Chapter THE TENTH: A Searching of Schoolmasters (5)

It was just at this moment that cries of “Order, Order,” made him aware of a feminine figure close beside him. He turned to meet the heaving wrath of Aunt Phœbe’s face. There was just an instant’s scrutiny. Then he remembered, he remembered everything, and with a wild shriek leapt clean off the platform upon the toes of the front row of the audience.

“If you _touch_ me!” he screamed....

The young man told the incident briefly and brightly.

“Thereby hangs a tale,” said Aunt Phœbe darkly, and became an allusive Sphinx for the rest of the dinner.

“I shook that man,” she said at last to Pryce.

“What—_him_?” said Pryce, staring round-eyed at the young man from Cambridge.

“No, the man at the meeting.”

“What—afterwards?” said Pryce, lost and baffled.

“No,” said Aunt Phœbe; “_before_.”

Pryce tried to look intelligent, and nodded his head very fast to conceal the fear and confusion in his mind.

Amidst all these voices and festivities sat Oswald, with a vast paper cap shaped rather like the dome of a Russian church cocked over his blind side, listening distractedly, noting this and that, saying little, thinking many things.

The banquet ended at last, and every one drifted to the library.

Affairs hovered vaguely for a time. Peter handed cigarettes about. Some one started the gramophone with a Two Step that set every one tripping. Hetty with a flush on her cheek and a light in her eyes was keeping near Peter; she seized upon him now for a dance that was also an embrace. Peter laughed, nothing loath. “Oh! but this is glorious!” panted Hetty.

“Come and dance, too, Joan,” said Wilmington.

“It’s stuffy!” said Joan.

Oswald, contemplating a retreat to his study armchair, found her presently in the hall dressed to go out with Huntley.

“We’re going over the hill to see the sunset,” Joan explained. “It’s too stuffy in there.”

Oswald met Huntley’s large grey eye for a moment. He had an instinctive distrust of Huntley. But on the other hand, surely Joan had brains enough and fastidiousness enough not to lose her head with this—this phosphorescent fish of a novelist.

“Right-o,” said Oswald, and hovered doubtfully.

Aunt Phœbe appeared on the landing above carrying off a rather reluctant Miss Scroby to her room for a real good talk; a crash and an unmistakable giggle proclaimed a minor rag in progress in the common room across the hall in which Sydney Sheldrick was busy. The study door closed on Oswald....

Joan and Huntley passed by outside his window. He sat down in front of his fire, poked it into a magnificent blaze, lit a cigar and sat thinking. The beat of dancing, the melody of the gramophone and a multitude of less distinct sounds soaked in through the door to him.

He was, he reflected, rather like a strange animal among all this youth. They treated him as something remotely old; he was one-and-fifty, and yet this gregarious stir and excitement that brightened their eyes and quickened their blood stirred him too. He couldn’t help a feeling of envy; he had missed so much in his life. And in his younger days the pace had been slower. These young people were actually noisier, they were more reckless, they did more and went further than his generation had gone. In his time, with his sort of people, there had been the virtuous life which was, one had to admit it, slow, and the fast life which was noisily, criminally, consciously and vulgarly vicious. This generation didn’t seem to be vicious, and was anything but slow. How far did they go? He had been noting little things between Peter and this Reinhart girl. What were they up to between them? He didn’t understand. Was she manœuvring to marry the boy? She must be well on the way to thirty, twenty-six or twenty-seven perhaps, she hadn’t a young girl’s look in her eyes. Was she just amusing herself by angling for calf-love? Was she making a fool of Peter? Their code of manners was so easy; she would touch his hands, and once Peter had stroked her bare forearm as it lay upon the table. She had looked up and smiled. Leaving her arm on the table. One could not conceive of Dolly permitting such things. Was this an age of daring innocence, or what was coming to the young people?

Joan seemed more dignified than the others, but she, too, had her quality of prematurity. At her age Dolly had dressed in white with a pink sash. At least, Dolly must have been _about_ Joan’s age when first he had seen her. Eighteen—seventeen? Of course a year or so makes no end of difference just at this age....

From such meditations Oswald was roused by the tumult of a car outside. He took a wary glimpse from his window at this conveyance, and discovered that it was coloured an unusual bright chocolate colour, and had its chauffeur—a depressed-looking individual—in a livery to match. He went out into the hall to discover the large presence, the square face, the “whisker,” and the china-blue eyes of Lady Charlotte Sydenham. He knew she was in England, but he had had no idea she was near enough to descend upon them. She stood in the doorway surveying the Christmas disorder of the hall. Some one had adorned Oswald’s stuffed heads with paper caps, the white rhinoceros was particularly motherly with pink bonnet-strings under its throat, a box of cigarettes had been upset on the table amidst various hats, and half its contents were on the floor, which was also littered with scraps of torn paper from the crackers; from the open door of the library came the raucous orchestration of the gramophone, and the patter and swish of dancers.

“I thought you’d be away,” said Aunt Charlotte, a little checked by the sight of Oswald. “I’m staying at Minchings on my way to sit on the platform at Cambridge. We’re raising money to get those brave Ulstermen guns. Something has to be done if these Liberals are not to do as they like with us. They and their friends the priests. But I _knew_ there’d be a party here. And those aunts. So I came.... Who are all these young people you have about?”

“Miscellaneous friends,” said Oswald.

“You’ve got a touch of grey in your hair,” she noted.

“I must get a big blond wig,” he said.

“You might do worse.”

“You’re looking as fresh as paint,” he remarked, scrutinizing her steadfastly bright complexion. “Is that the faithful Unwin sitting and sniffing in the car? It’s a rennet face.”

