Viola Egerton was as interested in life as a well-cared for kitten. She
did not want to get to the end of her ball of wool; but she loved
tangling it up.
She wanted to destroy a little, tease a little, explore a great deal,
and play imaginary games in an imaginary jungle, without being too much
interfered with by reality. She chased her own tail with ardour, and she
thought, when she had succeeded in catching it, she would have done
something very handsome.
She did not wish to be too different from other people. Viola was afraid
of the spark of imagination which pushed her beyond the hedges of her
upbringing, and she was even more afraid of the tides of young
generosity which threatened to make her ridiculous by their intensity.
She didn’t want to make people think she was tiresome and clever any
more than that she was innocent and dull. Above everything she wanted to
be considered modern; to be like some of the girls she knew—audacious,
a little hard, without continuity, and knowing rapidly and thoroughly
what they wanted.
These young people went their own way and were not easily upset.
Viola Egerton knew that she did not possess these qualities. She wavered
even over what she wanted, her judgment slid away from application, and
more often than not she went other people’s way, because she liked
pleasing them better than she liked pleasing herself.
Above all, she liked to please her mother. Mrs. Egerton was as charming
when she was pleased as a warm day in spring, and she was as inclement
as the edge of an east wind when people were careless, or wilful enough
to displease her.
She had been an indulgent mother, but there had always been something
behind her indulgence which could not be trifled with. She let her two
children do what they liked after she had chosen it.
Harry never found this out. When his mother had moulded him into the
precise form she thought a young man of his station should present, she
let him go on at his own momentum, and Harry went on, serenely,
selfishly, and above all safely, under the impression that he was
exercising his own free will.
But Viola had qualms. She had recognised even as a child that when her
heart was set upon an inconvenient mongrel puppy, her mother had
instantly presented her with a magnificent wax doll; and it had not been
precisely the same thing to her.
But she only once openly defied her mother. She wanted to read _Ann
Veronica_, every one was saying that it was a dreadful book and ought
never to be read by young girls. Almost every girl in Viola’s set read
it, and most of them thought they were potential Ann Veronicas, though
perhaps more intelligent. Mrs. Egerton said when she saw it in Viola’s
hands, ‘Oh, that tiresome book. I shouldn’t bother about it——’ and
_Ann Veronica_ mysteriously disappeared, a sapphire blue leather bound
volume of _An English Woman’s Love Letters_ taking its place. Viola went
out, bought another copy of _Ann Veronica_, read it with flaming cheeks
and an uneven heart, and took it to her mother. ‘I wanted to read it
after all,’ she said defiantly, ‘and I went and bought it.’
Mrs. Egerton said, ‘Did you, darling? What a pity. There is a copy
somewhere in the house. I’m afraid it must have bored you dreadfully.’
The worst of it was that Viola couldn’t feel like Ann Veronica. Nobody
defied her to go to balls; on the contrary, they brought round padded
motors and took her.
Neither of her parents were ever rude to her, or ordered her about, and
it is much more difficult to rebel against velvet than against violence.
As soon as Viola’s education was finished, her mother said to her,
‘Dearest, you’re the greatest friend I have in the world. It would break
my heart if, because we’re two grown up women in one house. We didn’t
get on.
‘I purpose to share all my pleasures with you and all my confidence—and
whatever you choose to tell me in return shall be kept secret. We will
talk over all you want to do, so that I shan’t make any mistakes.’
They did talk it over, and most of Viola’s inspirations evaporated; but
on the whole what replaced them was more inspiring still. Mrs. Egerton
was as good as her word; she gave her daughter her confidence; that is
to say, she told her what she thought it would be good for her to know,
and she made it extremely amusing.
Other girls in Viola’s set went out more alone and were tasting the
delights of new-won social freedom. Viola was anxious to reproduce their
liberty in her own life, but when it came to the point, Mrs. Egerton
raised her charming eyebrows, and said with laughing, experienced
eyes,—
‘But you don’t want to get kissed by young men in cabs, do you,
darling?’
And Viola wasn’t quite modern enough to say that she did. She could only
stammer and grow red, and look silly, and decide that no liberty was
worth having at the price of having to meet her mother’s amused wise
eyes, while she was using it.
Viola had with acuteness, the sensitiveness of the untried. No young
girl can explain easily that she wants to learn what older women know.
