Young Mr. Price worked quite hard (“rehrly, you know, kait sairys
effort!”) to bring his parent’s house up to the requirements of his
college friends. He was not likely to ask anyone to his home except for
political or enterprising reasons, because Millport at its richest did
not provide much entertainment for unsympathetic guests. Its merchant
princes fell short of imagination when it came to spending. They were as
unlike the Medici as could well be imagined. They not only failed to
encourage art, but they disliked it and fought against it. It took as
much pressure of public opinion from rival cities and continents to get
anything of value into the town as would have been required to turn
Lobengula into a St. Anthony. Sometimes when this or that architect,
painter, poet or musician was known to have built, decorated or filled
the super-halls of America and returned burdened with contracts and
delicious food, Millport used to stir uneasily in its contempt and
occasionally went so far as to despatch a clerk to find out if there
were any of the stuff left; because America’s habit of apt valuation is
only too well known in business circles. The fact that her people also
care passionately for their purchases might otherwise pass unnoticed.
Neither did Millport indulge itself much in luxuries such as sailing,
travelling or sport. The Prices kept a big motor which they used
carefully, often suffering the horrors of the local train or the crowded
tram rather than be unbusiness-like with petrol. Their clothes were a
source of pride rather than pleasure. Mrs. Price was timid in her choice
of garments and inclined to the perfect taste prescribed by the
lady-in-waiting at Messrs. Venison and Phipps. “Mantles this way,
Modom,” said the junior assistant in black charmeuse, and then Miss
Figginbottam, whom Mrs. Price “always reckoned on,” aged forty-five,
disillusioned and imperative, stepped forward and gave the casting vote
between the grey moire velours and the rather richer effect of the
petunia and chinchilla.
But young Mr. Price and his sisters now told the poor old lady that this
would not do. Her daughters took her to London and brought her back with
monkeys’ tails and Balkan embroideries hanging slantwise over her
innocent curves; they trotted her about in high-heeled shoes instead of
the soft kid boots that Bollingworth’s used to make so well to her
pattern. They did her hair in the fashion of Goya’s mistress and made
her drink cocktails and become a vegetarian, but forbade her to smoke,
which she did not understand. Her son taught her the names of the new
poets, but could never get six quotable lines of their poetry into her
head because there was “nothing to catch hold of” about it. Then they
began on Dad; and he took to it like a bird. There was no trouble with
him. He put himself entirely in the hands of his son’s tailor and then
was told he looked too smart. So he stood patiently and allowed his
trousers to be let down till they corkscrewed ever so rightly down his
short legs. He shaved off his beard and grew a very intellectual-looking
moustache; but his daughters told him he looked like a Labour Member and
made him shave it off. He smoked a pipe, which he did not care for, and
also learned when to smoke it; as, for instance, when his old friends of
the city had all got out their cigars. He was made to eat less and give
up carving; forbidden to press his guests to a second or third helping
and privately instructed to let the butler manage. He was persuaded to
buy some pedigree dogs for Mrs. Price, and a man was hired to lecture to
her once a week on their management and breeding as she wouldn’t learn
from books. The more they tore up the drawing-room the better the young
Prices were pleased, though it caused their mother secret agony. Besides
the names of poets and their works, the parents were made to learn the
phraseology of farming, lawn tennis, cricket, golf, sex-boredom and the
religions of the world.
It was during the time when these social gymnastics were being most
arduously practised by the Price family that they gave an evening party;
one might almost suppose for the purpose of taking their minds off
themselves. “Everybody” was there and a few representative nobodies,
just to show that Mr. Price, senior, was in touch with the political
movement of the day. “The University,” of course, were there, because
though it used not to be considered the thing in Millport to encourage
people who lived in poky houses and “talked superior” and “made fun,” it
is different now that the aristocracy have taken to asking even
theatrical people about and marrying professors and so on. You never
know in these days when your local goose won’t go away somewhere and
become a swan and get written up in the papers and go to Court or even
make money. Once bitten, twice shy. Mrs. Carpenter and Mrs. James Manley
and Mrs. Price had one or two secret grievances against certain
home-clad young wives whom they had avoided as “not quite——” and who had
gone back on them later by being positively run after by all sorts of
people; people you wouldn’t expect. How on earth is one to know? Jupiter
ought to label his protégés in some way from the start so that honest
people who can afford the best of everything may know where to look for
it.
