Chapter XXXIII

If there had been any side to take in favour of Viola Mr. Egerton would have taken it. It would have brought him into opposition with his wife in defence of her own child, and he was usually brought into opposition with her merely in self-defence; and he had, besides, all a father’s dislike to the idea of his daughter’s marrying any one, even his own choice. But there was no side to take. Viola had broken her engagement without a single creditable excuse.

Mr. Egerton had at first supposed that Reggie had ‘done something.’ Something which wasn’t of the slightest consequence, but which should never be told to a young girl before marriage when she wasn’t in a position to judge of it leniently.

Men in love made these disastrous confessions sometimes, and were punished for them with all the vindictive high-handedness of innocence.

But Viola said quite plainly that she had no fault to find with Reggie. He hadn’t told her anything at all. It was just a repetition of one of the most confusing of human situations when the horse is brought to water and cannot be persuaded to drink.

Mr. Egerton lost his temper several times in the course of his arguments with Viola, and even appealed to Heaven, a place he never thought of, except when his children disagreed with him! His relationship with Viola had been that common to many fathers. It consisted mainly of inarticulate affection, irrelevant family conversations, and nervous misunderstandings.

Finally he said with a groan. ‘Well! I can’t do anything with you, I see. You must go down to your mother.’

‘Oh, father, must I?’ cried Viola. For a moment their eyes met and sounded each other, as if they weren’t father and daughter at all, but two human creatures frightened by the crack of the same whip.

Mr. Egerton cleared his throat nervously, and then the smothered jealousy of years overcome the pity of the fellow victim.

‘You have always been inseparable from your mother!’ he said bitterly. ‘It’s no use turning to me now.’

Viola spent the journey down in a hundred imaginary interviews with her mother. She hoped she had allayed the full horror of the opening sentences by telegraphing ‘Have broken my engagement with Reggie, arrive at 4:15 to-morrow.’ She wouldn’t have actually to say it. Cèleste sat opposite to her with her mouth nipped up. Nobody had told her anything, but Viola saw that she knew.

She had repacked Viola’s things as if the bags of lavender between them had been packets of poison.

Viola had destroyed Cèleste’s future with her own. She was one more person whose success and happiness had been bound up in Viola’s personal choice, and she wasn’t going to let Viola off feeling it.

Viola turned her head away so that she couldn’t see Cèleste, and looked out on the soft, neat, green fields for protection. But they were too protected to look very reassuring. She wished the country between London and Eastbourne was wilder and less cared for. Being cared for was such a responsibility, the very trees looked as if they were doing somebody or other credit and daren’t for a moment forget it, and grow for themselves.

Viola hoped her mother would be in their private sitting room, it would be dreadful to be alone with her, but it would be more dreadful to go on waiting for it. The short, actual moment of the plunging knife couldn’t be as bad as when you just knew it would plunge, and wondered where it would strike you.

She tried to make herself believe that after all there wouldn’t be any knife. Her mother loved her so much; they were so like friends, it would be easy to say what she really felt to her mother, if her mother let her. But she knew that their friendship, even their love, was something that lay in Mrs. Egerton’s will. You couldn’t count on it if you didn’t please her.

Mrs. Egerton was sitting waiting for her in the hotel lounge; her eyes met Viola’s inscrutably and without harshness. She scarcely raised her graceful, reclining figure to greet her. They couldn’t, of course, say anything with the whole hotel surging and murmuring about them.

The band was playing light, bad music, which brought tears to Viola’s eyes.

They were tunes she and Reggie had so often danced to, when her heart was as light as her feet, and everything seemed casual and gay, and without penalties.

She felt sick and bewildered with what she had lost in him.

If only she could have kept him to dance with and laugh with and take her part.

She knew from the moment she saw her mother that what she wanted to escape was still there. She wasn’t any freer, really—she was only more exposed.

She was a real culprit now, a person nailed to a sin which does not only blacken him to others, but blackens the world for himself. Viola could only sit and crumble bread and butter and wonder what she had done it for. While her mother looked at her indifferently as if she were a stranger who hadn’t been very well brought up.

At last Viola could bear it no longer.

‘Did you get my telegram?’ she asked abruptly.

Mrs. Egerton’s fine eyebrows lifted, and she glanced at Viola as if she had been speaking in too loud a voice.

‘My dear,’ she said tranquilly, ‘should I have had tea ready if I were not expecting you? I understood you to say that you were arriving by the four fifteen.’

Viola’s eyes dropped; she remembered the infrequent occasions in her early youth when she had been really naughty. The most terrible thing to face had been that her mother ignored it. It was not until she was forgiven that the question of what she had done had ever been allowed to come up.