She wishes to appear to know already. She wishes not to know exactly,
but to be possessed of the adroitness which comes with knowledge; above
all she wishes to escape being watched while she is finding out.
Viola, more sensitive than most, made a swift retreat into her
ignorance.
She was allowed plenty of friends of her own age, but her mother was
always her most intimate companion, she was like an enchanting elder
sister. She laughed at Viola very little, and never before any one else,
and she gave her a sense of enormous social ease.
Her wisdom and experience were like skilful tools, ready to slip into
her daughter’s nervous hands at every crisis.
Mrs. Egerton never used anything she possessed against Viola; her wit,
her knowledge of the world, even her still splendid beauty—were not
rivals to her daughter’s gifts—they were always reinforcements.
She had been a noted beauty in her day, and no one would have known that
it was over, if she had not so placidly asserted it. Only Mrs. Egerton
herself knew that her placidity and her renunciation were but the cloak
of an ambition—as bitter as salt, and as hot as flame.
She had failed to do what she wanted with her own life, but she had
determined to do it with her daughter’s.
Harry was perfectly useless. He would never give his mother any trouble;
he was her husband over again, a decent, reliable, pleasant fellow,
without a leader’s eyes or hands.
He would not lose money, and when he died (which would probably be not
before eighty) he would never be heard of again.
Mrs. Egerton had wanted power and a great name. She had believed at
eighteen that Tom Egerton, who was very handsome and had just won a
fortune out of a peculiarly brilliant stroke of business, was capable of
presenting her with what she wanted.
He couldn’t become an ambassador because he was not a linguist, but he
might, if carefully run, become anything else. He talked a great deal
and men listened to him; he almost always said what the men of his own
class were thinking—and he never said what they weren’t. Unfortunately,
Tom’s shipping deal had really been the work of a common young
under-manager, whom the firm had to get rid of, because he wanted to be
made a director and had no capital beyond his brains.
Tom never did anything brilliant afterwards, but he went on making a
good deal of money regularly and thinking that it was, on the whole, due
to him that the money was made.
He did not realise that money follows money as duck follows duck, and
his increasing fortune looked very like brains—coming in, in large
quantities, fairly easily, and not going out again, because he always
had the sense not to do anything silly with it.
Tom couldn’t see what more his wife wanted. He was very much in love
with her, and for the first five years of their married life he met her
efforts to rouse him into political leadership, by kindred efforts of
his own. He puffed himself out like the frog who wanted to be thought a
bullock, but he had just enough commonsense to stop in time to prevent
any serious explosion. If a command of platitude, and a modest sense of
self-importance were enough to have made Tom a Cabinet Minister, there
is no doubt he would have become one. He believed in himself and he
believed in all the causes which support such a self, but he wasn’t as a
speaker, infectious.
He tried twice for a seat, failed with a too obvious majority against
him, and retired from public life with the knowledge that his wife
thought him a fool.
He was not the type of man who can go on being in love with a woman who
thinks him a fool; but he always admired her, and he never did anything
at all desperate.
He liked his home, his children and his business; he managed his cellars
excellently and was a delightful host.
What he did with his private life was his own affair; he could afford
discretion.
Mrs. Egerton never failed to be perfectly polite to her husband, and
perfectly indifferent to him. She spent a great deal of money, but it
was thoroughly well spent; and her conduct was irreproachable.
She often used to say with her wistful, two-edged smile, ‘I am the Early
Victorian wife and mother, you know. I have no life outside my poor
little home.’
They had a house in Grosvenor Square and one in the country.
No trainer ever studied a prospective favourite for the Derby with more
watchful precautionary care than Mrs. Egerton gave to her only daughter.
She played for Viola’s sensitive, imaginative heart as great men play
for kingdoms; and the child loved her, responded to her, and grew very
much what her mother had hoped; but Mrs. Egerton was not wholly sure of
her.
What in herself was a pleasant, romantic sentiment which often led her
to be very sorry for people when she could do nothing to help them, had
the dangerous element of intensity in Viola. Mrs. Egerton was a
well-bred woman and she never told unnecessary lies, but she did not
carry conclusions when they were too heavy to be comfortable, she put
them down; and there were moments when she thought Viola did not know
when to let unpleasant conclusions drop. She was an inconveniently
truthful child, and she was never silly in the right place.
Even Viola’s humour was more intelligent for her age than was at all
advisable.
