A week later Mrs. Ames was sitting at breakfast, with Harry opposite
her, expecting the early post, and among the gifts of the early post a
letter from her husband. He had written one very soon after his arrival
at Harrogate, saying that he felt better already. The waters, as Amy had
conjectured, could not be described as agreeable, since their
composition chiefly consisted of those particular ingredients which gave
to rotten eggs their characteristic savour, but what, so said the
valiant, did a bad taste in the mouth matter, if you knew it was doing
you good? An excellent band encouraged the swallowing of this
disagreeable fluid, and by lunch-time baths and drinking were over for
the day. He was looking forward to the Evans’ arrival; it would be
pleasant to see somebody he knew. He would write again before many days.
The post arrived; there was a letter for her in the Major’s large
sprawling handwriting, and she opened it. But it scarcely a letter: a
blister of expletives covered the smoking pages ... and the Evans’--two
of them--had arrived.
Mrs. Ames’ little toadlike face seldom expressed much more than a
ladylike composure, but had Harry been watching his mother he might have
thought that a shade of amusement hovered there.
“A letter from your father,” she said. “Rather a worried letter. The
cure is lowering, I believe, and makes you feel out of sorts.”
Harry was looking rather yellow and dishevelled. He had sat up very late
the night before, and the chase for rhymes had been peculiarly fatiguing
and ineffectual.
“I don’t feel at all well, either,” he said. “And I don’t think Cousin
Millie is well.”
“Why?” asked Mrs. Ames composedly.
“I went to see her yesterday and she didn’t attend. She seemed
frightfully surprised to hear that father had gone to Harrogate.”
“I suppose Dr. Evans had not told her,” remarked Mrs. Ames. “Please
telephone to her after breakfast, Harry, and ask her to dine with us
this evening.”
“Yes. How curious women are! One day they seem so glad to see you,
another you are no more to them than foam on a broken wave.”
This was one of the fragments of last night.
“On a broken what?” asked Mrs. Ames. The rustling of the turning leaf of
the _Morning Post_ had caused her not to hear. There was no sarcastic
intention in her inquiry.
“It does not matter,” said Harry.
His mother looked up at him.
“I should take a little dose, dear,” she said, “if you feel like that.
The heat upsets us all at times. Will you please telephone now, Harry?
Then I shall know what to order for dinner.”
Mrs. Ames’ nature was undeniably a simple one; she had no misty
profundities or curious dim-lit clefts on the round, smooth surface of
her life, but on occasion simple natures are capable of curious
complexities of feeling, the more elusive because they themselves are
unable to register exactly what they do feel. Certainly she saw a
connection between the non-arrival of dear Millie at Harrogate and the
inflamed letter from her husband. She had suspected also a connection
between dear Millie’s decision to spend August at Riseborough and her
belief that Major Ames was going to do so too. But the completeness of
the fiasco sucked the sting out of the resentment she might otherwise
have felt: it was impossible to be angry with such sorry conspirators.
At the same time, with regard to her husband, she felt the liveliest
internal satisfaction at his blistering communication, and read it
through again. The thought of her own slighted or rather unperceived
rejuvenescence added point to this; she felt that he had been “served
out.” Not for a moment did she suspect him of anything but the most
innocent of flirtations, and she was disposed to credit dear Millie with
having provoked such flirtation as there was. By this time also it must
have been quite clear to both the thwarted parties that she was in full
cognizance of their futile designs; clearly, therefore, her own _beau
rôle_ was to appear utterly unconscious of it all, and, unconsciously,
to administer nasty little jabs to each of them with a smiling face.
“They have been making sillies of themselves,” expressed her indulgent
verdict on the whole affair. Then in some strange feminine way she felt
a sort of secret pride in her husband for having had the manhood to
flirt, however mildly, with somebody else’s wife; but immediately there
followed the resentment that he had not shown any tendency to flirt with
his own, when she had encouraged him. But, anyhow, he had chosen the
prettiest woman in Riseborough, and he was the handsomest man.
But her mood changed; the thought at any rate of administering some
nasty little jabs presented itself in a growingly attractive light. The
two sillies had been wanting to dance to their own tune; they should
dance to hers instead, and by way of striking up her own tune at once
she wrote as follows, to her husband.
