Chapter XXXVI

Reggie had gone abroad. He couldn’t face London or himself in his accustomed life. He was a popular man, and every one would have taken his side; but they would have been very sorry for him. Reggie had always succeeded in everything he had undertaken, and he had never had to have any one sorry for him before.

It was a most serious and inconvenient moment for Reggie to leave his business, but he liked the feeling that he was risking great financial loss because of Viola’s heartlessness. The Egertons were risking great financial loss as well.

Reggie had already risen out of flat grief into distinguishing preferences. He was pleased to realise that he was looking white and desperate, and that he had the most expensive room with the best view of the Mediterranean in the hotel. He did not care in the least about the view, but he felt that a man with a broken heart ought to have the best of everything.

Reggie was young and astonished at not getting what he wanted. It was incredible that pain should lay violent hands upon him, but his heart was not broken because he had not gone deep enough into love to risk his inner self. He was like a child forcibly deprived of a delightful toy, but not like some one who has lost part of himself, and has to take up a weakened life without an incentive.

He opened his letters eagerly to see how badly everything was going without him.

Fortunately, things were going quite badly enough. The Dock Strike had started and promised to be the longest, fiercest, and most unsatisfactory strike that the dock and ship owners had ever strangled.

There was already talk of a Government commission, and if it came off, more or less impartial people would be allowed to study profits and conditions.

Mr. Egerton wrote hopelessly about it. He couldn’t put up a good case, because he was so enraged at having to put up a case at all.

He felt as if he had been born right, whereas Reggie was perfectly aware that righteousness could, and even at moments must, be worked. Feeling sure was sentimental nonsense. You had to look sharp and prove things. Mr. Egerton wrote that Jim Barton was at the bottom of it all. He was fighting for a Government commission and keeping the men quiet.

There was no sabotage and less drinking than usual. The strike relief was well organised, and though people suffered, there was nothing inordinate about their suffering.

It was a summer strike and the funds were very well administered. The owners might get men down from the north, but it was an appalling expense, and they knew that they wouldn’t be left alone to work in peace if they got them there. Jim Barton would be at them as he was day and night at the strikers, with that hideous vivid gift he had of pouring his vitality under other people’s skins.

Reggie cursed into his coffee cup when he thought of it. He was a clear, good-tempered speaker himself, but he wasn’t an orator.

Mr. Egerton did not mention Viola until the end of his letter, then he wrote: ‘I hear Viola is going to a Labour meeting against my express wishes. I think her head has been completely turned, but I’m sure I don’t know what has done it. Perhaps we oughtn’t to have had that bounder to dinner.’

Reggie read the sentence twice. Was it conceivable that there had been another man after all? Could the little, flower-like, well-bred girl he had chosen for himself have stooped to think about this man of no birth, who had risen laboriously above dropped ‘h’s’ and never above his accent, who in any decent company must always be a man apart? You couldn’t, Reggie thought, for all his education, mistake Barton for a gentleman?

Reggie had one of those brains which always has all its information ready for use. Neither anger, nor pity, not even fairness, ever deflected him from using his wits.

He ran over Jim’s career at the Bligh’s, and every disagreeable incident of their joint existence came at his call. He had paid the big, truculent lump of a hog out for knocking him down on the lawn. Wivvle would never have had the sense or the nerve to have got out of his scrape through Barton, if it hadn’t been for Reggie. That unexplained scrape attached itself remorselessly to Jim Barton. The Bligh’s household would never forget it—the mention of Jim Barton, if he was mentioned, would invariably bring back the cloud, and it might be so arranged that he would be mentioned. Mrs. Egerton was a very clever woman, and so was Mrs. Bligh; they were distant cousins and they both had daughters.

Reggie finished his breakfast with more appetite than he had begun it; he smoked a cigarette thoughtfully and then wrote a long, neat, unhurried letter to Mrs. Egerton.

Mrs. Egerton received the letter at the same time as Cèleste gave her Viola’s defiant message about the Labour meeting. It was too late to stop Viola going, but it wasn’t too late to avert the consequences.

Mrs. Egerton went out as usual, but she left word that she would see her daughter before breakfast next morning.

The house was empty when Viola returned, as empty as a big glittering shell. Mr. Egerton had gone to his club. Harry was dancing the tango.

