CHAPTER IV
—“And would it be indelicate to ask,” said Gillian, “whyI’m suddenly invited to take tea with you, on these lawns of sheer respectability? I’m touched, Deb, really I am; I even left some jolly little fellows from the trenches to look after themselves, while I toddled off here; and I bought a new hat on the way—d’you like it?”
“It’s a monstrosity,” Deb replied frankly. “Take it off at once, somebody might see you in it; that’s better. Why didn’t you bring your wounded soldiers?”
Gillian looked puzzled, and Antonia explained laughing: “The jolly little fellows from the trenches are not what you think, Deb; and I doubt if your in-laws would approve of their presence here at tea—it’s enough for a start, that you should be allowed to invite Gillian, without a cortège of bacillian satellites. How was she finally admitted? I’m curious, too.”
“My husband met an eminent titled specialist, who happened to mention that a pamphlet with a perfectly ghastly name, published last month by one Gillian Sherwood, revealed one of the most brilliant pieces of research of modern times; and that the whole medical and scientific world were in a state of thrilled awe—that true, Gillian?”
“I believe so,” modestly. “But it’s nice of your husband to overlook my little aside from virtue, Deb.”
“He didn’t exactly overlook it, you know. Samson doesn’t possess the art of overlooking. He walked all round it, breathing hard, for nearly a year; and then hung a label on it: ‘Eccentricity of Genius. Not to be confounded withFallen Woman. So please don’t spit!’”
“Ass!” chuckled Gillian.
“Lest you should grow proud, I may mention that Mrs Dolph Carew, likewise invited to tea this afternoon, has been and gone, that she might not have to meet you, Jill. I gatherthat she’s having a demure affair on the Q.T. with a certain Count Antoine ... but some women flaunt their affairs so shamelessly in the face of the world, that r-r-really, my dee-urr, one can’t possibly be associated with them. One is shocked, sorry—so ter-r-ribly sorry ... but the good Mrs Dolph Carew comes to tea early with the good Mrs Samson Phillips—oh, but very early——”
“I’mnothaving an ‘affaire,’” protested Gillian. “Does that little careful beast Manon imagine that I’m a cheap French novel? Deb, Debdarling, did you tell her that a multitude of hoary professors are always to be found squatting at my feet?”
“Yes. ‘We are not impressed.’... Hoary professors aren’tSociety, after all.”
Antonia meditated: “We might put Cliffe on to the story of the French Count——”
“Too busy with Winnie to understudy the God of Vengeance just at present.”
“Winnie?”
“Cliffe?”
Gillian nodded. “’M. Last night. Quaint, isn’t it? You know, she always had a queer fascination for him ... she was so placid and plump—and he so gaunt and impetuous ... he used to try and try andtryto rouse her to some display of emotion, till he went gibbering mad with failure ... and she just lay on the sofa. I used to watch them. So at last, in a sort of frenzy, he proposed to marry her—and she reallywassurprised. Rather surprised, not awfully. She said: ‘Fancy. Did you ever. What things you do say, Cliffe!’” Gillian mimicked the slow, fat speech of Winifred with a fidelity that stirred both her companions to mirth ... though Antonia was very white; and Deb’s lips were ruefully curved: If Cliffe were at all inclined to marry ... “then why not me—at the time?” half laughing, yet wondering a little how Winifred Potter had succeeded with Cliffe where all the rest of them had failed, and separately summed him up as sexless—dear old Cliffe—the Uncle type—a flying comet through their lives.—“And he’s exuberantly, fantastically happy in his choice,” Gillian added, innocent of sub-currents; “so am I and Theo—No—soareI and Theo.... That doesn’t sound right either, does it? Theo did all the flirting he could with her, in about a couple of hours.... So far and no further, you remember?—and then it bored him to have her always about the home. Andit made a lot of extra work for me—I’m not complaining—but just mentioning it, now it’s over. Of course we couldn’t turn her out, but we’re speeding up the nuptials with enthusiasm. And then we two shall be alone together ...” softly. And no one, seeing her eyes and her mouth, could have doubted the success of her pioneer experiment with the audacious but unworthy Greek.
