Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
file which includes the original illustration.
See 63935-h.htm or 63935-h.zip:
(https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/63935/pg63935-images.html)
or
(https://www.gutenberg.org/files/63935/63935-h.zip)
Some characters might not display properly in this UTF-8
text file (e.g., empty squares). If so, the reader should
consult the html version noted above.
THE COUNTERPLOT
Miss Hope Mirrlees, when she wrote _Madeleine_, several years ago, was
recognised to be one of the most promising of the younger school of women
novelists.
_The Counterplot_ is a study of the literary temperament. Teresa Lane,
watching the slow movement of life manifesting itself in the changing
inter-relations of her family, is teased by the complexity of the
spectacle, and comes to realise that her mind will never know peace till,
by transposing the problem into art, she has reduced it to its permanent
essential factors. So, from the texture of the words, the emotions, the
interactions of the life going on around her she weaves a play, the
setting of which is a Spanish convent in the fourteenth century, and this
play performs for her the function that Freud ascribes to dreams, for
by it she is enabled to express subconscious desires, to vent repressed
irritation, to say things that she is too proud and civilised ever to
have said in any other way. This brief summary can give but little idea
of the charm of style, the subtlety of characterisation, and the powerful
intelligence which Miss Hope Mirrlees reveals. The play itself is a most
brilliant, imaginative _tour de force_!
THE COUNTERPLOT
by
HOPE MIRRLEES
Author of “Madeleine: One of Love’s Jansenists”
“Every supposed restoration of the past is a creation of the
future, and if the past which it is sought to restore is a
dream, a thing but imperfectly known, so much the better.”
MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO.
[Illustration]
London: 48 Pall Mall
W. Collins Sons & Co. Ltd.
Glasgow Melbourne Auckland
Copyright
First Impression, December, 1923
Second ” February, 1924
Third ” April, 1924
Manufactured in Great Britain
TO JANE HARRISON
Μάλιστα δέ τ’ ἔκλυον αὐτοί
CHAPTER I
1
Plasencia was a square, medium-sized house of red brick, built some sixty
years ago, in those days when architects knew a great deal about comfort,
but cared so little about line that every house they designed, however
spacious, was uncompromisingly a “villa.” Viewed from the front, it was
substantial and home-like, and suggested, even in the height of summer,
a “merry Christmas” and fire-light glinting off the leaves of holly;
from the back, however, it had a look of instability, of somehow being
not firmly rooted in the earth—a cumbersome Ark, awkwardly perched for a
moment on Ararat, before plunging with its painted wooden crew into the
flood, and sailing off to some fantastic port.
It is possible that this effect was not wholly due to the indifferent
draughtsmanship of the Victorian architect, for there is a hint of the
sea in a delicate and boundless view, and the back of Plasencia lay open
to the Eastern counties.
Even the shadowy reticulation of a West-country valley, the spring bloom
upon fields and woods, and red-brick villas that glorifies the tameness
of Kent, are but poor things in comparison with the Eastern counties in
September: yellow stripes of mustard, jade stripes of cabbage, stripes of
old rose which is the earth, a suggestion of pattern given by the heaps
of manure, and the innumerable shocks of corn, an ardent gravity given by
the red-brown of wheat stubble, such as the red-brown sails of a fishing
boat give to the milky-blue of a summer sea; here and there a patch of
green tarpaulin, and groups of thatched corn-ricks—shadowy, abstract,
golden, and yet, withal, homely edifices, like the cottages of those
villages of Paradise whose smoke Herrick used to see in the distance.
An agricultural country has this advantage over heaths and commons and
pastoral land that the seasons walk across it _visibly_.
* * * * *
On a particular afternoon in September, about three years ago, Teresa
Lane sat in a deck-chair gazing at this view. She was a pallid,
long-limbed young woman of twenty-eight, and her dark, closely-cropped
hair emphasised her resemblance to that lad who, whether he be unfurling
a map of Toledo, or assisting at the mysterious obsequies of the Conde de
Orgas, is continually appearing in the pictures of El Greco.
As she gazed, she thought of the Spanish adjective _pintado_, painted,
which the Spaniards use for anything that is bright and lovely—flowers,
views; and certainly this view was _pintado_, even in the English sense,
in that it looked like a fresco painted on a vast white wall, motionless
and enchanted against the restless, vibrating foreground. Winds from the
Ural mountains, winds from the Atlantic celebrated Walpurgis-night on
the lawn of Plasencia; and, on such occasions, to look through the riven
garden, the swaying flowers and grasses, the tossing birch saplings,
at the tranced fields of the view was to experience the same æsthetic
emotion as when one looks at the picture of a great painter.
But the back of Plasencia had another glory—its superb herbaceous border,
which, waving banners of the same hues, only brighter, marched boldly
into the view, and became one with it. Now in September it was stiffened
by annuals: dahlias, astors, snapdragon, sunflowers; Californian poppies
whose whiteness—at any rate in the red poppyland of East Anglia—always
seems exotic, miraculous, suggesting the paradoxical chemical action
of the Blood of the Lamb. There were also great clumps of violas, with
petals of so faint a shade of blue or yellow that every line of their
black tracery stood out clear and distinct, and which might have been the
handiwork of some delicate-minded and deft-fingered old maid, expressing
her dreams and heart’s ease in a Cathedral city a hundred years ago. As
to herbaceous things proper, there was St. John’s wort, catmint, borrage,
sage; their stalks grown so long and thick, their blossoms so big and
brave, that old Gerard would have been hard put to see in them his
familiars—the herbs that, like guardian angels, drew down from the stars
the virtue for the homely offices of easing the plough-boy’s toothache,
the beldame’s ague.
A great lawn spread between the border and the house; it was still very
threadbare owing to the patriotic pasturage that, during the last years
of the War, it had afforded to half a dozen sheep, but it was darned in
so many places by the rich, dark silk of clover leaves as almost to be
turned into a new fabric.
Well, then, the view and border lay simmering in the late sunshine. A
horse was dragging a plough against the sky-line, and here and there thin
streams of smoke were rising from heaps of smouldering weeds. In the
nearer fields, Teresa could discern small, moving objects of a dazzling
whiteness—white leghorns gleaning the stubble; and from time to time
there reached her the noise of a distant shot, heralding a supper of
roast hare or partridge in some secluded farm-house. Then, like a Danish
vessel bound for pillage in Mercia, white, swift, compact, a flock of
wood pigeons would flash through the air to alight in a far away field
and rifle the corn.
