§
Now the end of this story, which is only the very beginning of Sally,
the merest introduction to her, for it isn’t to be supposed that nothing
more happened in her life,--the end of it is that she did as she was
told about Crippenham, and if the Duke had been less than ninety-three
there would have been a scandal.
But after ninety there is little scandal. The worst that was said of the
Lukes was that they had got hold of the old man, and nobody who saw
Sally believed that. Indeed, the instant anyone set eyes on her the
Duke’s behaviour was accounted for, and after five minutes in her
company it became crystal clear that she was incapable of getting hold
of anybody. So young, so shy, so acquiescent,--absurd to suppose she
ever had such a thing as an ulterior motive. And the husband, too;
impossible to imagine that silent scholar, also so young, and rather shy
too, or else very sulky,--impossible to imagine him plotting. On the
contrary, he didn’t seem to like what had happened to him much, and
showed no signs whatever either of pleasure or gratitude. But of Jocelyn
no one thought long. He was without interest for the great world. He was
merely an obscure young man at Cambridge, somebody the Duke’s amazing
beauty had married.
Sally did, then, as she was told about Crippenham. It was given her, and
she took it; or rather, for her attitude was one of complete passivity,
it became hers. But she had an unsuspected simple tenacity of purpose,
which was later to develop disconcertingly, and she refused to live
anywhere except in the four-roomed cottage in the corner of the garden,
built years before as a playhouse for Laura and Charles.
On this one point she was like a rock; a polite rock, against which
persuasions, though received sweetly and amiably, should beat in vain.
So the Duke had the little house fitted up with every known
labour-saving appliance, none of which Sally would use because of having
been brought up to believe only in elbow-grease, and two bathrooms, one
for her and one for Jocelyn; and he attached such importance to these
bathrooms, and he insisted so obstinately on their being built, that
Sally could only conclude the picks must need a terrible lot of washing.
Whited sepulchres they must be, she secretly thought; looking as clean
as clean outside, fit to eat one’s dinner off if it came to that, but
evidently nothing but show and take-in.
The Duke, much concerned at first, settled down to this determination of
Sally’s, and explained it to himself by remembering Marie-Antoinette.
She had her Trianon. She too had played, as Sally wished to play, at
being simple. He consoled himself by speaking of the cottage as Little
Trianon; a name Sally accepted with patience, though she told
Jocelyn--who was so much stunned at the strange turn his life had taken
that she found she could be quite chatty with him, and he never
corrected, and never even said anything back--she wouldn’t have thought
of herself. Some day, the Duke was sure, the marvellous child would
grow up and get tired of her Trianon, and then, when she wanted to move
into the house, she should find Versailles all ready for her, and very
different from what it used to be.
So, on the excuse of seeing to the alterations, he was hardly ever away
from Crippenham, and if he had been less than ninety-three there would
certainly have been a scandal.
But Jocelyn, who woke up after the wild joy and relief of being reunited
to Sally to find himself the permanent guest of a duke, didn’t know
whether to be pleased or annoyed. The problems of his and Sally’s
existence were solved, it was true, but he wasn’t sure that he didn’t
prefer the problems. He rubbed his eyes. This was fantastic. It had no
relation to real life, which was the life of hard work and constant
progress in his cloister at Ananias. Also, its topsy-turviness
bewildered him. Here was the Duke, convinced that Sally had married
beneath her, and so unshakably convinced that Jocelyn had enormous
difficulty in not beginning to believe it too. He couldn’t help being
impressed by the Duke. He had never met a duke before, never come within
miles of meeting one, and was impressed. That first afternoon, when he
had been carried off in the Rolls Royce to Crippenham, he had spent the
time between luncheon and tea shut up in the old man’s study being
upbraided for having taken advantage, as he was severely told, of
Sally’s youth and inexperience and motherlessness to persuade her into a
marriage which was obviously socially disastrous for her; and he
couldn’t even if he had wished to, which he certainly didn’t, tell him
about Mr. Pinner, because he couldn’t get through the barrier of his
deafness. There the old man had sat, with beetling brows and great
stern voice, booming away at him hour after hour, and there Jocelyn had
sat, young, helpless, silent, his forehead beaded with perspiration,
listening to a description, among other things, of the glories which
would have been Sally’s if he hadn’t inveigled her into marrying him.
And so sure was the Duke of his facts, and so indignant, that gradually
Jocelyn began to think there was something in it, and every moment felt
more of a blackguard. In the old man’s eyes, he asked himself, would
there be much difference between him and Pinner? And was there, in
anybody’s eyes, much difference? More education; that was all. But of
family, in the Duke’s sense, he had as little as Pinner, and if Pinner
had been to a decent school, as Jocelyn had, and then gone to
Cambridge--no, Oxford for Pinner--he would probably have cut quite as
good a figure, if not in science then in something else; perhaps as a
distinguished cleric.
He sat dumb and perspiring, feeling increasingly guilty; and if he could
have answered back he wouldn’t have, because the Duke made him feel
meek.