“Does Zoe know?”
“About Cliffe and Winnie? I don’t think so. I expected she’d be here this afternoon.”
“No, she’s indispensable to the War Office on Monday afternoons—not a couple of loafers like you—you’re lucky in your Major-General, Antonia, healwaysseems to be having bilious attacks!—I received a very Zoe-esque letter, hinting at a fruitful episode in a cinema, where she carelessly put her foot up on the seat in front of her and accidentally left it there even when someone sat down, and it came back with a note inside—the shoe, I mean—saying he wasfollement éperduof the pretty ankle, and would the owner meet him, etc.”
“A typical Zoe adventure, French and all. ‘Men may come and men may go,’ but there will always be enough for our Zoe! even nowadays.”
“After all, she only needs as many as there are doors to her flat, and one over. What is it, Antonia?”
Antonia said, “There’s young Nell—and she looks ... queer.”
Nell Redbury walked slowly across the lawn towards the tea-table under the yellowing chestnut tree. Arrived there, she stood, mutely awaiting interrogation; her gaze full on Gillian.... Nobody spoke; the three elder girls felt as though nipped and held in the pincers of tragedy, and each one was afraid....
“I’m going to have a baby,” said Nell at last, in the stupid voice of a child repeating a lesson she has not quite understood. “The doctor said so. Mums cried. And father said I was not to come home any more.”
“Is that all!” Gillian almost laughed in her relief. “Oh, you lucky little devil—no, I don’t mean that—you’re onlya kid still yourself, and it’s rather rough luck, but still—Who and where’s the infant husband? I suppose it’s Timothy?”
“Yes,” Nell answered gravely, but still standing a little aloof from the tea-table. “But he’s not my husband. We—I—thought you would be pleased.”
“Because I did it myself?” Her goddess became suddenly stern.
“Yes.” And once more the refrain, “I thought you would be pleased. You said ... you all said.... I’ve forgotten what you said,” with sudden droop to weariness.
“Whatever I said and whatever I did, wasn’t for a baby like you,” Gillian brutally informed her, in a double effort to vitalize the girl’s apathy and to knock her own conscience insensible. “I may have said that where marriage is impossible, it’s better to do the other thing than to brood and mope ... but in your case marriageispossible; possible and natural and inevitable. Especially now.... There’s no earthly or heavenly reason, young Nell, why you and Timothy should put yourselves to the inconvenience of being not married, and you’re jolly well going to be shoved through the ceremony the very first moment he can wangle leave and come back.”
“Yes,” Nell acquiesced again. And, after a pause: “But he won’t come back. It was in the paper to-day.... They’ve killed him.”
She still stood a little way off from the group at the tea-table, staring with mournful enquiry at Gillian, who had broken down in a fit of wild sobbing. Then, lest she had not been understood, she repeated: “The doctor says I’m going to have a baby. And Mums cried. And father said——”
“You needn’t go home, my dear, my dear.... You’re coming to my home with me. It’s all right—nothing to be frightened of—I’m going to look after you ... yes, both of you——” It was Antonia who swept to Nell’s side by an irresistible impulse, had gathered her strongly in her arms, and faced round on the other two with a look that challenged while it scorched.
“You’re neither of you going to meddle any more where Nell is concerned—haven’t you done enough harm? with your talk and your example and rubbish?—No one’s business but your own what you do with your life, is it, Gillian?—is it?I knew somebody would have to suffer—ancient law—on those who break the laws—and you go scot free, and this poor kiddie.... Oh,damnyour splendid freedom, and your new era, and your mix-up and mess-up of everything that’s clear and right—time-tested. Progress—isthisyour statue of progress?” She pointed to Nell Redbury, now crumpled forlornly against the older girl’s tense erect body....
