Anthony found himself wondering the next morning if he hadn’t put his
foot into it. The breakfast-table is a place where the emotions of last
night are apt to bring this metaphor home to one’s mind. Heroism looks
less heroic before ham and eggs, and the desire to save the world
flickers in front of bread and marmalade.
The breakfast-table at Merry Gardens was a particularly normal and
easy-going institution. There were things left hot on the side-board,
and you could be as late as you liked. Very often there was no other
company provided for you but sunbeams and the morning newspaper.
Anthony’s adventure of the night before did not precisely sink in its
significance, but he imperceptibly changed his attitude toward it.
Hadn’t he, after all, been rather a fool? He was a practical man, and he
had allowed himself to get into a situation which was, to say the least
of it, unpractical. Kitty had refused his offer, and he had refused
hers. What, then, was their alternative?
Anthony knew too much about his feelings to suppose that the momentary
shock given to them would do more than hold them back for a time. He was
the same, and so was Kitty. She was a different person from the Kitty he
had believed her to be, but she had the same powers of attraction. If
they drifted, they would drift in one direction—the direction he
intended to avoid. It was only if they parted that they could escape
both the horns of their dilemma. The reasonable thing, then, was to
part, as Kitty herself had pointed out to him.
Some strange, obscure, but very obstinate feeling in Anthony the night
before had refused to endorse his reason. He could not leave her looking
like a beaten child.
Daphne came in and poured out his tea. She explained that Jim had been
up hours trying to persuade a calf that its best interests lay in the
direction of the butcher. Jim was better than the cow-man at these
moments of persuasion, because he always knew which way an unwilling
animal is liable to turn. The cow-man went the other way with force, but
Jim went the same way with strategy, and calves, like the rest of
humanity, yield readily only to those who appear to be agreeing with
them.
“That brings us back to the old question,” said Anthony, tapping a
new-laid egg, “of which we are wisest to follow, reason or instinct?”
“It doesn’t bring Jim back to it,” Daphne replied, with a dimple;
“because he hasn’t any reason. He just feels things are so, and they are
so. I never knew a person who had fewer processes and more arrivals.”
“Then you think instincts are wiser than reasons, even when they
contradict common sense?” asked Anthony, curiously.
“Oh, common sense!” said Daphne, with contempt. “Who minds contradicting
common sense? I’m sure I don’t; it’s so crude! It sounds all right, and
then you poke it, and over it goes like a house of cards. Besides, when
you come down to it, it’s generally a way of saving one’s own corns.
When people say, ‘But do let us take a common-sense view of things,’
don’t they always mean, ‘Don’t, for heaven’s sake! let me in for
anything’?”
Anthony laughed.
“My profession is founded on common sense,” he explained. “Half of good
doctoring is looking at facts straight and acting on them sensibly.
People who get ill can’t do this, and doctors drag them back into it and
hold them there till nature reinforces them. I can’t dismiss common
sense so lightly. Besides, you let in other people as well as yourself
if you act against reason. What becomes of bad instincts?”
“Oh, I don’t call them instincts,” said Daphne. “Those are desires, they
come out of the top of your mind, you know, and pretend to be instincts,
because they’re strong, and you want to do them. When I say an instinct,
I mean the whole of you, back of your mind, that set feeling like a good
chocolate shape. You feel, ‘I’ve _got_ to do it,’ not, ‘I _want_ to do
it.’ Something bigger than you is getting at you or coming out through
you, I don’t know which.”
“I don’t believe in things bigger than myself interfering with my will,”
said Anthony. “I have not experienced it.” Then he stopped suddenly.
After all, he _had_ experienced it, had been himself subject in dreadful
hours to strange reinforcements. He had known and done things that he
could not account for; they had not come from himself. Perhaps they came
from his unconscious self; but he disliked this phrase, which he thought
fanciful.
“That’s a duck’s egg,” observed Daphne, swiftly. “They taste a little
stronger, but they’re just as nice. If it’s _there_, the something I
mean, it doesn’t matter whether you believe in it or not. I mean _it_
won’t mind. It’s too large to mind; it just acts.”
