CHAPTER ONE
JOHN OAKLEY sat at the desk in his bedroom window. It was opened widely, for the August afternoon was bright and warm. It gave a view of sloping lawn, flanked with rhododendrons, and then of a short flight of stone steps that led to a tennis-lawn from which a sound of voices came gay and clear on the windless air. Below that was a small paddock, and then the orchard, and then the hollow of Carford brook. The kitchen garden and the glass-houses lay to the left, and on the right the ground rose to the level at which he sat, and there, behind the rising bank, was a little hidden lawn, closed about with rhododendrons and lilac, laburnum and syringas, and with a little group of pines dividing it from the farther field.
They had made that lawn, Frida and he, when he had bought the place nearly thirty years ago. He had planted most of the trees with his own hands. But the choice had been hers. . . . There had always been tea ready there on the fine afternoons when he had been able to get back from the works in time, and at the weekends. That was before the War. . . . It had not been much used since Frida died.
Now his daughter Nina sat there with the friend she had brought down with her from London. He could hear their voices at times, just a few words, clear and distinct as though they were in the room beside him, and then they would be broken off as though by a disconnecting switch.
It was a peculiarity of that lawn, which was known to all the family, though it was not always remembered. Small as it was, and shadowed by bush and tree, with the falling laurel-crowded bank between it and the larger lawn, it seemed a very quiet and secret place, but it was a curious acoustic fact that the voices of those who sat on its rustic bench would be carried erratically to the windows of the bedroom, which was on the same level, and not so distant as it might seem to be.
John Oakley did not listen. He was occupied with the estimate which he had brought home to complete during the weekend, but for which he would have been outside with the livestock, or in the rose-garden. Neither was he one to listen deliberately to that which he was not intended to hear. Beyond that, he was not greatly interested. He was fond of Nina, as she of him. But she belonged to another world. The world of the youth that had grown up since there had been peace in Europe. The youth that smoked and drank and danced and motored, that talked familiarly of nightclubs and cocktails, and of its right to have a good time. It was particularly clear on that point. A youth which seemed to him at times to be without shame, as it would profess to be without honour. . . . That took its views of life, and its principles of morality, from the harlots of Hollywood. . . . To whom duty was a forgotten word. . . . Probably he was unfair. . . . He was not old in years, but he had been friendless since Frida died. . . . He had lived somewhat apart. . . . He had held his business together through some difficult years. . . . There were the birds, and the roses. . . . Yet he was conscious of falling apart - and behind. He was acquiring the fatal habit of thinking much of the past. Perhaps the first sign of age. Age, not of the body, but of the mind. He was falling out of the ranks. As Nina had said to him at breakfast, not unkindly, but in contemptuous rejection of an opinion he had expressed: "Oh, Father, you're too unsophisticated to be alive." Was her judgement really sounder than his, her experiences more valuable? They were certainly different. . . . He thought again that he might be unfair Probably every generation has such thoughts, as hope is changed for an ended thing, and the vigour of life recedes. Customs fail and recur. We are at home in youth, but we spend our age in the tolerant kindliness of a foreign land. . . .He had to remind himself again that he was not old in years. Only very lonely since Frida died, and tired with the ceaseless effort to hold the business together in these difficult times of high taxation and shortened hours. There was no forty-four-hour week for him. Day and night his mind must be on urgent problems which must be solved successfully if the works were to be kept going, and the weekly wages paid. . . .
He believed that the commercial supremacy of England was failing, if it were not already gone. And those in his position were the leaders of an army that they could no longer control; that had been taught that it must fight without over-exertion, or the risk of wounds; that victory did not matter over-much. There was always the dole. How great might have been the future of the British Commonwealth of Nations, with its vast resources and its empty lands! But, when the battle was at its height, was not every new law passed to restrain activity, to reduce responsibility, to encourage slackness of living? The battle was at its height, and the captains of industry must lead an army that only fought by the clock. . . . He knew that he was becoming unfair again. That this was not all the truth, perhaps not half. . . . And, after all, he believed in his own race, and his own land. Cannot a nation be tired at times, as a man tires? Will it always be foolish, because it falls to a foolish mood? That which is fundamental in character will reassert itself with a gathered strength. . . . If he felt at discord with surrounding circumstance, even with those of his own family, must not the real fault lie in his lack of sympathy, or adaptability? . . . . At worst, it was the common lot. . . . If he should fail, even with his own children, in understanding or tolerant sympathy, it would be no cause for satisfaction, but a plain fault. . . . Nina, too, would grow old into an alien world that would contemn the outlook of her own youth. . . .
Now her voice came clearly through the screening trees: "Oh, my dear! You should take no notice of that. Men are. . . ." The voice broke off abruptly as it had begun. He scarcely heard, regarding it no more than the frequent call of the tennis-score that came from the lower lawn, and it was five minutes later, when he had completed his calculation of the amount of material that would be needed, and was putting the papers aside for a final revision tomorrow afternoon, that Nina's voice came again, as clearly as though she were standing beside him: ". . . . my dear, you don't suppose mother wanted us, do you? Father made her, of course. Why, Aunt Muriel says that Dr. Wilson told him off after Elsie was born, and they had an awful row, and Dr. Wilson refused to come into the. . . ." The voice died again.
For a moment John Oakley sat motionless, listening for the further words that did not come. Then he reached forward, and drew in and fastened the casement-window.
CHAPTER TWO
"NINA, I want to speak to you."
Nina knew that tone, which she did not like. It reminded her too much of long-distant times when she had been brought into the library, at the door of which she now stood, for admonition, or rebuke of some infant! delinquency. Not that she had ever been seriously punished. But she was sensitive at atmosphere. She had always liked to be popular and approved. As a child, a word of displeasure from either parent would make her miserable till the cloud lifted. And she had not often experienced such an incident. She had been obedient to her parents, and a good elder sister to the younger children, in a careless, good-humoured way. If she had done things of which her parents disapproved, she had always been considerate enough to do them quietly, so that their feelings should not be hurt. At least, that had been while her mother lived. Laterly among! her London friends - well, her father had to know, more or I less, and he didn't make as much trouble as you might have supposed he would. But, really, he was so unobservant, so unsophisticated, that it was always difficult to know how much he did know. Anyway, he was a back number. The modern world's different, and you have to do what others to round you. You simply have to.
"Yes, Father," she said, with a hand still on the door, in the half-affectionate, half-flippant tone which was her defensive armour against such emergencies. "I hope it won't take long. The car's. . . ."
"It won't take long, but the car will have to wait a few minutes. . . . Come and sit down. I want to talk to you about your mother. . . . I accidentally overheard something that you were saying to Pauline this afternoon on the lawn."
Nina Oakley flushed easily. She had had a noticeably fair and beautiful complexion as a child, and now that she was twenty-seven, though her skin was somewhat damaged by cosmetics, and slightly coarsened by alcohol, it still reflected her feelings with an honesty which did not always please her. She looked uncomfortable enough as she took the chair opposite her father before the empty fireplace without further protest.
"What did your aunt really say?"
Nina felt slightly relieved by this question. If it were only a matter of having repeated what someone else had said. . . . And probably father hadn't heard more than a few words. . . . And, after all, Aunt Muriel had said it, and a good deal more, too, which she hadn't repeated to Pauline, for no particular reason, except that it hadn't occurred to her to do so. Nina's confidential or confessional moods were not frequent, but when they came over her they were without limit or restraint, and the one who was with her at the time would get the benefit of the lot.
"Aunt Muriel? She didn't mean anything really. I told her that I didn't suppose you could afford it. Mother often told me how little money you had about the time when Alwyn was born."
Joan Oakley saw that he was hooking something for which he had not cast his line. He said: "Couldn't afford what?" Nina realized that she was giving the wrong answer also. Unfortunately, she had gone too far to retreat. To invent a plausible alternative to the truth at this urgency was beyond her power. "Auntie said that Mother was in agony all night while you drove an old pony into Hunnerton for Dr. Wilson, because you wouldn't pay for a taxi."
"That is the kind of thing your aunt would say. Did you believe it?"
"I knew it was true about the pony, because Mother'd told me about that. But I said I knew you'd done the best you could. I told Auntie that I knew you hadn't got much money then."
"What did she say to that?"
"She said then. . . . Mother oughtn't to have had Alwyn at all."
"I see I don't really mind about that tale. If you'd thought for a moment you'd have seen how silly it was. If I'd waited for a taxi, I should have had to wait five or ten years. . . . But I was not asking you about that. What is the tale about Dr. Wilson when Elsie was born?"
"If you heard it, it's no use saying it over again. It's only what Aunt Muriel said. . . . I'm sorry I told Pauline. . . . Of course, I know people look on those things differently from how they did then."
"Then you believed your aunt's tale?"
"I only know what she said. . . . I daresay Auntie said more than was true."
"It was not a case of saying more than was true. It was an utter malicious imagination. No such quarrel or conversation ever occurred. It is a lie of a particularly poisonous kind, because Dr. Wilson is dead, and it would be impossible to disprove it, except for one fact that your aunt has overlooked. At the time that Elsie was born, Dr. Wilson was in Italy recovering from a long illness, and neither then nor later did your mother have her at all."
"Well, I'm sorry, Father I think Auntie ought to be more careful. I only repeated what she'd told me that she knew herself. I know I say things I shouldn't when I get talking. I'll tell Pauline it isn't true."
She spoke with regret, but was not seriously troubled. It was bad luck that her father had overheard, but it was not anything that mattered much, one way or other. Old-fashioned people did do old-fashioned things before the years of modern enlightenment, and, except for something to talk about, what did they matter now? People hadn't understood then that they oughtn't to have children unless they were sure that they'd be able to send them to the best schools, and even then they ought to think of whether they wanted to travel or whether it might do their looks any harm. And she had a rather vague idea that they hadn't known how to stop them coming, even if they hadn't wanted them (as, of course, they didn't really) except in crude or dangerous ways. She had no doubt that she was more "sophisticated" - a word to which she attached a curiously narrow meaning - than her mother had been at her age. But it was bad luck that her father had heard.
"Well, if that's all, Father, I'll be getting off. I can't say more than I'm sorry. I'll tell Pauline. I'll tell Auntie, too, when I see her. She ought to be more careful of what she says."
"I don't think it will be much good saying anything to your aunt. But that isn't all. I don't really mind these things that are said about myself. It is the slander about your mother. . . ."
Nina Oakley stared at her father in a bewildered astonishment. She was conscious that she would never willingly have said anything detrimental to her mother's memory, and she was absolutely unaware of having done anything of the kind. More than that, she was quite sure she had not.
"About Mother? Father! You know I wouldn't. Besides I don't think anything. There's nothing I could say. . . . You must have thought you heard something that wasn't said."
"I heard you say that your mother did not want her children."
"Oh, that." She answered with a mingling of surprise and relief in her voice. "Well, of course, I didn't mean anything. I didn't mean after we were born. I know what a good mother she was. I only meant she couldn't have wanted us beforehand. There's nothing in that. I don't suppose most mothers do. I know I shouldn't. You couldn't go anywhere."
John Oakley looked at his daughter. She had been a good; affectionate child. He had been a good father to her. They had had their times of confidence, of close understanding, in earlier years. There was real love on both sides, which might show a hidden strength if a test should come. But he saw that there was a gulf of misunderstanding which he could not bridge. . . . There were things that he could say, but were they worth saying? It might be no better than if he spoke in a foreign tongue. But Nina was showing signs again that she was impatient to go. If he did not speak now, he might never do so again.
He said: "I don't think you could easily understand how your mother would have felt if she had heard what you said. There is probably nothing of which you could accuse her in the whole category of crime which would have surprised or hurt her more. . . . Thinking it over, I was almost glad she was dead."
"Well, Father, I'm sorry. I can't say more."