“MY DEAREST LYNDHURST,
“I can’t tell you how glad I was to get your two letters, and to
know how much good Harrogate is doing you. What an excellent thing
that you went to Dr. Evans (please remember me to him), and that he
insisted so strongly on your taking yourself thoroughly in hand.”
She paused a moment, wondering exactly how strong this insistence had
been. It was possible that it was not very strong. So much the more
reason for letting the sentence stand. She now underlined the words “so
strongly.”
“Of course the waters are disgusting to take, and I declare I can
almost smell them when I read your vivid description, but, as you
said in your first letter, what is a bad taste in the mouth when
you know it is doing you good? And your second letter convinces me
how right you were to go, and when things like gout begin to come
out, it naturally makes you feel a little low and worried. I want
you to stop there the whole of August, and get thoroughly rid of
it.
“Here we are getting along very happily, and I am so glad I did not
go to the sea. Millie is here, as you will know, and we see a great
deal of her. She is constantly dropping in, _en fille_, I suppose
you would call it, and is in excellent spirits and looks so
pretty. But I am not quite at ease about Harry (this is private).
He is very much attracted by her, and she seems to me not very wise
in the way she deals with him, for she seems to be encouraging him
in his silliness. Perhaps I will speak to her about it, and yet I
hardly like to.”
Again Mrs. Ames paused: she had no idea she had such a brilliant touch
in the administration of these jabs. What she said might not be strictly
accurate, but it was full of point.
“I remember, too, what you said, that it was so good for a boy to
be taken up with a thoroughly nice woman, and that it prevented his
getting into mischief. I am sure Harry is writing all sorts of
poems to her, because he sighs a great deal, and has a most inky
forefinger, for which I give him pumice-stone. But if she were not
so nice a woman, and so far from anything like flirtatiousness, I
should feel myself obliged to speak to Harry and warn him. She
seems very happy and cheerful. I daresay she feels like me, and is
rejoiced to think that Harrogate is doing her husband good.
“Write to me soon again, my dear, and give me another excellent
account of yourself. Was it not queer that you settled to go to
Harrogate just when Millie settled not to? If you were not such
good friends, one would think you wanted to avoid each other! Well,
I must stop. Millie is dining with us, and I must order dinner.”
She read through what she had written with considerable content. “That
will be nastier than the Harrogate waters,” she thought to herself,
“and quite as good for him.” And then, with a certain largeness which
lurked behind all her littlenesses, she practically dismissed the whole
silly business from her mind. But she continued the use of the purely
natural means for restoring the colour of the hair, and tapped and
dabbed the corners of her eyes with the miraculous skin-food. That was a
prophylactic measure; she did not want to appear “a fright” when
Lyndhurst came back from Harrogate.
Mrs. Ames was well aware that the famous fancy dress ball had caused her
a certain loss of prestige in her capacity of queen of society in
Riseborough. It had followed close on the heels of her innovation of
asking husbands and wives separately to dinner, and had somewhat taken
the shine out of her achievement, and indeed this latter had not been as
epoch-making as she had expected. For the last week or two she had felt
that something new was required of her, but as is often the case, she
found that the recognition of such a truth does not necessarily lead to
the discovery of the novelty. Perhaps the paltriness of Lyndhurst’s
conduct, leading to reflections on her own superior wisdom, put her on
the path, for about this time she began to take a renewed interest in
the Suffragette movement which, from what she saw in the papers, was
productive of such adventurous alarums in London. For herself, she was
essentially law-abiding by nature, and though, in opposition to
Lyndhurst, sympathetically inclined to women who wanted the vote, she
had once said that to throw stones at Prime Ministers was unladylike in
itself, and only drew on the perpetrators the attention of the police to
themselves, rather than the attention of the public to the problem. But
a recrudescence of similar acts during the last summer had caused her
to wonder whether she had said quite the last word on the subject, or
thought the last thought. Certainly the sensational interest in such
violent acts had led her to marvel at the strength of feeling that
prompted them. Ladies, apparently, whose breeding--always a word of
potency with Mrs. Ames--she could not question, were behaving like
hooligans. The matter interested her in itself apart from its possible
value as a novelty for the autumn. Also an election was probably to take
place in November. Hitherto that section of Riseborough in which she
lived had not suffered its tranquillity to be interrupted by political
excitements, but like a man in his sleep, drowsily approved a
Conservative member. But what if she took the lead in some political
agitation, and what if she introduced a Suffragette element into the
election? That was a solider affair than that a quantity of Cleopatras
should skip about in a back garden.
