PART TWO 5 страница

Tietjens said:

“I know you, sir, to be the smartest general of division in the British Army. I leave you to draw your own conclusions as to why I said what I did…” He had told the exact truth, but he was not sorry to be disbelieved.

The General said:

“Then I'll take it that you tell me a lie meaning me to know that it's a lie. That's quite proper. I take it you mean to keep the woman officially out of it. But look here, Chrissie”—his tone took a deeper seriousness—If the woman that's come between you and Sylvia—that's broken up your home, damn it, for that's what it is! —is little Miss Wannop…”

“Her name was Julia Mandelstein, ” Tietjens said.

The General said:

“Yes! Yes! Of course! … But if it is the little Wannop girl and it's not gone too far… Put her back… Put her back, as you used to be a good boy! It would be too hard on the mother…”

Tietjens, said:

“General! I give you my word…”

The General said:

“I'm not asking any questions, my boy; I'm talking now. You've told me the story you want told and it's the story I'll tell for you! But that little piece is… she used to be! … as straight as a die. I daresay you know better than I. Of course when they get among the wild women there's no knowing what happens to them. They say they're all whores… I beg your pardon, if you like the girl…”

“Is Miss Wannop, ” Tietjens asked, “the girl who demonstrates? ”

“Sandbach said, ” the General went on, “that he couldn't see from where he was whether that girl was the same as the one in the Haymarket. But he thought it was… He was pretty certain. ”

“As he's married your sister, ” Tietjens said, “one can't impugn his taste in women. ”

“I say again, I'm not asking, ” the General said. “But I do say again too: put her back. Her father was a great friend of your father's: or your father was a great admirer of his. They say he was the most brilliant brain of the party. ”

“Of course I know who Professor Wannop was, ” Tietjens said. “There's nothing you could tell me about him. ”

“I daresay not, ” the General said drily. “Then you know that he didn't leave a farthing when he died and the rotten Liberal Government wouldn't put his wife and children on the Civil List because he'd sometimes written for a Tory paper. And you know that the mother has had a deuced hard row to hoe and has only just turned the corner. If she can be said to have turned it. I know Claudine takes them all the peaches she can cadge out of Paul's gardener. ”

Tietjens was about to say that Mrs Wannop, the mother, had written the only novel worth reading since the eighteenth century… But the General went on:

“Listen to me, my boy… If you can't get on without women… I should have thought Sylvia was good enough. But I know what we men are… I don't set up to be a saint. I heard a woman in the promenade of the Empire say once that it was the likes of them that saved the lives and figures of all the virtuous women of the country. And I daresay it's true… But choose a girl that you can set up in a tobacco shop and do your courting in the back parlour. Not in the Haymarket… Heaven knows if you can afford it. That's your affair. You appear to have been sold up. And from what Sylvia's let drop to Claudine…”

“I don't believe, ” Tietjens said, “that Sylvia's said anything to Lady Claudine… She's too straight. ”

“I didn't say 'said, '” the General exclaimed, “I particularly said 'let drop. ' And perhaps I oughtn't to have said as much as that, but you know what devils for ferreting out women are. And Claudine's worse than any woman I ever knew…”

“And, of course, she's had Sandbach to help, ” Tietjens said.

“Oh, that fellow's worse than any woman, ” the General exclaimed.

“Then what does the whole indictment amount to? ” Tietjens asked.

“Oh, hang it, ” the General brought out, “I'm not a beastly detective, I only want a plausible story to tell Claudine. Or not even plausible. An obvious lie as long as it shows you're not flying in the face of society—as walking up the Haymarket with the little Wannop when your wife's left you because of her would be. ”

“What does it amount to? ” Tietjens said patiently: “What Sylvia 'let drop'? ”

“Only, ” the General answered, “that you are—that your views are—immoral. Of course they often puzzle me. And, of course, if you have views that aren't the same as other people's, and don't keep them to yourself, other people will suspect you of immorality. That's what put Paul Sandbach on your track! … and that you're extravagant… Oh, hang it… Eternal hansoms, and taxis and telegrams… You know, my boy, times aren't what they were when your father and I married. We used to say you could do it on five hundred a year as a younger son… And then this girl too…” His voice took on a more agitated note of shyness—pain…”It probably hadn't occurred to you… But, of course, Sylvia has an income of her own… And, don't you see… if you outrun the constable and… In short, you're spending Sylvia's money on the other girl, and that's what people can't stand. ” He added quickly: “I'm bound to say that Mrs Satterthwaite backs you through thick and thin. Thick and thin! Claudine wrote to her. But you know what women are with a handsome son-in-law that's always polite to them. But I may tell you that but for your mother-in-law, Claudine would have cut you out of her visiting list months ago. And you'd have been cut out of some others too…”

Tietjens said:

“Thanks. I think that's enough to go on with… Give me a couple of minutes to reflect on what you've said…”

“I'll wash my hands and change my coat, ” the General said with intense relief.

