1
Mr. Waddington closed the door on Miss Madden slowly and gently so that
the action should not strike her as dismissive. He then turned on the
lights by the chimneypiece and stood there, looking at himself in the
glass. He wanted to know exactly how his face had presented itself to
Miss Madden. It would not be altogether as it appeared to himself; for
the glass, unlike the young girl's clear eyes, was an exaggerating and
distorting medium; he had noticed that his wife's face in the smoke-room
glass looked a good ten years older than the face he knew; he
calculated, therefore, that this faint greenish tint, this slightly
lop-sided elderly grimace were not truthful renderings of his complexion
and his smile. And as (in spite of these defects, which you could put
down to the account of the glass) the face Mr. Waddington saw was still
the face of a handsome man, he formed a very favourable opinion of the
face Miss Madden had seen. Handsome, and if not in his first youth, then
still in his second. Experience is itself a fascination, and if a man
has any charm at all his second youth should be more charming, more
irresistibly fascinating than his first.
And the child had been conscious of him. She had betrayed uneasiness, a
sense of danger, when she had found herself alone with him. He recalled
her first tentative flight, her hesitation. He would have liked to have
kept her there with him a little longer, to have talked to her about his
League, to have tested by a few shrewd questions her ability.
Better not. Better not. The child was wise and right. Her wisdom and
rectitude were delicious to Mr. Waddington, still more so was the
thought that she had felt him to be dangerous.
He went back into his library and sat again in his chair and meditated:
This experiment of Fanny's now; he wondered how it would turn out,
especially if Fanny really wanted to adopt the girl, Frank Madden's
daughter. That impudent social comedian had been so offensive to Mr.
Waddington in his life-time that there was something alluring in the idea
of keeping his daughter now that he was dead, seeing the exquisite
little thing dependent on him for everything, for food and frocks and
pocket-money. But no doubt they had been wise in giving her the
secretaryship before committing themselves to the irrecoverable step;
thus testing her in a relation that could be easily terminated if by any
chance it proved embarrassing.
But the relation in itself was, as Mr. Waddington put it to himself, a
little difficult and delicate. It involved an intimacy, a closer
intimacy than adoption: having her there in his library at all hours to
work with him; and always that little uneasy consciousness of hers.
Well, well, he had set the tone to-night for all their future
intercourse; he had in the most delicate way possible let her see. It
seemed to him, looking back on it, that he had exercised a perfect tact,
parting from her with that air of gaiety and light badinage which his
own instinct of self-preservation so happily suggested. Yet he smiled
when he recalled her look as she went from him, backing, backing, to the
door; it made him feel very tender and chivalrous; virtuous too, as if
somehow he had overcome some unforeseen and ruinous impulse. And all the
time he hadn't had any impulse beyond the craving to talk to an
intelligent and attractive stranger, to talk about his League.
Mr. Waddington went to bed thinking about it. He even woke his wife up
out of her sleep with the request that she would remind him to call at
Underwoods first thing in the morning.
2
As soon as he was awake he thought of Underwoods. Underwoods was
important. He had to round up the county, and he couldn't do that
without first consulting Sir John Corbett, of Underwoods. As a matter
of form, a mere matter of form, of course, he would have to consult him.
But the more he thought about it the less he liked the idea of
consulting anybody. He was desperately afraid that, if he once began
letting people into it, his scheme, his League, would be taken away from
him; and that the proper thing, the graceful thing, the thing to which
he would be impelled by all his instincts and traditions, would be to
stand modestly back and see it go. Probably into Sir John Corbett's
hands. And he couldn't. He couldn't. Yet it was clear that the League,
just because it was a League, must have members; even if he had been
prepared to contribute all the funds himself and carry on the whole
business of it single-handed, it couldn't consist solely of Mr.
Waddington of Wyck. His problem was a subtle and difficult one: How to
identify himself with the League, himself alone, in a unique and
indissoluble manner, and yet draw to it the necessary supporters? How to
control every detail of its intricate working (there would be endless
wheels within wheels), and at the same time give proper powers to the
inevitable Committee? If he did not put it quite so crudely as Fanny in
her disagreeable irony, his problem resolved itself into this: How to
divide the work and yet rake in all the credit?
He was saved from its immediate pressure by the sight of the envelope
that waited for him on the breakfast-table, addressed in a familiar
hand.
"Mrs. Levitt--" His emotion betrayed itself to Barbara in a peculiar
furtive yet triumphant smile.
"Again?" said Fanny. (There was no end to the woman and her letters.)
Mrs. Levitt requested Mr. Waddington to call on her that morning at
eleven. There was a matter on which she desired to consult him. The
brevity of the note revealed her trust in his compliance, trust that
implied again a certain intimacy. Mr. Waddington read it out loud to
show how harmless and open was his communion with Mrs. Levitt.
"Is there any matter on which she has not consulted you?"
"There seems to have been one. And, as you see, she is repairing the
omission."
A light air, a light air, to carry off Mrs. Levitt. The light air that
had carried off Barbara, that had made Barbara carry herself off the
night before. (It had done good. This morning the young girl was all
ease and innocent unconsciousness again.)
"And I suppose you're going?" Fanny said.
"I suppose I shall have to go."
"Then I shall have Barbara to myself all morning?"
"You will have Barbara to yourself all day."
He tried thus jocosely to convey, for Barbara's good, his indifference
to having her. All the same, it gave him pleasure to say her name like
that: "Barbara."
He was not sure that he wanted to go and see Mrs. Levitt with all this
business of the League on hand. It meant putting off Sir John. You
couldn't do Sir John _and_ Mrs. Levitt in one morning. Besides, he
thought he knew what Mrs. Levitt wanted, and he said to himself that
this time he would be obliged, for once, to refuse her.
But it was not in him to refuse to go and see her. So he went.