She had always felt a certain interest in the movement, but it was the
desire to make a novelty for the autumn, peppered, so to speak, by an
impatience at the futile treachery of her husband’s Harrogate plans, and
an ambition to take a line of her own in opposition to him, presented
their crusade in a serious light to her. The militant crusaders she had
hitherto regarded as affected by a strange lunacy, and her husband’s
masculine comment, “They ought to be well smacked, by Jove!” had the
ring of common-sense, especially since he added, for the benefit of such
crusaders as were of higher social rank, “They’re probably mad, poor
things.”
But during this tranquil month of August her more serious interest was
aroused, and she bought, though furtively, such literature in the form
of little tracts and addresses as was accessible on the subject. And
slowly, though still the desire for an autumn novelty that would eclipse
the memory of the congregations of Cleopatras was a moving force in her
mind, something of the real ferment began to be yeasty within her, and
she learned by private inquiry what the Suffragette colours were.
Naturally the introduction of an abstract idea into her mind was a
laborious process, since her life had for years consisted of an endless
chain of small concrete events, and had been lived among people who had
never seen an abstract idea wild, any more than they had seen an
elephant in a real jungle. It was always tamed and eating buns, as in
the Zoo, just as other ideas reached them peptonized by the columns of
daily papers. But a wild thing lurked behind the obedient trunk; a wild
thing lurked behind the reports of ludicrous performances in the Palace
Yard at Westminster.
August was still sultry, and Major Ames was still at Harrogate, when one
evening she and Harry dined with Millie. Since nothing of any
description happened in Riseborough during this deserted month, the
introductory discussion of what events had occurred since they last met
in the High Street that morning was not possible of great expansion.
None of them had seen the aeroplane which was believed to have passed
over the town in the afternoon, and nobody had heard from Mrs. Altham.
Then Mrs. Ames fired the shot which was destined to involve Riseborough
in smoke and brimstone.
“Lyndhurst and I,” she said, “have never agreed about the Suffragettes,
and now that I know something about them, I disagree more than ever.”
Millie looked slightly shocked: she thought of Suffragettes as she
thought of the persons who figure in police news. Indeed, they often
did. She knew they wanted to vote about something, but that was
practically all she knew except that they expressed their desire to vote
by hitting people.
“I know nothing about them,” she said. “But are they not very
unladylike?”
“They are a disgrace to their sex,” said Harry. “We soon made them get
out of Cambridge! They tried to hold a meeting in the backs, but I and a
few others went down there, and--well, there wasn’t much more heard of
them. I don’t call them women at all. I call them females.”
Mrs. Ames had excellent reasons for suspecting romance in her son’s
account of his exploits.
“Tell me exactly what happened in the backs at Cambridge, Harry,” she
said.
Harry slightly retracted.
“There is nothing much to tell,” he said. “Our club felt bound to make a
protest, and we went down there, as I said. It seemed to cow them a
bit!”
“And then did the proctors come and cow you?” asked his inexorable
mother.
“I believe a proctor did come; I did not wait for that. They made a
perfect fiasco, anyhow. They told me it was all a dead failure, and we
heard no more about it.”
“So that was all?” said Mrs. Ames.
“And quite enough. I agree with father. They disgrace their sex!”
“My dear, you know as little about it as your father,” she said.
“But surely a man’s judgment----” said Millie, making weak eyes at
Harry.
“Dear Millie, a man’s judgment is not of any value, if he does not know
anything about what he is judging. We have all read accounts in the
papers, and heard that they are very violent and chain themselves up to
inconvenient places like railings, and are taken away by policemen.
Sometimes they slap the policemen, but surely there must be something
behind that makes them like that. I am finding out what it is. It is all
most interesting. They say that they have to pay their rates and taxes,
but get no privileges. If a man pays rates and taxes he gets a vote, and
why shouldn’t a woman? It is all very well expressed. They seem to me to
reason just as well as a man. I mean to find out much more about it all.
