_ CHAPTER X
Jean Dunbarton received Mr. Geoffrey Stonor upon his entrance into Mrs. Freddy's drawing-room with a charming little air of fluttered responsibility.
'Mrs. Freddy and I have been lunching with the Whyteleafes. She had to go afterwards to say good-bye to some people who are leaving for abroad. So Mrs. Freddy asked me to turn over my Girls' Club to your cousin Sophia----'
'Are you given to good works, too?' he interrupted. 'What a terribly philanthropic age it is!'
Jean smiled as she went on with her explanation. 'Although it wasn't her Sunday, Sophia, like an angel, has gone to the club. And I'm here to explain. Mrs. Freddy said if she wasn't back on the stroke----'
'Oh, I dare say I'm a trifle early.'
It was a theory that presented fewer difficulties than that he should be kept waiting.
'I was to beg you to give her a few minutes' grace in any case.'
Instead of finding a seat, he stood looking down at the charming face. His indifference to Mrs Freddy's precise programme lent his eyes a misleading look of absent-mindedness, which dashed the girl's obvious excitement over the encounter.
'I see,' he had said slowly. What he saw was a graceful creature of medium height, with a clear colour and grey-blue eyes fixed on him with an interest as eager as it was frank. What the grey-blue eyes saw was probably some glorified version of Stonor's straight, firm features, a little blunt, which lacked that semblance of animation given by colour, and seemed to scorn to make up for it by any mobility of expression. The grey eyes, set somewhat too prominently, were heavy when not interested, and the claim to good looks which nobody had dreamed of denying seemed to rest mainly upon the lower part of his face. The lips, over-full, perhaps, were firmly moulded, but the best lines were those curves from the ear to the quite beautiful chin. The gloss on the straight light-brown hair may have stood to the barber's credit, but only health could keep so much grace still in the carriage of a figure heavier than should be in a man of forty--one who, without a struggle, had declined from polo unto golf. There was no denying that the old expression of incipient sullenness, fleeting or suppressed, was deepening into the main characteristic of his face, though it was held that he, as little as any man, had cause to present that aspect to a world content to be his oyster. Yet, as no doubt he had long ago learned, it was that very expression which was the cause of much of the general concern people seemed to feel to placate, to amuse, to dispel the menace of that cloud. The girl saw it, and her heart failed her.
'Mrs. Freddy said if I told you the children were in the garden expecting you, you wouldn't have the heart to go away directly.'
'She is right. I
haven't the heart.' And in that lifting of his cloud, the girl's own face shone an instant.
'I should have felt it a terrible responsibility if you were to go.' She spoke as if the gladness that was not to be repressed called for some explanation. 'Mrs. Freddy says that she and Mr. Freddy see so little of you nowadays. That was why she made such a point of my coming and trying to--to----'
'You needed a great deal of urging then?' He betrayed the half-amused, half-ironic surprise of the man accustomed to find people ready enough, as a rule, to clutch at excuse for a
tete-a-tete. Although she had flushed with mingled embarrassment and excitement, he proceeded to increase her perturbation by suggesting, 'Mrs. Freddy had to overcome your dislike for the mission.'
'Dislike? Oh, no!'
'What then?'
'My--well----' She lifted her eyes, and dared to look him full in the face as she said, 'I suppose you know you are rather alarming.'
'Am I?' he smiled.
People less interested in him than Jean were grateful to Geoffrey Stonor when he smiled. They felt relieved from some intangible responsibility for the order of the universe.
The girl brightened wonderfully. 'Oh, yes, very alarming indeed,' she assured him cheerfully.
'How do you make that out?'
'I don't need to "make it out." It's so very plain.' Then a little hastily, as if afraid of having said something that sounded like impious fault-finding, 'Anybody's alarming who is so--so much talked about, and so--well, like you, you understand.'
'I don't understand,' he objected mendaciously--'not a little bit.'
'I think you must,' she said, with her candid air. 'Though I had made up my mind that I wouldn't be afraid of you any more since our week-end at Ulland.'
'Ah, that's better!'
There was nothing in the words, but in the gentleness with which he brought them out, so much that the girl turned her eyes away and played with the handle of her parasol.
'Have you been reading any more poetry?' he said.
'No.'
'No? Why not?'
She shook her head. 'It doesn't sound the same.'
'What! I spoilt it for you?'
She laughed, and again she shook her head, but with something shy, half-frightened in her look. Nervously she dashed at a diversion.
'I'm afraid I was a little misleading about the children. They aren't in the garden yet. Shall we go up and see them having tea?'
'Oh, no, it would be bad for their little digestions to hurry them.'
He sat down. Her face gave him as much credit as though he had done some fine self-abnegating deed.
They spoke of that Sunday walk in the valley below the Ulland links, and the crossing of a swollen little stream on a rotting and rickety log.
'I
had to go,' she explained apologetically. 'Hermione had gone on and forgotten the puppy hadn't learnt to follow. I was afraid he'd lose himself.'
'It
was a dangerous place to go across,' he said, as if to justify some past opinion.
Her eyes were a little mischievous. 'I never thought
you'd come.'
'Why?' he demanded.
'Oh, because I thought you'd be too----' His slow look quickened as if to surprise in her some reflection upon his too solid flesh--or might it even be upon the weight of years? But the uncritical admiration in her face must have reassured him before the words, 'I thought you'd be too grand. It was delightful to find you weren't.'
He kept his eyes on her. 'Are you always so happy?'