As he walked up the park drive to the town he recalled with distinctly
pleasurable emotion the first time he had encountered Mrs. Levitt, the
vision of the smart little lady who had stood there by the inner gate,
the gate that led from the park into the grounds, waiting for his
approach with happy confidence. He remembered her smile, an affair of
milk-white teeth in an ivory-white face, and her frank attack: "Forgive
me if I'm trespassing. They told me there was a right of way." He
remembered her charming diffidence, the naïve reverence for his
"grounds" which had compelled him to escort her personally through them;
her attitudes of admiration as the Manor burst on her from its bay in
the beech trees; the interest she had shown in its date and
architecture; and how, spinning out the agreeable interview, he had gone
with her all the way to the farther gate that led into Lower Wyck
village; and how she had challenged him there with her "You must be Mr.
Waddington of Wyck," and capped his admission with "I'm Mrs. Levitt." To
which he had replied that he was delighted.
And the time after that--Partridge had discreetly shown her into the
library--when she had called to implore him to obtain exemption for her
son Toby; her black eyes, bright and large behind tears; and her cry:
"I'm a war widow, Mr. Waddington, and he's my only child;" the flattery
of her belief that he, Mr. Waddington of Wyck, had the chief power on
the tribunal (and indeed it would have been folly to pretend that he had
not power, that he could not "work it" if he chose). And the third time,
after he had "worked it," and she had come to thank him. Tears again;
the pressure of a plump, ivory-white hand; a tingling, delicious memory.
After that, his untiring efforts to get a war job for Toby. There had
been difficulties, entailing many visits to Mrs. Levitt in the little
house in the Market Square of Wyck-on-the-Hill; but in the end he had
had the same intoxicating experience of his power, all obstructions
going down before Mr. Waddington of Wyck.
And this year, when Toby was finally demobilized, it was only natural
that she should draw on Mr. Waddington's influence again to get him a
permanent peace job. He had got it; and that meant more visits and more
gratitude; till here he was, attached to Mrs. Levitt by the unbreakable
tie of his benefactions. He was even attached to her son Toby, whose
continued existence, to say nothing of his activity in Mr. Bostock's
Bank at Wyck, was a perpetual tribute to his power. Mr. Waddington had
nothing like the same complacence in thinking of his own son Horace; but
then Horace's existence and his activity were not a tribute but a
menace, a standing danger, not only to his power but to his fascination,
his sense of himself as a still young, still brilliant and effective
personality. (Horace inherited his mother's deplorable lack of
seriousness.) And it was in Mrs. Levitt's society that Mr. Waddington
was most conscious of his youth, his brilliance and effect. With an
agreeable sense of anticipation he climbed up the slopes of Sheep Street
and Park Street, and so into the Square.
The house, muffled in ivy, hid discreetly in the far corner, behind the
two tall elms on the Green. Mrs. Trinder, the landlady, had a sidelong
bend of the head and a smile that acknowledged him as Mr. Waddington of
Wyck and Mrs. Levitt's benefactor.
And as he waited in the low, mullion-darkened room he reminded himself
that he had come to refuse her request. If, as he suspected, it was the
Ballingers' cottage that she wanted. To be sure, the Ballingers had
notice to quit in June, but he couldn't very well turn the Ballingers
out if they wanted to stay, when there wasn't a decent house in the
place to turn them into. He would have to make this very clear to Mrs.
Levitt.
Not that he approved of Ballinger. The fellow, one of his best farm
hands, had behaved infamously, first of all demanding preposterous
wages, and then, just because Mr. Waddington had refused to be
brow-beaten, leaving his service for Colonel Grainger's. Colonel
Grainger had behaved infamously, buying Foss Bank with the money he had
made in high explosives, and then letting fly his confounded Socialism
all over the county. Knowing nothing, mind you, about local conditions,
and actually raising the rate of wages without consulting anybody, and
upsetting the farm labourers for miles round. At a time when the
prosperity of the entire country depended on the farmers. Still, Mr.
Waddington was not the man to take a petty revenge on his inferiors. He
didn't blame Ballinger; he blamed Colonel Grainger. He would like to see
Grainger boycotted by the whole county.
The door opened. He strode forward and found himself holding out a
sudden, fervid hand to a lady who was not Mrs. Levitt. He drew up,
turning his gesture into a bow, rather unnecessarily ceremonious; but he
could not annihilate instantaneously all that fervour.
"I am Mrs. Levitt's sister, Mrs. Rickards. Mr. Waddington, is it not?
I'll tell Elise you're here. I know she'll be glad to see you. She has
been very much upset."
She remained standing before him long enough for him to be aware of a
projecting bust, of white serge, of smartness, of purplish copper hair,
a raking panama's white brim, of eyebrows, a rouged smile, and a smell
of orris root. Before he could grasp its connexion with Mrs. Levitt this
amazing figure had disappeared and given place to a tapping of heels and
a furtive, scuffling laugh on the stairs outside. A shriller laugh--that
must be Mrs. Rickards--a long Sh-sh-sh! Then the bang of the front door
covering the lady's retreat, and Mrs. Levitt came in, stifling merriment
under a minute pocket-handkerchief.
He took it in then. They were sisters, Mrs. Rickards and Elise Levitt.
Elise, if you cared to be critical, had the same defects: short legs,
loose hips; the same exaggerations: the toppling breasts underpinned by
the shafts of her stays. Not Mr. Waddington's taste. And yet--and yet
Elise had contrived a charming and handsome effect out of black eyes and
the milk-white teeth in the ivory-white face. The play of the black
eyebrows distracted you from the equine bend of the nose that sprang
between them; the movements of her mouth, the white flash of its smile,
made you forget its thinness and hardness and the slight heaviness of
its jaw. Something foreign about her. Something French. Piquant. And
then, her clothes. Mrs. Levitt wore a coat and skirt, her sister's white
serge with a distinction, a greyish stripe or something; clean
straightness that stiffened and fined down her exuberance. One jewel,
one bit of gold, and she might have been vulgar. But no. He thought: she
knows what becomes her. Immaculate purity of white gloves, white shoes,
white panama; and the black points of the ribbon, of her eyebrows, her
eyes and hair. After all, the sort of woman Mr. Waddington liked to be
seen out walking with. She made him feel slender.
