The Fox in the Attic (8 page)

She would ask Mrs. Wadamy this very evening if Rachel couldn't come here after the grandmother was done with her. For a week, say, till they saw how things went. Tonight as ever was she'd write to Nellie ...

“A penny for your thoughts, Mrs. Winter,” said Mr. Wantage, pretending to topple Polly off his knee.

Mrs. Winter rose in silence and gave Polly so unusually loud and loving a kiss that they both looked at her wonderingly.

Presently evening closed in on Mellton Chase: all over the house the sound of curtains being drawn, everywhere the lights going on—front stairs as well as back.

In spite of Trivett Mary had got home in time to ask Jeremy Dibden (an Oxford friend of Augustine's, and a Mellton neighbor) over to dine with them. A party of three; for Parliament was sitting and Gilbert (Mary's husband) was detained in London, though probably he might be coming later.

Jeremy was tall and very thin, with narrow shoulders. “He must have been very difficult to fit,” thought Mary (noting how well his dinner-jacket in fact did fit him): “especially with that arm.” Polio in childhood had wilted his right arm: when he remembered he lifted it with the other hand into appropriate attitudes, but otherwise it hung from him like a loose tail of rope.

Mary's own face resembled her brother's: it was broad, intelligent, honest, sunburned to a golden russet color that toned with her curly reddish hair, and lightly freckled. It was almost a boy's face, except for the soft and sensitive lips. Jeremy's face on the other hand had much more of a girl's traditional pink-and-white briar-rose delicacy of coloring: and yet the cast of Jeremy's features was not effeminate—it would be fairer to say they had the regular perfection of the classical Greek. In spite of his faulty body Jeremy reminded Mary a little of the Hermes of Praxiteles: his lips tended to part in that same half-smile. “Yes, and he's aware of the likeness,” she thought; for his exquisite pale hair was allowed to curl so perfectly about his forehead it might well be carved marble.

“Somehow, though, his face isn't at all insipid because of the life in it: just very,
very
young.”

Now, dinner was ended. The white cloth had been taken away, Waterford glass gleamed on the dark mahogany by candlelight.

Undoubtedly the proper time had come to leave the two young men to their port (or rather, their old Madeira—port being out of fashion). But as Mary rose the talk had just reached the theme of the meaning of human existence. “Don't get up and go,” said Jeremy, disappointed, “just when we've started discussing something sensible at last.”

Mary glanced hesitantly from her brother to his friend. “Very well,” she said slowly, sitting down again a little reluctantly (was she perhaps become lately a shade less interested than she used to be in these abstract discussions?): “But only for a minute or two: Mrs. Winter has asked to see me about something.”

“And so you've
got
to go!—That's typical,” exclaimed her brother. “Admit I'm dead right, cutting loose from the whole thing.”

“It's known as Service,” said Jeremy to Augustine reprovingly, his light tongue flicking more meanings than one out of the single word. Then he turned to Mary: “But tell me; there's one thing I've always wanted to know: what is it makes you continue to jeopardize your life being driven by Trivett?” Augustine snorted. “Trivett,” declared Jeremy, “can't even change down with the Daimler in motion: he stops dead at the foot of every rise while he struggles into bottom! Trivett—the sound of whose horn ...” he pursued, lilting, “makes old women climb trees. He
only
accelerates round corners and at crossroads. I believe the sole time he has ever consistently stuck to the left side of the road was that time you took the car to France.”

Augustine gave a delighted chuckle.

“Surely in Gilbert's bachelor days he used to be head groom? Whatever possessed you, then, to make him chauffeur?”

The question sounded candid enough; but Mary glanced at Jeremy with a flicker of distrust, for wasn't the reason obvious? The bride had wanted to bring her hunters to Mellton and if the old duffer refused to retire voluntarily on pension what else
could
one do? For with Mary's upbringing one never entrusted a
horse
to the tender mercies of a Trivett. True, whenever he drove the car her heart was in her mouth and one day he'd surely kill them all; but similarly, one doesn't give way to fear.—But neither for that matter does one discuss one's servants with one's friends! Momentarily her eyes took on quite an angry look.