“She can sit,” said Lady Charlotte. “I shan’t stay ten minutes, and she’s got a hot-water bottle and three rugs. But being so near I had to come and see what was being done with those wards of mine.”

“Former wards,” Oswald interjected.

“The Gal I passed. Where is Master Stubland? I’ll just look at him. Is he one of these people making a noise in here?”

She went to the door of the library and surveyed the scene with an aggressive lorgnette. The furniture had been thrust aside with haste and indignity, the rugs rolled up from the parquet floor, and Babs Sheldrick was presiding over the gramophone and helping and interrupting Sydney in the instruction of Wilmington, of Peter and Hetty and of Adela and Sopwith Greene in some special development of the tango. All the young people still wore their paper caps and were heated and dishevelled. In the window-seat the convalescent suffragette was showing wrist tricks to one of the young men from Cambridge. “Party!” said Lady Charlotte. “Higgledy-piggledy I call it. Which is Peter?”

Peter was indicated.

“Well, he’s grown! Who’s that fast-looking girl he’s hugging?”

Peter detached himself from Hetty and came forward.

His ancient terror of the whisker-woman still hung about him, but he made a brave show of courage. “Glad you’ve not forgotten us, Lady Charlotte,” he said.

“Not much Stubland about _him_,” she remarked to Oswald. “There’s a photograph of you before you blew your face off—”

“It’s his mother he’s like,” said Oswald, laying a hand on Peter’s shoulder.

“I never saw a family harp on themselves more than the Sydenhams,” the lady declared. “It’s like the Habsburg chin.... This one of the new improper dances, Peter?”

“_Honi soit_,” said Peter.

“People have been whipped at the cart’s tail for less. In my mother’s time no decent woman waltzed. Even—in crinolines. Now a waltz isn’t close enough for them.”

The gramophone came to an end and choked. “Thank goodness!” said Lady Charlotte.

“Won’t you dance yourself, Lady Charlotte?” said Peter, standing up to her politely.

The hard blue eye regarded him with a slightly impaired disfavour, but the old lady made no reply.

They heard the startled voice of the youth from Cambridge. “It’s _her_!”...

But the sting of the call was at its end.

“So that’s Peter,” said Lady Charlotte, as the chauffeur and Oswald assisted her back into her liver-coloured car. “I told you I saw the Gal?”

“Joan?”

“I passed her on the road half a mile from here. Came upon her and her ’gentleman friend’—I suppose she’d call him—as we turned a corner. A snap-shot so to speak. It’s the walking-out instinct. Blood will tell. I saw her, but she didn’t see me. Lost, she was, to things mundane. But it was plain enough how things were. A tiff. Some lovers’ quarrel. Wake _up_, Unwin.”

“What do you mean?”

“What I say,” said Lady Charlotte.

“That fellow Huntley!”

“_Ha!_ So now you’ll lock the stable door! What else was to be expected?”

“But this is nonsense!”

“I may be mistaken. I hope I am mistaken. I just give you my impression. I’m not a fool, Oswald, though it’s always been your pleasure to treat me as one. Time shows.”

There was a pause while rugs with loud monograms were adjusted about her.

“Well, I’m glad I came over. I wanted to see the Great Experiment. I said at the time it can’t end well. Bad in the beginnings. No woman to help him—except for those two Weird Sisters. No religion. You see? The boy’s a young Impudence. The girl’s in some mess already. What did I tell you?”

Oswald was late with his recovery.

“Look here, auntie! you keep your libellous mind off my wards.”

“Home, Parbury!” said Lady Charlotte to the chocolate-uniformed chauffeur.

She fired a parting shot.

“I warned you long ago, you’d get the Gal into a thoroughly false position....”

She was getting away after her raid with complete impunity. Never before had she scored like this. Was Oswald growing old? She made her farewell of him with a stately gesture of head and hand. She departed disconcertingly serene. A flood of belated repartee rushed into Oswald’s mind. But except for a violent smell of petrol and a cloud of smoke and a kind of big scar of chocolate on the retina nothing remained now of Lady Charlotte.

In the hall he paused before a mirror and examined that touch of grey.

§ 20

But it had not been a lovers’ quarrel that had blinded Joan to the passing automobile. It had been the astounding discovery of her real relationship to Peter. So astounding had that been that at the moment she was not only regardless of the passing traffic but oblivious of Huntley and every other circumstance of her world.

Huntley was not one of those people who love; he was a pursuing egotist with an unwarrantable scorn for the intelligence of his fellow-creatures. He liked to argue and show people that they were wrong in a calm, scornful manner; _The Pernambuco Bunshop_ was a very sarcastic work. He was violently attracted by the feminine of all ages; it fixed his attention with the vast possibilities of admiration and triumph it offered him. And he had greedy desires. Joan attracted him at first because she was admired. He saw how Wilmington coveted her. She had a prestige in her circle. She had, too, a magnetism of her own. Before he realized the slope down which he slid, he wanted her so badly that he thought he was passionately in love. It kept him awake of nights, and distracted him from his work. He did not want to marry her. That was against his principles. That was the despicable way of ordinary human beings. He lived on a higher plane. But he wanted her as a monkey wants a gold watch—he wanted this new, fresh, lovely and beautiful thing just to handle and feel as his own.

There was little charm about Huntley and less companionship. He was too arrogant for companionship. But he abounded in ideas, he knew much, and so he interested her. He talked. He pursued her with the steadfast scrutiny of his large grey eyes—and with arguments. He tried to argue and manœuvre Joan into a passionate love for him.

Well, Joan had a broad brow; she thought things over; she was amenable to ideas.