'Oh, I hope not. That would be rather too inhuman, wouldn't it?'
'Too celestial, perhaps!' He laughed--but he was looking into the blue of her eyes as if through them he too had caught a glimpse of Paradise. 'I remember thinking at Ulland,' he said more slowly again, 'I had never seen any one quite so happy.'
'I was happy at Ulland. But I'm not happy now.'
'Then your looks belie you.'
'No, I am very sad. I have to go away from this delightful London to Scotland. I shall be away for weeks. It's too dismal.'
'Why do you go?'
'My grandfather makes me. He hates London. And his dreary old house on a horrible windy hill--he simply loves that!'
'And you don't love it
at all. I see.' He seemed to be thinking out something.
Compunction visited the face before him. 'I didn't mean to say I didn't love it
at all. It's like those people you care to be with for a little while, but if you must go being with them for ever you come to hate them--almost.'
They sat silent for a moment, then with slow reflectiveness, like one who thinks aloud, he said--
'I have to go to Scotland next week.'
'Do you! What part?'
'I go to Inverness-shire.'
'Why, that's where we are! Near----'
'Why shouldn't I drop down upon you some day?'
'Oh,
will you? That would be----' She seemed to save herself from some gulf of betrayal. 'There are walks about my grandfather's more beautiful than anything you ever saw--or perhaps I ought to say more beautiful than anything
I ever saw.'
'Nicer walks than at Ulland?'
'Oh, no comparison! One is a bridle-path all along a wonderful brown trout stream that goes racing down our hill. There's a moor on one side, and a wood on the other, and a peat bog at the bottom.'
'We might perhaps stop short of the bog.'
'Yes, we'd stop at old McTaggart's. He's the head-keeper and a real friend. McTaggart "has the Gaelic." But he hasn't much else, so perhaps you'd prefer his wife.'
'Why should I prefer his wife?'
Jean's face was full of laughter. Stonor's plan of going to Scotland had singularly altered the character of that country. Its very inhabitants were now perceived to be enlivening even to talk about; to
know--the gamekeeper's wife alone--would repay the journey thither.
'I assure you Mrs. McTaggart is a travelled, experienced person.'
He shook his head while he humoured her. 'I'm not sure travel or experience is what we chiefly prize--in ladies.'
'Oh, isn't it? I didn't know, you see. I didn't know how dreadfully you might miss the terribly clever people you're accustomed to in London.'
'It's because of the terribly clever people we are glad to go away.'
He waxed so eloquent in his admiration of the womanly woman (who seemed by implication to have steered clear of Mrs. McTaggart's pitfalls), that Jean asked with dancing eyes--
'Are you consoling me for not being clever?'
'Are you sure you aren't?'
'Oh, dear, yes. No possible shadow of doubt about it.'
'Then,' he laughed, 'I'm coming to Inverness-shire! I'll even go so far as to call on the McTaggarts if you'll undertake that she won't instruct me about foreign lands.'
'No such irrelevance! She'd tell you about London. She was here for six whole months. And she got something out of it I don't believe even you have. A Certificate of Merit.'
'No. London certainly never gave me one.'
'You see! Mrs. McTaggart lived the life of the Metropolis with such success that she passed an examination before she left. The subject was: "Incidents in the Life of Abraham." It says so on the certificate. She has it framed and hung in the parlour.'
He smiled. 'I admit few can point to such fruits of Metropolitan Ausbildung. But I think I shall prefer the burnside--or even the bog.'
'No; the moors. They're best of all.' She sat looking straight before her, with her heart's deep well overflowing at her eyes. As if she felt vaguely that some sober reason must be found for seeing those same moors in this glorified light all of a sudden, she went on, 'I'll show you a special place where white heather grows, and the rabbits tumble about as tame as kittens. It's miles away from the sea, but the gulls come sunning themselves and walking about like pigeons. I used to hide up there when I was little and naughty. Nobody ever found the place out except an old gaberlunzie, and I gave him tuppence not to tell.'
'Yes, show me that place.' His face was wonderfully attractive so!
'And we'll take The Earthly--William Morris--along, won't we?'
'I thought you'd given up reading poetry.'
'Yes--to myself. I used to think I knew about poetry, yes, better than anybody but the poets. There are people as arrogant as that.'
'Why, it's worse than Mrs. McTaggart!'
The girl was grave, even tremulous. 'But, no! I never had a notion of what poetry really was till down at Ulland you took my book away from me, and read aloud----'
* * * * *
Mr. Freddy let himself and Lord Borrodaile in at the front door so closely on the heels of Mrs. Freddy that the servant who had closed the door behind her had not yet vanished into the lower regions. At a word from that functionary, Mr. Freddy left his brother depositing hat and stick with the usual deliberation, and himself ran upstairs two steps at a time. He caught up with his wife just outside the drawing-room door, as she paused to take off her veil in front of that mirror which Mrs. Freddy said should be placed between the front door and the drawing-room in every house in the land for the reassurance of the timid feminine creature. She was known to add privately that it was not ignored by men--and that those who came often, contracted a habit of hurrying upstairs close at the servant's heels, in order to have two seconds to spare for furtive consultation, while he went on to open the drawing-room door. She had observed this pantomime more than once, leaning over the banisters, herself on the way downstairs.
'They tell me Stonor's been here half an hour,' said Mr. Freddy, breathlessly. 'You're dreadfully late!'
'No, darling----'
He held out his watch to confound her. 'You tell me you aren't late?'