At the end of two minutes Tietjens said:

“No; I don't see that there is anything I want to say. ” The General exclaimed with enthusiasm:

“That's my good lad! Open confession is next to reform… And… and try to be more respectful to your superiors… Damn it; they say you're brilliant. But I thank heaven I haven't got you in my command… Though I believe you're a good lad. But you're the sort of fellow to set a whole division by the ears… A regular… what's 'is name? A regular Dreyfus! ”

“Did you think Dreyfus was guilty? ” Tietjens asked.

“Hang it, ” the General said, “he was worse than guilty—the sort of fellow you couldn't believe in and yet couldn't prove anything against. The curse of the world…”

Tietjens said:

“Ah. ”

“Well, they are, ” the General said: “fellows like that unsettle society. You don't know where you are. You can't judge. They make you uncomfortable… A brilliant fellow too! I believe he's a brigadier-general by now…” He put his arm round Tietjens' shoulders.

“There, there, my dear boy, ” he said, “come and have a sloe gin. That's the real answer to all beastly problems. ”

It was some time before Tietjens could get to think of his own problems. The fly that took them back went with the slow pomp of a procession over the winding marsh road in front of the absurdly picturesque red pyramid of the very old town. Tietjens had to listen to the General suggesting that it would be better if he didn't come to the golf-club till Monday. He would get Macmaster some good games. A good, sound fellow that Macmaster now. It was a pity Tietjens hadn't some of his soundness!

Two city men had approached the General on the course and had used some violent invectives against Tietjens: they had objected to being called ruddy swine to their faces: they were going to the police. The General said that he had told them himself, slowly and guiltily, that they were ruddy swine and that they would never get another ticket at that club after Monday. But till Monday, apparently, they had the right to be there and the club wouldn't want scenes. Sandbach, too, was infuriated about Tietjens.

Tietjens said that the fault lay with the times that permitted the introduction into gentlemen's company of such social swipes as Sandbach. One acted perfectly correctly, and then a dirty little beggar like that put dirty little constructions on it and ran about and bleated. He added that he knew Sandbach was the General's brother-in-law, but he couldn't help it. That was the truth… The General said: “I know, my boy: I know…” But one had to take society as one found it. Claudine had to be provided for and Sandbach made a very good husband, careful, sober, and on the right side in politics. A bit of a rip; but they couldn't ask for everything! And Claudine was using all the influence she had with the other side—which was not a little, women were so wonderful! —to get him a diplomatic job in Turkey, so as to get him out of the way of Mrs Crundall! Mrs Crundall was the leading Anti-Suffragette of the little town. That was what made Sandbach so bitter against Tietjens. He told Tietjens so that Tietjens might understand.

Tietjens had hitherto flattered himself that he could examine a subject swiftly and put it away in his mind. To the General he hardly listened. The allegations against himself were beastly; but he could usually ignore allegations against himself, and he imagined that if he said no more about them he would himself hear no more. And, if there were, in clubs and places where men talk, unpleasant rumours as to himself he preferred it to be thought that he was the rip, not his wife the strumpet. That was normal, male vanity: the preference of the English gentleman! Had it been a matter of Sylvia spotless and himself as spotless as he was—for in all these things he knew himself to be spotless! —he would certainly have defended himself, at least, to the General. But he had acted practically in not defending himself more vigorously. For he imagined that, had he really tried, he could have made the General believe him. But he had behaved rightly! It was not mere vanity. There was the child up at his sister Effie's. It was better for a boy to have a rip of a father than a whore for mother!

The General was expatiating on the solidity of a squat castle, like a pile of draughts, away to the left, in the sun, on the flatness. He was saying that we didn't build like that nowadays.

Tietjens said:

“You're perfectly wrong, General. All the castles that Henry VIII built in 1543 along this coast are mere monuments of jerry-building… 'In 1543 jactat castra Delis, Sandgatto, Reia, Hastingas Henricus Rex'… That means he chucked them down…”

The General laughed:

“You are an incorrigible fellow… If ever there's any known, certain fact…”

“But go and look at the beastly things, ” Tietjens said. “You'll see they've got just a facing of Caen stone that the tide floated here, and the fillings-up are just rubble, any rubbish… Look here! It's a known certain fact, isn't it, that your eighteen-pounders are better than the French seventy-fives. They tell us so in the House, on the hustings, in the papers: the public believes it… But would you put one of your tiny pet things firing—what is it? —four shells a minute? —with the little bent pins in their tails to stop the recoil—against their seventy-fives with the compressed-air cylinders…”

The General sat stiffly upon his cushion:

“That's different, ” he said. “How the devil do you get to know these things? ”

“It isn't different, ” Tietjens said, “it's the same muddleheaded frame of mind that sees good building in Henry VIII as lets us into wars with hopelessly antiquated field guns and rottenly inferior ammunition. You'd fire any fellow on your staff who said we could stand up for a minute against the French. ”

“Well, anyhow, ” the General said, “I thank heaven you're not on my staff, for you'd talk my hind leg off in a week. It's perfectly true that the public…”

But Tietjens was not listening. He was considering that it was natural for an unborn fellow like Sandbach to betray the solidarity that should exist between men. And it was natural for a childless woman like Lady Claudine Sandbach, with a notoriously, a flagrantly unfaithful husband, to believe in the unfaithfulness of the husbands of other women!

