XI

The Wemyss-Entwhistle engagement proceeded on its way of development

through the ordinary stages of all engagements: secrecy complete,

secrecy partial, semi-publicity, and immediately after that entire

publicity, with its inevitable accompanying uproar. The uproar, always

more or less audible to the protagonists, of either approval or

disapproval, was in this case one of unanimous disapproval. Lucy's

father's friends protested to a man. The atmosphere at Eaton Terrace was

convulsed; and Lucy, running as she always did to hide from everything

upsetting into Wemyss's arms, was only made more certain than ever that

there alone was peace.

This left Miss Entwhistle to face the protests by herself. There was

nothing for it but to face them. Jim had had so many intimate, devoted

friends, and each of them apparently regarded his daughter as his

special care and concern. One or two of the younger ones, who had been

disciples rather than friends, were in love with her themselves, and

these were specially indignant and vocal in their indignation. Miss

Entwhistle found herself in the position she had tried so hard to

avoid, that of defending and explaining Wemyss to a highly sceptical,

antagonistic audience. It was as if, forced to fight for him, she was

doing so with her back to her drawing-room wall.

Lucy couldn't help her, because though she was distressed that her aunt

should be being worried because of her affairs, yet she did feel that

Everard was right when he said that her affairs concerned nobody in the

world but herself and him. She, too, was indignant, but her indignation

was because her father's friends, who had been ever since she could

remember always good and kind, besides perfectly intelligent and

reasonable, should with one accord, and without knowing anything about

Everard except that story of the accident, be hostile to her marrying

him. The ready unfairness, the willingness immediately to believe the

worst instead of the best, astonished and shocked her. And then the way

they all talked! Everlasting arguments and reasoning and hair-splitting;

so clever, so impossible to stand up against, and yet so surely, she was

certain, if only she had been clever too and able to prove things,

wrong. All their multitudinous points of view,--why, there was only one

point of view about a thing, Everard said, and that was the right one.

Ah, but what a woman wanted wasn't this; she didn't want this endless

thinking and examining and dissecting and considering. A woman--her very

thoughts were now dressed in Wemyss's words--only wanted her man. '"Hers

not to reason why,"' Wemyss had quoted one day, and both of them had

laughed at his parody, '"hers but to love and--not die, but live."'

The most that could be said for her father's friends was that they

meant well; but oh, what trouble the well-meaning could bring into an

otherwise simple situation! From them she hid--it was inevitable--in

Wemyss's arms. Here were no arguments; here were no misgivings

and paralysing hesitations. Here was just simple love, and the

feeling--delicious to her whose mother had died in the very middle of

all the sweet early petting, and whose whole life since had been spent

entirely in the dry and bracing company of unusually inquisitive-minded,

clever men--of being a baby again in somebody's big, comfortable,

uncritical lap.

The engagement hadn't leaked out so much as flooded out. It would have

continued secret for quite a long time, known only to the three and to

the maids--who being young women themselves, and well acquainted with

the symptoms of the condition, were sure of it before Miss Entwhistle

had even begun to suspect,--if Wemyss hadn't taken to dropping in,

contrary to expectations, on the Thursday evenings. Lucy's descriptions

of these evenings and of the people who came, and of how very kind they

were to her aunt and herself, and how anxious they were to help her,

they of course supposing that she was, actually, the lonely thing she

would have been if she hadn't had Everard as the dear hidden background

to her life--at this point they embraced,--at first amused him, then

made him curious, and finally caused him to come and see for himself.

He didn't tell Lucy he was coming, he just came. It had taken him five

Thursday evenings of playing bridge as usual at his club, playing it

with one hand, as he said to her afterwards, and thinking of her with

the other--'You know what I mean,' he said, and they laughed and

embraced--before it slowly oozed into and pervaded his mind that there

was his little girl, rounded by people fussing over her and making love

to her (because, said Wemyss, everybody would naturally want to make

love to her), and there was he, the only person who had a right to do

this, somewhere else.

So he walked in; and when he walked in, the group standing round Lucy

with their backs to the door saw her face, which had been gently

attentive, suddenly flash into colour and light; and turning with one

accord to see what it was she was looking at behind them with parted

lips and eyes of startled joy, beheld once more the unknown chief

mourner of the funeral in Cornwall.