He harped on “freedom.” He carried freedom far beyond the tempered liberties of ordinary human association. Any ordinary belief was by his standards a limitation of freedom. There was a story that he had once been caught burgling a house in St. John’s Wood and had been let off by the magistrate only because the crime seemed absolutely motiveless. No doubt he had been trying to convince himself of his freedom from prejudice about the rights of property. He had an obscure idea that he could induce Joan to plunge into wild depravities merely to prove himself free from her own decent instincts. But he was ceasing to care for his argument if only he could induce her.

There was a moment when he said, “Joan, you are the one woman”—he always called her a woman—“who could make me marry her.”

“I’ll spare you,” said Joan succinctly.

“Promise me that.”

“Promise.”

“Anyhow.”

“Anyhow.”

On this Christmas afternoon he discoursed again upon freedom. “You, Joan, might be the freest of the free, if only you chose. You are absolutely your own mistress. Absolutely.”

“I have a guardian,” she said.

“You’re of age.”

“No; I’m nineteen.”

“You—it happens, were of age at eighteen, Joan.” He watched her face. He had been burning to get to this point for weeks. “Even about your birth there was freedom.”

“So _you_ know that.”

“Icy voice! To me it seems the grandest thing. When I reflect that I, alas! was born in loveless holy wedlock I grit my teeth.”

“Oh! I don’t care. But how do you know?”

“It’s fairly well known, Joan. It’s no very elaborate secret. I’ve got a little volume of your father’s poetry.”

She hesitated. “I didn’t know my father wrote poetry,” she said.

“It was all Will Sydenham ever did that was worth doing—except launch you into the world. He was a dramatic critic and something of a journalist, I believe. Stoner of the _Post_ knew him quite well. But all this is ancient history to you.”

“It isn’t. Nobody has told me.... I didn’t know.”

“But what did you think?”

“Never mind what I thought. Every one doesn’t talk with your freedom. I’ve never been told. Who was my mother?”

“Stoner says she died in hospital. Soon after you were born. He never knew her name.”

“Wasn’t it Stubland?”

“Lord, No! Why should it be?”

“But then——”

“That’s one of the things that makes you so splendidly new, Joan. You start clean in the world—like a new Eve. Without even an Adam to your name. Fatherless, motherless, sisterless, brotherless. You fall into the world like a meteor!”

She stood astonished at the way in which she had blundered. Brotherless! If Huntley had not drawn her back by the arm Lady Charlotte’s car would have touched her....

§ 21

That night some one tapped at the bedroom door of Aunt Phyllis. “Come in,” she cried, slipping into her dressing-gown, and Joan entered. She was still wearing the dress of spangled black in which she had danced with Huntley and Wilmington and Peter. She went to her aunt’s fire in silence and stood over it, thinking.

“You’re having a merry Christmas, little Joan?” said Aunt Phyllis, coming and standing beside her.

“Ever so merry, Auntie. We go it—don’t we?”

Aunt Phyllis looked quickly at the flushed young face beside her, opened her mouth to speak and said nothing. There was a silence, it seemed a long silence, between them. Then Joan asked in a voice that she tried to make offhand, “Auntie. Who was my father?”

Aunt Phyllis was deliberately matter-of-fact. “He was the brother of Dolly—Peter’s mother.”

“Where is he?”

“He was killed by an omnibus near the Elephant and Castle when you were two years old.”

“And my mother?”

“Died three weeks after you were born.”

Joan was wise in sociological literature. “The usual fever, I suppose,” she said.

“Yes,” said Aunt Phyllis.

“Do you know much about her?”

“Very little. Her name was Debenham. Fanny Debenham.”

“Was she pretty?”

“I never saw her. It was Dolly—Peter’s mother—who went to her....”

“So that’s what I am,” said Joan, after a long pause.

“Only we love you. What does it matter? Dear Joan of my heart,” and Aunt Phyllis slipped her arm about the girl’s shoulder.

But Joan stood stiff and intent, not answering her caress.

“I knew—in a way,” she said.

The thought that consumed her insisted upon utterance. “So I’m not Peter’s half-sister,” she said.

“But have you thought——?”

Joan remained purely intellectual. “I’ve thought dozens of things. And I thought at last it was that.... Why was I called Stubland? I’m not a Stubland.”

“It was more convenient. It grew up.”

“It put me out. It has sent me astray....”

She remained for a time taking in this new aspect of things so intently as to be regardless of the watcher beside her. Then she roused herself to mask her extravagant preoccupation. “You’re no relation then of mine?” she said.

“No.”

“You’ve been so kind to me. A mother....”

Aunt Phyllis was weeping facile tears. “Have I been kind, dear? Have I seemed kind? I’ve always wanted to be kind. And I’ve loved you, Joan, my dear. And love you.”

“And Nobby?”

“Nobby too.”

“You’ve been bricks to me, both of you. No end. Aunt Phœbe too. And Peter——? Does Peter know? Does he know what I am?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what he knows, Joan.”

“If it hadn’t been for the same surname. Joan Debenham.... I’ve had fancies. I’ve thought Nobby, perhaps, was my father.... Queer!... Why did you people bother yourselves about me?”

“My dear, it was the most natural thing in the world.”

“I suppose it was—for you. You’ve been so decent——”

“Every woman wants a daughter,” said Aunt Phyllis in a whisper, and then almost inaudibly; “you are mine.”

“And the tempers I’ve shown. The trouble I’ve been. All these years. I wonder what Peter knows? He must suspect. He must have ideas.... Joan Debenham—from outside.”

She stood quite still with the red firelight leaping up to light her face, and caressing the graceful lines of her slender form. She stood for a time as still as stone. Had she, after all, a stony heart? Aunt Phyllis stood watching her with a pale, tear-wet, apprehensive face. Then abruptly the girl turned and held out her arms.

“Can I ever thank you?” she cried, with eyes that now glittered with big tears....