“Would you believe it, Mrs. —er?” Mrs. Manley had been known to say, on
coming to something of the sort in the pages of her _Times_.
“No, and if you ask me, I think it’s absu-u-rd,” replied Mrs. Price in
her new accent.
“I used to think her decidedly peculiar,” put in Mrs. Carpenter, “but
there never was any question that he was immensely clever. I used to
talk to him by the hour.” Emma Gainsborough was reported to have said
that she hoped that when Millport put up a memorial to Mrs. Carpenter it
would be in the appropriate form of a weathercock.
The Prices’ house was about three times the size of the Fultons’. It was
of the same pattern as all the other houses in the neighbourhood; only
its square mass seemed to have plumped itself down with more aggressive
self-satisfaction than the others. On a close spring day it could almost
be heard breathing there on its bit of gravel, puffing and grunting,
“Now then; what dju looking at? Go away. This is Mr. Price’s house.
We’ve got four reception rooms, twelve bedrooms, double tennis court,
treble croquet lawn, copious vinery, garage and the usual offices.”
It must be admitted that the party was a good one to the extent that the
prodigality of limitless self-satisfaction can go. The Prices meant well
so far as they could see beyond their own affairs; and their unfortunate
haziness over the rest of humanity was probably not their fault. Some
day the school of “Hope-for-all” thought may enlarge its activities and
devise a sort of Borstal system for the spiritually deficient, and the
habits of the Prices will be investigated and probably traced to some
quite simple defect in the marrow; the juice of a dog’s kidney may
perhaps be injected and suitable exercises prescribed, and so on.
Dancing was going on in the larger of the two drawing-rooms, cards were
to be played in the other, an “imperial supper,” as someone reported,
was laid out in the dining-room and Father’s den was banked up all round
by about a hundred hats, in the middle of which an old retainer with a
face like the largest and richest muffin ever seen sat as if in a nest.
No one could have approved more thoroughly of the proceedings than he.
He had spent nearly all his life in waiting on the ladies and gentlemen
of Millport in the evenings and in the small hours. By day it is
supposed that he slept and murmured in his dreams, “Cold chicken or
galantine, Sir? Lobster salad or trifle, Miss? Champagne, Madam?” He was
now too rheumatic for this labour of love, so he sat among the hats and
greeted the familiar faces as they came in. A few of them, such as Mr.
Manley, spoke to him. “Ah, Higgins, so you’re here, are you?” they said.
“Wet night, isn’t it?” and then they passed into the bright light and
deafening chatter. Cyril came in to leave his coat and hat at the same
moment as Sir Richard was receiving his ticket. “Hullo, what brings you
here?” he said. “Didn’t know you came to these things.”
“I’ve laid a foundation stone this afternoon and looked in on my
doctor,” Sir Richard began, and he paused a moment to dust his sleeve
with a clothes brush.
“Pure coincidence, I hope?” Cyril asked anxiously.
“No, it’s a fact,” the old man assured him. “But I’ll tell Milly you
asked and what’s more I won’t tell her that Queen Anne sent that joke to
_Punch_. She has got the car here and I thought I might as well go back
in it. Young David is here somewhere with her. By-the-bye, Price wants
me to let Aldwych to him for the hunting next year. I may have to go
abroad, but I can’t make up my mind.” He spoke in a low voice, but
Higgins heard.
“I shouldn’t,” Cyril answered. “You never know what those sort of people
will do with a place.”
“How d’you mean?” asked Sir Richard.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Cyril replied, “but it is never the same
afterwards.” It was characteristic of him not to connect any mental
process with a globe of flesh encircled by hats, so he spoke in his
usual tone. “You never get the smell of money out afterwards, and it
demoralises tenants worse than the plague. And what would you do with
the stables?”
“He wants to buy the lot,” said Sir Richard.
“My dear fellow!” Cyril exclaimed, and then words failed him. “Here,
come along and let’s see where the bottle imp has his lair. That
foundation stone had your wits in it, I think.”
