conception of the Empire as a great human enterprise, playing a
dominating part in the establishment of a world peace and a world
civilization, and giving a form and direction and pride to every life
within it. But these perpetual noises of royalty in its vulgarest, most
personal form, the loyalist chatter of illiterate women and the clamour
of the New Imperialism to “tax the foreigner” and exploit the empire for
gain, drowned his intention while it was still unspoken in his mind.
There were moments when he could already ask himself whether this empire
he had shaped his life to serve, this knightly empire of his,
enlightened, righteous, and predominant, was anything better than a
dream—or a lie.
§ 16
When Joan left Highmorton she came into the market-place of ideas. She
began to read the newspaper. She ceased to be a leggy person with a
skirt like a kilt and a dark shock of hair not under proper control;
instead, she became visibly a young lady, albeit a very young young
lady, and suddenly all adult conversation was open to her.
Under the brotherly auspices of Peter she joined the Cambridge
University Fabian Society. Peter belonged to it, but he explained that
he didn’t approve of it. He was in it for its own good. She also took a
place in two suffrage organizations, and subscribed to three suffrage
papers. Tel Wymark, who was also in Newton Hall, introduced her to the
Club of Strange Faiths, devoted to “the impartial examination of all
religious systems.” And she went under proper escort to the First
Wednesday in Every Month Teas in Bunny Cuspard’s rooms. Bunny was an
ex-collegiate student, he had big, comfortable rooms in Siddermorton
Street, and these gatherings of his were designed to be discussions,
very memorable discussions of the most advanced type, about this and
that. As a matter of fact they consisted in about equal proportions of
awkward silences, scornful treatment of current reputations, and Bunny,
in a loose, inaccurate way, spilling your tea or handing you edibles.
Bunny’s cakes and sandwiches were wonderful; in that respect he was a
born hostess. Junior dons and chance visitors to Cambridge would
sometimes drift in to Bunny’s intellectual feasts, and here it was that
Joan met young Winterbaum again.
Young Winterbaum was rather a surprise. He had got his features together
astonishingly since the days of Miss Murgatroyd’s school; he had grown a
moustache, much more of a moustache than Peter was to have for years
yet, and was altogether remarkably grown up and a man of the world.
“Funny lot,” he remarked to Joan when he had sat down beside her. “Why
do _you_ come to Cambridge?”
“My people make me come up here,” he explained; “family considerations,
duty to the old country, loyalty to the old college, and all that. But
I’d rather be painting. It’s the only live thing just now. You up to
anything?”
“Ears and eyes and mouth wide open,” said Joan.
“This show isn’t worth it. Do you ever drift towards Chelsea?”
Joan said she went to Hampstead now and then; she stayed sometimes with
the Sheldricks, who were in a congested house on Downshire Hill now, and
sometimes with Miss Jepson. Henceforth, now that she was no longer under
the Highmorton yoke, she hoped to be in London oftener.
“Did you see the Picasso show?” asked Winterbaum.
She had not.
“You missed something,” said young Winterbaum, just like old times.
“Picasso, Mancini; these are the gods of my idolatry....”
Bunny Cuspard interrupted clumsily with some specially iced cakes. Joan,
accepting a cake, discovered Wilmington talking absent-mindedly to her
chaperon and looking Pogroms at Winterbaum. So Joan, pleased rather than
excited by this chance evidence of a continuing interest, lifted up a
face of bright recognition and smiled and nodded to Wilmington....
§ 17
It was the ambition of Mrs. Sheldrick and her remaining daughters—some
of them had married—to make their home on Downshire Hill “a little bit
of the London _Quartier Latin_.”
Mr. Sheldrick had worn out the large, loose, tweed suit that had held
him together for so long, he had gone to pieces altogether and was dead
and buried, and the Sheldricks were keeping a home together by the
practice of decorative arts and promiscuous hospitalities. Mrs.
Sheldrick was writing a little in the papers of the weaker among the
various editors who lived within her social range; little vague reviews
and poems she wrote, with a quiet smile, that were not so much allusive
as with an air of having recently had a flying visit from an allusion
that was unable to stay. Sydney Sheldrick was practising sculpture, and
Babs was attending the London School of Dramatic Art, to which Adela
Murchison had also found her way. Antonia, the eldest, was in business,
making djibbah-like robes.