Presently Aunt Phyllis was sitting in her chair stroking Joan’s dark hair, and Joan was kneeling, staring intently at some strange vision in the fire. “Do you mind my staying for a time?” she asked. “I want to get used to it. It’s just as though there wasn’t anything—but just here. I’ve lost my aunt—and found a mother.”

“My Joan,” whispered Aunt Phyllis. “My own dear Joan.”

“Always I have thought Peter was my brother—always. My half brother. Until today.”

§ 22

It was Adela who inflicted Joan’s second shock upon her, and drove away the last swirling whispers of adolescent imaginations and moon mist from the hard forms of reality. This visit she had seemed greatly improved to Joan; she was graver. Visibly she thought, and no longer was her rolling eye an invitation to masculine enterprise. She came to Joan’s room on Boxing Day morning to make up dresses with her for the night’s dance, and she let her mind run as she stitched. Every one was to come in fancy dress; the vicarage girls would come and the Braughing people. Every one was to represent a political idea. Adela was going to be Tariff Reform. All her clothes were to be tattered and unfinished, she said, even her shoes were to have holes. She would wear a broken earring in one ear. “I don’t quite see your point,” said Joan.

“Tariff Reform means work for all, dear,” Adela explained gently.

Days before Joan had planned to represent Indian Nationalism. It was a subject much in dispute between her and Peter, whose attitude to India and Indians seemed to her unreasonably reactionary—in view of all his other opinions. She could never let her controversies with Peter rest; the costume had been aimed at him. She was going to make up her complexion with a little brown, wear a sari, sandals on bare feet, and a band of tinsel across her forehead. She had found some red Indian curtain stuff that seemed to be adaptable for the sari. She worked now in a preoccupied manner, with her mind full of strange thoughts. Sometimes she listened to what Adela was saying, and sometimes she was altogether within herself. But every now and then Adela would pull her back to attention by a question.

“Don’t you think so, Joan?”

“Think what?” asked Joan.

“Love’s much more _our_ business than it is theirs.”

That struck Joan. “Is it?” she asked. She had thought the shares in the business were equal and opposite.

“All this waiting for a man to discover himself in love with you; it’s rot. You may wait till Doomsday.”

“Still, they do seem to fall in love.”

“With any one. A man’s in love with women in general, but women fall in love with men in particular. We’re the choosers. Naturally. We want a man, that man and no other, and all our own. They don’t feel like that. And we have to hang about pretending they choose and trying to make them choose without seeming to try to make them. Well, we’re altering all that. When I want a man——”

Adela’s pause suggested a particular reference.

“I’ll get him somehow,” she said intently.

“If you mean to get him—if you don’t mind much the little things that happen meanwhile—you’ll get him,” said Adela, as though she repeated a creed. “But, of course, you can’t make terms. When a man knows that a woman is his, when he’s sure of it—absolutely, then she’s got him for good. Sooner or later he must come to her. I haven’t had my eyes open just for show, Joan, this last year or so.”

“Good luck, Adela,” said Joan.

Adela attempted no pretences. “It stands to reason if you love a man——” Her eyes filled with tears. “Love his very self. You can make him happy and safe. Be his line of least resistance. But the meanwhile is hard——”

Adela stitched furiously.

“That’s why you came down here?” Joan asked.

“You haven’t seen?” Adela’s preoccupation with Sopwith Greene had been the most conspicuous fact in the party. “Once or twice a gleam,” said Joan.

“Ask him to play tonight, dear,” said Adela. “Some of his own things.”

But now the last checks upon Adela’s talk were removed. She wanted to talk endlessly and unrestrainedly about love. She wanted to hear herself saying all the generosities and devotions she contemplated. “There’s no bargain in love,” said Adela. “You just watch and give.” Running through all her talk was a thread of speculation; she was obsessed by the idea of the relative blindness and casualness of love in men. “We used to dream of lovers who just concentrated upon us,” she said. “But there’s something nimmy-pimmy in a man concentrating on a woman. He ought to have a Job, something Big, his Art, his Aim—Something. One wouldn’t really respect a man who didn’t do something Big. Love’s a nuisance to a real man, a disturbance, until some woman takes care of him.”

“Couldn’t two people—take care of each other?” asked Joan.

“Oh, that’s Ideal, Joan,” said Adela as one who puts a notion aside. “A man takes his love where he finds it. On his way to other things. The easier it is to get the better he likes it. That’s why, so often, they take up with any—sort of creature. And why one needn’t be so tremendously jealous....”

Adela reflected. “_I_ don’t care a bit about him and Hetty.”

“Hetty Reinhart?”

“Everybody talked about them. Didn’t you hear? But of course you were still at school. Of course there’s that studio of hers. You know about her? Yes. She has a studio. Most convenient. She does as she pleases. It amused him, I suppose. Men don’t care as we do. They’re just amused. Men can fall in love for an afternoon—and out of it again. He makes love to her and he’s not even jealous of her. Not a bit. He doesn’t seem to mind a rap about Peter.”

She babbled on, but Joan’s mind stopped short.

“Adela,” she said, “what is this about Hetty and Peter?”

“The usual thing, I suppose, dear. You don’t seem to hear of _anything_ at Cambridge.”

“But you don’t mean——?”

“Well, I know _something_ of Hetty. And I’ve got eyes.”

“You mean to say she’s—she’s _got_ Peter?”

“It shows plainly enough.”

“_My_ Peter!” cried Joan sharply.

“You’re not an Egyptian princess,” said Adela.

“You mean—he’s gone—Peter’s gone—to her studio? That—things like that have happened?”

Adela stared at her friend. “These things _have_ to happen, Joan.”