“Touchée?” Jeremy murmured a little wickedly: “Be there or be there no some method in Augustine's madness?”

Augustine snorted again. These relics of feudalism! Such relationships were so wholly false; equally ruinous to the servant and the served: he was well quit of such.

Augustine had grown up from childhood with a rooted dislike of ever giving orders. Any relationship which involved one human being constraining another repelled him. But now Jeremy executed a volte-face and attacked him on this very point: the most ominous harbinger and indeed prime cause of bloody revolution is not the man who refuses to obey orders (said Jeremy), “it's the man like you who refuses to give them.”

“What harm do I do?” Augustine grumbled.

“You except to be allowed to let other people alone!” blazed Jeremy indignantly. “Can't you see it's intolerable for the ruled themselves when the ruling class abdicates? You mark my words, you tyrant too bored to tyrannize! Long ere the tumbrils roll here to Mellton
your
head will have fallen in the laps of Flemton's tricoteuses.”

Augustine snorted, and then cracked a walnut and examined its shriveled kernel with distaste. Funny you could never tell by the shells ...

“What do you suppose would happen,” Jeremy continued, “if there were more people like you? Mankind would be left exposed naked to the icy glare of Liberty: betrayed into the hands of Freedom, that eternal threat before which the Spirit of Man flees in an ever-lasting flight! Post equitem sedet atra—Libertas! Has there ever been a revolution which didn't end in
less
freedom? Because, has there ever been a revolution which wasn't essentially just one more desperate wriggle by mankind to escape from freedom?”

“A flight
from
freedom? What poppycock,” thought Augustine.

As was his wont, Jeremy was working out even the direction of his argument while he talked, leaping grass-hopper-like from point to point. His voice was pontifical and assured (except just occasionally for an excited squeak), but his face all the time was childishly excited by the sheer pleasures of the verbal chase. Augustine, watching rather than really heeding the friend he so admired, smiled tolerantly. Poor old Jeremy! It was a pity he could only think with his mouth open, because he was an able chap ...

“Poor old Augustine!” Jeremy was feeling at the same time, even while he talked: “He isn't believing a word I say! A prophet is not without honor ... ah well, never mind ... I'm really on to something this time—the flight from freedom ...” If he had read the signs of the times aright this was only too true ...

Mary began to tap the floor rhythmically with her foot. Jeremy's oratory quite drowned the impatient little noise, but she too was scarcely listening any more. Once on a time she had thought Jeremy absolutely brilliant: she still did in a way, but somehow nowadays she seemed to be losing the power of listening when he talked. One goes on growing up (she realized suddenly) even long after one is grown-up.

Jeremy had the tiresome knack of making even sound sense appear fantastic nonsense, and moreover didn't seem himself to know which was when: yet any moment he
might
reveal some real fragment of new truth, in a sudden phrase like a flashlight going off—something the plodders wouldn't have got to in a month-of-Sundays. Tonight, though, that “flight from freedom” idea was surely going too far. True, some people don't like pursuing freedom as fast as others but it's only a question of relative speed: surely men never turn their backs on their own freedom, it's tyrants who wrest it from them ... Liberalism and democracy after all isn't just a fashion, it's the permanent trend, it's human nature ... progress.

How profoundly Gilbert distrusted brilliance of this sort: Jeremy—Douglas Moss—all that Oxford kidney! “They're hounds who can find a scent but not follow it,” he had said: “They're babblers, they run riot ...” Gilbert didn't really share her passion for hunting (or he could never have tolerated a Trivett in his stables) but he liked its language: he used it in the House, to tease the Tories.

Augustine seemed to prize independence and solitude above everything. But surely (thought Mary) the pattern of man's relationships with man is the one thing specifically human in humanity? And so, to the humanist, disbelieving in God, that pattern is the supremely sacred thing? You can't just contract out of ... out of
Mankind
, as Augustine seemed to think.

Then Mary found herself wondering what it could be that Mrs. Winter was so anxious to see her about. She must go in a minute—the very first time Jeremy paused for breath.—Where had he got to?

“You anarchists ...” she heard him saying to Augustine.

