Some Do Not … · Part I · Chapter 1 5 (1/4)

V

“It doesn’t seem quite fair, Valentine,” Mrs. Duchemin said. She was rearranging in a glass bowl some minute flowers that floated on water. They made there, on the breakfast-table, a patch, as it were, of mosaic amongst silver chafing dishes, silver épergnes piled with peaches in pyramids, and great silver rose-bowls filled with roses, that drooped to the damask cloth. A congeries of silver largenesses made as if a fortification for the head of the table; two huge silver urns, a great silver kettle on a tripod and a couple of silver vases filled with the extremely tall blue spikes of delphiniums that, spreading out, made as if a fan. The eighteenth century room was very tall and long; panelled in darkish wood. In the centre of each of four of the panels, facing the light, hung pictures, a mellowed orange in tone, representing mists and the cordage of ships in mists at sunrise. On the bottom of each large gold frame was a tablet bearing the ascription: “J. M. W. Turner.” The chairs, arranged along the long table that was set for eight people, had the delicate, spidery, mahogany backs of Chippendale; on the golden mahogany sideboard that had behind it green silk curtains on a brass-rail were displayed an immense, crumbed ham, more peaches on an épergne, a large meat-pie with a varnished crust, another épergne that supported the large pale globes of grapefruit; a galantine, a cube of inlaid meats, encased in thick jelly.

“Oh, women have to back each other up in these days,” Valentine Wannop said. “I couldn’t let you go through this alone after breakfasting with you every Saturday since I don’t know when.”

“I do feel,” Mrs. Duchemin said, “immensely grateful to you for your moral support. I ought not, perhaps, to have risked this morning. But I’ve told Parry to keep him out till 10:15.”

“It’s, at any rate, tremendously sporting of you,” the girl said. “I think it was worth trying.”

Mrs. Duchemin, wavering round the table, slightly changed the position of the delphiniums.

“I think they make a good screen,” Mrs. Duchemin said.

“Oh, nobody will be able to see him,” the girl answered reassuringly. She added with a sudden resolution, “Look here, Edie. Stop worrying about my mind. If you think that anything I hear at your table after nine months as an ash-cat at Ealing, with three men in the house, an invalid wife and a drunken cook, can corrupt my mind, you’re simply mistaken. You can let your conscience be at rest, and let’s say no more about it.”

Mrs. Duchemin said, “Oh, Valentine! How could your mother let you?”

“She didn’t know,” the girl said. “She was out of her mind for grief. She sat for most of the whole nine months with her hands folded before her in a board and lodging house at twenty-five shillings a week, and it took the five shillings a week that I earned to make up the money.” She added, “Gilbert had to be kept at school of course. And in the holidays, too.”

“I don’t understand!” Mrs. Duchemin said. “I simply don’t understand.”

“Of course you wouldn’t,” the girl answered. “You’re like the kindly people who subscribed at the sale to buy my father’s library back and present it to my mother. That cost us five shillings a week for warehousing, and at Ealing they were always nagging at me for the state of my print dresses⁠ ⁠…”

She broke off and said:

“Let’s not talk about it any more if you don’t mind. You have me in your house, so I suppose you’ve a right to references, as the mistresses call them. But you’ve been very good to me and never asked. Still, it’s come up; do you know I told a man on the links yesterday that I’d been a slavey for nine months. I was trying to explain why I was a suffragette; and, as I was asking him a favour, I suppose I felt I needed to give him references too.”

Mrs. Duchemin, beginning to advance towards the girl impulsively, exclaimed:

“You darling!”

Miss Wannop said:

“Wait a minute. I haven’t finished. I want to say this: I never talk about that stage of my career because I’m ashamed of it. I’m ashamed of it because I think I did the wrong thing, not for any other reason. I did it on impulse and I stuck to it out of obstinacy. I mean it would probably have been more sensible to go round with the hat to benevolent people, for the keep of mother and to complete my education. But if we’ve inherited the Wannop ill-luck, we’ve inherited the Wannop pride. And I couldn’t do it. Besides I was only seventeen, and I gave out we were going into the country after the sale. I’m not educated at all, as you know, or only half, because father, being a brilliant man, had ideas. And one of them was that I was to be an athletic, not a classical don at Cambridge, or I might have been, I believe. I don’t know why he had that tic.⁠ ⁠… But I’d like you to understand two things. One I’ve said already: what I hear in this house won’t ever shock or corrupt me; that it’s said in Latin is neither here nor there. I understand Latin almost as well as English because father used to talk it to me and Gilbert as soon as we talked at all.⁠ ⁠… And, oh yes: I’m a suffragette because I’ve been a slavey. But I’d like you to understand that, though I was a slavey and am a suffragette⁠—you’re an old-fashioned woman and queer things are thought about these two things⁠—then I’d like you to understand that in spite of it all I’m pure! Chaste, you know.⁠ ⁠… Perfectly virtuous.”

Mrs. Duchemin said:

“Oh, Valentine! Did you wear a cap and apron? You! In a cap and apron.”