Personally I don’t pay rates and taxes, because that is Lyndhurst’s
affair, but if we had arranged differently and I paid for the house and
the rates and taxes, why shouldn’t I have a vote instead of him? And
from what I can learn the gardener has a vote, just the same as
Lyndhurst, although Lyndhurst does all the garden-rolling, and won’t let
Parkins touch the flowers.”
Mrs. Evans sighed.
“It all seems very confused and upside down,” she said. “Do smoke,
Harry, if you feel inclined. Will you have a cigarette, Cousin Amy? I am
afraid I have none. I never smoke.”
Harry was a little sore from his mother’s handling, and was not
unwilling to hit back.
“I never knew mother smoked,” he said. “Do you smoke, mother? How
delightful! How Eastern! I never knew you were Eastern. I always thought
you said it was not wicked for women to smoke, but only horrid. Do be
horrid. I am sure Suffragettes smoke.”
Mrs. Ames turned a swift appealing eye on Millie, entreating confidence.
Then she lied.
“Dear Millie, what are you thinking of?” she said. “Of course I never
smoke, Harry.”
But the appeal of the eyes had not taken effect.
“But on the night of my little dance, Cousin Amy,” she said, “surely you
had a cigarette. It made you cough, and you said how nice it was!”
Mrs. Ames wished she had not been so ruthless about the Suffragettes at
Cambridge.
“There is a great difference between doing a thing once,” she said, “and
making a habit of it. I think I did want to see what it was like, but I
never said it was nice, and as for its being Eastern, I am sure I am
glad to belong to the West. I always thought it unfeminine, and then I
knew it. I did not feel myself again till I had brushed my teeth and
rinsed my mouth. Now, dear Millie, I am really interested in the
Suffragettes. Their demands are reasonable, and if we are unreasonable
about granting them, they must be unreasonable too. For years they have
been reasonable and nobody has paid any attention to them. What are they
to do but be violent, and call attention to themselves? It is all so
well expressed; you cannot fail to be interested.”
“Wilfred would never let me hit a policeman,” said Milly. “And I don’t
think I could do it, even if he wanted me to.”
“But it is not the aim of the movement to hit policemen,” said Mrs.
Ames. “They are very sorry to have to----”
“They are sorrier afterwards,” said Harry.
Mrs. Ames turned a small, withering eye upon her offspring.
“If you had waited to hear what they had to say instead of running away
before the proctor came,” she said, “you might have learnt a little
about them, dear. They are not at all sorry afterwards; they go to
prison quite cheerfully, in the second division, too, which is terribly
uncomfortable. And many of them have been brought up as luxuriously as
any of us.”
“I could not go to prison,” said Mrs. Evans faintly, but firmly. “And
even if I could, it would be very wrong of me, for I am sure it would
injure Wilfred’s practice. People would not like to go to a doctor whose
wife had been in prison. She might have caught something. And Elsie
would be so ashamed of me.”
Mrs. Ames gave the suppressed kind of sigh which was habitual with her
when Lyndhurst complained that the water for his bath was not hot,
although aware that the kitchen boiler was being cleaned.
“But you need not go to prison in order to be a Suffragette, dear
Millie,” she said. “Prison life is not one of the objects of the
movement.”
Mrs. Evans looked timidly apologetic.
“I didn’t know,” she said. “It is so interesting to be told. I thought
all the brave sort went to prison, and had breakfast together when they
were let out. I am sure I have read about their having breakfast
together.”
A faint smile quivered on her mouth. She was aware that Cousin Amy
thought her very stupid, and there was a delicate pleasure in appearing
quite idiotic like this. It made Cousin Amy dance with irritation in
her inside, and explain more carefully yet.
“Yes, dear Millie,” she said, “but their having breakfast together has
not much to do with their objects----”
“I don’t know about that,” said Harry; “there is a club at Cambridge to
which I belong, whose object is to dine together.”
“Then it is very greedy of you, dear,” said Mrs. Ames, “and the
Suffragettes are not like that. They go to prison and do all sorts of
unladylike things for the sake of their convictions. They want to be
treated justly. For years they have asked for justice, and nobody has
paid the least attention to them; now they are making people attend. I
assure you that until I began reading about them, I had very little
sympathy with them. But now I feel that all women ought to know about
them. Certainly what I have read has opened my eyes very much, and there
are a quantity of women of very good family indeed who belong to them.”
