Sometimes she propounded terrible posers, which were not made any simpler
by being dropped from clear skies in the midst of talk on the most
innocent of themes. I remember one evening I was pointing out the
constellations.
I had just said, “That’s Orion’s Belt,” when she inquired, “Do you think,
Dombeen, that husbands and wives, when they love other people, ought to
go on living together?”
“But that has nothing to do with astronomy,” was my feeble reply.
Another time, after another of Eustace’s visits: “What do men look like
when their hearts are broken?”
“If I found I had married the wrong man I should leave him,” was another
announcement. (This was when she was sixteen.) “As a maffact, Dombeen,
I expect I shall make a mistake like that. I don’t see how one can help
it. I’ve always got tired of everything up to now, so why should it be
different with a husband?”
This was the War virus working with a vengeance! We all had to adjust
ourselves to that, we old people.
I don’t know how it is with my contemporaries, but the truth about me is
that at thirty I was much surer of myself and of accepted dogma than I am
at seventy. At thirty, if I had heard a young girl remark that chastity
is absurdly overrated, I should have been shocked; to-day I find myself
capable of wondering if it may not be true: if we do not, in protecting
that shadow, allow much sound substance to deteriorate? Doctors see more
than most spectators, and with these eyes I have watched many and many an
open-natured girl shrivel into an old maid and her finer juices turn to
gall—all because she was not wooed and had not the courage to defy
convention and woo for herself. The older one grows, the smaller is the
number of sins. I can enumerate very few now, and if I live much longer
there will be only one, and that is meanness.
“Aren’t our bodies our own, to do as we like with?” is a question that
may be said to be in the air in these days. And how explain to any young
person, girl or boy, that the answer is No?
Rose was not, so far as I could tell, as modern as this. But of course I
could not hope for complete knowledge of her, even if I had probed for
it. December and April are not confidants: at most they can be
sympathetic. Such insight as I had into her philosophy and creed of
living had to be gathered from generalities: from her comments on the
day’s news, from her selective readings aloud from the papers, from her
attitude to local misdemeanour: whether lenient or censorious. Lenience
was certainly her tendency. In the idiom of to-day she was “for” all
insurrectionists; she could even find it in her heart to be sorry for
miners. “I don’t wonder they strike, poor things. The mystery is how
they can go on digging that horrid black stuff at all, in the pitch dark
too, no matter how much you pay them.”
* * * * *
It was one afternoon when Rose was eighteen that I realized that she was
no longer merely a girl. Suddenly the peace of the garden was invaded by
a series of snorts and explosions, and a motor-car rushed up the
drive—one of those absurd little cars, very small and low, like an
important roller skate, with just room for two, and a naked nymph in
silver and without shame poised over the bonnet by way of mascot. The
kind of vehicle brought into existence to meet the demands of
second-lieutenants. Immediately afterwards I was told that a gentleman
wished to see me, and behold there he was, in the sitting-room—a tall
young man with a tiny moustache exactly the same width as his nose, and
purple socks. Although obviously not lacking in self-assurance, he
advanced rather nervously.
“What can I do for you?” I asked. “You know I have retired from
practice.”
“O, it isn’t about any old malady,” he explained. “Thank Heaven I’m as
fit as a fiddle. The fact is, I wanted to ask your advice. It’s
about—Miss, Miss Holt.”
“Yes?” I said. I knew instinctively what was coming, but it was no
business of mine to make it any easier for the young bandits who proposed
to carry off this treasure.
“Well,” he said, “the fact is, you know, she’s—there’s no one so topping;
or perhaps you don’t know?”
“Why should I be ignorant?” I asked. “Because I’m so old?”
“Well, I don’t mean that,” he replied. “But you’re her guardian, aren’t
you? And living here as she does. . .”
“Oh I see,” I said. “You mean that only strangers can discover how
delightful people can be?”
“No, not exactly that,” he stammered, “although, as a matter of fact, you
know, one does rather take one’s own people for granted. My sister Belle
now—to me she’s the stodgiest kind of old thing, but you should see the
fellows after her. Like flies. They’re not as keen as I am about Miss
Holt, though.”
“Then I must suppose,” I said, “that Rose—Miss Holt—is much nicer away
from home than she is when she is there.”
“Oh no!” he replied, “I didn’t mean that. I’m sure she’s always
charming.”
“Well, if neither of these is the reason, I am bound,” I said, “to fall
back on the theory that I am too old to recognize sweetness when I see
it.”
He was in a hole now and showed it. I liked him for his confusion. I
liked to think that any young man, particularly one who had been through
a war so much more destructive of good manners and good morals and honest
standards of living than of militarism, should still be capable of
embarrassment.