There was downstairs and the passage and staircase and upstairs, a
sitting-room in front, and a sort of oriental lounge (that later in the
evening became the bedroom of Antonia and Babs) behind. It had all been
decorated in the most modern style by Antonia in a very blue blue that
seemed a little threadbare in places and very large, suggestive shapes
of orange, with a sort of fringe of black and white chequers and a green
ceiling with harsh pink stars. And the chairs, except for the various
ottomans and cosy corners which were in faded blue canvas, had been
painted bright pink or grey.
Into this house they gathered, after nine and more particularly on
Saturdays, all sorts of people who chanced to be connected by birth,
marriage, misfortune, or proclivity with journalism or the arts. Hither
came Aunt Phœbe Stubland, and read a paper called insistently:
_Watchman, What of the Night? What of it?_ and quite up to its title;
and hither too came Aunt Phyllis Stubland, quietly observant. But quite
a lot of writers came. And in addition there were endless conspirators.
There was Mrs. O’Grady, the beautiful Irish patriot, who was always
dressed like a procession of Hibernians in New York, and there was
Patrick Lynch, a long, lax black object, ending below in large dull
boots, and above in a sad white face under wiry black hair, grieving for
ever that grief for Ireland—_Cathleen ni Houlihan_ and all the rest of
it—that only these long, black, pale Irishmen can understand. And there
was Eric Schmidt, who was rare among Irish patriots because of his
genuine knowledge of Erse. All these were great conspirators. Then there
was Mrs. Punk, who had hunger-struck three times, and Miss
Corcoran-Deeping the incendiary. And American socialists. And young
Indians. And one saw the venerable figure of Mr. Woodjer, very old now
and white and deaf and nervous and indistinct, who had advocated in
several beautiful and poetical little volumes a new morality that would
have put the wind up of the Cities of the Plain. And Winterbaum drifted
in, but cautiously, as doubting whether it wasn’t just “a bit too
marginal,” to bring away his two frizzy-haired sisters, very bright-eyed
and eager, rapid-speaking and _au fait_, and wonderfully bejewelled for
creatures so young. They were going in for dancing; they did Spanish
dances, stupendously clicking down their red heels with absolute
precision together; they took the Sheldricks on the way to the Contangos
or the Mondaines or the Levisons, or even to the Hoggenheimers; they
glittered at Downshire Hill like birds of Paradise, and had the
loveliest necks and shoulders and arms. Outside waited young
Winterbaum’s coupé—a very smart little affair in black and cream, with
an electric starter wonderfully fitted.
Here too came young Huntley, who had written three novels before he was
twenty-two, and who was now thirty and quite well known, not only as a
novelist of reputation, but as a critic eminently unpopular with actor
managers; a blond young man with a strong profile, a hungry, scornful
expression and a greedy, large blue eye that wandered about the crush as
if it sought something, until it came to rest upon Joan. Thereafter Mr.
Huntley’s other movements and conversation were controlled by a
resolution to edge towards and overshadow and dominate Joan with the
profile as much as possible.
Joan, by various delicacies of perception, was quite aware of these
approaches without seeming at any time to regard Huntley directly; and
by a subtlety quite imperceptible to him she drifted away from each
advance. She did not know who he was, and though the profile interested
her, his steadfast advance towards her seemed to be premature. Until
suddenly an apparently quite irrelevant incident spun her mind round to
the idea of encouraging him.
The incident was the arrival of Peter.
Early in the afternoon he had vanished from Mrs. Jepson’s, where he and
Joan were staying; he had not come in to dinner, and now suddenly he
appeared conspicuously in this gathering of the Sheldricks’,
conspicuously in the company of Hetty Reinhart, who was to Joan, for
quite occult reasons, the most detestable of all his large circle of
detestable friends. That alone was enough to tax the self-restraint of
an exceedingly hot-tempered foster sister. (So this was what Peter had
been doing with his time! This had been his reason for neglecting his
own household! At the _Petit Riche_, or some such place—with _her_! A
girl with a cockney accent! A girl who would stroke your arm as soon as
speak to you!...) But though the larger things in life strain us, it is
the smaller things that break us. What finally turned Joan over was a
glance, a second’s encounter with Peter’s eye. Hetty had sailed forward
with that extraordinary effect of hers of being a grown-up, experienced
woman, to greet Mrs. Sheldrick, and Peter stood behind, disregarded.