Mr. Joseph Price had been dancing with Evangeline and they were now
sitting in the winter garden. “You’re living at Drage now, aren’t you?”
he asked. “Rather a wretch’d sort of place, isn’t it? Not much to do
there, what?” Evangeline looked at him in surprise. “What sort of things
can’t you do?” she asked. “I should think you could do anything there is
to do as well there as anywhere; unless you want to shoot bears or ride
elephants.”
“I led the strainuous life there for a bit,” he replied. “I never was so
f’d up in my life.”
“How long were you there?” Evangeline asked.
“Oh, on and off f’ three years in charge ’f a batt’ry.”
“And where did your battery go to?” She was full of interest.
“Well, ’n point ’f fact it stayed where ’t was,” he replied carelessly.
“They’d had ’nough, you see, ’f sending out f’llers not prop’ly trained,
and the f’llers they sent to us then weren’t fit t’ handle a catapult.
H’wever, we pushed them off in th’ end.”
“And then where did you go?” she pursued.
“I’m ’fraid you’ll be raather shocked,” said Mr. Price, smiling, “but I
never got further than Switch’nham. Kait sairysly though, the Gov’nment
took over the Dad’s plant there and not a soul knew an’thing about it. I
had t’ run the whole blooming show by m’self with a handful of r’tired
M’thuselahs. Awf’l shaame, I thought, digging the pwur old things out at
their time ’f life. But now you have the whole sordid story ’f m’ life.
Not much of a f’ller, Price, is he? I know that’s what you’re thinking.”
“Well, I want to be quite fair,” said Evangeline. “Have you got anything
the matter with you?”
“No, sound ’s a bell,” said young Joseph.
“Well, but had you anything then?” she persisted. “Groggy arms or legs
or insides?”
“Lac’ration of right forearm ’n’ elbow, received when leaving th’
theatre in state ’f intoxication during ’n air raid,” he replied,
grinning at her, “also sustained loss ’f an eye and inj’ry to left
ankle.”
“Honest?” she asked earnestly. “Let me look at your eye.”
“’T’s glass, but there’s nothing green in it,” said Mr. Price, holding
down one eyelid, and she saw that what he said was true.
The music of the next dance began and he rose. “You dancing this?” he
asked, “or c’n I get you a partner? I’m ’fraid I’ve got to trot out Miss
Gainsborough. I shall keep her meuving for she caan’t talk.”
“I’ve lost my programme,” said Evangeline, “but I’m almost certain I’m
dancing with some kind of a Manley, with pink eyes—— Oh, I’m sorry, I
expect he is your cousin; everybody is here.”
“Yes, that’s Claud, I expect, but don’t mind me, please,” Mr. Price
replied. “His mother’s my aunt. But I don’t see him or my partner——” He
looked round and they waited a moment. “He’s great on the pwur, too,” he
said. “P’haps they’re hatching something t’gether. I don’t alt’gether
b’lieve in it m’self, d’you? Of course it’s awf’lly fine and all that
and I ’dmire it immensely, but I think it ’ncourages them t’ have
grievances—makes them dwell on their p’sition and so on, which after all
can’t be helped. Don’t you rather agree?”
“I don’t know,” said Evangeline. She was not attending much for she had
caught sight of her husband talking seriously to Mrs. Vachell and
wondered what it was about. She recalled her mind to what Mr. Price was
saying. “My sister thinks of nothing else,” she said, “but I am no good
at it; I am too lazy and selfish.” Emma Gainsborough appeared just then
and Mr. Price left Evangeline with an apology.
“Awf’lly hot, what?” he observed to Emma when they had been labouring
round the room a few minutes. Emma was not a good dancer.
“Hot what, what hot?” she mimicked him rather crossly. “You had better
stop and have an ice.”
“Forthcoming!” he observed as they stopped and he inspected her
curiously. “Forthcoming indeed! You’re magnif’cent actress, you know,
Miss Gainsborough. Why couldn’t you do thaat when I came to dinner with
you, ’nstead of making me think I was boring you all th’ time?”
Emma ignored his last sentence. “I am very sorry,” she said, “but I do
so hate parties. I get to know such a lot about the food before I see
it, and I know all the time that my father will criticise every dish
afterwards and mother will feel she has been a failure and say that she
must get another cook; and we never do. We have had the same one for
years and she gets steadily older and worse.”
