The Edwardians (8 page)

“You are very eloquent,” said Sebastian, “and your sarcasm makes me uneasy, but are you right? Surely one might lead a worse life.”

“Then,” pursued Anquetil, taking no notice, “there is another danger which you can scarcely hope to escape. It is the weight of the past. Not only will you esteem material objects because they are old—I am not superficial enough to reproach you for so harmless a weakness—but, more banefully, you will venerate ideas and institutions because they have remained for a long time in force; for so long a time as to appear to you absolute and unalterable. That is real atrophy of the soul. You inherit your code ready-made. That waxwork figure labelled Gentleman will be forever mopping and mowing at you. Thus you would never forget your manners, but you would break a heart, and think yourself rather a fine fellow for doing it. You would not defraud others; but you will defraud yourself; you will never take your conventions and smash them to bits. You will never tell lies—avoidable lies—but you will always be afraid of the truth. You will never wonder why you pursue a certain course of behaviour; you will pursue it because it is the thing to do. And the past is to blame for all this; inheritance, tradition, upbringing; your nurse, your father, your tutor, your public school, Chevron, your ancestors, all the gamut. You are condemned, my poor Sebastian; you are beyond rescue. Even should you try to break loose, it will be in vain. Your wildest excesses will be fitted into some pigeon-hole. That convenient phrase, ‘wild oats,' will cover you from twenty to thirty. That convenient word, ‘eccentric,' will cover you from thirty until death. ‘An eccentric nobleman.' That's the best you may hope for. But though you may wobble in your orbit, you can never escape from it.”

“Nor can the planets,” said Sebastian, looking up at Jupiter.

“Another misleading analogy,” said Anquetil, also looking at Jupiter; “the firmament has magnitude and possibly organisation in its favour, but mankind, though puny, has independence and an undeniable boldness. I like mankind. I prefer a small, bold astronomer to a big, decorous star. But we are getting away from you and Chevron and your common past; further away than you will ever get. You will never jump as far as a planet; never even further than the limits of your own park. You are fenced in—fenced in with oak planks cut from trees several centuries old.”

“Another misleading analogy,” said Sebastian; “you are simply losing yourself in a lot of words.”

“Ah, but remember,” said Anquetil, “I have had my head turned. Not only am I keeping you here in this very peculiar situation, but 1 have been invited by your mother into surroundings well calculated to make me lose my head. Consider my past. I come from the humblest of homes; I depended for my supper upon the catch of a few miserable herrings; I often did not know whether my father was drowned or still alive; my wits were my only fortune; when I go home from time to time today, I have to readjust my ideas, even my speech, until I scarcely know who I am or where I belong. But my weekend at Chevron has shown me one thing: I don't belong here. I don't mind admitting to you that these two days have disturbed me more than I should have thought possible. I have perceived a certain beauty where I expected to find nothing but farce. There have been moments, even, when I was bewildered and recreant, and was inclined to go back upon all my fiercest convictions. Your Chevron soothed and charmed me. You, yourself, were a thing new to my experience. You, and your Chevron, were different from your mother and your mother's world; you had a different quality. I try to be open-minded, you see; I recognise the small particular quality that is your speciality. It breathes from you like an aroma. I don't suppose that it is peculiar to you personally. I daresay I should recognise it in many young men of your class. You don't like to hear me say that,” said Anquetil; “it embarrasses you, you think me class-conscious. It is one of your taboos, never to mention class; I am offending against good manners. I don't care. This is my hour and I am making the most of it; and as for you, you must endure hearing the truth for once in your life. Besides, I am not insulting you. I am saying that I perceive the charm of a young man like yourself, master of a great estate, easy, full of grace, with centuries of easy, graceful ancestors behind him. You affect me very strongly—I, who thought myself beyond being affected by such things—so strongly that at dinner for an instant I imagined myself and you in the roles which your personality (oh, quite unconsciously!) was creating for us both. I saw you as the patron and myself as the parasite. You, of course, are quite unaware of the effect you produce; you are quite unaware of your own easy assumptions; that is part of the charm, but it is also your danger. Lofty young man that you are, splendid and insolent, no uneasiness has ever crept like a louse between your shirt and your skin. Remember always, to my credit, that I did my best to put it there.”

“Well, but what do you want me to do about it?” said Sebastian at last.