Nina was out of the room a, last. It was a beastly mess, father overhearing like that. And all about nothing, too. Of course, she wouldn't say anything against her mother. Tears almost rose to her eyes at the thought. But Father was so sentimental. It had been quite uncomfortable. She had a half-articulate, half-resentful feeling that he had acted indecently. Old people must have feelings, of course; but they shouldn't show them to embarrass the young. The ones who really matter.
"I say, you folk, I've been hindered. I'm coming now. You were sports to wait."
CHAPTER THREE
THE routines of life dominate the mind as the years pass, though not equally so with all, and it changes gear with an increasing smoothness to adjust itself to their requirements. It was three days later before John Oakley found himself with the leisure and in the mood of mind to give further thought to the conversation which he had overheard.
He was home somewhat earlier than usual, intending to have some time in his garden before dinner. He came to the quiet loneliness of a house from which his daughter, and the weekend guests, had departed: the smooth service of which seemed to him at times to isolate him more utterly than had he waited upon himself in a more literal solitude.
Nina had caught an early train on Monday morning to resume her secretarial duties in London, where she earned, as she told her father, three guineas weekly for dealing with the correspondence and arranging the interviews of a nerve-specialist in Hanover Square. She was in good spirits, having (as she told Pauline when they parted on the Euston platform) "touched Father for a tenner". - A cheque given with an inward reluctance, from a bank account which was sufficiently strained already, and upon which his other children might have equal or greater claims which they were less quick to urge; and yet with an outward willingness, for it was natural to him to give when he was asked, and he knew well enough that Nina would make no effort to live at the scale of the salary that she earned. Even with the money she had from him, he was puzzled at times to understand how she could spend so freely. . . .
There were two letters by the afternoon post when he got home that day; one from his son Alwyn, and one from his daughter Frida - now Frida Lawson, married at eighteen to journalist of twice her age, and with two children at twenty-four, and a hope of a third which was, as yet, too indefinite for advertisement.
Alwyn's letter was opened first, for he was not one to write to that address without some exceptional occasion. His business letters were addressed to the works, and Frida wrote every week, with a woman's facility. It said:
39a Addison Road,
W.6
(Early Wednesday morning).
Dear Father,
I promised you I'd let you know when I thought I'd met the right girl, and I think I have, and I hope you'll be pleased, though I know there are one or two things that you'd wish had been different. I suppose we can't expect to have everything.
I'm sure you'll like her herself, and that's the most important thing, isn't it? Her name's Joy Carfix. It's a queer name, and she says it was once French, and has got altered. She isn't French herself, of course. But she's been at a Convent in Normandy for the last seven years, and has just come home to live with her uncle at Treswick. I went there last weekend, and met her first in the train before we knew we were going to the same place. I haven't told her yet how I feel, because it did seem a bit quick, and I'd half-promised to tell you first, but I've got a feeling that it will come right when I do. It isn't conceit. But I feel differently about her from what I've ever done about anyone else, and I think she feels the same.
It's no good trying to tell you what she's like, but can I bring her next Sunday or the Sunday after? I don't think her uncle would refuse, if you wrote to him, but you'll know how we ought to go about that. He's Richard Corchester, Esq., The Grange, Treswick. (They call it Cawster. I expect you know that). But I want you to see her, and I don't want to lose any time. I don't want anyone to get first. You'll understand when you see her.
I know you won't like her religion being what it is, but she can't help that, can she? We can't have everything. You've always told me that.
Please write when you get this, and fix it up this Saturday if you can. There isn't overmuch time, but a wire or two might help. Don't stop to write back to me first, because we can't talk till you've seen what she's like, and she seems to think I ought to get your consent before we begin to fix anything up, and of course I want to know that you like her. But I know that's a sure thing, because everyone does.
Affec.
Alwyn.
P.S. Please send me a line tonight if you get this in time, or wire in the morning, to let me know what you're doing. I'm ringing her up at one, and I can get it fixed if I know.
It was evident to John Oakley that if Alwyn hadn't "told her yet" he had arrived at a very intimate understanding with this weekend acquaintance, whom he was so sure to like, and who had some qualities which her attractions were to be sufficient to overcome. Of course, she must be asked. There was plenty of time before the evening post. He put the letter aside, his mind mildly but pleasantly excited by the shadow of romance, the approach of unexpected incident that it brought. . . . He opened the other letter.
Birchett's Wood End,
Bucks.
My dear Father,
If you can do with us so soon after last month, I'm coming on Friday morning, bringing the children. Of course, I know you can, and we can't afford to go to Westgate again, but I know Mrs. Case likes to know first. Please tell her that we shall be in time for lunch. We shall come on the train that gets in at 12.42. Chester won't come till the evening, as he's gone to Liverpool till then, something about a shipping company that's winding up, and there's to be a meeting, and they are expecting a row, and Dixon wants a special report. That's really why he's away now, but it's about the usual thing that he doesn't want to come back. It's Field & Fletcher again. We may be able to come back by the next Friday. The man's coming this afternoon, and then I shall find out. Chester says if he can dish them this time it will carry it over the vacation, and Berryman's can have the money. I mean, if it comes in. He's sold a serial to a weekly paper for £120, but he doesn't know when they pay. But, anyway, he doesn't mean Field & Fletcher to have it. It's something they call a J.S., and he doesn't want to be in.
Christine is well, and so is Peter, though I thought she'd have caught a cold yesterday. Chester was up at four to catch the early train, and he saw her in the garden with nothing on. She'd gone down to find one of her cardboard dollies that she'd left out; or, at least, that was what she told Chester. You know what Peter is. I think it was because she heard Chester say that the loganberries were best picked in the early morning. But it may have been both.
I shall be rather glad for them to come because Mrs. Potter says that the children have got measles in the cottages in Richett's Lane, and you can't go to the wood without passing them, unless you go nearly two miles round and it's too far for anyone pushing the pram on a hot day. . . .
The letter went on for three pages, but we need not follow it further. It showed Frida in her usual cheerful, practical, matter-of-course attitude to the events of life, adjusting herself with a minimum of friction even to the needless financial embarrassments of the last two years, and Chester's unconventional method of facing them - or, perhaps, facing is not quite the word, though a contrary one would be equally inappropriate. He made strategic moves to the rear.
Well, her father was glad that they were coming again. He was always glad to have Frida, and the children brightened the house. He smiled in recollection of an incident of the visit of a month ago, when Peter had forbidden him the use of his own bed, where her twenty-seven dolls, cardboard and other, had been put to rest in two long rows at head and foot. . . . He liked talking to Chester also - listening to him for the most part. Yes, of course, they could come. It scarcely needed to be said, but he wrote that the house would be vacant, except that Alwyn would be coming, and probably a girl friend. He wrote briefly to Alwyn also, to let him know that he was "fixing it up", in his son's phrase. He must see Miss Carfix first. There could be little to say till then. He wrote more ceremoniously to Mr. Corchester, pausing first in a brief doubt as to whether he would not do better to write to the girl herself. These are not ceremonious days. But Alwyn had met the people, and should be best able to judge. It should be as he asked.
But when the letters were written, and had been sent to the post, and he had eaten his solitary and rather early dinner, he found that his mind would not settle upon the problems presented by the author of The Yellow Hand. He read on in a cursory mechanical way, making little effort to solve the enigma of who had committed the three murders, and was only mildly interested when he discovered that the two last had been perpetrated by the apparent victim of the first, who came to life again in the last chapter. His mind wandered continually, by some trick of association, from the news in his son's letter to the romance of his own youth, and to the wife that he had buried seven years ago in a grave that he had no will to visit again till he should be laid in it himself.
. . .He thought of the first year of his marriage, when he had been earning not much more than two pounds a week. He had had no happier time. . . . Of course, two pounds was more then than it was now. . . . But there was no lack of money today, for the things that people will have. . . . No lack of petrol and tobacco. People grudged it only for their children's lives. . . . That was not entirely fair. Not entirely true. But all his thoughts were tinged, all his recollections fouled, by the words that he had overheard three days ago. . . . Of course, there was no radical difference in the nature or the ways of men.
Even in those early unsullied days of his own marriage he had vaguely known that such vices existed. But they had had little objective reality. . . . It had been three years, or nearly that, before Nina was born. It had seemed to Frida and him in their inexperienced youth a very wonderful, rather sacred thing. Nina had been a child of loving and very lovable ways. Suppose at that time her mother could have fore-heard the words that had come to him last Sunday afternoon? In those first days, in her passionate pride and love for her first-born child. . . . He remembered that when Nina was born, they had advertised the fact in the Hunnerton papers, a custom more general then than it now is. And subsequently there had been circulars from illicit manufacturers of contraceptives, and he had shown them to Frida, and they had looked at them as something curious and unclean, and thrown them on the fire together. It had never crossed his mind that they should touch such things with their own hands - with their own thoughts. Nor, he was very sure, had it occurred to her, or it would have been said at once. They had been too intimate, too frank, for the thought to have been left unsaid. It would have been impossible for such a thing to have intruded into the atmosphere of their own lives. Of course, there had been times when the full joy of marriage had been frustrated by illness or weakness. Once for a long time. . . . But they had never thought of such resorts as those. . . . Yet he would not be unfair. . . . There must be many thousands today whose lives were lived simply and honourably; who met the high cost of the necessities of life, and the pressure of merciless taxation, with industry and self-sacrifice. Who gave battle to the cruelty of circumstance, rather than buy its clemency with the danegeld of the childless home. . . . And there must have been many in the earlier days, perhaps with less excuse, who bought their pleasure at the modern price, or what had those circulars meant? . . . Only there was the difference that the vice that had slunk past, as though aware of its own foulness, was now shameless and unafraid, bold even in the assertion of its own baseness. . . . Assemblies of Anglican bishops had done it homage in cowardly equivocal words; abashed to bless, and yet afraid to curse it. . . .
He wandered out into the garden, and to the orchard beyond, but the memory of the old days was upon him, and everything on which he looked had its own suggestion of word or incident, of things that were dead for ever, except as far as they remained in his own mind, where they must stir at times to a momentary resurrection, not knowing but that it might be their final consciousness. What is more desolately doomed than a memory which was dearly shared with one who no longer lives?
He went upstairs to his own room, conscious that he had stayed out somewhat too long. He could not endure the increasing chilliness of even a summer evening such as this, without risk of illness, since he had been wounded at Bethune. An undignified abdominal wound, of which he did not speak. There had been nothing romantic, nothing picturesque, in his short military experience.
He unlocked a drawer of old papers and letters, and of the diaries that Frida had kept intermittently from her schooldays. It was not as full as it once had been. He would go over it at times, and always end with the reluctant destruction of something that he did not wish to survive him - something that should not fall even into his children's hands.
But he had never felt the impulse of destruction as he did now. Those chance-heard heedless words had made real to him, as nothing had done before, the isolation of the past. Soon the empty grate was filled with papers that he no longer ought to keep, but only to cover away from unsympathetic, uncomprehending eyes. He left little but the children's letters that his wife had kept. They were written by yet-living hands. They could remain. But, for the rest, let the dead bury their dead. He might die at any time, and he would be the more content that he had left no records of what was private to himself and to one who was already dead. He cared nothing that he destroyed evidences which would have rejected the slander that he had overheard. Let them think as they would. . . . As a million others must have done before him through the slow hours of night, he read on, letter by letter, and closed each memory from the sacrilege of alien eyes with the finality of the protecting fire.