It might bring quite suitable young men up too short.
But these were faults of youth, and she was too lovely not to be easily
forgiven.
Viola had not inherited her mother’s splendid regularity of features,
but she had got her clear olive skin, the beauty of the lines of her
small head superbly carried, the delicate curve of her chin, and
eyebrows which had the fine, firm lightness of a butterfly’s wings. The
eyes beneath them were not as brilliant as Mrs. Egerton’s; they were a
shade darker and their expression was tentative and candid. Viola hadn’t
anything to hide, and she had a great deal to learn. Men thought them
charming eyes.
She was much smaller than her mother; nature had finished her off with
the same attention to detail; her hands were like white pointed flowers,
her feet and ankles had never needed the implacable care with which her
mother had treated them.
Mrs. Egerton left nothing in her daughter’s appearance to chance or
nature. She despised people who leave well alone, when with a little
attention to detail they could make it better.
No girl in London was as well turned out as Viola Egerton. She was as
actually strong, and as fragile looking, as a briar rose. She could have
stood any exposure, but she looked as if she had never been exposed. She
did not have freckles, colds or nerves.
Viola herself was perfectly unconscious of the processes applied to her.
She accepted cold cream for her skin, drank barley water when she would
have preferred tea, and enjoyed regular and delightful exercise without
thinking about these practices. She supposed she was clean and tidy like
everybody else.
Viola never discovered that she was as much a work of art as one of
Leonardo’s faintly smiling women; nor that secretly in her mother’s mind
there was the same high price attached to her.
It was true that a casual glance from a pair of masculine eyes—and all
Mrs. Egerton’s care might be thrown away. The point of Viola’s life must
be marriage, and after she had made her beautiful, Mrs. Egerton knew
that she still had the harder task in front of her, of making her beauty
safe.
Fortunately she had already avoided the worst pitfalls. Viola showed no
genius. She had not even any very strong tastes.
She had had the best teachers in Europe, and she sang in a perfectly
trained, sweet, small voice, and danced nearly as well as she had been
taught. She took to perfection in dress as naturally as a bee to
lavender. She hadn’t much time for reading, and read what was in the
house.
All the slighter dangers of the roused intellect had been successfully
escaped, but there was always the more acute danger of personal friends.
Mrs. Egerton had her house full of the right kind of men, and Viola had
talked to them from childhood without apparent supervision. The Egertons
received as many other women as Mrs. Egerton considered necessary. She
did not like other women, but when they had to be there they were there;
and she was perfectly charming to Viola’s girl friends.
With infinite skill and precaution she managed to prevent any deep
intimacy between Viola and these young persons.
When Viola showed too marked an inclination for ‘dear Maud’ she found
herself more and more thrown with ‘dear Edith,’ and if ‘dear Edith’
threatened to be at all tiresome, she faded without any apparent reason
into ‘dear Mabel.’
The Suffrage question was for a time a direct menace, but Mrs. Egerton
handled it from the first with supreme skill. She behaved as if the
women who wanted a vote suffered from the same serious disability to
attract which is supposed to haunt the unmarried. Attractive women did
not need to clamour for either a vote or a husband. What they wanted
happened without any legal stir. She refused to take the subject
seriously. ‘I know, dear,’ she said to Viola. ‘Suffragettes are the most
dreadful nuisance, and anti-Suffragettes are worse. I think we won’t let
people bore us over them.’ And she made a rule that no discussion on the
question should ever be allowed in her house.
Viola felt indefinably relieved by the shelving of this painful subject.
She wanted to think the vote didn’t matter, because she knew that if it
did she, too, ought to go white-faced and trembling to noisy meetings,
and walk with tired feet over the London streets. She even wondered
whether the whole question wasn’t so extreme as to make law-breaking
less an enormity than some of the laws hastily devised against it. At a
word of positive opposition she would have hoisted her colours and known
what they were.
But Mrs. Egerton said she thought that women would probably get the vote
in the end, if enough of them wanted it sufficiently, and could have got
it long ago if half a dozen really charming women hadn’t been able to
get a great deal more without bothering. But what these poor dears who
were making such a fuss didn’t realise was that a vote in itself was
really worth nothing at all, except perhaps to quite poor people. It
took the edge off sacrifice to think that if you gave everything you
had, and did everything you didn’t want to do, you would get nothing at
all for it.
