantly, she believed, she would recognize him. And until he came life was a torment of suspense. Life was all wrong and discordant, so wrong and discordant that at times she could have hated her lover for keeping her waiting so wretchedly.

And she had to go on as though this suspense was nothing. She had to disregard this vast impatience of her being. And the best way to do that, it seemed to her, was to hurry from one employment to another, never to be alone, never without some occupation, some excitement. Her break with Peter had an extraordinary effect of release in her mind. Hitherto, whatever her resentment had been she had admitted in practice his claim to exact a certain discretion from her; his opinion had been, in spite of her resentment, a standard for her. Now she had no standard at all—unless it was a rebellious purpose to spite him. On Joan’s personal conduct the thought of Oswald, oddly enough, had scarcely any influence at all. She adored him as one might a political or historical hero; she wanted to stand well in his sight, but the idea of him did not pursue her into the details of her behaviour at all. He seemed preoccupied with ideas and unobservant. She had never had any struggle with him; he had never made her do anything. And as for Aunts Phyllis and Phœbe—while the latter seemed to make vague gestures towards quite unutterable liberties, the former maintained an attitude of nervous disavowal. She was a woman far too uncertain-minded for plain speaking. She was a dear. Clearly she hated cruelty and baseness; except in regard to such things she set no bounds.

Hitherto Joan had had a very few flirtations; the extremest thing upon her conscience was Bunny Cuspard’s kiss. She had the natural shilly-shally of a girl; she was strongly moved to all sorts of flirtings and experimentings with love, and very adventurous and curious in these matters; and also she had a system of inhibitions, pride, hesitation, fastidiousness, and something beyond these things, a sense of some ultimate value that might easily be lost, that held her back. Rebelling against Peter had somehow also set her rebelling against these restraints. Why shouldn’t she know this and that? Why shouldn’t she try this and that? Why, for instance, was she always “shutting up” Adela whenever she began to discourse in her peculiar way upon the great theme? Just a timid prude she had been, but now——.

And all this about undesirable people and unseemly places, all this picking and choosing as though the world was mud; what nonsense it was! She could take care of herself surely!

She began deliberately to feel her way through all her friendships to see whether this thing, passion, lurked in any of them. It was an interesting exercise of her wits to try over a youth like old Troop, for example; to lure him on by a touch of flattery, a betrayal of warmth in her interest, to reciprocal advances. At first Troop wasn’t in the least in love with her, but she succeeded in suggesting to him that he was. But the passion in him released an unsuspected fund of egotistical discourse; he developed a disposition to explain himself and his mental operations in a large, flattering way both by word of mouth and by letter. Even when he was roused to a sense of her as lovable, he did not become really interested in her but only in his love for her. He arrived at one stride at the same unanalytical acceptance of her as of his God and the Church and the King and his parents and all the rest of the Anglican system of things. She was his girl—“the kid.” He really wasn’t interested in those other things any more than he was in her; once he had given her her rôle in relation to him his attention returned to himself. The honour, integrity, and perfection of Troop were the consuming occupations of his mind. This was an edifying thing to discover, but not an entertaining thing to pursue; and after a time Joan set herself to avoid, miss, and escape from Troop on every possible occasion. But Troop prided himself upon his persistence. He took to writing her immense, ill-spelt, manly letters, with sentences beginning: “You understand me very little if——.” It was clear he was hers only until some simpler, purer, more receptive and acquisitive girl swam into his ken.

Wilmington, on the other hand, was a silent covetous lover. Joan could make him go white, but she could not make him talk. She was a little afraid of him and quite sure of him. But he was not the sort of young man one can play with, and she marvelled greatly that any one could desire her so much and amuse her so little. Bunny Cuspard was a more animated subject for experiment, and you could play with him a lot. He danced impudently. He could pat Joan’s shoulder, press her hand, slip his arm round her waist and bring his warm face almost to a kissing contact as though it was all nothing. Did these approaches warm her blood? Did she warm his? Anyhow it didn’t matter, and it wasn’t anything.

