And then our two young people went out to their first dinner-parties
together. They began with Trafford's rich friend Solomonson, who had
played so large and so passive a part in their first meeting. He had
behaved with a sort of magnanimous triumph over the marriage. He made it
almost his personal affair, as though he had brought it about. "I knew
there was a girl in it," he insisted, "and you told me there wasn't.
O-a-ah! And you kept me in that smell of disinfectant and things--what a
chap that doctor was for spilling stuff!--for six blessed days!..."
Marjorie achieved a dress at once simple and good with great facility by
not asking the price until it was all over. (There is no half-success
with dinner-dresses, either the thing is a success and inestimable, or
not worth having at any price at all.) It was blue with a thread of
gold, and she had a necklace of blueish moonstones, gold-set, and her
hair ceased to be copper and became golden, and her eyes unfathomable
blue. She was radiant with health and happiness, no one else there had
her clear freshness, and her manner was as restrained and dignified and
ready as a proud young wife's can be. Everyone seemed to like her and
respect her and be interested in her, and Trafford kissed her flushed
cheek in the hansom as they came home again and crowned her happiness.
It had been quite a large party, and really much more splendid and
brilliant than anything she had ever seen before. There had been one old
gentleman with a coloured button and another with a ribbon; there had
been a countess with historical pearls, and half-a-dozen other people
one might fairly call distinguished. The house was tremendous in its
way, spacious, rich, glowing with lights, abounding in vistas and fine
remote backgrounds. In the midst of it all she had a sudden thrill at
the memory that less than a year ago she had been ignominiously
dismissed from the dinner-table by her father for a hiccup....
A few days after Aunt Plessington suddenly asked the Traffords to one of
her less important but still interesting gatherings; not one of those
that swayed the world perhaps, but one which Marjorie was given to
understand achieved important subordinate wagging. Aunt Plessington had
not called, she explained in her note, because of the urgent demands the
Movement made upon her time; it was her wonderful hard-breathing way
never to call on anyone, and it added tremendously to her reputation;
none the less it appeared--though here the scrawl became illegible--she
meant to shove and steer her dear niece upward at a tremendous pace.
They were even asked to come a little early so that she might make
Trafford's acquaintance.
The dress was duly admired, and then Aunt Plessington--assuming the
hearthrug and forgetting the little matter of their career--explained
quite Napoleonic and wonderful things she was going to do with her
Movement, fresh principles, fresh applications, a big committee of all
the "names"--they were easy to get if you didn't bother them to do
things--a new and more attractive title, "Payment in Kind" was to give
way to "Reality of Reward," and she herself was going to have her hair
bleached bright white (which would set off her eyes and colour and the
general geniality of appearance due to her projecting teeth), and so
greatly increase her "platform efficiency." Hubert, she said, was
toiling away hard at the detail of these new endeavours. He would be
down in a few minutes' time. Marjorie, she said, ought to speak at their
meetings. It would help both the Traffords to get on if Marjorie cut a
dash at the outset, and there was no such dash to be cut as speaking at
Aunt Plessington's meetings. It was catching on; all next season it was
sure to be the thing. So many promising girls allowed themselves to be
submerged altogether in marriage for a time, and when they emerged
everyone had forgotten the promise of their debut. She had an air of
rescuing Marjorie from an impending fate by disabusing Trafford from
injurious prepossessions....
Presently the guests began to drop in, a vegetarian health specialist, a
rising young woman factory inspector, a phrenologist who was being
induced to put great talents to better uses under Aunt Plessington's
influence, his dumb, obscure, but inevitable wife, a colonial bishop, a
baroness with a taste rather than a capacity for intellectual society, a
wealthy jam and pickle manufacturer and his wife, who had subscribed
largely to the funds of the Movement and wanted to meet the lady of
title, and the editor of the Movement's organ, _Upward and On_, a young
gentleman of abundant hair and cadaverous silences, whom Aunt
Plessington patted on the shoulder and spoke of as "one of our
discoveries." And then Uncle Hubert came down, looking ruffled and
overworked, with his ready-made dress-tie--he was one of those men who
can never master the art of tying a bow--very much askew. The
conversation turned chiefly on the Movement; if it strayed Aunt
Plessington reached out her voice after it and brought it back in a
masterful manner.
Through soup and fish Marjorie occupied herself with the inflexible
rigour of the young editor, who had brought her down. When she could
give her attention to the general conversation she discovered her
husband a little flushed and tackling her aunt with an expression of
quiet determination. The phrenologist and the vegetarian health
specialist were regarding him with amazement, the jam and pickle
manufacturer's wife was evidently deeply shocked. He was refusing to
believe in the value of the Movement, and Aunt Plessington was
manifestly losing her temper.
"I don't see, Mrs. Plessington," he was saying, "that all this amounts
to more than a kind of Glorious District Visiting. That is how I see it.
You want to attack people in their homes--before they cry out to you.
You want to compel them by this Payment in Kind of yours to do what you
want them to do instead of trying to make them want to do it. Now, I
think your business is to make them want to do it. You may perhaps
increase the amount of milk in babies, and the amount of whitewash in
cottages and slums by your methods--I don't dispute the promise of your
statistics--but you're going to do it at a cost of human self-respect
that's out of all proportion----"
Uncle Hubert's voice, with that thick utterance that always suggested a
mouthful of plums, came booming down the table. "All these arguments,"
he said, "have been answered long ago."
"No doubt," said Trafford with a faint asperity. "But tell me the
answers."