Anquetil considered him. To Sebastian's eyes, accustomed by now to the darkness, he looked almost diabolic, with the two tufts of the fuzzy black hair sticking out on either side of his face, and the scar running from his mouth to his ear. He knew, however, that he liked Anquetil better than anyone he had ever met in his life. “What do you want me to do about it?” he repeated.

“Come away with me,” said Anquetil. “I am sailing next week, and I may not return to England for two years or more. Come away with us and forget who you are, forget Chevron, forget your carpenters and your blacksmiths, forget society, forget your safety; forget the whole paraphernalia. Learn another point of view. This is your opportunity. Look, you're hanging over a big drop. Down there, you die; but up here, beside me, you breathe and live. Which is it to be?”

“Do you mean that you will push me over if I refuse?” asked Sebastian. He was not frightened, but interested; he thought that Anquetil, in his exalted state of mind, was capable of anything.

“Oh, no,” said Anquetil contemptuously, “I shan't push you over. I wouldn't commit a murder for the sake of an allegory. But, metaphorically, you will fall if you refuse. I shall look down, and I shall see a little black speck twirling, twirling down until it disappears into greater blackness, and that will be the free spirit of Sebastian gone forever. An empty husk of a body will then politely lead me back across the maze of roofs.”

“And you'll despise me.” Anquetil did not answer.

“I can't do it,” said Sebastian desperately, after a long pause. “Why didn't you say all this yesterday? Then, I might have listened to you; today, I can't. You simply torture me, and all for nothing. It's too
late.”

“Ah?” said Anquetil. “Then I was right. Something has happened to you; I have known it all day. I suppose you imagine that you have fallen in love.”

“I
have
fallen in love,” said Sebastian sulkily. Anquetil laughed. “What an anti-climax! My poor boy, you evidently have a genius for the commonplace. I see I was mistaken in you. Forget all that I have said.” They sat there, hostile, absurd, facing one another. “I am indeed unfortunate,” said Anquetil, “to have come upon the scene twenty-four hours too
late. For since you tell me that yesterday you might have listened, I can only imagine that this cataclysm overtook you late last night. What happened? Did some fair lady appear in your bedroom? Was it . . .”

“Shut up!” cried Sebastian, “I won't stand this. “

“Of course you won't,” said Anquetil, “I forgot you were a gentleman. I apologise; you see, I'm only
a common man, and I rather resent having given myself away to you as I have been doing for the past hour. But you see that one of my prophecies about you has already come true; I told you that you would have a series of love affairs with fashionable married women. You are already at the beginning of one, it seems; perhaps the first? I hope you will enjoy it. I hope it will be a long time before you discover the ghastly sameness which attends all such adventures. I hope . . .”

“Shall we go down now?” said Sebastian in a voice of ice.

“By all means,” said Anquetil instantly; “let us go down.”

Anquetil left England and
was heard of no more, but he left it unaccompanied by Sebastian. His image very quickly faded in Lucy's memory, whether as a cause for annoyance or for regret. On the other hand, she began to notice a change in her son, and upon her asking him fondly one day what had come over him, he replied that she might attribute anything she chose to Leonard Anquetil. Lucy was surprised by this, and unconvinced, since she would have expected Anquetil's influence over Sebastian, if any, to work in quite a different direction. She wished that Sebastian were not always so uncommunicative. She, who revelled in confidences, could never indulge the taste with her son, probably the only creature in the world of whom she stood in any awe, for he was not a person of whom one could ask many questions, and indeed she knew very well that she would be wasting her breath in asking questions which from the outset he did not intend to answer. Moreover he was daily growing more forbidding and more masterful, and arranged his life as it pleased him without seeking advice or encouraging interference. Lucy sighed, but her distress was greatly modified by the fact that he was developing in exactly the way she most desired. According to her ideas, he was growing up into an exemplary son, and conducted himself precisely in the way that his mother considered suitable for a young man of his position. He made friends with all the right young men, he brought them home to Chevron, where they became acquainted with Viola; he went to balls in London and danced with all the right debutantes, he flirted with all the right young married women; he organised parties on his own behalf, both at Chevron and elsewhere—was it not he who chartered a liner and spent a turbulent weekend with forty friends, steaming up and down the river from London to Gravesend, and from Gravesend to London, while the strains of his orchestra floated out to the astonished crowds upon the banks?—he bought the fastest motor on the market and drove it himself, he squandered money, he was picturesque, extravagant, wild. Yet withal he was wary, and showed no disposition to marry, though every mother in London did her best to trap him. Finally he appeared one day at Chevron, announced that he had been sent down from Oxford, had no intention of returning there, and proposed to enter the Household Cavalry as soon as possible.