But so _pintado_ was the view, so under the notion of art, that these
movements across its surface gave one an æsthetic shock such as one
would experience before a mechanical device introduced into a painting,
and, at the same time, thrilled the imagination, as if the door in a
picture should suddenly open, or silver strains proceed from the painted
shepherd’s pipe.
Teresa could hardly be said to take a pleasure in the view and its
flowery foreground—indeed, like all lovely and complicated things,
they teased her exceedingly; because the infinite variety which made
up their whole defied expression. Until the invention of some machine,
she was thinking, shows to literature what are its natural limits (as
the camera and cinema have shown to painting) by expressing, in some
unknown medium, say a spring wood _in toto_—appearance, smells, noises,
associations—which will far outstrip in exact representation the combined
qualities of Mozart, Spencer, Corot, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and yet remain
dead and flat and vulgar,—so long shall we be teased by the importunities
of detail and forget that such things as spring woods are best expressed
lightly, delicately, in a little song, thus:
The grove are all a pale, frail mist,
The new year sucks the sun;
Of all the kisses that we kissed
Now which shall be the one?
As she murmured the lines below her breath, two children came running
down the grass path that divided the herbaceous border—Anna and Jasper
Sinclair, the grandchildren of the house.
Teresa watched their progress, critically, through half-closed lids.
Yes, children are the right _fauna_ for a garden—they turn it at once
into a world that is miniature and Japanese. But perhaps a kitten
prowling among flower-beds is better still—it is so amusing to watch
man’s decorous arrangement of nature turning, under the gambols of the
sinister little creature, into something primitive and tropical—bush,
or jungle, or whatever they call it in Brazil and places; but Anna was
getting too big.
Human beings too! Worse than the view, because more restless and more
complicated, yet insisting on being dealt with; even Shelley could not
keep out of his garden his somewhat Della Cruscan Lady.
The children came running up to her.
“You don’t know what _we’ve_ found, what _we’ve_ found, what _we’ve_
found!” “Let _me_ say! a _dead_ hare, and we’ve buried him and....” “And
I’ve found a new fern; I’ve got ten and a half kinds now and I ought to
get a Girl Guide’s badge for them, and the Doña _promised_ me some more
blotting-paper, but....”
Teresa stroked Jasper’s sticky little hand and listened indulgently to
their chatter. Then they caught sight of Mrs. Lane coming out of the
house, and rushed at her, shouting, “Doña! Doña!”
The Spaniards deal in a cavalier way with symbolism; for instance, they
put together from the markets, and streets, and balconies of Andalusia
a very human type of female loveliness; next, they express this type
with uncompromising realism in painted wooden figures which they set up
in churches, saying, “This is not Pepa, or Ana, or Carmen. Oh, no! It
isn’t a woman at all: it’s a mysterious abstract doctrine of the Church
called the Immaculate Conception.” They then proceed to fall physically
in love with this abstract doctrine—serenading it with lyrics, organising
pageants in its honour, running their swords through those who deny its
truth, storming the Vatican for its acceptance.
Hence, for those who are acquainted with Spain, it is hard to look on
Spanish concrete things with a perfectly steady eye—they are apt to
become transparent without losing their solidity.
However this may be, Mrs. Lane (the Doña, as her friends and family
called her), standing there smiling and monumental, with the children
clinging to her skirts, seemed to Teresa a symbol—of what she was not
quite sure. Maternity? No, not exactly; but it was something connected
with maternity.
The children, having said their say, made for the harbour of their
own little town—to wit, the nursery—where, over buns, and honey, and
chocolate cake, they would tell their traveller’s tales; and the Doña
bore down slowly upon Teresa and sank heavily into a basket chair. She
raised her _lorgnette_ and gazed at her daughter critically.
“Teresa,” she said, in her slow, rather guttural voice, “why do you so
love that old skirt? But I warn you, it is going to the very next jumble
sale of Mrs. Moore.”
Teresa smiled quite amicably.
“Why can’t you let Concha’s elegance do for us both?” she asked.
So toneless and muted was Teresa’s voice that it was generally impossible
to deduce from it, as also from her rather weary impassive face, of what
emotion her remarks were the expression.
“Rubbish! There is no reason why I shouldn’t have _two_ elegant
daughters,” retorted the Doña, wondering the while why exactly Teresa
was jealous of Concha. “It _must_ be a man; but who?” she asked herself.
Aloud she said, “I wonder why tea is so late. By the way, I told you,
didn’t I, that Arnold is coming for the week-end and bringing Guy? And
some young cousin of Guy’s—I think he said his name was Dundas.”
“I know—Rory Dundas. Guy often talks about him. He’s a soldier, so he’ll
probably be even more tiresome than Guy.”
Oho! How, exactly, was this to be interpreted?
“Why, Teresa, a nice young officer, with beautiful blue eyes like Guy
perhaps, only not slouching like Cambridge men, and you think that he
will be _tiresome_!”
Again Teresa smiled amicably, and wished for the thousandth time that
her mother would sometimes stop being ironical—or, at any rate, that her
irony had a different flavour.
“And so Guy is tiresome too, is he?”
Teresa laughed. “No one shows more that they think so than you, Doña.”
“Oh! but I think _all_ Englishmen tiresome.”
Then the butler and parlour-maid appeared with tea; and a few minutes
later Concha, the other daughter, strolled up, her arm round the waist of
a small, elderly lady.
Concha was a very beautiful girl of twenty-two. She was tall, and built
delicately on a generous scale; her hair was that variety of auburn
which, when found among women of the Latin races, never fails to give a
thrill of unexpectedness, and a whiff of romance—hinting at old old rapes
by Normans and Danes. As one looked at her one realised what a beautiful
creature the Doña must once have been.