CHAPTER FOUR
FRIDA LAWSON came on Friday with her two children; Christine, whose fifth birthday had been a week ago, a brown-haired girl, with quiet happy eyes, keeping near her mother for the most part, and somewhat maternal in attitude to a sister fifteen months younger. If we look longer at this younger sister we only do what is the common occupation of those around her. You might love Peter or not as you pleased - she would be unlikely to concern herself whether you did or not, unless you should get in her way - but she was not one who could be ignored. She was a child of innocent wide blue eyes, of fine-gold curls, of a delicately-dimpled chin, and with a delusive aspect of fragility which came from her small-featured face, and was not supported by an inappeasable appetite, and a tireless energy both of mind and body. The emotions she excited in those around her were somewhat varied, with the one monotonous circumstance that she was never overlooked for long.
Today her conduct had been of a perfection which a child of two or three years will very seldom attempt and will attain even less frequently. Quiet, polite, and smiling, she had seemed incapable of any evil thing. Since last night, when a nearly-tearful Christine had gone to her mother with small red tooth-marks on her arm, and Peter, being interrogated, had replied with a disarming smile: "I don't know whether I been naughty or not, but I did bite Christie's arm," she had had an immaculate record. . . . And with this record still unflawed, her mother put her to bed at last in the night-nursery always kept ready for these frequent visits, and left her sitting up in her dressing-gown with her dolls around her - Christine, quietly tired from a day of travel, and quietly happy to have come to the house which she loved to visit, being already sleeping in a bed at the other side of the room. And Frida Lawson, feeling that the cares of the day were over, went down to dinner to meet her father, somewhat later than usual in coming home, and her husband, who had arrived on the evening train.
. . .Chester Lawson, a long lean man, with a thin brown face, and brown humorous eyes, was in the midst of an anecdote which is best left at the start, for it was not destined to end, when his musically-inflected drawl was interrupted by his first-born's voice, and Christine stood white-robed in the doorway. "Mother, I wish you'd speak to Peter. She won't let me sleep. She says I'm to sing to her red baby-dolly, and I am so tired."
Her mother rose at once. Going to Peter was so frequent a part of the evening routine. She came back in a few moments, her manner having somewhat less than its usual placidity. "Chester," she said, "if you've finished, I wish you'd come to speak to Peter. She won't take any notice of me. . . . I've got to change everything on the bed." She did not really expect that Peter's father would have more influence than herself, but she regarded it as a proper family procedure to call for a father's intervention in domestic emergencies.
Peter, clad in a light-blue dressing-gown which buttoned at the back in such a way as to make it as difficult as possible for her to get out of it, sat demurely on the edge of her sister's bed, watching her mother and Mrs. Case remaking her own from the resources of the airing-cupboard, her expression only changing to a sudden excited protest if a careless foot or a Ricked sheet should threaten the safety of the seven members of her innumerable family who now lay in a row on the floor with only a shawl to cover them.
She greeted her father with a confident happy smile, and opened the conversation with the swift obliquity which was her usual first line of defence in such emergencies.
"My red baby-dolly had a bad pain."
"I didn't come up to talk to you about a doll. Mother told me that you'd been a very naughty girl. I can't think how at your age. . . ."
"I very happy with my father and my mother," she suggested diplomatically.
"Then you shouldn't give your mother so much trouble. I'm afraid you'll have to have a really bad punishment this time."
Peter studied the unrelaxing severity of her father's face. "I don't like this con'ersation," she said definitely.
"Then you shouldn't do such things. I can't understand how you could when you were wide awake, and in grand-father's house, too. I'm afraid we shall have to give you a punishment that will make you remember."
She looked at her father with reproachful eyes. "We mustn't talk now. My red baby-dolly's had a bad pain, and she's just going to sleep."
"Then I shall put her into mother's room till I've finished talking to you."
For the first time a look of real alarm crossed the innocence of the baby face. Quick hands clutched at the invalid that had been lying on the bed beside her.
"Sorry," she said hurriedly. "I won't do it again. I won't do it again ever." She gave a side-glance at her mother, to judge the prospects of appeal in that direction, should her father persist in this dreadful threat of removing her offspring.
"I very happy with my mother and my father," she repeated desperately.
"But we're not happy with you, Peter. You make mother very miserable," Frida interposed. "It's no use saying you won't do such a thing again. Your father's talking about you having done it now. You must answer him properly if you don't want him to take Beryl away."
"It isn't Beryl, it's Mary Ann."
"Then if you don't want Mary Ann to be taken away."
"I couldn't get my feet cold on the bare floor, so I said 'Escoose me', and wet the bed."
"Nonsense, Peter," her father answered severely. "The floor isn't cold at all."
That was true. Even linoleum is not unpleasantly cold on a warm August evening, but both her parents recognized the full subtlety of this defence. It was only four mornings ago that she had been admonished severely as to the danger of cold bare feet, when she had been found in the garden at four a.m.; and there was a carpet on the floor of her bedroom.
"I think we'd better say that you'll have nothing but dry bread for breakfast."
She looked at her father with doubtful eyes. She thought the worst moment was past. There had been an occasion when she had met the same threat with a bland, "I like dry bread, I'll have dry bread two mornings," but the sequel had not been such as to tempt her to repeat that riposte. "I don't like grape-nuts," she ventured non-committally.
"You know you don't like dry bread, Peter," her mother answered, "and you don't like to give mother this trouble, or Mrs. Case. You'd been such a good girl today."
"I sorry, Mother." There was a genuine and angelic penitence in tone and face, which passed into a brisker manner as she added: "If my red baby-dolly wets the bed, I smack her hard."
"But, Peter," her mother expostulated, "we don't smack you when you're naughty. You should talk to her, and try to make her a better girl." Peter saw the crisis was over. Laughter gurgled in her throat as she answered firmly: "I smack my red baby-dolly hard, if she wets the bed."
Christine, a silent absorbed spectator of her sister's skirmish with authority, lifted head from pillow to speak for the first time. "I never smack Jezebel. Peter's always smacking her dolls. Peter's dolls have always got pains. She doesn't feed them at all some days."
It was true that Peter's dolls had a lively and precarious existence, in contrast to the monotony with which Jezebel was washed and fed and put to rest. But the cherished Jezebel was an only child. Christine was not a believer in large families.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE children were allowed to have breakfast with their grandfather and parents. It was not an early meal, John Oakley having adopted the post-War practice of staying at home on Saturdays. He came in from the garden at the sound of the breakfast gong as Peter was being lifted on to her chair, and gleefully informing the maid who did it: "Ada, I been a dreadfully naughty girl. I having dry bread."
Peter's table manners were incalculable. Liable to be of a kind which would shock a Zulu, they were about equally likely to be of a standard which made her family appear boorish around her. On this occasion she had given hostages to fortune, having promised six of her dollies that they could have breakfast with her because they hadn't got up before they were told to, and knowing that her mother's permission to lay them in a row beyond her plate at the end of the table was dependant upon her promise to set them such example as a parent should. (The others had been of such deplorable conduct that they were thrown into a heap in a corner of the nursery floor, with no prospect of any breakfast at all. Jezebel had been dressed and washed and fed, and was now back in her cradle, sleeping peacefully, as a baby should.)
"Gran'father," she informed him happily, "I been dreadfully naughty. I got to have dry bread for breakfus." She commenced to eat it with good appetite.
"Frida," Chester remarked, surveying the row of dolls, "we made a mistake when we named those children. It's Peter who ought to have been Christine. You know Owen Seaman's To Christine.
"Christine," her mother said, "why didn't you put on your other dress? I told you not to wear that again till I'd mended it under the sleeve."
"I won't trouble you with the rest."
"Sorry, Mother, I forgot," Christine said absently. Unlike her mother, she had a habit of listening when her father talked. Her mother listened only when they were by themselves - or, of course, when he talked about anything that mattered, which was less often than not.
"He's the editor of Punch, isn't he?" Mr. Oakley inquired. He was not deficient in humour, but he often found it difficult to tell whether Chester were serious. He wished Frida wouldn't be so unresponsive when her husband was talking. But Chester never seemed to mind. He knew that they understood each other in their own ways. But he had missed the joke on this occasion. He was not sure that he ought not to have laughed.
"Yes," Chester answered, "it's in an old Punch Annual. But it isn't comic. Of course there's 'my future lies behind my back.' That's rather neat. Seaman always is. But he's naturally quite a serious poet. Only, he once wrote some amazingly good parodies, and he was never able to change his clothes afterwards. The British public objects to any man doing that while it's looking on."
"Isn't it today that Elsie's coming back from the Westcotts?" Frida inquired of her father.
"Yes." That was so. Elsie, her younger sister, had been spending the first part of her vacation with a college friend. She was intending to enter the teaching profession through the avenue of a brilliantly-won scholarship and a training-college. She was a strenuous young woman, both in work and play. There would be incessant tennis on the lawn, and incessant talk at the table. Frida was glad she was coming home. She liked the tennis, and was indifferent to the talk. She said: "I wonder whether Miss Carfix plays?"
They were interrupted by the sound of the telephone-bell in the library, which adjoined the breakfast-room. "I expect it's something from the office," Mr. Oakley said, as he rose.
He came back in a few moments, looking somewhat worried, but with something of the more alert manner and decisive tone which had been habitual in earlier years, and were liable to be resumed before any need of action or confronting difficulty.
"Frida," he said, "I've got to go down to the office. I shan't be long away. Let Perkins know he's to bring the car round at once. Miss Carfix is due at 3.20. Of course, she must be met. But I shall be back long before that. You may expect me for lunch. Alwyn will be on the same train."
"He didn't say anything in his letter - " Frida began.
"No. But he will. . . . Chester, I want just a word with you before I go."
The two men passed into the library together. "I just wanted to be sure that there's no more trouble than usual," the older man said, as the door closed.
"There's no trouble at all."
"Well, I'm glad to know. It might have been rather awkward at the moment, but you know if it were really needed - - "
"Yes, I know that. But I shouldn't ever let your money go into their pockets. It's good of you to ask, all the same. . . .. Of course, if Frida'd been different, it might have been a hell of a mess, but, as it is, it always seems more or less of a joke."
"Well, I'm glad there's nothing special."
John Oakley was a business man. He could not look at things with his son-in law's eyes. He cared nothing for social prestige, but his financial reputation was a precious thing. Now he was on the way to his office in response to a message that there was a disquieting letter from the bank, and the cashier had hesitated to present the wages-cheque without first informing him of it. He could not have faced Chester's financial crisis in Chester's way, and yet his son-in-law's attitude, with its cool logical honesty, and contemptuous indifference to the conventions of commercial life, may have been of subconscious value in giving an added tone of confidence to the morning's negotiations, which were to be even more difficult than he anticipated.
CHAPTER SIX
EXPLANATIONS are tedious, and a good tale should not look backward, but go ahead. Yet an explanation must be given, and it will be best to get it over at once, and as shortly as it can be made, while Chester is scribbling a leading article for the Morning Chronicle on the little lawn where Nina had talked so carelessly a week ago, and Christine's mother is mending that slit under the arm, and Peter had been persuaded to reluctant sleep with promise of excitements to come in the afternoon, and is lying in cherubic innocence among a litter of dolls, including three that have been restored to a precarious favour, and John Oakley is sitting in a bank-manager's private room.
Two years ago, Chester Lawson had found himself heir to the estate of a cousin younger than himself, who had been killed in the usual modern manner, and who had left him his entire possessions, with the exception of some legacies of (as it seemed) comparatively small amount.
Basil Lawson had been a merchant doing a moderate turnover, mainly on the Australian market. The lorry had run over him in the course of its routine progression. It had not been going at more than twenty-eight miles an hour, which its driver described as ten, according to the numerical conventions applicable to such incidents, and a coroner's jury were unanimous in exonerating him, five of them having driving licences, and knowing that they were under a constant liability to similar annoyances. It had distributed his brains on the smooth surface of the road without allowing him any interval for adjusting his affairs, or explaining them to those who would take control. He was believed to be a man of substantial means.
