John was recalled, of course, before the end of our furlough, which
knocked various things on the head; but that is the sort of thing one
learned to take with philosophy in any lengthened term of Her Majesty’s
service. Besides, there is usually sugar for the pill; and in this case
it was a Staff command bigger than anything we expected for at least
five years to come. The excitement of it when it was explained to her
gave Cecily a charming colour. She took a good deal of interest in the
General, her papa; I think she had an idea that his distinction would
alleviate the situation in India, however it might present itself. She
accepted that prospective situation calmly; it had been placed before
her all her life. There would always be a time when she should go and
live with papa and mamma in India, and so long as she was of an age to
receive the idea with rebel tears she was assured that papa and mamma
would give her a pony. The pony was no longer added to the prospect; it
was absorbed no doubt in the general list of attractions calculated
to reconcile a young lady to a parental roof with which she had no
practical acquaintance. At all events, when I feared the embarrassment
and dismay of a pathetic parting with darling grandmamma and the
aunties, and the sweet cat and the dear vicar and all the other objects
of affection, I found an agreeable unexpected philosophy.
I may add that while I anticipated such broken-hearted farewells I
was quite prepared to take them easily. Time, I imagined, had brought
philosophy to me also, equally agreeable and equally unexpected.
It was a Bombay ship, full of returning Anglo-Indians. I looked up and
down the long saloon tables with a sense of relief and of solace; I
was again among my own people. They belonged to Bengal and to Burma, to
Madras and to the Punjab, but they were all my people. I could pick out
a score that I knew in fact, and there were none that in imagination I
didn’t know. The look of wider seas and skies, the casual experienced
glance, the touch of irony and of tolerance, how well I knew it and how
well I liked it! Dear old England, sitting in our wake, seemed to hold
by comparison a great many soft, unsophisticated people, immensely
occupied about very particular trifles. How difficult it had been, all
the summer, to be interested! These of my long acquaintance belonged to
my country’s Executive, acute, alert, with the marks of travail on them.
Gladly I went in and out of the women’s cabins and listened to the argot
of the men; my own ruling, administering, soldiering little lot.
Cecily looked at them askance. To her the atmosphere was alien, and I
perceived that gently and privately she registered objections. She
cast a disapproving eye upon the wife of a Conservator of Forests, who
scanned with interest a distant funnel and laid a small wager that it
belonged to the Messageries Maritimes. She looked with a straightened
lip at the crisply stepping women who walked the deck in short and
rather shabby skirts with their hands in their jacket-pockets
talking transfers and promotions; and having got up at six to make
a water-colour sketch of the sunrise, she came to me in profound
indignation to say that she had met a man in his pyjamas; no doubt; poor
wretch, on his way to be shaved. I was unable to convince her he was not
expected to visit the barber in all his clothes.
At the end of the third day she told me that she wished these people
wouldn’t talk to her; she didn’t like them. I had turned in the hour we
left the Channel and had not left my berth since, so possibly I was not
in the most amiable mood to receive a douche of cold water. ‘I must try
to remember, dear,’ I said, ‘that you have been brought up altogether in
the society of pussies and vicars and elderly ladies, and of course you
miss them. But you must have a little patience. I shall be up tomorrow,
if this beastly sea continues to go down; and then we will try to find
somebody suitable to introduce to you.’
‘Thank you, mamma,’ said my daughter, without a ray of suspicion. Then
she added consideringly, ‘Aunt Emma and Aunt Alice do seem quite elderly
ladies beside you, and yet you are older than either of them aren’t you?
I wonder how that is.’
It was so innocent, so admirable, that I laughed at my own expense;
while Cecily, doing her hair, considered me gravely. ‘I wish you would
tell me why you laugh, mamma,’ quoth she; ‘you laugh so often.’
We had not to wait after all for my good offices of the next morning.
Cecily came down at ten o’clock that night quite happy and excited; she
had been talking to a bishop, such a dear bishop. The bishop had been
showing her his collection of photographs, and she had promised to play
the harmonium for him at the eleven-o’clock service in the morning.
‘Bless me!’ said I, ‘is it Sunday?’ It seemed she had got on very well
indeed with the bishop, who knew the married sister, at Tunbridge,
of her very greatest friend. Cecily herself did not know the married
sister, but that didn’t matter--it was a link. The bishop was charming.
‘Well, my love,’ said I--I was teaching myself to use these forms of
address for fear she would feel an unkind lack of them, but it was
difficult--‘I am glad that somebody from my part of the world has
impressed you favourably at last. I wish we had more bishops.’
‘Oh, but my bishop doesn’t belong to your part of the world,’ responded
my daughter sleepily. ‘He is travelling for his health.’
It was the most unexpected and delightful thing to be packed into one’s
chair next morning by Dacres Tottenham. As I emerged from the music
saloon after breakfast--Cecily had stayed below to look over her hymns
and consider with her bishop the possibility of an anthem--Dacres’s face
was the first I saw; it simply illuminated, for me, that portion of the
deck. I noticed with pleasure the quick toss of the cigar overboard as
he recognized and bore down upon me. We were immense friends; John liked
him too. He was one of those people who make a tremendous difference;
in all our three hundred passengers there could be no one like him,
certainly no one whom I could be more glad to see. We plunged at once
into immediate personal affairs, we would get at the heart of them
later. He gave his vivid word to everything he had seen and done;
we laughed and exclaimed and were silent in a concert of admirable
understanding. We were still unravelling, still demanding and explaining
when the ship’s bell began to ring for church, and almost simultaneously
Cecily advanced towards us. She had a proper Sunday hat on, with flowers
under the brim, and a church-going frock; she wore gloves and clasped a
prayer-book. Most of the women who filed past to the summons of the bell
were going down as they were, in cotton blouses and serge skirts, in
tweed caps or anything, as to a kind of family prayers. I knew exactly
how they would lean against the pillars of the saloon during the psalms.