The elderly lady was governess _emerita_ of the Lanes. They had grown
so attached to her that she had stayed on as “odd woman”—arranging the
flowers, superintending the servants, going up to London at the sales
to shop for the family. They called her “Jollypot,” because “jolly” was
the adjective with which she qualified anything beautiful, kindly,
picturesque, or quaint; “pot” was added as the essence of the æsthetic
aspect of “jolliness,” typified in the activities of Arts and Crafts and
Artificers’ Guilds—indeed she always, and never more than to-day, looked
as if she had been dressed by one of these institutions; on her head
was a hat of purple and green straw with a Paisley scarf twisted round
the crown, round her shoulders was another scarf—handwoven, gray and
purple—on her torso was an orange jumper into which were inserted squares
of canvas wool-work done by a Belgian refugee with leanings to Cubism;
and beads,—enormous, painted wooden ones. Once Harry Sinclair (the father
of Anna and Jasper) had exploded a silence with the question, “Why is
Jollypot like the Old Lady of Leeds? Because she’s ... er ... er ...
INFESTED WITH BEADS!!!”
While on this subject let me add that it was characteristic of her
relationship with her former pupils that they called her Jollypot to her
face, and that she had never taken the trouble to find out why; that the
great adventure of her life had been her conversion to Catholicism—a
Catholicism, however, which retained a tinge of Anglicanism: to wit, a
great deal of vague enthusiasm for “dear, lovely St. Francis of Assisi,”
combined with a neglect of the crude and truly Catholic cult of that most
potent of “medicine-men”—St. Anthony of Padua; and that taste for Dante
studies so characteristic of middle-aged Anglican spinsters. Indeed,
she was remarkably indiscriminating in her tastes, and loved equally
Shakespeare, Dante, Mrs. Browning, the Psalms, Anne Thackeray, and W. J.
Locke; but from time to time she surprised one by the poetry and truth of
her observations.
The Doña, holding in mid-air a finger biscuit soaked in chocolate,
smiled and blinked a welcome; but her eyes flashed to her brain the
irritated message, “If only the jumper were purple, or even green! And
those beads—does she sleep in them?”
Partly from a Latin woman’s exaggerated sense of the ridiculous
possibilities in raiment, partly from an Andalusian _Schaden-freude_,
ever since she had known Jollypot she had tried to persuade her that a
devout Catholic should dress mainly in black; but Jollypot would flush
with indignation and cry, “Oh! Mrs. Lane, how _can_ you? When God has
given us all these _jolly_ colours! Just look at your own garden! I
remember a dear old lady when I was a girl who used to say she didn’t
see why we should say grace for _food_ because that was a necessity and
God was _bound_ to give it to us, but that we should say it for the
_luxuries_—flowers and colours—that it was so good and _fatherly_ of Him
to think of.” Which silly, fanciful Protestantism would put the Doña into
a frenzy of irritation.
But Jollypot—secure in her knowledge of her own consideration of the
Sesame and Lilies of the field—had, as usual, a pleasant sense of being
prettily dressed, and, quite unaware that she offended, she sat down to
her tea with a little sigh of innocent pleasure. Concha, after having
hugged the unresponsive Doña, and affectionately inquired after Teresa’s
headache, wearily examined the contents of the tea-table, and having
taken a small piece of bread and butter, muttered that she wished Rendall
would cut it thinner.
“And what have you been doing this afternoon?” asked the Doña.
“At the Moore’s,” answered Concha, a little sulkily.
“But how very kind of you! That poor Mrs. Moore must have been quite
touched ... did I hear that Eben was home on leave?” and the Doña
scrutinised her with lazy amusement; Teresa, also, looked at her.
“Oh, yes, he’s back,” said Concha, lightly, but blushing crimson all the
same. She loathed being teased. “How incredibly Victorian and Spanish it
all is!” she thought.
She yawned, then poured some tea and cream into a saucer, added two lumps
of sugar, and put it down on the lawn for the refreshment of ’Snice, the
dachshund.
“And how was Eben?” asked the Doña.
“Oh, he was in _great_ form—really _extraordinarily_ funny about getting
drunk at Gibraltar,” drawled Concha; she always drawled when she was
angry, embarrassed, or “feeling grand.”
“Oh! the English always get drunk at Gibraltar—it wasn’t at all original
of Eben.”
“I suppose not,” and again Concha yawned.
“And I suppose Mrs. Moore said, ‘Ebenebeneben! Prenny guard!’ which meant
that one of the Sunday school children was coming up the path and he must
be careful what he said.”
Concha gurgled with laughter—pleasantly, like a child being tickled—at
the Doña’s mimicry; and the atmosphere cleared.
Teresa remembered Guy Cust’s once saying that conversation among members
of one family was a most uncomfortable thing. When one asks questions it
is not for information (one knows the answers already) but to annoy. It
is, he had said, as if four or five men, stranded for years on a desert
island with a pack of cards, had got into the habit of playing poker
all day long, and that, though the game has lost all savour and all
possibilities of surprise; for each knowing so well the “play” of the
other, no bluff ever succeeds, and however impassive their opponent’s
features, they can each immediately, by the sixth sense of intimacy,
distinguish the smell of a “full house,” or a “straight,” from that of a
“pair.”
For instance, the Doña and Teresa knew quite well where Concha had been
that afternoon; and Concha had known that they would know and pretend
that they did not, so she had arrived irritated in advance, and the Doña
and Teresa had watched her approach, maliciously amused in advance.
“Well, and was Mrs. Moore hinting again that she would like to have her
Women’s Institute in my garden?” asked the Doña.
“Oh, yes, and she wants Teresa to go down to the Institute one night and
talk to them about Seville, but I was quite firm and said I was sure
nothing would induce her.”
“You were wrong,” said Teresa, in an even voice, “I should like to talk
to them about Seville.”
“Good Lord!” muttered Concha.
“Give them a description of a bull-fight, Teresa. It would amuse me to
watch the face of Mrs. Moore and the Vicar,” said the Doña.
Teresa and Concha laughed, and Jollypot shuddered, muttering, “Those poor
horses!”
The Doña looked at her severely. “Well, Jollypot and what about the poor
foxes and hares in England?”
This amœbæan dirge was one often chanted by the Doña and Jollypot.
“Oh! look at the birds’ orchard ... all red with haws. Poor little
fellows! They’ll have a good harvest,” cried Jollypot, pointing to the
double hedge of hawthorn that led to the garage, and evidently glad to
turn from man’s massacring of beasts to God’s catering for birds.