“No use ranting at me, Antonia; I’m terribly responsible in this case,” Gillian acknowledged. “And of course it’s my business, not yours, to take Nell home and look after her——”
“With Theo about the place?”
Gillian was silent. And Deb interposed: “She’s better with Antonia, Jill.Ican’t give her shelter, worse luck——” Samson, she knew, would show no mercy in this crisis.
Gillian said softly, “If Theo can help....” She found it difficult to put into words her conviction that Nell was only eighteen, and it might be warmth to her frozen emotions to have it conveyed—even by Theo Pandos—that men were still in the world and still desiring her ... a wintry gleam of promise for the future.
But it was heartless to translate her meaning in front of Nell, whose chubby serious young lover was only just dead.... And Antonia’s wrath swept out again like a banner in the wind:
“Theo—help? isn’t he as promiscuous as the rest of you—as Deb, as Cliffe ... with your love-making all over the place ... sex discussed just for the fun of it.... Deb prattling about the waste of her young limbs—we haven’t forgotten that talk, Nell and I.... Nell hasn’t forgotten it to some purpose.... Let’s all live our own lives—let’s all live somebody else’s.... Well, it’s been a merry puddle-party while it lasted! Come on, Nell,” her voice sank to inexpressible tenderness. Without a backward glance, she supported the quivering, clinging form of the younger girl across the lawn and through the garden gate. “Taxi!” they heard her clear call. And the responding grate of wheels against the kerb.
Their departure was one little aspect of the war: woman perforce dependent upon the manlier woman ... while out in France the fatal shrapnel bullets ripped through the staggering ’planes....
“Deb,” Gillian lifted an appalled white face from burial in her palms; “Deb, she’s right. Antonia’s right. I’m to blame for this little tragedy.”
“So am I. We all talked—and forgot that Nell listened and did not quite understand.”
“I did more than talk ... with the result that Nell is to have the baby I wanted and denied myself.... It seems that I couldn’t save that poor little love-child from birth, after all! But surely Imusthave had the sense to say there should be above all a case and a reason before girls chucked marriage to the winds.... What possible reason could those children have had to play the fool?”
“The individual exception is beyond Nell. What you did was good—to her. She took the example and grafted it promiscuously.”
“Antonia called us all fatally promiscuous ... but Antonia——” Gillian hesitated. “Artemis on the turn,” she remarked presently. “Deb—there’s a time when virginity inevitably becomes spinsterhood. It’s rather a dangerous time.... Antonia has kept fiercely pure——”
“Out of a sort of protest to us....”
“Perhaps.”
“What a muddle we’re in, Jill, every one of us, since we’ve left the old track——”
“We’re beating onwards into the open, no doubt of it. But the transition period can’t be skipped, like a dull bit of history. There’s bound to be a generation of martyrs between the old and the new. In whatever context of development. Education—and sex—and religion—and nationality——” she debated silently for a pause of time. “Yes—it fits in each case....”
Nationality.... Deb’s thoughts flew to her brother. She was anxious, not having heard from him or seen him since Samson had written that letter suggesting the compromise of the Labour Battalion, more than a fortnight ago. And to-morrow was Richard’s eighteenth birthday....
“It will be all right for the next generation. Our lot are not sure yet—stumble forwards and backwards in the twilight—let go of established tradition before they’ve graspedat an equivalent to support them. And some of us must be sacrificed down the wrong paths to prove them wrong....”
“Not my child, anyway,” Deb cried with sudden vehemence. “Sheshan’t be a victim to neither-nor. One of us is enough.”
“You’ll bring her up in the old way?”
“As strictly as I can, right and wrong, good and bad ... signposts wherever she may stop and wonder. I’m going to superintend her morals; I’m going to say ‘don’t,’ and I’m going to ask questions, and forbid her things. And be shocked whenever it’s necessary I should be shocked——”
“You little reactionary!”
