Some Do Not … · Part I · Chapter 1 5 (2/4)

In every man there are two minds that work side by side, the one checking the other; thus emotion stands against reason, intellect corrects passion and first impressions act just a little, but very little, before quick reflection. Yet first impressions have always a bias in their favour, and even quiet reflection has often a job to efface them.

The night before Tietjens had given several thoughts to this young woman. General Campion had assigned her to him as maîtresse en tître. He was said to have ruined himself, broken up his home and spent his wife’s money on her. Those were lies. On the other hand they were not inherent impossibilities. Upon occasion and given the right woman, quite sound men have done such things. He might, heaven knows, himself be so caught. But that he should have ruined himself over an unnoticeable young female who had announced herself as having been a domestic servant, and wore a pink cotton blouse⁠ ⁠… that had seemed to go beyond the bounds of even the unreason of club gossip!

That was the strong, first impression! It was all very well for his surface mind to say that the girl was not by birth a tweeny maid; she was the daughter of Professor Wannop and she could jump! For Tietjens held very strongly the theory that what finally separated the classes was that the upper could lift its feet from the ground whilst common people couldn’t.⁠ ⁠… But the strong impression remained. Miss Wannop was a tweeny maid. Say a lady’s help, by nature. She was of good family, for the Wannops were first heard of at Birdlip in Gloucestershire in the year 1417⁠—no doubt enriched after Agincourt. But even brilliant men of good family will now and then throw daughters who are lady helps by nature. That was one of the queernesses of heredity.⁠ ⁠… And, though Tietjens had even got as far as to realise that Miss Wannop must be a heroine who had sacrificed her young years to her mother’s gifts, and no doubt to a brother at school⁠—for he had guessed as far as that⁠—even then Tietjens couldn’t make her out as more than a lady help. Heroines are all very well; admirable, they may even be saints; but if they let themselves get careworn in face and go shabby.⁠ ⁠… Well, they must wait for the gold that shall be amply stored for them in heaven. On this earth you could hardly accept them as wives for men of your own set. Certainly you wouldn’t spend your own wife’s money on them. That was what it really came to.

But, brightened up as he now suddenly saw her, with silk for the pink cotton, shining coiled hair for the white canvas hat, a charming young neck, good shoes beneath neat ankles, a healthy flush taking the place of yesterday’s pallor of fear for her comrade; an obvious equal in the surroundings of quite good people; small, but well-shaped and healthy; immense blue eyes fixed without embarrassment on his own.⁠ ⁠…

“By Jove⁠ ⁠…” he said to himself: “It’s true! What a jolly little mistress she’d make!”

He blamed Campion, Sandbach and the club gossips for the form the thought had taken. For the cruel, bitter and stupid pressure of the world has yet about it something selective; if it couples male and female in its inexorable rings of talk it will be because there is something harmonious in the union. And there exists then the pressure of suggestion!

He took a look at Mrs. Duchemin and considered her infinitely commonplace and probably a bore. He disliked her large-shouldered, many-yarded style of blue dress and considered that no woman should wear clouded amber, for which the proper function was the provision of cigarette holders for bounders. He looked back at Miss Wannop, and considered that she would make a good wife for Macmaster; Macmaster liked bouncing girls and this girl was quite lady enough.

He heard Miss Wannop shout against the gale to Mrs. Duchemin:

“Do I sit beside the head of the table and pour out?”

Mrs. Duchemin answered:

“No! I’ve asked Miss Fox to pour out. She’s nearly stone deaf.” Miss Fox was the penniless sister of a curate deceased. “You’re to amuse Mr. Tietjens.”

Tietjens noticed that Mrs. Duchemin had an agreeable turret voice; it penetrated the noises of Mr. Horsley as the missel-thrush’s note a gale. It was rather agreeable. He noticed that Miss Wannop made a little grimace.

Mr. Horsley, like a megaphone addressing a crowd, was turning from side to side, addressing his hearers by rotation. At the moment he was bawling at Macmaster; it would be Tietjens’ turn again in a moment to hear a description of the heart attacks of old Mrs. Haglen at Nobeys. But Tietjens’ turn did not come.⁠ ⁠…

A high-complexioned, round-cheeked, forty-fivish lady, with agreeable eyes, dressed rather well in the black of the not-very-lately widowed, entered the room with precipitation. She patted Mr. Horsley on his declamatory right arm and, since he went on talking, she caught him by the hand and shook it. She exclaimed in high, commanding tones:

“Which is Mr. Macmaster, the critic?” and then, in the dead lull to Tietjens: “Are you Mr. Macmaster, the critic? No!⁠ ⁠… Then you must be.”

Her turning to Macmaster and the extinction of her interest in himself had been one of the rudest things Tietjens had ever experienced, but it was an affair so strictly businesslike that he took it without any offence. She was remarking to Macmaster:

“Oh, Mr. Macmaster, my new book will be out on Thursday week,” and she had begun to lead him towards a window at the other end of the room.