'Sh--no. I do so sympathize with a girl who has no mother,' with which enigmatic rejoinder she pushed open the door, and went briskly through the double drawing-room to where Mr. Geoffrey Stonor and Jean Dunbarton were sitting by a window that overlooked the square.
Stonor waved away Mrs. Freddy's shower of excuses, saying--
'You've come just in time to save us from falling out. I've been telling Miss Dunbarton that in another age she would have been a sort of Dinah Morris, or more likely another St. Ursula with a train of seven thousand virgins.'
'And all because I've told him about my Girls' Club! and----'
'Yes,' he said, '"and"----' He turned away and shook hands with his two kinsmen. He sat talking to them with his back to the girl.
It was a study in those delicate weights and measures that go to estimating the least tangible things in personality, to note how his action seemed not only to dim her vividness but actually to efface the girl. In the first moments she herself accepted it at that. Her looks said: He is not aware of me any more--ergo, I don't exist.
During the slight distraction incident to the bringing in of tea, and Mr. Freddy's pushing up some of the big chairs, Mr. Stonor had a moment's remembrance of her. He spoke of his Scottish plans and fell to considering dates. Then all of a sudden she saw that again and yet more woundingly his attention had wandered. The moment came while Lord Borrodaile was busy Russianizing a cup of tea, and Mr. Freddy, balancing himself on very wide-apart legs in front of his wife's tea-table, had interrogated her--
'What do you think, shall I ring and say we aren't at home?'
'Perhaps it would be----' Mrs. Freddy's eye flying back from Stonor caught her brother-in-law's. 'Freddy'--she arrested her husband as he was making for the bell--'say, "except to Miss Levering."'
'All right. Except to Miss Levering.' And it was at that point that Jean saw she wasn't being listened to.
Even Mrs. Freddy, looking up, was conscious of something in Stonor's face that made her say--
'Old Sir Hervey's youngest daughter. You knew
him, I suppose, even if you haven't met her. Jean, you aren't giving Mr. Stonor anything to eat.'
'No, no, thanks. I don't know why I took this.' He set down his tea-cup. 'I never have tea.'
'You're like everybody else,' said the girl, in a half-petulant aside.
'Does nobody have tea?'
She lowered her voice while the others discussed who had already been sent away, and who might still be expected to invade.
'Nobody remembers anybody else when that Miss Levering of theirs is to the fore. You began to say when--to talk about Scotland.'
He had taken out his watch. 'I was wondering if the children were down yet. Shall we go and see?'
Jean jumped up with alacrity.
'Sh!' Mrs. Freddy held up a finger and silenced her little circle. 'They must have thought I was ringing for toast--somebody's being let in!'
'Let's hope it's Miss Levering,' said Mr. Freddy.
'I must see those young barbarians of yours before I go,' said Stonor, rising with decision.
The sound of voices on the stair was quite distinct now. By the time the servant had opened the door and announced: 'Mrs. Heriot, Miss Heriot, Captain Beeching,' Mr. Freddy, the usually gracious host, was leading the way through the back drawing-room, unblushingly abetting Mr. Stonor's escape under the very eyes of persons who would have gone miles on the chance of meeting him.
Small wonder that Jean was consoled for knowing herself too shy to follow, if she remembered that he had actually asked her to do so! She showed no surprise at the tacit assumption on the part of his relations that Geoffrey Stonor could never be expected to sit there as common mortals might, making himself more or less agreeable to whoever might chance to drop in. Unless they were 'very special' of course he couldn't be expected to put up with them.
But what on earth was happening! No wonder Mrs. Freddy looked aghast. For Mrs. Heriot had had the temerity to execute a short cut and waylay the escaping lion. 'Oh, how do you do?'--she thrust out a hand. And he went out as if she had been thin air! It was the kind of insolence that used to be more common, because safer, than it is likely to be in future--a form of condoned brutality that used to inspire more awe than disgust. People were guilty even of a slavish admiration of those who had the nerve to administer this wholly disproportionate reproof to the merely maladroit. It could be done only by one whom all the world had conspired to befog and befool about his importance in the scheme of things.
Small wonder the girl, too, was bewildered. For no one seemed to dream of resenting what had occurred. The lesson conveyed appeared to be that the proper attitude to certain of your fellow-creatures was very much the traditional one towards royalty. You were not to speak unless you were spoken to. And yet this man who with impunity snubbed persons of consideration, was the same one who was coming to call on Sally McTaggart--he was going to walk the bridle-path along the burnside to the white heather haven.
With the dazed look in her eyes, and cheeks scarlet with sympathy and confusion, the girl had run forward to greet her aunt, and to do her little share toward dissipating the awkward chill that had fallen on the company.
After producing a stammered, 'Oh--a--I thought it was----' the immediate effect on Mrs. Heriot was to make her both furious and cowed. Though a nervous stream of talk trickled on, Mrs. Freddy's face did not lose its flustered look nor did the company regain its ease, until a further diversion was created by the appearance of Miss Levering with an alert, humorous-looking man of middle-age in her train.
'Mr. Greatorex was passing just in time to help me out of my hansom,' was her greeting to Mrs. Freddy.
'And I,' said the gentleman, 'insisted on being further rewarded by being brought in.'
'
That is Miss Levering?' whispered Jean, partly to distract her aunt.
'Yes; why not?' said Lord Borrodaile, overhearing.
'Oh, I somehow imagined her different.'