“But he’s only a boy yet.”

“She doesn’t think he’s a boy. Why! he’s almost of age! Lot of boy about Peter!”

“But do you mean——?”

“I don’t mean anything, Joan, if you’re going to look like that. You’ve got no right to interfere in Peter’s love affairs. Why should you? Don’t we all live for experience?”

“But,” said Joan, “Peter is different.”

“No. No one is different,” said Adela.

“But I tell you he’s _my_ Peter.”

“He’s your brother, of course.”

“_No!_”

“Your half brother then. Everybody knows that, Joan—thanks to the Sheldricks. A sister can’t always keep her brothers away from other girls.”

Joan was on the verge of telling Adela that she was not even Peter’s half sister, but she restrained herself. She stuck to the thing that most concerned her now.

“It’s spoiling him,” she said. “It will make a mess of him. Why! he may think that is love, that!—slinking off to a studio. The nastiness! And she’s had a dozen lovers. She’s a common thing. She just strips herself here and shows her arms and shoulders because she’s—just that.”

“She’s really in love with him anyhow,” said Adela. “She’s gone on him. It’s amusing.”

“Love! _That_—love! It makes me sick to think of it,” said Joan.

“A man isn’t made like that,” said Adela. “Peter has to go his own way.”

“Peter,” said Joan, “who used to be the cleanest thing alive.”

“Good sisters always feel like that,” said Adela. “I know how shocked I was when first I heard of Teddy.... It isn’t the same thing to men, Joan. It isn’t indeed....”

“_Dirty_ Peter,” said Joan with intense conviction. “Of course I’ve known. Of course I’ve known. Any one could see. Only I wouldn’t know.”

She thrust the striped red stuff for her Indian dress from her.

“I shan’t be Indian Nationalism, Adela, after all. Somehow I don’t care to be. Why should I cover myself up in this way?”

“You’d look jolly.”

“No. I want something with black in it. And red. And my arms and shoulders showing. Why shouldn’t we all dress down to Hetty? She has the approval of the authorities. Aunt Phœbe applauds every stitch she takes off. Freedom—with a cap of Liberty.”

“Hetty said something about being Freedom,” hesitated Adela.

“Then I shall come as Anarchy,” said Joan, staring at the red stuff upon the table before her.

Came a pause.

“I don’t see why Peter should have all the fun in life,” said Joan.

§ 23

Joan as Anarchy made a success that evening at Pelham Ford. In the private plans of Hetty Reinhart that success had not been meant for Joan. Hetty as Freedom gave the party her lithe arms, her slender neck, and so much of her back that the two vicarage girls, who had come very correctly in powder and patches as Whig and Tory, were sure that it was partly accidental. On Hetty’s dark hair perched a Phrygian cap, and she had a tricolour skirt beneath a white bodice that was chiefly decolletage and lace. About her neck was a little band of black which had nothing to do with Freedom; it was there for the sake of her slender neck. She was much more like _La Vie Parisienne_. She was already dancing with Peter when Joan, who had delayed coming down until the music began, appeared in the doorway. Nobby, wrapped in a long toga-like garment of sun-gold and black that he alleged qualified him to represent Darkest Africa, was standing by the door, and saw the effect of Joan upon one of the Braughing boys before he discovered her beside him.

Her profile was the profile of a savage. She lifted her clear-cut chin as young savage women do, and her steady eyes regarded Hetty and Peter. Her black hair was quite unbound and thrown back from her quiet face, and there was no necklace, no bracelet, not a scrap of adornment nor enhancement upon her arms or throat. It had not hitherto occurred to Oswald that his ward had the most beautiful neck and shoulders in the world, or that Joan was as like what Dolly once had been as a wild beast is like a cherished tame one. But he did presently find these strange ideas in his mind.

Her dress was an exiguous scheme of slashes and tatters in black and bright red. She was bare ankled—these modern young people thought nothing of that—but she had white dancing shoes upon her feet.

“Joan!” said Huntley, advancing with an air of proprietorship.

“No,” said Joan with a gesture of rejection. “I don’t want to dance with any one in particular. I’m going to dance alone.”

“Well—dance!” said Huntley with a large courtly movement of a white velvet cloak all powdered with gold crosses and fleur-de-lys, that he pretended was a symbol of Reaction.

“When I choose,” said Joan. “And as I choose.”

Across the room Peter was staring at her, and she was looking at Peter. He tripped against Hetty, and for a little interval the couple was out of step. “Come on, Peter,” said Hetty, rallying him.

Joan appeared to forget Peter and every one.

There was dancing in her blood, and this evening she meant to dance. Her body felt wonderfully light and as supple as a whip under her meagre costume. There was something to be said for this semi-nudity after all. The others were dancing a two-step with such variations as they thought fit, and there was no objection whatever at Pelham Ford to solo enterprises. Joan could invent dances. She sailed out into the room to dance as she pleased.

Oswald watched her nimble steps and the whirling rhythms of her slender body. She made all the others seem overdressed and clumsy and heavy. Her face had a grave preoccupied expression.

Huntley stood for a moment or so beside Oswald, and then stepped out after her to convert her dance into a duet. He too was a skilful and inventive dancer, and the two coquetted for a time amidst the other couples.

Then Joan discovered Wilmington watching her and Huntley from the window bay. She danced evasively through Huntley’s circling entanglements, and seized Wilmington’s hand and drew him into the room.

“I can’t dance, Joan,” he said, obeying her. “You _know_ I can’t dance.”

“You have to dance,” she said, aglow and breathing swiftly. “Trust me.”

She took and left his hands and took them again and turned him about so skilfully that a wonderful illusion was produced in Wilmington’s mind and in those about him that indeed he could dance. Huntley made a crouching figure of jealousy about them; he spread himself and his cloak into fantastic rhombs—and then the music ceased....