"My _dear_ Mr. Waddington, how good of you!"
"My dear Mrs. Levitt--always delighted--when it's possible--to do
anything."
As she covered him with her brilliant eyes he tightened his shoulders
and stood firm, while his spirit braced itself against persuasion. If it
was the Ballingers' cottage--
"I really am ashamed of myself. I never seem to send for you unless I'm
in trouble."
"Isn't that the time?" His voice thickened. "So long as you do send--"
He thought: It isn't the Ballingers' cottage then.
"It's your own fault. You've always been so good, so kind. To my poor
Toby."
"Nothing to do with Toby, I hope, the trouble?"
"Oh, no. No. And yet in a way it has. I'm afraid, Mr. Waddington, I may
have to leave."
"To leave? Leave Wyck?"
"Leave dear Wyck."
"Not seriously?"
He wasn't prepared for that. The idea hit him hard in a place that he
hadn't thought was tender.
"Quite seriously."
"Dear me. This is very distressing. Very distressing indeed. But you
would not take such a step without consulting your friends?"
"I _am_ consulting you."
"Yes, yes. But have you thought it well over?"
"Thinking isn't any use. I shall have to, unless something can be done."
He thought: "Financial difficulties. Debts. An expensive lady. Unless
something could be done?" He didn't know that he was exactly prepared to
do it. But his tongue answered in spite of him.
"Something must be done. We can't let you go like this, my dear lady."
"That's it. I don't see how I _can_ go, with dear Toby here. Nor yet how
I'm to stay."
"Won't you tell me what the trouble is?"
"The trouble is that Mrs. Trinder's son's just been demobilized, and she
wants our rooms for his wife and family."
"Come--surely we can find other rooms."
"All the best ones are taken. There's nothing left that I'd care to live
in.... Besides, it isn't rooms I want, Mr. Waddington, it's a house."
It was, of course, the Ballingers' cottage. But she couldn't have it.
She couldn't have it.
"I wouldn't mind how small it was. If only I had a little home of my
own. You don't know, Mr. Waddington, what it is to be without a home of
your own. I haven't had a home for years. Five years. Not since the
war."
"I'm afraid," said Mr. Waddington, "at present there isn't a house for
you in Wyck."
He brooded earnestly, as though he were trying to conjure up, to create
out of nothing, a house for her and a home.
"No. But I understand that the Ballingers will be leaving in June. You
said that at any time, if you had a house, I should have it."
"I said a house, Mrs. Levitt, not a cottage."
"It's all the same to me. The Ballingers' cottage could be made into an
adorable little house."
"It could. With a few hundred pounds spent on it."
"Well, you'd be improving your property, wouldn't you? And you'd get it
back in the higher rent."
"I'm not thinking about getting anything back. And nothing would please
me better. Only, you see, I can't very well turn Ballinger out as long
as he behaves himself."
"I wouldn't have him turned out for the world.... But do you consider
that Ballinger _has_ behaved himself?"
"Well, he played me a dirty trick, perhaps, when he went to Grainger;
but if Grainger can afford to pay for him I've no right to object to his
being bought. It isn't a reason for turning the man out."
"I don't see how he can expect you to refuse a good tenant for him."
"I must if I haven't a good house to put him into."
"He doesn't expect it, Mr. Waddington. Didn't you give him notice in
December?"
"A mere matter of form. He knows he can stay on if there's nowhere else
for him to go to."
"Then why," said Mrs. Levitt, "does he go about saying that he dares you
to let the cottage over his head?"
"Does he? Does he say that?"
"He says he'll pay you out. He'll summons you. He was most abusive."
Mr. Waddington's face positively swelled with the choleric flush that
swamped its genial fatuity.
"It seems somebody told him you were going to do up the cottage and let
it for more rent."
"I don't know who could have spread that story."
"I assure you, Mr. Waddington, it wasn't me!"
"My dear Mrs. Levitt, of course.... I won't say I wasn't thinking of it,
and that I wouldn't have done it, if I could have got rid of
Ballinger...." He meditated.
"I don't see why I shouldn't get rid of him. If he dares me, the
scoundrel, he's simply asking for it. And he shall have it."
"Oh, but I wouldn't for worlds have him turned into the street. With his
wife and babies."
"My dear lady, I shan't turn them into the street. I shouldn't be
allowed to. There's a cottage at Lower Wyck they can go into. The one he
had when he first came to me."
He wondered why he hadn't thought of it before. It wasn't, as it stood,
a decent cottage; but if he was prepared to spend fifty pounds or so on
it, it could be made habitable; and, by George, he _was_ prepared, if it
was only to teach Ballinger a lesson. For it meant that Ballinger would
have to walk an extra mile up hill to his work every day. Serve him
right, the impudent rascal.
"Poor thing, he won't," said Mrs. Levitt, "have his nice garden."
"He won't. Ballinger must learn," said Mr. Waddington with magisterial
severity, "that he can't have everything. He certainly can't have it
both ways. Abuse and threaten me and expect favours. He may go ... to
Colonel Grainger."
"If it really _must_ happen," said Mrs. Levitt, "do you mean that I may
have the house?"
"I shall be only too delighted to have such a charming tenant."
"Well, I shan't threaten and abuse you and call you every nasty name
under the sun. And you won't, you _won't_ turn me out when my lease is
up?"
He bowed over the hand she held out to him.
"You shall never be turned out as long as you want to stay."
By twelve o'clock they had arranged the details; Mr. Waddington was to
put in a bathroom; to throw the two rooms on the ground floor into one;
to build out a new sitting-room with a bedroom over it; and to paint and
distemper the place, in cream white, throughout. And it was to be called
the White House. By the time they had finished with it Ballinger's
cottage had become the house Mrs. Levitt had dreamed of all her life,
and not unlike the house Mr. Waddington had dreamed of that minute
(while he planned the bathroom); the little bijou house where an
adorable but not too rigorously moral lady--He stopped with a mental
jerk, ashamed. He had no reason to suppose that Elise was or would
become such a lady.
