Viola awoke in the morning to that sharp contraction of the heart with
which instinct defies reason.
She knew that there was nothing wrong; but she didn’t want to have to
talk to her mother.
It was not the first time she had felt that her intimacy with Mrs.
Egerton had penalties attached to it. If a person knows you very well
they may cross without warning the threshold of your consciousness. You
feel that their mind impinges upon your mind, and that when they
withdraw they take away with them something precious and secret which
was your own.
The young, with their undefined dreams and insecure possessions, resent
these pressures and disclosures. They have no ready weapon against the
mastery of searching love. They only know that what they have not yet
found for themselves, they do not want found, and perhaps judged, by
more expert eyes.
Viola dressed slowly; she wondered if she would be clever enough to
avoid talking about that strange man? She had nothing to do with him
really, but she found his image waiting for her, without impatience, but
with a curious solidity, wherever her imagination turned. It was not
like being pursued, but it was like constantly arriving at the same
spot.
Viola had read that people who get lost walk round and round in circles
continually coming to where they had started from; but then they didn’t
want to arrive there.
They didn’t have that curious little shock of half pleasure and half
surprise that Viola had when at any pause in her mind—quite
unexpectedly—she saw Jim. She went to her mother’s room at her usual
time, but her eyes had a veiled look, and she spoke in a tiresome modern
tone, a kind of slangy nonchalance which she knew her mother
particularly disliked. Mrs. Egerton made no secret of the fact that
jauntiness made her flesh creep, and she knew that Viola was never
jaunty unless she had something to hide.
Viola kissed her mother with tenderness and tried to put conviction into
her inquiries about the headache. Mrs. Egerton dismissed it with a
heroic gesture.
‘My poor darling,’ she said pityingly. ‘Did you have a perfectly
wretched evening?’
Viola straightened her slim figure and looked vaguely about her for a
chair.
‘It wasn’t half bad,’ she dropped. ‘Reggie was quite amusing.’ After all
it was perfectly natural for her to talk as if it was Reggie who
mattered.
‘Darling, he’s brilliant,’ Mrs. Egerton murmured. Her private reflection
was that Reggie had probably done something silly, and that she had
better find out what it was. ‘And that dreadful man,’ she said aloud, ‘I
suppose he turned up? Mr. What’s-his name, who belongs to the Salvation
Army?’
‘Does he?’ asked Viola, not meeting her mother’s eyes; ‘I thought he had
a sect of his own. Yes, he turned up all right.’
‘Poor dear!’ sighed Mrs. Egerton. ‘I suppose he wore blue serge and
tried to shake hands with Hobbs in the hall. I can’t quite see why we
should have had the bother of him; but I do hope that, as you and Reggie
had to sacrifice your evening together, this eccentric young docker
agreed to whatever your father had in mind?’
‘I don’t think he did agree particularly,’ Viola replied. ‘He wasn’t a
very agreeing kind of person.’
‘They never are,’ said Mrs. Egerton resignedly. ‘It’s so unfortunate
that when the poor become educated they lose all sense of gratitude to
the class above them. When I was young, if you asked a person like that
to dinner—only, of course, you never did—they would have agreed to
anything.’ Viola looked up quickly. She couldn’t have said exactly what
she felt; part of it was anger, and part of it astonishment at a
familiar point of view, which suddenly seemed astonishing; but most of
it was downright pain.
She was so much hurt that she instantly fell back upon her safest line
of defence; she didn’t say anything at all.
‘Your father, and Reggie as well, seemed to think it important to tone
him down a little,’ Mrs. Egerton went on after a pause, ‘so I hoped you
had helped them to succeed. What did you wear, darling?’
‘Oh, that nasturtium thing with the lace,’ said Viola. ‘Can we get
anything for you while we are shopping, mother? I am going out with
Reggie furniture hunting.’
‘Nothing, dearest, thank you; and you sang to them?’
‘Yes,’ said Viola.
‘And afterwards you and Reggie had a nice little talk?’
‘We had an hour alone together, I think,’ said Viola steadily. ‘I looked
at the clock.’
‘My dearest child,’ murmured Mrs. Egerton, ‘how modern you are! We poor
old lovers never looked at clocks!’
Viola turned suddenly towards her mother, her cheeks turned from their
pale clear cream to deep carnation. ‘You don’t mind my asking you, do
you,’ she said with terrible young directness. ‘But _were_ you and
father really lovers?’
Mrs. Egerton put down her cup of chocolate very carefully. ‘I adored
your father,’ she said decisively. ‘He was like that picture of Sir
Galahad, you know the one we have in the hall behind the door? One’s not
quite sure if he’s meant to be dead or not. But, of course, your father
didn’t wear his hair quite so long.’
‘What stopped your adoring him, mother,’ Viola went on with a breathless
sensation of daring, which she felt might be going to cost her more than
it cost her mother.
Mrs. Egerton met her anxious eyes with an ironical indulgence.
‘Thirty years, I think, dear’ she said gently, ‘or perhaps the city. I
was very romantic and silly, your father was always thoroughly sensible.