“The Argentine Tango!” cried Huntley. “Joan, you _must_ tango.”

“Never.”

“Dance Columbine to my Harlequin then.”

“And stand on your knee? I should break it.”

“Try me,” said Huntley.

“Kneel,” said Joan. “Now take my hands. Prepare for the shock.” And she leapt lightly to his knee and posed for a second, poised with one toe on Huntley’s thigh, and was down again.

“Do it again, Joan,” he cried with enthusiasm. “Do it again.”

“Let us invent dances,” cried Aunt Phyllis. “Let us invent dances. Couldn’t we dance charades?”

“Let them dance as nature meant them to,” said Aunt Phœbe’s deepest tones. “_Madly!_”

“Shall we try that Tango we did the other night?” said Hetty, coming behind Peter.

Peter had come forward to the group in the centre of the room. Old habits were strong in him, and he had a vague feeling that this was one of the occasions when Joan ought to be suppressed. “We’re getting chaotic,” he said.

“You see, Peter, I’m Anarchy,” said Joan.

“An ordered Freedom is the best,” said Peter without reflecting on his words.

“Nobby, I want to dance with you,” said Joan.

“I’ve never danced anything but a Country Dance—you know the sort of thing in which people stand in rows—in my life,” said Oswald.

“A country dance,” cried Joan. “Sir Roger de Coverley.”

“We want to try a fox-trot we know,” complained one of the Braughing guests.

Two parties became more and more distinctly evident in the party. There was a party which centred around Hetty and the Sheldrick girls, which was all for the rather elaborately planned freak dances they had more or less learnt in London, the Bunny-Hugs, the Fox-Trot, and various Tangoes. Most of the Londoners were of this opinion, Sopwith Greene trailed Adela with him, and Huntley was full of a passionate desire to guide Joan’s feet along the Tango path. But Joan’s mind by a kind of necessity moved contrariwise to Hetty’s. Either, she argued, they must dance in the old staid ways—Oswald and the Vicarage girls applauding—or dance as the spirit moved them.

“Oh, dance your old Fox-Trots,” she cried, with a gesture that seemed to motion Huntley and Hetty together. “Have your music all rattle and rag-time like sick people groaning in trains. That’s neither here nor there. I want to dance to better stuff than that. Come along, Willy.”

She seized on Wilmington’s arm.

“But where are you going?” cried Huntley.

“I’m going to dance Chopin in the hall—to the pianola.”

“You’re going to play,” she told Wilmington.

“But you can’t,” said Peter.

Joan disappeared with her slave. A light seemed to go out from the big library as she went. “Now we can get on,” said Hetty, laying hands on her Peter.

For a time the Fox-Trot ruled. The Vicarage girls didn’t do these things, and drifted after Joan. So did Oswald. Towards the end the dancers had a sense of a cross-current of sound in the air, of some adverse influence thrown across their gymnastics. When their own music stopped, they became aware of that crying voice above the thunder, the Revolutionary Etude.

There was a brief listening pause. “Now, how the deuce,” said Huntley, “can she be dancing _that_?”

He led the way to the hall....

“I’m tired of dancing,” whispered Hetty. “Stay back. They’re all going. I want you to kiss the little corner of my mouf.”

Peter looked round quickly, and seized his privilege with unseemly haste. “Let’s see how Joan is dancing that old row,” he said....

Animation, boldness, and strict relegation of costume to its function of ornament had hitherto made Hetty the high light of this little gathering. She was now to realize how insecure is this feminine predominance in the face of fresher youth and greater boldness. And Joan was full of a pretty girl’s discovery that she may do all that she dares to do. For a time—and until it is time to pay.

Life had intoxicated Joan that night. A derision of seemliness possessed her. She was full of impulse and power. She felt able to dominate every one. At one time or other she swept nearly every man there except Oswald and Peter and Pryce into her dancing. Two of the Braughing youths fell visibly in love with her, and Huntley lost his head, badgered her too much to dance, and then was offended and sulked in a manner manifest to the meanest capacity. And she kissed Wilmington.

That was her wildest impulse. She came into the study where he was playing the pianola for her dancing. She wanted him to change the roll for the first part of the Kreutzer Sonata, and found herself alone with him. She loved him because he was so completely and modestly hers. She bent over him to take off the roll from the instrument, and found her face near his forehead. “Dear old Willy,” she whispered, and put her hand on his shoulder and brushed his eyebrows with her lips.

Then she was remorseful.

“It doesn’t mean anything, Willy,” she said.

“I know it doesn’t,” he said in a voice of the deepest melancholy.

“Only you are a dear all the same,” she said. “You are clean. You’re _right_.”

“If it wasn’t for my damned Virtues——” said Wilmington. “But anyhow. Thank you, Joan—very much. Shall I play you this right through?”

“A little slowly,” she said. “It’s marked too fast,” and went towards the open door.

Then she flitted back to him.... Her intent face came close to his. “I don’t love any one, Willy,” she said. “I’m not the sort. I just dance.”

They looked at each other.

“I love _you_,” said Wilmington, and watched her go.

But she had made him ridiculously happy....

She danced through the whole Kreutzer Sonata. The Kreutzer Sonata has always been a little dirty since Tolstoy touched it. Tolstoy pronounced it erotic. There are men who can find a lascivious import in a Corinthian capital. The Kreutzer Sonata therefore had a strong appeal to Huntley’s mind. These associations made it seem to him different from other music, just as calling this or that substance a “drug” always dignified it in his eyes with the rich suggestions of vice. He read strange significances into Joan’s choice of that little music as he watched her over the heads of the Braughing girls. But Joan just danced.

