Just before Christmas, Teresa met Lady Varens in a shop. “My dear, I am
so glad to see you,” said the soft voice that reminded her of Aldwych
and her first happiness there. “Come and have tea with me somewhere. I
have a great deal to tell you.” Teresa’s heart bounded and bumped. It
seemed a year before the girl behind the counter located her particular
little wooden ball from among the dozens that were bowling along the
wire above her head, carrying little scraps of paper and small change to
a stupid public who did not know David. She followed Lady Varens through
the crowd to a shop on the other side of the street, where they sat down
at a table shut away in a recess off the main room. “What would you
like?” Lady Varens asked; “tea and crumpets?”
“Oh yes, anything, awfully,” said Teresa, hardly able to hide her
impatience.
“David is coming back next week, did you know?” said Lady Varens. “Has
he written to you?”
“No,” said Teresa; “I haven’t heard from him for a year.” Tears came
into her eyes, but she flattered herself that they were unobserved.
“We are both going to stay with Mr. Manley,” Lady Varens went on. “I had
just let my villa and was going to friends in Rome when David’s letter
came; but I didn’t want to lose any time by bringing him round all that
way so I came here and Mr. Manley wants us both to go to him. We must
settle finally with the Prices whether we take Aldwych back next year or
whether I go out with David to the Argentine. He has a charming house
there.”
“Oh,” said Teresa, “and which do you think you will do?” Her heart
seemed to have stood still for a year, waiting for the answer, before it
came.
“I don’t know at all, but old Bessie, David’s nurse, who writes to me
sometimes from the village, says they are all longing for him to come
back. The Prices seem to have put everybody’s back up. None of the
outside people will stay if he buys the place and he makes all sorts of
mischief with the bailiff and the farmers, imagining he is being robbed
of sixpence somewhere or other. He says that if he buys it he is going
to get an American expert over to run it all on some new system by which
everything is organised and checked automatically, and the output, as
they call it, of every grain and cow and rabbit and man and boy on the
place is ascertained, and if it doesn’t work out at the maximum the
animal is destroyed and the man is sacked.”
“Oh, David must come back,” said Teresa. “It sounds too horrible.”
“Very well then, dear, tell him so,” said Lady Varens, drinking her tea
peacefully without a hint of intention in her voice.
“I can’t think why the man in the Bible was told to give all his money
to the poor if it wasn’t the right thing to do,” said Teresa. She put
her chin on her hands and puckered her brow over some inner problem.
“I think it was probably suggested more for his benefit than for that of
the poor,” said Lady Varens. “It is the giving that matters much more
than who gets the stuff.”
“Do you really think so?” said Teresa.
“Yes, personally I do. People can only be governed by the qualities that
are in them, and a state can’t make them equal, because it is made up
itself of inequalities. It can never be made into an automatic machine;
it is alive—made of live things. I can’t understand how even decent
socialists can expect it to act as if it were a machine. Of course one
knows what bad communists are after. They are just criminal tyrants who
want to be beasts in control instead of controlled beasts. But the good
ones make me desperate. It is so impossible to imagine anything but
disaster coming from their innocent idiocy. They seem to go on blindly
hoping that human intelligence can devise a scheme that is proof against
human intelligence. They are dear things but I do wish they would take
their hobby horses to some place where the bad boys couldn’t harness
them to the cart that will land us all in the ditch. They think they can
out-theorise history and all forms of religion.”
Two little tears rolled at last down Teresa’s cheeks and were lost in
the cup with which she tried in vain to hide them. Their salt taste
symbolised to her the bitterness of her failure.
“Oh, bother it!” she said; “I give up here and now trying to do any
good. It is no earthly use.”
“David said that when he left Oxford,” said Lady Varens, lighting a
cigarette to avoid Teresa’s eye. “But in a way he works harder than ever
at it now.”
“Does he?” Teresa answered with elaborate indifference.
“Yes; won’t you come to dinner with us while we are with Mr. Manley? He
said I was to ask anyone I liked and he loves you.”
“Yes, I would like to.”