“Have some coffee or ’n ice?” he suggested. “What c’n I get you? I say,
th’ band seems to be packing up—that means supper. Will you excuse me as
I merst look after one of the dowagers. Claud will take you in. Here,
Claud,” he beckoned to his cousin, “’ll you taek Miss Gainsborough?” and
he departed in haste. He found that his mother had allotted Susie to him
from among “the dowagers.” The parent Gainsboroughs, Sir Richard and his
wife, Cyril and the sister of the ex-Lord Mayor, filled a table with
their host, and Joseph Price and Susie sat together close by.
“A most charming young man, that Joseph Price,” Susie remarked in her
room that night. “I wish Evangeline had met him before dear Evan came to
the house so constantly. He is so fond of sport. I hear there is some
idea of his father taking Aldwych.”
“Mother Price’s diamonds would flash the glad news from tower to tower,”
said Cyril with more animosity than he generally showed to anyone. “Her
searchlights played over me at supper till anyone could have spotted the
lobster swimming in the champagne.” Susie took refuge in silence and
they went to bed. Evangeline and Evan were talking in their room at the
same time. “I hope you had supper,” she said, “I feel I don’t want any
more to eat for days. Whom did you get hold of?”
“Mrs. Vachell,” he answered. “She is a very charming woman; most
interesting and cultivated.”
“Evan, I shall never understand you,” she said with amusement. “You
disapprove of the most harmless people and Mrs. Vachell does more harm
than almost anyone at Drage.”
“Now that is so like a woman,” said Evan. “Always running down your own
sex if a man praises one of them.”
Evangeline winced under the injustice and her amusement died. “You will
give me a sharp tongue some day that I wasn’t born with,” she said
hotly. “What I meant was that Mrs. Vachell doesn’t believe in any of the
things you are always fighting about, she isn’t kind to people for she
doesn’t like them, and Mrs. Carpenter——”
“Don’t mention her,” said Evan. “She’s an awful woman.”
“Yes, I know you can’t stand her any more than you can stand Mrs.
Trotter who is a perfectly harmless, common little thing, as good as
gold. But Mrs. Carpenter is the solid prop of the whole edifice of what
I understand you want people to be and yet you hate her.”
“She’s a humbug,” said Evan, “that’s why.”
“I don’t think Mrs. Vachell believes in anything except brains,” said
Evangeline. “That’s her own affair,” he replied. “That is a matter
between her and her Maker. All I say is that she behaves like a lady and
talks intelligently, without that silly affectation of chaff that spoils
most women.”
“She doesn’t work nearly as hard as Mrs. Carpenter,” Evangeline laboured
on. She would always take up any cause at a moment’s notice and
sacrifice the approval she loved best in her whole-hearted defence.
“Well, keep your opinion and I’ll keep mine,” he said, “I never could
help being fond of you, Evangeline, but you do exasperate me sometimes
more than I can tell you. I never know whether you deliberately won’t
see what I am talking about or whether you can’t.”
“If that is all,” she said contentedly, “I don’t mind. I thought you
were angry with me.”
The Gainsboroughs were habitually early risers. At half-past nine they
generally parted for the day; the Principal to his principalling, his
wife to the kitchen, fortified by renewed hope of Annie being able to
cook something really nice to-day; Emma to the grimy back street where
she had her office. It had been late when they reached home after the
Prices’ party, and Mrs. Gainsborough’s inevitable question, “Would you
like anything, dear, before you go to bed?” was known to the other two
to offer no inducement to sitting up; no one can talk over a feast on
digestive biscuits and water. The three bedroom doors were shut within
ten minutes after the cab had rattled away down the street and not a
sound was heard in the big house except faint snoring from the top floor
and the ticking of the grandfather clock on the landing below. Emma got
into bed and heard the clock gather itself together with a hoarse rattle
and strike one; four church clocks answered it a minute later. The trams
had stopped and the road was so silent that a policeman’s footstep was
heard all up the street that lay behind the house, round the corner and
down past Emma’s window almost to the end of the Square. “Certainly not!