Harry pulled his handkerchief out of the sleeve of his dress-coat; he
habitually kept it there. Just now the Omar Khayyam Club was rather
great on class distinctions.
“I do not see what that matters,” he said. “Because a man’s
great-grandmother was created a duchess for being a king’s mistress----”
Mrs. Evans and Mrs. Ames got up simultaneously; if anything Mrs. Ames
got up a shade first.
“I do not think we need go into that, Harry,” said Mrs. Ames.
Millie tempered the wind.
“Will you join us soon, Harry?” she said. “If you are too long I shall
come and fetch you. We have been political to-night! Will it be too cold
for you in the garden, Cousin Amy?”
Left to himself, Harry devoted several minutes’ pitiful reflection to
his mother’s state of mind. In spite of her awakened interest in the
Suffragette movement, she seemed to him deplorably old-fashioned. But
with his second glass of port his thoughts assumed a rosier tone, and he
determined to wait till Cousin Millie came to fetch him. Surely she
meant him to do that: no doubt she wanted to have just one private word
with him. She had often caught his eye during dinner, with a deprecating
look, as if to say this tiresome rigmarole about Suffragettes was not
her fault. He felt they understood each other....
There was a large Chippendale looking-glass above the sideboard, and he
got up from the table and observed the upper part of his person which
was reflected in it. A wisp of hair fell over his forehead; it might
more rightly be called a plume. He appeared to himself to have a most
interesting face, uncommon, arresting. He was interestingly and
characteristically dressed, too, with a collar Byronically low, a soft
frilled shirt, and in place of a waistcoat a black cummerbund. Then
hastily he mounted on a chair in order to see the whole of his lean
figure that seemed so slender. It was annoying that at this moment of
critical appreciation a parlour-maid should look in to see if she could
clear away....
* * * * *
There is nothing that so confirms individualism in any character as
periods of comparative solitude. In men such confirmation is liable to
be checked by the boredom to which their sex is subject, but women,
less frequently the prey of this paralysing emotion, when the demands
made upon them by household duties and domestic companionship are
removed, enter very swiftly into the kingdoms of themselves. This
process was very strongly at work just now with Millie Evans;
superficially, her composure and meaningless smoothness were unaltered,
so that Mrs. Ames, at any rate, almost wondered whether she had been
right in crediting her with any hand in the Harrogate plans, so
unruffled was her insipid and deferential cordiality, but down below she
was exploring herself and discovering a capacity for feeling that
astonished her by its intensity. All her life she had been content to
arouse emotion without sharing it, liking to see men attentive to her,
liking to see them attracted by her and disposed towards tenderness.
They were more interesting like that, and she gently basked in the
warmth of their glow, like a lizard on the wall. She had not wanted more
than that; she was lizard, not vampire, and to sun herself on the wall,
and then glide gently into a crevice again, seemed quite sufficient
exercise for her emotions. Luckily or unluckily (those who hold that
calm and complete respectability is the aim of existence would prefer
the former adverb, those who think that development of individuality is
worth the risk of a little scorching, the latter) she had married a man
who required little or nothing more than she was disposed to give. He
had not expected unquiet rapture, but a comfortable home with a “little
woman” always there, good-tempered, as Millie was, and cheerful and
pliable as, with a dozen exceptions when the calm precision came into
play, she had always been. Temperamentally, he was nearly as
undeveloped as she, and the marriage had been what is called a very
sensible one. But such sensible marriages ignore the fact that human
beings, like the shores of the bay of Naples, are periodically volcanic,
and the settlers there assume that their little property, because no
sulphurous signs have appeared on the surface, is essentially quiescent,
neglecting the fact that at one time or another emotional disturbances
are to be expected. But because many quiet years have passed
undisturbed, they get to believe that the human and natural fires have
ceased to smoulder, and are no longer alive down below the roots of
their pleasant vines and olive trees. All her life up till now, Millie
Evans had been like one of these quiescent estates; now, when middle-age
was upon her, she began to feel the stir of vital forces. The surface of
her life was still undisturbed, she went about the diminished business
of the household with her usual care, and in the weeks of this solitary
August knitted a couple of ties for her husband, and read a couple of
novels from the circulating library, with an interest not more markedly
tepid than usual. But subterranean stir was going on, though no
fire-breathing clefts appeared on the surface. Subconsciously she wove
images and dreams, scarcely yet knowing that it is out of such dreams
that the events and deeds of life inevitably spring. She had scarcely
admitted even to herself that her projects for August had gone
crookedly: the conviction that Lyndhurst Ames had found himself gouty
and in need of Harrogate punctually at the date when he knew that she
might be expected there, sufficiently straightened them. The intention
more than compensated the miscarriage of events.
