tremendous air of discussing things deeply. Lady Charlotte expressed a
great number of opinions very forcibly, and Mr. Sycamore listened with
the manner of a man who had at last after many years of intellectual
destitution met a profoundly interesting talker. Only now and then did
he seem to question her view. But yet he succeeded in betraying a
genuine anxiety about the possible penalties that might fall upon Lady
Charlotte. Presently, she never knew quite how, she found herself
accusing Joan of her illegitimacy.
“But my dear Lady Charlotte, the poor child is scarcely responsible.”
“If we made no penalties on account of illegitimacy the whole world
would dissolve away in immorality.”
Mr. Sycamore looked quite arch. “My dear lady, surely there would be one
or _two_ exceptions!”...
Finally, with a tremendous effect of having really got to the bottom of
the matter, he said: “Then I conclude, Lady Charlotte, that now that the
children are baptized and their spiritual welfare is assured, all you
wish is for things to go on quietly and smoothly without the Miss
Stublands annoying you further.”
“Exactly,” said Lady Charlotte. “My one desire is to go abroad—now that
my task is done.”
“You have every reason to be satisfied, Lady Charlotte, with things as
they are. I take it that what I have to do now is to talk over the Miss
Stublands and prevent any vindictive litigation arising out of the
informality of your proceedings. I think—yes, I think and hope that I
can do it.”
And this being agreed upon Mr. Sycamore lunched comfortably and departed
to The Ingle-Nook, where he showed the same receptive intelligence to
Aunt Phœbe. There was the same air of taking soundings in the deep
places of opinion.
“I understand,” he said at last, “that your one desire is to be free
from further raids and invasions from Lady Charlotte. I can quite
understand it. Practically she will agree to that. I can secure that. I
think I can induce her to waive what she considers to be her rights. You
can’t unbaptize the children, but I should think that under your care
the effect, whatever the effect may be, can be trusted to wear off....”
And having secured a similar promise of inaction from the Miss
Stublands, Mr. Sycamore returned to London, twinkling pleasantly about
the spectacles as he speculated exactly what it was that he had so
evidently quite satisfactorily settled.
CHAPTER THE SIXTH
THE FOURTH GUARDIAN
§ 1
It was just a quarter of a year after the death of Dolly and Arthur
before Oswald Sydenham heard of the event and of Arthur’s will and of
the disputes of his three fellow guardians in England. For when the
stonemason boatman staggered and fell and the boat turned over beneath
the Arco Naturale, Oswald was already marching with a long string of
porters and armed men beyond the reach of letters and telegrams into the
wilderness.
He was in pursuit of a detachment of the Sudanese mutineers who, with a
following of wives, children and captives, were making their way round
through the wet forest country north of Lake Kioga towards the Nile
province. With Sydenham was an able young subaltern, Muir, the only
other white man of the party. In that net of rivers, marsh and forest
they were destined to spend some feverish months. They pushed too far
eastward and went too fast, and they found themselves presently not the
pursuers but the pursued, cut off from their supports to the south. They
built a stockade near Lake Salisbury, and were loosely besieged. For a
time both sides in the conflict were regarded with an impartial
unfriendliness by the naked blacks who then cultivated that primitive
region, and it was only the looting and violence of the Sudanese that
finally turned the scale in favour of Sydenham’s little force. Sydenham
was able to attack in his turn with the help of a local levy; he took
the Sudanese camp, killed twenty or thirty of the mutineers, captured
most of their women and gear, and made five prisoners with very little
loss to his own party. He led the attack, a tall, lean, dreadful figure
with half a face that stared fiercely and half a red, tight-skinned,
blind mask. Two Sudanese upon whom his one-sided visage came suddenly,
yelled with dismay, dropped their rifles and started a stampede. Black
men they knew and white men, but this was a horrible red and white man.
A remnant of the enemy got away to the north and eluded his pursuit
until it became dangerous to push on further. They were getting towards
the district in which was the rebel chief Kabarega, and a union of his
forces with the Sudanese fugitives would have been more than Sydenham
and Muir could have tackled.
