gorges with frequent water-splashes. The stream widens and crosses the
road in a broad, pebbly shallow of ripples just at the end of Pelham
Ford, there is a causeway with a white handrail for bicycles and foot
passengers beside the ford, and beyond it is an inn and the post office
and such thatched, whitewashed homes as constitute the village. Then
beyond comes a row of big trees and the high red wall and iron gates of
this house Oswald had taken. The church of Pelham Ford is a little
humped, spireless building up the hill to the left. The stream brawls
along for a time beside the road. Through the gates of the house one
looks across a lawn barred by the shadows of big trees, at a blazing
flower-garden that goes up a series of terraces to the little red tiled
summerhouse that commands the view of the valley. The house is to the
right and near the road, a square comfortable eighteenth-century
red-brick house with ivy on its shadowed side and fig trees and rose
trees towards the sun. It has a classical portico, and a grave but
friendly expression.
The Margate house had been a camp, but this was furnished with some
deliberation. Oswald had left a miscellany of possessions behind him in
Uganda which Muir had packed and sent on after him when it was settled
that there could be no return to Africa. The hall befitted the home of a
member of the Plantain Club; African spoils adorned it, three lions’
heads, a white rhinoceros head, elephants’ feet, spears, gourds, tusks;
in the midst a large table took the visitor’s hat and stick, and bore a
large box for the post. Out of this hall opened a little close study
Oswald rarely used except when Joan and Peter and their friends were at
home and a passage led to a sunny, golden-brown library possessing three
large southward windows on the garden, a room it had pleased him greatly
to furnish, and in which he did most of his writing. It had a parquet
floor and Oriental rugs like sunlit flower-beds. Across the hall,
opposite the study, was a sort of sittingroom-livingroom which was given
over to Joan and Peter. It had been called the Schoolroom in the days
when their holiday visits had been mitigated by the presence of some
temporary governess or tutor, and now that those disciplined days were
over their two developing personalities still jostled in the one
apartment. A large pleasant drawing-room and a dining-room completed the
tale of rooms on the ground floor.
In this room across the hall there was much that would have repaid
research on the part of Oswald. The room was a joint room only when Joan
and Peter were without guests in the house. Whenever there were guests,
whether they were women or men, Joan turned out and the room became a
refuge or rendezvous for Peter. It was therefore rather Peter’s than
Joan’s. Here as in most things it was Peter’s habit to prevail over
Joan. But she had her rights; she had had a voice in the room’s
decoration, a share in its disorder. The upper bookshelves to the right
of the fireplace were hers and the wall next to that. Against this stood
her bureau, locked and secure, over and against Peter’s bureau. Oswald
had given them these writing desks three Christmases ago. But the mess
on the table under the window was Peter’s, and Peter had more than his
fair share of the walls. The stuffed birds and animals and a row of
sculls were the result of a “Mooseum” phase of Peter’s when he was
fourteen. The water-colour pictures were Peter’s. The hearthrug was the
lion-skin that Peter still believed had been brought for him from
Nairobi by Oswald.
Peter could caricature, and his best efforts were framed here; his style
was a deliberate compliment to the incomparable Max. He had been very
successful twice in bringing out the latent fierceness of Joan; one not
ungraceful effort was called “The Scalp Dance,” the other, less pleasing
to its subject, represented Joan in full face with her hands behind her
back and her feet apart, “Telling the Whole Troof.” Joan, alas! had no
corresponding skill for a retort, but she had framed an enlargement of a
happy snap-shot of Peter on the garden wall. She had stood below and
held her camera up so that Peter’s boots and legs were immense and his
head dwindled to nothing in perspective. So seen, he became an
embodiment of masculine brutality. The legend was, “The Camera can
Detect what our Eyes Cannot.”