'She
is different,' said Aunt Lydia, with bitter gloom. 'You would never know in the least what she was like from the look of her.'
Lord Borrodaile's eyes twinkled. 'Is that so?' he said, indulgent to a mood which hardly perhaps made for dispassionate appraisement.
'You don't believe it!' said Mrs. Heriot. 'Of course not!'
'I was only thinking what a fillip it gave acquaintance to be in doubt whether a person was a sinner or a saint.'
'It wouldn't for me,' said Jean.
'Oh, you see, you're so Scotch.'
He was incorrigible!
'I didn't hear, who is the man?' Jean asked, as those not knowing usually did.
Although far from distinguished in appearance, Mr. Greatorex would have stood in no danger of being overlooked, even if he had not those twinkling jewel-like eyes, and two strands of coal-black hair trained across his large bumpy cranium, from the left ear to the right, and securely pasted there.
'It's that wretched radical, St. John Greatorex.' Mrs. Heriot turned from her niece to Lord Borrodaile. 'What foundation is there,' she demanded, 'for the rumour that he tells such good stories at dinner?
I never heard any.'
'Ah, I believe he keeps them till the ladies have left the room.'
'You don't like him, either,' said Mrs. Heriot, reaching out for the balm of alliance with Lord Borrodaile.
But he held aloof. 'Oh, they say he has his points--a good judge of wine, and knows more about Parliamentary procedure than most of us.'
'How you men stand up for one another! You know perfectly well you can't endure him.' Mrs. Heriot jerked her head away and faced the group round the tea-table. 'What is she saying? That she's been to a Suffrage meeting in Hyde Park!'
'How could she! Nothing would induce me to go and listen to such people!' said Miss Dunbarton.
Her eyes, as well as Mrs. Heriot's, were riveted on the tall figure, tea-cup in hand, moving away from the table now to make room for some new arrivals, and drawing after her a portion of the company, including Lady Whyteleafe and Richard Farnborough, who one after another had come in a few moments before. It was to the young man that Greatorex was saying, with a twinkle, 'I am sure Mr. Farnborough agrees with me.'
Slightly self-conscious, he replied, 'About Miss Levering being too--a----'
'For that sort of thing altogether "too."'
'How do you know?' said the lady herself, with a teasing smile.
Greatorex started out of the chair in which he had just deposited himself at her side. 'God bless my soul!' he said.
'She's only saying that to get a rise out of you.' Farnborough seemed unable to bear the momentary shadow obscuring the lady's brightness.
'Ah, yes'--Greatorex leaned back again--'your frocks aren't serious enough.'
'Haven't I been telling you it's an exploded notion that the Suffrage people are all dowdy and dull?'
'Pooh!' said Mr. Greatorex.
'You talk about some of them being pretty,' Farnborough said. '
I didn't see a good-looking one among 'em.'
'Ah, you men are so unsophisticated; you missed the fine feathers.'
'Plenty o' feathers on the one I heard.'
'Yes, but not
fine feathers. A man judges of the general effect. We can, at a pinch, see past unbecoming clothes, can't we, Lady Whyteleafe? We see what women could make of themselves if they took the trouble.'
'All the same,' said the lady appealed to, 'it's odd they don't see how much better policy it would be if they
did take a little trouble about their looks. Now, if we got our maids to do those women's hair for them--if we lent them our French hats--ah,
then'--Lady Whyteleafe nodded till the pear-shaped pearls in her ears swung out like milk-white bells ringing an alarum--'they'd convert you creatures fast enough then.'
'Perhaps "convert" is hardly the word,' said Vida, with ironic mouth. As though on an impulse, she bent forward to say, with her lips near Lady Whyteleafe's pearl drop: 'What if it's the aim of the movement to get away from the need of just these little dodges?'
'Dodges?'
But without the exclamation, Miss Levering must have seen that she had been speaking in an unknown tongue. A world where beauty exists for beauty's sake--which is love's sake--and not for tricking money or power out of men, even the possibility of such a world is beyond the imagining of many.
Something was said about a deputation of women who had waited on Mr. Greatorex.
'Hm, yes, yes.' He fiddled with his watch chain.
As though she had just recalled the circumstances, 'Oh, yes,' Vida said, 'I remember I thought at the time, in my modest way, it was nothing short of heroic of them to go asking audience of their arch opponent.'
'It didn't come off!' He wagged his strange head.
'Oh,' she said innocently, 'I thought they insisted on bearding the lion in his den.'
'Of course I wasn't going to be bothered with a lot of----'
'You don't mean you refused to go out and face them!'
He put on a comic look of terror. 'I wouldn't have done it for worlds! But a friend of mine went and had a look at 'em.'
'Well,' she laughed,'did he get back alive?'
'Yes, but he advised me not to go. "You're quite right," he said. "Don't you think of bothering," he said. "I've looked over the lot," he said, "and there isn't a week-ender among 'em."'
Upon the general laugh that drew Hermione and Captain Beeching into the group, Jean precipitated herself gaily into the conversation. 'Have they told you about Mrs. Freddy's friend who came to tea here in the winter?' she asked Hermione. 'He was a member of Parliament, too--quite a little young one--he said women would never be respected till they had the vote!'
Mr. Greatorex snorted, the other men smiled, and all the women, except Aunt Lydia, did the same.
'I remember telling him,' Mrs. Heriot said, with marked severity, 'that he was too young to know what he was talking about.'
'Yes, I'm afraid you all sat on the poor gentleman,' said Lord Borrodaile.
