INTRODUCING THE READER TO MR. AND MRS. WYNNE, A COUNTY CRICKETER, A
SUFFRAGETTE, AN HEIR OF THE AGES, AND AN ANGEL
Queen Anne's Gate, where my stepsister and her family live, is, I
think, save for the lack of sun, the most attractive street in
London. My stepsister's house backing on the Park, the windows on
that side pick up some kindly oblique rays in the afternoon, but in
the morning they are sunless. My stepsister, who is an optimist,
says, however, that she would as soon see from her rooms London lit
by the sun as have the sun herself.
Certainly she has made her own especial sanctuary very charming, and
the view over the Park and the water to the cool line of Carlton
House Terrace and the grey mist above is very soothing. To the right
is the half smoked, half gleaming stone-work of the Government
offices.
It is a quiet spot, undisturbed by shattering traffic. One sits here
within sound of the greater music of the city, but so far removed
from it that the cries of the water-fowl and the cooing of
outrageously fat pigeons come soothingly to the ear. Now and then a
bugle sounds in the neighbouring barracks. Big Ben booms the hours.
In the room at the top of the house which I occupied on my return
from abroad while Naomi was scouring the neighbourhood for a lodging
for me, I used, as I lay awake at night, to hear the water-fowl so
clearly that at first it seemed like old days in Norfolk. Now, it is
a circumstance worth recording that after Norfolk there is no place
where one can so certainly count upon watching the sure strong flight
of wild-duck as St. James's Park.
It is very interesting, after an intercourse with a family which for
some years has been carried on wholly by letter, with perhaps an
occasional interchange of photographs, to be set down suddenly in its
midst and become one of it. My stepsister of course came more or
less naturally enough to me, for we had been friends when we were
young, before I went abroad. Moreover, she requires no learning: she
is always complete and the same. But her husband I had never seen,
and as for the children (as I thought of them), they were just names
and anecdotes and faded _cartes de visite_ to me. I, however, thanks
to their mother's loyalty, was more to them, for they had been told
much about my young days, and I have no doubt that portions at least
of my infrequent letters were read aloud as they arrived.
The initial difficulty--by no means a small one--of what I was to be
called having been slowly overcome (myself objecting as strongly to
the Uncle Kent which they seemed to favour as they did to the Kent
pure and simple which I wanted), all went very smoothly, and the
family quickly dropped company manners and showed me what it really
was. Not that the difference was very marked, but a difference of
course there always is--company manners being for the most part a
kind of sandpaper that removes the asperities (and occasionally the
attractions) of personality.
They are all very affectionate, but at the same time they all have
their idiosyncrasies and cherish them.
There are (as one says) two boys and two girls; but the boys are
twenty-seven and twenty-five, and the girls twenty-nine and
twenty-one. Naomi, the eldest, is the quiet head of the house, for
my stepsister has poor health and takes things easily, and it is
understood that she must be saved from anxieties and trials. Naomi
therefore is the buffer state not only between her mother and the
kitchen but between her mother and the world.
Brasilia when I first arrived was a Slade student, a suffragette, and
beyond correction or even instruction on any point under the sun.
She wore a badge bearing the words "Defiance, not Defence." Drusilla
is very pretty, but Naomi, I think, is beautiful. It is, however,
Drusilla who wins notice. Naomi's beauty is for a riper judgment,
since the better you know her the more beautiful she is. I thought
of Ceres directly I saw her, and the impression grows. If I were an
artist I would paint her so. She has the steady level gaze that I
think of as that goddess's: she loves all little helpless things, and
all little helpless things love her; she leaves nothing quite where
it is, but stimulates and nourishes it. And yet to compare Naomi
with Ceres is not doing her full justice, for it takes no count of
her sympathetic imagination or her readiness for fun. Ceres the
goddess, I take it, might have been the dullest woman in real life.
Naomi, although she could not be called clever and certainly is not
witty, is so full of what, to save much language, one might call
womanliness, and the best womanliness, as to suggest profound sanity.