‘You will like to rest, perhaps,’ Mrs. Egerton said, after the ritual of tea. ‘You will find your room waiting for you.’

People they knew came up, and Viola felt herself being firmly propelled through wastes of interminable conversations.

It did not seem possible to her that people were still going on with what they had talked about on Saturday; and that they expected her to go on talking about it too. Surely enough had happened to stop dances and dinner parties, or was there in the world she lived in never anything that was enough to stop them? She found herself with set, shaking lips, and eyes which she tried to keep attentively smiling, agreeing to their incomprehensible arrangements.

This time yesterday afternoon Reggie had been showing her what a man’s heart looks like when it has been suddenly exposed by pain, and ever since that, life had been opening and growing more terrible to her, like something relentlessly expanded by invisible elastic. She didn’t know that she wanted to see it, but if she had got to see it she did want to know what it meant, and all this bad music and flutter about arrangements prevented her from knowing. They kept calling her back into a world where the only significances are appearances, and nobody notices invisible elastic.

Mrs. Egerton said nothing further to Viola until after dinner. She stared a little when Viola said she had a headache and couldn’t play bridge.

‘Very well then, dear,’ she murmured, ‘I’ll look in on you on my way up to bed.’

Mrs. Egerton was no earlier than usual. Punctually at eleven o’clock she came into Viola’s room. She held her head high, and the soft folds of her pearl-coloured velvet tea-gown followed every movement of her pliable, decisive figure. She had lost heavily at bridge that evening, but she looked as if she had won. She sat down by Viola’s bedside, and after asking punctiliously if her head was any better, she said without a change of tone, ‘Have you written to the _Morning Post_, yet?’

‘Done what?’ stammered Viola.

‘Announced,’ said Mrs. Egerton in a clear expressionless voice, ‘the breaking of your engagement. I understand that when people break their promises of marriage they usually have the courtesy to let the fact be known publicly. It saves troublesome private explanations afterwards.’

‘Oh, no—not yet——’ said Viola. It almost seemed as if her mother wasn’t going to try to make her change her mind.

Mrs. Egerton picked up her lace fan and began waving it softly to and fro. She was enormously relieved by Viola’s admission, but she did not show any signs of relief.

‘It would be interesting to know,’ she said without looking at her daughter, ‘why you have chosen to break the heart of the nicest man of your acquaintance? That is to say, of course, if the rupture is of your doing, and not as the world will naturally suppose, Reggie’s?’

‘Oh, mother,’ said Viola brokenly. She felt as if the world wouldn’t matter if she could only get her mother away from it, but if she couldn’t, how was she going to face the world? Her mother had always faced it for them both before.

‘No, my dear, I don’t at all suppose it,’ said Mrs. Egerton, laying down her fan and confronting Viola with unrelenting, narrowed eyes. ‘I happen to know that Reginald Ainley is a man of honour as well as a very dear fellow. He would never dream of breaking any one’s heart, or spoiling their reputation. Whatever has been done, has been done, I feel sure, by you alone, in a fit of very awkward ignorance—innocence, as you would no doubt prefer my calling it. Mercifully, it is not too late to be perfectly frank with me. What has caused you to take such a violent step?’

‘I couldn’t marry him,’ said Viola. She looked piteously at her mother’s mature, wise eyes. ‘I didn’t love him.’

It was such a poor little narrow plea, flung out in the cold, before a cosmopolitan, experienced mind.

Her mother brushed it impatiently aside.

‘My dear,’ she said, ‘do remember you are not in the servants’ hall, or even in the act of writing a penny novelette to be read there. In our class of life we can very well marry a man we like very much without appealing to melodrama.’

‘But, mother,’ Viola urged, ‘not marry him! Not just liking him—how could I? I tried. You don’t know how hard I tried, but he wouldn’t have liked it himself—he didn’t really, _now_—and it would have been worse _after_.’

She had begun to tremble with a strange feeling of physical cold. It was as if everything that warmed and comforted her heart was being dragged relentlessly from her. If her mother didn’t understand, her whole world must topple over, because it would show that the foundation of it was false—the life they had lived together, the immense reassurance of their mutual give and take wouldn’t be real at all. Either they saw this fundamental thing together, or they had been deceived in each other. They weren’t friends, companions and twin souls—they were just a mother and daughter who had nothing between them but a painful, unequal love.

She put her hand out beseechingly on her mother’s lap, but Mrs. Egerton did not touch it. She, too, knew that the crisis of their life together had been reached. If Viola’s will failed her now the purpose of her whole life failed.

The love within her receded and turned to ice. All her strength rallied to her will; she must make Viola yield. An appeal to her emotions wouldn’t last, but a broken will always lasts, it can never really reassert itself again.