Down there they had taken for granted that he was a relation of Jim's,

the kind of relative who in a man's life appears only three times, the

last of which is his funeral; here in Eaton Terrace they were

immediately sure he was not, anyhow, that, because for relatives who

only appear those three times a girl's face doesn't change in a flash

from gentle politeness to tremulous, shining life. They all stared at

him astonished. He was so different from the sorts of people they had

met at Jim's. For one thing he was so well dressed,--in the mating

season, thought Miss Entwhistle, even birds dress well,--and in his

impressive evening clothes, with what seemed a bigger and more spotless

shirt-front than any shirt-front they could have imagined, he made them

look and feel what they actually were, a dingy, shabby lot.

Wemyss was good-looking. He might be middle-aged, but he was

good-looking enough frequently to eclipse the young. He might have a

little too much of what tailors call a fine presence, but his height

carried this off. His features were regular, his face care-free and

healthy, his brown hair sleek with no grey in it, he was clean-shaven,

and his mouth was the kind of mouth sometimes described by journalists

as mobile, sometimes as determined, but always as well cut. One could

visualise him in a fur-lined coat, thought a young man near Lucy,

considering him; and one couldn't visualise a single one of the others,

including himself, in the room that evening in a fur-lined coat. Also,

thought this same young man, one could see railway porters and

taxi-drivers and waiters hurrying to be of service to him; and one not

only couldn't imagine them taking any notice that wasn't languid and

reluctant of the others, including himself, but one knew from personal

distressing experience that they didn't.

'My splendid lover!' Lucy's heart cried out within her when the door

opened and there he stood. She had not seen him before in the evening,

and the contrast between him and the rest of the people there was really

striking.

Miss Entwhistle had been right: there was no hiding the look in Lucy's

eyes or Wemyss's proprietary manner. He hadn't meant to take any but the

barest notice of his little girl, he had meant to be quite an ordinary

guest--just shake hands and say 'Hasn't it been wet to-day'--that sort

of thing; but his pride and love were too much for him, he couldn't hide

them. He thought he did, and was sure he was behaving beautifully and

with the easiest unconcern, but the mere way he looked at her and stood

over her was enough. Also there was the way she looked at him. The

intelligences in that room were used to drawing more complicated

inferences than this. They were outraged by its obviousness. Who was

this middle-aged, prosperous outsider who had got hold of Jim's

daughter? What had her aunt been about? Where had he dropped from? Had

Jim known?

Miss Entwhistle introduced him. 'Mr. Wemyss,' she said to them

generally, with a vague wave of her hand; and a red spot appeared and

stayed on each of her cheekbones.

Wemyss held forth. He stood on the hearthrug filling his pipe--he was

used to smoking in that room when he came to tea with Lucy, and forgot

to ask Miss Entwhistle if it mattered--and told everybody what he

thought. They were talking about Ireland when he came in, and after the

disturbance of his arrival had subsided he asked them not to mind him

but to go on. He then proceeded to go on himself, telling them what he

thought; and what he thought was what _The Times_ had thought that

morning. Wemyss spoke with the practised fluency of a leading article.

He liked politics and constantly talked them at his club, and it created

vacancies in the chairs near him. But Lucy, who hadn't heard him on

politics before and found that she could understand every word, listened

to him with parted lips. Before he came in they had been saying things

beyond her quickness in following, eagerly discussing Sinn Fein,

Lloyd George, the outrageous cost of living--it was the autumn of

1920--turning everything inside out, upside down, being witty, being

surprising, being tremendously eager and earnest. It had been a kind of

restless flashing round and catching fire from each other,--a kind of

kick, and flick, and sparks, and a burst of laughter, and then on to

something else just as she was laboriously getting under weigh to follow

the last sentence but six. She had been missing her father, who took her

by the hand on these occasions when he saw her lagging behind, and

stopped a moment to explain to her, and held up the others while she got

her breath.