Chester was not too indifferent to money to receive the news of his inheritance with satisfaction. But on investigating the position, he found no evidences of the reputed wealth outside the business itself. He had to face the question of continuing or closing it down. The manager, a Mr. Henry Tibbetts, had been emphatic in recommending its continuance. He agreed that it would yield little if it were broken up. But as a going concern - Do you value a racehorse by the amount of meat on its bones? He pointed to the very considerable sums which Mr. Basil Lawson had drawn out of it during recent years. There appeared to be no doubt about that. How he had spent the money subsequently was less clear, and less relevant. Would Mr. Tibbetts be prepared to continue to manage it? Yes, for a reasonable increase of salary, Mr. Tibbetts would. In fact, Mr. Tibbetts did. He managed it for nine or ten months, at the end of which time he had managed to produce a position which was no longer manageable. Mr. Tibbetts went.
Chester Lawson lacked both the experience and inclination to take over the control of the business. He lacked the commercial knowledge which might have enabled an energetic man to steer it clear of the shoals to which it had drifted. He consulted the accountant who had dealt with its affairs in his cousin's time. He instructed him to take temporary charge, and to prepare a report. The report was promptly made, and was a decisive document. It blamed Mr. Tibbetts, who seemed to have lost his head when placed in control, and the continent of Australia, which appeared to have mislaid its prosperity. Mr. Tibbetts had bought too much, and sold too little. Worse than that, he had sold to those who were unlikely to pay. Without fresh capital, the business could not be continued. Capable management was equally necessary. If both these could be provided, the business might recover - or it might not. The depression on the Australian market might be prolonged. The accountant, a man destitute of imagination, but with the ability of a cool precision, on being interviewed, advised closing it down. Chester Lawson was inclined to like the idea. The last Balance Sheet had shown assets of £10,000, against liabilities that were £7,000 less. It was true that he had withdrawn about £2,000 (which was an additional reason for the present shortness of capital) to discharge the legacies, and to satisfy the claims of taxation. Still, £5,000 is a useful sum. How soon could the business be realized?
Mr. Birkett pondered. "I don't think," he said, choosing his words carefully, "that, if I were you, I should anticipate any considerable surplus on a forced realization. It might be the other way."
It had been the other way. Chester learnt that the late manager had shown a true perception of the position on at least one occasion - that on which he had used the metaphor of the meat on the horse's bones.
The incidents which followed are outside the direct course of this narrative, and can only be briefly indicated, though an analysis of them would illuminate much of the comedies of commerce and of humanity. There was some effort to sell the business of B. Lawson & Co. as a going concern, which failed owing to the depression in Australian trade, and the quantity and nature of the stock which Mr. Tibbetts had accumulated. This negotiation led to a rumour that it was in financial difficulties, which reached one of its largest creditors, who rang up the Foreign and General Trade Protection Society, who philanthropically collected his debts without any charge to himself, and asked them to get in this one immediately. Mr. Sinkwell, the manager of the F. & G.T.P.S., rang up the solicitors to the F. & G.T.P.S. and asked them to issue a writ. (The F. & G.T.P.S. did not expect to receive any of the resulting costs, because it would be illegal for it to do so. It lived on air.) Having scrupulously allowed his first client twenty-four hours' start, Mr. Sinkwell rang up a number of other firms which, from the curious records that his office contained, he knew to have dealings with Basil Lawson & Co., and said that he was "acting for other creditors in this matter," and might he do so for them also? Within a fort-night he was in a position to wreck the business. Basil Lawson & Co. was understood to be dying, and, as vultures drop from a clear sky, the medical and surgical specialists and undertakers gathered to receive their fees.
Mr. Birkett, C.A., recognized the position without expressing surprise or any other emotion. He advised a Deed of Assignment, with Mr. Sinkwell as Trustee. He explained frankly that he should have liked to have been Trustee himself, but that Mr. Sinkwell was too strong. If that gentleman were not Trustee himself, Mr. Chester Lawson might be confronted with the unpleasant ordeal of bankruptcy.
Chester Lawson became difficult. He said that he hoped that the business, at the worst, would realize sufficient to pay the creditors, and, in any event, he intended to do so; but he saw no occasion for filling Mr. Sinkwell's pocket.
Mr. Birkett was patient in explanation. He saw no occasion for paying the creditors in full. In view of the circumstances of the case, they were not likely to show any hostile feeling. He understood that his client had no other property, except his journalistic income? Very well. An assignment of the business assets should meet the case, Mr. Sinkwell assenting. If Mr. Sinkwell were Trustee, he would most certainly assent. Otherwise not.
Chester Lawson was not a business man, but he was accustomed to the discovery of facts, and to their valuation. He saw the position clearly enough, with the obstacles of inexperience, but with the advantage of novelty.
He said that he would never sign anything which would be to Mr. Sinkwell's gain. He was determined that that individual should not profit by the crisis which he had engineered. Mr. Birkett told him that he had really no choice. If the business were forced into bankruptcy, Mr. Sinkwell would still be elected Trustee. The programme was inevitable. So many hundreds of pounds for Mr. Sinkwell; so many shillings in the pound for the creditors: so much discredit for Mr. Lawson: and in twelve months the whole matter would be forgotten, and Mr. Sinkwell's teeth would be scraping on other bones.
Chester Lawson had taken this reverse of expected fortune so equably, had shown so little excitement of voice and manner in Mr. Birkett's office, that that experienced professional gentleman did not feel serious doubt that his advice would be taken, however unwelcome it might have been on a first hearing, but he found that his client would not be moved from his decision. He would pay his debts (as far as he could) without Mr. Sinkwell's assistance. He gave battle in his own way.
He obtained the assistance of a friendly solicitor, to whom he had once done a service for which he had expected no return. He asked him to delay the various legal attacks which were being made upon him under Mr. Sinkwell's able direction. Mr. Percival Hatchett proved to be the right man for the emergency, though he had been somewhat discouraging at the first interview. He was of an habitual and even unscrupulous loyalty to his friends and clients. He took up every case that entered his office with an unhesitating belief that he represented integrity, and that the other side ought to get what was coming to it, and probably a bit more.
Yet he looked somewhat gloomily upon the first and largest of the writs that were laid before him.
"I can enter an appearance, of course," he said, "but I don't suppose I can hold it up more than about ten days if I do. Not unless you're prepared to pay the cash into court." He spoke mysteriously about the disastrous consequences of a Summons under Order XIV.
Then he brightened somewhat to ask if Mr. Lawson were quite sure that there wasn't any defence. Mr. Lawson admitted that he hadn't considered the point. He had assumed that Field & Fletcher wouldn't issue a writ unless the account were owing.
"You just go back," Mr. Hatchett replied more cheerfully, "and look up every scrap of paper about these transactions, and send them round here. You don't know that the account's due for payment. You don't know that you owe it at all."
After that there were consultations, and affidavits, and the expected "Summons under Order XIV", and an adjournment of it. There really did seem to be a doubt as to whether Mr. Fletcher had not been somewhat too impetuous in assumption that the whole account was due when the rumour of failure had first disturbed his mind. Finally, there was the afternoon when Mr. Hatchett returned in triumph from the court with the news that he had obtained "unconditional leave to defend," which meant, in plain words, that Mr. Lawson could not be forced to pay £300 for some months to come, and would then have the pleasure of paying anything up to £600, if he should be able to do so.
And meanwhile Chester Lawson had not been idle. A too-hurried auction sale had disposed of Mr. Tibbetts's deplorable stock for an even more deplorable price: Mr. Birkett had found a firm of Eastern merchants who wished to extend their operations to the Australian market, and who would purchase the book-debts for something more than they would be likely to realize, if the goodwill were included. At the end of three weeks, Chester was in the interesting position of having about £3,000 in the bank, and a list of creditors' accounts amounting to £4,368 3s. 9½d. very neatly written out by one of Mr. Birkett's clerks, on the table before him.
This was in Mr. Hatchett's office. Mr. Birkctt was there also. They held council of war. The professional gentlemen concurred in the advice they gave.
Mr. Lawson demurred. He wished to make liberal provision for their own costs. (There were no objections to that.) Then he wanted them to divide the money pro rata between the creditors, sending the cheques to them rather than to their professional representatives, and without reference to any legal proceedings which might be commenced.
Mr. Hatchett was sorry he could not undertake that. It was futile to attempt to ignore costs which had been incurred. Also, there was professional etiquette to consider.
Mr. Birkett felt the same. He said further that if their client would hand the money over to them, there was little doubt that they could arrange the whole matter in such a way that he would have no further worry.
Mr. Lawson still demurred. He would clear the debts which Mr. Tibbetts had incurred in his name, as quickly as he was able, but he would pay not a penny more, except to those whose help he had sought. He would send out the cheques himself, with a letter stating that he would pay the balances of the accounts as early as possible.
Subsequently, he gave way on two points. He agreed to recognize the hoary legal inequity by which payments for rents and rates are preferential to other debts, and to leave the question of the conditions on which any payments should be made to Messrs. Field & Fletcher in Mr. Hatchett's very capable hands.
It is an idle but interesting speculation to consider how far his erratic method of dealing with this fortuitous financial crisis in his affairs might have been deflected by the influence of a different wife, or of a variety of circumstance. But Frida had accepted the approach of an apparent prosperity, and the fading of that illusion, with the unruffled cheerfulness and unswerving attention to the practical details of daily living which appeared to render her impervious to the majority of human ills, and which caused some to think her incapable of any strength of passion, and others, even more fatuously, to suppose her a fool.
In fact, she perceived very quickly that her husband was deriving sufficient satisfaction from the issues of his own obstinacy, and from the various expedients of delay, evasion, neglect, or defiance, with which, under Mr. Hatchett's half-amused advice, he met the subsequent assaults of the more aggressive of his adversaries, to give considerable compensation for the proportion of his uncertain income which he alienated to the reduction of their demands.
Seeing his lazy cheerfulness to remain unruffled, she left him to deal with his financial emergencies with the uninterfering confidence with which she would expect him to regard her preparations for the next day's dinner, while rendering any aid that was in her power as inevitably as she would have expected him to leave a message at the butcher's, had she asked him to do so.
Frida had that rarest of human qualities, the capacity to see things in their true proportions, and when the first bailiff sat awkwardly on a kitchen chair, she saw no more than a somewhat disreputable individual, who had hired himself contemptibly, and who was needing his tea. She was complaisantly aware that the furniture was her father's gift to herself, and beyond the reach of a grasping hand, and when, three days later, Messrs. Field & Fletcher had been converted to the same opinion, and withdrew, somewhat poorer men, she sorted out some of Christine's outworn clothes for an invalid child of her unsavoury visitor with no consciousness of generosity.
She had regarded with a similar equanimity the three tradesmen who had appeared at the back door with their books made up within a few hours of Messrs. Field & Fletcher's bailiff being deposited upon her, and the opposite attitude of Mr. Bulpit, the Birchett's Wood grocer, who had found himself too busy to render the usual weekly account on the following Saturday, till she had interviewed him with a disconcerting directness, and convinced him, with an open purse, that she would not be inconvenienced by discharging it with her usual regularity.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE institution of tea as the third meal of the day is an established ritual throughout the whole of England, but it is one that varies in its solemnity with the longitude of its observance. In the Northern Counties it is a portentous feast, delightful or dreadful, as you will, but not to be casually undertaken or lightly left. In the South it is more apt to be a matter of fancy cakes and fragility, even to the abomination of the knee-balanced cup, and the absence of a supporting platter. But the Midlands have been disposed to avoid these extremities, and there are countless well-ordered homes where it is a light and pleasant meal, served in comfort and eaten at leisure, not too slight to draw the household to the convenience of a common table, nor too heavy to leave the appetite undamaged for the dinner of the later evening.