And the poor innocent woman was saying, "Just one thing, Mr. Waddington,
the rent?"
(No earthly reason.) "We can talk about that another time. I shan't be
hard on you."
No. He wouldn't be hard on her. But in that other case there wouldn't
have been any rent at all.
As he left the house he could see Mrs. Rickards hurrying towards it
across the square.
"She waddles like a duck," he thought. The movement suggested a plebeian
excitement and curiosity that displeased him. He recalled her face. Her
extraordinary face. "Quite enough," he thought, "to put all that into my
head. Poor Elise"
He liked to think of her. It made him feel what he had felt last night
over Barbara Madden--virtuous--as though he had struggled and got the
better of an impetuous passion. He was so touched by his own beautiful
renunciation that when he found Fanny working in the garden he felt a
sudden tenderness for her as the cause of it. She looked up at him from
her pansy bed and laughed. "What are you looking so sentimental for, old
thing?"
3
Mrs. Levitt's affair settled, he could now give his whole time to the
serious business of the day.
He was exceedingly anxious to get it over. Nothing could be more
disturbing than Fanny's suggestion that the name of Sir John Corbett
might carry more weight with his Committee than his own. The Waddingtons
of Wyck had ancestry. Waddingtons had held Lower Wyck Manor for ten
generations, whereas Sir John Corbett's father had bought Underwoods and
rebuilt it somewhere in the 'seventies. On the other hand Sir John was
the largest and richest landowner in the place. He could buy up
Wyck--on--the--Hill to--morrow and thrive on the transaction. He
therefore represented the larger vested interest And as the whole
object of the League was the safeguarding of vested interests, in other
words, of liberty, that British liberty which is bound up with law and
order, with private property in general and landownership in particular;
as the principle of its very being was the preservation of precisely
such an institution as Sir John himself, the Committee of the Wyck
Branch of the League could hardly avoid inviting him to be its
president. There was no blinking the fact, and Fanny hadn't blinked it,
that Sir John was the proper person. Most of Fanny's suggestions had a
strong but unpleasant element of common sense.
But the more interest he took in the League, the more passionately he
flung himself into the business of its creation, the more abhorrent to
Mr. Waddington was the thought that the chief place in it, the
presidency, would pass over his head to Sir John.
His only hope was in Sir John's well-known indolence and
irresponsibility. Sir John was the exhausted reaction from the efforts
of a self-made grandfather and of a father spendthrift in energy; he had
had everything done for him ever since he was a baby, and consequently
was now unable or unwilling to do anything for himself or other people.
You couldn't see him taking an active part in the management of the
League, and Mr. Waddington couldn't see himself doing all the work and
handing over all the glory to Sir John. Still, between Mr. Waddington
and the glory there was only this supine figure of Sir John, and Sir
John once out of the running he could count without immodesty on the
unanimous vote of any committee he formed in Wyck.
It was possible that even a Sir John Corbett would not really carry it
over a Waddington of Wyck, but Mr. Waddington wasn't taking any risks.
What he had to do was to suggest the presidency to Sir John in such a
way that he would be certain to refuse it.
He had the good luck to find Sir John alone in his library at tea-time,
eating hot buttered toast.
There was hope for Mr. Waddington in Sir John's attitude, lying back and
nursing his little round stomach, hope in the hot, buttery gleam of his
cheeks, in his wide mouth, lazy under the jutting grey moustache, and in
the scrabbling of his little legs as he exerted himself to stand
upright.
"Well, Waddington, glad to see you."
He was in his chair again. With another prodigious effort he leaned
forward and rang for more tea and more toast.
"Did you walk?" said Sir John. His little round eyes expressed horror at
the possibility.
"No, I just ran over in my car."
"Drove yourself?"
"No. Too much effort of attention. I find it interferes with my
thinking."
"Interferes with everything," said Sir John. "'Spect you drove enough
during the war to last you for the rest of your life."
"Ah, Government service. A very different thing. That reminds me; I've
come to-day to consult you on a matter of public business."
"Business?" (He noted Sir John's uneasy pout.) "Better have some tea
first." Sir John took another piece of buttered toast.
If only Sir John would go on eating. Nothing like buttered toast for
sustaining that mood of voluptuous inertia.
When Mr. Waddington judged the moment propitious he began. "While I was
up in London I had the pleasure of lunching with Sir Maurice Gedge. He
wants me to start a branch of the National League of Liberty here."
"Liberty? Shouldn't have thought that was much in your line. Didn't
expect to see you waving the red flag, what? Why didn't you put him on
to our friend Grainger?"
"My dear Corbett, what are you thinking of? The object of the League is
to put down all that sort of thing--Socialism--Bolshevism--to rouse the
whole country and get it to stand solid for order and good government."
"H'm. Is it? Queer sort of title for a thing of that sort--League of
Liberty, what?"
Mr. Waddington raised a clenched fist. Already in spirit he was on his
platform. "Exactly the title that's needed. The people want liberty,
always have wanted it. We'll let 'em have it. True liberty. British
liberty. I tell you, Corbett, we're out against the tyranny of Labour
minorities. You and I and every man that's got any standing and any
influence, we've got to see to it that we don't have a revolution and
Communism and a Soviet Government here."
"Come, you don't think the Bolshies are as strong as all that, do you?"
Mr. Waddington brought his fist down on the arm of his chair. "I _know_
they are," he said. "And look here--if they get the upper hand, it's the
great capitalists, the great property holders, the great _land_owners
like you and me, Corbett, who'll be the first to suffer.... Why, we're
suffering as it is, here in Wyck, with just the little that fellow
Grainger can do. The time'll come, mark my words, when we shan't be able
to get a single labourer to work for us for a fair wage. They'll bleed
us white, Corbett, before they've done with us, if we don't make a
stand, and make it now.