(His expression of tranquil self-satisfaction was maddening.) His eye
went round the room looking, Joan knew, for two people. It rested on
Joan.
The question that Peter was asking Joan mutely across the room was in
effect this: “Are you behaving yourself, Joan?”
Then, not quite reassured by an uncontrollable scowl, Peter looked away
to see if some one else was present. Some one else apparently wasn’t
present, and Joan was unfeignedly sorry.
He was looking for Mir Jelalludin, the interesting young Indian with the
beautifully modelled face, whom Joan had met and talked to at the Club
of Strange Faiths. At the Club of Strange Faiths one day she had been
suddenly moved to make a short speech about the Buddhist idea of
Nirvana, which one of the speakers had described as extinction. Making a
speech to a little meeting was not a very difficult thing for Joan; she
had learnt how little terrible a thing is to do in the Highmorton
debating society, where she had been sustained by a grim determination
to score off Miss Frobisher. She said that she thought the real
intention was not extinction at all, but the escape of the individual
consciousness after its living pilgrimage from one incarnate self to
another into the universal consciousness. That was the very antithesis
of extinction; one lost oneself indeed, but one lost oneself not in
darkness and non-existence, but in light and the fullness of existence.
There was all the difference between a fainting fit and ecstasy between
these two conceptions. And it was true of experience that one was least
oneself, least self-conscious and egotistical at one’s time of greatest
excitement.
Mir Jelalludin received these remarks with earnest applause. He made as
if to speak after her, rose in his place, and then hastily sat down.
Afterwards he came and spoke to her, quite modestly and simply, without
the least impertinence.
He explained, with a pleasant staccato accent and little slips in his
pronunciation that suggested restricted English conversation and much
reading of books, how greatly he had been wanting to say just what she
had said, “so bew-ti-fully,” but he had been restrained by “impafction
of the pronunsation. So deefi’clt, you know.” One heard English people
so often not doing justice to Indian ideas so that it was very pleasant
to hear them being quite sympathetically put.
There was something very pleasing in the real intellectual excitement
that had made him speak to her, and there was something very pleasing to
the eye in the neat precision with which his brown features were
chiselled and the decisive accuracy of every single hair on his brow. He
was, he explained, a Moslem, but he was interested in every school of
Indian thought. He was afraid he was not very orthodox, and he showed a
smile of the most perfect teeth. There had always been a tendency to
universalism in Indian thought, that affected even the Moslem. Did she
know anything of the Brahmo Somaj? Had she read any novel of
Chatterji’s? There was at least one great novel of his the English ought
to read, the _Ananda Math_. No one could understand Indian thought
properly who had not read it. He had a translation of it into
English—which he would lend her.
Would she be interested to read it?
Might he send it to her?
Joan’s chaperon was a third year girl who put no bar upon these
amenities. Joan accepted the book and threw out casually that she
sometimes went to Bunny Cuspard’s teas. If Mr. Jelalludin sent her
Chatterji’s book she could return it to Bunny Cuspard’s rooms.
It was in Bunny Cuspard’s room that Peter had first become aware of this
exotic friendship. He discovered his Joan snugly in a corner listening
to an explanation of the attitude of Islam towards women. It had been
enormously misrepresented in Christendom. Mr. Jelalludin was very
earnest in his exposition, and Joan listened with a pleasant smile and
regarded him pleasantly and wished that she could run her fingers just
once along his eyebrow without having her motives misunderstood.
But at the sight of his Joan engaged in this confabulation Peter
suddenly discovered all the fiercest traits of race pride. He fretted
about the room and was rude to other people and watched a book change
hands, and waited scarcely twenty seconds after the end of Joan’s
conversation before he came up to her.
“I say, Joan,” he said, “you can’t go chumming with Indians anyhow.”
“Peter,” she said, “we’ve chummed with India.”
“Oh, nonsense! Not socially. Their standards are different.”
“I hope they are,” said Joan. “The way you make these Indian boys here
feel like outcasts is disgraceful.”
“They’re different. The men aren’t uncivil to them. But it isn’t for
you——”
“It’s for all English people to treat them well. He’s a charming young
man.”