“Seville!” said Concha meditatively; and a silence fell upon them
while the word went rummaging among the memories of the mother and her
daughters.
Tittering with one’s friends behind one’s _reja_, while Mr. Lane down
below (though then only twenty-three, already stout and intensely
prosaic), self-consciously sang a Spanish serenade with an execrable
English accent; gipsy girls hawking lottery tickets in the _Sierpes_;
eating ices in the _Pasaje del Oriente_; the ladies in mantillas laughing
shrilly at the queer English hats and clumsy shoes; the wall of the
Alcazar patined with jessamine; long noisy evenings (rather like poems by
Campoamor), of cards and acrostics and flirtation; roses growing round
orange trees; exquisite horsemanship; snub-nosed, ill-shaven men looking
with laughing eyes under one’s hat, and crying, _Viva tu madre!_ Dark,
winding, high-walled streets, called after Pedro the Cruel’s Jewish
concubines; one’s milk and vegetables brought by donkeys, stepping as
delicately as Queen Guinevere’s mule. One by one the candles of the
_Tenebrario_ extinguished to the moan of the _miserere_, till only the
waxen thirteenth remains burning; goats, dozens of wooden Virgins in
stiff brocade, every one of them _sin pecado concebida_, city of goats
and Virgins ... yes, that’s it—city of goats and Virgins.
“By the way,” said Concha nonchalantly, “I’ve asked Eben to lunch on
Sunday.”
The Doña bowed ironically and Concha blushed, and calling ’Snice got up
and moved majestically towards the house.
“Arnold’s coming on Saturday, Jollypot,” said the Doña, triumphantly.
“The dear fellow! That _is_ jolly,” said Jollypot; then sharply drew in
her breath, as if suddenly remembering something, and, with a worried
expression, hurried away.
The thing she had suddenly remembered was that the billiard-table was at
that moment strewn with rose petals drying upon blotting-paper, and that
Arnold would be furious if they were not removed before his arrival.
The Doña, by means of a quizzical look at Teresa, commented upon the last
quarter of an hour, but Teresa’s expression was not responsive.
“Well,” said the Doña, regretfully hoisting her bulk from her
basket-chair, “I must go and catch Rudge before he goes home and tell him
to keep the sweet corn for Saturday—Arnold’s so fond of it. And there’s
the border to be—oh, your father and his golf!”
The irritated tone of this exclamation ended on the last word in a note
of scorn.
* * * * *
Teresa sat on alone by the deserted tea-table, idly watching the Doña
standing by the border, in earnest talk with the gardener.
How comely and distinguished, and how beautifully modelled the Doña
looked in the westering light! No one could model like late sunshine—she
had seen it filtering through the leaves of a little wood and turning
the smooth, gray trunk of a beech into an exquisite clay torso, not yet
quite dry, fresh from the plastic thumb, faithfully maintaining the
delusion that, though itself a pliable substance, the frame over which
it was stretched was rigid and bony. The Doña and beech trees, however,
were beautiful, even without the evening light; but she had also seen the
portion of a rain-pipe that juts out at right angles from the wall before
taking its long and graceless descent—she had seen the evening light turn
its dirty yellow into creamy flesh-tints, its contour into the bent knee
of a young Diana.
Forces that made things _look_ beautiful were certainly part of a
“Merciful Dispensation.” Memory was one of these forces. How exquisite,
probably, life at Plasencia would look some day!
It would take a lot of mellowing, she thought, with a little smile.
Again it was a question of the swarm of tiny details: beauty, evidently,
requiring their elimination.
But, for instance, the interplay of emotions at tea that afternoon—was
it woven from the tiny brittle threads of unimportant details, or was it
made of a more resisting stuff?
Why was the Doña equally irritated that she, Teresa, ignored young men,
and that Concha ran after them—like a tabby-cat in perpetual season?
No—that was disgusting, coarse, unkind. There was nothing ugly about
Concha’s abundant youth: she was merely normal—following the laws of
life, no more disgusting than a ripe apple ready to drop.
There came into Teresa’s head the beginning of one of Cervantes’s
_Novelas Exemplares_, which tells of the impulse that drives young men,
although they may love their parents dearly, to break away from their
home and wander across the world, “... nor can meagre fare and poor
lodging cause them to miss the abundance of their father’s house; nor
does travelling on foot weary them, nor cold torment them, nor heat
exhaust them.”
And, added Teresa, rich in the wisdom of a myriad songs and stories, they
are probably fully aware, ere they shut behind them the door of their
home, that some day they, too, will discover that freedom is nought but a
lonely wind, howling for the past.
_Il n’y a pour l’homme que trois événements: naître, vivre et mourir_
... yes, but to realise that, personally, emotionally—to feel _as one_
the three events—three simultaneous things making one thing that is
perpetually repeated, three notes in a chord—and the chord Life itself
... an agonising sense of speed ... yes, the old simile of the rushing
river that carries one—where? But every life, or group of lives, is deaf
to the chord, stands safe on the bank of the river, till a definite
significant moment, which, looked back upon, seems to have announced its
arrival with an actual noise—a knocking, or a rumbling. To Teresa, it
seemed that that moment for them all at Plasencia had been Pepa’s death,
two years ago—_that_ had been what had plunged them into the river.
Before, all of them (the Doña too) had lived in Eternity. Now, when
Teresa awoke in the night, the minutes dripped, one by one, on to the
same nerve, till the agony became almost unbearable; and it was the agony
of listening to a tale which the narrator cannot gabble fast enough,
because you know the end beforehand—yes, something which is at once a
ball all tightly rolled up that you hold in your hand and a ball which
you are slowly unwinding.
She looked towards the house—the old ark that had so long stood high and
dry; now, it seemed to her, the water had reached the windows of the
lowest story—soon it would be afloat, carrying them all ... no, not her
father. He, she was sure, was still—would always be—outside of Time.
But Concha—Concha was there as much as she herself.
Why did she mind in Concha the same intellectual insincerities and
pretensions, the same airs and graces, that she had loved in Pepa?