The government force turned southward again. Oswald had been suffering
from fatigue and a recurrence of blackwater fever, a short, sharp spell
that passed off as suddenly as it came; but it left him weak and
nervously shaken; for some painful days before he gave in he ruled his
force with an iron discipline that was at once irrational and
terrifying, and afterwards he was carried in a litter, and Muir took
over the details of command. It was only when Oswald was within two
days’ journey of Luba Fort upon Lake Victoria Nyanza that his letters
reached him.
§ 2
During all this time until he heard of Dolly’s death, Oswald’s heart was
bitter against her and womankind. He had left England in a fever of
thwarted loneliness. He did his best to “go to Hell” even as he had
vowed in the first ecstasy of rage, humiliation and loss. He found
himself incapable of a self-destructive depravity. He tried drinking
heavily and he could never be sure that he was completely drunk; some
toughness in his fibre defeated this overrated consolation. He attempted
other forms of dissipation, and he could not even achieve remorse,
nothing but exasperation with that fiddling pettiness of sexual
misbehaviour which we call Vice. He desired a gigantic sense of
desolation and black damnation, and he got only shame for a sort of
childish nastiness. “If this is Sin!” cried Oswald at last, “then God
help the Devil!”
“There’s nothing like Work,” said Oswald, “nothing like Work for
forgetfulness. And getting hurt. And being shot at. I’ve done with this
sort of thing for good and all....”
“What a fool I was to come here!...”
And he went on his way to Uganda.
The toil of his expedition kept his mind from any clear thinking about
Dolly. But if he thought little he felt much. His mind stuck and raged
at one intolerable thought, and could not get beyond it. Dolly had come
towards him and then had broken faith with the promise in her eyes, and
fled back to Arthur’s arms. And now she was with Arthur. Arthur was with
her, Arthur had got her. And it was intolerably stupid of her. And yet
she wasn’t stupid. There she was in that affected little white cottage
with its idiotic big roof, waiting about while that fool punched copper
or tenored about æsthetics. (Oswald’s objection to copper repoussé had
long since passed the limits of sanity.) Always Dolly was at Arthur’s
command now. Until the end of things. And she might be here beside her
mate, with the flash in her eyes, with her invincible spirit, sharing
danger, fever and achievement; empire building, mankind saving....
Now and then indeed his mind generalized his bitter personal
disappointment with a fine air of getting beyond it. The Blantyre woman
and that older woman of his first experiences who had screamed at the
sight of his disfigured face, were then brought into the case to
establish a universal misogyny. Women were just things of sex,
child-bearers, dressed up to look like human beings. They promised
companionship as the bait on the hook promises food. They were the cheap
lures of that reproductive maniac, herself feminine, old Mother Nature;
sham souls blind to their own worthless quality through an inordinate
vanity and self-importance. Ruthless they were in their distribution of
disappointment. Sterile themselves, life nested in them. They were the
crowning torment in the Martyrdom of Man.
Thus Oswald in the moments when thought overtook him. And when it came
to any dispute about women among the men, and particularly to the
disposal of the women after the defeat of the mutineers near Lake
Salisbury, it suited his humour to treat them as chattels and to note
how ready they were to be treated as chattels, how easy in the transfer
of their affections and services from their defeated masters to their
new owners. This, he said, was the natural way with women. In Europe
life was artificial; women were out of hand; we were making an inferior
into a superior as the Egyptian made a god of the cat. Like cat worship
it was a phase in development that would pass in its turn.
The camp at which his letters met him was in the Busoga country, and all
day long the expedition had been tramping between high banks of
big-leaved plants, blue flowering salvias, dracenas and the like, and
under huge flowering trees. Captain Wilkinson from Luba Fort had sent
runners and porters to meet them, and at the halting-place, an open
space near the banana fields of a village, they found tea already set
for them. Oswald was ill and tired, and Muir took over the bothers of
supervision while Oswald sat in a deck chair, drank tea, and opened his
letters. The first that came to hand was from Sycamore, the Stubland
solicitor. Its news astonished him.
_Dear Sir_, wrote Mr. Sycamore.