“It isn’t _done_, Joan.”
“It’s going to be, Petah.”
“You’re meeting him again?”
“If I think proper.”
“Oh!” said Peter, baffled for the time. “All _right_, Joan.”
A fierce exchange of notes followed. “Don’t you understand the fellow’s
a polygamist?” Peter wrote. “He keeps his women in purdah. No decent
woman could be talked to in India as he talked to you. Not even an
introduction. Personally, I’ve no objection to any friends you make
provided they are decent friends....”
“He isn’t a polygamist,” Joan replied. “I’ve asked him. And every one
says he’s a first-rate cricketer. As for decent friends, Peter——”
The issue had been still undecided when they came down for the Christmas
vacation.
So far Joan had maintained her positions without passion. But now
suddenly her indignation at Peter’s interference flared to heaven. That
he should come here, hot from Soho, to tyrannize over _her_! Indians
indeed! As if Hetty Reinhart wasn’t worse than a Gold Coast nigger!...
The only outward manifestation of this wild storm of resentment had been
her one instant’s scowl at Peter. Thereafter Joan became again the
quiet, intelligently watchful young woman she had been all that evening.
But now she turned herself through an angle of about thirty degrees
towards Huntley, who was talking to old Mrs. Jex, the wonder of
Hampstead, who used to know George Eliot and Huxley, the while he was
regarding Joan with sidelong covetousness. Joan lifted her eyes towards
him with an expression of innocent interest. The slightly projecting
blue eyes seemed to leap in response.
Mrs. Jex was always rather inattentive to her listener when she was
reciting her reminiscences, and Huntley was able to turn away from her
quietly without interrupting the flow.
The Sheldrick circle scorned the formalities of introductions. “Are you
from the Slade school?” said Huntley.
“Cambridge,” said Joan.
“My name’s Gavan Huntley.”
But this was going to be more amusing than Joan had expected. This was a
real live novelist—Joan’s first. Not a fortnight ago she had read _The
Pernambuco Bunshop_, and thought it rather clever and silly.
“Not _the_ Gavan Huntley?” she said.
His face became faintly luminous with satisfaction. “Just Gavan
Huntley,” he said with a large smile.
“The Pernambuco Bunshop?” she said.
“Guilty,” he pleaded, smiling still more naïvely.
One had expected something much less natural in a novelist.
“I _loved_ it,” said Joan, and Huntley was hers to do what she liked
with. Joon’s idea of a proper conversation required it to be in a
corner. “Do Sheldricks never sit down?” she asked. “I’ve been standing
all the evening.”
“They can’t,” he said confidentially. “They’re the other sort of Dutch
doll, the cheap sort, that hasn’t got joints at the knees.”
“Antonia sometimes leans against the wall.”
“Her utmost. The next thing would be to sit on the floor with her legs
straight out. I’ve seen her do that. But there is a sort of bench on the
staircase landing.”
Thither they made their way, and there presently Peter found them.
He found them because he was making for that very corner in the company
of Sydney Sheldrick. “Hullo!” said Sydney. “That you, Joan?”
“We’ve taken this corner for the evening,” said Huntley, laying a
controlling hand on Joan’s pretty wrist.
Joan and Peter regarded each other darkly.
“There ought to be more seats about somewhere,” said Sydney. “Come up to
the divan, old Peter....”
Of course Peter must object to Huntley. They were scarcely out of the
Sheldricks’ house when he began. “That man Huntley’s a bad egg, Joan.
Everybody knows it.”
For a time they disputed about Huntley.
“Peter,” said Joan, with affected calm, “is there any man, do you think,
to whom so—so untrustworthy a girl as I am might safely talk?”
Peter seemed to consider. “There’s chaps like Troop,” he said.
“Troop!” said Joan, relying on her intonation.
“It isn’t that you’re untrustworthy,” said Peter.
“Fragile?”
“It’s the look and tone of things.”
“I wonder how you get these ideas.”
“What ideas?”
“Of how I behave in a corner with Jelalludin or Gavan Huntley.”
“I haven’t suggested anything.”
“You’ve suggested everything. Do you think I collect stray kisses like
Sydney Sheldrick? Do you think I’m a dirty little—little—cocotte like
Hetty Reinhart?”