If I had to describe this gift in a single word, I should say
acceptivity. Those of us who are born critical and exacting approach
nothing quite simply: we disapprove or we approve, and in so doing
lose not only time but equanimity. But to Naomi's serene, sane mind
the world has to be accepted as it is, and therefore she is always
the same. Not that she considers everything perfect, but she has an
instinctive realisation of the inevitability of imperfection which
keeps her contented--or at any rate prevents querulous discontent.
Naomi's sweet and candid mind, without poring over the matter at all,
has, one feels, submitted life and all its phenomena to a reasonable
evaluation. She understands: in a word, accepts. It is indeed a
special prerogative of even stupid women to do this simply. The last
thing that men learn about women is how transparent and natural they
really are in all the essentials, our delay being due largely to our
own want of imagination and not a little to the circumstance that we
are brought up to expect freakishness, insincerity, and mischief.
Proverbial lore, the testimony of so much literature, and the whole
tendency of national facetiousness run that way. And yet few
intelligent men individually would support it from their own
knowledge, and most would say that among their least admirable and
most ridiculous moments were those which they had once spent in
protecting their wives or sweethearts (to use a better word than
fiancées) from possibilities of offence in public places. Women are
far nearer nature than men: so near, indeed, that one suspects that
the inventor of most of the superficial proprieties was not Mrs.
Grundy but her husband.
Naomi has no vocation. The eight years intervening between her birth
and that of Drusilla made all the difference, and it is as natural
for the elder sister never to have learned, say, typewriting, as it
is for the younger to learn painting in Gower Street. But Naomi is
by far the busier. She is, indeed, always employed, either indoors
or out. She does the shopping, decides the menu, writes most of the
letters, engages servants, and pays the calls.
Those are her family duties. Her own tastes run in the direction of
what is called charity, but to them she herself would never give that
word. The number of her pensioners (and I might say subjects or
worshippers) no one probably will ever know. They are not by any
means all in want of material help, the only benefaction she offers
beneath many roofs being the bounty of her smile and cheerfulness.
She makes a point, for example, of retaining knowledge of the Queen
Anne's Gate servants after they leave, which they do only to be
married and have fat and happy babies with punctuality and dispatch
for Miss Naomi to play with and befriend. There are three such
servants at this moment in various parts of London whose babies are
visited regularly; but Frank's twins naturally come first. Then
there is a hospital at which Naomi attends, and a girls' club of
which she is the treasurer; and of course she has a retinue of
"chars" and sewing women.
The boys are Frank and Lionel. Frank is the only one that is
married, and he lives in a tiny house in Barton Street with his wife
and his twins. He is at present a journalist, but all kinds of books
are to come from him. Lionel is at the Bar, but not yet has he
pleaded a cause, largely, I fancy, on account of the British
solicitor's unwillingness to believe in the zeal or capacity of a
Middlesex fast scorer (for Lionel plays for that county), and partly
because his grandmother's generosity has made it so absurdly possible
for Lionel to neglect his duties.
Frank I like immensely, for he is quiet and kind and humorous, but
Lionel is more caustic and impatient than one wants, and he is also a
shade too voluble upon games. He may be said to live for them; and,
as with most men who do so, his yawns come with the dusk. Cricket I
too adore, and we have this passion in common; but Lionel is not
interested in the past, and that, of course, is where all my cricket
lies. He is, however, going to take me to see him play, and I dare
say I shall soon learn enough about the new men not to bore him.
Into golf I cannot follow him; partly because I have never played,
and partly because I like socialism in games, and the idea of
employing a caddie will always be unpleasant to me. Lionel naturally
cannot accept this point of view, and so few other golfers that I
know are able to do so that I have come to the conclusion that the
golfing temperament is essentially aristocratic--a feudal
inheritance--the property exclusively of those who can see nothing
absurd or even degrading in the spectacle of powerful frivolous men
being followed by boys of burden.
With my stepsister I was of course quickly at home; but with her
husband, Alderley Wynne, K.C., I shall never really be comfortable.
