They had gone on to talk of her father and of the types of men who
controlled international business. She had had plentiful opportunities
for observation in their homes and her own. Gunter Lake, the big banker,
she knew particularly well, because, it seemed, she had been engaged
or was engaged to marry him. “All these people,” she said, “are pushing
things about, affecting millions of lives, hurting and disordering
hundreds of thousands of people. They don’t seem to know what they
are doing. They have no plans in particular.... And you are getting
something going that will be a plan and a direction and a conscience
and a control for them? You will find my father extremely difficult, but
some of our younger men would love it.
“And,” she went on; “there are American women who’d love it too. We’re
petted. We’re kept out of things. We aren’t placed. We don’t get enough
to do. We’re spenders and wasters--not always from choice. While these
fathers and brothers and husbands of ours play about with the fuel and
power and life and hope of the world as though it was a game of poker.
With all the empty unspeakable solemnity of the male. And treat us as
though we ought to be satisfied if they bring home part of the winnings.
“That can’t go on,” she said.
Her eyes went back to the long, low, undulating skyline of the downs.
She spoke as though she took up the thread of some controversy that had
played a large part in her life. “That isn’t going on,” she said with an
effect of conclusive decision.
Sir Richmond recalled that little speech now as he returned from
Salisbury station to the Old George after his farewell to Martineau. He
recalled too the soft firmness of her profile and the delicate line of
her lifted chin. He felt that this time at any rate he was not being
deceived by the outward shows of a charming human being. This young
woman had real firmness of character to back up her free and independent
judgments. He smiled at the idea of any facile passion in the
composition of so sure and gallant a personality. Martineau was very
fine-minded in many respects, but he was an old maid; and like all old
maids he saw man and woman in every encounter. But passion was a thing
men and women fell back upon when they had nothing else in common. When
they thought in the pleasantest harmony and every remark seemed to weave
a fresh thread of common interest, then it wasn’t so necessary. It might
happen, but it wasn’t so necessary.... If it did it would be a secondary
thing to companionship. That’s what she was,--a companion.
But a very lovely and wonderful companion, the companion one would not
relinquish until the very last moment one could keep with her.
Her views about America and about her own place in the world seemed
equally fresh and original to Sir Richmond.
“I realize I’ve got to be a responsible American citizen,” she had said.
That didn’t mean that she attached very much importance to her recently
acquired vote. She evidently classified voters into the irresponsible
who just had votes and the responsible who also had a considerable
amount of property as well. She had no illusions about the power of the
former class. It didn’t exist. They were steered to their decisions by
people employed, directed or stimulated by “father” and his friends and
associates, the owners of America, the real “responsible citizens.” Or
they fell a prey to the merely adventurous leading of “revolutionaries.”
But anyhow they were steered. She herself, it was clear, was bound
to become a very responsible citizen indeed. She would some day, she
laughed, be swimming in oil and such like property. Her interest in
Sir Richmond’s schemes for a scientific world management of fuel was
therefore, she realized, a very direct one. But it was remarkable to
find a young woman seeing it like that.
Father it seemed varied very much in his attitude towards her. He
despised and distrusted women generally, and it was evident he had made
it quite clear to her how grave an error it was on her part to persist
in being a daughter and not a son. At moments it seemed to Sir
Richmond that she was disposed to agree with father upon that. When Mr.
Grammont’s sense of her regrettable femininity was uppermost, then he
gave his intelligence chiefly to schemes for tying her up against the
machinations of adventurers by means of trustees, partners, lawyers,
advisers, agreements and suchlike complications, or for acquiring a
workable son by marriage. To this last idea it would seem the importance
in her life of the rather heavily named Gunter Lake was to be ascribed.
But another mood of the old man’s was distrust of anything that could
not be spoken of as his “own flesh and blood,” and then he would direct
his attention to a kind of masculinization of his daughter and to
schemes for giving her the completest control of all he had to leave her
provided she never married nor fell under masculine sway. “After all,”
he would reflect as he hesitated over the practicability of his life’s
ideal, “there was Hetty Green.”
This latter idea had reft her suddenly at the age of seventeen from
the educational care of an English gentlewoman warranted to fit her for
marriage with any prince in Europe, and thrust her for the mornings and
a moiety of the afternoons of the better part of a year, after a swift
but competent training, into a shirt waist and an office down town. She
had been entrusted at first to a harvester concern independent of Mr.
Grammont, because he feared his own people wouldn’t train her hard. She
had worked for ordinary wages and ordinary hours, and at the end of the
day, she mentioned casually, a large automobile with two menservants
and a trustworthy secretary used to pick her out from the torrent of
undistinguished workers that poured out of the Synoptical Building. This
masculinization idea had also sent her on a commission of enquiry into
Mexico. There apparently she had really done responsible work.
But upon the question of labour Mr. Grammont was fierce, even for an
American business man, and one night at a dinner party he discovered
his daughter displaying what he considered an improper familiarity
with socialist ideas. This had produced a violent revulsion towards the
purdah system and the idea of a matrimonial alliance with Gunter Lake.
Gunter Lake, Sir Richmond gathered, wasn’t half a bad fellow. Generally
it would seem Miss Grammont liked him, and she had a way of speaking
about him that suggested that in some way Mr. Lake had been rather
hardly used and had acquired merit by his behaviour under bad treatment.
There was some story, however, connected with her war services in Europe
upon which Miss Grammont was evidently indisposed to dwell. About that
story Sir Richmond was left at the end of his Avebury day and after his
last talk with Dr. Martineau, still quite vaguely guessing.
So much fact about Miss Grammont as we have given had floated up in
fragments and pieced itself together in Sir Richmond’s mind in the
course of a day and a half. The fragments came up as allusions or by way
of illustration. The sustaining topic was this New Age Sir Richmond
fore shadowed, this world under scientific control, the Utopia of fully
developed people fully developing the resources of the earth. For a
number of trivial reasons Sir Richmond found himself ascribing the
project of this New Age almost wholly to Dr. Martineau, and presenting
it as a much completer scheme than he was justified in doing. It was
true that Dr. Martineau had not said many of the things Sir Richmond
ascribed to him, but also it was true that they had not crystallized out
in Sir Richmond’s mind before his talks with Dr. Martineau. The idea of
a New Age necessarily carries with it the idea of fresh rules of conduct
and of different relationships between human beings. And it throws
those who talk about it into the companionship of a common enterprise.
To-morrow the New Age will be here no doubt, but today it is the hope
and adventure of only a few human beings.
So that it was natural for Miss Grammont and Sir Richmond to ask: “What
are we to do with such types as father?” and to fall into an idiom that
assumed a joint enterprise. They had agreed by a tacit consent to a
common conception of the world they desired as a world scientifically
ordered, an immense organization of mature commonsense, healthy and
secure, gathering knowledge and power for creative adventures as yet
beyond dreaming. They were prepared to think of the makers of the
Avebury dyke as their yesterday selves, of the stone age savages as
a phase, in their late childhood, and of this great world order Sir
Richmond foresaw as a day where dawn was already at hand. And in such
long perspectives, the states, governments and institutions of to-day
became very temporary-looking and replaceable structures indeed. Both
these two people found themselves thinking in this fashion with an
unwonted courage and freedom because the other one had been disposed to
think in this fashion before. Sir Richmond was still turning over in
his mind the happy mutual release of the imagination this chance
companionship had brought about when he found himself back again at the
threshold of the Old George.