'It was such fun. He was flat as a pancake when we'd done with him. Aunt Ellen was here. She told him with her most distinguished air she didn't want to be respected.'
'Dear Lady John!' murmured Miss Levering. 'I can hear her!'
'Quite right,' said Captain Beeching. 'Awful idea to think you're
respected.'
'Simply revolting,' agreed Miss Heriot.
'Poor little man!' laughed Jean, 'and he thought he was being
so agreeable!'
'Instead of which it was you.'
Miss Levering said the curious words quite pleasantly, but so low that only Jean heard them.
The girl looked up. 'Me?'
'You had the satisfaction of knowing you had made yourself immensely popular with all other men.'
The girl flushed. 'I hope you don't think I did it for that reason.'
The little passage was unnoticed by the rest of the company, who were listening to Lord Borrodaile's contented pronouncement: 'I'm afraid the new-fangled seed falls on barren ground in our old-fashioned gardens--
pace my charming sister-in-law.'
Greatorex turned sharply. 'Mrs. Tunbridge! God bless my soul, you don't mean----'
'There is one thing I will say for her'--Mrs. Freddy's brother-in-law lazily defended the honour of the house--'she doesn't, as a rule, obtrude her opinions. There are people who have known her for years, and haven't a notion she's a light among the misguided.'
But Greatorex was not to be reassured. 'Mrs. Tunbridge! Lord, the perils that beset the feet of man!' He got up with a half-comic ill humour.
'You're not going!' The hostess flitted over to remonstrate. 'I haven't had a word with you.'
'Yes, yes; I'm going.'
Mrs. Freddy looked bewildered at the general laugh.
'He's heard aspersions cast upon your character,' said Lord Borrodaile. 'His moral sense is shocked.'
'Honestly, Mrs. Tunbridge'--Farnborough was for giving her a chance to clear herself--'what do you think of your friends' recent exploits?'
'My friends?'
'Yes; the disorderly women.'
'They are not my friends,' said Mrs. Freddy, with dignity, 'but I don't think you must call them----'
'Why not?' said Lord Borrodaile. '
I can forgive them for worrying the Liberals'--he threw a laughing glance at Greatorex--'but they
are disorderly.'
'Isn't the phrase consecrated to a different class?' said Miss Levering, quietly.
'You're perfectly right.' Greatorex, for once, was at one with Lord Borrodaile. 'They've become nothing less than a public nuisance. Going about with dog-whips and spitting in policemen's faces.'
'I wonder,' said Mrs. Freddy, with a harassed air--'I wonder if they did spit!'
'Of course they did!' Greatorex exulted.
'You're no authority on what they do,' said Mrs. Freddy. 'You run away.'
'Run away?' He turned the laugh by precipitately backing away from her in a couple of agitated steps. 'Yes, and if ever I muster up courage to come back, it will be to vote for better manners in public life, not worse than we have already.'
'So should I,' observed Mrs. Freddy, meekly. 'Don't think I defended the Suffragettes.'
'But still,' said Miss Levering, with a faint accent of impatience, 'you
are an advocate for the Suffrage, aren't you?'
'I don't beat the air.'
'Only policemen,' Greatorex mocked.
'If you cared to know the attitude of the real workers in the Reform,' Mrs. Freddy said plaintively, 'you might have seen in any paper that we lost no time in dissociating ourselves from the two or three hysterical----' She caught her brother-in-law's critical eye, and instantly checked her flow of words.
There was a general movement as Greatorex made his good-byes. Mrs. Heriot signalled her daughter.
In the absence of the master, Lord Borrodaile made ready to do the honours of the house to a lady who had had so little profit of her visit. Beeching carried off the reluctant Farnborough. Mrs. Freddy kept up her spirits until after the exodus; then, with a sigh, she sat down beside Vida. 'It's true what that old cynic says,' she admitted sorrowfully. 'The scene has put back the Reform a generation.'
'It must have been awfully exciting. I wish I'd been there,' said Jean.
'I
was there.'
'Oh, was it as bad as the papers said?'
'Worse. I've never been so moved in public--no tragedy, no great opera ever gripped an audience as the situation in the House did that night. There we all sat breathless--with everything more favourable to us than it had been within the memory of woman. Another five minutes and the resolution would have passed. Then--all in a moment'--Mrs. Freddy clasped her hands excitedly--'all in a moment a horrible, dingy little flag was poked through the grille of the Woman's Gallery--cries--insults-- scuffling--the police--the ignominious turning out of the women--
us as well as the---- Oh, I can't
think of it without----' She jumped up and walked to and fro. 'Then the next morning!' She paused. 'The people gloating. Our friends antagonized--people who were wavering--nearly won over--all thrown back! Heart-breaking! Even my husband! Freddy's been an angel about letting me take my share when I felt I must--but, of course, I've always known he doesn't like it. It makes him shy. I'm sure it gives him a horrid twist inside when he sees even the discreetest little paragraph to say that I am "one of the speakers." But he's always been an angel about it before this. After the disgraceful scene, he said, "It just shows how unfit women are for any sort of coherent thinking or concerted action."'
'To think,' said Jean, more sympathetically, 'that it should be women who've given their own scheme the worst blow it ever had!'
'The work of forty years destroyed in five minutes!'
'They must have felt pretty sick,' said the girl, 'when they waked up the next morning--those Suffragettes.'