“Very well; come next Thursday if you are not too busy,” said Lady
Varens. “By the way, how is your sister? Are they still at Drage?”
“Oh, no—dear me, it is a long story to tell you all the things that have
happened since you left. But Evan is in Egypt and Evangeline and Ivor
are with us.”
“I am sorry; that sounds dreary,” she said. “I never knew your sister
well, but I liked him though he seemed so different from her. I often
wished he had thought of going out to the colonies or something of that
sort. I believe it would have suited her. I can’t see her in a garrison
town.”
“She used to say she would like to lead two lives at once,” said Teresa.
“One a sort of Wild West business and the other with someone very
literary, but Evan isn’t either, so I suppose people compromise or do
something different from what they intended.”
“Tell me, Teresa,” said Lady Varens, “I am not asking from curiosity; is
it a success?”
“Chips could make a success of almost anybody who didn’t interfere with
her,” Teresa replied. “She is not at all exacting and she is so
affectionate. But Evan is a little like John Knox or that sort of
person; then she does things without telling him and he gets all sorts
of ideas into his head. I do hate Mrs. Vachell. I think she does more
harm than a thousand mothers-in-law.” Lady Varens laughed.
“Do be careful what you say about mothers-in-law. When David marries I
shall remind you of that remark and ask you not to suggest to my
daughter-in-law that I interfere, because I don’t.”
Teresa blushed and looked vexed. “I had forgotten about you, really,”
she said. “But Mrs. Vachell came to stay by the sea when Chips and I
were there with Ivor, and it all went wrong after that. I don’t think
they were ever happy again. And I believe she only did it out of sheer
spite because she hates men.”
“Does she? I should never have guessed that,” said Lady Varens.
“No, nobody would. She never says a word, but she used to get at that
wretched boy Fisk, at the University, and put him up to all sorts of
revolutions; not because she cares twopence about the poor, I think,
unless they are women, but she wants women to govern everything, and I
think she got him to believe that they would all help a revolution for
the sake of making laws to get what they want for themselves. Don’t you
think that Miss Smackfield would probably drop her Bolshevism if there
were any women capitalists?”
“I don’t know that I or anyone else knows exactly what a capitalist is.
But do you seriously suppose Miss Smackfield cares a hang what any row
is about so long as she can be in the front with an axe, shouting, ‘Off
with his head!’ like the Queen of the pack of cards. She would be
forgotten to-morrow if someone put a flower pot over her.”
They talked for some little time and at last Lady Varens said, “It is so
difficult to remedy anything, from a disease to a grievance. There is
always a ‘vicious circle,’ not one thing alone that is the matter.
People are ill because they fuss and fuss because they are ill. There
are some, I think, who want a revolution because they are miserable, and
others who are miserable because they want a revolution, another lot who
make other people’s misfortunes an excuse for making a row and some more
who put all their misfortunes down to other people’s love of making a
row. If you take a human body in that sort of contradictory mess into a
doctor’s consulting room, he pays no attention to the details, but tells
the patient to wash in the Ganges or eat a lightly-boiled onion an hour
before sunset with his back to the north; or else he tries
psycho-analysis or hypnotism.”
“Oh, does he?” said Teresa, who was quite bewildered by this time.
“Yes, he does, and once upon a time it was done with incantations and
charms, or the fat of a dormouse was rubbed under the ear. There was
Christianity too, with all sorts of by-products in the way of
Reformations and Crusades—but you see my point. A really engrossing
superstition or a creed with a ritual would be more useful than
discussing symptoms of national neurasthenia. Any idea that is unselfish
and clean would do, and Bolshevism isn’t either; it is both selfish and
dirty.”
“But you can’t preach unselfishness to the unemployed,” Teresa objected,
“not, anyhow, so long as there are ‘boudoir gowns for my lady when she
snatches a moment’s rest in her strenuous afternoon,’ advertised in the
papers. If I were an unemployed, I should want to tear my lady in
pieces, and roll her beastly maid with the sofa and the pot of chocolate
over and over in the mud on the Embankment.”