Privately, Lucy thought that Leonard Anquetil was less responsible than Sylvia Roehampton. She could not imagine Anquetil—“that rude man, my dear”—as encouraging Sebastian to his present career of dissipation. Sebastian's liaison with Lady Roehampton was, of course, notorious. She was seen everywhere with him, and though some people said it was a pity, Lucy did not altogether agree; Sylvia would teach the boy a lot, and meanwhile she kept him from less desirable entanglements; also, thanks to Sylvia's medium, it was often possible for Lucy to trickle into Sebastian's ear suggestions which could certainly not have been made by any more direct method. Sylvia, superb and triumphant, was commendably amenable, even if she occasionally annoyed Lucy by her air of superior privity. (Lucy's passion for her son, probably the most estimable thing about her, inevitably carried with it a certain degree of jealousy.) Many and long were the conferences that Lucy held with Sylvia, for Sylvia, even if not contributing much beyond an “Ah!” or a “Quite,” was content to let Lucy talk while she herself reclined on a sofa, stitching at an endless piece of needlework which well displayed the grace of her little, white, exquisite hands. They were tiny hands, that collapsed, boneless as a kitten, when one grasped them. Lucy, who had scarcely noticed these hands before, now often looked at them and thought with a curious complicated pang how much Sebastian must love them. She, who was as a rule unappreciative of women apart from their clothes, learnt to appraise Sylvia very closely in those days. She looked at the other woman with all her own feminine experience coming to her aid. Sylvia, the beautiful Sylvia, she had always thought, had always been something of an overblown rose, loose, generous, lovely; now she recognised an additional luxuriance, as though the rose were putting forth all its lavishness before the petals fluttered finally to the ground. There was a bloom on her cheeks, a light in her eyes, a softness on her mouth, which even Lucy must attribute to some influence working from within. Then, immediately, she began to wonder. Was Sylvia really in love with Sebastian? or was it only a final blossoming of her vanity? Impossible to answer! and, needless to say, no allusion was ever made between the friends as to Sebastian and Sylvia's real relationship. “How kind you are to that boy of mine,” Lucy would say, playing the grateful mother; “so good of you, Sylvia dear, to be bothered with a boy who might be your son—and so raw and uncontrolled, too; so uncivilised. I never know what he will do next. There seems to be no sense in him. I wonder that George doesn't get annoyed, to see him perpetually storming into the house. Send him back to me, if he becomes a nuisance.”

But she was amused, not dismayed. For a young man to start his career with a love affair with an older woman was quite
de rigueur,
and in choosing Sylvia, Sebastian had certainly given proof of his fastidiousness. Lucy respected the instinct that went straight for the best. It did not distress her in the least that they should exhibit themselves together as they did, for she considered it quite cynically: Sebastian
affiché
with the most beautiful woman in London, Sylvia
affiché
with the most dashing and eligible young man. Such aesthetic sense as she possessed was gratified by such an association. Of course, it must not go on for too long. An apprenticeship was a very different thing from a career. Meanwhile she was quite content that Sebastian should become tanned in the rays of Sylvia's Indian summer.

About Sylvia, her dear friend, she did not trouble her head at all. Sylvia had had enough experience, and could look after herself. Still, she wondered. Was Sylvia merely amusing herself with the boy, or was she really in love with him? Anyhow, however much in love she might be, Sylvia could be trusted to see that no unpleasantness resulted. Supposing that George, for instance, suddenly unsealed the eyelids that had been so conveniently stuck together for all these years, and put his foot down as he most certainly would? What would Sylvia do then? Lucy's knowledge of her friend and of her world gave the instant answer: prevent a scandal. The code was rigid. Within the closed circle of their own set, anybody might do as they pleased, but no scandal must leak out to the uninitiated. Appearances must be respected, though morals might be neglected. Sylvia knew and had always obeyed this unwritten law. Lucy had no cause to be uneasy, though she might perhaps have felt a tremor had she known how very passionately Sylvia had fallen in love with Sebastian.

The way in which Lucy had originally discovered her son's infatuation perhaps deserves remark and record.