One corner of this room was occupied by a pianola piano and a large
untidy collection of classical music rolls; right and left of the
fireplace the bookshelves bore an assortment of such literature as
appealed in those days to animated youth, classics of every period from
Plato to Shaw, and such moderns as Compton Mackenzie, Masefield, Gilbert
Cannan and Ezra Pound. Back numbers of _The Freewoman_, _The New Age_,
_The New Statesman_, and _The Poetry Review_ mingled on the lowest
shelf. There was a neat row of philosophical textbooks in the Joan
section; Joan for no particular reason was taking the moral science
tripos; and a microscope stood on Peter’s table, for he was
biological....
§ 3
Oswald’s domestic arrangements had at first been a grave perplexity. In
Uganda he had kept house very well with a Swahili over-man and a number
of “boys”; in Margate this sort of service was difficult to obtain, and
the holiday needs of the children seemed to demand a feminine influence
of the governess-companion type, a “lady.” A succession of refined
feminine personalities had intersected these years of Oswald’s life.
They were all ladies by birth and profession, they all wore collars
supported by whalebone about their necks, and they all developed and
betrayed a tenderness for Oswald that led to a series of flights to the
Climax Club and firm but generous dismissals. Oswald’s ideas of
matrimony were crude and commonplace; he could imagine himself marrying
no one but a buxom young woman of three-and-twenty, and he could not
imagine any buxom young woman of three-and-twenty taking a healthy
interest in a man over forty with only half a face and fits of fever and
fretfulness. When these ladies one after another threw out their gentle
intimations he had the ingratitude to ascribe their courage to a sense
of his own depreciated matrimonial value. This caused just enough
indignation to nerve him to the act of dismissal. But on each occasion
he spent the best part of a morning and made serious inroads upon the
club notepaper before the letter of dismissal was framed, and he always
fell back upon the stock lie that he was going abroad to a Kur-Ort and
was going to lock up the house. On each occasion the house was locked up
for three or four weeks, and Oswald lived a nomadic existence until a
fresh lady could be found. Finally God sent him Mrs. Moxton.
She came in at Margate during an interregnum while Aunt Phyllis was in
control. Aunt Phyllis after a reflective interview passed her on to
Oswald. She was more like Britannia than one could have imagined
possible; her face was perhaps a little longer and calmer and her pink
chins rather more numerous.
“I understand,” she said, seating herself against Oswald’s desk, “that
you are in need of some one to take charge of your household.”
“Did you—hear?” began Oswald.
“It’s the talk of Margate,” she said calmly.
“So I understand that you are prepared to be the lady——”
“I am _not_ a lady,” said Mrs. Moxton with a faint asperity.
“I beg your pardon,” said Oswald.
“I am a housekeeper,” she said, as who should say: “at least give me
credit for that.” “I have had experience with a single gentleman.”
There seemed to be an idea in it.
“I was housekeeper to the late Mr. Justice Benlees for some years, until
he died, and then unhappily, being in receipt of a small pension from
him, I took to keeping a boarding-house. Winnipeg House. On the Marine
Parade. A most unpleasant and anxious experience.” Her note of
indignation returned, and the clear pink of her complexion deepened by a
shade. “A torrent of Common People.”
“Exactly,” said Oswald. “I have seen them walking about the town.
Beastly new yellow boots. And fast, squeaky little girls in those new
floppy white hats. You think you could dispose of the boarding-house?”
Mrs. Moxton compressed her chins slightly in assent.
“It’s a saleable concern?”
“There are those,” said Mrs. Moxton with a faint sense of the marvels of
God’s universe in her voice, “who would be glad of it.”
He rested his face on his hand and regarded her profile very earnestly
with his one red-brown eye—from the beginning to the end of the
interview Mrs. Moxton never once looked straight at him. He perceived
that she was incapable of tenderness, dissimulation, or any personal
relationship, a woman in profile, a woman with a pride in her work, a
woman to be trusted.
“You’ll _do_,” he said.
“Of course, Sir, you will take up my references first. They are a
little—old, but I think you will find them satisfactory.”
“I have no doubts about your references, Mrs. Moxton, but they shall be
taken up nevertheless, duly and in order.”