She smiled tenderly as she remembered how once at school she had opened
Pepa’s _Oxford Book of English Verse_ at the fly-leaf and found on it, in
a “leggy,” unfledged hand, the following inscription: “To Josepha Lane,
from her father,” and underneath, an extract from Cicero’s famous period
in praise of letters—_et haec studia adulescentiam alunt, senectutem
oblectant_, and so on. (That term Pepa’s form had been reading the _Pro
Archia_.)
Teresa had gone to her and asked her what it meant.
“Dad would _never_ have written that—besides, it’s in your writing.”
Pepa had blushed, and then laughed, and said, “Well, you see I wanted
Ursula Noble” (Ursula Noble’s father was a celebrated Hellenist) “to
think that _we_ had a brainy father too!”
Then, how bustling and important she had been when, shorty after her
_début_, she had become engaged to Harry Sinclair—a brilliant Trinity
Don, much older than herself, and already an eminent Mendelian—how
quickly and superficially she had taken over all his views—liberalism,
atheism, eugenics!
Oh, yes, there had been much that had been irritating in Pepa; but,
though Teresa had recognised it mentally, she had never felt it in her
nerves.
She was suddenly seized with a craving for Pepa’s presence—dear,
innocent, complacent Pepa, so lovely, so loving, with her fantastic, yet,
somehow or other, cheering plans for one’s pleasure or well-being—plans
that she galvanised with her own generous vitality.
Yes, Pepa had certainly been very happy during her six or seven
years of married life at Cambridge: cultured undergraduates pouring
into tea on Sundays, and Pepa taking them as seriously as they took
themselves, laughing delightedly at the latest epigram that was going
the round of Trinity and Kings’—“Dogs are sentimental,” or “Shaw is so
Edwardian”—trolling _Spanish Ladies_ or the _Morning Dew_ in chorus round
the piano; footing it on the lawn—undergraduates, Newnham students,
Cambridge matrons, young dons, eyeglasses and prominent teeth glittering
in the sun, either a slightly patronising smile glued on the face, or an
expression of strenuous endeavour—to the favourite melodies of Charles
II.; suffrage meetings without end, lectures on English literature,
practising glees in the Choral Society; busy making cardboard armour for
the Greek play, or bicycling off to Grantchester, or taking Anna to her
dancing class, or off to Boots to change her novels—a Galsworthy for
herself, a Phillips Oppenheim for Harry.
It had always seemed to Teresa that this life, in spite of its suffrage
and girl’s clubs and “culture,” was both callous and frivolous in
comparison with the tremendous adventures that were going on, all round,
in laboratories and studies and College rooms: at any moment Professor ——
might be able to resolve an atom, and blow up the whole of Cambridge in
the process; and, in little plots of ground, flowers whose _habitat_ was
Peru or the Himalayas, were springing up with—say, purple pollen instead
of golden, and that meant that a new species had been born; or else,
Mr. —— of Christ’s, or John’s, or Caius, would suddenly feel the blood
rush to his head as a blinding light was thrown on the verbal nouns of
classical Arabic by a French article he had just been reading on the use
of diminutives in the harems of Morocco.
Anyhow, whether callous or frivolous or both, it had given Pepa seven
happy years.
What Harry Sinclair’s contribution—apart from the necessary
background—had been to that happiness it would, perhaps, be difficult
to determine. There could be no one in the world less sympathetic to
the small emotional things—so important in married life—than Harry:
homesickness, imagined slights when one was tired, fears that one’s son
aged three summers might some twenty years ahead fall in love with little
Angela Webb, and there was consumption in the family—he viewed them with
the impatience of a young lady before the furniture of a drawing-room
that she wants to clear for a dance, the dance, in his case, being the
sweeps, pirouettes, glides, of endless clever and abstract talk through
the clear, wide spaces of an intellectual universe.
However, emotionally, Pepa had never quite grown up, so perhaps she had
missed nothing.
All the same, when he had broken down at her death, there had been
something touching and magnificent in his fine pity—not for himself, but
for Pepa, so ruthlessly, foolishly, struck down in the hey-day of her
splendid vigour. “It’s devilish! devilish!” he had sobbed.
During the last days of her life, Pepa had talked to Teresa a good deal
about Anna and Jasper. “Make them want to be nice people,” she had said;
and Teresa remembered that, even through her misery, she had wondered
that Pepa had not used a favourite Cambridge _cliché_ and said, “Make
them want to be _splendid people_”; perhaps it was she, Teresa, who was
undeveloped emotionally.
She had tried hard to do what Pepa had asked her; but in these latter
days, when the outlines of the virtues have lost their firmness, it is
difficult to give children that concrete sense of Goodness that had made
the Victorian mothers’ simple homilies, in after years, glow in the
memory of their children with the radiance of a Platonic Myth.
Well, anyhow, she must go up to the nursery now.
* * * * *
She walked into the house. In the hall, as if in illustration of
her views on memory, the light was falling on, and beautifying a
medley of objects, incongruous as the contents of one’s dreams: the
engraving of Frith’s _Margate_ that had hung in Mr. Lane’s nursery in
the old Kensington house where he had been born; a large red and blue
india-rubber ball dropt by Anna or Jasper; the old Triana pottery,
running in a frieze round the walls, among which an occasional
Hispano-Mauresque plate yielded up to the touch of the sun the store
of fire hidden in its lustre; a heap of dusty calling-cards in a flat
dish on the table; Arnold’s old Rugby blazer, hanging, a brave patch of
colour, among the sombre greatcoats.... Through the half-opened door of
the drawing-room came a scent of roses; and through the green baize door
that led to the kitchen the strange, lewd sounds of servants making merry
over their tea. Probably Gladys, the under-housemaid, was reading cups.
Teresa mounted the wide, easy stairs, and, passing through another green
baize door, entered the children’s quarters, and then the nursery itself.
There, tea finished and cleared away, a feeling of vague dissatisfaction
had fallen on the two children. Every minute bed-time was drawing nearer,
and anxious eyes kept turning towards the door; would any one come before
it was too late, and Jasper was already plunging and “being silly” in the
bath, while Anna, clad in a pink flannel dressing-gown, her hair in two
tight little plaits, was putting tidy her books and toys, and—so as to
perform the daily good deed enjoined by the Girl Guides—Jasper’s too?