To-night, when her two guests had gone, the inevitable step happened:
her unchecked impulses grew stronger and more definite, and out of the
misty subconsciousness of her mind the disturbance flared upwards into
the light of her everyday consciousness. With genuine flame it mounted;
it was no solitary imagining of her own that had kindled it; he, she
knew, was a conscious partner, and she had as sign the memory that he
had kissed her. Somehow, deep in her awakening heart, that meant
something stupendous to her. It had been unrealized at the time, but it
had been like the touch of some corrosive, sweet and acid, burrowing
down, eating her and yet feeding her. Up till now, it seemed to have
signified little, now it invested itself with a tremendous significance.
Probably to him it meant little; men did such things easily, but it was
that which had burrowed within her, making so insignificant an entry,
but penetrating so far. It was not a proof that he loved her, but it had
become a token that she loved him. Otherwise, it could not have
happened. There was something final in the beginning of it all. Then he
had kissed her a second time on the night of the fancy dress ball. He
had called that a cousinly kiss, and she smiled at the thought of that,
for it showed that it required to be accounted for, excused. She felt a
sort of tenderness for that fluttering, broken-winged subterfuge, so
transparent, so undeceptive. If cousins kissed, they did not recollect
their relationship afterwards, especially if there was no relationship.
He had not kissed her because she was some sort of cousin to his wife.
Yet it hardly stating the case correctly to say that he had kissed her.
Doubtless, on that first occasion below the mulberry-tree it was his
head that had bent down to hers, while she but remained passive,
waiting. But it was she who had made him do it, and she gloried in the
soft compulsion she had put on him. Even as she thought of it this
evening, her eye sparkled. “He could not help it,” she said to herself.
“He could not help it.”
Out of the sequestered cloistral twilight of her soul there had stepped
something that had slumbered there all her life, something pagan,
something incapable of scruples or regrets, as void of morals as a nymph
or Bacchanal on a Greek frieze. It did not trouble, so it seemed, to
challenge or defy the traditions and principles in which she had lived
all these years; it appeared to be ignorant of their existence, or, at
the most, they were but shadows that lay in unsubstantial bars across a
sunlit pavement. At present, it stood there trembling and quiescent,
like a moth lately broken out from its sheathed chrysalis, but momently,
now that it had come forth, it would grow stronger, and its crumpled
wings expand into pinions feathered with silver and gold.
But she made no plans, she scarcely even turned her eyes towards the
future, for the future would surely be as inevitable as the past had
been. One by one the hot August days dropped off like the petals of
peach blossom, which must fall before the fruit begins to swell. She
neither wanted to delay or hurry their withering. There were but few
days left, few petals left to fall, for within a week, so her husband
had written, he would be back, vastly better for his cure, and Major
Ames was coming with him. “I shall be so glad to see my little woman
again,” he had said. “Elsie and I have missed her.”
Occasionally she tried to think about her husband, but she could not
concentrate her mind on him. She was too much accustomed to him to be
able to fix her thoughts on him emotionally. She was equally well
accustomed to Elsie, or rather equally well accustomed to her complete
ignorance about Elsie. She could no more have drawn a chart of the
girl’s mind than she could have drawn a picture of the branches of the
mulberry-tree under which she so often sat, beholding the interlacement
of its boughs but never really seeing them. Never had she known the
psychical bond of motherhood; even the physical had meant little to her.