“Thank you, Sir,” said Mrs. Moxton, giving him a three-quarter face, and
almost looking at him in her pleasure.
And thereafter Mrs. Moxton ruled the household of Oswald according to
the laws and habits of the late Mr. Justice Benlees, who had evidently
been a very wise, comfortable, and intelligent man. When she came on
from the uncongenial furniture at Margate to the comfort and beauty of
Pelham Ford she betrayed a certain approval by expanding an inch or so
in every direction and letting out two new chins, but otherwise she made
no remark. She radiated decorum and a faint smell of lavender. She had,
it seemed, always possessed a black-watered-silk dress and a gold chain.
Even Lady Charlotte approved of her.
For some years Mrs. Moxton enabled Oswald to disregard the social
difficulties that are supposed to surround feminine adolescence. Joan
and Peter got along very well with Pelham Ford as their home, and no
other feminine control except an occasional visit from the Stubland
aunts. Then Aunt Charlotte became tiresome because Joan was growing up.
“How can the gal grow up properly,” she asked, “even considering what
she is, in a house in which there isn’t a lady at the head?”
Oswald reflected upon the problem. He summoned Mrs. Moxton to his
presence.
“Mrs. Moxton,” he said, “when Miss Joan is here, I’ve been thinking,
don’t you think she ought to be, so to speak, mistress of the place?”
“I have been wondering when you would make the change, Mr. Sydenham,”
said Mrs. Moxton. “I shall be very pleased to take my orders from Miss
Joan.”
And after that Mrs. Moxton used to come to Joan whenever Joan was at
Pelham Ford, and tell her what orders she had to give for the day. And
when Joan had visitors, Mrs. Moxton told Joan just exactly what
arrangements Joan was to order Mrs. Moxton to make. In all things that
mattered Mrs. Moxton ruled Joan with an obedience of iron. Her curtseys,
slow, deliberate and firm, insisted that Joan was a lady—and had got to
be one. She took to calling Joan “Ma’am.” Joan had to live up to it, and
did. Visitors increased after the young people were at Cambridge. Junior
dons from Newnham and Girton would come and chaperon their hostess, and
Peter treated Oswald to a variety of samples of the younger male
generation. Some of the samples Oswald liked more than others. And he
concealed very carefully from Aunt Charlotte how mixed these young
gatherings were, how light was the Cambridge standard of chaperonage,
and how very junior were some of the junior dons from the women’s
colleges.
§ 4
When children are small we elders in charge are apt to suppose them
altogether plastic. There are resistances, it is true, but these express
themselves at first only in tantrums, in apparently quite meaningless
outbreaks; we impose our phrases and values so completely, that such
spasmodic opposition seems to signify nothing. We impose our names for
things, our classifications with their thousand implications, our
interpretations. The child is imitative and obedient by instinct, its
personality for the most part latent, warily hidden. That is “hand,” we
dictate, that is “hat,” that is “pussy cat,” that is “pretty, pretty,”
that is “good,” that is “nasty,” that is “ugly—Ugh!” That again is
“fearsome; run away!” There is no discussion. If we know our parental
business we are able to establish all sorts of habits, readinesses,
dispositions in these entirely plastic days. “Time for Peter to go to
bed,” uttered with gusto, becomes the signal for an interesting ritual
upon which he embarks with dignity. Until some idiot visitor remarks
loudly, “Doesn’t he _hate_ going to bed? I always _hated_ going to bed.”
Whereupon in that matter the seeds of reflection and dissent are sown in
the little mind.
And so with most other matters. For a few years of advantage the new
mind is clay and we have it to ourselves, and then, still clay, it
becomes perceptibly resistant, perceptibly disposed to recover some
former shape we have given it or to take an outline of its own. It
discovers we are not divine and that even Dadda cannot recall the
sunset. It is not only that other minds are coming in to modify and
contradict our decisions. We contradict ourselves and it notes the
contradiction. And old Nature begins to take an increasing share in the
accumulating personality. Apart from what we give and those others give,
things bubble up inside it, desires, imaginations, creative dreams. By
imperceptible degrees the growing mind slips away from us. A little
while ago it seemed like some open vessel into which we could pour
whatever we chose; now suddenly it is closed and locked, hiding a
fermentation.