Houses such as Chevron enjoy not only their traditions but their minor habits. Raisins and almonds appear during Advent, when the last bunches of white grapes shrivel yellow like the skin of an old woman and are no longer decorative though still palatable; raisins and almonds, with oranges and bananas, are typical of the winter season when the home produce, but for the humble apple, gives out; yet there are certain imported fruits which persist irrespective of season throughout the year. Such a foreigner is the French Plum. Black, glossy, he remains a plum so long as he is offered in a bottle labelled J. & C. Clark, Bordeaux—his most expensive and luxurious form; in more modest households he is bought by the pound from the grocer, is stewed, served with custard, and becomes a Prune, even as a sheep becomes mutton once it is dead, or the deceased relict of a baronet, in the column headed Latest Wills, becomes Dame. The distinction between French plums and stewed prunes is thus not to be over-looked by those sensitive to these nice shades. French plums, then, were a constant adjunct to the Chevron dinner table, though stewed prunes never. French plums appeared regularly, in their squat tubby little bottle labelled J. & C. Clark, Bordeaux, and Viola, who detested them, had from her childhood upwards been enjoined to eat them—“So good for you, darling; another one, just to please mother”—but by the usual irony of life, Sebastian, whose complexion mattered less, had always consumed them in large quantities of his own accord. He had, indeed, been known to finish off a bottle at a single sitting, and to tell the chaplet, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor, Gentleman, Apothecary, Ploughboy, Thief, several times over in the garland of stones arranged round the edge of his plate. What more natural, therefore, than that his mother should notice that he now never ate more than four? or, if pressed, was consistent in bringing the tally up to nine? She tested him more than once, dining alone with him and Viola at Chevron: always four stones, or nine. “This year, next year, now, or never?” she twitted him; that fitted the four, but not the nine. Then it dawned on her:
Elle m' aime, un peu, beaucoup, passionnémen
t
—
and
she saw the arithmetic which would bring it to
pas du tout.
Then, being committed to numbers, how could she fail to put two and two together? Sebastian's secret was hers.

It was also the property of the Chevron servants. Correct, distant, reserved, it was not to be supposed that they were without eyes in their heads, and it may also be imagined that they had their views upon the subject. This strange behind-the-scenes domestic world, indeed—so sharply segregated, yet so intimately concerned—had been thrown into a muddled state of mind upon observing the new complication in the affairs of their master. The upper servants, who regarded themselves as the discreet guardians of the house and family, suffered most from this confusion of their feelings, for they brought to the consideration of the matter two entire but conflicting systems of opinion, the one learnt in youth in a home decently regardful of the moral virtues, the other acquired through years of experience in an atmosphere where self-indulgence was the natural law. What was their own existence but one long pandering to this self-indulgence? Printed cards, with a list and timetable of duties, hung in all the underservants' bedrooms. Wood must be cut and carried, hot water bottles put into beds, inkstands filled, breakfast trays prepared, blinds raised or lowered; housemaids must vanish silently if surprised at their tasks, hall-boys must not be allowed to whistle, Vigeon must wear London clothes in the country, no noise must be made anywhere lest her Grace should hear it and be annoyed—all this long creed was handed on and taken absolutely for granted in its observance. In a word, life for the great and wealthy must be made as pleasant as possible. Their pleasures came under the same heading; traditionally, the lords of Chevron had kept their mistresses for so many hundreds of years, that the charming cohort of the shades of these ladies peopled the corridors and insinuated their suggestions into ears well attuned to listen. If the fifth duke had made a scandal in the reign of Queen Anne, why shouldn't his Grace make one now, if he was so minded? Thus thought Mrs. Wickenden stoutly; and tried to crush the small voice which said that this was not precisely the lesson she had learnt at her mother's knee. Her mother had implied that married ladies cast down their eyes when in the presence of gentlemen other than their husbands, and that young gentlemen reserved their attentions for the young ladies they desired to marry; and although a lifetime of experience had taught Mrs. Wickenden that very different principles obtained in the society which she had the privilege to serve, her early training was still sufficiently vivid to cause her an occasional sigh. Lady Roehampton was a great beauty, of course, and one knew what young men were—said Mrs. Wickenden, who had never come within three yards of a young man in her life; still, one couldn't help wishing that his Grace's fancy had lighted on a nice young lady, so they might look forward to a wedding in the chapel and eventually—though Mrs. Wickenden was far too much refined to say so—to a nursery once more at Chevron.