"That's what the League's for, to set up a standard, something we can
point to and say: These are the principles we stand for. Something you
can rally the whole country round. We shall want your support--"
"I shall be very glad--anything I can do--"
Mr. Waddington was a little disturbed by this ready acquiescence.
"Mind you, it isn't going to end here, in Wyck. I shall start it in Wyck
first; then I shall take it straight to the big towns, Gloucester,
Cheltenham, Cirencester, Nailsworth, Stroud. We'll set 'em going till
we've got a branch in every town and every village in the county."
He thought: "That ought to settle him." He had created a vision of
intolerable activity.
"Bless me," said Sir John, "you've got your work cut out for you."
"Of course I shall have to get a local committee first. I can't take a
step like that without consulting you."
Sir John muttered something that sounded like "Very good of you, I'm
sure."
"No more than my duty to the League. Now, the point is, Sir Maurice was
anxious that _I_ should be president of this local branch. It needs
somebody with energy and determination--the president's work, certainly,
will be cut out for him--and I feel very strongly, and I think that my
Committee will feel that _you_, Corbett, are the proper person."
"H'm--m."
"I didn't think I should be justified in going further without first
obtaining your consent."
"We-ell--"
Mr. Waddington's anxiety was almost unbearable. The programme had
evidently appealed to Sir John. Supposing, after all, he accepted?
"I wouldn't ask you to undertake anything so--so arduous, but that it'll
strengthen my hands with my Committee; in fact, I may get a much
stronger and more influential Committee if I can come to them, and tell
them beforehand that you have consented to be president."
"I don't mind being president," said Sir John, "if I haven't got to do
anything."
"I'm afraid--I'm _afraid_ we couldn't allow you to be a mere
figurehead."
"But presidents always are figureheads, aren't they?"
There was a bantering gleam in Sir John's eyes that irritated Mr.
Waddington. That was the worst of Corbett; you couldn't get him to take
a serious thing seriously.
"'T any rate," Sir John went on, "there's always some secretary johnnie
who runs round and does the work."
So that was Corbett's idea: to sit in his armchair and bag all the
prestige, while he, Waddington of Wyck, ran round and did the work.
"Not in this case. In these small local affairs you can't delegate
business. Everything depends on the personal activity of the president."
"The deuce it does. How do you mean?"
"I mean this. If Sir John Corbett asks for a subscription he gets it.
We've got to round up the whole county and all the townspeople and
villagers. It's no use shooting pamphlets at 'em from a motor-car. They
like being personally interviewed. If Sir John Corbett comes and talk to
them and tells them they must join, ten to one they will join.
"And there isn't any time to be lost if we want to get in first before
other places take it up. It'll mean pretty sharp work, day in and day
out, rounding them all up."
"Oh, Lord, Waddington, _don't_. I'm tired already with the bare idea of
it."
"Come, we can't have you tired, Corbett. Why, it won't be worse, it
won't be half as bad as a season's hunting. You're just the man for it.
Fit as fit."
"Not half as fit as I look, Waddington."
"There's another thing--the meetings. If the posters say Sir John
Corbett will address the meeting people'll come. If Sir John Corbett
speaks they'll listen."
"My dear fellow, that settles it. I can't speak for nuts. You _know_ I
can't. I can introduce a speaker and move a vote of thanks, and that's
about all I _can_ do. It's your show, not mine. _You_ ought to be
president, Waddington. You'll enjoy it and I shan't."
"I don't know at all about enjoying it. It'll be infernally hard work."
"Precisely."
"You don't mean, Corbett, that you won't come in with us? That you won't
come on the Committee?"
"I'll come on all right if I haven't got to speak, and if I haven't got
to do anything. I shan't be much good, but I could at least propose you
as president. You couldn't very well propose yourself."
"It's very good of you."
Mr. Waddington made his voice sound casual and indifferent, so that he
might appear to be entertaining the suggestion provisionally and under
protest. "There'll have to be one big meeting before the Committee's
formed or anything. If I let you off the presidency," he said playfully,
"will you take the chair?"
"For that one evening?"
"That one evening only."
"You'll do all the talking?"
"I shall have to."
"All right, my dear fellow. I daresay I can get my wife to come on your
committee, too. That'll help you to rope in the townspeople.... And now,
supposing we drop it and have a quiet smoke."
He roused himself to one more effort. "Of course, we'll send you a
subscription, both of us."
Mr. Waddington drove off from Underwoods in a state of pleasurable
elation. He had got what he wanted without appearing--without appearing
at all to be playing for it. Corbett had never spotted him.
There he was wrong. At that very moment Sir John was relating the
incident to Lady Corbett.
"And you could see all the time the fellow wanted it himself. I put him
in an awful funk, pretending I was going to take it."
All the same, he admitted very handsomely that the idea of the League
was "topping," and that Waddington was the man for it. And the
subscription that he and Lady Corbett sent was very handsome, too.
Unfortunately it obliged Mr. Waddington to contribute a slightly larger
sum, by way of maintaining his ascendancy.
4
On his way home he called at the Old Dower House in the Square to see
his mother. He had arranged to meet Fanny and Barbara Madden there and
drive them home.
The old lady was sitting in her chair, handsome, with dark eyes still
brilliant in her white Roman face, a small imperious face, yet soft,
soft in its network of fine grooves and pittings. An exquisite old lady
in a black satin gown and white embroidered shawl, with a white
Chantilly scarf binding rolled masses of white hair. She had been a Miss
Postlethwaite, of Medlicott.
"My dear boy--so you've got back?"
She turned to her son with a soft moan of joy, lifting up her hands to
hold his face as he stooped to kiss her.
"How well you look," she said. "Is that London or coming back to Fanny?"
"It's coming back to you."
"Ah, she hasn't spoilt you. You know how to say nice things to your old
mother."