It is at such a meal that acquaintance may be commenced most naturally, and with the minimum of discomfort for those who are uncertain of their reception, or self-conscious of an inevitable appraisement; and there was a kindly tactfulness in Frida's request to her father's housekeeper that it should be somewhat earlier than usual, so that those who would arrive on the 3.20 would find it ready by the time that the car had brought them home, and they had cleansed themselves of the dust of travel. Elsie also (coming from Worcester) would be arriving at the station about the same time, and Perkins could wait the few minutes that would be necessary to bring her up with her brother and his new friend. During his solitary weeks, John Oakley rarely invaded the dining-room, preferring that his meals should be served in the library, or in the little breakfast-room which adjoined it, but when his children came home, as they were always free to do, whether for weekends or for longer periods, meals were laid again on the long oak table, and the large mullion-windowed room which his wife had loved was reawakened to something of the liveliness of the older days.
Now his daughter Frida sat in her mother's place, and he on her right, in the seat which had been his since that table had been bought twenty-seven years ago, and his youngest daughter, Elsie, a self-possessed young lady with a very vigorous appetite, sat beside him. Chester Lawson sat opposite, with Miss Carfix on his left, and Alwyn on her farther side.
The children had been subjected to a short inspection, during which they had been examined and praised in the customary manner of English women, as though they were incapable of sense or feeling, a procedure to which Christine had opposed a mask of demure indifference, and Peter an impatience which she saw no reason to hide. "I don't want you," she had protested to the kissing Elsie, "I want my tea." Now they were having the desired tea with Mrs. Case, in the housekeeper's room, and even Peter's voice was unable to reach her parents' ears as she explained, with the smile of one who wishes to tell a happy anecdote in a way which will be pleasing to all; "I don't know whether I wasn't naughty or not, but I did bite Christie's eye."
So while Frida is asking Miss Carfix "Two lumps or one?" and remembering everyone else's preferences with the accuracy that Elsie applied to mathematics of less useful kinds, and other members of the assembled family are passing plates of bread-and-butter, and small dishes of jam, and making the tentative conversational openings which are indicative of a stranger's presence, we may take a leisurely view of the Oakley family and their guest, and commence to listen to the conversation when it becomes worth while to do so.
Looking at Frida first (for she is at the head of the table), should we say she was married, if her left hand were hidden, and we did not know it already? Yes, we think we should, though it is something less than a confident affirmation. At twenty-five she has the slim figure of healthful youth, as she may still have it when she is twice that age; slimmer, indeed, than the robust and athletic Elsie. Her children have come easily, as they most often do to those who marry in happy youth. And yet her eyes, greyer than Peter's, but with a curious likeness, have a restfulness that is rare in youth unless its experiences be complete, and its passions satisfied. Her face is clear of the cosmetics by which women have combined to challenge the meaning of emancipation, and to blazon the indigestions of soul and body which they aim to hide.
Her father, quieter than his children, more observant, more aware than they of the living scene as a whole, may be slower to speak, but expects by the custom of twenty years that there will be a silence when he does so, which will be less readily accorded to others. He is loved and respected by his children, with a trust that has been justified as often as it has been tried, but they would be surprised to learn that it is as a basic fact that they regard him, rather than as an individual. He is static, like the house itself in which they were born, and round which centre the memories of their own changing developments. We have seen him as an individual, but they are scarcely able to do so. It is natural that he should think of them but they are occupied with the fullness of their own lives. We must not call it the tragedy of age, for age is not tragic, except through disease or cowardice, but it is its condition that it is isolated, neither by its own difference or indifference, but by the blindness of youth, which cannot understand that the soul does not lesson nor change as the body weakens. A thing inevitable, because the body is the visible expression of the soul, and in age it is no more than a blurred sign, or a broken note.
But John Oakley did not count himself old (who does while any balance of health and vigour remains?) in spite of thinning hair in which there was little of colour left, and the wound of which he did not speak. In fact, he looked somewhat younger than usual this afternoon, and sat somewhat more upright, as his thoughts wandered continually to the morning's interview in the bank-manager's room, and to the increased realization which it had brought that he might have a harder fight even than had been the case already during the last five years, if he were to pull the business through. He had fought that fight for longer than his children's lives, fluctuating in its intensities, but never ceasing (except for that restful irresponsible time that ended at Bethune), with one to sympathize while his wife had lived, but accepted by his children as though the benefits which it gave were theirs by the operation of a natural law.
"Pleasure to have it none, to lose it pain," so will the child most often regard the social status, and the comforts of its parents' home.
Elsie sits next to her father, light-haired and grey-eyed, solving the problem of eating and talking all the time without apparent breech of good manners, with the ease of one who has practised it for about nineteen years (she was twenty last April), and indifferent to the fact that her meal includes the paint with which she smeared her lips in the train half-an-hour ago (but it had not been much, for she was still young enough to be conscious of her father's disapproval, and believed that she had successfully gauged the maximum that he would pass unnoticed - a delusion that ended when he kissed her carefully three inches away).
Now she is sparring with Chester, and is reduced to five seconds' unexpected silence by a confusing retort, so that Frida uses the pause to turn the conversion toward Miss Carfix by asking if it has been warm this summer in Normandy? And Joy Carfix lifts long lashed lids in a quick shy glance at her hostess to say, in a lower tone than those that have been contending around her, that it has been rather cold and wet.
It was a pretty voice, was the general thought. Perhaps pretty was hardly the word. It was a voice that was low and clear: that would carry far without effort. And when she lifted her eyes - well, you could understand Alwyn being gone on her. Any boy would. But was there anything there? Anything worth pursuit and discovery within the small head of lustrous black-brown curls, made more emphatic by the scarlet of the simple one-piece dress, with its out-of-date old-silver brooch at the throat? It was the year in which fashion was beginning to shorten its close fitting dresses. Calves were for the common gaze, but the knee was still one of woman's private parts, to show which was a gesture of indecency. It was the following summer that dresses were cut so that knees were covered when erect, but less easily when sitting, so that many thousands of women in train or tram were simultaneously occupied in a continual skirt-smoothing for the intermittent covering of those useful joints. Not that they were embarrassed by these preliminary revelations, as a boy would have been in a corresponding circumstance. There is probably no part of her person, back or front, high or low, that a woman would not exhibit with a demure unconsciousness if her sister were doing the same; a fact which it may be indiscreet to observe, and on which it would be more so to comment. It is enough to recall with gratitude that having inflicted their legs upon us, they set to work to improve them. Many of them needed it urgently. . . . But we were to listen to the conversation, not to wander like this. Elsie is talking of tennis. She has learnt a smashing service from the college coach, which she is anxious to practice upon the family. She says that it will be too hot for Father to play this evening. (He had once said that himself, and she had always remembered it when a four could be made up without him.) She looked round the table. There were still five, unless - -
"Do you play tennis, Miss Carfix?"
"Yes - a little." That might mean anything.
"You'd like a game after tea?" Alwyn asks her, quickly. He can count, as well as Elsie.
We look at Alwyn for the first time. A shy-mannered, rather handsome boy, darker than his sisters. We may look now as much as we will, but there is only one thing to see. His eyes are for Joy Carfix, anticipating her wants before anyone else can do so. There is no doubt where his thoughts are. As to her, you may guess as you will. She has looked at him once or twice in a friendly intimate way, but for the most part her eyes, and her occasional words, are for Chester on her other hand. Chester is reminded of a hen pigeon standing with a complacent affectation of unconsciousness while the cock coos round her. But who knows what the pigeon thinks? She may be engaged in an honest effort to make up her mind.
"I should like half-an-hour with you, Alwyn, in the library after tea," his father interposes, "if Miss Carfix would like to join the others at tennis. It will save time on Monday, if I have the week's report now."
That suits Elsie. Chester can play well enough, but she thinks herself his match, if not more. She will have Frida, and he can make the best of the foreign girl, who doesn't look as though she could use anything but her eyes, and Frida is a safe partner always. Elsie goes through life playing to win, and for twenty years she has made a good job of it too, picking up everything that was lying round - everything, that is, that seemed worth the effort of a stretched hand - and has done it with very little friction indeed. Popularity and good repute are two of the worth-while things.
"I don't believe in husbands and wives playing together," she says, in a half-serious tone, "they always lose first, and then quarrel between themselves."
"Indeed - " Frida begins.
"Oh, yes, we do," Chester interrupts, "like hell."
Frida, smiling, lets it pass. It is too silly for further words. Elsie asks how long they are staying this time? Longer, she hopes, than the weekend. "Usual thing, I suppose? Left everything locked up, or is Margaret looking in?"
Frida admits, smiling again, that it is the usual thing. They have left the cottage closed, Margaret Potter, a woman who came in daily to help in the rougher work, having taken a fortnight's holiday, visiting friends at Reading. It wasn't bailiffs this time. It was a man with a judgement summons that had to be served personally upon Chester, and after a time it would expire, and Field & Fletcher would have to take out another for a later date. T hat was how she understood it, but Chester could explain better than she.
Chester said that would do. Anyway, it pleased them to think that the man would knock at an unresponsive door. Of course, he would have to go up to Town once or twice, but he could send in most of what he was on now by post.
Alwyn looked uncomfortable while this conversation proceeded. He was wondering what Joy Carfix thought. Her face gave no sign. Aiming at explanation, he began: "I wonder you're not ashamed to talk of bailiffs in the way you do. I don't know what people - - "
"Why should we be ashamed?" Frida asked, "You're not ashamed of what other people do to you. It's what you do yourself - - "
"We used to call you Victorian," Elsie said, looking at her sister with speculative eyes, "but you're not that. A Victorian woman would have about died. No, you're not Victorian. And you're certainly not modern. I wonder what you are."
Frida showed no inclination to attempt solution of this problem, and Chester took up the conversation.
"As a matter of fact," he said, "the bailiff era is over. It began with one who was with us, more or less, for three days. After that there were several others, but they lost heart more quickly. There was an occasion when we had two at once. Frida read Tennyson to them.
"You know I didn't."
"No. It was Wordsworth. 'A bailiff on the kitchen-chair, a simple bailiff was to her, and he was nothing more.' After that we had the era of Bankruptcy Notices. Hatchett told me not to take much notice of them. It appeared that they are an inferior article. Cheap but ineffectual. A Bankruptcy Petition is the real thing, and no one is very willing to invest in one of those, if they think it will be successful. The idea is that it's to be adjourned, till you've paid all you owed, and a lot more. When Hatchett let them know that there'd be no adjournments for me, they lost interest in those experiments, and concentrated on Judgement Summonses. The idea of them is that if you don't pay when you get them, you'll get into gaol more likely than not."
"I thought," Elsie said, "that imprisonment for debt was abolished after Dickens exposed it."
"Most people do; but you thought wrong, all the same. The idea is much what it was then, to blackmail the prisoner's friends, but the imprisonment, if the bluff fails, is a very different thing. At least, so I'm told. Dixon says he'll pay me a good price if I'll do three weeks, and find out what it's like."
"I'm afraid all this is rather puzzling to Miss Carfix," John Oakley remarked. "Perhaps a little explanation - - "
Chester gave this very willingly to his attractive neighbour. She was a good listener. He was in doubt of how much she understood, and could guess her thoughts even less. "So you see," he concluded, "as I wasn't willing to pay those who were making the trouble, or to pay less than I owed, and as I'm not willing to pay twenty-five shillings in the pound now. . . ."
Joyce Carfix looked puzzled. "Twenty-five shillings in the pound?" she said. "I thought there were only twenty."
"So there are. I should have said twenty-five shillings for every pound that the business owed."
Elsie, listening, wondered again, was there anything there?
CHAPTER EIGHT
ALWYN followed his father into the library. The request that he should do so, if not entirely welcome, had not been surprising, and did not necessarily imply that he was to give report of the guest who had been brought to the house at his asking. He had entered his father's business five years ago, and had been tried "on the road" at his own desire, as soon as he had felt sufficiently familiar with its details to talk to customers effectively. He had won success in that capacity which had surprised his father, and may have been beyond his own anticipations.