Then there was Graham Prothero, a very good-looking friend of Peter’s, whom she had met while skating. He had a lively eye, and jumped after a meeting or so straight into Joan’s dreams, where he was still more lively and good-looking. She wished she knew more certainly whether she had got into his dreams.

Meanwhile Joan’s curiosity had not spared Jelalludin. She had had him discoursing on the beauties of Indian love, and spinning for her imagination a warm moonlight vision of still temples reflected in water tanks, of silvery water shining between great lily leaves, of music like the throbbing of a nerve, of brown bodies garlanded with flowers. There had been a loan of Rabindranath Tagore’s love poems. And once he had sent her some flowers.

Any of these youths she could make her definite lover she knew, by an act of self-adaptation and just a little reciprocal giving. Only she had no will to do that. She felt she must not will anything of the sort. The thing must come to her; it must take possession of her. Sometimes, indeed, she had the oddest fancy that perhaps suddenly one of these young men would become transfigured; would cease to be his clumsy, ineffective self, and change right into that wonderful, that compelling being who was to set all things right. There were moments when it seemed about to happen. And then the illusion passed, and she saw clearly that it was just old Bunny or just staccato Mir Jelalludin.

In Huntley, Joan found something more intriguing than this pursuit of the easy and the innocent. Huntley talked with a skilful impudence that made a bold choice of topics seem the most natural in the world. He presented himself as a leader in a great emancipation of women. They were to be freed from “the bondage of sex.” The phrase awakened a warm response in Joan, who was finding sex a yoke about her imagination. Sex, Huntley declared, should be as incidental in a woman’s life as it was in a man’s. But before that could happen the world must free its mind from the “superstition of chastity,” from the idea that by one single step a woman passed from the recognizable into an impossible category. We made no such distinction in the case of men; an artist or a business man was not suddenly thrust out of the social system by a sexual incident. A woman was either Mrs. or Miss; a gross publication of elemental facts that were surely her private affair. No one asked whether a man had found his lover. Why should one proclaim it in the case of a woman by a conspicuous change of her name? Here, and not in any matter of votes or economics was the real feminine grievance. His indignation was contagious. It marched with all Joan’s accumulated prejudice against marriage, and all her growing resentment at the way in which emotional unrest was distracting and perplexing her will and spoiling her work at Cambridge. But when Huntley went on to suggest that the path to freedom lay in the heroic abandonment of the “fetish of chastity,” Joan was sensible of a certain lagging of spirit. A complex of instincts that conspired to adumbrate that unseen, unknown, and yet tyrannous lover, who would not leave her in peace and yet would not reveal himself, stood between her and the extremities of Huntley’s logic.

There were moments when he seemed to be pretending to fill that oppressive void; moments when he seemed only to be hinting at himself as a possible instrument of freedom. Joan listened to him gravely enough so long as he theorized; when he came to personal things she treated him with the same experimental and indecisive encouragement that she dealt out to her undergraduate friends. Huntley’s earlier pose of an intellectual friend was attractive and flattering; then he began to betray passion, as it were, unwittingly. At a fancy dress dance at Chelsea—and he danced almost as well as Joan—he became moody. He was handsome that night in black velvet and silver that betrayed much natural grace; Joan was a nondescript in black and red, with short skirts and red beads about her pretty neck. “Joan,” he said suddenly, “you’re getting hold of me. You’re disturbing me.” He seemed to soliloquize. “I’ve not felt like this before.” Then very flatteringly and reproachfully, “You’re so damned intelligent, Joan. And you dance—as though God made you to make me happy.” He got her out into an open passage that led from the big studio in which they had been dancing, to a yard dimly lit by Chinese lanterns, and at the dark turn of the passage kissed her more suddenly and violently than she had ever been kissed before. He kissed her lips and held her until she struggled out of his arms. Up to that moment Joan had been playing with him, half attracted and half shamming; then once more came the black panic that had seized her with Bunny and Adela.

She did not know whether she liked him now or hated him. She felt strange and excited. She made him go back with her into the studio. “I’ve got to dance with Ralph Winterbaum,” she said.

“Say you’re not offended,” he pleaded.