“That’s illogical,” said Lady Varens. “I have to shut my eyes tight when
I see advertisements of anything to do with my lady, because I know that
that sort of indignation is off the line. Communism is dreary and
crushing and impossible, I think; and if you are going to let people
keep the money they or their fathers make, then you must let them alone
to spend it as they like. There are idiots in every class who chuck
money about. But, as I say, if you are going to admit freedom to inherit
and make, you must have freedom to spend as well, or else Rule Britannia
becomes Rule Bolshevina, and my dear friend, the British working man,
who hates to be hustled, will have to set up his apple cart again in
some other place.”
“No, it is quite true, it won’t suit him a bit,” said Teresa, thinking
of Mr. Jason.
“I have tried to imagine the very beeriest British loafer being made
compulsorily drunk at stated intervals by a public authority, and I
can’t see him getting a bit of pleasure out of it. And as for being
compulsorily busy, and obliged to see nothing but good plays, and sent
to hear good music—has any real Englishman ever devised such a plan, or
are they all those very unhumorous Huns in disguise? Only a nation that
wears spectacles could picture England as a community with rules, except
the ordinary policeman rules. But the people have got so used to freedom
that they may let the thing go on and stand watching it like a dog fight
until it is done and has to be cleaned up.”
“That is what Mrs. Vachell said about Evangeline, that father wouldn’t
interfere about Evan until he had actually done something. She said that
men won’t bother to prevent a thing happening.”
“What are you talking about?” said Lady Varens.
“Oh, I forgot, I was thinking about what you said. Evan did rather try
to work out theories about Ivor and there was a bother that there
needn’t have been if he and Chips had understood each other instead of
working separately. However that is nothing. I expect they will worry
through all right.”
“Well, come and see David,” said Lady Varens, “and help us to decide
what we will do. He is all for stopping a muddle before it is too late.”
Teresa went home in a tram, among the faces in the fog, but she did not
notice them. She was tired to death by problems and counter problems; by
desires that seemed to lead straight to a just and happy end, and were
blocked always, sooner or later, by some defect of the quality that
engendered them. Equality had a way of elbowing the grace of respect off
the path, social recognition bred snobbery and civic responsibility led
to jobbery, philanthropy grew so easily into impertinence, reform into
self-righteousness and contentment into smugness; there seemed no end to
the fine and stupid ideas that had started along the same road.
Innocence and discipline fought for perfection in every imaginative
task. She saw a world full of Evans and Evangelines quarrelling
irreconcilably for ever, like Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
The car trundled and swayed, grinding along its rails. The distorted,
grotesquely-dressed forms that had been made beautiful all these years
in her imagination by the belief that they were princes and princesses
in disguise, waiting for the magic touch of recognition to restore them
to their kingdom, failed for the first time to excite her interest. The
desire which used to entice her with the promise of a new world had
vanished, and left in its place a message rather like the traditional
note on the pincushion left by the escaping heroine of romance. The
message said that the only truth on which heaven and earth were agreed
was that a marriage would shortly take place.
She cheered up a little as she looked at the fog-bound faces on either
side of her, and thought how greatly any of them might be improved by
loving any one as much as she loved David. Another still more cheerful
idea occurred to her, that perhaps they did! Perhaps it was only the mud
filtering down upon the city that made them look so depressed. Inside
their minds there might be an inextinguishable flame that only needed to
be kindled to destroy all anger and discontent. “I suppose there will
always be Evans and Evangelines,” she thought, “all the Tweedledums and
Tweedledees, and they will fight about nothing whenever they meet; but
if they were really in love Evan wouldn’t look for trouble and
Evangeline wouldn’t try to walk round it; they would go through it
together as it came. I am glad David doesn’t either worry or shirk—but
then, of course, he wouldn’t.”
When she reached home she went up to the nursery where Evangeline was
putting Ivor to bed, it being nurse’s afternoon out. When he was tucked
up and Evangeline was tidying the nursery, Teresa sat down by the fire
and said, “I met Lady Varens and had tea with her. David is coming home
in a few days, and they are going to stay with Mr. Manley. They are
going to make up their minds what they will do with Aldwych.”