For two years past he had been established as a manufacturers' agent with an office in London, representing not only his father's, but several other Midland firms, and making a moderate but steadily increasing income. Looking somewhat younger than his age - he was twenty-two - and having a natural courtesy of manner, he had found himself generally liked, and his customers had found him not only capable and reliable in his dealings, but having a regard for their interests and requirements which was more than a professional pose. The fact was that he enjoyed his work. He had the quality of imagination that makes romance of any occupation. While he carried on business in a single partitioned fourth-floor room in a side-street off Aldgate, badly furnished, littered and piled with samples, staffed with one semi-illiterate girl, who manipulated the ancient typewriter he had bought for £4 15s. before he had sufficient experience to know its real value, he saw himself in imagination handling a country's trade, and forming international combines. It was of his nature to have an instinctive loyalty to his family, and particularly to his father, to whom he was bound by a strong affection, and an unusual degree of mutual confidence. It was an untested bond, and none could tell the degree of strain which it would bear without snapping. That there might be an approaching strain they were both aware, but it was not the first subject on which his father spoke.
"What have you been able to do for us this week? Have you got Millward's contract? I thought you would have written yesterday, but there was nothing at the office this morning."
Alwyn was surprised, with some reason, at the implication, slight as it was, of these opening queries. His own mind was preoccupied in another way, and he was unconscious of any fault of omission.
"I didn't think you went in on Saturday mornings. I got Millward's contract renewed yesterday. I thought, as I was coming down - " He went into details of the business which he had done, and was interrupted by the query: "Did you get Herman's cheque?"
"Yes. I've brought it with me."
"If you'd only sent it on! Is it for the whole account?"
"No. It's for May. They want some allowances off the June account that I couldn't pass without asking you."
"Could you get it on Monday?"
Alwyn did not look pleased at this proposal. He knew that Joyce had come prepared to stay for a few days if she were sufficiently persuaded to do so, and he had intended to take a short holiday himself. He said: "Yes, I daresay I could. Tuesday, anyway. Edward Herman isn't always there on Monday. Is it important?"
"Yes. . . . Money's very tight at the moment, and the bank's beginning to kick. August's always a bad month. . . ." He went into details.
Alwyn said he would catch an early train on Monday.
After that there was a moment's silence. Alwyn, half-inclined to obey an urgent impulse to get into the garden, but feeling that there was something that must be said first, broke it with: "Thanks for asking Miss Carfix."
His father hesitated in his answer. "She seems a very attractive girl. . . . We'll have a talk in the morning. . . . I expect you'll want to get out now." His mind was occupied again with the business problems that the conversation had brought up. He was not in the mood for talking of other things.
But as Alwyn was going out, he called him back. "Miss Carfix understands that we are informal here? She won't expect us to dress for dinner?"
CHAPTER NINE
"WHAT do you think of her?" Elsie asked her sister as they made their way to the nursery together. Dinner-time was approaching, and Chester had wandered off with their father to look at livestock. Alwyn and Miss Carfix had disappeared down the orchard.
"I think she's lovely."
"Yes - of course. Anyone can see that. Chester did in particular."
"Yes. I should hope he could."
"Don't you ever - No, I suppose not. It must be a queer feeling to be so sure. . . . What I meant was, do you like her as a prospective sister-in-law? She seems to be applying for that position."
"She's a good loser."
"Yes," Elsie conceded. Her new overhead service had proved as devastating as she had hoped, and the sisters had won three sets out of four from their opponents. Only the last had been lost, after a prolonged struggle. Joyce Carfix had played an agile game, but without subtlety or force, only really exerting herself to win in the last set, when Chester had urged her to do so. Not that she had seemed to lack interest in the game, but she had laughed equally whether she won or lost. Elsie conceded that, adding: "But she didn't care. She only cares how she looks, if you ask me. I doubt whether she's got the brains of a hen. I suppose," she added, somewhat inconsequently, "Alwyn's kissing her now."
They found the two children having the glass of milk and biscuits which were the routine allowance at bedtime. At least, Christine was having them. Peter had announced that she preferred some jelly which she had seen on the kitchen-table. She was arguing the point with her usual ability. If her hope of victory sank when she heard her mother's approach, she allowed no sign of disquiet to appear.
"I couldn't eat it, Mother," she explained, "I couldn't re'ly. My teeth got too tired."
"Then you'd better leave the table."
"They're not too tired to eat jelly. It couldn't bite."
"If your teeth are so tired, you'd better stay in bed tomorrow."
A look of sudden consternation came on the small face at this unexpected development. Tempest threatened. Then it cleared as suddenly, with shrewd realization that the threat was only to induce her to clear her plate.
With a sigh and smile for a battle lost she picked up the biscuit.
"I'll hear your prayers when you've finished, before I go down," Frida said to the children.
"Yes, Mother," Christine answered. "Jezebel's said hers."
Peter looked up rebelliously. She loathed any alteration in established routines. Prayers were always said after you had got into bed, and might be used conversationally, and with the introduction of impromptu variations, as a means of keeping your mother with you for considerable periods. "I can't say prayers now," she said. "God hasn't come"
"I've told you, Peter that God's everywhere."
"He's in the other room."
"I shall hear Christine's first, and then yours."
"No" (with a swift change of front), "hear mine first."
"I shall hear Christine's first."
Peter knew when her mother meant what she said. She abandoned the point, to ask: "May I say 'shan't ever sin any more'?" That was an original addition of her own, its source beyond discovery, its interpolation in incongruous places so frequent that her mother had felt obliged to discourage it, especially as it was always said with an audible chuckle, as though its author regarded it as containing a quality of exceptional humour.
"You can say it once, if you're good. Now, Christine."
"God," Peter explained, as Christine commenced obediently, "is hearing my dollies' prayers in the other room."
. . .Meanwhile, John Oakley had forgotten his business anxieties in the pleasure of showing his pigeons to an intelligent and interested auditor. It was Chester's strength and weakness that he could be equally interested in a thousand things. Now he was absorbed in obtaining up-to-date information of his father-in-law's efforts to establish a new breed of pigeons.
He had worked for some years to establish the variation, but with only partial success. Last year a cat had broken into the loft where these birds were breeding, and killed the best three, among others. But for that. . . .
Alwyn had taken Joy Carfix down through the orchard to show her the wooded hollow of the little stream-bed which lay beneath it, and rose again to the meadow of Cawsett's farm. She had shown no reluctance to go with him, but Elsie's guess of their occupation was widely inaccurate. Inaccurate it would have been in any event, because there was something different here from the casual love-makings of her college friends, but particularly so because Alwyn had to explain that he had promised his father that he would go up to London again on Monday, and it had been implicitly understood between them, though with economy of words, that he would be at home for the coming week - at least, if she were invited and consented to stay.
Joy said, smiling, that she wanted to get back early herself. They could go on the same train. Only one who was super-sensitive to her moods, as Alwyn was, could have been disturbed by the tone or substance of this reply. He said that there was no need for her to go back. Frida had said a few minutes ago that she hoped she would stay longer than the weekend. He might be able to come down again on Tuesday.
Joy was somewhat placated inwardly by the evident wretchedness of his reply, but she could not easily regard a business reason as sufficient for such a desertion. But stay? Not she. She would be terrified. Terrified? What of? Oh, it didn't matter, if he couldn't see. Not of his father. He was rather a dear. Well, of Elsie, of course. Elsie wasn't - ? No, of course; men never saw anything. Wasn't it time to go in to get ready for dinner? No, she understood that they didn't dress. He'd told her that in the train. It was much the nicest way. She hated formality. (But what is the use of bringing down a dress that you can't wear? And one in which you know that you look your best, too.) Well, it must be time to go in, anyway.
No, they weren't kissing at the orchard-gate.
Alwyn, conscious of thin ice, turned the talk to indifferent things, as they went back through the apple-trees from which some of the earlier fruit was already falling. The ground beyond the hedge on their left belonged to Mr. Bartleet, who had been M.P. for the division till the last election, when he had lost his seat to the Conservative candidate. Pursley Park, it was called. He was a free-trader, a Liberal; the founder and head of Bartleet's, the cycle-saddle makers, now one of the largest leather works in Hunnerton. He was also, it appeared, a singularly mean man. He told a tale of how, last year, his Persian cat had broken into one of the pigeon-houses, and killed about a dozen birds, some prize-winners among them, and others that his father could not replace. There had been no doubt of the culprit's guilt. She had been caught in the loft. Mr. Bartlett had expressed his regret, and asked what the damage was. His father had suggested £5 - £50 would have been poor compensation. When Mr. Bartket heard this amount, he had sent his cook in to say that the cat was really hers, and might she pay two-and-six-pence a week? Of course, his father had told her he did not want her to pay.
Joyce did not seem responsive to the tone of this anecdote. She said that perhaps the cat really had belonged to the cook. She had known of a cook who had two cats.
Alwyn felt that he was accused of making an unjust reflection upon a neighbour's character, and was led to tell another anecdote to justify it. The tale was good enough if properly told, and to an appreciative listener.
Until two or three years ago, his father had kept some pea-fowl - a peacock and two hens, which had wandered loose over lawns and orchard and field, doing some occasional damage in the garden, perhaps, but not too much. The hens made nests in the orchard grass, and had reared a number of young birds, for which there had been a ready sale.
Mr. Bartleet had discussed the habits of peafowl with Mr. Oakley, and had learnt that they are birds of somewhat polygamous habits. He had observed that his neighbour's peacock sometimes wandered into his own gardens, especially in the lonely days when the peahens were sitting. Mr. Bartleet bought two peahens of his own. They made nests. They laid. They sat. Mr. Bartleet had reasonably good grounds for supposing that pea-chicks would follow, as, in fact, they did. But under the influence of Mr. Bartleet's hens, Mr. Oakley's peacock had developed a habit of spending half his time (if not more) on Mr. Bartleet's side of the hedge, and when the hens commenced to sit, he was no longer a welcome visitor. Mr. Bartleet addressed his neighbour in a polite note. He hated to complain, but Mr. Oakley's peafowl had contracted a habit of wandering, and were really doing a great deal of damage. Now that the strawberry-beds - . If Mr. Oakley could kindly keep them up more strictly till the summer would be over?
Mr. Oakley considered the letter for a day or two, and decided not to reply. He knew the facts. He had no wish to develop a quarrel with his neighbour. You cannot confine a peacock in a rabbit hutch. It has too much tail. Even a loft or a stable may prove unsatisfactory. Mr. Oakley sold the birds.
As an illustration of the meanness of (some) human nature, the tale had points. But Alwyn told it too hurriedly, both because they were approaching the house, and because his auditor appeared uninterested. He indicated its vital detail too lightly. He was aware that it fell flat. Actually, Joyce did not understand it at all.
As they sat at the dinner-table a few minutes later, and Joy turned to Chester on her other side, to hold her own, adroitly enough, in some light conversational exchanges, both she and Alwyn were conscious of an inward wretchedness for which it would be difficult to state any adequate cause, but the existence of which (in the other) should have been satisfactory to both of them, had they had sufficient emotional experience to understand its significance. But there are new opportunities either to join in closer alliance or to drift apart in the shoals and eddies of the conversation which is before them, to which we may do well to listen, while Christine lies awake in the room above considering with gravity the encouraging fact communicated by her mother a quarter of an hour ago that the Commandments are no more than ten. If there are no more than ten sins in the world, it should not be difficult to avoid them with reasonable care and forethought. Anyway, it should be less trouble than the care of Peter's innumerable family. Her arm goes round the beloved Jezebel. She, at least, did not miss her meals, nor lie uncovered in the chilly morning hours.