She gave him no answer. She did not know the answer. She wanted to get away and think. He perceived her confused excitement and did not want to give her time to think. She found Winterbaum and danced with him, and all the time, with her nerves on fire, she was watching Huntley, and he was watching her. Then she became aware of Peter regarding her coldly, over the plump shoulder of a fashion-plate artist. She went to him as soon as the dance was over.

“Peter,” she said, “I want to go home.”

He surveyed her. She was flushed and ruffled, and his eyes and mouth hardened.

“It’s early.”

“I want to go home.”

“Right. You’re a bit of a responsibility, Joan.”

“Don’t, then,” she said shortly, and turned round to greet Huntley as though nothing had happened between them.

But she kept in the light and the crowd, and there was a constraint between them. “I want to talk to you more,” he said, “and when we can talk without some one standing on one’s toes all the time and listening hard. I wish you’d come to my flat and have tea with me one day. It’s still and cosy, and I could tell you all sorts of things—things I can’t tell you here.”

Joan’s dread of any appearance of timid virtue was overwhelming. And she was now blind with rage at Peter—why, she would have been at a loss to say. She wanted to behave outrageously with Huntley. But in Peter’s sight. This struck her as an altogether too extensive invitation.

“I’ve never noticed much restraint in your conversation,” she said.

“It’s the interruptions I don’t like,” he said.

“You get me no ice, you get me no lemonade,” she complained abruptly.

“That’s what my dear Aunt Adelaide used to call changing the subject.”

“It’s the cry of outraged nature.”

“But I saw you having an ice—not half an hour ago.”

“Not the ice I wanted,” said Joan.

“Distracting Joan! I suppose I must get you that ice. But about the tea?”

“I _hate_ tea,” said Joan, with a force of decision that for a time disposed of his project.

Just for a moment he hovered with his eye on her, weighing just what that decision amounted to, and in that moment she decided that he wasn’t handsome, that there was something _unsound_ about his profile, that he was pressing her foolishly. And anyhow, none of it really mattered. He was nothing really. She had been a fool to go into that dark passage, she ought to have known her man better; Huntley had been amusing hitherto and now the thing had got into a new phase that wouldn’t, she felt, be amusing at all; after this he would pester. She hated being kissed. And Peter was a beast. Peter was a hateful beast....

Joan and Peter went home in the same taxi—in a grim silence. Yet neither of them could have told what it was that kept them hostile and silent.

§ 19

But Joan and Peter were not always grimly silent with one another. The black and inexplicable moods came and passed again. Between these perplexing mute conflicts of will, they were still good friends. When they were alone together they were always disposed to be good friends; it was the presence and excitement and competition of others that disturbed their relationship; it was when the species invaded their individualities and threatened their association with its occult and passionate demands. They would motor-cycle together through the lanes and roads of Hertfordshire, lunch cheerfully at wayside inns, brotherly and sisterly, relapse again into mere boy and girl playfellows, race and climb trees, or, like fellow-students, share their common room amicably, dispute over a multitude of questions, and talk to Oswald. They both had a fair share of scholarly ambition and read pretty hard. They had both now reached the newspaper-reading stage. Peter was beginning to take an interest in politics, he wanted to discuss socialism and economic organization thoroughly; biological work alone among all scientific studies carries a philosophy of its own that illuminates these questions, and Oswald was happy to try over his current interests in the light of these fresh, keen young minds. Peter was a discriminating advocate of the ideas of Guild socialism; Oswald was still a cautious individualist drifting towards Fabianism. The great labour troubles that had followed the Coronation of King George had been necessary to convince him that all was not well with the economic organization of the empire. Hitherto he had taken economic organization for granted; it wasn’t a matter for Sydenhams.