She was Elsie’s mother by accident, so to speak; and she was but as a
tree from which a gardener has made a cutting, planting it near, so that
sapling and parent stem grow up in sight of each other, but quite
independently, without sense of their original unity. Even when her baby
had lain at her breast, helpless, and still deriving all from her, the
sweet intimate mystery of the life that was common to them both had been
but a whispered riddle to her; and that was long ago, its memory had
become a faded photograph that might really have represented not herself
and her baby, but any mother and child. It was very possible that before
long Elsie would be transplanted by marriage, and she herself would have
to learn a little more about chess in order to play with her husband in
the evening.
Such, hitherto, had been her emotional life: this summary of it and its
meagre total is all that can justly be put to credit. She liked her
husband, she knew he was kind to her, and so, in its inanimate manner,
was the food which she ate kind to her, in that it nourished and
supported her. But her gratitude to it was untinged with emotion; she
was not sentimental over her breakfast, for it was the mission of food
to give support, and the mission of her husband had not been to her much
more than that. Neither wifehood nor motherhood had awakened her
womanhood. Yet, in that she was a woman, she was that most dangerous of
all created or manufactured things, an unexploded shell, liable to blow
to bits both itself and any who handled her. The shell was alive still,
its case uncorroded, and its contents still potentially violent. That
violence at present lay dark and quiet within it; its sheath was smooth
and faintly bright. It seemed but a play-thing, a parlour-ornament; it
could stand on any table in any drawing-room. But the heart of it had
never been penetrated by the love that could transform its violence into
strength: now its cap was screwed and its fuse fixed. Until the damp and
decay of age robbed it of its power, it would always be liable to wreck
itself and its surroundings.
* * * * *
These same days that for her were kindling dangerous stuff, passed for
Mrs. Ames in a _crescendo_ of awakening interest. All her life she had
been wrapped round like the kernel of a nut, in the hard, dry husk of
conventionalities, her life had been encased in a succession of minute
happenings, and, literally speaking, she had never breathed the outer
air of ideas. As has been noticed, she gave regular patronage to St.
Barnabas’ Church, and spent a solid hour or two every week in decorating
it with the produce of her husband’s garden, from earliest spring, when
the faint, shy snowdrops were available, to late autumn, when October
and November frosts finally blackened the salvias and chrysanthemums.
But all that had been of the nature of routine: a certain admiration for
the vicar, a passionless appreciation of his nobly ascetic life, his
strong, lean face, and the fire of his utterances had made her
attendance regular, and her contributions to his charities quite
creditably profuse in proportion to her not very ample means. But she
had never denied herself anything in order to increase them, while the
time she spent over the flowers was amply compensated for when she saw
the eclipse they made of Mrs. Brooks’ embroideries, or when the lilies
dropped their orange-staining pollen on to the altar-cloth. Stranger,
perhaps, from the emotional point of view, had been her recently
attempted rejuvenescence, but even that had been a calculated and
materialistic effort. It had not been a manifestation of her love for
her husband, or of a desire to awaken his love for her. It was merely a
decorative effort to attract his attention, and prevent it wandering
elsewhere.
But now, with her kindled sympathy for the Suffragette movement, there
was springing up in her the consciousness of a kinship with her sex
whom, hitherto, she had regarded as a set of people to whom, in the
matter of dinner-giving and entirely correct social behaviour, she must
be an example and a law, while even her hospitalities had not been
dictated by the spirit of hospitality but rather by a sort of pompous
and genteel competition. Now she was beginning to see that behind the
mere events of life, if they were to be worth anything, must lie an
idea, and here behind this woman’s crusade, with all its hooliganism,
its hysteria, its apish fanaticism, lay an idea of justice and
sisterhood. They seemed simple words, and she would have said off-hand
that she knew what they meant. But, as she began faintly to understand
them, she knew that she had been as ignorant of them as of what
Australia really was. To her, as it was a geographical expression only,
so justice was an abstract expression. But the meaning of justice was
known to those who gave up the comforts and amenities of life for its
sake, and for its sake cheerfully suffered ridicule and prison life and
misunderstanding. And the fumes of an idea, to one who had practically
never tasted one, intoxicated her as new wine mounts to the head of a
teetotaler.
Ideas are dangerous things, and should be kept behind a fireguard, for
fear that the children, of whom this world largely consists, should burn
their fingers, thinking that these bright, sparkling toys are to be
played with. Mrs. Ames, in spite of her unfamiliarity with them, did not
fall into this error. She realized that if she was to warm herself, to
get the glow of the fire in her cramped and frozen limbs, she must treat
it with respect, and learn to handle it. That, at any rate, was her
intention, and she had a certain capacity for thoroughness.
