Mr. Magnet made his first proposal in form three days later, after
coming twice to tea and staying on to supper. He had played croquet with
Mr. Pope, he had been beaten twelve times in spite of twinges in the
sprained ankle--heroically borne--had had three victories lucidly
explained away, and heard all the particulars of the East Purblow
experiment three times over, first in relation to the new Labour
Exchanges, then regarded at rather a different angle in relation to
female betting, tally-men, and the sanctities of the home generally, and
finally in a more exhaustive style, to show its full importance from
every side and more particularly as demonstrating the gross injustice
done to Mr. Pope by the neglect of its lessons, a neglect too systematic
to be accidental, in the social reform literature of the time. Moreover,
Mr. Magnet had been made to understand thoroughly how several later
quasi-charitable attempts of a similar character had already become, or
must inevitably become, unsatisfactory through their failure to follow
exactly in the lines laid down by Mr. Pope.
Mr. Pope was really very anxious to be pleasant and agreeable to Mr.
Magnet, and he could think of no surer way of doing so than by giving
him an unrestrained intimacy of conversation that prevented anything
more than momentary intercourse between his daughter and her admirer.
And not only did Mr. Magnet find it difficult to get away from Mr. Pope
without offence, but whenever by any chance Mr. Pope was detached for a
moment Mr. Magnet discovered that Marjorie either wasn't to be seen, or
if she was she wasn't to be isolated by any device he could contrive,
before the unappeasable return of Mr. Pope.
Mr. Magnet did not get his chance therefore until Lady Petchworth's
little gathering at Summerhay Park.
Lady Petchworth was Mrs. Pope's oldest friend, and one of those brighter
influences which save our English country-side from lassitude. She had
been more fortunate than Mrs. Pope, for while Mr. Pope with that
aptitude for disadvantage natural to his temperament had, he said, been
tied to a business that never gave him a chance, Lady Petchworth's
husband had been a reckless investor of exceptional good-luck. In
particular, led by a dream, he had put most of his money into a series
of nitrate deposits in caves in Saghalien haunted by benevolent
penguins, and had been rewarded beyond the dreams of avarice. His
foresight had received the fitting reward of a knighthood, and Sir
Thomas, after restoring the Parish Church at Summerhay in a costly and
destructive manner, spent his declining years in an enviable contentment
with Lady Petchworth and the world at large, and died long before
infirmity made him really troublesome.
Good fortune had brought out Lady Petchworth's social aptitudes.
Summerhay Park was everything that a clever woman, inspired by that
gardening literature which has been so abundant in the opening years of
the twentieth century, could make it. It had rosaries and rock gardens,
sundials and yew hedges, pools and ponds, lead figures and stone urns,
box borderings and wilderness corners and hundreds and hundreds of feet
of prematurely-aged red-brick wall with broad herbaceous borders; the
walks had primroses, primulas and cowslips in a quite disingenuous
abundance, and in spring the whole extent of the park was gay, here with
thousands of this sort of daffodil just bursting out and here with
thousands of that sort of narcissus just past its prime, and every patch
ready to pass itself off in its naturalized way as the accidental native
flower of the field, if only it hadn't been for all the other different
varieties coming on or wilting-off in adjacent patches....
Her garden was only the beginning of Lady Petchworth's activities. She
had a model dairy, and all her poultry was white, and so far as she was
able to manage it she made Summerhay a model village. She overflowed
with activities, it was astonishing in one so plump and blonde, and
meeting followed meeting in the artistic little red-brick and
green-stained timber village hall she had erected. Now it was the
National Theatre and now it was the National Mourning; now it was the
Break Up of the Poor Law, and now the Majority Report, now the Mothers'
Union, and now Socialism, and now Individualism, but always something
progressive and beneficial. She did her best to revive the old village
life, and brought her very considerable powers of compulsion to make the
men dance in simple old Morris dances, dressed up in costumes they
secretly abominated, and to induce the mothers to dress their children
in art-coloured smocks instead of the prints and blue serge frocks they
preferred. She did not despair, she said, of creating a spontaneous
peasant art movement in the district, springing from the people and
expressing the people, but so far it had been necessary to import not
only instructors and material, but workers to keep the thing going, so
sluggish had the spontaneity of our English countryside become.
Her little gatherings were quite distinctive of her. They were a sort of
garden party extending from mid-day to six or seven; there would be a
nucleus of house guests, and the highways and byeways on every hand
would be raided to supply persons and interests. She had told her friend
to "bring the girls over for the day," and flung an invitation to Mr.
Pope, who had at once excused himself on the score of his ankle. Mr.
Pope was one of those men who shun social gatherings--ostensibly because
of a sterling simplicity of taste, but really because his intolerable
egotism made him feel slighted and neglected on these occasions. He told
his wife he would be far happier with a book at home, exhorted her not
to be late, and was seen composing himself to read the "Vicar of
Wakefield"--whenever they published a new book Mr. Pope pretended to
read an old one--as the hired waggonette took the rest of his
family--Theodore very unhappy in buff silk and a wide Stuart
collar--down the avenue.