But now came Everard, and in a minute everything was plain. He had the

effect on her of a window being thrown open and fresh air and sunlight

being let in. He was so sensible, she felt, compared to these others; so

healthy and natural. The Government, he said, only had to do this and

that, and Ireland and the cost of living would immediately, regarded as

problems, be solved. He explained the line to be taken. It was a very

simple line. One only needed goodwill and a little common sense. Why,

thought Lucy, unconsciously nodding proud agreement, didn't people have

goodwill and a little common sense?

At first there was a disposition to interrupt, to heckle, but it grew

fainter and soon gave way to complete silence. The other guests might

have been stunned, Miss Entwhistle thought, so motionless did they

presently sit. And when they went away, which they seemed to do earlier

than usual and in a body, Wemyss was still standing on the hearthrug

explaining the points of view of the ordinary, sensible business man.

'Mind you,' he said, pointing at them with his pipe, 'I don't pretend to

be a great thinker. I'm just a plain business man, and as a plain

business man I know there's only one way of doing a thing, and that's

the right way. Find out what that way is, and go and do it. There's too

much arguing altogether and asking other people what they think. We

don't want talk, we want action. I agree with Napoleon, who said

concerning the French Revolution, _"Il aurait fallu mitrailler cette

canaille."_ We're not simple enough.'

This was the last the others heard as they trooped in silence down the

stairs. Outside they lingered for a while in little knots on the

pavement talking, and then they drifted away to their various homes,

where most of them spent the rest of the evening writing to Miss

Entwhistle.

The following Thursday evening, her letters in reply having been vague

and evasive, they came again, each hoping to get Lucy's aunt to himself,

and on the ground of being Jim's most devoted friend ask her straight

questions such as who and what was Wemyss. Also, more particularly, why.

Who and what he was was of no sort of consequence if he would only be

and do it somewhere else; but they arrived determined to get an answer

to the third question: Why Wemyss? And when they got there, there he was

again; there before them this time, standing on the hearthrug as if he

had never moved off it since the week before and had gone on talking

ever since.

This was the end of the Thursday evenings. The next one was unattended,

except by Wemyss; but Miss Entwhistle had been forced to admit the

engagement, and from then on right up to the marriage her life was a

curse to her and a confusion. Just because Jim had appointed no guardian

in his will for Lucy, every single one of his friends felt bound to fill

the vacancy. They were indignant when they discovered that almost before

they had begun Lucy was being carried off, but they were horrified when

they discovered what Wemyss it was who was carrying her off. Most of

them quite well remembered the affair of Mrs. Wemyss's death a few weeks

before, and those who did not went, as Miss Entwhistle had gone, to the

British Museum and read it up. They also, though they themselves were

chiefly unworldly persons who lost money rather than made it, instituted

the most searching private inquiries into Wemyss's business affairs,

hoping that he might be caught out as such a rascal or so penniless, or,

preferably, both, that no woman could possibly have anything to do with

him. But Wemyss's business record, the solicitor they employed informed

them, was quite creditable. Everything about it was neat and in order.

He was not what the City would call a wealthy man, but if you went out

say to Ealing, said the solicitor, he would be called wealthy. He was

solid, and he was certainly more than able to support a wife and family.

He could have been quite wealthy if he had not adopted a principle to

which he had adhered for years of knocking off work early and leaving

his office at an hour when other men did not,--the friends were obliged

to admit that this, at least, seemed sensible. There had been, though, a

very sad occurrence recently in his private life,--'Oh, thank you,'

interrupted the friends, 'we have heard about that.'

But however good Wemyss's business record might be, it couldn't alter

their violent objection to Jim's daughter marrying him. Apart from the

stuff he talked, there was the inquest. They were aware that in this

they were unreasonable, but they were all too much attached to Jim's

memory to be able to be reasonable about a man they felt so certain he

wouldn't have liked. Singly and in groups they came at safe times, such

as after breakfast, to Eaton Terrace to reason with Lucy, too much

worried to remember that you cannot reason with a person in love. Less

wise than Miss Entwhistle, they tried to dissuade her from marrying this

man, and the more they tried the tighter she clung to him. To the

passion of love was added, by their attitudes, the passion of

protectiveness, of flinging her body between him and them. And all the

while, right inside her innermost soul, in spite of her amazement at

them and her indignation, she was smiling to herself; for it was really

very funny, the superficial judgments of these clever people when set

side by side with what she alone knew,--the tenderness, the simple

goodness of her heart's beloved.