_I regret to have to inform you of the death of my two clients, your
friends Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Stubland. They were drowned by a boat
accident at Capri on the third of this month, and they probably died
within a few minutes of each other. They had been in Italy upon a
walking tour together. There were no witnesses of the accident—the
boatman was drowned with them—and the presumption in such cases is that
the husband survived the wife. This is important because by the will of
Mrs. Stubland you are nominated as the sole guardian both of the son and
the adopted daughter, while by the will of Mr. Stubland you are one of
four such guardians. In all other respects the wills are in identical
terms...._
At this point Oswald ceased to read.
He was realizing that these words meant that Dolly was dead.
§ 3
Oswald felt very little grief at the first instant of this realization.
We grieve acutely for what we have lost, whether it be a reality or a
dream, but Dolly had become for Oswald neither a possession nor a hope.
In his mind she was established as an intense quarrel. Whatever he had
to learn about her further had necessarily to begin in terms of that.
The first blow of this news made him furious. He could not think of any
act or happening of Dolly’s except in terms of it being aimed at him.
And he was irrationally angry with her for dying in such a way. That she
had gone back to Arthur and resumed his embraces was, he felt, bad
enough; but that she should start out to travel with Arthur alone, to
walk by Arthur’s side exactly as Oswald had desired her to walk by his
side—he had dreamt of her radiant companionship, it had seemed within
his grasp—and at last to get drowned with Arthur, that was the thing to
strike him first. He did not read the rest of the letter attentively. He
threw it down on the folding table before him and hit it with his fist,
and gave his soul up to a storm of rage and jealousy.
“To let that fool drown her!” he cried. “She’d do anything for him....
“And I might go to _Hell_!...
“Oh, _damn_ all women!...”
It was not a pretty way of taking this blow. But such are the
instinctive emotions of the thwarted male. His first reception of the
news of Dolly’s death was to curse her and all her sex....
And then suddenly he had a gleam of imagination and saw Dolly white and
wet and pitiful. Without any intermediate stage his mind leapt straight
from storming anger to that....
For a time he stared at that vision—reproached and stunned....
Something that had darkened his thoughts was dispelled. His mind was
illuminated by understanding. He saw Dolly again very clearly as she had
talked to him in the garden. It was as if he had never seen her before.
For the first time he realized her indecision. He understood now why it
was she had snatched herself back from him and taken what she knew would
be an irrevocable step, and he knew now that it was his own jealous
pride that had made that step irrevocable. The Dolly who had told him of
that decision next morning was a Dolly already half penitent and
altogether dismayed. And if indeed he had loved her better than his
pride, even then he might have held on still and won her. He remembered
how she had winced when she made her hinting confession to him. No
proud, cold-hearted woman had she been when she had whispered, “Oswald,
now you must certainly go.”
It was as plain as daylight, and never before had he seen it plain.
He had left her, weak thing that she was, because she was weak, for this
fellow to waste and drown. And it was over now and irrevocable.
“Men and women, poor fools together,” he said. “Poor fools. Poor fools,”
and then at the thought of Dolly, broken and shrinking, ashamed of the
thing she had done, at the thought of the insults he had slashed at her,
knowing how much she was ashamed and thinking nevertheless only of his
own indignity, and at the thought of how all this was now stilled
forever in death, an overwhelming sense of the pitifulness of human
pride and hatred, passion and desire came upon him. How we hated! how we
hurt one another! and how fate mocked all our spites and hopes! God sold
us a bargain in life. Dolly was sold. Arthur the golden-crested victor
was sold. He himself was sold. The story had ended in this pitiless
smacking of every one of the three poor tiresome bits of self-assertion
who had acted in it. It was a joke, really, just a joke. He began to
laugh as a dog barks, and then burst into bitter weeping....
He wept noisily for a time. He blubbered with his elbows on the table.
His Swahili attendant watched him with an undiminished respect, for
Africa weeps and laughs freely and knows well that great chiefs also may
weep.
Presently his tears gave out; he became very still and controlled,
feeling as if in all his life he would never weep again.
He took up Mr. Sycamore’s letter and went on reading it.
“_In all other respects the wills are in identical terms_,” the letter
ran. “_In both I am appointed sole executor, a confidence I appreciate
as a tribute to my lifelong friendship with Mr. Stubland and his
parents. The other guardians are Miss Phyllis and Miss Phœbe Stubland
and your aunt-in-law, Lady Charlotte Sydenham._”
“Good heavens!” cried Oswald wearily, as one hears a hopelessly weak
jest. “But _why_?”
