Among the people who called on Susie from Mr. Price’s Paradise, the
county, was Lady Varens, David Varens’s stepmother. Sir Richard and
Cyril were admirably suited to one another because the old man was a
sportsman by nature and practice. He had had an adventurous youth and
“mercifully,” as Cyril said, “forgotten the details.” Then, on his
father’s death, he came back to Millshire and managed the estate with
the same thoroughness that had brought him success in less peaceful
enterprises. He married first a guest of one of his hunting neighbours.
She was lying unconscious on a bank, with her horse grazing beside her,
when he saw her for the first time; and when he had brought her round
and taken her home and called every other day to ask how she was it
seemed natural to regard her as his own property. She died when David
was nine, and Sir Richard married, two years afterwards, a lady whom he
thought to have been unjustly divorced from a drunken old peer who had
married her from the schoolroom.
She was good to David and kept her own counsel, so Millshire allowed her
to carry on the tradition of Varens hospitality; in fact there was an
extra piquancy about her parties owing to the opportunity they gave for
a little private skeleton hunting among intimate friends. Towards the
following Christmas, while Evangeline was staying with Evan’s sisters,
Sir Richard invited Cyril to take a day or two’s hunting with him and
stay over the week-end. Lady Varens hoped that Mrs. Fulton would come
too, and bring her daughter, to hunt or not, as she liked. Evangeline
being away, Teresa was torn from her heart’s delight, the alleys, the
rotting garrets and the dingy clubs where she groped all day for the
scattered remnant of what seemed to her the lost birthright of the
bottom class, their right to the fellowship of common desires and tastes
with the people who filled her mother’s drawing-room.
“What is the good of this eternal talk about all men being able to reach
any position they are fitted for, if, when you come across the most
lovable people in that class, you can hardly bear to sit with them for
five minutes because of smells and anxieties and habits that shut them
off like a cage that they didn’t make themselves and can’t get out of?”
she asked Emma Gainsborough.
“We are trying to get them out,” said Emma.
“I know,” Teresa answered, “but I don’t see how you can unless you kill
Mrs. Carpenter.” She and Mrs. Carpenter had perhaps the same end in view
when they worked among the dismal crowds that swarmed in the mud and
hideousness of the poorer quarters, but to the casual observer it looked
as though the “charity ladies,” as Strickland called them, were under
the impression that in their promotion of health and virtue they were
pressing something new on somebody who had never heard of it, while
Teresa hoped to restore a treasure that had been lost by past
generations.
Her own experience was showing her that the cage door gives way before
devotees who will suffer the violation of everything that makes life
sweet to them for the sake of what they hold dearer, and she also
learned the freemasonry of hard work; the point where she stuck was the
apparent impossibility of ever bridging the gulf between Mrs. Carpenter
and Mrs. Potter. How to wean Mrs. Carpenter from the idea that the
social order was all right because she was on the bright side of it, and
at the same time convince Mrs. Potter that it was not all wrong because
she was on the dark one? As one of Emma’s friends pointed out, twenty
centuries had passed since the only serious attempt had been made to
bring about an understanding between the ancestors of those two
irreconcilable ladies. The best spiritual engineering had been carried
on ever since along the lines then laid down; communications had been
devised and traffic of a sort carried on. But as soon as Mrs. Potter
advanced a little and caught sight of Mrs. Carpenter and went for her,
bald-headed, and when Mrs. Carpenter sailed along from her end of the
bridge and then sat down and sang to Mrs. Potter——. I must stop this
allegory or the reader will break down in tears of perplexity and
perhaps send the book straight back to the library; unless he has
himself lived for a time miserably wedged between the philanthropists
and the slums of a city.
To get on with the story. Teresa was, as I have said, torn from her
absorbing occupation and compelled to go with her father and mother to
be the Varens’ guest at Aldwych Court.
I believe there is no place so comfortable to stay in as an English
country house belonging to a good hostess. The luxury of dressing in any
part of her room without the penalty of gooseflesh; the deep, scented
bath and warm towel three feet square; the rich, dry fluffiness under
foot, and the cup of tea afterwards, brought by a maid who seemed to
have nothing else to do, banished all visions of Mrs. Potter to such a
remote corner of Teresa’s consciousness that when she did remember her
again the recollection had no more sting than a bad dream. She ate her
dinner, served by willing men and women who performed their duties like
priests of Isis, instead of, as dear Strickland did, giving her the
uneasy feeling that one course would have been quite enough if ladies
were not so greedy. She had observed sometimes to Evangeline that
Millport maids treated their mistresses as if they were parrots whose
dirty cages had to be cleaned out, and whom it “took up people’s time”
to feed.
David Varens is to play his part on the stage now, but there is to be no
sudden change in the music to waltz time, nor cries of the villagers,
“But here comes the Prince! Gay and dancing, bright and prancing, sing
we now our welcome,” nor will the light fade and moon children glide out
from under trees and sit upon their mushrooms while he sings, “Queen of
the dusk and lodestar of my dreams.” He comes on like Cyril’s
millionaire, “walking quite unaffectedly” among a number of ordinary
people. It was not until Teresa and her mother went away on Monday that
she began seriously to prefer him to Mrs. Potter. It may be difficult
for anyone who is unacquainted with the love of Beauty for the Beast to
understand what a disappointment it was to her to find that her heart
had betrayed her and was transferring its allegiance to a normal object.
