The Edwardians (4 page)

Button, gathering up the lovely mass of taffeta and tulle, held the bodice open while the Duchess flung off her wrap and dived gingerly into the billows of her dress. Viola watched enraptured the sudden gleam of her mother's white arms and shoulders. Button breathed a sigh of relief as she began doing up the innumerable hooks at the back. But Lucy could not stand still for a moment, and strayed all over the room with Button in pursuit, hooking. “Haven't you finished
yet,
Button? Nonsense, it isn't tight. You'll say next that I'm getting fat.” Lucy was proud of her waist, which indeed was tiny, and had changed since her girlish days only from eighteen to twenty inches. “Only when your Grace stoops,” said Button apologetically, for Lucy at the moment was bending forward and peering into her mirror as she puffed the roll of her hair into a rounder shape.
“There
,
then,” said the Duchess, straightening herself, but reaching down stiffly for the largest of her rubies, which she tried first against her shoulder, but finally pinned into a knot at her waist. Then she encircled her throat with the high dog-collar of rubies and diamonds, tied with a large bow of white tulle at the back. “You must choose a wife who will do credit to the jewels, Sebastian,” she said as she slipped an earring into its place, “because, of course, the day will come when your poor old mother has to give up everything to her daughter-in-law, and we shan't like that—eh, Button?”—for she was in a better humour now, again completely adorned and clothed—”but we'll put up with it for the joy of seeing a bride brought to Chevron—eh, Button? eh, Wacey? oh, no, of course Wacey has gone to do the table—and you and I, Button, will retire to the Dower House and live humbly for the rest of our lives, and perhaps his Grace will ask us to the garden-party—eh, Sebastian, you rogue?—will you, if your wife allows it?” Lucy was herself again, adjusting her frock, clasping her bracelets, dusting her throat with powder—for she was one of those who used powder, to the disapproval of her elders—and everybody except Sebastian was radiant with responsive smiles. She flicked her handkerchief across Sebastian's lips. “Sulky boy! but Sylvia Roehampton says you are even more attractive when you sulk than when you are amiable, so I suppose I must believe her. Now Viola, my darling, I must run. Kiss me good night. Go straight to bed. Do I look nice?”

“Oh, mother, you look too lovely!”

“That's all right.” Lucy liked as much admiration as she could get. “Now you'll run away to bed, won't you? Dear me, I quite envy you the quiet of the schoolroom instead of that noisy dinner. Don't you, Sebastian? Good-night, my darling. Come along, Sebastian. I shall want you to wait up for me, Button, of course. You go in front, Sebastian, and open the doors. Dear, dear, how late you children have made me. Sebastian, you must apologise to old Octavia at dinner, and tell her it was all your fault. My fan, Button! good heavens, woman, what are you there for? One has to think of everything for oneself.”

Those meals! Those endless, extravagant meals, in which they all indulged all the year round! Sebastian wondered how their constitutions and their figures could stand it; then he remembered that in the summer they went as a matter of course to Homburg or Marienbad, to get rid of the accumulated excess, and then returned to start on another year's course of rich living. Really there was very little difference, essentially, between Marienbad and the vomitorium of the Romans. How strange that eating should play so important a part in social life! They were eating quails and cracking jokes. That particular dish of the Chevron chef was famous: an ortolan within the quail, a truffle within the ortolan, and
pâté de fois gras
within the truffle; by the time all the disembowelling had taken place, there was not much left of any of the constituents. From his place at the head of the table, Sebastian watched the jaws going up and down, and wished that he did not always see people as though they were caricatures. There was Sir Harry Tremaine, the perfect courtier, with his waved white hair, turning his head rigidly above his high collar, rather like a bird; there was Mrs. Levison, with her raucous voice and her hair like a frizzed yellow sponge. They were all people whose names were familiar to every reader of the society titbits in the papers. Sebastian saw them suddenly as a ventriloquist's box of puppets. Fourteen down one side of the table, fourteen up the other; with himself and his mother at either end, that made thirty. Then his vision shifted, and he was obliged to admit that they were very ornamental. They seemed so perfectly concordant with their setting, as though they had not a care in the world; the jewels glittered, the shirt-fronts glistened; the servants came and went, handing dishes and pouring wine in the light of the many candles. The trails of smilax wreathed greenly in and out among the heavy candelabra and the dishes of grapes and peaches. Yes, he must admit that his mother's friends were ornamental; he liked the bare shoulders and piled hair of the women, their pretty hands, and the bracelets round their wrists; the clouds of tulle, and the roses clasped by a brooch against the breast. His mother herself, whom he had so lately seen as a mask within her mirror, looked young and lovely now, so far away down the table; for a curious instant he imagined her, no longer his mother, but his wife. Then leaning towards her he saw the long nose of the Jew. “A tip for the Stock Exchange!” he thought; for his mother had explained to him, with unusual candour, exactly why she wanted him to be polite to Sir Adam. This passion for money was a thing Sebastian could not understand; he was rich; his mother practically controlled the spending of his fortune until he should be twenty-one; where was the need for more? It was simply part of her creed and the creed of her friends. Creed, greed; they rhymed. He was paying no attention to what his neighbour was saying. Yet Sebastian was said to have charming manners.