She looked up at him, at his solemn face that simmered with excited
egoism. Barbara could see that he was playing--playing in his
ponderous, fatuous way, at being her young, her not more than
twenty-five years old son. He turned with a sudden, sportive, caracoling
movement, to find a chair for himself. He was sitting on it now, close
beside his mother, and she was holding one of his big, fleshy hands in
her fragile bird claws and patting it.
From her study of the ancestral portraits in the Manor dining-room
Barbara gathered that he owed to his mother the handsome Roman structure
that held up his face, after all, so proudly through its layers of
Waddington flesh. He had the Postlethwaite nose. The old lady looked at
her, gratified by the grave attention of her eyes.
"Miss Madden can't believe that a little woman like me could have such a
great big son," she said. "But, you see, he isn't big to me. He'll never
be any older than thirteen."
You could see it. If he wasn't really thirteen to her he wasn't a day
older than twenty-five; he was her young grown-up son whose caresses
flattered her.
"She spoils me, Miss Madden."
You could see that it pleased him to sit close to her knees, to have his
hand patted and be spoilt.
"Nonsense. Now tell me what happened at Underwoods. Is it to be John
Corbett or you?"
"Corbett says it's to be me."
"I'm glad he's had that much sense. Well--and now tell me all about this
League of yours."
He told her all about it, and she sat very quietly, listening, nodding
her proud old head in approval. He talked about it till it was time to
go. Then the old lady became agitated.
"My dear boy, you mustn't let Kimber drive you too fast down that hill.
Fanny, will you tell Kimber to be careful?"
Her face trembled with anxiety as she held it to him to be kissed. At
that moment he was her child, escaping from her, going out rashly into
the dangerous world.
"I like going to see Granny," said Fanny as Kimber tucked them up
together in the car. "She makes me feel young."
"You may very well feel it," said Mr. Waddington. "It's only my mother's
white hair, Miss Madden, that makes her look old."
"I thought," said Barbara, "she looked ever so much younger"--she was
going to say, "than she is"--"than most people's mothers."
"You will have noticed," Fanny said, "that my husband is younger than
most people."
Barbara noticed that he had drawn himself up with an offended air,
unnaturally straight. He didn't like it, this discussion about ages.
They were running out of the Square when Fanny remembered and cried out,
"Oh, stop him, Horatio. We must go back and see if Ralph's coming to
dinner."
But at the White Hart they were told that Mr. Bevan had "gone to Oxford
on his motor-bike" and was not expected to return before ten o'clock.
"Sorry, Barbara."
"I don't see why you should apologize to Miss Madden, my dear. I've no
doubt she can get on very well without him."
"She may want something rather more exciting than you and me,
sometimes."
"I'm quite happy," Barbara said.
"Of course you're happy. It isn't everybody who enjoys Ralph Bevan's
society. I daresay you're like me; you find him a great hindrance to
serious conversation."
"That's why _I_ enjoy him," Fanny said. "We'll ask him for to-morrow
night."
Barbara tucked her chin into the collar of her coat. The car was running
down Sheep Street into Lower Wyck. She stared out abstractedly at the
eastern valley, the delicate green cornfields and pink fallows, the
muffling of dim trees, all washed in the pale eastern blue, rolling out
and up to the blue ridge.
It made her happy to look at it. It made her happy to think of Ralph
Bevan coming to-morrow. If it had been to-night it would have been all
over in three hours. And something--she was not sure what, but felt that
it might be Mr. Waddington--something would have cut in to spoil the
happiness of it. But now she had it to think about, and her thoughts
were safe. "What are you thinking about, Barbara?"
"The view," said Barbara. "I want to sketch it."
V
1
Mr. Waddington was in his library, drawing up his prospectus while Fanny
and Barbara Madden looked on. At Fanny's suggestion (he owned
magnanimously that it was a good one) he had decided to "sail in," as
she called it, with the prospectus first, not only before he formed his
Committee, but before he held his big meeting. (They had fixed the date
of it for that day month, Saturday, June the twenty-first.)
"You come before them from the beginning," she said, "with something
fixed and definite that they can't go back on." And by signing the
prospectus, Horatio Bysshe Waddington, he identified it beyond all
contention with himself.
It was at this point that Barbara had blundered.
"Why," she had said, "should we go to all that bother and expense? Why
can't we send out the original prospectus?"
"My dear Barbara, the original prospectus isn't any good."
"Why isn't it?"
"Because it isn't Horatio's prospectus."
Barbara looked down and away from the dangerous light in Fanny's eyes.
"But it expresses his views, doesn't it?"
"That's no good when he wants to express them himself."
And so far from being any good, the original prospectus was a positive
hindrance to Mr. Waddington. It took all the wind out of his sails; it
took, as he justly complained, the very words out of his mouth and the
ideas out of his head; it got in his way and upset him at every turn.
Somehow or other he had got to stamp his personality upon this thing.
"It's no good," he said; "if they can't recognize it as a personal
appeal from ME." And here it was, stamped all over, and indelibly, with
the personalities of Sir Maurice Gedge and his London Committee. And he
couldn't depart radically from the lines they had laid down; there were
just so many things to be said, and Sir Maurice and his Committee had
contrived to say them all.
But, though the matter was given him, Mr. Waddington, before he actually
tackled his prospectus, had conceived himself as supplying his own fresh
and inimitable manner; the happy touch, the sudden, arresting turn. But
somehow it wasn't working out that way. Try as he would, he couldn't
get away from the turns and touches supplied by Sir Maurice Gedge.
"It would have been easy enough," he said, "to draw up the original
prospectus. I'd a thousand times rather do that than write one on the
top of it."
Fanny agreed. "It's got to _look_ different," she said, "without _being_
different."
"Couldn't we," said Barbara, "turn it upside down?"
"Upside down?" He stared at her with great owl's eyes, offended,
suspecting her this time of an outrageous levity.