The General was saying:

“Who did you hear that stuff from about the French field gun? ”

Tietjens said:

“From you. Three weeks ago! ”

And all the other society women with unfaithful husbands… They must do their best to down and out a man. They would cut him off their visiting lists! Let them. The barren harlots mated to faithless eunuchs… Suddenly he thought that he didn't know for certain that he was the father of his child and he groaned.

“Well, what have I said wrong now? ” the General asked. “Surely you don't maintain that pheasants do eat man-golds…”

Tietjen proved his reputation for sanity with:

“No! I was just groaning at the thought of the Chancellor! That's sound enough for you, isn't it? ” But it gave him a nasty turn. He hadn't been able to pigeon-hole and padlock his disagreeable reflections. He had been as good as talking to himself…

In the bow-window of another hostelry than his own he caught the eye of Mr Waterhouse, who was looking at the view over the marshes. The great man beckoned to him and he went in. Mr Waterhouse was aware that Tietjenswhom he assumed to be a man of sense—should get any pursuit of the two girls stopped off. He couldn't move in the matter himself, but a five pound note and possibly a police promotion or so might be handed round if no advertisement were given to the mad women on account of their raid of that afternoon.

It was not a very difficult matter: for where the great man was to be found in the club lounge, there, in the bar, the major, the town clerk, the local head of the police, the doctors and solicitors would be found drinking together. And after it was arranged the great man himself came into the bar, had a drink and pleased them all immensely by his affability…

Tietjens himself, dining alone with the Minister to whom he wanted to talk about his Labour Finance Act, didn't find him a disagreeable fellow: not really foolish, not sly except in his humour, tired obviously, but livening up after a couple of whiskys, and certainly not as yet plutocratic; with tastes for apple-pie and cream of a fourteen-year-old boy. And, even as regards his famous Act, which was then shaking the country to its political foundations, once you accepted its fundamental unsuitedness to the temperament and needs of the English working-class, you could see that Mr Waterhouse didn't want to be dishonest. He accepted with gratitude several of Tietjens' emendations in the actuarial schedules… And over their port they agreed on two fundamental legislative ideals: every working man to have a minimum of four hundred a year and every beastly manufacturer who wanted to pay less to be hung. That, it appeared, was the High Toryism of Tietjens as it was the extreme Radicalism of the extreme Left of the Left…

And Tietjens, who hated no man, in face of this simpleminded and agreeable schoolboy type of fellow, fell to wondering why it was that humanity that was next to always agreeable in its units was, as a mass, a phenomenon so hideous. You look at a dozen men, each of them not by any means detestable and not uninteresting: for each of them would have technical details of their affairs to impart: you formed them into a Government or a club, and at once, with oppressions, inaccuracies, gossip, backbiting, lying, corruption and vileness, you had the combination of wolf, tiger, weasel, and louse-covered ape that was human society. And he remembered the words of some Russian: “Cats and monkeys. Monkeys and cats. All humanity is there. ”

Tietjens and Mr Waterhouse spent the rest of the evening together.

Whilst Tietjens was interviewing the policeman, the Minister sat on the front steps of the cottage and smoked cheap cigarettes, and when Tietjens went to bed, Mr Waterhouse insisted on sending by him kindly messages to Miss Wannop, asking her to come and discuss female suffrage any afternoon she liked in his private room at the House of Commons. Mr Waterhouse flatly refused to believe that Tietjens hadn't arranged the raid with Miss Wannop. He said it had been too neatly planned for any woman, and he said Tietjens was a lucky fellow, for she was a ripping girl.

Back in his room under the rafters, Tietjens fell, nevertheless, at once a prey to real agitation. For a long time he pounded from wall to wall and, since he could not shake off the train of thought, he got out at last his patience cards, and devoted himself seriously to thinking out the conditions of his life with Sylvia. He wanted to stop scandal if he could; he wanted them to live within his income, he wanted to subtract that child from the influence of its mother. These were all definite but difficult things… Then one half of his mind lost itself in the rearrangement of schedules, and on his brilliant table his hands set queens on kings and checked their recurrences.

In that way the sudden entrance of Macmaster gave him a really terrible physical shock. He nearly vomited: his brain reeled and the room fell about. He drank a great quantity of whisky in front of Macmaster's goggling eyes; but even at that he couldn't talk, and he dropped into his bed faintly aware of his friend's efforts to loosen his clothes. He had, he knew, carried the suppression of thought in his conscious mind so far that his unconscious self had taken command and had, for the time, paralysed both his body and his mind.

“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 epergnes 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 epergne, a large meat-pie with a varnished crust, another epergne 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 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 athlete, 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 woud 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 coining? ” 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 had 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 Clicquot. 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 toothglass. 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—Teatray—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…”

⇐ Предыдущая 2 3 4 5 678 9 10 11 Следующая ⇒