‘My very dear child,’ she said quietly, ‘you know nothing at all about life, though you are very clever and intelligent. I hoped you weren’t too clever to trust me; I was not afraid about the engagement, for I thought when you chose we had chosen together. I knew that Reggie would make you happy. You do not know, but as a matter of fact any good young man who is suitable and loves a girl with the best that is in him, can make her happy, unless she is in love with some one else.

‘You are not in love with any one else, are you?’

Viola shook her head. She was sure she did not love any one else. But she knew there was a man who would not take the consent of her lips and her eyes and leave untouched the spirit behind them.

It was perhaps true, as her mother said, that the outside of you could be content if you forced it to, with youth, and (what her mother would never have dreamed of calling) passion, and plenty of all the good things you were used to—so used to that they sometimes seemed like chains around your feet; but what of this new old self that had never cared for the doll instead of the puppy, the pretty book against the true book, the sheltered pane instead of the clean cold air?

‘The whole thing is so silly,’ her mother went on with a delicate, restrained impatience. In a few months’ time you would be a contented wife with a delightful home and a perfect husband. You need not fear that Reggie’s love would bother you. That only lasts for the first few weeks or months, and you would be to Reggie very much what Reggie would be to you, a nice, intimate contemporary with the same interests as your own. You need not upset yourself in any way—life is always perfectly simple if you are with suitable people.

‘But you must act reasonably, and in the main, as other people act. Breaking an engagement implies that you are either unbalanced or unattractive—and I should extremely resent your being thought either of these things.

‘I know men are often stupid and inconsiderate. Can you point out to me any particular thing which Reggie could do, or not do, to please you?’

Viola sat up straight in bed, her dark hair hung down in two long plaits, and her eyes shone with a sudden queer fire.

‘Oh, mother,’ she said, ‘I don’t care about being pleased, but there is something I care about which Reggie hasn’t got—he hasn’t got any feeling—about me being me; and when I try to find out what he is like—I don’t like him at all.’

‘My dear,’ said Mrs. Egerton with a little ironic smile, ‘that is where you make your mistake. You shouldn’t try to find out what men are like. It is your business to find out what pleases and what displeases them—but nothing more. Women don’t really like men, or men, women. We put up with each other for the good of the race.’

‘Oh, but that’s awful!’ cried Viola, sinking back on her pillow. ‘That’s simply awful! Is there no such thing as love?’

‘Oh, yes, there is love,’ said Mrs. Egerton, with a sudden vibration in her voice. ‘I love you, Viola. I gave you life. I held you little and helpless in my arms. I would have given my body to be burned for you.

‘You were a very delicate child. Sometimes I never took my clothes off for five nights together, fighting for you with death, and I won. I gave you day by day all my best thoughts. I had no plan that you were not the centre of. You were in my heart and part of me, as much as when I carried you. If you are beautiful and strong and clever enough to argue with me now, it is with my love for you that you do it. You never look in the glass without seeing my love for you, nor use your cruel young strength without feeling it! Oh, my dear—you say is there any love?—there is a love that never leaves you—and which counts all its honours and its joys only for you! If I had thought you would not be happy with Reggie I would never have let him near you. But you will be happy with him. He is not a husband who refuses the co-operation of his wife, and yet is not strong enough to do anything alone.

‘Reggie will hold power in his hands, his children will be privileged. Your heart will be full of pride and content, and from the moment of your wedding till the day when you are ready to send the life out of your heart, as I am ready now to send you, you will have triumphed.

‘And I shall be glad of it, living or dead, I shall be glad of it—as I have never been glad of any triumph of my own!’

Mrs. Egerton leaned back, her breath came quickly, her eyes never left the white, startled face of her child.

All the power in her concentrated itself on this one moment’s struggle. She felt her grasp over the child’s soul strengthen. She did not say another word to break the binding silence.

Viola could never get away from her now; moment by moment vanished, and it seemed as if there was no protest left in her.

And then she said in a perfectly steady, reasoning little voice, ‘But, mother, I don’t call that love at all—you just don’t give me any room to live.’

Mrs. Egerton rose steadily to her feet; but she was stricken.

The fruit of her life had fallen rotten at the root, she could not bear to look at the cruel child whose touch had brought it down. The ice spread over her heart again, encasing it for ever. Viola did not know what she had done, but a panic seized her—she felt, if her mother had left the room without speaking to her, as if she would never see her again. She cried out, ‘Mother! Mother!’ But Mrs. Egerton, moving slowly towards the door, never turned her head. There was a curious and awful silence in the room, as if some one had just died.

Viola had asked her mother for space to live; but she had given her mother only space—in which to die.