“Oh, are they?” said Evangeline. “Do you suppose they will go back?”
“I should think quite likely.”
“You look very pleased, Dicky,” said Evangeline, looking at her sister’s
face in the firelight. “I am so glad if it is all right. But Dicky——”
she hesitated in a frightened way—“you know I have no nerves in these
days, and I get unnecessary panics—, don’t build on his being the same
as when he went away, will you? You know what men are.”
“Oh, Chips, do drop that men and women business,” said Teresa wearily.
“There are men and men and David is David.”
“I know,” she admitted, “but you see Evan is also Evan, so I warn you
from my experience—quite kindly meant, and you are angry, quite fairly.”
“I think you would like him best to be Evan if you loved him,” said
Teresa. “He wouldn’t be ‘men’ any more, and you wouldn’t compare him
with yourself.”
“I do love him,” Evangeline answered; “but he thinks I don’t because I
deceived him.”
“Do you suppose he doesn’t love you because he deceived you?”
“I am sure he doesn’t, because men—I am sorry, I won’t say it. But he is
always talking about ‘women’ too. In fact, he began.”
“Do you know, as I was coming up in the tram it occurred to me how like
Tweedledum and Tweedledee you two are, and now what you say makes you
more absurdly like. They never knew which began the quarrels. You need a
‘monstrous crow’ to send you both flying into one another’s arms. Of
course if you were in a book Ivor would have a dangerous illness or
something silly like that.”
“That would only make us hate each other more because he would say that
God did it for our good, and I should say that God was sorry the devil
did it.”
“And suppose Ivor died, whose doing would you say it was?”
“No one’s doing at all. But I should say the devil made the germs and
that God did nothing, except that He was glad to have Ivor back.”
“I am sure that is very bad theology,” said Teresa, “You can’t have
Badness with a definite intention and Goodness without any.”
“Why not? Intentions mean brains and theories and I do loathe them more
than I can tell you. I’m content with things that are alive and perfect;
I mean without diseases and sins. One doesn’t need any intention for
loving the sun and everything that I call ‘God.’ But Evan sets his brain
humming and buzzing like a factory to make up the awful Moloch of a
creature that he worships.”
“It is very odd,” said Teresa, “how people have always been more annoyed
by each other’s religions than by anything else. I am myself. I could
put up with Mrs. Carpenter’s face, if it were not for the things she
says about the Church. But there we go again! I suppose if a monstrous
crow could frighten quarrellers apart a monstrous dove might prevent
them from fighting; but I don’t know, and there would probably be some
drawback to that too; there always is. I am going to meet David next
week.”
“You know, I can’t go on living at home for ever,” said Evangeline. “I
shall have to arrange something when all this business is over, and what
am I going to tell people? I can’t keep an unexplained husband in the
background all my life. Just think of it! Very little money, no man, no
father for the children and no explanation to give. I shall have to
become a paid agitator in self-defence.”
“To agitate about what?”
“Oh, anything. Mrs. Vachell belongs to all sorts of societies. I might
help to run a paper. I’ve always liked papers.”
“Yes, I know you have,” said Teresa. “I think, Chips, if you hadn’t sat
so comfortably in the sun, and been content with sensations you might
have found out more for yourself. Isn’t that why we called you ‘Chips,’
just because you were always picking up bits of information? I always
think of toast and newspapers when I remember you as my elder sister in
the nursery. Either with toast and newspapers by the fire or else out in
the garden when you ought to have been somewhere else. Do you remember
when you brought in a worm when we were away in the country, and you put
it on a doll’s chair on the tea-table, and tried to make it sit up, and
Miss Jacks came in? But to go back to your newspaper; you can’t do that.
Do wait until you are well again, and then go away from Mrs. Vachell,
and write to Evan. I am not sure you hadn’t better leave your family
with nurse and me somewhere, and go to Egypt yourself; but, anyhow, it
will be all right. I have told you things are always happening.”