After dinner, primed by his mother's discreet signals, he moved round to talk to the Italian ambassador. He rather liked old Potini, a crank on the subject of the English character. Sebastian, depressed now and disgusted—for he suffered acutely from his moods—would have welcomed any argument, and knew he would get entertainment from old Potini, who was always bursting with things he wanted to say. Among the ruins of the dinner table, Sebastian drew a chair up beside him, holding a glass of port under the light, and old Potini began at once, rubbing his cigar between his fingers: “Ah, you young man! you fortunate young man! home from Oxford, I suppose? Yes, Oxford, that strange university where you young men live in segregation; a town of masculine citizens.” The ambassador's English was faultless, if a trifle elaborate; the only thing which betrayed him was the rolling of his r's. “Now such a thing, my dear duke,” he said, drawing his chair a little nearer to Sebastian and talking confidentially, “would be unthinkable in Italy. Or, indeed, in any Latin country. The English have no interest in women—in Woman, that is to say. What do you care about a pretty ankle? You think a lot about the fetlocks of your polo ponies, but when you look at a woman you rarely look below her face. Oh, I assure you. You yourself are nineteen—twenty? And what part do women play in your life? What do you do in the evenings at Oxford? You sit with your friends, hugging your knees and smoking your pipe, and you talk about—what? Sport, politics. Woman might not exist; she is Bad Form. An evening in London now and then, I daresay,”—and his chuckle made Sebastian feel as though the ambassador had given him a dig in the ribs,—“then back to this male life among a thousand other young men, as though nothing had happened. Yes, you are a strange race, a secret race, ashamed of being natural. Now in Italy, at your age. . . .” The ambassador's words threw Sebastian into an ill humour; he was stung, disturbed; he was ashamed of his virginity. People were not very real to him, and women least real of all. Little did he foresee, as he sat scowling at his wine, the adventure that was about to befall him. He wondered only how soon he might interrupt Potini, and suggest joining the ladies upstairs.

“Nothing ever happens,” said Sebastian violently; “day after day goes by, and it is always the same.”

“Happenings go in series,” said Lady Roehampton, “nothing happens, as you say; and then several things happen in a quick, odd succession. It is as though life had been gathering strength over a long period for an effort. Notice that for yourself. It is no good my telling you. One never believes other people's experience, and one is only very gradually convinced by one's own. Oh, my dear Sebastian,” she said—and she ceased to quote Mrs. Cheyne and spoke for once in all sincerity, remembering a young lover who had died—”think of all the people who have died too young to have learnt their own wisdom.”

They were walking in the garden after dinner, up and down the long path that ran parallel with the house. From the windows of the house streamed yellow light, and the sounds of music. Overhead, the sky was black and starry, and the trees of the garden were massed darkly against the faintly lingering light of the horizon. The summer air was warm and scented. Sebastian had forced her to come out; still disturbed by the veiled sneers of Potini, he had felt it necessary to make a determined gesture, and in this company of strangely artificial standards he could think of nothing more drastic than to deprive his mother's bridge tables of Lady Roehampton's presence. He smiled inwardly and ironically at the inadequacy of his caprice; it had created so much annoyance, an annoyance, he felt, which in other company would be reserved for something of real emotional importance; yet it was an annoyance discreetly controlled, with the perfect manners of those well-bred people. Lady Roehampton herself had alone displayed graciousness; she had smiled on the boy who, suddenly masterful, demanded her society. She had risen with a great billowing of blue taffeta skirts—a graceful, warm uprising of her beauty, conscious that many eyes were curiously and speculatively turned towards her. Sebastian was intensely aware of her quality as she strolled beside him; her quality of a beautiful woman exquisitely finished, with a perfect grasp on life, untroubled, shrewd, mature, secret, betraying her real self to none. Compared with her, he felt vague and raw, incapable of coming to terms with life. Yet he felt he could talk to her. She was charming, dangerous; he could talk to her. The knowledge that she was wholly unworthy of his confidence added a spice of pleasurable pain to the humiliation of giving himself away. For Sebastian liked to pour vinegar into his own wounds.