'I don't waste any sympathy on
them. I'm thinking of the penalty
all women have to pay because two or three hysterical----'
'Still, I think I'm sorry for them,' the girl persisted. 'It must be dreadful to find you've done such a lot of harm to the thing you care most about in the world.'
'Do you picture the Suffragettes sitting in sack-cloth?' said Vida, speaking at last.
'Well, they can't help realizing
now what they've done.'
'Isn't it just possible they realize they've waked up interest in the Woman Question so that it's advertised in every paper, and discussed under every roof, from Land's End to John-o'-Groats? Don't you think
they know there's been more said and written about it in these days since the scene than in the ten years before it!'
'You aren't saying you think it was a good way to get what they wanted!' exclaimed Mrs. Freddy.
'I'm only pointing out that it seems not such a bad way to get it known they
do want something, and--"want it bad,"' Vida added, smiling.
Jean drew her low chair almost in front of the lady who had so wounded her sensibilities a little while before with that charge of popularity-hunting.
'Mrs. Tunbridge says before that horrid scene everything was favourable at last,' the girl hazarded.
'Yes,' said Mrs. Freddy, 'we never had so many friends in the House before----'
'"Friends,"' echoed the other woman, with a faint smile.
'Why do you say it like that?'
'Because I was thinking of a funny story--(he
said it was funny)--a Liberal Whip told me the other day. A Radical member went out of the House after his speech in favour of the Women's Bill, and as he came back half an hour later he heard some members talking in the lobby about the astonishing number who were going to vote for the measure. And the Friend of Woman dropped his jaw and clutched the man next him. "My God!" he said, "you don't mean they're going to
give it to them!"'
'Sh! Here is Ronald.' Mrs. Freddy's tact brought her smiling to her feet as the figure of her brother-in-law appeared in the doorway. But she turned her back on him and affected absorption in the tableau presented by Jean leaning forward, elbow on knee, chin in hand, gazing steadily in Vida Levering's face.
'I don't want to interrupt you two,' said the hostess, 'but I think you must look at the pictures.'
'Oh, yes, I brought them specially'--Lord Borrodaile deflected his course in order to take up from the table two squares of cardboard tied face to face with tape.
'Bless the man!' Mrs. Freddy contemplated him with smiling affectation of scorn. 'I mean the new photographs of the children. He's thinking of some reproductions Herbert Tunbridge got while he was abroad--pictures of things somebody's unearthed in Sicily or Cyprus.'
'Crete, my dear.' He turned his back on the fond mother and Jean who was already oh-ing with appreciation at the first of a pile of little Saras and Cecils. When he came back to his corner of the sofa he made no motion to undo his packet, but 'Now then!' he said, as he often did on sitting down beside Vida Levering--as though they had been interrupted on the verge of coming to an agreement about something.
She, with an instinct of returning the ball, usually tossed at him some scrap of news or a jest, or some small social judgment. This time when he uttered his 'Now then,' with that anticipatory air, she answered instantly--'Yes; something rather odd has been happening. I've been seeing beyond my usual range.'
'Really!' He smiled at her with a mixture of patronage and affection. 'And did you find there was "something new under the sun" after all?'
'Well, perhaps not so new, though it seemed new to me. But something differently looked at. Why do we pretend that all conversion is to some religious dogma--why not to a view of life?'
'Bless my soul! I begin to feel nervous.'
'Do you remember once telling me that I had a thing that was rare in my sex--a sense of humour?'
'I remember often thinking it,' he said handsomely.
'It wasn't the first time I'd heard that. And it was one of the compliments I liked best.'
'We all do. It means we have a sense of proportion--the mental suppleness that is capable of the ironic view; an eye that can look right as well as left.'
She nodded. 'When you wrote to me once, "My dear Ironist," I--yes--I felt rather superior. I'm conscious now that it's been a piece of hidden, intellectual pride with me that I could smile at most things.'
'Well, do you mean to forswear pride? For you can't live without smiling.'
'I've seen something to-day that I don't feel I want to smile at. And yet to you it's the most ludicrous spectacle in London.'
'This is all very mysterious.' He turned his long, whimsical face on one side as he settled himself more comfortably against the cushion.
'You heard why I was late?' she said.
'I took the liberty of doubting the reason you gave!'
'You mustn't. It wasn't even my first offence.'
'You must find time hang very heavy on your hands.'
'On the contrary. I've never known the time to go so fast. Oh, heaps of people would do what I have, if they only knew how queer and interesting it is, and how already the outer aspect of the thing is changing. At the first meetings very few women of any class. Now there are dozens--scores. Soon there'll be hundreds. There were three thousand people in the park this afternoon, so a policeman told me, but hardly any of the class that what Dick Farnborough calls "runs England."'
'I suppose not.'
'You don't even know yet you'll have to deal with all that passionate feeling, all that fixed determination to bring about a vast, far-reaching change!--a change so great----'
'That it would knock civilized society into a cocked hat.'
'I wonder.'
'You
wonder?'
'I wonder if you oughtn't to be reassured by the--bigness of the thing. It isn't only these women in Hyde Park. They have a Feministe Movement in France. They say there's a Frauenbewegung in Germany. From Finland to Italy----'
'Oh, yes, strikes and uprisings. It's an uneasy Age.'
'People in India wanting a greater share in the government----'
'Mad as the Persians----' he smiled--'fancy
Persians clamouring for a representative chamber! It's a sort of epidemic.'
'The Egyptians, too, restless under "benefits." And now everywhere, as if by some great concerted movement--the Women!'