“You seem to know a good deal about _it_” said Anthony, accepting the
duck’s egg. “Newly married people make extraordinary discoveries. First
they discover themselves. This, I believe, takes the honeymoon, and is
not interesting to observers; then they discover the universe; after
that they settle down and proceed to take both to pieces at their
leisure. You seem to be in the middle phase, the most illuminating to
the uninitiated. May I ask if you know how your glorified instinct is
liable to act, and what it feels like?”
“If it’s your instinct,” said Daphne, with unshaken confidence,
“_you’ll_ know that. I don’t know anything about your instinct, you see;
I only know my own. It’s just telling me I haven’t ordered the dinner,
and the butcher may come any minute, so I must be quick about it. You’ll
be in to-night, won’t you?”
Anthony hesitated.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Better not count on me.”
Daphne, too, paused for a moment. Then she said tentatively:
“Mother comes next week, Tony.”
Anthony met her eyes steadily.
“Yes, Daphne,” he answered.
“It’ll be rather awkward,” Daphne began a little uncomfortably, “about
Kitty, won’t it? Mother’s sure to guess there’s somebody, and wonder why
we don’t have her here. Do you really _want_ me to have Kitty here,
Tony?”
Anthony got up, and opened the door for her.
“No,” he said quietly, “I don’t.”
Daphne drew a quick breath as if something had hurt her. She knew that
yesterday Anthony had wanted Kitty to come to the house.
Their eyes held each other for a long moment, but neither of them said
anything. The Ardens were a frank, but uncommunicative, family. They
expressed what they thought, but they kept their private affairs to
themselves. When they most wanted to show sympathy they got out of one
another’s way.
Daphne left him alone now. She went to deal with the cook, and Anthony
resettled to his breakfast.
He had decided what to do. His conversation with Daphne had not altered
him,—conversations with women never did,—it had merely helped to
crystallize his intention. He would go and tell Kitty their scheme
wouldn’t work:
It wouldn’t be particularly easy to tell her after having persuaded her
the night before to try it, but it would be less easy still for Kitty if
they tried it and it failed. If they had got to part, they could at
least part decently and as friends.
This was where Anthony made his first mistake: lovers do not part as
friends. If they meet in order to part, they very seldom succeed in
parting at all, and when they do succeed, it is with bitterness and
without the sanity of reasonable forms.
When Anthony arrived at the farm he found Mr. Costrelle in possession.
He had motored over from a friend’s house in the course of the morning.
“I always arrive an hour before dinner and leave an hour after
breakfast,” Mr. Costrelle informed Anthony. “I consider it one of the
chief rules of civilization. Nobody wants to see you trailing about his
house all day with a train in your eye. I am sure you agree with me. I
arrived here at this unearthly hour only because Kitty has persuaded me
to look on this as a home; otherwise I would have motored to and fro
from duck pond to duck pond till seven o’clock in the evening, poisoning
myself with bad sherry and cold beef rolled in sawdust, which is what
English inns provide you with in the place of food. The country is a
beastly place for putting in time. ‘The kindly fruits of the earth’ are
very much overrated. I never enjoy them, and there are no rational
amusements. I don’t know how you can stand it.”
Kitty laughed.
“Tony hasn’t found any difficulty so far,” she remarked, “but of course
he doesn’t happen to be my father. You’ve just come in time,” she added
to Anthony. “Papa has brought me an invitation from an aunt to stay two
or three weeks with her in London—an invitation that’s been about five
years en route, and I’m going to show him what rags I have to wear. You
can help him decide if they’ll do.”
“You’d better go to Paris,” observed Mr. Costrelle, “and buy new ones.
It won’t take any time and will save a lot of worry.”
“I can’t afford it,” said Kitty, briefly.
Mr. Costrelle looked from Kitty to Anthony and from Anthony to Kitty. He
drew out a long and extraordinarily good cigar. It was as fragrant as
very good tea.
“Well,” he said in his slow, cool voice, in which suggestion always told
with the directness of a carefully chosen chemical, “I should have
thought you could have afforded it—somehow or other.”
If Mr. Costrelle had said, “Isn’t this man here to foot your bills?” he
could not have made his meaning clearer.