She went through the noiseless hall, and up the wide staircase to her room, without seeing even a servant. The silence, the emptiness and the light frightened her. She was haunted by the thought of Eliza’s small, hard face, and burning eyes. It was the first time in Viola’s life that she had come in contact with the hardness of evil. She realised suddenly that people who had no quarrel with you at all might do terrible things to hurt you. All the crimes she had ever read of flashed into her mind, their ugliness and their precision. She had always felt vaguely sorry for criminals before, as for those unfortunate people who went a little too far—but she hadn’t known that they had faces like Eliza.

Why hadn’t she called Jim back and stopped him? She had nearly called him, but the policeman with his heavy tread had startled her as if it were she who was being pursued.

Or was it that after all custom had been too much for Viola, and that strips of scarlet cloth two doors off had mocked at her as if she had betrayed its chief treasure?

She was a coward; she shouldn’t have let Jim go without a word of kindness. He might fall under suspicion: he had been with her when Eliza left them. People would say, ‘That’s the kind of person who leads a strike,’ and all that wonderful sense of fellowship she had felt to-night would be shaken and blotted out by the loss of a wretched string of pearls.

Viola felt confused by the enormity of chance. Why had she worn her pearls, or sent for Jim, or talked to Eliza? And, above all, why had Jim said so stupidly and so fiercely, just when she needed all her wits about her to help him, that he would give his soul to touch her?

She had heard men use that phrase before, but they hadn’t meant it—nor had they really, if they had taken the trouble to look for one—much of a soul to produce. They simply meant they rather wanted to kiss her. Jim had looked at her as if her kiss was worth a kingdom to him.

His eyes had shaken her; it was as if by looking he had held her closer than any man had ever held her before; and yet when he had said that she was as safe with him as if he hated her, she had known that it was true.

You could trust most men up to a certain conventional point, but not beyond. There was no point, no check in the sea of trust she felt for Jim.

She had been frightened by the strength of his passion, and shocked because after all he was a common man; but she hadn’t been frightened by what might happen to her with this common man.

Of course any relation between them was impossible, what Jim had said was perfectly true. He was fighting her father, and Eliza was his sister. Viola couldn’t make friends with a person, however interesting, whose sister stole jewelry. There was Jim’s religion too. Viola didn’t understand religion; Jim’s stood behind him, queer and ominous as a cloud. She wasn’t sure what it could do to him, but she knew she feared it.

Religion when it is real is as terrible as crime and as dividing.

It was what Jim meant all the time; even when he was alone.

Viola was sure of this because he hadn’t touched her hand, or waited for an answer. She liked him more for these two things than she liked him for anything; but it made her feel how very dangerous religion might be.

She leaned out of the window into the large, quiet Square. There was a light, desultory breeze moving the leaves of the Square garden. She watched them swing to and fro, dark and alive, like her young thoughts.

She listened with a new quickening of the heart to the far-off sounds of the city, until they sank to rest.

Something curious had happened to the night; everything Viola saw and heard was more vivid to her, and more acute; even the silence brought with it a deeper significance.

The dawn came imperceptibly, the black, curved Square grew gray and the lamp light pale. Birds twittered uncertainly, and were still.

Night prowlers slipped, like shadows, across the Square. The air grew cool and fresh as if it had subdued the light, but still Viola could not bear to leave the window. She did not want to shut her eyes and leave the new touched world.

When she slept at last she dreamed that her string of pearls was broken, and the pearls alive and scattering about her feet. She wanted to escape from them, but they pursued her, crying out that she belonged to them and could never escape.

In the morning Cèleste told her that her mother wished to see her directly she was dressed.

Viola went to her mother’s room before breakfast.

Mrs. Egerton never began a difficult conversation with any one by stating what she had to say. She always, as far as it was open to her, laid waste the mind of her adversary until she had reached the end of his resources. Then carefully and without hurry she inserted what she intended to say, into the void.

She talked to Viola for half an hour the next morning before she mentioned Mrs. Bligh.

She heard all that Viola had to tell her about the Labour meeting and the loss of the pearls.

She forbore from pointing any moral, she did not even stoop to connect the two incidents, though Viola knew that her mother felt it to be obvious that people who went to Labour meetings would lose pearls.

Viola said in defence of this unattacked citadel that she had never seen so many people before, and supposed that among all those thousands there might very well be a pick-pocket or two. Mrs. Egerton looked as if it was a pity so many people were there for such an immoral purpose, whether they were pickpockets or not, but she did not say so.

Viola gave up the Labour meeting. She said diffidently and without purpose that it had been a very warm night and must be beautiful in the country just now.

‘I think it would be better for you to be there,’ her mother agreed tranquilly.

