Crisis prevailed in Buryhamstreet that night. On half a dozen sleepless
pillows souls communed with the darkness, and two at least of those
pillows were wet with tears.
Not one of those wakeful heads was perfectly clear about the origins and
bearings of the trouble; not even Mr. Pope felt absolutely sure of
himself. It had come as things come to people nowadays, because they
will not think things out, much less talk things out, and are therefore
in a hopeless tangle of values that tightens sooner or later to a
knot....
What an uncharted perplexity, for example, was the mind of that
excellent woman Mrs. Pope!
Poor lady! she hadn't a stable thing in her head. It is remarkable that
some queer streak in her composition sympathized with Marjorie's passion
for Trafford. But she thought it such a pity! She fought that sympathy
down as if it were a wicked thing. And she fought too against other
ideas that rose out of the deeps and did not so much come into her mind
as cluster at the threshold, the idea that Marjorie was in effect grown
up, a dozen queer criticisms of Magnet, and a dozen subtle doubts
whether after all Marjorie was going to be happy with him as she assured
herself the girl would be. (So far as any one knew Trafford might be an
excellent match!) And behind these would-be invaders of her guarded mind
prowled even worse ones, doubts, horrible disloyal doubts, about the
wisdom and kindness of Mr. Pope.
Quite early in life Mrs. Pope had realized that it is necessary to be
very careful with one's thoughts. They lead to trouble. She had clipped
the wings of her own mind therefore so successfully that all her
conclusions had become evasions, all her decisions compromises. Her
profoundest working conviction was a belief that nothing in the world
was of value but "tact," and that the art of living was to "tide things
over." But here it seemed almost beyond her strength to achieve any sort
of tiding over....
(Why _couldn't_ Mr. Pope lie quiet?)
Whatever she said or did had to be fitted to the exigencies of Mr. Pope.
Availing himself of the privileges of matrimony, her husband so soon as
Mr. Magnet had gone and they were upstairs together, had explained the
situation with vivid simplicity, and had gone on at considerable length
and with great vivacity to enlarge upon his daughter's behaviour. He
ascribed this moral disaster,--he presented it as a moral disaster of
absolutely calamitous dimensions--entirely to Mrs. Pope's faults and
negligences. Warming with his theme he had employed a number of homely
expressions rarely heard by decent women except in these sacred
intimacies, to express the deep indignation of a strong man moved to
unbridled speech by the wickedness of those near and dear to him. Still
warming, he raised his voice and at last shouted out his more forcible
meanings, until she feared the servants and children might hear, waved a
clenched fist at imaginary Traffords and scoundrels generally, and
giving way completely to his outraged virtue, smote and kicked blameless
articles of furniture in a manner deeply impressive to the feminine
intelligence.
Finally he sat down in the little arm-chair between her and the cupboard
where she was accustomed to hang up her clothes, stuck out his legs very
stiffly across the room, and despaired of his family in an obtrusive and
impregnable silence for an enormous time.
All of which awakened a deep sense of guilt and unworthiness in Mrs.
Pope's mind, and prevented her going to bed, but did not help her in the
slightest degree to grasp the difficulties of the situation....
She would have lain awake anyhow, but she was greatly helped in this by
Mr. Pope's restlessness. He was now turning over from left to right or
from right to left at intervals of from four to seven minutes, and such
remarks as "Damned scoundrel! Get out of this!" or "_My_ daughter and
degrade yourself in this way!" or "Never let me see your face again!"
"Plight your troth to one man, and fling yourself shamelessly--I repeat
it, Marjorie, shamelessly--into the arms of another!" kept Mrs. Pope
closely in touch with the general trend of his thoughts.
She tried to get together her plans and perceptions rather as though she
swept up dead leaves on a gusty day. She knew that the management of the
whole situation rested finally on her, and that whatever she did or did
not do, or whatever arose to thwart her arrangements, its entire tale of
responsibility would ultimately fall upon her shoulders. She wondered
what was to be done with Marjorie, with Mr. Magnet? Need he know? Could
that situation be saved? Everything at present was raw in her mind.
Except for her husband's informal communications she did not even know
what had appeared, what Daffy had seen, what Magnet thought of
Marjorie's failure to bid him good-night. For example, had Mr. Magnet
noticed Mr. Pope's profound disturbance? She had to be ready to put a
face on things before morning, and it seemed impossible she could do so.
In times of crisis, as every woman knows, it is always necessary to
misrepresent everything to everybody, but how she was to dovetail her
misrepresentations, get the best effect from them, extract a working
system of rights and wrongs from them, she could not imagine....
(Oh! she did so wish Mr. Pope would lie quiet.)
But he had no doubts of what became _him_. He had to maintain a splendid
and irrational rage--at any cost--to anybody.