Kitty flushed suddenly to the roots of her hair; the tears showed for an
instant in her eyes. It was the only time in her life that she appeared
obviously disconcerted. She spoke quickly.
“Oh, one can always raise money, of course—” she agreed, with a little
shaken laugh. “I’m not totally at the end of my resources, Papa. Still,
I think what I have will do. You two sit up here in the tower as a
council of war, and I’ll try them before you one by one. It’ll be a
mannikin show without music.”
Mr. Costrelle nodded and prepared to make himself comfortable.
He had spent between fifty and sixty years in the pursuit of comfort,
and he could always effect the process better for himself than the most
careful attendant could accomplish for him.
He shut the tower windows because he disliked drafts, then he chose the
easiest position on the divan with consideration, placed himself with
his back to the light—he disliked glare—drew a footstool in front of
him, and proceeded to enjoy his cigar.
He did not ask Anthony if he smoked; he did not care if Anthony smoked
or not. He considered his cigars far too good for young men.
Anthony watched him with an antagonism that was queerly blended with
amusement. It was impossible not to be amused by a person whose
absorption in himself was so unruffled. Mr. Costrelle was tall, lean,
and pale. He had a long, well-finished face with remarkably blue eyes;
they shone out of the hollows of his white cheeks like forget-me-nots by
the side of a pool.
His hair was gray, thick, and very well brushed. He went to the best
tailor in London and had an excellent set of the shoulders. He carried
the marks of his perpetual dissipation lightly. They were plain to
Anthony’s trained and scrutinizing eyes, but they would have escaped the
ordinary observer.
Mr. Costrelle had done several generous actions in his life; he had not
yet become incapable of doing them, but he had never continuously put
himself out for any one. He did not care what people thought of him, and
he said whatever came into his head. When he wanted to do a thing he did
it, whatever consequences might follow. He considered it extremely
bourgeois to be checked by consequences; and though he had a very shrewd
idea of the feelings of others, as people who live for sensation usually
have, he never for a moment stopped to consider them. He asked no
quarter and he gave none. He did not believe in any one else’s motives.
If they were different from his own, he thought them morbid or
sentimental.
Mr. Costrelle believed that some people were foolish about getting what
they wanted and other people were intelligent, but he did not think
there was any other difference worth mentioning. He said to Kitty:
“I shall take trouble to show you the ropes, but I sha’n’t take any
further trouble about you. A person who knows the ropes and doesn’t
follow them properly is a fool, and a fool’s a person that every one
else had better avoid.”
Mr. Costrelle observed Anthony without looking at him. Anthony was a
good-looking man of his own class who had had a rough time of it and had
succeeded in holding himself together. Mr. Costrelle had already decided
that it was high time Kitty settled down and married. He came down on
purpose to tell her so, and he decided that Anthony would do as well as
any one else.
Anthony did not look a particularly easy man to fool, but his having had
a bad time would probably make him easier, and Mr. Costrelle did justice
to his daughter; he considered that Kitty, if she kept her head, could
fool any man.
This decision did not make Mr. Costrelle politer to Anthony; it merely
made him observant.
“You interested in women’s clothes?” he remarked after a pause.
“No,” said Anthony. “I suppose I have a general idea of whether they
suit them or not.”
“It’s a great waste of time having general ideas about clothes,” said
Mr. Costrelle, dispassionately. “It’s a thing men ought to study
carefully in order to help the women. Women have very little sense about
what they wear; they put themselves into the hands of dressmakers,
ignorant and interested people, most of ’em, and get ruined. Of course
my girl’s different. I taught Kitty myself. She consults the one or two
real designers there are in Paris, but she has her own ideas. She is the
only perfectly dressed woman I know. You never see her in a motor
looking as if she were going to a Sunday-school treat, or off to church
as if she were leading a ballet. She considers the occasion, what hat’ll
carry in a high wind, what in general suits her at different times of
the day, and she gets the right shade and the right materials and puts
’em on properly.