'Yes, yes; there's plenty of regrettable restlessness up and down the world, a sort of wave of revolt against the constituted authorities. If it goes too far--nothing for us but a military despotism!'
She shook her head with a look of such serene conviction that he persisted, 'I'd be sorry if we came to it--but if this spirit grows, this rebellion against all forms of control----'
'No, no, against other people's control. Suppose it ends in people learning self-control.'
'That's the last thing the masses can do. There are few, even of the
elite, who have ever done it, and they belong to the Moral Aristocracy--the smallest and most rigid in the world. This thing that you're just opening your eyes to, is the rage against restraint that goes with decadence. But the phlegmatic Englishman won't lead in that degringolade.'
'You mean we won't be among the first of the great nations to give women the Suffrage?'
'
England? ' The slow head-shake and the smile airily relegated the Woman's Movement to the limbo of the infinitely distant.
'Just because the men won't have it?' and for the second time she said, 'I wonder. For myself, I rather think the women are going to win.'
'Not in my time. Not even in yours.'
'Why?'
'Oh, the men will never let it come to the point.'
'It's interesting to hear you say that. You justify the militant women, you know.'
'That is perhaps
not to hit the bull's eye!' he said, a little grimly. Then dropping his unaccustomed air of chill disapproval, he appealed to his friend's better taste. A confession of sheer physical loathing crept into his face as he let fall two or three little sentences about these women's offence against public decorum. 'Why, it is as hideous as war!' he wound up, dismissing it.
'Perhaps it
is war.' Her phrase drew the cloud of menace down again; it closed about them. It seemed to trouble her that he would not meet her gaze. 'Don't think----' she prayed, and stumbling against the new hardness in his face, broke off, withdrew her eyes and changed the form of what she had meant to say. 'I think I like good manners, too, but I see it would be a mistake to put them first. What if we have to earn the right to be gentle and gracious without shame?'
'You seriously defend these people!'
'I'm not sure they haven't taken the only way.' She looked at her friend with a fresh appeal in her eyes. But his were wearing their new cold look. She seemed to nerve herself to meet some numbing danger of cowardice. 'The old rule used to be patience--with no matter what wrong. The new feeling is: shame on any one who weakly suffers wrong! Isn't it too cheap an idea of morals that women should take credit for the enduring that keeps the wrong alive? You won't say women have no stake in morals. Have we any right to let the world go wrong while we get compliments for our forbearance and for pretty manners?'
'You began,' said Borrodaile, 'by explaining other women's notions. You have ended by seeming to adopt them as your own. But you are a person of some intelligence. You will open your eyes before you go too far. You belong to the people who are responsible for handing on the world's treasure. As we've agreed, there never was a time when it was attacked from so many sides. Can't you see what's at stake?'
'I see that many of the pleasantest things may be in eclipse for a time.'
'My dear, they would die off the face of the earth.'
'No, they are too necessary.'
'To you and me. Not to the brawlers in Hyde Park. The life of civilized beings is a very complex thing. It isn't filled by good intentions nor even by the cardinal virtues. The function of the older societies is to hand on the best things the world has won, so that those who come after, instead of having to go back to barbarism, may start from where the best of their day left off. We do for manners and the arts in general what the Moors did for learning when the wild hordes came down. There were capital chaps among the barbarians,' he smiled, 'I haven't a doubt! But it was the men who held fast to civilization's clue, they were the people who mattered.
We matter. We hold the clue.' He was recovering his spirits. 'Your friends want to open the gates still wider to the Huns. You want even the Moors overwhelmed.'
'Many women are as jealous to guard the old gains as the men are. Wait!' She leaned forward. 'I begin to see! They are more keen about it than the mass of men. The women! They are civilization's only ally against your brother, the Goth.'
He laughed. 'When you are as absurd as that, my dear, I don't mind. No, not a little bit. And I really believe I'm too fond of you to quarrel on any ground.'
'You don't care enough about anything to quarrel about it,' she said, smiling, too. 'But it's just as well'--she rose and began to draw on her glove--'just as well that each of us should know where to find the other. So tell me, what if it should be a question of going forward in the suffrage direction or going back?'
'You mean----'
'----on from latchkeys and University degrees to Parliament, or back.'
'Oh, back,' he said hastily. 'Back. Yes, back to the harem.'
When the words were out, Lord Borrodaile had laughed a little uneasily--like one who has surprised even himself by some too-illuminating avowal. 'See here,' he put out a hand. 'I'm not going to let you go for a minute or two. I've brought something to show you. This foolish discussion put it out of my head.' But the revealing word he had flung out--it seemed to have struck wide some window that had been shuttered close before. The woman stood there in the glare. She did not refuse to be drawn back to her place on the sofa, but she looked round first to see if the others had heard and how they took it. A glimpse of Mrs. Freddy's gown showed her out of earshot on the balcony.