Miss Wannop said:

“What have you done with Gertie?”

“Gertie!” Mrs. Wannop exclaimed with the surprise of one coming out of a dream. “Oh yes! She’s fast asleep. She’ll sleep till four. I told Hannah to give a look at her now and then.”

Miss Wannop’s hands fell open at her side.

“Oh, mother!” forced itself from her.

“Oh, yes,” Mrs. Wannop said, “we’d agreed to tell old Hannah we didn’t want her today. So we had!” She said to Macmaster: “Old Hannah is our charwoman,” wavered a little and then went on brightly: “Of course it will be of use to you to hear about my new book. To you journalists a little bit of previous explanation⁠ ⁠…” and she dragged off Macmaster, who seemed to bleat faintly.⁠ ⁠…

That had come about because just as she had got into the dogcart to be driven to the rectory⁠—for she herself could not drive a horse⁠—Miss Wannop had told her mother that there would be two men at breakfast, one whose name she didn’t know; the other, a Mr. Macmaster, a celebrated critic. Mrs. Wannop had called up to her:

“A critic? Of what?” her whole sleepy being electrified.

“I don’t know,” her daughter had answered. “Books, I daresay.”

A second or so after, when the horse, a large black animal that wouldn’t stand, had made twenty yards or so at several bounds, the handy man who drove had said:

“Yer mother’s ’owlin’ after yer.” But Miss Wannop had answered that it didn’t matter. She was confident that she had arranged for everything. She was to be back to get lunch; her mother was to give an occasional look at Gertie Wilson in the garret; Hannah, the daily help, was to be told she could go for the day. It was of the highest importance that Hannah should not know that a completely strange young woman was asleep in the garret at eleven in the morning. If she did, the news would be all over the neighbourhood at once, and the police instantly down on them.

But Mrs. Wannop was a woman of business. If she heard of a reviewer within driving distance she called on him with eggs as a present. The moment the daily help had arrived, she had set out and walked to the rectory. No consideration of danger from the police would have stopped her; besides, she had forgotten all about the police.

Her arrival worried Mrs. Duchemin a good deal, because she wished all her guests to be seated and the breakfast well begun before the entrance of her husband. And this was not easy. Mrs. Wannop, who was uninvited, refused to be separated from Mr. Macmaster. Mr. Macmaster had told her that he never wrote reviews in the daily papers, only articles for the heavy quarterlies, and it had occurred to Mrs. Wannop that an article on her new book in one of the quarterlies was just what was needed. She was, therefore, engaged in telling Mr. Macmaster how to write about herself, and twice after Mrs. Duchemin had succeeded in shepherding Mr. Macmaster nearly to his seat, Mrs. Wannop had conducted him back to the embrasure of the window. It was only by sitting herself firmly in her chair next to Macmaster that Mrs. Duchemin was able to retain for herself this all-essential, strategic position. And it was only by calling out:

“Mr. Horsley, do take Mrs. Wannop to the seat beside you and feed her,” that Mrs. Duchemin got Mrs. Wannop out of Mr. Duchemin’s own seat at the head of the table, for Mrs. Wannop, having perceived this seat to be vacant and next to Mr. Macmaster, had pulled out the Chippendale armchair and had prepared to sit down in it. This could only have spelt disaster, for it would have meant turning Mrs. Duchemin’s husband loose amongst the other guests.

Mr. Horsley, however, accomplished his duty of leading away this lady with such firmness that Mrs. Wannop conceived of him as a very disagreeable and awkward person. Mr. Horsley’s seat was next to Miss Fox, a grey spinster, who sat, as it were, within the fortification of silver urns and deftly occupied herself with the ivory taps of these machines. This seat, too, Mrs. Wannop tried to occupy, imagining that, by moving the silver vases that upheld the tall delphiniums, she would be able to get a diagonal view of Macmaster and so to shout to him. She found, however, that she couldn’t, and so resigned herself to taking the chair that had been reserved for Miss Gertie Wilson, who was to have been the eighth guest. Once there she sat in distracted gloom, occasionally saying to her daughter:

“I think it’s very bad management. I think this party’s very badly arranged.” Mr. Horsley she hardly thanked for the sole that he placed before her; Tietjens she did not even look at.

Sitting beside Macmaster, her eyes fixed on a small door in the corner of a panelled wall, Mrs. Duchemin became a prey to a sudden and overwhelming fit of apprehension. It forced her to say to her guest, though she had resolved to chance it and say nothing:

“It wasn’t perhaps fair to ask you to come all this way. You may get nothing out of my husband. He’s apt⁠ ⁠… especially on Saturdays.⁠ ⁠…”

She trailed off into indecision. It was possible that nothing might occur. On two Saturdays out of seven nothing did occur. Then an admission would be wasted; this sympathetic being would go out of her life with a knowledge that he needn’t have had⁠—to be a slur on her memory in his mind.⁠ ⁠… But then, overwhelmingly, there came over her the feeling that, if he knew of her sufferings, he might feel impelled to remain and comfort her. She cast about for words with which to finish her sentence. But Macmaster said:

“Oh, dear lady!” (And it seemed to her to be charming to be addressed thus!) “One understands⁠ ⁠… One is surely trained and adapted to understand⁠ ⁠… that these great scholars, these abstracted cognoscenti⁠ ⁠…”

Mrs. Duchemin breathed a great “Ah!” of relief. Macmaster had used the exactly right words.