But (thought Mary) to do away with all government like anarchists you'd have to cut the Imperative mood right out of human grammar; for “government” isn't just something tucked away on a high shelf labelled POLITICS—governing goes on in every human relationship, every moment of the day. One's always governing and being governed. The Imperative mood is the very warp on which that sacred pattern of humanity is woven: tamper with those strong Imperative threads and the whole web must ravel ...

“No!” cried Augustine giving the table such a thump the glasses rang (
Heavens! How much of all this nonsense could she have been saying out loud?
) “Your web can't ravel, because ... Emperor's New Clothes! There IS NO web! There's no thread, even, joining man to man—nothing!”

“I see,” broke in Jeremy, delighted. “You mean, train-bearers and train-wearers alike human society is but a procession of separate, naked men pretending? ‘Whom God hath put asunder, let no man ...'”

One of the wine glasses was still singing and Mary hushed its tiny voice with her finger. “I really must go now,” she said: “I told Mrs. Winter ‘Nine.' If Gilbert and his friends arrive ...”

“Don't go!” said Augustine. “You never know with these Parliament boys: maybe they won't turn up at all!”

“But how are they getting here?” asked Jeremy, “Is dear Trivett meeting their train at Templecombe?”

His voice was innocent but his eye unholy, and Mary was secretly smiling as she left the room. The incompatibility of Jeremy and Gilbert really was more comfortable displayed like this than hidden.

Augustine closed the door he had held for his sister and sat down again.

“The voice is the voice of Gilbert!” said Jeremy sadly. “She never used to talk like that.”

“Logically it's not many steps from Mary's ‘web' to horrors like the Divine Right of Kings,” said Augustine, “once you start valuing mankind above each separate man.”

“Only one step—in History's seven-league boots,” said Jeremy. “One glissade, rather ... Hegel! Br-r-r!—Then Fichte! Treitschke! Von Savigny! Ugh-gh!”

Augustine forebore to ask him why he wasted his time reading such forgotten German metaphysicians—knowing that probably he didn't. They refilled their glasses.

“Politicians!” said Jeremy: “They wholly identify their own with their country's interests.” He allowed himself a quick sardonic smile at his own quip. “These upright Gilberts—so guiltless of favoritism they'll sacrifice a friend as readily as an enemy ... if their career's at stake.
Poor
Mary!”

At Oxford (that intense white incandescence of young minds) everyone had been agreed that only inferior people feel an itch for power, or even consent to have it thrust upon them. “Qualities of leadership”—as Douglas Moss once put it—“reveal the Untermensch.” “Ambition is the first infirmity of ignoble minds.” And so on. That might not be the kind of language Augustine used himself but it was doctrine to which the very marrow of his bones responded. To Augustine, even honest statesmen and politicians seemed at best a kind of low-grade communal servant—like sewer-cleaners, doing a beastly job decent men are thankful not to have to do themselves. And indeed the ordinary citizen does only need to become aware of his system of government if it goes wrong and stinks ...

And Gilbert was an M.P.! Augustine had hated his own sister marrying beneath her like this—into that despised “Sweeper” caste. Now inevitably she herself was beginning to think “Sweeper” thoughts.

“Poor Mary!” said Jeremy again. But then a comforting thought struck him: “Perhaps in her case though it's only old age?” he suggested charitably: “How old is she, by the by?”

Augustine had to admit his sister was now twenty-six and Jeremy nodded sagely. After all—as both these young men recognized—no intellect can hope to retain its keenest edge after twenty-four or -five.

“Eheu fugaces!” said twenty-two-year-old Jeremy, sighing. “Give the decanter a gentle push, dear boy.”

Silence for a while.

*

Sipping her solitary coffee in the drawing-room after Mrs. Winter had left her, Mary began to muse. It was time Augustine grew out of friends like Jeremy—unless Jeremy himself was capable of growing up, which she rather doubted.

Dear Augustine! That queer isolated life he chose to lead ... Now, of course, he was going to be dragged back into society by the short hairs—inquests, newspapers and all that: was this possibly a blessing in disguise? She was sure he had great talents, if only he would apply them to something.