Perhaps things have always been more or less so between elders and
young, but in the old days of slower change what fathers and mothers had
to tell the child, priest and master re-echoed, laws and institutions
confirmed, the practice of every one, good or evil, endorsed in black or
white. But from the break-up of the Catholic culture in England onward
there has been an unceasing conflict between more and more divergent
stories about life, and in the last half century that clash has
enormously intensified. What began as a war of ideals became at last a
chaos. Adolescence was once either an obedience or a rebellion; at the
opening of the twentieth century it had become an interrogation and an
experiment. One heard very much of the right of the parent to bring up
children in his own religion, his own ideas, but no one ever bothered to
explain how that right was to be preserved. In Ireland one found near
Dublin educational establishments surrounded by ten-foot walls topped
with broken glass, protecting a Catholic atmosphere for a few precious
and privileged specimens of the Erse nation. Mr. James Joyce in his
_Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man_, has bottled a specimen of that
Catholic atmosphere for the astonishment of posterity. The rest of the
youth of the changing world lay open to every wind of suggestion that
blew. The parent or guardian found himself a mere competitor for the
attention and convictions of his charges.
§ 5
Through childhood and boyhood and girlhood, Peter’s sex and seniority
alike had conspired to give him a leadership over Joan. His seemed the
richer, livelier mind, he told most of the stories and initiated most of
the games; Joan was the follower. That masculine ascendancy lasted until
Peter was leaving Caxton; in spite of various emancipating forces at
Highmorton. Then in less than a year Joan took possession of herself.
Reserve is a necessary grace in all younger brothers and sisters. Peter
spread his reveries as a peacock spreads its tail, but Joan kept her
dreams discreetly private. All youth lives much in reverie; thereby the
stronger minds anticipate and rehearse themselves for life in a thousand
imaginations, the weaker ones escape from it. Against that early
predominance of Peter, Joan maintained her self-respect by extensive
secret supplements of the Bungo-Peter saga. For example she was
Bungo-Peter’s “Dearest Belovèd.” Peter never suspected how Bungo-Peter
and she cuddled up together at the camp fires and were very close and
warm every night, until she went off to sleep....
When she was about fourteen Joan’s imagination passed out of the phase
of myth and saga into the world of romance. The real world drew closer
to her. Bungo-Peter vanished; Nobby shrank down to a real Uncle Nobby.
Her childish reveries had disregarded possibility; now the story had to
be plausible; it had to join on to Highmorton and The Ingle-Nook and
Pelham Ford; its heroine had to be conceivable as the real Joan. And
with the coming of reality, came moods. There were times when she felt
dull, and the world looked on her with a grey and stupid face, and other
times to compensate her for these dull phases, seasons of unwonted
exaltation. It was as if her being sometimes drew itself together in
order presently to leap and extend itself.
In these new phases of expansion she had the most perfect conviction
that life, and particularly her life, was wonderful and beautiful and
destined to be more and more so. She began to experience a strange, new
happiness in mere existence, a happiness that came with an effect of
revelation. It is hard to convey the peculiar delight that invaded her
during these phases. It was almost as if the earth had just been created
for her and given to her as a present. There were moments when the world
was a crystal globe of loveliness about her, moments of ecstatic
realization of a universal beauty. The slightest things would suffice to
release this sunshine in her soul. She would discover the intensest
delight in little, hitherto disregarded details, in the colour of a leaf
held up to the light, or the rhythms of ripples on a pond or the touch
of a bird’s feather. There were moments when she wanted to kiss the
sunset, and times when she would clamber over the end wall of the garden
at Pelham Ford in order to lie hidden and still, with every sense awake,
in the big clump of bracken in the corner by the wood beyond. The smell
of crushed bracken delighted her intensely. She wanted to be a nymph
then and not a girl in clothes. And shining summer streams and lakes
roused in her a passionate desire to swim, to abandon herself wholly to
the comprehensive sweet silvery caress of the waters.