Their craving for the society of “grown-ups” was as touching and
inexplicable, it seemed to Teresa, as that of dogs. She had noticed
that they longed for it most between tea and bed-time—it was as if they
needed, then, a _viaticum_ against the tedium of going to bed and the
terrors of the night. Nor, she had noticed, was Nanny, dearly though they
loved her, capable of giving this _viaticum_, nor could any man provide
it: it had to be given by a grandmother, or mother, or aunt.
So Teresa’s advent was very warmly welcomed; and sitting down in the
rocking-chair she tried to perform the difficult task of amusing Anna and
Jasper at the same time. For between Anna of nine and Jasper of six there
was very little in common.
Jasper, like the boy Froissart, “never yet had tired of children’s games
as they are played before the age of twelve”: these meaningless hidings,
and springings, and booings, and bouncings of balls. His mind, too, was
all little leaps, and springs, and squeals, and queer little instincts
running riot, with a tendency to baby _cabotinage_. “Don’t be silly,
Jasper!” “Don’t show off!” were continually being said to him.
Anna’s mind, on the other hand, was completely occupied with solid
problems and sensible interests, namely, “I hope that silly Meg will
marry Mr. Brook (she was reading Louisa Alcott’s _Little Women_). I
expect the balls were damp to-day, as they wouldn’t bounce ... it would
be nice if I could get a badge for tennis next year. _Ut_ with the
subjunctive ... no, no, the accusative and infinitive ... wait a minute
... I’m not quite sure. Every square with a stamp in it—every _single_
square. I wonder why grown-ups don’t spend _all_ their money on stamps.
I wonder if Daddy remembered to keep those Argentine ones for me ...
little pictures of a man that looks like George—George—George IV., I
think—anyhow, the one that didn’t wear a wig ... the Argentine ones are
always like that ... that’ll make six Argentine stamps. Brazil ones are
pretty, too ... what’s the capital of Brazil again?”
Teresa had found that a story—one that combined realism with the
marvellous—was the best focus for these divergent interests; so she
started a story.
The sun was setting; and the border and view, painted on the glass of the
nursery windows, grew dim. Some one in the garden whistled the air of:
You made me love you:
I didn’t want to do it,
I didn’t want to do it.
Nanny sat with her sewing, listening too, a pleased smile on her face,
the expression of a vague and complex feeling of satisfaction: for one
thing, it was all so suitable and what she had been used to in her other
places—kind auntie telling the children a story after tea; then there was
a sense of “moral uplift” as, doubtless, the story was allegorical; poor
Mrs. Sinclair in heaven, too—she would be glad if she could see what a
good aunt they had—then there was also a genuine interest in the actual
story; for no nurse without a sense of narrative and the marvellous is
fit for her post.
“Bed-time, I’m afraid. Kiss kind Auntie and say, ‘Thank you, Auntie, for
the nice story.’”
Outside, the cowman was leading the cows home to the byre across the
lawn. It was a good thing that Rudge, the head gardener, was safe in
his cottage, eating his tea. Far away an express flashed across the
view, whistling like a nightjar, giving a sudden whiff of London that
evaporated as swiftly as its smoke.
“But we don’t call her ‘Auntie’; we call her ‘Teresa,’” said Anna for the
thousandth time.
“Now, Anna dear, don’t be rude. Up you get, Jasper. I’m afraid, miss, it
really is bed-time ... and they were late last night too.”
2
Teresa dressed and went down to the drawing-room, to find her father and
Jollypot already there and chatting amicably.
“The place was full of salmon at four and sixpence a pound, and he said,
‘You’ll never get rid of that!’ and the fishmonger said, ‘Won’t I? It’ll
go like winking,’ and the other chap said, ‘Who’ll buy it these hard
times?’ and he said, ‘The miners, of course.’”
Dick Lane was a stockily-built man of middle height, with a round,
rubicund face. A Frenchman had once described him as, _Le type accompli
du farmer-gentleman_.
He was, however, a Londoner, born and bred, as his fathers had been
before him for many a generation; but, as they had always had enough
and to spare for beef and mutton and bacon, the heather of Wales and
the pannage of the New Forest had helped to build their bones; besides,
it was not so very long ago that cits could go a-maying without being
late for ’Change; and then, there is the Cockney’s dream of catching,
one day before he dies, the _piscis rarus_—a Thames trout—a dream which,
though it never be realised, maketh him to lie down in green pastures and
leadeth him beside the still waters.
As to Dick, he liked cricket, and the smell of manure and of freshly-cut
hay, he liked pigs, and he liked wide, quiet vistas; but he liked them
as a background to his prosaic and quietly regulated activities—much
as a golfer, though mainly occupied with the progress of the game,
subconsciously is not indifferent to the springy turf aromatic with thyme
and scabious, nor to the pungent breezes from the sea, nor to the sweep
of the downs.
He and Teresa exchanged friendly nods, and she, sinking into a chair,
began to contemplate him—much as Blake may have contemplated the tiger,
when he wondered:
What mysterious hand and eye
Framed its awful symmetry.
There he sat, pink from his bath, pleasantly tired after his two rounds
of golf, expounding to Jollypot his views on the threatened strike—the
heir to all the ages.
For his body and soul were knit from strange old fragments: sack; fear of
the plague; terror of the stars; a vision of the Virgin Queen borne, like
a relic in a casket, on the shoulders of fantastically-dressed gentlemen;
Walsingham; sailor’s tales of Spanish ladies; a very English association
between the august word of Liberty and the homely monosyllable Wilkes;
dynasties tottering to the tune of “Lillybolero”; Faith, Hope, and
Charity, stimulated by cries of, “No Popery,” “Lavender, Sweet Lavender,”
“Pity the poor prisoners of the Fleet”; Dr. Donne thundering Redemption
at Paul’s Cross, the lawn at his wrist curiously edged with a bracelet
of burnished hair; Hector of Troy, Alexander the Great, Pride, Lechery,
Robin Hood, throbbing in ballads, or else, alive and kicking and bravely
dressed beyond one’s dreams, floating in barges down the Thames;
Death—grinning in stone from crevices of the churches, dancing in
churchyards with bishops and kings and courtesans, forming the burden of
a hundred songs, and at last, one day, catching one oneself; Death—but
every death cancelled by a birth.