"Yes. Really upside down. You see, the heads go in this order--Defence
of Private Property; Defence of Capital; Defence of Liberty; Defence of
Government; Defence of the Empire; Danger of Revolution, Communism and
Bolshevism; Every Man's Duty. Why not reverse them? Every Man's Duty;
Danger of Bolshevism, Communism and Revolution; Defence of the Empire;
Defence of Government; Defence of Liberty; Defence of Capital; Defence
of Private Property."
"That's an idea," said Fanny.
"Not at all a bad idea," said Mr. Waddington. "You might take down the
heads in that order."
Barbara took them down, and it was agreed that they presented a very
original appearance thus reversed; and, as Barbara pointed out, the one
order was every bit as logical as the other; and though Mr. Waddington
objected that he would have preferred to close on the note of Government
and Empire, he was open to the suggestion that, while this might appeal
more to the county, with the farmers and townspeople, capital and
private property would strike further home. And by the time he had
changed "combat the forces of disorder" to "take a stand against anarchy
and disruption," and "spirit of freedom in this country" to "British
genius for liberty," and "darkest hour in England's history" to
"blackest period in the history of England," he was persuaded that the
prospectus was now entirely and absolutely his own.
"But I think we must sound the note of hope to end up with. My own
message. How about 'We must remember that the darkest hour comes before
dawn'?"
"My dear Horatio, if you inflate yourself so over your prospectus,
you'll have no wind left when you come to speak. Be as wildly original
as you please, but _don't_ be wasteful and extravagant."
"All right, Fanny. I will reserve the dawn. Please make a note of that,
Miss Madden. Speech. 'Blackest'--or did I say 'darkest'?--'hour before
dawn.'"
"You'd better reserve all you can," said Fanny.
When Barbara had typed the prospectus, Mr. Waddington insisted on taking
it to Pyecraft himself. He wanted to insure its being printed without
delay, and to arrange for the posters and handbills; he also wanted to
see the impression it would make on Pyecraft and on the young lady in
Pyecraft's shop. He liked to think of the stir in the composing room
when it was handed in, and of the importance he was conferring on
Pyecraft.
"You haven't said what you think of the prospectus," said Fanny, as they
watched him go.
"I haven't said what I think of the League of Liberty."
"What _do_ you think of it?"
"I think it looks as if somebody was in an awful funk; and I don't see
that there's going to be much liberty about it."
"That," said Fanny, "is how it struck me. But it'll keep Horatio quiet
for the next six months."
"_Quiet_? And afterwards?"
"Oh, afterwards there'll be his book."
"I'd forgotten his book."
"That'll keep him quieter than anything else; if you can get him to
settle down to it."
2
That evening Barbara witnessed the reconciliation of Mr. Waddington and
Ralph Bevan. Mr. Waddington made a spectacle of it, standing, majestic
and immovable, by his hearth and holding out his hand long before Ralph
had got near enough to take it.
"Good evening, Ralph. Glad to see you here again."
"Good of you to ask me, sir."
Barbara thought he winced a little at the "sir." He had a distaste for
those forms of deference which implied his seniority. You could see he
didn't like Ralph. His voice was genial, but there was no light in his
bulging stare; the heavy lines of his face never lifted. She wondered:
Was it Ralph's brilliant youth that had offended him, reminding him,
even when he refused to recognize his fascination? For you could see
that he did refuse, that he regarded Ralph Bevan as an inferior,
insignificant personality. Barbara had to revise her theory. He wasn't
jealous of him. It would never occur to him that Fanny, or Barbara for
that matter, could find Ralph interesting. Nothing could disturb for a
moment his immense satisfaction with himself. He conducted dinner with a
superb detachment, confining his attention to Fanny and Barbara, as if
he were pretending that Ralph wasn't there, until suddenly he heard
Fanny asking him if he knew anything about the National League of
Liberty and what he thought of it.
"Mr. Waddington doesn't want to know what I think of it."
"No, but we want to."
"My dear Fanny, any opinion, any honest opinion--"
"Oh, Ralph's opinion will be honest enough."
"Honest, I daresay," said Mr. Waddington.
"Well, if you really want to know, I think it's a pathological symptom."
"A what?" said Mr. Waddington, startled into a show of interest.
"Pathological symptom. It's all funk. Blue funk. True blue funk."
"That's what Barbara says."
The young man looked at Barbara as much as to say, "I knew I could trust
you to take the only intelligent view."
"It's run," he said, "by a few imbeciles, like Sir Maurice Gedge.
They're scared out of their lives of Bolshevism."
"Do you mean to say that Bolshevism isn't dangerous?"
"Not in this country."
"Perhaps, then, you'd like to see a Soviet Government in this country?"
"I didn't say so."
"But I understand that you uphold Bolshevism?"
"I don't uphold funk. But," said Ralph, "there's rather more in it than
that. It's being engineered. It's a deliberate, dishonest, and malicious
attempt to discredit Labour."
"Absurd," said Mr. Waddington. "You show that you are ignorant of the
very principles of the League."
If he recognized Ralph's youth, it was only to despise it as crude and
uninformed.
"It is--the--National--League--of Liberty."
"Well, that's about all the liberty there is in it--liberty to suppress
liberty."
"You may not know that I'm starting a branch of the League in Wyck."
"I'm sorry, sir. I did not know. Fanny, why did you lay that trap for
me?"
"Because I wanted your real opinion."
"Before you set up an opinion, you had better come to my meeting on the
twenty-first. Then perhaps you'll learn something about it."
Fanny changed the subject to Sir John Corbett's laziness.
"A man," said Mr. Waddington, "without any seriousness, any sense of
responsibility."
After coffee Mr. Waddington removed Fanny to the library to consult with
him about the formation of his Committee, leaving Barbara and Ralph
Bevan alone. Fanny waved her hand to them from the doorway, signalling
her blessing on their unrestrained communion.
"It's deplorable," said Ralph, "to see a woman of Fanny's intelligence
mixing herself up with a rotten scheme like that."
"Poor darling, she only does it to keep him quiet."
"Oh, yes, I admit there's every excuse for her."