“Cut is the main point. A woman should know her own figure as a captain
knows his ship. If she goes wrong about line, give her up as a bad job;
take her to the nearest department shop and let her run amuck among
ready-made clothes. Nothing’ll save her. The French haven’t anything
like our natural amount of beauty, but you hardly ever see a plain woman
in France. Women have too much sense to be plain over there. They know
how to avoid it; besides, their men help them. Look at a German _Frau_!
By Jove! she is the indictment of the whole race. It’s a satisfaction to
me to think that the Germans have the women they deserve.
“Ah, here’s Kitty, black and white, with a touch of scarlet. Those
stripes are too broad for your height, Kitty; they make you look like a
young zebra. You want to have the stripes halved. Get it copied with a
smaller stripe, and, I should say, a quarter of an inch shorter. You can
stand it, and the scarlet’ll tell more; otherwise it’ll do very nicely.”
The dresses followed one another in a bewildering flood; they seemed to
Anthony interminable and extravagant, and yet he found himself enchanted
by them. In each he was confronted by a new Kitty. It was like seeing a
succession of Lady Hamilton’s portraits: you could not fix your mind on
which was loveliest.
Kitty was not so beautiful as the immortal Emma, but she had more
spirit. She had the quality which makes a man sit up. No man in Kitty’s
presence ever forgot to make the best of himself; it seemed worth while.
Mr. Costrelle smoked on steadily, with watchful eyes. Nothing escaped
his criticism. He examined the smallest detail, and he and Kitty
discussed the points of difference inexhaustibly. They listened
indulgently to Anthony when he spoke, but they plainly regarded him as
one of the uninitiated.
Their relationship surprised Anthony, who had been brought up in a
family where the feeling of kinship was strong, it was at once so
cordial and so casual. Kitty and her father might have been congenial
strangers meeting for the first time in a railway-carriage. They
obviously got on well together, but there seemed no particular reason
why they should ever meet again.
Kitty reappeared for the last time in the yellow chiffon dress she had
worn the night before. It was intolerable to Anthony that she should
wear it now. Kitty took it as a matter of course; she even sat in the
small Sheraton chair, with her head thrown back, and glanced across the
room with unmoved eyes at her father.
“Do you think I’m all right in this particular primrose shade?” she
asked anxiously. “I meant it to have less color in it, but they always
coarsen their shades over here.”
“It’ll be better at night,” agreed her father. “If you want to tone it
down a bit, have the scarf the same color as the jade ornament.”
“Are you sitting straight?” asked Anthony, suddenly.
Kitty stared at him.
“What a funny question!” she said a little irritably. “Yes, I suppose I
am.”
“That left shoulder doesn’t look the same as the right,” said Anthony;
“that’s all.”
Mr. Costrelle looked amazed.
“She never had a curvature,” he said. “I hope you haven’t done anything
so stupid, my dear girl, as to develop one at your age.”
“Of course I haven’t,” said Kitty, impatiently. “Tony’s a doctor; he’s
fussy. All doctors are fussy. They like to make discoveries; and as the
only discovery they can make is something wrong with you, they’re very
pessimistic company. What a pity you can’t discover I’m all right, Tony!
It would be much nicer for papa, and have the added merit, for the
scientific mind, of being accurate.”
Anthony did not answer her; he was looking intently at her shoulder.
There was something wrong about it. Kitty got up with a little impatient
swing of her skirts and left the room.
“I didn’t know you were a doctor,” observed Mr. Costrelle, thoughtfully.
“I had an idea your people owned Pannell, that jolly old place in
Sussex, under the downs.”
“They do,” said Anthony, shortly.
“You’re the oldest son living, aren’t you?” pursued Mr. Costrelle,
ignoring Anthony’s annoyance.
“Yes,” said Anthony.
“It’s a strange fad,” said Mr. Costrelle, contemplatively. “Personally I
think medical science is frightfully overrated. Things that don’t get
right of themselves, stay wrong; that’s my experience. Besides, what you
want of a doctor is not to stop your doing things, which is, I take it,
what you prescribe half the time, but to show you how you can go on
doing them with impunity. But you don’t. Nobody gives impunity—there’s
no such thing—and when you come to think of it, it’s the only thing you
want. Who cares to be well if they can’t do as they like, and who cares
to do what they like if they can’t be well?”