“Evan’s sisters are another problem,” Evangeline said presently. “They
don’t know anything yet, but they keep on wanting Ivor to go there, and
when they do find out they will do everything they can to get him taken
away from me. They will think I am an active danger if I differ from
Evan in any way. And they are so silly with Ivor. They do spoil him so.”
“I think that is awfully funny,” said Teresa. “Doesn’t it amuse you if
you think of it?”
“You mean because Evan complains of me spoiling him? But then, you see,
I don’t and they do. You never saw such drivel as they carry on. Ivor
gets quite imbecile when he is there; he hardly seems the same. It isn’t
gaiety, it is a sort of orgie of pranks; like those wearisome film
comedies where a lot of people slip up on a piece of soap, and get
covered with whitewash and food. Really when I am staying there I often
feel like asking the cook to shoot me into the dining-room by the hatch
and fling a basin of custard after me just so as not to damp the party.”
“Doesn’t Evan mind that?”
“No, he doesn’t, because it is something that can be explained. It
doesn’t amuse him, but he can pigeon-hole it as ‘all good girls’’ way of
amusing themselves. It has nothing to do with him, but it is a necessary
cog in the machinery of a nice family so he can get on with something
else while they do it. It is almost like a domestic rite. But when I
enjoy myself he thinks it is moral indulgence because it isn’t planned
out and it isn’t tiring.”
“I don’t know how father gets on so well with all sorts of different
people,” said Teresa. “It never seems to bother him if they don’t
understand what he is talking about. He never tries to explain himself
or cares whether they agree with him or not.”
“No, I daresay, but then he has only got himself to bother about,” said
Evangeline. “If he had to protect us from a wife with high principles it
might make him think a bit.”
Teresa dreaded telling her mother about the Varens’ return. Experience
has taught me that there are many painstaking minds who will come to a
knot at this point, and want to be told why any young girl with a clear
conscience should dread to tell so amiable and good a mother that an
eligible young man, dear to them both, has returned to the
neighbourhood. But it cannot be made quite clear to all readers. The
nearest thing that can be said is that perhaps if Susie had been known
to approve less of the possibility with which Teresa was secretly aglow,
the girl would have been less anxious to keep it to herself. “Alice in
Wonderland” is full of the everyday experience of simple people, and in
one of those irrational gambollings of the female mind which have been
referred to on another page I seem to see Susie represented by the
kindly Dodo who said to Alice after she had won the race, “I beg your
acceptance of this elegant thimble,” and presented her with her own
property. Teresa was as straight-forward as Alice, and liked things to
work out logically, so she resented being led up to her lover, as much
as she disliked hearing Mrs. Carpenter instruct Mrs. Potter in the art
of patience.
She decided now that the dangerous moment could be most successfully
faced under Cyril’s protection, so she announced at dinner, “I met Lady
Varens to-day, and they are both coming back, probably for good.” She
made the news sound as gossipy and impersonal as she could, and shot a
rapid glance at her father.
“I am glad to hear that,” he replied. “The Perkin Warbecks can now
resume their normal occupations.”
“Who are they?” she said.
“I don’t know who they were, but I remember being sent to bed because I
didn’t know that they aspired to the throne. I’ve remembered their
beastly names ever since.”
“They are staying with Mr. Manley,” Teresa went on, “at least she is,
and David is going there next week. I promised to go to dinner one
evening, so I can tell them about the Perkin Warbecks. It is nice to
think how pleased the farmers will be, isn’t it?” She felt some pride in
the way she was conducting this affair.
“Very nice, dear,” said Susie quietly. “Do you know at all how he got on
in the Argentine?”
“No, she didn’t say,” Teresa answered.
“I thought perhaps you might have heard sometimes,” said Susie. “So
often out in those lonely places people are so glad of posts, and they
write and tell one all sorts of things about themselves, just with the
idea of getting an answer. I remember I had a cousin who used to write
dreadfully dull letters all about the country and then strings and
strings of questions.”