On the Monday morning
they were all disposed of; the carriages came round to the front door, and they were all stowed away safely inside—the men into the station bus, with its fusty smell, its rattling windows, and the rumbling of its rubber-less wheels on the gravel; the women into the rubber-tyred broughams, the windows making a frame to the pretty veiled faces and waving hands. Sebastian came out to the door, smiling, his two little spaniels at his heels, the flag floating from the tower as it would float until the day it flew at half-mast for Sebastian's death. So they were all gone, all but Leonard Anquetil, who had been asked to stay till after luncheon. Sebastian turned, and crossed to the inner court, whistling; he enjoyed the sensation that the house was once more empty. He would force himself to forget Lady Roehampton. These parties might please his mother; they did not please him. He enjoyed another life—the life of Chevron. His mother did not altogether relish his interest in the estate; he could not help that. The estate was his, and he loved it. At these moments, he forgot that “nothing ever happened.” He felt, on the contrary, that in the placid continuity of Chevron lay a vitality of an order different from the brilliant excitement of his mother's world.

It came now to him as an audible hum. The whole community of the great house was humming at its work. In the stables, men were grooming horses; in the ‘shops,' the carpenter's plane sent the woodchips flying, the diamond of the glazier hissed upon the glass; in the forge, the hammer rang upon the anvil and the bellows windily sighed; in the slaughterhouse, the keeper slung up a deer by its four feet tied together; in the shed, an old man chopped faggots. Sebastian heard the music and saw the vision. It was a tapestry that he saw, and heard the strains of a wind orchestra, coming from some invisible players concealed behind the trees. His thoughts turned to the house itself, and there also found their satisfaction, for there also was activity; the pestle thumped in the kitchen; the duck turned sizzling on the spit; the laundry-maids beat the linen in the coppers; the garden-boy dumped a basket of fruit on the dresser; and in the still-room the maid stirred a cauldron of jam upon the fire; Mrs. Wickenden counted the sheets in the linen cupboard, putting a bag of lavender between each; Vigeon, having stored away the plate, turned the key in the lock of the strong room door. Sebastian's thoughts strayed out again, over the park where the bracken-fronds were uncurling; and went beyond, running up and down the paths, to
this
farm where he had granted a new Dutch barn, to
that
cottage where the damaged tiles were already half stripped from the roof. Ladders and mallets, and men tossing up the tiles: Sebastian was a good landlord. He would walk over to Bassett's cottage that afternoon, and see how things were getting on. Or he would ride over. He had leisure, a whole week before him. Even his mother was going away to London. Next Saturday the house would again be filled with people—people who were so well equipped, so sure of themselves, so supercilious, that they ruffled and confused him, and made him say the biting things that so disconcerted his mother—but until then there was nothing but leisure hung with tapestry and filled with the sounds that were as music.

All was warmth and security, leisure and continuity. An order of things which appeared unchangeable to the mind of nineteen hundred and five. Why should they change, since they had never changed? There were a few minor changes, perhaps; no armourer was beating out a new pair of greaves for his young master; but in the main the tapestry had changed very little. The figures were the same, and the background was the same: the grey walls, the flag on the tower, the verdure of the trees, the hares and the deer feeding in the glades—even to the laundry-maid hanging out the washing. Court-baron and audit; heriot and peppercorn; the rope flapped idly against the flagstaff. Sebastian became aware that he was still standing in the middle of the court. He looked across the grass, to the bronze replica of the dying gladiator, upon whose shield his ancestor had caused his own coat of arms to be embossed. Superb insolence! thus to impose upon the classic statue the heraldry of an English milord. Nor did he realise that that insolence found a counterpart in his own youth and lordly security. He simply shook himself out of a dream, and went indoors to his own room. Sarah and Henry trotted after him.