“_I do not know if you will remember me, but I have had the pleasure of
meeting you on one or two occasions, notably after your admirable paper
read to the Royal Geographical Society. This fact and the opinion our
chance meetings have enabled me to form of you, emboldens me to add
something here that I should not I think have stated to a perfect
stranger, and that is my impression that Mr. Stubland was particularly
anxious that you should become a guardian under his will. I knew Mr.
Stubland from quite a little boy; his character was a curious one, there
was a streak of distrust and secretiveness in it, due I think to a
Keltic strain that came in from his mother’s side. He altered his will a
couple of days before he started for Italy, and from his manner and from
the fact that Mrs. Stubland’s will was not also altered, I conclude that
he did so without consulting her. He did so because for some reason he
had taken it into his head that you would not act, and he did so for no
other reason that I can fathom. Otherwise he would have left the former
will alone. Under the circumstances I feel bound to tell you this
because it may materially affect your decision to undertake this
responsibility. I think it will be greatly to the advantage of the
children if you do. I may add that I know the two Miss Stublands as well
as I knew their brother, and that I have a certain knowledge of Lady
Charlotte, having been consulted on one occasion by a client in relation
to her. The Misses Stubland were taking care of The Ingle-Nook and
children—there is a trustworthy nurse—in the absence of the parents up
to the time of the parents’ decease, and it will be easy to prolong this
convenient arrangement for the present. The children are still of tender
age and for the next few years they could scarcely be better off. I
trust that in the children’s interest you will see your way to accept
this duty to your friend. My hope is enhanced by the thought that so I
may be able later to meet again a man for whose courage and abilities
and achievements I have a very great admiration indeed._
_I am, dear Sir,_
_Very truly yours,_
_George Sycamore._”
“Yes,” said Oswald, “but I can’t, you know.”
He turned over Sycamore’s letter again, and it seemed no longer a jest
and an insult that Arthur had made him Peter’s guardian. Sycamore’s
phrases did somehow convey the hesitating Arthur, penitent of the
advantages that had restored him Dolly and still fatuously confident of
Oswald’s good faith.
“But I can’t do it, my man,” said Oswald. “It’s too much for human
nature. Your own people must see to your own breed.”
He sat quite still for a long time thinking of another child that now
could never be born.
“Why didn’t I stick to her?” he whispered. “Why didn’t I hold out for
her?”
He took up Sycamore’s letter again.
“But why the devil did he shove in old Charlotte?” he exclaimed. “The
man was no better than an idiot. And underhand at that.”
His eye went to a pile of still unopened letters. “Ah! here we are!” he
said, selecting one in a bulky stone-grey envelope.
He opened it and extracted a number of sheets of stone-grey paper
covered with a vast, loose handwriting, for which previous experience
had given Oswald a strong distaste.
_My dear Nephew_, her letter began.
_I suppose you have already heard the unhappy end of that Stubland
marriage. I have always said that it was bound to end in a tragedy...._
“Oh Lord!” said Oswald, and pitched the letter aside and fell into deep
thought....
He became aware of Muir standing and staring down at him. One of the
boys must have gone off to Muir and told him of Oswald’s emotion.
“Hullo,” said Muir. “All right?”
“I’ve been crying,” said Oswald drily. “I’ve had bad news. This fever
leaves one rotten.”
“Old Wilkinson has sent us up a bottle of champagne,” said Muir. “He’s
thought of everything. The cook’s got curry powder again and there’s a
basket of fish. We shall dine tonight. It’s what you want.”
“Perhaps it is,” said Oswald.
§ 4
After dinner, the best dinner they had had for many weeks, a dinner
beautifully suggestive to a sick man of getting back once more to a
world in which there is enough and comfort, Oswald’s tongue was loosened
and he told his story. He was not usually a communicative man but this
was a brimming occasion; Muir he knew for a model of discretion, Muir
had been his colleague, his nurse and his intimate friend to the
exclusion of all others, for three eventful months, and Muir had already
made his confidences. So Oswald told about Dolly and how his scar and
his scruples had come between them, and what he thought and felt about
Arthur, and so to much experimental wisdom about love and the bitterness
of life. He mentioned the children, and presently Muir, who had the firm
conscientiousness of the Scotch, brought him back to Peter.