They found a long lunch table laid on the lawn beneath the chestnuts,
and in full view of the poppies and forget-me-nots around the stone
obelisk, a butler and three men servants with brass buttons and red and
white striped waistcoats gave dignity to the scene, and beyond, on the
terrace amidst abundance of deckchairs, cane chairs, rugs, and cushions,
a miscellaneous and increasing company seethed under Lady Petchworth's
plump but entertaining hand. There were, of course, Mr. Magnet, and his
friend Mr. Wintersloan--Lady Petchworth had been given to understand
how the land lay; and there was Mr. Bunford Paradise the musician, who
was doing his best to teach a sullen holiday class in the village
schoolroom to sing the artless old folk songs of Surrey again, in spite
of the invincible persuasion of everybody in the class that the songs
were rather indelicate and extremely silly; there were the Rev. Jopling
Baynes, and two Cambridge undergraduates in flannels, and a Doctor
something or other from London. There was also the Hon. Charles Muskett,
Lord Pottinger's cousin and estate agent, in tweeds and very helpful.
The ladies included Mrs. Raff, the well-known fashion writer, in a
wonderful costume, the anonymous doctor's wife, three or four
neighbouring mothers with an undistinguished daughter or so, and two
quiet-mannered middle-aged ladies, whose names Marjorie could not catch,
and whom Lady Petchworth, in that well-controlled voice of hers,
addressed as Kate and Julia, and seemed on the whole disposed to treat
as humorous. There was also Fraulein Schmidt in charge of Lady
Petchworth's three tall and already abundant children, Prunella,
Prudence, and Mary, and a young, newly-married couple of cousins, who
addressed each other in soft undertones and sat apart. These were the
chief items that became distinctive in Marjorie's survey; but there were
a number of other people who seemed to come and go, split up, fuse,
change their appearance slightly, and behave in the way inadequately
apprehended people do behave on these occasions.
Marjorie very speedily found her disposition to take a detached and
amused view of the entertainment in conflict with more urgent demands.
From the outset Mr. Magnet loomed upon her--he loomed nearer and nearer.
He turned his eye upon her as she came up to the wealthy expanse of
Lady Petchworth's presence, like some sort of obsolescent iron-clad
turning a dull-grey, respectful, loving searchlight upon a fugitive
torpedo boat, and thereafter he seemed to her to be looking at her
without intermission, relentlessly, and urging himself towards her. She
wished he wouldn't. She hadn't at all thought he would on this occasion.
At first she relied upon her natural powers of evasion, and the presence
of a large company. Then gradually it became apparent that Lady
Petchworth and her mother, yes--and the party generally, and the gardens
and the weather and the stars in their courses were of a mind to
co-operate in giving opportunity for Mr. Magnet's unmistakable
intentions.
And Marjorie with that instability of her sex which has been a theme for
masculine humour in all ages, suddenly and with an extraordinary
violence didn't want to make up her mind about Mr. Magnet. She didn't
want to accept him; and as distinctly she didn't want to refuse him. She
didn't even want to be thought about as making up her mind about
him--which was, so to speak, an enlargement of her previous
indisposition. She didn't even want to seem to avoid him, or to be
thinking about him, or aware of his existence.
After the greeting of Lady Petchworth she had succeeded very clumsily in
not seeing Mr. Magnet, and had addressed herself to Mr. Wintersloan, who
was standing a little apart, looking under his hand, with one eye shut,
at the view between the tree stems towards Buryhamstreet. He told her
that he thought he had found something "pooty" that hadn't been done,
and she did her best to share his artistic interests with a vivid sense
of Mr. Magnet's tentative incessant approach behind her.
He joined them, and she made a desperate attempt to entangle Mr.
Wintersloan in a three-cornered talk in vain. He turned away at the
first possible opportunity, and left her to an embarrassed and
eloquently silent _tete-a-tete_. Mr. Magnet's professional wit had
deserted him. "It's nice to see you again," he said after an immense
interval. "Shall we go and look at the aviary?"
"I hate to see birds in cages," said Marjorie, "and it's frightfully
jolly just here. Do you think Mr. Wintersloan will paint this? He does
paint, doesn't he?"
"I know him best in black and white," said Mr. Magnet.
Marjorie embarked on entirely insincere praises of Mr. Wintersloan's
manner and personal effect; Magnet replied tepidly, with an air of
reserving himself to grapple with the first conversational opportunity.
"It's a splendid day for tennis," said Marjorie. "I think I shall play
tennis all the afternoon."
"I don't play well enough for this publicity."
"It's glorious exercise," said Marjorie. "Almost as good as dancing,"
and she decided to stick to that resolution. "I never lose a chance of
tennis if I can help it."
She glanced round and detected a widening space between themselves and
the next adjacent group.
"They're looking at the goldfish," she said. "Let us join them."
Everyone moved away as they came up to the little round pond, but then
Marjorie had luck, and captured Prunella, and got her to hold hands and
talk, until Fraulein Schmidt called the child away. And then Marjorie
forced Mr. Magnet to introduce her to Mr. Bunford Paradise. She had a
bright idea of sitting between Prunella and Mary at the lunch table,
but a higher providence had assigned her to a seat at the end between
Julia--or was it Kate?--and Mr. Magnet. However, one of the
undergraduates was opposite, and she saved herself from undertones by
talking across to him boldly about Newnham, though she hadn't an idea of
his name or college. From that she came to tennis. To her inflamed
imagination he behaved as if she was under a Taboo, but she was
desperate, and had pledged him and his friend to a foursome before the
meal was over.
"Don't _you_ play?" said the undergraduate to Mr. Magnet.
"Very little," said Mr. Magnet. "Very little--"
At the end of an hour she was conspicuously and publicly shepherded from
the tennis court by Mrs. Pope.
"Other people want to play," said her mother in a clear little
undertone.
Mr. Magnet fielded her neatly as she came off the court.
"You play tennis like--a wild bird," he said, taking possession of her.
Only Marjorie's entire freedom from Irish blood saved him from a
vindictive repartee.