Teresa need not have been afraid. Her mother did, as Evangeline had
pointed out, achieve what seemed like conjuring tricks in the lives of
other people, but she only prepared spiritual omelets in places where no
omelet was likely to be made in the ordinary way. Having satisfied
herself now that Teresa had been completely cut off from David while he
was away and was full of suppressed excitement at his return, she was
too great an artist in mystery to use apparatus when the laws of nature
were already operating in the direction she wished.
Three days after this was Christmas Day, and both Susie and Teresa had a
busy day before them. Susie was to attend a tea and distribution of
useful Christmas presents to the inmates of the Mary Popley Home, and
Teresa was to help serve dinner to some hundreds of street urchins,
members of one of the many organisations with which Emma’s devoted band
worked ceaselessly and hopefully, undeterred by rumours of class war or
theories about the reconstruction of the State. Emma’s workers got on
with the business of cleaning the city as best they could, while Fisk,
the people’s friend, raved of blood and destruction, and then went home
to tend his dormice. Teresa’s post was at the end of a trestle table
with nearly fifty boys on each side. She was buttoned up to the neck in
an overall; her face was hot from the stove beside her and from the
crowded atmosphere; her head felt bursting from the smell of poor homes
and the clapper of voices; her feet were icy from the draught along the
wooden floor which was only separated from the street by an open door
and a long stone passage. In front of her was a gigantic hot-pot,
replaced by another as soon as empty. She held in her hand a long iron
spoon, greasy from top to bottom and heavy to wield. At her elbow were a
pile of plates, which were snatched up and borne away by other helpers
as fast as she filled them. There were three tables altogether, and the
same thing was happening at both ends of each. Other people, visitors
and members of the committee, stood about the room and looked on, giving
a hand with any extra job that was needed. When the last plate was
filled Teresa had a moment in which to look at the faces down the table.
They were all faces from behind the fog, but they were young, and the
Great Depression (as she called the public expression of countenance
when she first came to Millport) had not yet reached them. Many of them
were pale and pinched, many were apple-faced, some fat and white, but
they were all young and as free as squirrels. They bore marks of cold
and hunger, some of them of cruelty and disease, every single one of
them had a cold in the head and took no notice of it. “The plum pudding,
Miss——. May I pass?” said a voice beside her, and, as she moved, a
monstrous pudding was put before her and the helpers pawed the ground in
their impatience to be off with the plates. Teresa doled out great
helpings of the stuff as fast as she could, grasping her heavy spoon
with both hands. Once more she had time to look at the boys. They were
not talking now; they were stuffing, and they had said all they had to
say to their neighbours. She saw one of them deposit a large
tablespoonful of the pudding in a pocket of his little age-worn
waistcoat, and in the horror of the moment she exclaimed, “Child! what
on earth are you doing?”
“It’s for me granny,” he said, “she’s sick.” Teresa experienced the
upheaval of mind and body that used to shake her with a general sense of
topsy-turvydom when she first took up Emma’s work, and which she had
nearly lost during the last years. She remembered Ivor as she had left
him that morning, happily engaged in discussion on seasonable topics of
revelry, she thought of dirty little faces assembled outside toyshops
lighted up early on account of the penetrating fog; she had a vision of
the Price family in paper caps seated among a débris of hothouse dessert
and wine and coffee and expensive trifles in leather and gold, recently
unwrapped from parcels, each “novelty” designed to save small
discomforts, such as the lighting of a match or the turn of a head to
see the time; she thought of Evan’s sisters, giggling happily beneath
banners that advertised Peace and Goodwill, and of Fisk at the other end
of the Christmas dinner-table, gloomily contemplating his father’s
mésalliance, the Gainsboroughs’ old cook who never could cook anything
decently, and who had now become the last straw on all that an unjust
government had heaped upon him at his birth. Teresa’s mind, which had by
now established David in its background as a referee in all debated
questions, recalled at this moment her first visit to Aldwych and her
self-reproach for having eaten the price of Albert Potter’s splints. “I
have been along that road,” David had said, “and it leads nowhere except
to a maze where you lose yourself and die for want of a new argument.”
“David!” she cried now, in her heart, “David! get me out of this and
take me with you, if you know where you are going.”