There, he was undisturbed; the centre of all the life that hummed around him. Plenty of work awaited him, for when he was at home he insisted on looking into all the estate business himself. It was the only thing that made him really happy. He knew only three kinds of people: his Oxford friends, who thought him aloof and unsatisfactory; his mother's friends; and his own dependents. Between his dependents and himself the best of understandings existed, an understanding due partly to the fact that he had grown up amongst them, standing beside the woodcutters as a small boy to watch them fell a tree; begging a new rabbit-hutch from Wickenden; leading his pony himself down to the forge to be shod; partly to their innate sense of tradition; and partly, we must concede, to Sebastian's own manner, which in such relationships was both simple and charming. He might puzzle his mother and his mother's friends; he might even puzzle himself, with the revulsions of his moods; but his own people, who saw him only in the one mood, his most serene, found him nothing of an enigma. Furthermore, he was open-handed, as he could well afford to be; money was a thing about which he never needed to think. There had always been plenty of money at Chevron, and there still was, even with the income-tax raised from 11 d. To 1/- in the pound; that abundance was another of the things which had never changed and which had every appearance of being unchangeable. It was taken for granted, but Sebastian saw to it that his tenants benefited as well as himself. “An ideal landlord—wish there were more like him,” they said, forgetting that there were, in fact, many like him; many who, in their unobtrusive way, elected to share out their fortune, not entirely to their own advantage—quiet English squires, who, less favoured than Sebastian, were yet imbued with the same spirit, and traditionally gave their time and a good proportion of their possessions as a matter of course to those dependent upon them. A voluntary system, voluntary in that it depended upon the temperament of the squire; still, a system which possessed a certain pleasant dignity denied to the systems of a more compulsory sort. But did it, Sebastian reflected, sitting with his pen poised above his cheque-book, carry with it a disagreeable odour of charity? He thought not; for he knew that he derived as much satisfaction from the idea that Bassett would no longer endure a leaking roof as Bassett could possibly derive, next winter, from the fact that his roof no longer leaked. He would certainly go over and talk to the man Bassett. Bassett should see that he took a personal interest. Together they would stand and watch the wooden pegs being tapped into the sound new tiles. “Very much obliged to your Grace, I'm sure,” the man Bassett would say—he was always known as the man Bassett, nobody knew why—but the last thing Sebastian wanted was gratitude. He would instantly think with apologetic shame of his own roof, the roof of Chevron, seven acres of it, no one inch of which would be allowed to leak for more than a single hour after its discovery by Wickenden.—Wickenden. He must see Wickenden. There was a note laid on his table: “Wickenden would be glad if he might see your Grace for a few minutes.” He rang the bell and sent for Wickenden.

Wickenden came, a small apple-faced man with keen blue eyes, a foot rule sticking out of the pocket of his baize apron. He had served his apprenticeship in the Chevron shops under his own father, and now had succeeded to the position of head-carpenter. He had started by rough-hewing the timber-ends for gate-posts, and now delegated all but the most delicate work to his underlings. Eight Wickenden children came annually to the Christmas tree, there to receive a toy, an apple, and an orange, but Wickenden had no passion in his life but Chevron. “Well, Wickenden, what can I do for you?”

Sebastian had anticipated some apprehension about an insecure chimney, a flaking gable—the structure which had resisted the weather since the days of Henry the Seventh was in need of constant supervision and repair—but Wickenden picked at his cap, keeping his eyes bent down upon it, in a way which indicated a deeper trouble. It was evident that he would bring out
his words with difficulty. “Well, Wickenden, what's tumbling down now?” Wickenden raised his eyes. “Everything! as it seems to me, your Grace.”

Sebastian was startled; the man's eyes were swimming in tears.

“It's my boy, your Grace—Frank, my eldest. Your Grace knows that I was to have taken him into the shops this year. Well, he won't come. He wants to go—I hardly know how to tell your Grace. He wants to go into the motor trade instead. Says it's the coming thing. Now your Grace knows,” said Wickenden becoming voluble, “that my father and his father before him were in the shops, and I looked to my boy to take my place after I was gone. Same as your Grace's son, if I may make the comparison. I never thought to see a son of mine leave Chevron so long as he was fit to stay there. And Frank
is
fit—a neater-handed boy I seldom saw. That's what draws him to engines. Now what is engines, I ask your Grace? What's screwing up a nut beside handling a nice piece of wood? Such nice pieces of wood as I have lying out
in the timber-yard, too; will be as ripe as a violin in forty years or so. Just right for Frank to handle by the time he's sixty. He could make panelling out of them—anything! I picked the oak for the grain myself; Mr. Reynolds, he wanted to saw them up for firewood, but I wouldn't let him. I said, it'd be a shame. Oak that came down in the gale three winters ago. I cut it into planks and left it out in the yard to weather. I showed it to Frank, and ‘Frank,' I said, ‘when you're sixty and need a nice piece of wood, you'll find it here, and don't you forget your father put it there for you.' And now he wants to go into the motor trade. I don't know if it'd be any good your Grace talking to him. Telling him he's giving up a sure job for a shadow. Telling him he's breaking his father's heart. I don't know, I'm sure. The young is very set on their own ideas. But it seems to me that everything is breaking up, now that my eldest wants to leave the shops and go in to the motor trade.”