Without all this he would not have been sitting there, saying, “The
English working man is at bottom a sensible chap, and if they would only
appeal to his common sense it would be all right.”
Then the gong sounded. Dick looked at his watch and remarked, quite
good-humouredly, “I wonder how many times your mother has been in time
for dinner during the thirty years we have been married.”
At last the door opened, and the Doña came in with Concha.
“I have just been saying I wonder how many times you have been in time
for dinner since we were married.”
The Doña ignored this remark, and busied herself in straightening
Teresa’s fichu.
Then they went in to dinner.
“By the way, Anna,” said Dick, looking across at the Doña and sucking
the soup off his moustache, “I was playing golf with Crofts, and he says
there’s going to be a wonderful new rose at the show this year—terra
cotta coloured. It’s a Lyons one; he says it’s been got by a new way of
hybridising. We must ask Harry about it.”
“Harry wouldn’t know—he knows nothing about gardening,” said the Doña
scornfully.
“Not know? Why, he’ll know _all_ about it. That fellow Worthington—you
know who I mean, the chap that went on that commission to India—well,
he’s a knowledgeable sort of chap, and he asked me the other day at the
Club if Dr. Sinclair of Cambridge wasn’t a son-in-law of mine, and he
said that he’d been making the most wonderful discoveries lately.”
“What’s the use of discoveries—of Harry’s, at any rate? They do no one
any good,” said the Doña sullenly.
“Oh, I don’t know; there’s no knowing what these things mayn’t lead
to—they may teach us to improve the human stock and all sorts of things”;
and then Dick applied himself to the more interesting subject of his
fried sole, oblivious, in spite of years of experience, that his remark
had horrified his wife by its impious heresy.
However, her only comment was an ironical smile.
“To learn to know people through flowers—what a lovely idea,” mused
Jollypot, who was too absent-minded to be tactful. “I think it is his
work among flowers that makes Dr. Sinclair so—so——”
“So like a flower himself, eh?” grinned Dick, with a sudden vision of his
large, massive, overbearing son-in-law.
“I’m sure flowers really irritate Harry horribly,” said Concha. “They’ve
probably got the Oxford manner, or are not Old Liberals, or something.”
“You are quite right, Concha. Both flowers and children irritate him,”
said the Doña bitterly.
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Dick, with indifferent good humour. “By the
way,” he added, “I’ve asked a young fellow called Munroe down for the
week-end. He’s representing a South African sugar firm we have to do with
... it’ll be all right, won’t it?”
“Well, Arnold’s written to say he’s coming, and he doesn’t like
strangers, you know,” said the Doña.
“Well, I’m blessed ... has it come to this ...” he spluttered, roused
completely out of his habitual good humour.
“No, it hasn’t,” said Concha soothingly, and laid a hand on his.
“Well, all the same, it’s ...” he growled; and then subsided, slightly
appeased.
The Doña, quite unmoved, continued placidly eating her sole. Then she
remarked, “And where is your friend to sleep, may I ask? Arnold is
bringing down Guy and a cousin of his. When the children are here you
_know_ how little room we have.”
“I suppose one of them—Arnold, as far as that goes—can sleep at Rudge’s,”
said Dick sulkily.
“Oh, I can sleep in Dad’s dressing-room, if it comes to that,” said
Teresa.
“Or I can,” said Concha.
“Oh, no, you’re so much more dependent on your own dressing-table and
your own things,” said Teresa; and Concha blushed. Innocent remarks of
Teresa’s had a way of making her blush; but she was a fighter.
“What’s the good Colonial like?” she asked, her voice not quite
natural—and thinking the while, “I _will_ ask if I choose! It’s
absolutely unbearable how self-conscious they’re making me—it’s like
servants.”
“The Colonial—what Colonial? Oh, Monroe! He’s a Scot really, but he’s
been out there some years; done jolly well, too. He’s a gallant fellow,
too—V.C. in the war.”
“Oh, no-o-o!” drawled Concha, “_how_ amusing! V.C.’s are so exotic—it’s
like seeing a fox suddenly in a wood——” and then she blushed again, for
she realised that this remark was not original, but Guy Cust’s, and that
Teresa was looking at her.
“What’s he like?” she went on hurriedly.
“Oh, I don’t know ... he’s a great big chap,” and then he added
cryptically, “pretty Scotch, I should say.”
* * * * *
When dinner was over, the Doña went up to the nursery to apologise, in
case the children were still awake, for not having been up before to say
good-night. She found they were asleep, however, but Nanny was sitting in
the day-nursery darning a jersey of Jasper’s; so, partly to avoid having
had the trouble of climbing the stairs for nothing, partly because she
had been seeking for some time the occasion for a private chat, she sank
into the rocking-chair—looking extremely distinguished in her black lace
mantilla and velvet gown.
Her brown eyes, with the quizzical droop of the lids that Teresa had
inherited, fixed Nanny in a disconcerting Spanish stare.
How thankful she was that _she_ did not have to wear a gown of black
serge fastening down her chest with buttons, and a starched white cap.
“I think the children have had a happy summer,” she said.
“Oh, yes, madam. There’s nowhere like Plasencia—and no one like Granny
and Auntie!”
There was a definite matter upon which the Doña wanted information; but
it required delicate handling. She was on the point of approaching it by
asking if the children were not very lonely at Cambridge, but realising
that this would be a reflection upon Nanny she immediately abandoned
it—no one could deal more cavalierly, when she chose, with the feelings
of others than the Doña; but she never _inadvertently_ hurt a fly.
So what she said was, “I suppose Dr. Sinclair is always very busy?”
“Oh, yes—always working away at his stocks and his chickens,” said Nanny
placidly, holding a small hole up to the light. “He’s managed to get that
bit of ground behind the garden, and he’s planted it with nothing but
stocks. He lets Anna help him with the chickens. She’s becoming quite a
little companion to her Daddy.”
“That is delightful,” purred the Doña; then, after a pause, “He must be
terribly lonely, poor man.”
“Oh, yes, he frets a lot, I’m sure; but, of course, gentlemen don’t show
it so much.”
“Ah?” and there was a note of suppressed eagerness in the interjection.
Nanny began to feel uncomfortable.