Somewhat to this effect did Mrs. Wickenden disburden herself to her sister-in-law, the wife of Wickenden the carpenter, who had come in to tea. She had once been still-room-maid at Chevron, and was now Mrs. Wickenden's only friend and confidante. Together the two elderly women could stir their tea and discuss the affairs of Chevron up and down, inside and out. For Mrs. Wickenden could make no friends within the house. The housemaid—even the head housemaid—were beneath her; the cook was a
chef,
and, anyway, the “kitchen people” were as separate as the Bandarlog; between herself and Miss Wace an avowed though inconvenient hostility existed, too complicated in its origins and ramifications to be detailed here; Button she considered pert and untrustworthy; Mrs. Vigeon and she were at daggers drawn; visiting maids, even Miss Hull, her crony, were ineligible for intimate confidences, since they formed no part of Chevron and Mrs. Wickenden's sense of the closed circle was at least as strong as Lucy's own; her sister-in-law, however, provided the ideal partner. Although not now of the house, she had once been of it, and had its workings at her fingertips; moreover, she was allied through marriage and followed every event, large and small, with a faithful and passionate interest; finally, her discretion in the outside world was assured. She just allowed it to be known that no secret of Chevron was hid from her; but she never went further than that. Mrs. Wickenden, in consequence, said things to her which she scarcely allowed herself to think in the privacy of her own bedroom.

It was very pleasant, having tea in the housekeeper's room. It was a good tea—scones, plum-cake, Madeira cake, and several sorts of jam—all brought in and suitably disposed by a well-trained housemaid of the meaner sort. (Mrs. Wickenden was far more haughty and particular with the house-maid detailed to wait upon her than Lucy ever dared to be with Mrs.Wickenden.)Martha Wickenden much enjoyed the weekly teas to which she was invited by her glorious sister-in-law; not only did she relish the plum-cake, but she liked to feel herself associated with the lordly way in which the housekeeper rang the bell, said “Bring some more coals,” rang it again for more hot water, and rang it finally that the curtains might be drawn. She liked to loll on the sofa and gaze at the photographs standing in their frames: Lucy in her wedding dress; the late duke in the robes of the Garter; a Royal group with the King in the middle, wearing a Homburg hat, Lucy sitting beside him; Sebastian as a little boy; Sebastian and Viola as children, laughing on a toboggan in the snow; Sebastian, today, in uniform. The housekeeper never lolled. She sat prim and upright, jerking her shawl round her shoulders, for she was always chilly—a characteristic gesture, which interrupted the constant darting and stabbing of her crochet hook as inches of crochet lace dangled and lengthened with incredible rapidity. Sometimes she would have “one of my headaches”—for thus did she always refer to them, prefaced by the possessive and almost affectionate pronoun—and then the darting of the hook would be suspended as she rubbed her forehead with a stump of menthol that lived in her workbasket, screwed into a tube of yellow wood. Mrs. Wickenden never allowed these distractions to interfere with her conversation. In a low, even, and mournful voice she rambled on, as one whose function is always to deplore. Listening to her, you would have thought that the very beauty of Chevron was tinged with a mortal melancholy, and that Sebastian and Viola were tragically doomed from birth. Sebastian was her darling. Viola she of course spoke of with fitting respect, but with slight reservation; for secretly she thought Viola haughty. But Sebastian! How often had she not crept into his nursery, despite the black looks of his nurse, whenever a cold had kept him in bed, and had amused him by the hour, making dolls for him out of wish-bones, with sealing-wax heads and grey flannel cloaks. She had always been convinced that he would never reach manhood, and even now she maintained that he was not long for this world. Many a time had the carpenter's wife, who was of a more robust temperament (and moreover, was enjoying her tea), entered a word of protest, “I'm sure, Jane, I never saw a better set-up young gentleman than his Grace,” but Jane would have none of it. “You may think so, Martha,” she would reply, “but you haven't heard him cough in his nursery as I have, winter after winter—oh, dear, something pitiful; and what with the draughts that come down these passages, and the cold striking up from these stone floors—there, they didn't think of those things in the old days; and now with this rackety life,” she added darkly, and Martha pursed her lips and nodded her head as she stirred her tea, for she knew what the allusion was to. It was the prelude to the most succulent moment of the whole afternoon. It meant that Jane, with many windy sighs, was about to embark on the topic of his Grace's infatuation.