In the days of the Saga story, the time of the story had always been
Now—and Never; but in the drama of adolescence the time of all Joan’s
reveries was Tomorrow; what she dreamt of now were things that were to
be real experiences in quite a little time, when she had grown just a
year or so older, when she was a little taller, when she had left
school, when she was really as beautiful as she hoped to be.
The world about her by example and precept, by plays and stories and
poems and histories, was supplying her with a rich confusion of material
for these anticipatory sketches. One main history emerged in her
fifteenth year. It went on for many months. Joan of Arc was in the
making of it, and Jane Shore, and Nell Gwyn. At first she was the Lady
Joan, and then she became just Joan Stubland, but always she was the
king’s mistress.
From the very beginning Joan had found something splendid and attractive
in the word “mistress.” It had come to her first in a history lesson,
and then more brightly clad in a costume novel. But it was a very
glorious and noble kind of mistress that Joan had in view. Her ideas of
the authority and duties of a mistress were vague; but she knew that a
mistress rules by beauty. That she ruled Joan never doubted—or why
should she be called mistress? And she prevailed over queens, so French
history had instructed her. She made war and peace. Joan of Arc was
inextricably mixed in with the vision. She was a beautiful girl, and she
told the king of France what to do. At need she led armies. What else
but a mistress could you call her? “Mistress of France,” magnificent
phrase! Of such ideas was Joan Stubland woven. The king perhaps would do
injustice, or neglect a meritorious case. Then Joan Stubland would
appear, watchful and dignified. “No,” she would say. “That must not be.
I am the king’s mistress.”
And she wore a kind of light armour. Without skirts. Never with skirts.
Joan at fourteen already saw long skirts ahead of her, and hated them as
a man might hate a swamp that he must presently cross knee-deep.
Where the king went Joan went. But he was not the current king, nor his
destined successor. She had studied these monarchs in the illustrated
papers—and in the news. She did not think much of them. They stood down
out of Joan’s dream in favour of a younger autocrat. After all, was
there not also a young prince, her contemporary, who would some day be
king? But in her imagination he was not like his published portraits;
instead—and this is curious—he was rather like Peter. He was as much
like Peter as any one. This was all of Peter that ever got into her
reveries, for there was a curious bar in her mind to Peter being thought
of either as her lover or as any one not her lover. Something obscure in
her composition barred any such direct imaginations about Peter.
So, contrawise to all established morality and to everything to which
her properly constituted teachers were trying to shape her, a chance
phrase in a history book filled the imagination of Joan with this dream
of a different sort of woman’s life altogether. In which one went side
by side with a man in a manly way, sharing his power, being dear and
beautiful to him. Compared with such a lot who would be one of these
wives? Who would stay at home and—as a consequence apparently of the
religious ceremony of matrimony—have babies?
The king’s mistress story was Joan’s dominant reverie, but it was not
her only one. It was, so to speak, her serial; it was always “to be
continued in our next.” But her busy mind, whenever her attention was
not fully occupied, was continually spinning romance; beside the serial
story there were endless incidental ones. Almost always they were love
stories. They were violent and adventurous in substance, full of chases,
fights, and confrontations, but Joan did not stint herself of kissing
and embraces. There were times when she liked tremendously to think of
herself kissing. Most little girls of thirteen or fourteen are thinking
with the keenest interest and curiosity about this lover business and
its mysteries, and Joan was no exception. She was deeply interested to
find she was almost as old as Juliet. Inspired by Shakespeare, Joan
thought quite a lot about balconies and ladders—and Romeo. Some of her
school contemporaries jested about these things and were very arch and
sly. But she was as shy of talking about love as she was prone to love
reveries. She talked of flowers and poetry and music and scenery and
beautiful things as though they were things in themselves, but in her
heart she was convinced that all the loveliness that shone upon her in
the world was only so much intimation of the coming loveliness of love.