But Peter lies on her back with a carefree mind. A smile, dimples the innocence of her face as she recalls the good-night conversation with her mother, who had reproached her with the misdeeds of the earlier day. "But I'm not naughty now, Mummie," she had protested, with a natural indignation. "I've said 'God make me a good girl!' "
"Do you think He will?" her mother had replied, with an intended severity, and a consciousness of indiscretion that came a second too late to arrest the words. But Peter had not appeared to hear. She had remembered a necessary appendix to her prayers, "God bless my pretend children," and Frida had been content to leave the question unanswered.
Now Peter's mind went back to the problem which her mother had thrust upon her. "He didn't last time," she says at last, in a doubtful wonder, which breaks into sudden laughter at a thought into which it might be indiscreet to penetrate further.
She has promised her mother that she will not get uncovered again, but it is a warm night, and her only garment is already on the floor at the bedside. Short but vigorous legs are kicking rhythmically at the bedclothes. "I shan't ever sin any more," she chuckles, as she kicks off the last vestige of sheet. Her legs rise to the perpendicular.
CHAPTER TEN
THE addition of one to five has made six so many times that we are reasonably justified in the supposition that it will continue to do so, but the addition of one chemical element to any other five will not produce the sum of six, but something incalculably different. It is so with the intercourse of individuals, verbal or otherwise. Even while she was a silent auditor of a conversation which was singularly impersonal, as conversations at the Oakleys' dinner-table had always tended to be, and especially so when Nina was absent, the presence of Joy Carfix had its impalpable influence, and when she spoke she changed its current entirely with five words which seemed to her to state an obvious platitude, and which no one there would have been prepared to deny.
The talk began about the homing instinct in pigeons, continuing something which Mr. Oakley had been saying to Chester as they had entered the room together. It was a subject on which he had a very definite opinion. "I don't say," he went on, "that pigeons haven't got instincts, or that we haven't, for that matter. What I do say is that a pigeon finds its way home by sight alone, and there's no mystery about it, and never would have been if people hadn't been anxious to make one, because they don't like to allow that a bird can have any sense. There are the individual differences, to begin with. Some birds will take a lot of trouble to find their way home, and others won't. Then if you want a bird to fly home for a long distance, say two hundred miles, it's no good taking it straight there, however good homers its parents may have been. You've got to train it gradually, first five miles, and then ten, and then twenty-five, till it knows a wide stretch of country round its home.
"Then look what it does when it's loosed in a strange place. It rises high in the air, and flies in widening circles till it sees some familiar landmark, and then, if it's a good bird, it makes straight for home. If it were guided by instinct it could go on flying by night, which it never does. Even when it's over the sea, it can't keep its course during the night, which explains why so many hundreds of the best birds are lost in those ghastly races from France and Spain, which ought not to be allowed."
"Probably," Chester said, "an eagle or a falcon would act in much the same way, if it could be tamed equally to make its home at your door, and to be flown loose. . . .I believe there is some evidence that the gyr-falcon does cross the Atlantic at times, though it seems hard to credit."
Alwyn suggested that he might mean the peregrine.
Chester said it didn't much matter which he had meant, because whichever he meant he was probably wrong. Elsie. said to Chester: "You never really believe anything, do you?"
Chester protested, though without indignation: "Oh, I wouldn't say that."
"Even that," Elsie retorted, "you're not sure about. . . . What I mean is that you have opinions, but no convictions. And even your opinions don't seem to be of any importance. Not to yourself, I mean. You'd always be about as willing to write an article on one side as the other. I shouldn't be surprised if you've done it on both before now."
"So he can," Frida concurred. "He wrote the leading articles for two papers last month, one on each side. . . . It was to help someone who was suddenly ill."
"I don't know how you can."
"No one's fit to write at all who couldn't do that," Chester replied. "However much there is to be said on one side, every fair-minded man knows there's at least a column to be said on the other - and probably a lot more."
Mr. Oakley blocked this diversion, holding to the previous line of the conversation. He had seen sea-mews in the Atlantic, a thousand miles from the nearest land, after a night of storm in which it had seemed impossible that any bird could endure either on the surface of the water or in the air. They had been skimming the sea in easy tireless flight, adjusting their motion to the heaving of the water, and their own relative positions, in a way which was itself a wonder to watch. Where had they been the night before?
Chester said that if he had the choice of another incarnation he should certainly be a bird, though he was less sure which particular one he would choose. Probably a sea-bird. They still had some measure of freedom in a world where men had left none for themselves, and very little for any other creature that they were able to dominate. Men assumed their superiority, but if he were Creator or Controller of the world, and were reducing its varieties, he thought he should wipe out the human race much more willingly than many other species of birds or animals.
He spoke so seriously that Joy Carfix looked up at him with puzzled eyes. "But animals," she said, "have no souls." It requires some consideration, some analysis, to see why the conversation paused for a moment, as though someone had struck a note of deliberate discord. It was said with an obvious innocence, as a statement of elementary fact; something beyond dispute. It was not a proposition that anyone was disposed to challenge. Even had it been so, it was not a table at which divergent views were unwelcome. To John Oakley it was an integral part of his religion to believe it. But there was a consciousness that it was not spoken as a proposition to be asserted or defended. It was a thing she said because she had been taught, or rather, had been told to believe it. It was the voice of dogma, not reason. The voice of authority in religion.
John Oakley was a member of the nonconformist church in Hunnerton, though he had ceased to attend regularly since there had been a change of pastorate which he did not welcome. His religion was a fixed point, from which his mind wandered far in its speculations and interests, but to which it always returned. There were a number of articles of belief which he would not allow to be questioned in his own mind. They were settled things. Yet he believed (and it was partly true) that he had reached them by his own mental activities; that they were approved at the bar of reason, rather than accepted with the authority of tradition. Frida held without discussion to the same faith. What she thought herself, or how far she thought herself, would be shown (was being shown already) by the way in which she influenced and taught her children. What Chester believed (if anything) was difficult to discover. Elsie's phrase that he had opinions rather than convictions was shrewd enough. Elsie's own mind was the home of various confident beliefs and disbeliefs of the moment, with which she was well-content, but which might ultimately find it difficult to lie down together, being of mutually-destructive kinds. Alwyn had a mind like his father's, one to speculate and explore, but with a less firmly-rooted foundation of initial belief. It had its moorings, but in the storms of controversy the anchor would be more likely to drag. Yet they were all alike in that they might be quick to assert, but less so to assume.
But the voice of Joy Carfix was that of one who states what she has been told, and because it has been told her. Subtly, it was the voice of Rome. It gave to those who heard it the feeling that a man may have who argues points of faith or dogma with the priest of any church. It is difficult to treat him as a reasoning being. He fences with his feet fixed to one spot. You take such contest, if at all, with a buttoned foil. You do not strike too hard, feeling that there is an element of indecency in offering an argument which he cannot meet. You observe him to be unaware of his own weakness, and, indeed, he can hold his own well enough if he can keep his feet to the chosen spot. His weakness is in his rear. It is in that which he would have you assume without argument. . . .
The talk paused for a long second of silence, and then broke out from all sides at once. Alwyn said jestingly that if Chester hadn't got a soul he didn't suppose that anyone would notice the difference. Chester answered Joy seriously: "I suppose it's a question of what you mean by a soul. I'd agree with you that animals haven't got souls like men. I think some of them may have a better kind." Frida said: "I hope you'll choose one that keeps clear of the Arctic regions. You know how I hate the cold."
Elsie was silent for once, observing Frida's assumption that she and Chester would wish to continue their companionship, even under such conditions. Her sister's marriage did not fit the common talk of her college friends, which was inclined to condemn marriage as an ancestral folly: a bondage hindering the free exploitation of individual "sex". Some of our parents might have accepted it willingly enough, being slow-going folk, or, at least, have concealed the misery they endured; but we were born to a freer age, and know the harm that such inhibitions cause. Frida's evident happiness was an affront to the emancipated generation to which she belonged. It was an enigma also, intriguing her sister's mind.
Mr. Oakley spoke a second later than the younger people. He was an opponent of vivisection, and there came to his mind a reflection that he had made more than once before, and with which most of his hearers were familiar already. "The modern scientist always asserts that the differences between men and the other animals are so small that they're hardly worth noticing, unless he wants to cut an animal to pieces while it's alive, and then he forgets what he's just said, and tells you that an animal's nothing more than an automaton, and even when it cries out it doesn't mean that it's really hurt."
Elsie said: "But the Behaviourists really put men in the same category."
"Scarcely that," Chester objected. "They deny personality rather than physical consciousness."
"Anyway, no one takes them seriously except themselves."
"But even they," Chester suggested tolerantly, "have had their use. They have demonstrated a falsehood by reducing it to an absurdity."
Joy had listened in silence. She did not follow the conversation clearly, nor did she wish to show her deficiency. She recognized that it trod the forbidden borderland of religious belief which she had been withheld from exploring. She did not want to talk religion, in which she was not over-greatly interested. She had come here to wear a new dress (which was upstairs), and to be wooed by Alwyn Oakley (who was going to London on Monday). She felt disappointed, and she recognized a potential hostility in the mental atmosphere around her. With a perversely nervous inclination to stir trouble which often led her into needless difficulty, she said: "I suppose you don't really believe in God or His Mother?"
Chester answered that with a more definite affirmation than might have been expected from him. "On the contrary, God is about the only fact of which I am quite sure." He ignored the status of the Mother of Christ.
But Elsie was less scrupulous, or less diplomatic. There may be courtesies to be observed to a guest of another creed, but if she herself - Elsie had (as it happened) come little into contact with members of the Roman Church. Her college set, had they regarded the doctrines of the Virgin Birth or the Immaculate Conception, would have done so only for derision. But, in fact, they did not regard them at all. They were interested in other things. The two girls were soon in an animated discussion, to which John Oakley listened in unusual silence. Alwyn was silent also, desiring only an opportunity to divert the conversation. At Treswick Grange there had been no talk of religion, in which he did not think that Joy took more than the normal interest of a healthy girl. By what perverse fate must it break out now?
The argument itself was not on a high level, and may be left unrecorded. Miss Carfix held her own well enough, helped obliquely by Chester on more than one occasion, who, without taking her side, contrived to obstruct her opponent. The doctrine of the Virgin Birth is held (as far as any beliefs are definitely held at all) by the Protestant churches. He mentioned this. Elsie asked him if he believed it himself. He replied that if you accept the super-humanity of Christ, both the evidences and the inherent probabilities are about equally balanced. Elsie said, with some contempt, and some truth, that that was the attitude he took about everything. Her own argument assumed that no one really believed it. Miss Carfix fell into a natural and rather helpful error when she failed to distinguish between the various sections of English Protestantism. To the Roman Catholic mind the Established Church is its real opponent. The Nonconformist churches regard the Anglicans also as their most natural foes. When she mentioned the intellectual anarchy of the Anglican church, as she had been taught to regard it, she found that she was saying something on which all could agree. It is a point on which it has no defence. You may sympathize with the views of those, such as Bishop Barnes or Dean Inge, who have renounced Christianity, or with those who sit on the doorstep of Rome, but it is true of both that they are betraying that which they are vowed, and which they are paid, to teach. The leaders of the Nonconformist churches are in a similar uncertainty as to the ditch into which they would prefer to fall, but they are not (all) equally pledged to fixity of belief.
Alwyn diverted the conversation to these differences. Frida turned it into a practical channel by explaining the distances of the two nearest Catholic churches, to one of which she supposed that Miss Carfix would want to go in the morning. One was on the farther side of Hunnerton; the other in the opposite direction - a long country walk. Neither was very easy for a stranger to find. Perhaps Alwyn would show her the way?
Alwyn said that he would. If he came with her in the morning, would she come with him to their chapel at Hunnerton in the evening?