At supper she found herself drifting to a seat near Peter. She left him to his Hetty, and went up the table to a place under Oswald’s black wing. The supper at Pelham Ford was none of your stand-up affairs. Mrs. Moxton’s ideas of a dance supper were worthy of Britannia. Oswald carved a big turkey and Peter had cold game pie, and Aunt Phyllis showed a delicate generosity with a sharp carver and a big ham. There were hot potatoes and various salads, and jugs of lemonade and claret cup for every one, and whisky for the mature. Joan became a sober enquirer about African dancing.

“It’s the West Coast that dances,” said Oswald. “There’s richer music on the West Coast than all round the Mediterranean.”

“All this American music comes from the negro,” he declared. “There’s hardly a bit of American music that hasn’t colour in its blood.”

After supper Joan was the queen of the party. Adela was in love with her again, as slavish as in their schooldays, and the Sheldricks and the Braughing boys and girls did her bidding. “Let’s do something processional,” said Joan. “Let us dress up and do the Funeral March of a Marionette.”

Hetty didn’t catch on to that idea, and Peter was somehow overlooked. Most of the others scampered off to get something black and cast aside anything too coloured. Aunt Phyllis knew of some black gauze and produced it. There were black curtains in the common room, and these were seized upon by Huntley and Wilmington. They made a coffin of the big black lacquered post-box in the hall, and a bier of four alpenstocks and a drying-board from the scullery.

Joan was chief mourner, and after the Funeral March was over danced the sorrows of life before the bier to the first part of the Fifth Symphony.

Hetty and Peter sat close together and yet unusually apart upon the broad window-seat. Hetty looked tired and Peter seemed inattentive. Perhaps they had a little overdone each other’s charm that Christmas.

And only once more that evening did it happen that Peter and Joan met face to face. Nearly everybody poured out into the garden to see the guests go off. The Braughing people crowded hilariously into a car; the others walked. The weather had suddenly hardened, a clear dry cold made the paths and road very like metal, and not the littlest star was missing from the quivering assembly in the sky.

“We’ll have skating yet,” cried the Braughing party.

Adela and Joan and Wilmington and Pryce came with Huntley and Greene and the vicarage girls along the road and over the ice-bound water-splash as far as the vicarage gate. “Too cooold to say good-bye,” cried Joan. “Oh, my _poor_ bare legs!” and led a race back.

Adela was left far behind, but neither Wilmington nor Pryce would let Joan win without a struggle. The three shot in through the wide front door almost abreast, and Joan ran straight at Peter and stopped short within two feet of him.

“I’ve won!” said Joan.

Just for an instant the two looked at one another, and it seemed to Joan afterwards that she had seen something then in Peter’s eyes, something involuntary that she had caught just once before in them—when she had come upon him by chance in Petty Cury when first she had gone up to Cambridge.

A silly thing to think about! What did it matter? What did anything matter? Life was a dance, and Joan, thank heaven! could dance. Peter was just nothing at all. Nothing at all. Nothing at all.

“I wonder, Joan, how many miles you have pranced tonight!” said Aunt Phyllis, kissing her good night.

“Joan,” said Adela, “you _are_ The Loveliest.”...

For a minute or so Joan stood in front of her looking-glass, studying a flushed, candle-lit figure....

“Pah!” she said at last. “_Hetty!_” and flung her scanty clothes aside.

She caught the reflection of herself in the mirror again. She spread out her hands in a gesture to the pretty shape she saw there, and stood.

“What’s the Good of it?” she said at last.

As soon as Joan’s head touched the pillow that night she fell asleep, and she slept as soundly as a child that had been thoroughly naughty and all at sixes and sevens, and that has been well slapped and had a good cry to wind up with, and put to bed. In all the world there is no sounder sleep than that.

CHAPTER THE TWELFTH
THE WORLD ON THE EVE OF WAR

§ 1

Oswald sat in the March sunshine that filled and warmed his little summerhouse, and thought about Joan and Peter....

His sudden realization of Joan’s mental maturity, the clear warning it brought to him that the task and opportunity of education was passing out of his hands, that already the reckoning of consequences was beginning for both his wards, set his mind searching up and down amidst the memories of his effort, to find where he could have slipped, where blundered and failed. He perceived now how vague had been the gesture with which he had started, when he proclaimed his intention to give them “the best education in the world.”

The best education in the world is still to seek, and while he had been getting such scraps of second best for them as he could, the world itself, nature, tradition, custom, suggestion, example and accident, had moulded them and made them. When he measured what had been done upon these youngsters by these outward things and compared it with their deliberate education, the schoolmaster seemed to him to be still no more than a half-hearted dwarf who would snare the white horses of a cataract with a noose of packthread.

“The generations running to waste—like rapids.”

But there are stronger harnessings than packthreads, and there are already engineers in the world who, by taking thought and patient work, can tame the maddest torrent that ever overawed the mind of man. In the end perhaps all torrents will be tamed, and knowledge and purpose put an end to aimless adventure. The schoolmaster will not always be a dwarf....

As our children grow beyond our control we begin to learn something of the reality of education. The world had Joan and Peter now; at the most Oswald could run and shout advice from the bank as they went down the rush. But he knew that he could have done more for them, and that with a different world he could have done infinitely more for them in their receptive years. They were the children of an age; their restless fever of impulse was but their individual share in a great fever. The whole world now was restless, out of touch with any standards, and manifestly drifting towards great changes.