They looked at each other and smiled. A smile of delicious and secret
understanding.
"Isn't he wonderful?" she said.
"I thought you'd like him.... I say, you know, I _must_ come to his
meeting. He'll be more wonderful than ever there. Can't you see him?"
"I can. It's almost _too_ much--to think that I should be allowed to
know him, to live in the same house with him, to have him turning
himself on by the hour together. What have I done to deserve it?"
"I see," he said, "you _have_ got it."
"Got what?"
"The taste for him. The genuine passion. I had it when I was here. I
couldn't have stood it if I hadn't."
"I know. You must have had it. You've got it now."
"And I don't suppose I've seen him anything like at his best. You'll get
more out of him than I did."
"Oh, do you think I shall?"
"Yes. He may rise to greater heights."
"You mean he may go to greater lengths?"
"Perhaps. I don't know. You'd have, of course, to stop his lengths,
which would he a pity. I think of him mostly in heights. There's no
reason why you shouldn't let him soar.... But I mustn't discuss him.
I've just eaten his dinner."
"No, we mustn't," Barbara agreed. "That's the worst of dinners."
"I say, though, can't we meet somewhere?"
"Where we _can?_"
"Yes. Where we can let ourselves rip? Couldn't we go for more walks
together?"
"I'm afraid there won't be time."
"There'll be loads of time. When he's off in his car 'rounding up the
county.'"
"When he's 'off,' I'm 'on' as Mrs. Waddington's companion."
"Fanny won't mind. She'll let you do anything you like. At any rate,
she'll let _me_ do anything _I_ like."
"Will you ask her?"
"Of course I shall."
So they settled it.
3
When Barbara said to herself that Mr. Waddington would spoil her evening
with Ralph Bevan, she had judged by the change that had come over the
house since the return of its master. You felt it first in the depressed
faces of the servants, of Partridge and Annie Trinder. A thoughtful
gloom had settled even on Kimber. Worse than all, Fanny Waddington had
left off humming. Barbara missed that spontaneous expression of her
happiness.
She thought: "What is it he does to them?" And yet it was clear that he
didn't do anything. They were simply crushed by the sheer mass and
weight of his egoism. He imposed on them somehow his incredible
consciousness of himself. He left an atmosphere of uneasiness. You felt
it when he wasn't there; even when Fanny had settled down in the
drawing-room with "Tono-Bungay" you felt her fear that at any minute the
door would open and Horatio would come in.
But Barbara wasn't depressed. She enjoyed the perpetual spectacle he
made. She enjoyed his very indifference to Ralph, his refusal to see
that he could command attention, his conviction of his own superior
fascination. She knew now what Ralph meant when he said it would be
unkind to spoil him for her. He was to burst on her without preparation
or description. She was to discover him first of all herself. First of
all. But she could see the time coming when her chief joy would be their
making him out, bit by bit, together. She even discerned a merry devil
in Fanny that amused itself at Horatio's expense; that was aware of
Barbara's amusement and condoned it. There were ultimate decencies that
prevented any open communion with Fanny. But beyond that refusal to
smile at Horatio after eating his dinner, she could see no decencies
restraining Ralph. She could count on him when her private delight
became intolerable and must be shared.
But there were obstacles to their intercourse. Mr. Waddington couldn't
very well start on what he called his "campaign" until he was armed with
his prospectus, and Pyecraft took more than a week to print it. And
while she sat idle, thinking of her salary, the fiend of conscience
prompted Barbara to ask him for work. Wasn't there his book?
"My book? My Cotswold book?" He pretended he had forgotten all about it.
He waved it away. "The book is only a recreation, an amusement. Plenty
of time for that when I've got my League going. Still, I shall be glad
when I can settle down to it, again.".... He was considering it now with
reminiscent affection.... "If it would amuse you to look at it--"
He began a fussy search in his bureau.
"Ah, here we are!"
He unearthed two piles of manuscript, one typed, the other written, both
scored with erasures, with almost illegible corrections and insertions.
"It's in a terrible mess," he said.
She saw what her work would be: to cut a way through the jungle, to make
clearings.
"If I were to type it all over again, you'd have a clean copy to work on
when you were ready."
"If you _would_ be so good. It's that young rascal Ralph. He'd no
business to leave it in that state."
Her scruple came again to Barbara.
"Mr. Waddington, you'd take him on again for your secretary if he'd come
back?"
"He'd come back all right. Trust him."
"And you'd take him?"
"My dear young lady, why should I? I don't want _him_; I want _you_."
"And _I_ don't want to stand in his way."
"You needn't worry about that."
"I can't help worrying about it. You'd take him back if I wasn't here."
"You _are_ here."
"But if I weren't?"
"Come, come. You mustn't talk to me like that."
She went away and talked to Fanny.
"I can't bear doing him out of his job. If he'll come back--"
"My dear, you don't know Ralph. He'd die rather than come back. They've
made it impossible between them."
"Mr. Waddington says he'd take him back if I wasn't here."
"He wouldn't. He only thinks he would, because it makes him feel
magnanimous. He offered Ralph half a year's salary if he'd go at once.
And Ralph went at once and wouldn't touch the salary. That made him come
out top dog, and Horatio didn't like it. Not that he supposed he could
score off Ralph with money. He isn't vulgar."
No. He wasn't vulgar. But she wondered how he would camouflage it to
himself--that insult to his pride. And there was Ralph's pride that was
so fiery and so clean. Yet--
"Yet Mr. Bevan comes and dines," she said.
"Yes, he comes and dines. He'll always be my cousin, though he won't be
Horatio's secretary. He's got a very sweet nature and he keeps the
issues clear."
"But what will he _do_? He can't live on his sweet nature."
"Oh, he's got enough to live on, though not enough to--to do what he
wants on. But he'll get a job all right. You needn't bother your dear
little head about Ralph."
Fanny said to herself: "I'll tell him, then he'll adore her more than
ever. If only he adores her _enough_ he'll buck up and get something to
do."