If she had said, ‘Your conduct is disobedient, you are no longer to be trusted, you break engagements, lose pearls and have vulgar tastes, therefore you are better in the country, where the opportunities for exposing these failings are fewer,’ she could not have made her meaning clearer.

Viola bowed her head in acknowledgment of her sins. She felt as if she were moving under a load of guilt. She wanted to be punished and exiled. She didn’t mind what happened to her as long as she didn’t have to confess. She hadn’t really done anything dreadful, even though she was not quite sure what it was.

Her mother waited a little for Viola to protest or to make some suggestion, but Viola said nothing.

‘I have just been telephoning to dear Annette Bligh,’ Mrs. Egerton said after a sufficient pause. ‘They haven’t any of their tiresome pupils there just now, and she very kindly suggests taking you. You have no objection to going there, I suppose?’

‘No, mother,’ said Viola. She had so little objection that she wondered with a fresh pang of remorse whether her mother remembered, or if she had ever known, that Jim Barton had been one of the Bligh’s tiresome pupils.

She raised her eyes to her mother’s, her candid, conscience-stricken eyes. ‘I’m so dreadfully sorry about the pearls,’ she said falteringly.

‘You must be,’ said Mrs. Egerton suavely. ‘They are, of course, irreplaceable. I should think you might be ready by the three-fifteen. It gets in at five-thirty, I believe. They say they will meet you. Annette’s eldest daughter Dora is nineteen. She is engaged, perhaps you remember, to Sir Mark Flitton? Mabel, the youngest, is going into an Anglican Sisterhood. Annette is intensely religious, and, after all, if girls don’t want to marry, it’s much the most becoming thing they can do, don’t you think?

‘I suppose so, if they’re really religious,’ said Viola, not meeting the fine, shrewd gaze that rested searchingly upon her.

‘You must be something,’ said her mother a little dryly. ‘If you don’t know how to play your cards, you had much better learn how to say your prayers. Tell Cèleste to pack your boxes, and I will go out with you at eleven this morning to help you to buy a few country clothes.’

‘Am I to stay there for ages and ages?’ asked Viola.

‘No doubt you will do as you like,’ said Mrs. Egerton tranquilly. ‘But I should suggest your staying there until you have learned, for instance, that one cannot be a satisfactory member of a household and act against its prejudices. You are of age and can do as you like, of course, but we have, you must remember, the same privilege, and if what you like is too much of a contrast to our preferences, we are not obliged to have you permanently under the same roof.’

‘Do you hate me, mother?’ Viola asked with a catch in her voice, ‘because I can’t do what you want?’

Mrs. Egerton reflected for a moment before replying, then she said, ‘I think you would find you could do it if you tried. Protection is not a form of hostility.’

‘But don’t you,’ Viola pleaded under her breath, ‘love me any more?’

Mrs. Egerton glanced away from her; as far as it was possible for her to love—with every nerve of her angry being—she loved and hated this exasperating, uncertain creature whom she had created and could not control.

‘I am not particularly pleased with you, if that is what you mean,’ she said without emotion.

It was a truthful answer, for to be pleased is what many people mean by love.

Viola knew she only had to say ‘Send for Reggie,’ and the whole household would be at her feet again; all the warmth and tenderness she missed at every turn was waiting on the other side of that hidden spring.

She turned away from her mother with a cold, sick feeling at her heart. If she would only give in, she needn’t be chilled and frightened any more, not by outer things—and did inner things matter?

Hortense, her mother’s maid, came in with the breakfast tray. She pulled up the delicate, rose-coloured blinds and let the sunshine in. The room shone as it always did, soft and gleaming, with a luxury too fine to betray itself.

Her mother began opening her letters one by one with a small green jade paper-knife. She had turned her attention off Viola as completely as if she had ceased to exist. Mrs. Egerton never had any attention for what she could not govern.

Viola knew that her father was waiting for her downstairs, and that he would mind just as much. It was all very well to believe in freedom, and love people who fought for it, but it was quite another thing to make two very tender and indulgent parents thoroughly angry and unhappy.

Viola could never have opposed her parents at all if it hadn’t been for Reggie, but since her engagement to Reggie she had imperceptibly moved a little away from them, and now she couldn’t move back.

Mr. Egerton was very angry with her. He minded much more about the pearls than her mother had, and much more about the Labour meeting.

‘I can’t expect loyalty from my workmen when I don’t get it from my own daughter,’ he said bitterly.

Viola was overwhelmed with shame; but in the midst of her shame she caught herself thinking, ‘Is loyalty having to believe whatever they believe?’ And she knew that she would go on being ashamed, but that she never would believe what they did.