Neither Joan nor Peter seemed to have any definite purpose in life. Their impulses were not focused. They were drawn hither and thither. That was the essential failure of their adolescence. Their education had done many good things for them, but it had left their wills as spontaneous, indefinite and unsocial as the will of a criminal. Physically Oswald and the world had done well by them; they were clean-blooded, well grown, well exercised animals; they belonged to a generation of youth measurably taller, finer, and more beautiful than any generation before them. They were swift-footed and nimble. Mentally, too, they were swift and clear. It was not that their ideas were confused but their wills. Each of them could speak and read and write three languages quite well, they could draw well and Peter could draw brilliantly, they were alive to art and music, they read widely, they had the dispassionate, wide, scientific vision of the world. But being so fine and clean it was all the more distressing to realize that these two young people now faced the world with no clear will in them about it or themselves, that Joan seemed consumed with discontents and this dark personal quarrel with Peter, and that Peter could be caught and held by a mere sensual adventure. Hetty Reinhart kept him busy with notes and situations; having created a necessity she went on to create a jealous rivalry. He would be sometimes excited and elated, sometimes manifestly angry and sulky; and his work at Cambridge, which for two years had been conspicuously brilliant, was falling away.

Until Joan’s angry outspokenness had forced these facts upon his attention, Oswald had shirked their realization. He had seen with his one watchful eye, but he had not willed to see. A score of facts had lain, like disagreeable letters that one hesitates to answer, uncorrelated in his mind. The disorders of the Christmas party had indeed left him profoundly uneasy. With the new year he went with Peter on a trip to Russia. He wanted the youngster to develop a vision of the European problem, for Peter seemed blind to the importance of international things. They had crossed to Flushing, travelled straight through to Berlin, gone about Berlin for a few days, run on to St. Petersburg—it was not yet Petrograd—visited a friendly house near the Valdai Hills, spent a busy week in and about Moscow, and returned by way of Warsaw. They saw Germany already trained like an athlete for the adventure of the coming war, and Russia great and disorderly, destined to be taken unawares. Then they returned to England to look again at their own country with eyes refreshed by these contrasts. And all the time Oswald watched Peter and speculated about the thoughts and ideas hidden in Peter’s head.

§ 2

This Russian trip had been precipitated by a sudden opportunity. Originally Oswald had planned a Russian tour for his wards on a more considerable scale. Among the unsolved difficulties of this scheme had been his ignorance of Russian. He had thought of employing a courier—but a courier can be a tiresome encumbrance. His friend Bailey, who was an enthusiast for Russia and spoke Russian remarkably well for an Englishman, wrote from Petrograd offering to guide Oswald and Peter about that city, suggesting a visit to a cousin who had married a Russian landowner in Novgorod, and a week or so in Moscow, where some friends of Bailey’s would keep a helpful eye on the travellers. It was too good a chance to lose. There was some hasty buying of fur-lined gloves, insertion of wadding under the fur of Oswald’s fur coat, and the purchase of a suitable outfit for Peter.

Bailey had his misogynic side, Oswald knew; he thought women troublesome millinery to handle; and he did not include Joan in the invitation. On the whole Oswald did not regret that omission, because it gave him so excellent a chance of being alone with Peter for long spells, and getting near his private thoughts.

It was an expedition that left a multitude of vivid impressions upon the young man’s memory; the still, cold, starry night of the departure from Harwich, the lit decks, the black waters, the foaming wake caught by the ship’s lights, the neat Dutch landscape with its black and white cows growing visible as day broke, shivering workers under a chill, red-nosed dawn pouring down by a path near the railway into the factories of some industrial town; the long flat journey across Germany; the Sieges-Allée and the war trophies and public buildings of Berlin; the Sunday morning crowd upon Unter den Linden; the large prosperity of the new suburbs of Berlin; north Germany under an iron frost, a crowd of children sliding and skating near Königsberg; the dingier, vaster effects of Russia, streets in Petrograd with the shops all black and gold and painted with shining pictures of the goods on sale to a population of illiterates, the night crowd in the People’s Palace; a sledge drive of ten miles along the ice of a frozen river, a wooden country house behind a great stone portico, and a merry house party that went scampering out after supper to lie on the crisp snow and see the stars between the tree boughs; the chanting service in a little green-cupolaed church and a pretty village schoolmistress in peasant costume; the great red walls of the Kremlin rising above the Moskva and the first glimpse of that barbaric caricature, the cathedral of St. Basil; the painted magnificence of the Troitzkaya monastery; a dirty, evil-smelling little tramp with his bundle and kettle, worshipping unabashed in the Uspenski cathedral; endless bearded priests, Tartar waiters with purple sashes, a whole population in furs and so looking absurdly wealthy to an English eye; a thousand such pictures, keen, bright and vivid against a background of white snow....

The romanticism of the late Victorians still prevailed in Oswald’s mind. The picturesqueness of Russia had a great effect upon him. From the passport office at Wirballen with its imposing green-uniformed guards and elaborate ceremonies onward into Moscow, he marked the contrast with the trim modernity of Germany. The wild wintry landscape of the land with its swamps and unkempt thickets of silver birch, the crouching timber villages with their cupolaed churches, the unmade roads, the unfamiliar lettering of the stations, contributed to his impression of barbaric greatness. After the plainly ugly, middle-class cathedral of Berlin he rejoiced at the dark splendours, the green serpentine and incense, of St. Isaac’s; he compared the frozen Neva to a greater Thames and stood upon the Troitzki Bridge rejoicing over the masses of the fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul. In Petrograd he said, “away from here to the North Pole is Russia and the Outside, the famine-stricken north, the frozen fen and wilderness, the limits of mankind.” Moscow made him talk of the mingling of east and west, western and eastern costumes jostled in the streets. He was surprised at the frequency of Chinamen. “Away from here to Vladivostok,” he said, “is Russia and all Asia. North, west, east and south there is limitless land. We are an island people. But here one feels the land masses of the earth.”