“Yes ... I know. Don’t mistake me, Gillian—I believe it best to be first thoughtful and then courageous—as you’ve been. But my daughter Naomi—I’m quite sure it is to be a daughter—will be partly a Phillips; handicapped from the start. Samson is at least a generation behind even the transition period. He’s almost extinct. And he’ll be her father.”
“Meaning that if you marry the jailer of a prison, it saves trouble to bring up the child as a convict?”
“If Naomi rebels, she’ll be up against it.... I want her to be happy. Oh, I couldn’t bear to see her muddling and experimenting as I’ve muddled and experimented; a failure as I’ve failed. She must learn to please the Phillips family, and conform to Phillips’ standards. For her, there’s only happiness in conformity.”
“And for you?”
“Yes—and for me. That’s partly racial, you know. The Jewish girl isn’t meant to be a pioneer of freedom.”
“Nell——”
“Nell, I honestly do believe for your greater rest to-night, Gillian, would have succumbed anyhow. She’s really deep down passionate—not only a surface affair.... I say, isn’t it curious how we’ve always deplored the waste of Charlotte Verity’s fanatical tolerance on Antonia who doesn’t need it?—It fits in splendidly now for Nell. She’ll make a heroine of Nell, and simply love having her there.”
“The pattern preconceived....” Gillian murmured. “Then was it also decreed since the first evolution from chaos, O Deborah, that you should fit into the Phillips’ scheme at last?”
“It seems like it,” not altogether ruefully. “When I tried to play the old game, just once, just for fun, it politely informedme that it had no further use for my services,” and on an impulse she confided in Gillian her expedition to Jermyn Street, three months ago.
“Blair—behaved quite well,” was Gillian’s sole comment.
“Oh yes. Blair is a man of experience. There’s a mellowness about him—Had it been a chivalrous hot-headed young knight to whom I had flown in distressed rebellion, he would have urged me to abandon my home and husband, and trust my future to him—and we’d have been unhappy ever after.”
“Is Samson still suspicious?”
“Yes—up till the hour of going to press; on and off. But I can counter it.”
“With what do you counter it?”
“Fascination,” admitted Deb simply.
Gillian laughed, but would not explain her laughter. From the tone in which Deb had said, “I can counter it,” it was delightfully evident that Samson was providing his wife with a new game, the game of re-conquest.... “It keeps the child occupied and amused,” reflected Gillian; “and of course she’ll coax down his suspicions in the end, especially——”
“It’ll be all right in December,” she prophesied to Deb, who in her turn gurgled mirthfully and refused to say why.
“‘The Colonel’s lady and Judy O’GradyAre sisters under their skins.’”
“‘The Colonel’s lady and Judy O’GradyAre sisters under their skins.’”
“‘The Colonel’s lady and Judy O’GradyAre sisters under their skins.’”
“‘The Colonel’s lady and Judy O’Grady
Are sisters under their skins.’”
—you representing Judy in this instance, with the entire bulk of the Phillips’ Illusion in the rôle of the Colonel’s lady.”
“Define the Phillips’ Illusion. It crops up in your conversation like King Charles’ head.”
“The Illusion is that any girl would love Samson; that I love Samson; that I am happy; that I am doing my best to make Samson happy; that we are all happy together; that we are a united family. Amen. In the end the Illusion will become fact. It will overpower me ... it’s already much stronger than I am.”
“You’re by nature—adaptable, aren’t you, Deb?!”
“Horribly so ... yes, and that fits in, too, Jill, for if I’d been very emphatically myself, all cornery and defiant, I’d have rebelled and gone on rebelling and urged Naomi to rebel ... and we’d have been uncomfortable for the rest of our lives. But for me as I am—the most pliable, accommodating, imitativecreature on earth—I do see, oh, ... tolerable comfort and resignation ahead.”
“Intolerable discomfort and rebellion are better things for the soul, Deb. They stimulate it.”
But Deb only said: “The Phillips’ Illusion is too much for me....”