Certainly not!” Emma imagined the footsteps saying, and her heart warmed
to the image of faithful Robert, patient and decorous, with order as his
means of subsistence and disorder his only hope of pleasure in the
monotonous hours. “Certainly not. Certainly not.” The clocks chimed two
strokes and then one; half-past one. Robert was coming back. Cats began
to quarrel in the sooty flower beds of the Square; scuffled, spat,
shrieked and vanished. Emma thought harshly of them and gradually dozed.
The silence was broken by a sudden uproar in the street at the back,
near the corner of Robert’s beat, where rows of mean little houses led
down to one of the railway stations. There were loud sounds of
quarrelling, a woman’s voice and two or three men; a splintering of
glass, a scream, grumbling, threats and oaths and then—“Certainly not.
Certainly not.” Robert was coming back.
“’Ere, what’s this?” she imagined he would say when he reached the
corner, but all was silent before he had passed the Square, and any hope
of incident for that night faded away as the clock struck two and the
rain began to fall gently. Emma was wide awake now and lay for some time
thinking of her work with the hopelessness of a tired body and mind.
Robert probably never suffered in this way. If he got in the dumps he
took something for it, “an’ as for that lot up there,” he would have
said, pointing a thumb up the poverty-stricken scene of the quarrel,
“the sooner they was all turned out the better.” Mrs. Robert probably
understood more than he did about the discouraging habits of matter,
which collects again as soon as it is displaced. Teresa’s dreams were
busy with other plans for settling the difficulty. She wanted to build
up the whole mess into a work of art.
The Gainsboroughs had their deferred talk about the Prices’ party at
breakfast next morning.
“Joseph Price is a perfect ass,” said Emma. “And yet you can’t be as
angry with him as he makes you. I want first to slap him and then to
turn him right side up again and put him back in his chair.”
“No, I think he is really dreadful,” said her mother. “He always was a
tiresome little boy, but Cambridge seems to have done him more harm than
good. I can’t think where he gets that silly way of speaking. It is more
like Oxford if anything, but it isn’t that either. I wouldn’t libel the
poor things.”
“It is a sort of culture and climbing mixed,” said Emma. “Don’t you
remember when the Mortons came down here to open the Industries? Some of
them talked exactly like that, only it wasn’t so obvious because it must
have been longer since they did it on purpose. It is almost natural to
lots of people I am sure. But Joseph Price was very busy with it then.
‘Voilà que j’arrive!’ his whole face said.”
“It was a splendid supper,” said Mrs. Gainsborough, “I only wish I could
teach Annie to make quenelles like that. I think she must make ours too
soft. They always have that curious squashy tastelessness about them, or
else too much pepper.”
“My dear Beatrice, you’ll never do anything with that woman, so long as
you live,” said the Principal. He tossed a piece of kidney on his plate.
“Look at that! Leathery, dry—a kidney ought to be a dream of tenderness
and blood, just poised—poised, mind, so that the juices soak through—on
a piece of toast, neither hard nor soft, browned to a turn——”
“Oh, Father,” interrupted his daughter, “do please talk of something
else. You make me dribble with envy; I can’t bear it.”
“Poor darlings!” murmured the mother, compassionate almost to tears. “It
is hard on you. I really will speak to her and see if she wouldn’t care
to go to Mrs. Plumtre; I know they don’t care what they eat. I’m not
sure even that they’re not vegetarians.”
“Did you know Mrs. Price has become a vegetarian?” said Emma. “But not
the duck-made-of-peas kind; just lettuce and peaches and cheese; except
when she goes to London by herself, she told me. Oh dear, I must go but
I am so sleepy,” she yawned and got up.
“Did you sleep well, darling?” asked her mother anxiously.
“There was a row going on in Millard Street and it woke me up.”
“I’d have all those people turned out,” said the Principal. “When
there’s a revolution the houses round here won’t be fit to live in. And
there’s that Cranston next door, throwing out literature that is so much
rank poison by its stupidity. It is bad enough to harm even educated
idiots, for they take it all in, but at least they are not likely to
burn down——”
“If you please, Sir, Mr. Fisk wants to know if he can see you for a
moment. He is in the library,” said Annie at the door.
Emma escaped, and as she passed the open door of the library she saw a
young man with hair à la Kropotkin and immense spectacles whom she knew
to be the secretary of the students’ debating society and the son of
good Mr. Fisk, plumber and decorator in the neighbourhood.