'I've got something here really rather wonderful,' Lord Borrodaile went on, with that infrequent kindling of enthusiasm. He had taken one of the unmounted photographs from between its two bits of cardboard and was holding it up before his eyeglass. 'Yes, he's an extraordinary beggar!'--which remark in the ears of those who knew his lordship, advertized his admiration of either some man of genius or 'Uebermensch' of sorts. Before he shared the picture with his companion he told her of what was not then so widely known--details of that most thrilling moment perhaps in all the romance of archaeology--where the excavators of Knossos came upon the first authentic picture of a man belonging to that mysterious and forgotten race that had raised up a civilization in some things rivalling the Greek--a race that had watched Minoan power wane and die, and all but the dimmest legend of it vanish, before the builders of Argos and Mycenae began laying their foundation stones. Borrodaile, with an accent that for him was almost emotion, emphasized the strangeness to the scholar of having to abandon the old idea of the Greek being the sole flower of Mediterranean civilization. For here was this wonderful island folk--a people standing between and bridging East and West--these Cretan men and women who, though they show us their faces, their delicate art and their stupendous palaces, have held no parley with the sons of men, some say for three and thirty centuries. 'But wait! They'll tell us tales before those fellows have done! I wouldn't mind hearing what this beggar has to say for himself!' At last he shared the picture. They agreed that he was a beggar to be reckoned with--this proud athlete coming back to the world of men after his long sleep, not blinded by the new day, not primitive, apologetic, but meeting us with a high imperial mien, daring and beautiful.
'What do you suppose he is carrying in that vase?' Vida asked; 'or is that some trophy?'
'No, no, it's the long drinking cup--to the expert eye that is added evidence of his high degree of civilization. But
think, you know, a man like that walking the earth so long before the Greeks! And here. This courtly train looking on at the games. What do you say to the women!'
'Why, they had got as far as flouncing their gowns and puffing their sleeves! Their hair!'--'Dear me, they must have had a M. Raoul to ondule and dress it.' 'Amazing!--was there ever anything so modern dug out of the earth before?' 'No, nothing like it!' he said, holding the pictures up again between the glass and his kindling eye. 'Ce sont vraiment des Parisiennes!'
Over his shoulder the modern woman looked long at that strange company. 'It is nothing less than uncanny,' she said at last. 'It makes one vaguely wretched.'
'What does?'
'To realize that so long ago the world had got so far. Why couldn't people like these go further still? Why didn't their sons hold fast what so great a race had won?'
'These things go in cycles.'
'Isn't that a phrase?'--the woman mused--'to cover our ignorance of how things go--and why? Why should we be so content to go the old way to destruction? If I were "the English" of this splendid specimen of a Cretan, I would at least find a new way to perdition.'
'Perhaps we shall!'
They sat trying from the accounts of Lord Borrodaile's archaeological friends to reconstruct something of that vanished world. It was a game they had played at before, with Etruscan vases and ivories from Ephesus--the man bringing to it his learning and his wit, the woman her supple imagination and a passion of interest in the great romance of the Pilgrimage of Man.
But to-day she bore a less light-hearted part--'It all came to an end!' she repeated.
'Well, so shall we.'
'But--we--
you will leave your like behind to "hold fast to the clue," as you said a little while ago.'
'Till the turn of the wheel carries the English down. Then somewhere else on our uneasy earth men will begin again----'
'----the fruitless round! But it's horrible--the waste of effort in the world! It's worse than horrible. It's insane.' She looked up suddenly into his face. 'You are wise. Tell me what you think the story of the world means, with its successive clutches at civilization--all those histories of slow and painful building--by Ganges and by Nile and in the Isles of Greece.'
'It's a part of the universal rhythm that all things move to--Nature's way,' he answered.
'Or was it because of some offence against one of her high laws that she wiped the old experiments out? What if the meaning of history is that an Empire maintained by brute force shall perish by brute force!'
'Ah,' he fixed her with those eyes of his. 'I see where you are going.'
'You can't either of you go anywhere,' said Mrs. Freddy, appearing through the balcony window, 'till you've seen the children's pictures.' Vida's eye had once more fallen on the reproduction of one of the Cretan frescoes with a sudden intensification of interest.
'What is it?' Borrodaile asked, looking over her shoulder.
Woman-like she offered the man the outermost fringe of her thought. 'Even Lady Whyteleafe,' she said, 'would be satisfied with the attention they paid to their hair.'
'Come, you two.' Mrs. Freddy was at last impatient. 'Jean's got the
really beautiful pictures, showing them to Geoffrey. Let us all go down to help him to decide which is the best.'
'Geoffrey?'
'Geoffrey Stonor--you know him, of course. But nobody knows the very nicest side of Geoffrey, do they?' she appealed to Borrodaile,--'nobody who hasn't seen him with children?'
'I never saw him with children,' said Vida, buttoning the last button of her glove.
'Well, come down and watch him with Sara and Cecil. They perfectly adore him.'
'No, it's too late.'
But the fond mother drew her friend to the window. 'You can see them from here.'
Vida was not so hurried, apparently, but what she could stand there taking in the picture of Sara and Cecil climbing about their big, kind cousin, with Jean and Mr. Freddy looking on.
'Children!' Their mother waved a handkerchief. 'Here's another friend! Chil---- They're too absorbed to notice,' she said apologetically, turning to find Vida had left the window, and was saying good-bye to Borrodaile.
'Oh, yes,' he agreed, 'they won't care about anybody else while Geoffrey is there.' Lord Borrodaile stooped and picked up a piece of folded paper off the sofa. 'Did I drop that?' He opened it. '
Votes for----' He read the two words out in an accent that seemed to brand them with foolishness, even with vulgarity. 'No, decidedly I did not drop it.'
He was conveying the sheet to the wastepaper basket as one who piously removes some unsavoury litter out of the way of those who walk delicately. Miss Levering arrested him with outstretched hand.
'Do you want it?' His look adjured her to say, 'No.'
'Yes, I want it.'
'What for?' he persisted.
'I want it for an address there is on it.' _