Leonard Anquetil woke late, and lay for a while with his hands laced behind his head, very much amused at himself for being in such surroundings. It tickled him exceedingly that, because one had tried to reach the South Pole, one should be invited to Chevron. Chevron! that anachronism! the duchess' guests, those figures of cardboard! Anquetil was not impressed by such things. Yet he owned—he must own—that both were picturesque in their way. The picturesqueness of Chevron pleased him best; he had not much historical sense, but such historical sense as he had, recognised the morsel of English history. But Chevron was dead, he thought; or at all events moribund; or, to say the least of it, static. It was a rock at which waters were nibbling. He was not at all sure that the duchess' guests, for all their fantastic unreality, were not more permanent as a type in the world, outlasting the dignity of Chevron and continuing to exist independently of it; prosperous or ruined, a snobbish society—he sneered—was an inevitable component of the human system. They might carry on in rags; still there would exist always a group affecting elegance and superiority, preserving their jargon establishing their internal freemasonry, excluding the unwanted aspirant, admitting for a brief space and according to the accepted caprice of the moment such outsiders as himself. He had no illusions; so few illusions, that he did not even despise himself for being there. He had wanted to see the cream of English society from the inside; well, he had seen it. He would not want to see it again, and it would afford him but the very slightest amusement to elude their pursuit in future.

Anything but fatuous, he could not help being unpleasantly aware of the interest taken in him by the duchess. At first she had merely given him his turn of flattery; had played the impresario—“Fancy, Sir Adam, Mr. Anquetil was left behind by his ship for a whole winter in the Arctic Circle, and lived in a snow-hut on nothing but biscuits”; had tried to make him talk; had asked him to tell them how he got the scar on his cheek; then, thinking she had awarded him enough attention, had mercifully passed on to somebody else; but at a given moment, as she strolled down the her baceous border with him after tea, he had felt that she suddenly ceased to regard him as an exhibit and began to think of him as a man. He had felt it as definitely as though he had heard an audible click. He had been gazing at her in wonderment, fascinated by the incredibly foolish flow of remarks that she was pouring forth, and she had happened to look up at him, catching his eyes fixed upon her. Thereafter, and much to his embarrassment, her manner had changed towards him; subtly she had suggested—oh, not by a word—that some understanding existed between them. Thank goodness, he had been very careful. He had not played up to her in any way. The last thing that he, Leonard Anquetil, wanted was an entanglement with a lady of fashion. He was not the man to play tame cat to any woman. But the incident, if incident it could be called, had suggested various speculations to his surprisingly unsuspicious mind, and he had looked with a fresh eye full of an amused curiosity at his fellow-guests. With fashionable gossip he was utterly unfamiliar, therefore he must observe and deduct for himself if he was to arrive at any discoveries. ‘Fast'—he remembered that he had heard this particular set called ‘fast.' Outwardly, he must admit, they behaved with perfect correctness. Although they were all upon terms of easy intimacy, and although he imagined that they were in the habit of meeting constantly in each other's houses throughout the year, even the practice of Christian names did not appear to be very general amongst them; the women, naturally called each other by their Christian names, but such was by no means the rule between the men and the women. Indeed, he would have said that a good deal of formality was observed. Yet, once his very fleeting and contemptuous interest had been aroused, he had become conscious of many undercurrents whose significance he was unable to disentangle. Half-smiles and flickers of confederacy; he felt acutely that he was the only outsider in a company of which every member was privy to the origin, developments, and existing state of its complications. He wondered how many
faux pas
he had committed, and hoped he had committed a great many. His fellow-guests, he felt sure, were far too well informed ever to commit one in the whole course of their careers.