Anthony ignored this conundrum. He was still thinking hard.
“I ought to have noticed that before,” he said under his breath,
“unless, of course, she has her clothes bunched up there. That would
account for it.”
“Her _clothes_ bunched up!” said Mr. Costrelle with scorn. “My dear
young man, is that the kind of dress which has clothes bunched up under
it, and is Kitty, poor innocent child—innocent I mean of being
idiotic—the kind of person not to put on her clothes properly?”
Kitty came back, and the subject dropped.
“I don’t see how you ever succeeded in getting Aunt Mallard to invite me
to the house again,” said Kitty, “considering my fearful reputation. Do
you, Tony? You must have been awfully clever, Papa.”
“No,” said Mr. Costrelle, complacently, “I was not, in this instance,
clever; I was merely good. Very few women who have passed their first
youth are obdurate to a repentant sinner of the opposite sex. Your aunt
was no exception. I sacrificed myself for you. I simply said: ‘My dear
Augusta, can you wonder that the child has tales told about her when you
consider my career? I regret it deeply, but it has been I hesitate to
tell you how shocking. I dare say if I had done as you advised earlier,
and had a thoroughly good companion for her, people might have held
their tongues; but you know what country tongues are, unsophisticated
and anxious to believe the worst. And I admit I disliked the idea of a
respectable middle-aged lady in my house—I mean in Kitty’s house. They
never have been in mine as far as I can remember. Either I should have
shocked them, and they would have gone; or else I wouldn’t have shocked
them, and then they wouldn’t have been of much use if they had stayed.
You see my point?’
“Your aunt said she did, and that it was deplorable; she added: ‘As all
my girls are married, I don’t mind taking Kitty for a fortnight. But
mind, no fast married men are to come to the house.’
“Your aunt is so intelligent and, for a deeply religious woman, so on
the spot.
“I took the liberty of answering for you, Kitty; but I said I supposed
it didn’t matter how fast the unmarried men were. And your aunt most
tactfully remarked that it didn’t do to be too old-fashioned.”
“I dare say I shall have some fun,” said Kitty, thoughtfully. “I hope
you said I must have a latch-key.”
Mr. Costrelle shook his head.
“I did my best,” he explained. “I said you were always very considerate
about the servants not having late hours, and that if you happened to be
out with me—to a theater or a lecture, you know—it might be as well
for her to lend you an extra key. She said lectures were never late. It
was the best I could do. I dare say you’ll manage it better.”
“Dear old thing!” said Kitty, appreciatively, “how well you get on with
Aunt Augusta! It seems almost a pity you don’t see more of her.”
“It’s not at all a pity,” said Mr. Costrelle, firmly. “She takes away my
appetite for lunch, to which she always invites me. Women with drab
complexions should never wear fawn color; but they always do.”
“I’ll be one of the unmarried ones,” said Anthony, suddenly. “I suppose
I can call even if I am not fast?”
“Will you?” said Kitty, carelessly.
She took it as a matter of course, and yet an hour ago it had not been a
matter of course.
Anthony looked away from Kitty. He was aware that he had never cared so
little for her as he did at the moment of his decision.
She and her father struck him as intolerably light. He could not
understand their rapacity for pleasure. Neither of them had any fixed
goal beyond their fugitive desires.
All their wits, all their ingenuities, were bent in attaining temporary
gratifications. Neither of them had any roots or appeared to have any
compunction.
Last night Kitty had seemed to be really sorry; she had spoken with what
sounded like conviction. Where was the conviction now? She had wanted
Anthony as a stand-by, if as nothing else. To-day she was apparently
indifferent whether he was there or not.
It would be easy to leave her now, and yet Anthony knew that what held
him to her was the very fact of her incorrigible lightness. It had
flashed into his mind that she was threatened—threatened as a butterfly
is threatened by the brutal onslaught of a sudden storm. He could feel
the pitiless cold of it against her colored wings. There was no shelter
for her in Mr. Costrelle, and Kitty had herself broken down all other
shelters.
Anthony could have left Kitty if he had been certain of the sunshine for
her. There might, after all, be nothing wrong; but Anthony was not
certain of the sunshine.