“Do you mind,” he asked, “if I smoke?”
“Not at all,” I said. “Every one smokes now. Tobacco is the next thing
to mother’s milk.”
He took a cigarette from a gold case and tapped it. “I’m afraid it’s
only a gasper,” he explained.
“I’d rather it was a pipe,” I said.
“Pipes don’t appeal to me any more,” he replied. “I took to cigarettes
in France and I’ve never gone back.”
A few whiffs seemed to give him courage. “I came to see you,” he said at
last, “because I want to marry Miss Holt.”
I was silent for a minute, during which I was taking him all in, and
reviewing Rose’s life, and seeing them together, and speculating on the
future, and realizing how different this happy-go-lucky youth, with a
touch of effrontery and few thoughts for anything but motoring and
dancing, was from the husband I had been wishing for her. It is
extraordinary what a lot can be thought about in sixty seconds.
Meanwhile he puffed his gasper and nursed his little moustache and swung
a leg with so much purple sock now exposed that a suspender was visible
too.
“Do you live about here?” I asked at last. “I don’t seem to remember
your face.”
“I’m staying with my uncle, Major Wilkinson,” he said. “My name’s
Sibthorp.”
“And what do you do?”
“Well, I’m not doing anything at the moment. I’ve only just been
demobbed. I may possibly go back to Oxford. But I’d rather make some
money. There’s talk of the mater setting me up as a chicken-farmer.
There’s a devil of a lot of eggs wanted.”
“And what did you do in the war?”
“I was in the Air Force. Jolly lucky too. I never had a scratch.”
“But you scratched a Hun or two, I hope?”
“I fancy I did,” he said.
“Any medals?” I said.
“I got the D.S.O.,” he replied simply.
“You must let me shake your hand,” I said, “but remember that it is
entirely without prejudice to the other matter. Do you happen to know
how Miss Holt feels about it?”
“O I think she thinks I’m a pretty decent sort,” he said.
“Why do you like her?” I asked. “She doesn’t rouge.”
“I loathe rouge,” he said warmly.
I shook him by the hand again—again warning him that it was without
prejudice.
“Does she like you at all?” I asked.
“She likes jazzing with me, I know,” he assured me.
“Life isn’t a dance,” I replied.
“No, of course not,” he said. “I know that. I know it’s a jolly serious
affair.”
“And you are proposing that Miss Holt should help you with the poultry?”
I suggested.
“She’d love it,” he said. “It’s a great lark.”
“This means,” I said, “that you would have to live in the country, and
give constant attention to the work. No more jazzing, and very little
motoring except to the market? Do you think that’s an existence for a
girl of brains and ambition and high spirits, who happens to be an artist
too?”
His face took on an expression of perplexity.
“But—but—she’d be married,” he said.
“So you think that love in an isolated cottage surrounded by roosters and
incubators, with only one human companion, is a sufficient paradise to
offer her? Upon my word, you seem to me to be uncommonly sure of your
fascination. She would have to be very fond of you to give up her
present home and pursuits, even with the society of a very aged man
occasionally thrust upon her, and take to chicken-farming. Doesn’t it
occur to you that that would be a big sacrifice?”
“But—but one must begin,” he said. “The poultry business would only be a
start. We might go on to much bigger things.”
“It will be time to talk about marriage,” I said, “when you have made
some of that progress.”
“Then you refuse to consider me?” he asked ruefully.
“Not at all,” I said. “It is not for me to decide anything. Rose has a
father. But I should certainly put what obstacles I could in your way,
until you had something better to propose as a means of livelihood than a
chicken-farm in the air.”
“But you don’t forbid me to see her, or anything like that?” he asked
eagerly.
“Of course not. And I couldn’t if I wanted to. See as much of her as
she wants.”
“And if she told you that I—if she ever said anything about marrying
me—you wouldn’t put a spoke in the wheel, would you?”
“I should do nothing to discourage her,” I said—“not from any desire to
see her marry you, but for the opposite reason. Old though I am, I have
not forgotten that forbidden fruit is the most attractive. So I
shouldn’t forbid you.”
“I say, that’s brainy,” he said, with genuine admiration. “I should
never have thought of that.”
“May I ask,” I said, “if you have put your case to Miss Holt?”
“Not in so many words,” he replied. “I thought I would see you first.”
“That’s rather an unusual course nowadays, isn’t it?”
“Well, that’s how the mater felt, anyway. It was her idea.”
“You talked it over with your mother?”
“Yes.”
“So Rose is all ignorant of this visit?”
“Yes,” he said.