“He was a decent little chap,” said Oswald. “He was tremendously like
Dolly.”
“And not like that other man?” said Muir sympathetically.
“No. Not a bit.”
“I’m thinking you ought to stand by him for all you’re worth.”
Oswald thought.
“I will,” he said....
The next morning life did not seem nearly so rounded and kindly as it
had been after his emotional storm of the evening before; he was angry
and jealous about Dolly and Arthur again, and again disposed to regard
his guardianship as an imposition, but he felt he had given his word
overnight and that he was bound now to stand by Joan and Peter as well
as he could. Moreover neither Lady Charlotte nor the sisters Stubland
were really, he thought, people to whom children should be entrusted.
His party reached Luba’s the next evening, and he at once arranged to
send a cable to Mr. Sycamore accepting his responsibility and adding:
“Prefer children should go on as much as possible mother’s ideas until
my return.”
CHAPTER THE SEVENTH
THE SCHOOL OF ST. GEORGE AND THE VENERABLE BEDE
§ 1
So for a time this contest of the newer England of free thought,
sentimental socialism, and invested profits (so far as it was embodied
in the Stubland sisters) and the traditional landowning, church-going
Tory England (so far that is as Lady Charlotte Sydenham was able to
represent it), for the upbringing of Joan and Peter was suspended, and
the Stubland sisters remained in control of these fortunate heirs of the
ages. The two ladies determined to make the most of their opportunity to
train the children to be, as Aunt Phœbe put it, “free and simple, but
fearlessly advanced, unbiassed and yet exquisitely cultivated,
inheritors of the treasure of the past purged of all ancient defilement,
sensuous, passionate, determined, forerunners of a superhumanity”—for
already the phrases at least of Nietzsche were trickling into the
restricted but turbid current of British thought.
In their design the Stubland sisters were greatly aided by the sudden
appearance of Miss Murgatroyd in the neighbourhood, and the rapid and
emphatic establishment of the School of Saint George and the Venerable
Bede within two miles of The Ingle-Nook door.
Miss Murgatroyd was a sturdy, rufous lady with a resentful manner, as
though she felt that everything and everybody were deliberately getting
in her way, and an effort of tension that passed very readily from anger
to enthusiasm and from enthusiasm to anger. Her place was in the van.
She did not mind very much where the van was going so long as she was in
it. She was a born teacher, too, and so overpoweringly moved to teach
that what she taught was a secondary consideration. She wanted to do
something for mankind—it hardly mattered what. In America she would have
been altogether advanced and new, but it was a peculiarity of
middle-class British liberalism at the end of the nineteenth century
just as it was of middle-class French liberalism a hundred years before,
that it was strongly reactionary in colour. In the place of Rousseau and
his demand for a return to the age of innocence, we English had Ruskin
and Morris, who demanded a return to the Middle Ages. And in Miss
Murgatroyd there was Rousseau as well as Ruskin; she wanted, she said,
the best of everything; she was very comprehensive; she epitomized the
movements of her time.
A love disappointment—the man had fled inexplicably to the ends of the
earth and vanished—had exacerbated in Miss Murgatroyd a passion for the
plastic affections of children; she had resolved to give herself wholly
to the creation of a new sort of school embodying all the best ideals of
the time. She saw herself a richly-robed, creative prophetess among the
clustering and adoring young.
She had had a certain amount of capital available, and this she had
expended upon the adaptation of a pleasant, many-roomed, modern house
that looked out bravely over the valley of the Weald about a mile and
three-quarters from The Ingle-Nook, to the necessities of a
boarding-school, and here she presently accumulated her scholars. She
furnished it very brightly in art colours and Morris patterns; wherever
possible the woodwork was stained a pleasing green and perforated with
heart-shaped holes; there were big, flat, obscurely symbolical
colour-prints by Walter Crane, reproductions in bright colours of the
works of Rossetti and Burne Jones and Botticelli, and a full-size cast
of the Venus of Milo. The name was Ruskinian in spirit with a touch of
J. R. Green’s _Short History of the English People_.