We settled down perfectly. _You_ are my romance now, Viola. I never gave
romance up. I transferred it to you.’
‘Oh, but you’ve had it!’ cried Viola. She knew now she was giving
herself away, but she couldn’t help it—something in her had to come out
and find shelter. It was afraid to be alone in her heart. ‘What worries
me is—I don’t feel like that at all about Reggie. There isn’t any
romance!’
There was a short pause before Mrs. Egerton found the wisest thing to
say.
‘I think your’s,’ she said tenderly, ‘is all before you, Viola. You are
in some ways very immature, and love is coming to you slowly and
incompletely—as all great things (which are going to be permanent)
come. You do like and trust Reggie?’
‘I like him very much indeed,’ agreed Viola; ‘and of course I trust
him.’
‘Oh, how lightly you say that, darling,’ murmured her mother, ‘as if to
be able to trust a man was a very little thing! You don’t know what it
is yet—the immensity of being able to trust your husband! Why, half the
women in London can’t—and even the other half—— But you are quite
safe, for if I had not _known_ that Reggie was to be trusted——’
‘I should never have liked him, should I?’ Viola unexpectedly
interrupted.
‘No—I don’t suppose I ever liked any one you have not provided for me
to like——’
‘My darling girl,’ said her mother softly, ‘do you suppose I want you to
get your disappointments from my hands? If I can stand between you and
the first dreadful sharpness of young mistakes, I shall be infinitely
thankful.’
But that didn’t seem to be what Viola meant. She sat there obstinately
saying nothing, as if she wanted her young mistakes.
Mrs. Egerton’s skilled mind ran back swiftly over the conversation.
Viola was apparently ready to speak about Reggie, but she was unwilling,
or was she only bored, when the conversation turned on that unspeakable
socialist? Had the blue serge person said anything to upset her? Viola
had always been over-sensitive about the poor—her mother quite
sympathised with her attitude. It seemed to her, as long as you didn’t
do anything tiresome, quite the right feeling for a young girl to have.
She had herself suggested to Viola two very excellent societies: one for
giving factory girls holidays, and one for providing babies with
artificial food.
Whenever Viola felt badly about the poor, she had the societies, and
whenever she didn’t feel badly, the societies ran on quite comfortably
without her. Mrs. Egerton subscribed heavily to both.
It was an excellent arrangement, and it would be just like a socialist
to say something to upset it.
It did not enter into Mrs. Egerton’s conception of life that the
personality of the man himself could have upset Viola. It is doubtful if
she thought that people beneath a certain social standing had any
personality. They might have good looks, but girls, unless they were
fast, did not run any danger from a common man’s good looks.
‘Dearest,’ she said firmly, ‘I think you are worried about something.
Sometimes I know one feels oppressed with life, and everything seems to
stop pleasing. Directly you came in this morning I thought to myself
that you had something pricking against your happiness. Tell me what it
is?’
It was uncanny the power her mother had of slipping past her defences
into Viola’s mind, but there was something which had escaped her. Viola
herself did not know the importance of this escape.
She only felt faintly relieved that Jim Barton wasn’t really in the
conversation at all. She had nearly forgotten him herself now in her
anxiety about her engagement, but she hadn’t forgotten that she didn’t
want to talk about him.
‘I suppose the trouble is,’ she said slowly, ‘that I don’t really know
if I’m happy or not. I keep expecting to be happy.’
Her mother’s eyes darkened as they met hers.
‘Ah, my dear!’ she said. ‘Thank God you’ve never known unhappiness!’
‘No,’ agreed Viola quietly, ‘I don’t think I have—but what I feel is
that I may be going to!’
Mrs. Egerton kissed her, and said with decision, ‘Never, if I can help
it, darling. There’s a cold wind—put on your furs. And don’t worry
Reggie about your feelings. He’d be desperate about them, and we don’t
need to be desperate yet, do we?’
Viola returned her kiss, but she wasn’t perfectly satisfied. She wasn’t
quite sure whether she needed to be desperate or not.
As soon as Viola had closed the door Mrs. Egerton rang for the Bradshaw.
‘This is a very serious business,’ she said to herself, ‘and if I’m not
very careful something odious is sure to happen. Reggie hasn’t half
enough tact, he’s too much in love, poor boy; and as for Viola, she
deserves to be slapped. She has always had a curious tendency to avoid
what is suitable. It makes her very unreliable. I had better take her
away from Reggie for a month. Then Paris, then the wedding. Engagements
are always unsatisfactory.
‘There is a great deal too much emotion about, without one’s knowing
quite what to do with it. Perhaps I was silly not to let her get used to
flirting. But innocence is so rare nowadays, and whatever people say to
the contrary, still very attractive to men.
‘Unfortunately, Viola always carries things to extremes. At her age,
with even less experience, I had as much innocence as was convenient to
everybody, and no more. I think we’d better try Eastbourne; it’s
sufficiently amusing, and sounds healthy enough to make a good excuse.’
Mrs. Egerton’s mind was one that never overlooked details.