* * * * *
It was in the last week of August that Major Ames was expected back,
after three weeks of treatment. At first, as reflected in his letters,
his experiences had been horrifying; the waters nauseated him, and the
irritating miscarriage of the plan which was the real reason for his
going to Harrogate, caused him fits of feeble rage which were the more
maddening because they had to be borne secretly and silently. Also the
lodgings he had procured seemed to him needlessly expensive, and all
this efflux of bullion was being poured out on treatment which Dr.
Evans had told him was really quite unnecessary. Regular and sparkling
letters from his wife, in praise of August spent at Riseborough,
continued to arrive and filled him with impotent envy. He, too, might be
spending August at Riseborough if he had not been quite so precipitate.
As it was, his mornings were spent in absorbing horrible draughts and
gently stewing in the fetid waters of the Starbeck spring: his meals
were plain to the point of grotesqueness, his evenings were spent in
playing inane games of patience, while Elsie and the doctor pored
silently over their chessboard, saying “Check” to each other at
intervals. But through the days and their tedious uniformity there ran a
certain unquietness and desire. It was clear that Millie, no less than
he, had planned that they should be together in August, but his desire
did not absorb him, rather it made him restless and anxious about the
future. He did not even know if he was in love with her; he did not even
know if he wanted to be. The thought of her kindled his imagination, and
he could picture himself in love with her: at the same time he was not
certain whether, if the last two months could be lived over again, he
would let himself drift into the position where he now found himself.
There was neither ardour nor anything imperative in his heart;
something, it is true, was heated, but it only smouldered and smoked. It
was of the nature of such fire as bursts out in haystacks: it was born
of stuffiness and packed confinement, and was as different as two things
of the same nature can be, from the swift lambency and laudable flame of
sun-kindled and breeze-fed flame. It disquieted and upset him; he could
not soberly believe in the pictures his imagination drew of his being
irresistibly in love with her: their colour quickly faded, their
outlines were wavering and uncertain. And the background was even more
difficult to fill in ... how was the composition to be arranged? Where
would Amy stand? What aspect would Riseborough wear? And then, after a
long silence, Elsie said “Check.”
Major Ames was due to arrive at Riseborough soon after four in the
afternoon, and Mrs. Ames was at pains to be at home by that hour to
welcome him and give him tea, and had persuaded Harry to go up to the
station to meet him. She had gathered a charming decoration of flowers
to make the room bright, and had put a couple more vases of them in his
dressing-room. Before long a cab arrived from the station bearing his
luggage, but neither he nor Harry occupied it. So it was natural to
conclude that they were walking down, and she made tea, since they would
not be many minutes behind the leisurely four-wheeler. She wanted very
particularly to give him an auspicious and comfortable return: he must
not think that, because this Suffragette movement occupied her thoughts
so much, she was going to become remiss in care for him. But still the
minutes went on, and she took a cup of tea herself, and found it already
growing astringent. What could have detained him she could not guess,
but certainly he should have another brew of tea made for him, for he
hated what in moments of irritation he called tincture of tannin. Five
o’clock struck, and the two quarters that duly followed it. Before that
a conjecture had formed itself in her mind.
Then came the rattle of his deposited hat and stick in the hall, and the
rattle of the door-handle for his entry.
“Well, Amy,” he said, “and here’s your returned prodigal. Train late as
usual, and I walked down. How are you?”
She got up and kissed him.
“Very well indeed, Lyndhurst,” she said; “and there is no need to ask
you how you are.”
She paused a moment.
“Your luggage arrived nearly an hour ago,” she said.
He had forgotten that detail.
“An hour ago? Surely not,” he said.
She gave him one more pause in which he could say more, but nothing
came.
“You have had tea, I suppose,” she said.
“Yes; Evans insisted on my dropping in to his house, and taking a cup
there. That rogue Harry has stopped on. Well, well: we were all young
once! You remember the old story I told you about the Colonel’s wife
when I was a lad.”
She remembered it perfectly. She felt sure also that he had not meant to
tell her where he had been since his arrival at the station.