It was something between childish terror of the sea and the remorse of a
pilgrim whose prayers have grown cold that followed on the joy his
presence gave her. “How happy I am,” she thought, and then, as a ghostly
voice demanded the truth, she added, “and I don’t care a hang what Mrs.
Potter is doing.”
There were other people staying in the house, but she did not notice
them and no more need we. Lady Varens and Susie talked and knitted and
drove, and Lady Varens liked Susie, because it was impossible not to on
a slight acquaintance, and Susie liked Lady Varens because there was
mystery about her and she had great charm, with her soft eyes that saw
much and told nothing, and her sensitive mouth whose utterances led to
conversation, but also told nothing. Susie admired in her the ideal
woman, and “we are so much alike” was what she chiefly thought of her.
Cyril enjoyed his hunting and sat up late in the smoking-room.
“I hope you will come and see us, Mr. Varens,” said Susie before they
left. “Your mother, I know, hardly ever leaves this lovely place, and no
more should I if it were mine. But I know you do come into town
sometimes. We can always give you lunch and it will be such a change to
hear about the beautiful country things in the middle of all our
ugliness; I never get used to it. I shall be so anxious to hear whether
that dear black cow gets all right again. Cows are such mothers, you
know; one feels so sorry for them having to be parted from those sweet
calves. You are going to manage the estate now, Sir Richard told me. How
delightful that will be, and what a saving of anxiety to him.”
“Yes,” said David, “I come in two or three times a week to the
University. Perhaps you would let me come one of those days, may I?
Thanks very much.”
He took Teresa through the woods that morning. She said less than usual,
and presently he noticed this. “You look worried,” he remarked. “Is
anything wrong?”
“I don’t know that you can call it wrong,” she answered, “but I feel
almost sick at the thought of going back to Emma Gainsborough and her
office. It doesn’t seem any use from here. I was bent on teaching music
to Albert Potter the day I came, and now I want to turn him into a calf
or a frog. What is the good of Emma going on sending different kinds of
splints for him and telling Mrs. Potter how to put them on? The money I
have eaten since I came here would have saved him from getting like that
a year ago.”
“Look here,” said David seriously, “I have been along that road while I
was at Oxford, and it leads nowhere, except into a sort of maze where
you lose yourself and die for want of a fresh argument. If I had ideas I
would come down to your place and do what you are doing for as long as
you wanted me, but I haven’t got any ideas and I have got fields—or
rather my father has, and can’t look after them as he used to—and I am
going to see what is to be got out of them.”
“I have neither ideas nor fields,” she said, “but I had an enormous
family when I left home last week, and now I have been happy and
forgotten them.”
“Did you forget them?” he asked.
“Yes, quite,” she answered sadly.
“Then you can’t really care for them enough to succeed,” he said. This
struck Teresa a blow. “Don’t you ever forget your farms and things?” she
asked, “not for a minute?”
“No, except when I’m asleep or hunting.”
“Hunting! my hunting is done down there,” she said illogically.
“Then where are your farms?”
“Oh, blow!” said Teresa.
“All right. Well, when will you come back here?”
“When I can’t bear any more committees of the charitable. I wish you
could see Mrs. Carpenter. Do you remember, she was at the Gainsboroughs
the night you were there?”
“Was she? I forget. What like?”
“Like an hour glass, in pink—with the sand quite solid.”
“I didn’t notice. I couldn’t make your Miss Gainsborough talk, that’s
all I know. Is there anything the matter with her?”
“Dear me, no,” she answered in surprise. “She’s very amusing when you
know her. Mr. Price got her into such a state of nerves. He did me, too.
Do you understand him?”
“No, but I think he is only trying to mix society; just what you want to
do with Mrs. Potter. If you encourage her you ought to encourage him.”
Teresa looked at him to see whether he was laughing, but they had come
to a stile and he was waiting politely for her to get over. Instead of
climbing she sat down on it and faced him. “It is absolutely different,”
she began to explain. “What I can’t bear is to find people, who would be
just like you if they had been sent to school and fed, unable to express
themselves and living in such horrible places that one can hardly attend
to what they are trying to say because of the awfulness. And it is
nonsense to say that they can always get out. All self-made men say
afterwards that they were newsboys, but there are thousands of darling
newsboys who haven’t got just the bit of extra that made Dick
Whittington; and, as my mother says, purring among her furs on a
platform, ‘they are often taught to be bad.’ She does talk such rot, and
yet often her platitudes wouldn’t be so telling if they were not made up
over a small piece of truth. There is nothing like that about that
dreadful man Price; is there now? Come, speak up.”
“He wants to get into a better set and explain himself,” said David.
“Nonsense,” answered Teresa, “not a better set at all; only a more
fashionable one.”
“Well, but you say that your set isn’t any better than Mrs. Potter’s,
only more fashionable. If that is so then Mrs. Potter is a snob like
Price. But if you claim some other advantage that you want Mrs. Potter
to share, why shouldn’t Price be sensitive about having been born
outside a set that claims to be better than his own?”
“I wish I could get someone who has as much ‘lip’ as you have to talk to
you,” said Teresa. “I can’t do it, but I know you are wrong.”
“Your Potter vocabulary is beyond me,” said David politely.