Pelham Ford at such times became a backwater from the main current of human affairs, the current that was now growing steadily more rapid and troubled. Thinking could go on at Pelham Ford. There were still forces in that old-world valley to resist the infection of intense impatience that was spreading throughout the world. The old red house behind its wall and iron gates seemed as stable as the little hills about it; the road and the row of great trees between the stream and the road, the high pathway and the ford and the village promised visibly to endure for a thousand years. It was when Aunt Phyllis or Aunt Phœbe descended upon the place to make a party, “get a lot of young people down and brighten things up,” or when the two youngsters went to London together into the Sheldrick translation of the _Quartier Latin_, or when they met in Cambridge in some crowded chattering room that imagination grew feverish, fierce jealousies awoke, temperaments jarred, and the urge of adolescence had them in its clutch again.

It was during one of these parties at Pelham Ford that Joan was to happen upon two great realizations, realizations of so profound an effect that they may serve to mark the end for her of this great process of emotional upheaval and discovery that is called adolescence. They left her shaped. They came to her in no dramatic circumstances, they were mere conversational incidents, but their effect was profound and conclusive.

In the New Year of 1914 Oswald was to take Peter to Russia for three weeks. Before his departure, Aunt Phœbe had insisted that there should be a Christmas gathering of the young at Pelham Ford. They would skate or walk or toboggan or play hockey by day, and dress up and dance or improvise charades and burlesques in the evening. One or two Sheldricks would come, Peter and Joan could bring down any stray friends who had no home Christmas to call them, and Aunts Phyllis and Phœbe would collect a few young people in London.

The gathering was from the first miscellaneous. Christmas is a homing time for the undergraduates of both sexes, such modern spirits as the home failed to attract used to go in those days in great droves to the Swiss winter sports, and Joan found nobody but an ambitious Scotch girl whom she knew but slightly and Miss Scroby the historian, who was rather a friend for Aunt Phyllis than herself. Peter discovered that Wilmington intensely preferred Pelham Ford to his parental roof, and brought also two other stray men, orphans. This selection was supplemented by Aunt Phœbe, who had latterly made Hetty Reinhart her especial protégée. She descanted upon the obvious beauty of Hetty and upon the courage that had induced Hetty to leave her home in Preston and manage for herself in a great lonely studio upon Haverstock Hill. “The bachelor woman,” said Aunt Phœbe; “armed with a latchkey and her purity. A vote shall follow. Hetty is not one of the devoted yet. But I have my hopes. We need our Beauty Chorus. Hetty shall be our Helen, and Holloway our Troy.”

So with Peter’s approval Hetty was added to the list before Joan could express an opinion, and appeared with a moderate sized valise that contained some extremely exiguous evening costumes, and a steadfast eye that rested most frequently on Peter. In addition Aunt Phœbe brought two Irish sisters, one frivolous, the other just recuperating from the hunger-strike that had ended her imprisonment for window-breaking in pursuit of the Vote, and a very shy youth of seventeen, Pryce, the caddie-poet. Huntley was to constitute a sort of outside element in the party, sharing apartments with young Sopwith Greene the musician, in the village about half a mile away. These two men were to work and keep away when they chose, and come in for meals and sports as they thought fit. At the eleventh hour had come a pathetic and irresistible telegram from Adela Murchison:

Alone Xmas may I come wire if inconvenient.

and she, too, was comprehended.

The vicarage girls were available for games and meals except on Sunday and Christmas Day; there was a friendly family of five sons and two daughters at Braughing, a challenging hockey club at Bishop’s Stortford, and a scratch collection at Newport available by motor-car for a pick-up match if the weather proved, as it did prove, too open for skating.

Oswald commonly stood these Aunt parties for a day or so and then retreated to the Climax Club. Always beforehand he promised himself great interest and pleasure in the company of a number of exceptionally bright and representative youths and maidens of the modern school, but always the actual gathering fatigued him and distressed him. The youths and maidens wouldn’t be representative, they talked too loud, too fast and too inconsecutively for him, their wit was too rapid and hard—and they were all over the house. It was hard to get mental contacts with them. They paired off when there were no games afoot, and if ever talk at table ceased to be fragmentary Aunt Phœbe took control of it. In a day or so he would begin to feel at Pelham Ford like a cat during a removal; driven out of his dear library, which was the only available room for dancing, he would try to work in his unaccustomed study, with vivid, interesting young figures passing his window in groups of two or three, or only too audibly discussing the world, each other, and their general arrangements, in the hall.

