The confidence of Solomonson had made it impossible for Trafford to
alter his style of living almost directly upon the conclusion of their
agreement. He went back to Marjorie to broach a financially emancipated
phase. They took a furnished house at Shackleford, near Godalming in
Surrey, and there they lived for nearly a year--using their Chelsea home
only as a town apartment for Trafford when business held him in London.
And there it was, in the pretty Surrey country, with the sweet air of
pine and heather in Marjorie's blood, that their second child was born.
It was a sturdy little boy, whose only danger in life seemed to be the
superfluous energy with which he resented its slightest disrespect of
his small but important requirements.
When it was time for Marjorie to return to London, spring had come round
again, and Trafford's conceptions of life were adapting themselves to
the new scale upon which they were now to do things. While he was busy
creating his factory in the East End, Marjorie was displaying an equal
if a less original constructive energy in Sussex Square, near Lancaster
Gate, for there it was the new home was to be established. She set
herself to furnish and arrange it so as to produce the maximum of
surprise and chagrin in Daphne, and she succeeded admirably. The Magnets
now occupied a flat in Whitehall Court, the furniture Magnet had
insisted upon buying himself with all the occult cunning of the humorist
in these matters, and not even Daphne could blind herself to the
superiority both in arrangement and detail of Marjorie's home. That was
very satisfactory, and so too was the inevitable exaggeration of
Trafford's financial importance. "He can do what he likes in the rubber
world," said Marjorie. "In Mincing Lane, where they deal in rubber
shares, they used to call him and Sir Rupert the invaders; now they call
them the Conquering Heroes.... Of course, it's mere child's play to
Godwin, but, as he said, 'We want money.' It won't really interfere with
his more important interests...."
I do not know why both those sisters were more vulgarly competitive with
each other than with any one else; I have merely to record the fact that
they were so.
The effect upon the rest of Marjorie's family was equally gratifying.
Mr. Pope came to the house-warming as though he had never had the
slightest objection to Trafford's antecedents, and told him casually
after dinner that Marjorie had always been his favourite daughter, and
that from the first he had expected great things of her. He told Magnet,
who was the third man of the party, that he only hoped Syd and Rom would
do as well as their elder sisters. Afterwards, in the drawing-room, he
whacked Marjorie suddenly and very startlingly on the shoulder-blade--it
was the first bruise he had given her since Buryhamstreet days. "You've
made a man of him, Maggots," he said.
The quiet smile of the Christian Scientist was becoming now the fixed
expression of Mrs. Pope's face, and it scarcely relaxed for a moment as
she surveyed her daughter's splendours. She had triumphantly refused to
worry over a rather serious speculative disappointment, but her faith in
her prophet's spiritual power had been strengthened rather than weakened
by the manifest insufficiency of his financial prestidigitations, and
she was getting through life quite radiantly now, smiling at (but not,
of course, giving way to) beggars, smiling at toothaches and headaches,
both her own and other people's, smiling away doubts, smiling away
everything that bows the spirit of those who are still in the bonds of
the flesh....
Afterwards the children came round, Syd and Rom now with skirts down and
hair up, and rather stiff in the fine big rooms, and Theodore in a high
collar and very anxious to get Trafford on his side in his ambition to
chuck a proposed bank clerkship and go in for professional aviation....
It was pleasant to be respected by her family again, but the mind of
Marjorie was soon reaching out to the more novel possibilities of her
changed position. She need no longer confine herself to teas and
afternoons. She could now, delightful thought! give dinners. Dinners are
mere vulgarities for the vulgar, but in the measure of your brains does
a dinner become a work of art. There is the happy blending of a modern
and distinguished simplicity with a choice of items essentially good and
delightful and just a little bit not what was expected. There is the
still more interesting and difficult blending and arrangement of the
diners. From the first Marjorie resolved on a round table, and the
achievement of that rare and wonderful thing, general conversation. She
had a clear centre, with a circle of silver bowls filled with short cut
flowers and low shaded, old silver candlesticks adapted to the electric
light. The first dinner was a nervous experience for her, but happily
Trafford seemed unconscious of the importance of the occasion and talked
very easily and well; at last she attained her old ambition to see Sir
Roderick Dover in her house, and there was Remington, the editor of the
_Blue Weekly_ and his silent gracious wife; Edward Crampton, the
historian, full of surprising new facts about Kosciusko; the Solomonsons
and Mrs. Millingham, and Mary Gasthorne the novelist. It was a good
talking lot. Remington sparred agreeably with the old Toryism of Dover,
flank attacks upon them both were delivered by Mrs. Millingham and
Trafford, Crampton instanced Hungarian parallels, and was happily
averted by Mary Gasthorne with travel experiences in the Carpathians;
the diamonds of Lady Solomonson and Mrs. Remington flashed and winked
across the shining table, as their wearers listened with unmistakable
intelligence, and when the ladies had gone upstairs Sir Rupert
Solomonson told all the men exactly what he thought of the policy of the
_Blue Weekly_, a balanced, common-sense judgment. Upstairs Lady
Solomonson betrayed a passion of admiration for Mrs. Remington, and Mrs.