Miss Wannop replied:

“Yes! I wore a cap and apron and sniffled, ‘M’m!’ to the mistress; and slept under the stairs too. Because I would not sleep with the beast of a cook.”

Mrs. Duchemin now ran forward and catching Miss Wannop by both hands kissed her first on the left and then on the right cheek.

“Oh, Valentine,” she said, “you’re a heroine. And you only twenty-two!⁠ ⁠… Isn’t that the motor coming?”

But it wasn’t the motor coming and Miss Wannop said:

“Oh, no! I’m not a heroine. When I tried to speak to that Minister yesterday, I just couldn’t. It was Gertie who went for him. As for me, I just hopped from one leg to the other and stuttered: ‘V⁠ ⁠… V⁠ ⁠… Votes for W⁠ ⁠… W⁠ ⁠… W⁠ ⁠… omen!’⁠ ⁠… If I’d been decently brave I shouldn’t have been too shy to speak to a strange man.⁠ ⁠… For that was what it really came to.”

“But that surely,” Mrs. Duchemin said⁠—she continued to hold both the girl’s hands⁠—“makes you all the braver.⁠ ⁠… It’s the person who does the thing he’s afraid of who’s the real hero, isn’t it?”

“Oh, we used to argue that old thing over with father when we were ten. You can’t tell. You’ve got to define the term brave. I was just abject.⁠ ⁠… I could harangue the whole crowd when I got them together. But speak to one man in cold blood I couldn’t.⁠ ⁠… Of course I did speak to a fat golfing idiot with bulging eyes, to get him to save Gertie. But that was different.”

Mrs. Duchemin moved both the girl’s hands up and down in her own.

“As you know, Valentine,” she said, “I’m an old-fashioned woman. I believe that woman’s true place is at her husband’s side. At the same time⁠ ⁠…”

Miss Wannop moved away.

“Now, don’t, Edie, don’t!” she said. “If you believe that, you’re an anti. Don’t run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. It’s your defect really.⁠ ⁠… I tell you I’m not a heroine. I dread prison: I hate rows. I’m thankful to goodness that it’s my duty to stop and housemaid-typewrite for mother, so that I can’t really do things.⁠ ⁠… Look at that miserable, adenoidy little Gertie, hiding upstairs in our garret. She was crying all last night⁠—but that’s just nerves. Yet she’s been in prison five times, stomach-pumped and all. Not a moment of funk about her!⁠ ⁠… But as for me, a girl as hard as a rock that prison wouldn’t touch.⁠ ⁠… Why, I’m all of a jump now. That’s why I’m talking nonsense like a pert schoolgirl. I just dread that every sound may be the police coming for me.”

Mrs. Duchemin stroked the girl’s fair hair and tucked a loose strand behind her ear.

“I wish you’d let me show you how to do your hair,” she said. “The right man might come along at any moment.”

“Oh, the right man!” Miss Wannop said. “Thanks for tactfully changing the subject. The right man for me, when he comes along, will be a married man. That’s the Wannop luck!”

Mrs. Duchemin said, with deep concern:

“Don’t talk like that.⁠ ⁠… Why should you regard yourself as being less lucky than other people? Surely your mother’s done well. She has a position; she makes money.⁠ ⁠…”

“Ah, but mother isn’t a Wannop,” the girl said, “only by marriage. The real Wannops⁠ ⁠… they’ve been executed, and attaindered, and falsely accused and killed in carriage accidents and married adventurers or died penniless like father. Ever since the dawn of history. And then, mother’s got her mascot⁠ ⁠…”

“Oh, what’s that?” Mrs. Duchemin asked, almost with animation, “a relic⁠ ⁠…”

“Don’t you know mother’s mascot?” the girl asked. “She tells everybody.⁠ ⁠… Don’t you know the story of the man with the champagne? How mother was sitting contemplating suicide in her bed-sitting room and there came in a man with a name like Tea-tray; she always calls him the mascot and asks us to remember him as such in our prayers.⁠ ⁠… He was a man who’d been at a German university with father years before and loved him very dearly, but not kept touch with him. And he’d been out of England for nine months when father died and round about it. And he said: ‘Now Mrs. Wannop, what’s this?’ And she told him. And he said, ‘What you want is champagne!’ And he sent the slavey out with a sovereign for a bottle of Veuve Cliquot. And he broke the neck of the bottle off against the mantelpiece because they were slow in bringing an opener. And he stood over her while she drank half the bottle out of her tooth-glass. And he took her out to lunch⁠ ⁠… o⁠ ⁠… o⁠ ⁠… oh, it’s cold!⁠ ⁠… And lectured her⁠ ⁠… And got her a job to write leaders on a paper he had shares in⁠ ⁠…”

Mrs. Duchemin said:

“You’re shivering!”

“I know I am,” the girl said. She went on very fast. “And of course, mother always wrote father’s articles for him. He found the ideas, but couldn’t write, and she’s a splendid style.⁠ ⁠… And, since then, he⁠—the mascot⁠—Tea-tray⁠—has always turned up when she’s been in tight places. Then the paper blew her up and threatened to dismiss her for inaccuracies! She’s frightfully inaccurate. And he wrote her out a table of things every leader writer must know, such as that ‘A. Ebor’ is the Archbishop of York, and that the Government is Liberal. And one day he turned up and said: ‘Why don’t you write a novel on that story you told me?’ And he lent her the money to buy the cottage we’re in now to be quiet and write in⁠ ⁠… Oh, I can’t go on!”