This meekness, however, didn’t last. It presently, after a period of
bewilderment, gave way to something very like resentment, which in its
turn developed into a growing conviction that he had become just a cat’s
paw,--he who, if left to himself, could have done almost anything.
Naturally he didn’t like this. But how, for the moment, could he help
it? Sally was going to have a baby. They had to live somewhere. It was
really heaven-sent, the whole thing. Yet--Sally, whom he had been going
to mould, was moulding him. Unconsciously; nothing to do with any
intention or desire of her own. And what she was moulding him into,
thought Jocelyn, as he drove himself backwards and forwards every day
between Crippenham and Cambridge, between his domestic life and his
work, between the strange mixture of emotions at the one end and the
clear peace and self-respect at the other, turning over in his mind with
knitted brows, as he drove, all that had happened to him in the brief
weeks since he had added Sally to his life--what she was moulding him
into was a cat’s paw.
Yes. Just that.
Were all husbands cat’s paws?
Probably, thought Jocelyn.
§
Mrs. Luke also reacted to the Moulsfords in terms of meekness. Hers,
however, lasted. She found them permanently dazzling. Besides, there was
nothing to be done. Jocelyn had gone; she had lost him for ever; he
would never come back, she very well knew, to the old life of dependence
on her. And if he must go, if she must lose him, there really was no one
in the world she would more willingly lose him to than the Duke of
Goring. For certainly it was a splendid, an exalted losing.
When she had had time to think after that visit from Lord Charles--he
had, she considered, a curious attractiveness--and was more herself
again, when she had recovered a little from the extreme misery she had
gone through and began not to feel quite so ill, she found it easy to
forgive her _mauvais quart d’heure_. The Moulsfords were heaping
benefits on her boy. They were settling all his difficulties. That
morning when she was so unhappy, Lord Charles had been most
delightfully kind and sympathetic, and had told her that the Duke, his
father, intended to help the young couple,--‘You know my son won this
year’s Rutherford Prize,’ she had said. ‘Indeed I do,’ he had answered
in his charming, eager way, adding how much interested his father was in
the careers of brilliant young men, especially at Cambridge, helping
them in any way he could--and who would not, in such circumstances,
forgive?
Mrs. Luke forgave.
The fact, however, remained that she was now alone, and she couldn’t
think what her life was going to be without Jocelyn. For how, she
wondered, did one live without an object, with no _raison d’être_ of any
sort? How did one live after one has left off being needed?
That year the spring was late and cold. The days dragged along, each one
emptier than the last. There was nothing in them at all; no reason,
hardly, why one should so much as get up every morning and dress for
days like that,--pithless, coreless, dead days. She tried to comfort
herself by remembering that at least she wasn’t any longer beaten down
and humiliated, that she could lift her head and look South Winch in the
face, and look it in the face more proudly than ever before; but even
that seemed to have lost its savour. Still, she mustn’t grumble. This
happened to all mothers sooner or later, this casting loose, this final
separation, and to none, she was sure, had it ever happened more
magnificently. She mustn’t grumble. She must be very thankful. She _was_
very thankful. Like Toussaint l’Ouverture--Wordsworth, again--she had,
she said to herself, sitting solitary through the chilly spring evenings
by her fire after yet another empty day, great allies; only fortunately
of a different kind from poor Toussaint’s, for however highly one might
regard, theoretically, exultations and agonies and love and man’s
unconquerable mind, she, for her part, preferred the Moulsfords.
But did she?
A bleak little doubt crept into her mind. As the weeks passed, the doubt
grew bleaker. Invisible Moulsfords; Moulsfords delightful and most
friendly when one met them, but whom one never did meet; Moulsfords full
of almost intimacies; Moulsfords who said they were coming to see one
again, and didn’t come; Moulsfords benignant, but somewhere else: were
these in the long run, except as subjects of carefully modest
conversation in South Winch--and South Winch, curiously, while it was
plainly awe-struck by what had happened to Jocelyn yet was also
definitely less friendly than it used to be--were these in the long run
as life-giving, as satisfying, as fundamentally _filling_ as Toussaint’s
exultations and agonies?
Ah, one had to _feel_; feel positively, feel acutely. Anything,
anything, any anger, any pain, any anxiety, any exasperation, anything
at all that stabbed one alive, was better than this awful numbness, this
empty, deadly, settled, stagnant, back-water calm....
And one evening, when it had been raining all day, after a period of
standing at the drawing-room window looking out at the dripping front
garden, where the almond-tree by the gate shivered in the grey twilight
like a frail, half-naked ghost, she turned and went to her
writing-table, and sat down and wrote a little note to Mr. Thorpe, and
asked if he would not come in after his dinner, and chat, and show that
they could still be good friends and neighbours; and when she had
finished it, and signed herself Margery, with no Luke, she rang for the
little maid, and bade her take it round to Abergeldie and bring back an
answer.
‘For after all,’ she said to herself while she waited, standing by the
fire and slowly smoothing one cold hand with the other, ‘he has
_sterling_ qualities.’