Millingham mumbled depreciation of the same lady's intelligence in Mary
Gasthorne's unwilling ear. "She's _passive_," said Mrs. Millingham. "She
bores him...."
For a time Marjorie found dinner-giving delightful--it is like picking
and arranging posies of human flowers--and fruits--and perhaps a little
dried grass, and it was not long before she learnt that she was esteemed
a success as a hostess. She gathered her earlier bunches in the Carmel
and Solomonson circle, with a stiffening from among the literary and
scientific friends of Trafford and his mother, and one or two casual and
undervalued blossoms from Aunt Plessington's active promiscuities. She
had soon a gaily flowering garden of her own to pick from. Its strength
and finest display lay in its increasing proportion of political
intellectuals, men in and about the House who relaxed their minds from
the tense detailed alertness needed in political intrigues by
conversation that rose at times to the level of the smarter sort of
article in the half-crown reviews. The women were more difficult than
the men, and Marjorie found herself wishing at times that girl novelists
and playwrights were more abundant, or women writers on the average
younger. These talked generally well, and one or two capable women of
her own type talked and listened with an effect of talking; so many
other women either chattered disturbingly, or else did not listen, with
an effect of not talking at all, and so made gaps about the table. Many
of these latter had to be asked because they belonged to the class of
inevitable wives, _sine-qua-nons_, and through them she learnt the value
of that priceless variety of kindly unselfish men who can create the
illusion of attentive conversation in the most uncomfortable and
suspicious natures without producing backwater and eddy in the general
flow of talk.
Indisputably Marjorie's dinners were successful. Of course, the
abundance and aesthetic achievements of Mrs. Lee still seemed to her
immeasurably out of reach, but it was already possible to show Aunt
Plessington how the thing ought really to be done, Aunt Plessington with
her narrow, lank, austerely served table, with a sort of quarter-deck at
her own end and a subjugated forecastle round Hubert. And accordingly
the Plessingtons were invited and shown, and to a party, too, that
restrained Aunt Plessington from her usual conversational prominence....
These opening years of Trafford's commercial phase were full of an
engaging activity for Marjorie as for him, and for her far more
completely than for him were the profounder solicitudes of life lost
sight of in the bright succession of immediate events.
Marjorie did not let her social development interfere with her duty to
society in the larger sense. Two years after the vigorous and resentful
Godwin came a second son, and a year and a half later a third. "That's
enough," said Marjorie, "now we've got to rear them." The nursery at
Sussex Square had always been a show part of the house, but it became
her crowning achievement. She had never forgotten the Lee display at
Vevey, the shining splendours of modern maternity, the books, the
apparatus, the space and light and air. The whole second floor was
altered to accommodate these four triumphant beings, who absorbed the
services of two nurses, a Swiss nursery governess and two
housemaids--not to mention those several hundred obscure individuals who
were yielding a sustaining profit in the East End. At any rate, they
were very handsome and promising children, and little Margharita could
talk three languages with a childish fluency, and invent and write a
short fable in either French or German--with only as much misspelling as
any child of eight may be permitted....
Then there sprang up a competition between Marjorie and the able, pretty
wife of Halford Wallace, most promising of under-secretaries. They gave
dinners against each other, they discovered young artists against each
other, they went to first-nights and dressed against each other.
Marjorie was ruddy and tall, Mrs. Halford Wallace dark and animated;
Halford Wallace admired Marjorie, Trafford was insensible to Mrs.
Halford Wallace. They played for points so vague that it was impossible
for any one to say which was winning, but none the less they played like
artists, for all they were worth....
Trafford's rapid prosperity and his implicit promise of still wider
activities and successes brought him innumerable acquaintances and many
friends. He joined two or three distinguished clubs, he derived an
uncertain interest from a series of week-end visits to ample,
good-mannered households, and for a time he found a distraction in
little flashes of travel to countries that caught at his imagination,
Morocco, Montenegro, Southern Russia.
I do not know whether Marjorie might not have been altogether happy
during this early Sussex Square period, if it had not been for an
unconquerable uncertainty about Trafford. But ever and again she became
vaguely apprehensive of some perplexing unreality in her position. She
had never had any such profundity of discontent as he experienced. It
was nothing clear, nothing that actually penetrated, distressing her. It
was at most an uneasiness. For him the whole fabric of life was, as it
were, torn and pieced by a provocative sense of depths unplumbed that
robbed it of all its satisfactions. For her these glimpses were as yet
rare, mere moments of doubt that passed again and left her active and
assured.