Lucy laughed to herself in her happy sureness. She had miraculously

found not only a lover she could adore and a guide she could follow and

a teacher she could look up to and a sufferer who without her wouldn't

have been healed, but a mother, a nurse, and a playmate. In spite of his

being so much older and so extraordinarily wise, he was yet her

contemporary,--sometimes hardly even that, so boyish was he in his talk

and jokes. Lucy had never had a playmate. She had spent her life

sitting, as it were, bolt upright mentally behaving, and she hadn't

known till Wemyss came on the scene how delicious it was to relax.

Nonsense had delighted her father, it is true, but it had to be of a

certain kind; never the kind to which the adjective 'sheer' would apply.

With Wemyss she could say whatever nonsense came into her head, sheer or

otherwise. He laughed consumedly at her when she talked it. She loved to

make him laugh. They laughed together. He understood her language. He

was her playmate. Those people outside, old and young, who didn't know

what playing was and were trying to get her away from him, might beat at

the door behind which he and she sat listening, amused, as long as they

liked.

'How they all try to separate us,' she said to him one day, sitting as

usual safe in the circle of his arm, her head on his breast.

'You can't separate unity,' remarked Wemyss comfortably.

She wanted to tell them that answer, confront them with it next time

they came after breakfast, as a discouragement to useless further

effort, but she had learned that they somehow always knew when what she

said was Everard's and not hers, and then, of course, prejudiced as they

were, they wouldn't listen.

'Now, Lucy, that's pure Wemyss,' they would say. 'For heaven's sake say

something of your own.'

At Christmas Wemyss had an encounter with Miss Entwhistle, who ever

since she had been told of the engagement had been so quiet and

inoffensive that he quite liked her. She had seemed to recognise her

position as a side-show, and had accepted it without a word. She no

longer asked him questions, and she made no difficulties. She left him

alone with Lucy in Eaton Terrace, and though she had to go with them on

the outings she asserted herself so little that he forgot she was there.

But when towards the middle of December he remarked one afternoon that

he always spent Christmas at The Willows, and what day would she and

Lucy come down, Christmas Eve or the day before, to his astonishment she

looked astonished, and after a silence said it was most kind of him, but

they were going to spend Christmas where they were.

'I had hoped you would join us,' she said. 'Must you really go away?'

'But----' began Wemyss, incredulous, doubting his ears.

It was, however, the fact that Miss Entwhistle wouldn't go to The

Willows; and of course if she wouldn't Lucy couldn't either. Nothing

that he said could shake her determination. Here was a repetition, only

how much worse--fancy spoiling his Christmas--of her conduct in Cornwall

when she insisted on going away from that nice little house where they

were all so comfortably established, and taking Lucy up to London. He

had forgotten, so acquiescent had she been for weeks, that down there he

had discovered she was obstinate. It was a shock to him to realise that

her obstinacy, the most obstinate obstinacy he had ever met, might be

going to upset his plans. He couldn't believe it. He couldn't believe he

wasn't going to be able to have what he wished, and only because an old

maid said 'No.' Was the story of Balaam to be reversed, and the angel be

held up by the donkey? He refused to believe such a thing possible.

Wemyss, who made his plans first and talked about them afterwards,

hadn't mentioned Christmas even to Lucy. It was his habit to settle what

he wished to do, arrange all the details, and then, when everything was

ready, inform those who were to take part. It hadn't occurred to him

that over the Christmas question there would be trouble. He had

naturally taken it for granted that he would spend Christmas with his

little girl, and of course as he always spent it at The Willows she

would spend it there too. All his arrangements were made, and the

servants, who looked surprised, had been told to get the spare-rooms

ready for two ladies. He had begun to feel seasonable as early as the

first week in December, and had bespoken two big turkeys instead of one,

because this was to be his first real Christmas at The Willows--Vera had

been without the Christmas spirit--and he felt it couldn't be celebrated

lavishly enough. Two where there had in previous years been one,--that

was the turkeys; four where there had been two,---that was the plum

puddings. He doubled everything. Doubling seemed the proper, even the

symbolic expression of his feelings, for wasn't he soon going to be

doubled himself? And how sweetly.