More than one of those who listened recognized a new aspect of this introduction of an alien church. They might themselves have gone once tomorrow - or they might not. Excuses are easily found in fine August weather. They were not such devotees of church attendance that nothing was allowed to supervene. But here they must behave, as it were, in the enemy's sight.
They were diverted from this realization by Miss Carfix's reply. She would be very glad for Alwyn to come with her, but she was not allowed to attend other churches herself. They had new light at once upon the arrogance and the discipline of the Roman Church.
Chester smothered another query from Elsie which might have led into deeper quagmires by reverting to the previous discussion. If the Anglican churches were empty today, as they mostly were, he suggested that it was not so much a matter of vestments or dogmas as that they had ceased to teach or practice the high code of the faith they professed. He instanced the case of a London church which appealed widely for public support to enable it to keep open, in the absence of any sufficient congregation to finance its requirements. It let off its Vestry Hall to a secular society, and when it happened that this society was a little late with the quarter's rent, the rector had put the bailiffs in without even a preliminary warning of his intention.
"Well," Elsie objected, being in the mood to argue with someone, "why shouldn't he, like anyone else, if they didn't pay?"
"I don't say he should or shouldn't. I only say that he should have resigned first. How could he teach a faith in which he had ceased to believe?"
The conversation became animated in this discussion. Should a priest be expected to observe a higher code of conduct than that of other professing Christians? Was the forcible recovery of debt consistent with Christian principles under any circumstance? If so, what were they? If not, what would be the social consequences?
Chester said, to this last, no one could tell, for it had never been tried. England was officially a Christian country, but English law had always firmly rejected the principles of Christianity. The common interpretation of Christianity was that barbarities were inevitable, but they must be committed in a decorous way. In the instance he had mentioned, he had no doubt that the Rector had acted through a Church Council, who had acted through a respectable firm of solicitors, who had instructed a respectable firm of auctioneers, one of whose members held a bailiff's certificate, whose assistant had been employed to seize and, if legally possible, sell the Society's chairs, and when the money had been obtained, in whatever manner, it had found its way unobtrusively to the treasurer's hands, who had found it very convenient for the payment of the organist's salary. Let not your left hand know what your right hand doeth had always been a very popular Christian text.
"Do you know," Frida inquired, "that we've been sitting here for more than an hour?"
CHAPTER ELEVEN
JOYCE CARFIX looked out from her bedroom window, over the trees and lawns of the falling gardens, dimly seen in the starless heat-haze of the August night, and was uncertain of what she felt.
It was so few weeks - scarcely more than days - since she had escaped from the firm though gentle discipline of a convent school; had exchanged the cold clean austerity of her dormitory cubicle, with its narrow white-quilted bed, for the luxuries of her uncle's home. With feminine quickness she had adapted herself to the changed conditions, with avid hands she had caught at the quick romance which life had offered - and it had brought her here. Her mood was doubtfully happy, timidly adventurous, only certain that it felt unsure. There was a strangeness about these people with their keen impersonal interests, and readiness to question the most fundamental things, from which she shrank. But Alwyn's hand had touched hers - was it chance? - as they had risen from the dinner-table, and from that moment something of shadow had left her mind. He would not go back on Monday unless he really must. He knew that les affaires must be taken seriously. . . .
She had never worried much about religion. It was an accepted thing. It seemed here to be, somehow, more vital, though it was so loosely held. Vital - and, perhaps, menacing. . . .She had been taught that England was a heretic country - worse, in that way, than France, which was merely infidel. And she must remember not to depart from the principles of her faith, or (they should perhaps have been stated first) the observances of her church. Not that she was likely to do so. She was of a natural loyalty. Her family had been Catholics when the power of Rome was at its highest in England, and through the bitter years that had followed; and in these indifferent days they were good Catholics still. Actually, she was repelled by Protestantism, as she understood it. A cold faith for one who has been taught to feel the nearness of many saints, and of the dear Mother of God. . . .
What had Mr. Lawson said? She remembered a phrase with which he had turned the point of something which Elsie had directed at herself: "The difference between the Protestant and Catholic churches is that the one does not know what it believes, and the other does not know why it believes it." Carelessly and rather crudely worded, and of a grammatical construction which might be capable of defence, but seemed to need it, it yet contained a truth which was evident even to her limited knowledge. And like most of Chester Lawson's truths she saw that it was double-edged. It was not the part of every private in an army to take control. She believed what she was told by the Leaders of the Faith she held. Were they not the more competent to decide? This was not less easy to accept when it was contrasted with an alternative anarchy.
Well, anyway, it was time for bed. Yawning, she closed the curtains, and switched on the light upon the restful comfort and quiet harmonious colours of a guest-room in which the spirit of the woman who had made that home still lived, though she had died ten years before.
Having no standard of comparison, Joy could not realize how kind Fortune had been in guiding her so straightly to an English home of the older kind, in a flat-and-bungalow period of ill-made, hire-purchased furniture, without aspect of permanence or stability, without reverence for its own past or faith in its own future, where the talk is most often of sparking-plugs and carburetters, and the laughter of children is seldom heard - a time which is yet only half-alarmed at the substance of the stones which science gives its followers when they ask for bread.
Yet the room had its influence upon her. There was a quiet stable peace in this large-gardened house. She recognized the atmosphere of a home, which is a woman's deepest need, though she saw also that it might be something less than a home to her. This was of what she felt. What she thought was of the dress that she had not been able to wear, and not long of that, for sleep comes quickly to the young.
John Oakley, in the next room, was occupied with thoughts which gave way less easily to the need for rest. His mind fluctuated between his business anxieties and this sudden infatuation of Alwyn's. He wished to do what was right. To consider Alwyn's interest first - of course. Even if it were a thing which he could not approve, it was a matter for advice rather than opposition. He tried to decide what his wife's attitude would have been, had she lived, as he would always do when such questions rose. He knew that she would feel very much as he did himself, and yet, relatively, be realized that her concern would have been just a little more for the character of the girl herself, just a little less on this question of religion that disturbed his mind. Both by ancestral prejudice and personal conviction, he disliked the Roman church. He disliked its priestcraft, its monasteries, its confessions, its superstitions of transubstantiation, and of the worship of saints. He disliked its prayers for the dead. He held strongly to certain tenets of belief which he thought to be essential to personal salvation. At least, he thought that he thought so, which is a not-very-different thing.
He had not quite the same kind of hostility for the Roman that he had for the Anglican church, for it was by the latter that his own church had been persecuted in its earlier days, neither had he quite the same degree of contempt. The Roman church was more remote. But it was also the more formidable opponent. Everyone, friend or foe, recognizes the sagacity with which it is directed. It has a rigid discipline. It speaks with authority. Its enemies may call it jesuitical, meaning no praise, but they do not accuse it of any foolish simplicities. Beside, it, the English church, holding to its "establishment" for the revenue it brings, and grumbling inconsistently that its prayer-book should be controlled by a parliament of Nonconformists and Jews, without internal self-discipline or self-respect, is an object for derision rather than any stronger emotion. Hatred weakens as contempt grows.
Gradually, the relative positions had changed since the memory of which his father had told him. . . . It was a village school, to which his father and his brothers had entered for the first time, their own father having bought a farm in that district. A village where the vicar held unquestioned authority, where dissent was a despised and persecuted, almost an unknown, thing. The school-master, a small-minded, mean-souled man, had received these boys, who were not allowed to be present at the school-prayers, with jeers in the open class-room. He had questioned them as to why they should be absent. "Don't you call yourself a Christian?" he had said to John's father, and the boy, to whom the word implied adult baptism, and being "aware of salvation" and of many strange and difficult things, had answered "No, sir," with a shamefaced courage, to be met with a loud-voiced sneer from the master; "Boys, here's a boy who says he isn't a Christian!"
After that, there had been ostracism and playground persecutions, till the boy in desperation had caught up a line-prop, and laid out one of his tormentors with a badly-broken head, and that trouble had ended. . . .
It was an episode such as could hardly have happened in John Oakley's own experience. A tale of the middle of last century, impossible in any school of today. Much of the bitterness was gone, but the old antagonisms, which were not only of creed, but political and social also, though they might seem dead today, would stir at times, as though they had been buried alive. And might they only be dormant thus because it was an age in which all faith had weakened, in which whatever religion men might profess was a lighter weight in the scale than it once had been? What were the words of the Founder of their common faith? I came not to bring peace but a sword. . . . She was a charming girl. . . . He would find opportunity to talk to her tomorrow, if it could be done naturally. It was not a thing to be forced. . . . There were ways in which he would have been glad for his own daughters to be more like her. . . . He thought plurally, but it was Nina who was in his mind. . . . Not Frida, at least. . . . There were things that Elsie had said that he had not been pleased to hear. He must talk to her, making occasion if it did not come of itself. But he did not delude himself into thinking that he could have great influence now. Those days were past. If their mother had lived. . . . But all he could do now was to keep the home so that they would feel that they could always come when they would, and be ready to give help or counsel if he were asked.
. . ."I can't go to bed just yet," Frida said, as Chester closed the bedroom-door. "I've got some sewing to do. It won't take long. I hope you're not tired."
"No, I should like a pipe. I can lean out of the window."
"There's no reason you shouldn't smoke downstairs."
"I know that, but I never feel quite comfortable, knowing your father doesn't like it."
"Nina smokes when she's here. He never says anything."
"No, but that's how I feel. Like you would if you did that mending downstairs tomorrow."
"Mother never had sewing about on Sunday. I think it was a good rule, though I sometimes do it myself at home,"
"I don't say it wasn't. . . . What's the verdict?"
"I think she's charming. So I told Elsie. Elsie doesn't like her very much yet. I expect she will. I hope they'll be very happy."
"You talk as though it were all settled, and they'd been married yesterday."
"So it is, or at least it soon will be. Even a man might see that."
"People sometimes change their minds."
"Alwyn wouldn't. You ought to know him better than that."
"Well, he is rather like you. There wasn't much chance for me when you'd made your mind up. . . . I'm glad I've not got to marry her, anyway."
"Why?"
"Because she's as soft as a padded room, and would give way about equally."
"Yes. I know what you mean. But she wouldn't have been silly enough to marry you. She'd know that you'd murder her in about a week, just because she couldn't be sensible. But Alwyn's different from you."
"You feel sure that she'll have him?"
"You can trust Alwyn to see to that. How long has he taken to get her here?" Frida, having disposed of the only subject of importance on her horizon, became silent, but Chester was in a talkative mood. He had probably never had an anxious moment concerning the destiny of his own soul (nor would he have used the word, which he considered obsolete, except for those who are drowned at sea), but he was as keenly interested in religion as in the problems of Indian Government, the effects of tariff-barriers, or the composition of the next test-match team. He went on: "They'll come a cropper over the religion question more likely than anything else." He talked for ten minutes about the possibility of it ending in Miss Carfix leaving her Church (which he thought unlikely), and upon the significance of the fact that those who do forsake the Roman communion rarely find any alternative anchorage.
Frida may have listened. When he stopped, she said: "Peter wasn't asleep when I went in just now. She said she was too hot, but I put the sheet over her, and one blanket. Mrs. Case thought it was hardly necessary, but the nights often get colder before morning at this time of year."
It was just then that Elsie knocked at the door and asked if she had gone to bed yet, and, if not, would she come to her room for a few minutes, as she wanted a talk? The voice was unlike Elsie's usual confident tones, seeming to be controlled with difficulty to an effect of casualness at which it only partly succeeded.
CHAPTER TWELVE
"FRIDA," Elsie said, "I suppose I'm a fool to show this to anyone, but I know I can trust you not to talk, and I've just got to tell someone. It's such cursed bad luck - and all about nothing, too."
She held a letter in her hand as she spoke, and then passed it over, adding: "You'd better read what Con says."
Frida read the letter in silence, and then looked a second time at