"It's ridiculous," said Aunt Plessington, "to talk of the self-respect
of the kind of people--oh! the very dregs!"
"It's just because the plant is delicate that you've got to handle it
carefully," said Trafford.
"Here's Miss Gant," said Aunt Plessington, "_she_ knows the strata we
are discussing. She'll tell you they have positively _no_
self-respect--none at all."
"_My_ people," said Miss Gant, as if in conclusive testimony, "actually
conspire with their employers to defeat me."
"I don't see the absence of self-respect in that," said Trafford.
"But all their interests----"
"I'm thinking of their pride."...
The discussion lasted to the end of dinner and made no headway. As soon
as the ladies were in the drawing-room, Aunt Plessington, a little
flushed from the conflict, turned on Marjorie and said, "I _like_ your
husband. He's wrong-headed, but he's young, and he's certainly spirited.
He _ought_ to get on if he wants to. Does he do nothing but his
researches?"
"He lectures in the spring term," said Marjorie.
"Ah!" said Aunt Plessington with a triumphant note, "you must alter all
that. You must interest him in wider things. You must bring him out of
his shell, and let him see what it is to deal with Affairs. Then he
wouldn't talk such nonsense about our Work."
Marjory was at a momentary loss for a reply, and in the instant's
respite Aunt Plessington turned to the jam and pickle lady and asked in
a bright, encouraging note: "Well! And how's the Village Club getting
on?"...
She had another lunge at Trafford as he took his leave. "You must come
again soon," she said. "I _love_ a good wrangle, and Hubert and I never
want to talk about our Movement to any one but unbelievers. You don't
know the beginnings of it yet. Only I warn you they have a way of
getting converted. I warn you."...
On this occasion there was no kissing in the cab. Trafford was
exasperated.
"Of all the intolerable women!" he said, and was silent for a time.
"The astounding part of it is," he burst out, "that this sort of thing,
this Movement and all the rest of it, does really give the quality of
English public affairs. It's like a sample--dredged. The--the
_cheapness_ of it! Raised voices, rash assertions, sham investigations,
meetings and committees and meetings, that's the stuff of it, and
politicians really have to attend to it, and silly, ineffective,
irritating bills really get drafted and messed about with and passed on
the strength of it. Public affairs are still in the Dark Ages. Nobody
now would think of getting together a scratch committee of rich old
women and miscellaneous conspicuous people to design an electric tram,
and jabbering and jabbering and jabbering, and if any one objects"--a
note of personal bitterness came into his voice--"jabbering faster; but
nobody thinks it ridiculous to attempt the organization of poor people's
affairs in that sort of way. This project of the supersession of Wages
by Payment in Kind--oh! it's childish. If it wasn't it would be
outrageous and indecent. Your uncle and aunt haven't thought for a
moment of any single one of the necessary consequences of these things
they say their confounded Movement aims at, effects upon the race, upon
public spirit, upon people's habits and motives. They've just a queer
craving to feel powerful and influential, which they think they can best
satisfy by upsetting the lives of no end of harmless poor people--the
only people they dare upset--and that's about as far as they go.... Your
aunt's detestable, Marjorie."
Marjorie had never seen him so deeply affected by anything but herself.
It seemed to her he was needlessly disturbed by a trivial matter. He
sulked for a space, and then broke out again.
"That confounded woman talks of my physical science," he said, "as if
research were an amiable weakness, like collecting postage stamps. And
it's changed human conditions more in the last ten years than all the
parliamentary wire-pullers and legislators and administrative experts
have done in two centuries. And for all that, there's more clerks in
Whitehall than professors of physics in the whole of England."...
"I suppose it's the way that sort of thing gets done," said Marjorie,
after an interval.
"That sort of thing doesn't get done," snapped Trafford. "All these
people burble about with their movements and jobs, and lectures and
stuff--and _things happen_. Like some one getting squashed to death in a
crowd. Nobody did it, but anybody in the muddle can claim to have done
it--if only they've got the cheek of your Aunt Plessington."
He seemed to have finished.
"_Done!_" he suddenly broke out again. "Why! people like your Aunt
Plessington don't even know where the handle is. If they ventured to
look for it, they'd give the whole show away! Done, indeed!"
"Here we are!" said Marjorie, a little relieved to find the hansom
turning out of King's Road into their own side street....
And then Marjorie wore the blue dress with great success at the
Carmels'. The girls came and looked at it and admired it--it was no mere
politeness. They admitted there was style about it, a quality--there was
no explaining. "You're _wonderful_, Madge!" cried the younger Carmel
girl.
The Carmel boy, seizing the opportunity of a momentary seclusion in a
corner, ended a short but rather portentous silence with "I say, you
_do_ look ripping," in a voice that implied the keenest regret for the
slacknesses of a summer that was now infinitely remote to Marjorie. It
was ridiculous that the Carmel boy should have such emotions--he was six
years younger than Trafford and only a year older than Marjorie, and yet
she was pleased by his manifest wound....
There was only one little thing at the back of her mind that alloyed her
sense of happy and complete living that night, and that was the ghost of
an addition sum. At home, in her pretty bureau, a little gathering pile
of bills, as yet unpaid, and an empty cheque-book with appealing
counterfoils, awaited her attention.
Marjorie had still to master the fact that all the fine braveries and
interests and delights of life that offer themselves so amply to the
favoured children of civilization, trail and, since the fall of man at
any rate, have trailed after them something--something, the
justification of morality, the despair of all easy, happy souls, the
unavoidable drop of bitterness in the cup of pleasure--the Reckoning.