“_Joan!_”
“_Well_,” said Joan savagely, and said no more.
Peter came to the defence of Hetty belatedly. “How can you say such
things of Hetty?” he asked. “What can you know about her?”
“Pah! I can smell what she is across a room. Do you think I’m an
absolute young fool, Peter?”
“You’ve got no right, Joan——”
“Why argue, Peter, why argue? When things are plain. Can’t you go your
own way, Peter”—Joan was annoyed to find suddenly that she was weeping.
Tears were running down her face. But the road was dark, and perhaps if
she gave no sign Peter would not see. “You go your own way, Peter, go
your own way, and let me go mine.”
Peter was silent for a little while. Then compunction betrayed itself in
his voice.
“It’s you I’m thinking of, Joan. I can’t bear to see you make yourself
cheap.”
“Cheap! And _you_?”
“I’m different. I’m altogether different. A man is.”
Silence for a time. Joan seemed to push back her hair, and so smeared
the tears from her face.
“We interfere with each other,” she said at last. “We interfere with
each other. What is the good of it? You’ve got to go your way and I’ve
got to go mine. We used to have fun—lots of fun. _Now_....”
She couldn’t say any more for a while.
“I’m going my own way, Peter. It’s a different way——Leave me alone. Keep
off!”
They said no more. When they got in they found Miss Jepson sitting by
the fire, and she had got them some cocoa and biscuits. The headache
that had kept her from the Sheldrick festival had lifted, and Joan
plunged at once into a gay account of the various people she had seen
that evening—saving and excepting Gavan Huntley. But Peter stood by the
fireplace, silent, looking down into the fire, sulking or grieving. All
the while that Joan rattled on to Miss Jepson she was watching him with
almost imperceptible glances and wondering whether he sulked or grieved.
Did he feel as she felt? If he sulked—well, confound him! But what if
this perplexing dissension hurt him as much as it was hurting her!
§ 18
Joan had long since lost that happiness, that perfect assurance, that
intense appreciation of the beauty in things which had come to her with
early adolescence. She was troubled and perplexed in all her ways. She
was full now of stormy, indistinct desires and fears, and a gnawing,
indefinite impatience. No religion had convinced her of a purpose in her
life, neither Highmorton nor Cambridge had suggested any mundane
devotion to her, nor pointed her ambitions to a career. The only career
these feminine schools and colleges recognized was a career of academic
successes and High School teaching, intercalated with hunger strikes for
the Vote, and Joan had early decided she would rather die than teach in
a High School. Nor had she the quiet assurance her own beauty would have
given her in an earlier generation of a discreet choice of lovers and
marriage and living “happily ever afterwards.” She had a horror of
marriage lurking in her composition; Mrs. Pybus and Highmorton had each
contributed to that; every one around her spoke of it as an entire
abandonment of freedom. Moreover there was this queerness about her
birth—she was beginning to understand better now in what that queerness
consisted—that seemed to put her outside the customary ceremonies of
veil and orange blossoms. Why did they not tell her all about it—what
her mother was and where her mother was? It must be a pretty awful
business, if neither Aunt Phyllis nor Aunt Phœbe would ever allude to
it. It would have to come out—perhaps some monstrous story—before she
could marry. And who could one marry? She could not conceive herself
marrying any of these boys she met, living somewhere cooped up in a
little house with solemn old Troop, or under the pursuing eyes, the
convulsive worship, of Wilmington. She had no object in life, no star by
which to steer, and she was full of the fever of life. She was getting
awfully old. She was eighteen. She was nineteen. Soon she would be
twenty.
All her being, in her destitution of any other aim that had the
slightest hold upon her imagination, was crying out for a lover.
It was a lover she wanted, not a husband; her mind made the clearest
distinction between the two. He would come and unrest would cease,
confusion would cease and beauty would return. Her lover haunted all her
life, an invisible yet almost present person. She could not imagine his
face nor his form, he was the blankest of beings, and yet she was so
sure she knew him that if she were to see him away down a street or
across a crowded room, instantly, she believed, she would recognize him.
And until he came life was a torment of suspense. Life was all wrong and
discordant, so wrong and discordant that at times she could have hated
her lover for keeping her waiting so wretchedly.