The Egertons went to Egypt for the worst winter, and in the summer Viola
was nineteen and received her first proposal. It was a most satisfactory
offer: ten thousand a year and a baronetcy of a quite respectable date.
Mrs. Egerton was not a vulgar woman, but she felt the same secret thrill
of triumph with which a careful cat greets its kitten’s first mouse.
She took Viola’s refusal perfectly calmly. It was a very fine mouse, but
she had not meant it to be final.
Sir Edgar Milton was an excellent match; but he wasn’t anything else. He
had an engaging manner and the brains of a healthy schoolboy of fifteen.
He wanted Viola as if she was cake, and cried when she refused him.
Viola cried as well; she cried a great deal too much; it even gave her
mother a momentary pang of uneasiness as to whether a kitten of so
remorseful a type would make a satisfactory mouser?
Viola’s next refusal was a man of the world. Bertram Montague had had a
career with women, and a more inspiring and less erratic career in the
House. He was the kind of man who may still, if it is made reasonably
easy, do something remarkable.
Viola was flattered by his attentions and a little afraid of him. He was
very clever with her, and she nearly accepted him because he made it
seem as if there was no alternative. But something in his eyes at the
last moment made her feel like a creature close to a trap. She ran away
from him literally, and was very much ashamed of herself afterwards.
She didn’t cry after that refusal, but she felt very much relieved.
Mrs. Egerton thought two refusals were enough. She had a long, quiet
talk with Viola, and she made her feel, without hurting her feelings,
that to go on refusing nice, kind men, who would make perfectly good
husbands, wouldn’t be considerate or even very well-bred.
‘Of course there’s no reason in the world why you should marry, my pet,’
she said tranquilly. ‘I never can see why to be an old maid should
always seem a little ridiculous and left out, particularly as such very
plain women marry, and sometimes such extremely pretty ones don’t; but
if you’ve really made up your mind to avoid marriage, it would be
kinder, wouldn’t it, to a little more avoid men?’
Mrs. Egerton didn’t point out how, in a house that was practically
always full of them, they were to be avoided. She only smiled
caressingly and said, ‘There is nothing in the world your father and I
want less than to get rid of you, dearest.’
Viola knew that she had an ideal home, but she wanted sometime or other
to get out of it, and of course she didn’t want to be unkind.
So when the third applicant came she accepted him. He was young,
handsome, intelligent, and extravagantly in love with her. Viola really
rather wanted to accept him. She thought it would be nice to go off
alone together. It was always exciting when he came, and dull when he
went.
She could do whatever she liked with him.
It was like owning a very intelligent dog who picks up tricks in a flash
and never snaps at his biscuit till you say the word.
It was true that Viola was not sure that she wanted to marry him, but
then she wasn’t sure that she wanted to marry any one, she was only sure
that she didn’t want not to be married at all.
This man was the kind of husband she had always meant to have. He was
cleverer than she was; he knew all about politics and had real books she
had never heard of. He held his own easily in the society of much older
men.
He had a pleasant wit and the air of never being left behind. He, too,
would give Viola that reassuring sense of social security which her
mother gave her.
Perhaps he would give her more, and reassure her sometimes wondering
sense of moral questions, a little overlooked in the pressure of daily
life.
But though he was the kind of man Viola wanted, he wasn’t the man
himself. Nothing in her heart but pity responded to his pleading,
burning eyes. Unfortunately she had a great deal of pity, and she did
not know that pity can be cruel when it is given instead of love.
Mrs. Egerton comforted her by assuring Viola that love came gradually
with nice women, and that the nicer they were the more gradually it
came.
Her father said with even more than his usual confidence in his own
judgment, ‘What I like about him, my darling, is he’s all right. You’ve
chosen a white man.’ His future son-in-law was the son of his
co-director.
Harry kissed her and said she was a lucky girl, and he hoped she’d
invite him to Scotland and make her husband buy a yacht. A marriage
founded on these simple principles couldn’t, in Harry’s eyes, go very
far wrong.
Viola put her hand on his shoulder and said thoughtfully, ‘Harry, I wish
I knew more about men,’ and Harry chuckled and said, ‘You will, old
girl, you will,’ but of course what Viola had meant was _first_.
No one had tried to influence her about her engagement. She wasn’t being
deceived or hoodwinked, no essential fact was kept from her.
She knew all about love; the only thing she had not had much opportunity
of learning anything about was life.