Then suddenly, having finished his preparations and proceeding, the

time being ripe, to the question of the day of arrival, he found

himself up against opposition. Miss Entwhistle wouldn't go to The

Willows--incredible, impossible, and insufferable,--while Lucy, instead

of instantly insisting and joining with him in a compelling majority,

sat as quiet as a mouse.

'But Lucy----' Wemyss having stared speechless at her aunt, turned to

her. 'But of course we must spend Christmas together.'

'Oh yes,' said Lucy, leaning forward, 'of course----'

'But of course you must come down. Why, any other arrangement is

unthinkable. My house is in the country, which is the proper place for

Christmas, and it's your Everard's house, and you haven't seen it

yet--why, I would have taken you down long ago, but I've been saving up

for this.'

'We hoped,' said Miss Entwhistle, 'you would join us here.'

'Here! But there isn't room to swing a turkey here. I've ordered two,

and each of them is twice too big to get through your front door.'

'Oh, Everard--have you actually ordered turkeys?' said Lucy.

She wanted to laugh, but she also wanted to cry. His simplicity was too

wonderful. In her eyes it set him apart from criticism and made him

sacred, like the nimbus about the head of a saint.

That he should have been secretly busy making preparations, buying

turkeys, planning a surprise, when all this time she had been supposing

that why he never mentioned The Willows was because he shrank both for

himself and for her from the house of his tragedy! There had never been

any talk of showing it to her, as there had about the house in Lancaster

Gate, and she had imagined he would never go near it again and was

probably quietly getting rid of it. He would want to get rid of it, of

course,--that house of unbearable memories. To the other one, the house

in Lancaster Gate, he had insisted on taking them to tea, and in spite

of a great desire not to go, plainly visible on her aunt's face and felt

too by herself, it had seemed after all a natural and more or less

inevitable thing, and they had gone. At least that poor Vera had only

lived there, and not died there. It was a gloomy house, and Lucy had

wanted him to give it up and start life with her in a place without

associations, but he had been so much astonished at the idea--'Why,' he

had cried, 'it was my father's house and I was born in it!'--that she

couldn't help laughing at his dismay, and was ashamed of herself for

having thought of uprooting him. Besides, she hadn't known he had been

born in it.

The Willows, however, was different. Of that he never spoke, and Lucy

had been sure of the pitiful, the delicate reason. Now it appeared that

all this time he had just been saving it up as a Christmas treat.

'Oh, Everard----!' she said, with a gasp. She hadn't reckoned with The

Willows. That The Willows should still be in Everard's life, and

actively so, not just lingering on while house agents were disposing of

it, but visited and evidently prized, came upon her as an immense shock.

'I think we can achieve a happy little Christmas for you here,' said her

aunt, smiling the smile she smiled when she found difficulty in smiling.

'Of course you and Lucy would want to be together. I ought to have told

you earlier that we were counting on you, but somehow Christmas comes on

one so unexpectedly.'

'Perhaps you'll tell me why you won't come to The Willows,' said Wemyss,

holding on to himself as she used to make him hold on to himself in

Cornwall. 'You realise, of course, that if you persist you spoil both

Lucy's and my Christmas.'

'Ah, but you mustn't put it that way,' said Miss Entwhistle, gentle but

determined. 'I promise you that you and Lucy shall be very happy here.'

'You haven't answered my question,' said Wemyss, slowly filling his

pipe.

'I don't think I'm going to,' said Miss Entwhistle, suddenly flaring up.

She hadn't flared up since she was ten, and was instantly ashamed of

herself, but there was something about Mr. Wemyss----

'I think,' she said, getting up and speaking very gently, 'you'll like

to be alone together now.' And she crossed to the door.

There she wavered, and turning round said more gently still, even

penitentially, 'If Lucy wishes to go to The Willows I'll--I'll accept

your kind invitation and take her. I leave it to her.'

Then she went out.

'That's all right then,' said Wemyss with a great sigh of relief,

smiling broadly at Lucy. 'Come here, little love,--come to your Everard,

and we'll fix it all up. Lord, what a kill-joy that woman is!'

And he put out his arms and drew her to him.