His home would have felt altogether chaotic to him but for the presence, the unswerving, if usually invisible, presence of Mrs. Moxton, observing times and seasons, providing copious suitable meals, dominating by means of the gong, replacing furniture at every opportunity, referring with a calm dignity to Joan as the hostess for all the rules and sanctions she deemed advisable. From unseen points of view one felt her eye. One’s consolation for the tumult lay in one’s confidence in this discretion that lay behind it. Even Aunt Phœbe’s way of speaking of “our good Moxton” did not mask the facts of the case. Pelham Ford was ruled. At Pelham Ford even Aunt Phœbe came down to meals in time. At Pelham Ford no fire, once lit, ever went out before it was right for it to do so. You might in pursuit of facetious ends choose to put your pyjamas outside your other clothes, wrap your window curtains about you, sport and dance, and finally, drawn off to some other end, abandon these wrappings in the dining-room or on the settee on the landing. When you went to bed your curtains hung primly before your window again, and your pyjamas lay folded and reproved upon your bed.

The disposition of the new generation to change its clothes, adopt fantastic clothes, and at any reasonable excuse get right out of its clothes altogether, greatly impressed Oswald. Hetty in particular betrayed a delight in the beauties of her own body with a freedom that in Oswald’s youth was permitted only to sculpture. But Adela made no secrets of her plump shoulders and arms, and Joan struck him as insensitive. Skimpiness was the fashion in dress at that time. No doubt it was all for the best, like the frankness of Spartan maidens. And another thing that brought a flavour of harsh modernity into the house was the perpetual music and dancing that raged about it. There was a pianola in the common room of Joan and Peter, but when they were alone at home it served only for an occasional outbreak of Bach, or Beethoven, or Chopin. Now it was in a state of almost continuous eruption. Aunt Phyllis had ordered a number of rolls of dance music from the Orchestrelle library, and in addition she had brought down a gramophone. Never before had music been so easy in the world as it was in those days. In Oswald’s youth music, good music, was the rare privilege of a gifted few, one heard it rarely and listened with reverence. Nowadays Joan could run through a big fragment of the Ninth Symphony, giving a rendering far better than any but a highly skilled pianist could play, while she was waiting for Peter to come to breakfast. And this Christmas party was pervaded with One Steps and Two Steps, pianola called to gramophone and gramophone to pianola, and tripping feet somewhere never failed to respond. Most of these young people danced with the wildest informality. But Hetty and the youngest Irish girl were serious propagandists of certain strange American dances, the Bunny Hug, and the Fox Trot; Sopwith Greene and Adela tangoed and were getting quite good at it, and Huntley wanted to teach Joan an Apache dance. Joan danced by rule and pattern or by the light of nature as occasion required.

The Christmas dinner was at one o’clock, a large disorderly festival. Gavan Huntley and Sopwith Greene came in for it. Oswald carved a turkey, Aunt Phyllis dispensed beef; the room was darkened and the pudding was brought in flaming blue and distributed in flickering flames. Mince-pies, almonds and raisins, Brazil nuts, oranges, tangerines, Carlsbad plums, crystallized fruits and candied peel; nothing was missing from the customary feast. Then came a mighty banging of crackers, pre-war crackers, containing elaborate paper costumes and preposterous gifts. Wilmington ate little and Huntley a great deal, and whenever Joan glanced at them they seemed to be looking at her. Hetty, flushed and excited, became really pretty in a paper cap of liberty, she waved a small tricolour flag and knelt up in her chair to pull crackers across the table; Peter won a paper cockscomb and was moved to come and group himself under her arm and crow as “Vive la France!” The two Irish girls started an abusive but genial argument with Sopwith Greene upon the Irish question. Aunt Phœbe sat near Aunt Phyllis and discoursed on whether she ought to go to prison for the Vote. “I try to assault policemen,” she said. “But they elude me.” One of Peter’s Cambridge friends, it came to light, had been present at a great scene in which Aunt Phœbe had figured. He emerged from his social obscurity and described the affair rather amusingly.

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.”