“And,” Macmaster was going on, “merely to spend a short hour; a swallow flight⁠ ⁠… ‘As when the swallow gliding from lofty portal to lofty portal’⁠ ⁠… You know the lines⁠ ⁠… in these, your perfect surroundings⁠ ⁠…”

Blissful waves seemed to pass from him to her. It was in this way that men should speak; in that way⁠—steel-blue tie, true-looking gold ring, steel-blue eyes beneath black brows!⁠—that men should look. She was half-conscious of warmth; this suggested the bliss of falling asleep, truly, in perfect surroundings. The roses on the table were lovely; their scent came to her.

A voice came to her:

“You do do the thing in style, I must say.”

The large, clumsy but otherwise unnoticeable being that this fascinating man had brought in his train was setting up pretensions to her notice. He had just placed before her a small blue china plate that contained a little black caviar and a round of lemon; a small Sèvres, pinkish, delicate plate that held the pinkest peach in the room. She had said to him: “Oh⁠ ⁠… a little caviar! A peach!” a long time before, with the vague underfeeling that the names of such comestibles must convey to her person a charm in the eyes of Caliban.

She buckled about her her armour of charm; Tietjens was gazing with large, fishish eyes at the caviar before her.

“How do you get that, for instance?” he asked.

“Oh!” she answered: “If it wasn’t my husband’s doing it would look like ostentation. I’d find it ostentatious for myself.” She found a smile, radiant, yet muted. “He’s trained Simpkins of New Bond Street. For a telephone message overnight special messengers go to Billingsgate at dawn for salmon, and red mullet, this, in ice, and great blocks of ice, too. It’s such pretty stuff⁠ ⁠… and then by seven the car goes to Ashford Junction.⁠ ⁠… All the same, it’s difficult to give a breakfast before ten.”

She didn’t want to waste her careful sentences on this grey fellow; she couldn’t, however, turn back, as she yearned to do, to the kindredly running phrases⁠—as if out of books she had read!⁠—of the smaller man.

“Ah, but it isn’t,” Tietjens said, “ostentation. It’s the great Tradition. You mustn’t ever forget that your husband’s Breakfast Duchemin of Magdalen.”

He seemed to be gazing, inscrutably, deep into her eyes. But no doubt he meant to be agreeable.

“Sometimes I wish I could,” she said. “He doesn’t get anything out of it himself. He’s ascetic to unreasonableness. On Fridays he eats nothing at all. It makes me quite anxious⁠ ⁠… for Saturdays.”

Tietjens said:

“I know.”

She exclaimed⁠—and almost with sharpness:

“You know!”

He continued to gaze straight into her eyes:

“Oh, of course one knows all about Breakfast Duchemin!” he said. “He was one of Ruskin’s road-builders. He was said to be the most Ruskin-like of them all!”

Mrs. Duchemin cried out: “Oh!” Fragments of the worst stories that in his worst moods her husband had told her of his old preceptor went through her mind. She imagined that the shameful parts of her intimate life must be known to this nebulous monster. For Tietjens, turned sideways and facing her, had seemed to grow monstrous, and as if with undefined outlines. He was the male, threatening, clumsily odious and external! She felt herself say to herself: “I will do you an injury, if ever⁠—” For already she had felt herself swaying the preferences, the thoughts and the future of the man on her other side. He was the male, tender, in-fitting; the complement of the harmony, the meat for consumption, like the sweet pulp of figs.⁠ ⁠… It was inevitable; it was essential to the nature of her relationship with her husband that Mrs. Duchemin should have these feelings.⁠ ⁠…

She heard, almost without emotion, so great was her disturbance, from behind her back the dreaded, high, rasping tones:

“Post coitum tristia! Ha! Ha. That’s what it is?” The voice repeated the words and added sardonically: “You know what that means?” But the problem of her husband had become secondary; the real problem was: “What was this monstrous and hateful man going to say of her to his friend, when, for long hours, they were away?”

He was still gazing into her eyes. He said nonchalantly, rather low:

“I wouldn’t look round if I were you. Vincent Macmaster is quite up to dealing with the situation.”

His voice had the familiarity of an elder brother’s. And at once Mrs. Duchemin knew⁠—that he knew that already close ties were developing between herself and Macmaster. He was speaking as a man speaks in emergencies to the mistress of his dearest friend. He was then one of those formidable and to be feared males who possess the gift of right intuitions.⁠ ⁠…

Tietjens said: “You heard!”