Miss Wannop burst into tears.

“It’s thinking of those beastly days,” she said. “And that beastly, beastly yesterday!” She ran the knuckles of both her hands fiercely into her eyes, and determinedly eluded Mrs. Duchemin’s handkerchief and embraces. She said almost contemptuously:

“A nice, considerate person I am. And you with this ordeal hanging over you! Do you suppose I don’t appreciate all your silent heroism of the home, while we’re marching about with flags and shouting? But it’s just to stop women like you being tortured, body and soul, week in, week out, that we⁠ ⁠…”

Mrs. Duchemin had sat down on a chair near one of the windows; she had her handkerchief hiding her face.

“Why women in your position don’t take lovers⁠ ⁠…” the girl said, hotly. “Or that women in your position do take lovers⁠ ⁠…”

Mrs. Duchemin looked up; in spite of its tears her white face had an air of serious dignity.

“Oh, no, Valentine,” she said, using her deeper tones. “There’s something beautiful, there’s something thrilling about chastity. I’m not narrow-minded. Censorious! I don’t condemn! But to preserve in word, thought and action a lifelong fidelity.⁠ ⁠… It’s no mean achievement.⁠ ⁠…”

“You mean like an egg and spoon race,” Miss Wannop said.

“It isn’t,” Mrs. Duchemin replied gently, “the way I should have put it. Isn’t the real symbol Atalanta, running fast and not turning aside for the golden apple? That always seemed to me the real truth hidden in the beautiful old legend.⁠ ⁠…”

“I don’t know,” Miss Wannop said, “when I read what Ruskin says about it in the Crown of Wild Olive. Or no! It’s the Queen of the Air. That’s his Greek rubbish, isn’t it? I always think it seems like an egg-race in which the young woman didn’t keep her eyes in the boat. But I suppose it comes to the same thing.”

Mrs. Duchemin said:

“My dear! Not a word against John Ruskin in this house.”

Miss Wannop screamed.

An immense voice had shouted:

“This way! This way!⁠ ⁠… The ladies will be here!”

Of Mr. Duchemin’s curates⁠—he had three of them, for he had three marshland parishes almost without stipend, so that no one but a very rich clergyman could have held them⁠—it was observed that they were all very large men with the physiques rather of prizefighters than of clergy. So that when by any chance at dusk, Mr. Duchemin, who himself was of exceptional stature, and his three assistants went together along a road the hearts of any malefactors whom in the mist they chanced to encounter went pit-a-pat.

Mr. Horsley⁠—the number two⁠—had in addition an enormous voice. He shouted four or five words, interjected tee-hee, shouted four or five words more and again interjected tee-hee. He had enormous wrist-bones that protruded from his clerical cuffs, an enormous Adam’s apple, a large, thin, close-cropped, colourless face like a skull, with very sunken eyes, and when he was once started speaking it was impossible to stop him, because his own voice in his ears drowned every possible form of interruption.

This morning, as an inmate of the house, introducing to the breakfast-room Messrs. Tietjens and Macmaster, who had driven up to the steps just as he was mounting them, he had a story to tell. The introduction was, therefore, not, as such, a success.⁠ ⁠…

“A State of Siege, Ladies! Tee-hee!” he alternately roared and giggled. “We’re living in a regular state of siege.⁠ ⁠… What with⁠ ⁠…” It appeared that the night before, after dinner, Mr. Sandbach and rather more than half-a-dozen of the young bloods who had dined at Mountby, had gone scouring the country lanes, mounted on motor bicycles and armed with loaded canes⁠ ⁠… for suffragettes! Every woman they had come across in the darkness they had stopped, abused, threatened with their loaded canes and subjected to cross-examination. The countryside was up in arms.

As a story this took, with the appropriate reflections and repetitions, a long time in telling, and afforded Tietjens and Miss Wannop the opportunity of gazing at each other. Miss Wannop was frankly afraid that this large, clumsy, unusual-looking man, now that he had found her again, might hand her over to the police whom she imagined to be searching for herself, and her friend Gertie, Miss Wilson, at that moment in bed, under the care, as she also imagined, of Mrs. Wannop. On the links he had seemed to her natural and in place; here, with his loosely hung clothes and immense hands, the white patch on the side of his rather cropped head and his masked rather shapeless features, he affected her queerly as being both in and out of place. He seemed to go with the ham, the meatpie, the galantine and even at a pinch with the roses; but the Turner pictures, the aesthetic curtain and Mrs. Duchemin’s flowing robes, amber and rose in the hair did not go with him at all. Even the Chippendale chairs hardly did. And she felt herself thinking oddly, beneath her perturbations, of a criminal and the voice of the Rev. Horsley that his Harris tweeds went all right with her skirt, and she was glad that she had on a clean, cream-coloured silk blouse, not a striped pink cotton.

She was right as to that.