Beside his clear, comprehensive, legal, synthetic mind, accustomed to
see the end at the same moment that it sees the beginning,
generalising swiftly and usually accurately, my intellectual edges
appear so very ragged and indistinct, and my hesitancies with regard
to right and wrong so cowardly and anarchical. Moreover, he does not
understand how any man can voluntarily expatriate himself except for
gain, and I have come back so little better off than I left.
Alderley likes a man to make either money or reputation; he is
impatient of all who stand still. Stuff must in due course be
succeeded by silk in life as well as at the Bar, he holds. I figure
as a stationary man, which is only one degree less reprehensible than
a retrograde man. None the less, since he is devoted to his wife in
a very beautiful, attentive way, and she is fond of me, and I stand
for her relation (although I am, of course, no kin to her really),
even although his critical judgment tells him that I have failed, his
heart and house are open to me.
It is amusing to watch him with his daughters, for although he
disapproves of almost every word that Drusilla says, yet his passion
for intellectual activity makes him secretly far prouder of her than
of Naomi, whom he loves truly enough, but is inclined rather to group
with mere creatures of instinct.
Naomi threw out signals of understanding at once and took me under
her charge, as I have already shown. You leave it to me, she seemed
to say, evidently looking upon me as a foreigner in need of help and
instruction at every turn. Unmarried girls of twenty-nine, if they
have not grown embittered (as they are too apt to do), can be very
administrative and protective. The maternal feeling, I suppose.
With Drusilla, whose blood circulates more in the brain, I have not
hit it off so well, although we are quite friendly. She so clearly
looks upon me pityingly as a trifler and in a sense an ignoramus (for
I had never even heard of John), and she is not yet old enough to see
that England and its needs can perhaps be as well, if not better,
studied from abroad than when one is in the midst. The difference
between Naomi and Drusilla is that Drusilla asks, Naomi gives. Not
the least remarkable thing in this wonderful world in which we grope
and have our being, is the amazing differences that can exist in the
children of the same parents.
With the exception of Frank, the family seems to be incorrigibly
celibate. But of course at every moment lifelong decisions to be
single are being overturned, and one never knows. Drusilla now, I
feel, might easily follow some such remark as "Please pass the salt"
with the statement, made equally coolly, that she was engaged. If
so, it would probably be to a Fabian with long hair, a blue flannel
collar, and a red tie, or some youthful artist whose genius carries
with it a perpetual dispensation from soap and razor. All her
friends seem to be young men of these two brands, who like drawing to
be ugly and poetry to be Irish. I meet her now and then in St.
James's Park with a retinue of them, and we stand on the bridge and
exchange views of life for a few moments or draw each other's
attention to the light over Whitehall and the colour of London. Then
they move off, a little as if they were guests for the Last Supper,
with their brown beards and blue collars, and Drusilla and I walk to
Queen Anne's Gate together.
They are all simple good fellows, in spite of their very patent
atheisms and nihilisms and solemn vows to be married either without a
ceremony at all or in a registry office; but I don't think our little
Drusilla is for any of them. For this new comradeship between young
men and young women is not making for marriage, especially among the
bisexual, as to a certain extent most artists and revolutionaries are.
One other member the family may be said to have: Mr. Adolphus--or
Dollie--Heathcote, an articled pupil of Alderley's who is continually
dropping in in the evening and is on the best terms with himself and
every one: a very agreeable ornamental person. When it was the
fashion to present me with contributions of furniture or knick-knacks
for my rooms, Dollie, who seems to have an infallible scent for
everything that is, in his own phrase, dodgy, and who lights his
cigarettes with a pocket spirit-lamp that would not be out of place
in the _Arabian Nights_, gave me a clock on a new design which
dispenses with a dial but records the hours and minutes on little
numbered labels. These labels are flipped away by an invisible
agency one by one as they expire, and are for one's comfort almost
too much like performers in a sombre moral drama illustrating the
flight of time and the approach of annihilation. Dollie, however, I
am sure has no such thoughts. "A top-hole idea," he called it.