As dogs who live much with human beings develop an agonising
sensitiveness, so servants are apt to develop from an intimacy with their
masters a delicacy and refinement of feeling often much greater than that
of the masters.
At the bottom of her heart, she resented Dr. Sinclair’s indifference to
his children—at any rate, his indifference to Jasper—for Anna, who was
a remarkably intelligent little girl, he rather liked. But with regard
to Jasper, he had once remarked to a crony at dinner that, with the
exception of the late Lord —— (naming a famous man of science), his son
was the greatest bore he had ever met; which remark had been repeated by
the parlour-maid in a garbled version to the indignant Nanny.
Then, in decent mourning, a broken heart as well as a crape band must be
worn on the sleeve; Dr. Sinclair’s sleeve was innocent of either, and
it could not be denied that within eight months of his wife’s death his
voice was as loud and cheerful, his eyes as bright, as ever before.
Yes; but it was quite another matter to be pumped, even by “Granny,” or
to admit to any one but her own most secret heart that “Daddy” could,
under any circumstances, behave otherwise than as the model of all the
nursery virtues.
There was a short silence; then the Doña said, “Yes, poor man! It must be
very dull for him. But I suppose he is beginning to see his friends?”
“Oh, yes, madam, the College gentlemen sometimes come to talk over
his work with him,” and Nanny pursed up her lips, and accelerated the
speed with which she was threading her needle through her warp. “It’s a
blessing, I’m sure,” she added, “that he has his work to take off his
thoughts sometimes.”
“Yes, indeed!”; then, after a slight pause, “What about that Miss—what
was her name—the lady professor—Miss Fyles-Smith? Is she still working
with Dr. Sinclair?”
“I couldn’t say, madam, I’m sure. She was very kind, taking the children
on the river, and that—_when Dr. Sinclair was away_.”
The slight emphasis on the temporal clause did more credit to Nanny’s
heart than her head—considering that the rapier she was parrying was
wielded by the Doña; for it caused the Doña to say to herself, “Aha! she
knows what I mean, does she? There must be something in it then.”
However, this was loyal, faithful service, and the Doña had an innate
respect for the first-rate; but, though honouring Nanny, she did not feel
in the least ashamed of herself.
She changed the subject, and sat on, for a while, chatting on safe,
innocent topics.
3
The Doña considered that no sand-dune, Turkish divan, bank whereon
the wild thyme blows, or Patriarch’s bosom, could rival her own
fragrant-sheeted, box-spring-mattressed, eiderdowned bed; therefore she
went there early and lay there late. So on leaving the nursery, although
it was barely half-past nine, she went straight to bed, and there she
was soon established, her face smeared with Crême Simon, with a Spanish
novel lying open on the quilt. But the comfort of beds, as of all other
things—even though they be ponderable and made of wood and iron—is
subject to the capricious tyranny of dreams; and for some time, in spite
of the skill of Mr. Heal, the Doña’s bed had not been entirely compact of
roses.
When, an hour or so later, Dick climbed into his bed, she said, “I
suppose you realise that Harry has forgotten all about my Pepa?”
“Oh, nonsense, Anna! Poor chap, you don’t expect him to be always
whimpering, do you? I tell you, the English aren’t demonstrative.”
“Nor are the Spaniards, but they have a great deal of heart all the same;
and Harry has absolutely none—I don’t believe he has any soul either.”
“So much the better then; he can’t be damned.”
This was an unusually acute and spiteful remark—for Dick. The Doña
had never confided to him her vicarious terrors touching the apostasy
of Pepa, who had not had her children baptised, and, during her last
illness, had refused to the end the ministrations of Holy Church; but
one cannot pass many years in close physical intimacy with another
person without getting an inkling, though it be only subconsciously, of
that person’s secret thoughts; and though Dick had never consciously
registered his knowledge of the Doña’s, the above remark had been made
with intention to wound.
His irritation at her criticism of Harry was caused by a sense of
personal guilt: twice, perhaps, during the last year had his own thoughts
dwelt spontaneously upon Pepa—certainly not oftener.
With a sigh of relief he put out the light, shook himself into a
comfortable position, and then got into the shadowy yacht in which
every night he sailed towards his dreams. With that tenderness of males
(which deserves the attention of the Freudians) towards any vehicle—be
it horse, camel, motor-car, or ship—he knew and loved every detail of
her equipment; and in the improvements which, from time to time, he made
in her he observed a rigid realism—never, for instance, making them
unless they were justified by the actual state of his bank-book. The only
concession that he made to pure fancy was that there was no wife and
children to be considered in making his budget. On the strength of an
unexpected dividend, he had recently had her fitted out with a wireless
installation. The only guests were his life-long friend, Hugh Mallam, and
a pretty, though shadowy and somewhat Protean, young woman.
As to the Doña, she lay for hours staring with wide eyes at the darkness.
Why, oh why, had she married a Protestant? Just to annoy her too vigilant
aunts, for the sake of novelty and excitement she had, in spite of her
confessor, run off with a round-faced, unromantic young Englishman—really
unromantic, but for her with the glamour that always hangs round
hereditary enemies. Perhaps she deserved to be punished: but when they
had been little she had been so sure of her children—how could they ever
be anything but her own creatures, pliable to her touch? Even Arnold,
brought up a Protestant (he had been born before the Bull exacting that
all children of a mixed marriage should be Catholics), she had been
certain that, once his own master, he would come over. She smiled as she
remembered how he used to say when he was at school—as a joke—“Oh, yes,
I’m going to be the Pope, and I’ll have a special issue of stamps to be
used in the Vatican, then after a few days suppress ’em; so I’ll have a
corner in them!” And though he had _not_ come over to Rome, there was a
certain relaxing of tension as she thought of him; somehow or other, it
made it different his having been born before the Bull. But Pepa—that
was another thing: a member of the Catholic fold from her infancy ...
where could she be now but in that portion of Purgatory which is outside
the sphere of influence of prayers and masses, and which will one day
be known as Hell? Before her passed a series of realistic pictures of
those torments, imprinted on her imagination during _las semanas de los
ejerjicios espirituales_ of her girlhood.
Could it be?... No, it was impossible.... Impossible? Pepa had died in
mortal sin ... she was there.