This young lady would be little less than a rebuke to them. I surveyed
her approach; she positively walked as if it were Sunday.
‘My dear,’ I said, ‘how endimanchee you look! The bishop will be very
pleased with you. This gentleman is Mr. Tottenham, who administers
Her Majesty’s pleasure in parts of India about Allahabad. My daughter,
Dacres.’ She was certainly looking very fresh, and her calm grey eyes
had the repose in them that has never known itself to be disturbed about
anything. I wondered whether she bowed so distantly also because it was
Sunday, and then I remembered that Dacres was a young man, and that
the Farnham ladies had probably taught her that it was right to be very
distant with young men.
‘It is almost eleven, mamma.’
‘Yes, dear. I see you are going to church.’
‘Are you not coming, mamma?’
I was well wrapped up in an extremely comfortable corner. I had ‘La
Duchesse Bleue’ uncut in my lap, and an agreeable person to talk to. I
fear that in any case I should not been inclined to attend the service,
but there was something in my daughter’s intonation that made me
distinctly hostile to the idea. I am putting things down as they were,
extenuating nothing.
‘I think not, dear.’
‘I’ve turned up two such nice seats.’
‘Stay, Miss Farnham, and keep us in countenance,’ said Dacres, with
his charming smile. The smile displaced a look of discreet and amused
observation. Dacres had an eye always for a situation, and this one was
even newer to him than to me.
‘No, no. She must run away and not bully her mamma,’ I said. ‘When she
comes back we will see how much she remembers of the sermon;’ and as
the flat tinkle from the companion began to show signs of diminishing,
Cecily, with one grieved glance, hastened down.
‘You amazing lady!’ said Dacres. ‘A daughter--and such a tall daughter!
I somehow never--’
‘You knew we had one?’
‘There was theory of that kind, I remember, about ten years ago. Since
then--excuse me--I don’t think you’ve mentioned her.’
‘You talk as if she were a skeleton in the closet!’
‘You DIDN’T talk--as if she were.’
‘I think she was, in a way, poor child. But the resurrection day hasn’t
confounded me as I deserved. She’s a very good girl.’
‘If you had asked me to pick out your daughter--’
‘She would have been the last you would indicate! Quite so,’ I said.
‘She is like her father’s people. I can’t help that.’
‘I shouldn’t think you would if you could,’ Dacres remarked absently;
but the sea air, perhaps, enabled me to digest his thoughtlessness with
a smile.
‘No,’ I said, ‘I am just as well pleased. I think a resemblance to me
would confuse me, often.’
There was a trace of scrutiny in Dacres’s glance. ‘Don’t you find
yourself in sympathy with her?’ he asked.
‘My dear boy, I have seen her just twice in twenty-one years! You see,
I’ve always stuck to John.’
‘But between mother and daughter--I may be old-fashioned, but I had an
idea that there was an instinct that might be depended on.’
‘I am depending on it,’ I said, and let my eyes follow the little blue
waves that chased past the hand-rail. ‘We are making very good speed,
aren’t we? Thirty-five knots since last night at ten. Are you in the
sweep?’
‘I never bet on the way out--can’t afford it. Am I old-fashioned?’ he
insisted.
‘Probably. Men are very slow in changing their philosophy about women. I
fancy their idea of the maternal relation is firmest fixed of all.’
‘We see it a beatitude!’ he cried.
‘I know,’ I said wearily, ‘and you never modify the view.’
Dacres contemplated the portion of the deck that lay between us. His
eyes were discreetly lowered, but I saw embarrassment and speculation
and a hint of criticism in them.
‘Tell me more about it,’ said he.
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake don’t be sympathetic!’ I exclaimed. ‘Lend me a
little philosophy instead. There is nothing to tell. There she is and
there I am, in the most intimate relation in the world, constituted
when she is twenty-one and I am forty.’ Dacres started slightly at the
ominous word; so little do men realize that the women they like can ever
pass out of the constated years of attraction. ‘I find the young
lady very tolerable, very creditable, very nice. I find the relation
atrocious. There you have it. I would like to break the relation into
pieces,’ I went on recklessly, ‘and throw it into the sea. Such things
should be tempered to one. I should feel it much less if she occupied
another cabin, and would consent to call me Elizabeth or Jane. It is not
as if I had been her mother always. One grows fastidious at forty--new
intimacies are only possible then on a basis of temperament--’
I paused; it seemed to me that I was making excuses, and I had not the
least desire in the world to do that.
‘How awfully rough on the girl!’ said Dacres Tottenham.
‘That consideration has also occurred to me,’ I said candidly, ‘though I
have perhaps been even more struck by its converse.’
‘You had no earthly business to be her mother,’ said my friend, with
irritation.
I shrugged my shoulders--what would you have done?--and opened ‘La
Duchesse Bleue’.