Westwood (28 page)

Margaret’s feelings were still a girl’s feelings, but they were stronger than those of most girls, and she was not satisfied by the glimpses which she had of Gerard Challis. She longed to talk to him and (although she knew that the longing was most unlikely ever to be satisfied) to become his friend. Such a friendship as Alice Meynell had with George Meredith seemed to her a beautiful relationship and one not lacking in spiritual excitements; if she could have had such a friendship with Gerard Challis, she told herself, she would have had nothing more to wish for.

She had bought all his plays and knew many passages in them by heart, and had been three times to see
The Hidden Well
, which had been revived in London; once with Zita and twice by herself. That rare mind! What a joy it was, to see it revealing itself through the words and gestures of the actors! How spiritual yet passionate was his approach to
Love
! When his men and women spoke of their love for one another she felt as if they were expressing her deepest feelings; and she felt none of the faint embarrassment and distaste which had affected her when she looked at Alexander Niland’s picture of the lovers lying in the summer grass.

But daydreaming, and reading his plays and going to see them performed, were not satisfying;
and sometimes she experienced a slight revulsion of feeling as if she had been eating sickly sweets. She was disturbed by the disloyalty of such feelings but admitted their existence, and even began to realize that they were due to the scanty diet upon which her emotions were compelled to feed.

Therefore, when she opened the door of the Little Room one Saturday afternoon in March and saw him seated by the open window, her astonishment and joy were so great that she coloured deeply.

He took that as inevitable and no more than his due, and rose slowly and gracefully and stood by the window, his tall slight form dark against the brilliance of the spring day, with one hand resting on the back of the little Victorian couch upon which he had been seated. He smiled at her and she tremulously returned the smile, and then he said:

‘I shall not disturb you if I remain here for a little while?’

‘Oh no! I – are you sure – I shan’t disturb you? Zita and I are making – doing some sewing – and I thought – she is out, but I have the afternoon free – I might be getting on with it.’

How truly thankful she was that ‘it’ was of a nature which permitted it to be worked upon under his eyes without embarrassment! – and how far gone she was in romantic love that the thought did not incline her to smile.

He bent his head and stood courteously while she took from a drawer the blouse of white net which Zita was helping her to make and sat down at the far end of the room, and then he reseated himself upon the little couch, and, extending his arm along the curve of its back, gazed into vacancy in silence. Margaret, bending over her sewing, found her hands shaking and barely capable of their task. Suddenly it occurred to her, increasing her agitation, that he was studying the Little Room, absorbing its atmosphere to use it in the new play which she knew him to be working upon. And she was here with him, alone! a witness (but that she dared not look up) of his creative ardour! It was almost too much. Suddenly he spoke, and to save her life she could not have repressed her convulsive start.

‘Women have been imprisoned in this room for two hundred years,’ he said abruptly.

In spite of her happiness and agitation, this remark did surprise Margaret very much. The Little Room was such a quiet, pleasant, sunny place, she herself was fond of sewing, which soothed her restlessness and satisfied her own creative instinct, and she had so liked to think of other women sewing here as long as the house had stood, that it required a distinct effort to think of the Little Room as a prison. However, she made the effort (in spite of some difficulty in knowing just what to reply) and looked up, murmuring intensely, ‘Yes … I know.’

‘Women, with their half-formed desires timidly pressing forward into the unknown world outside these walls. Here they sat … sewing.’

Impossible to convey in print the chill irony he put into the last word; any self-respecting needle would have melted before it, and Margaret only made a soft affirmative sound in response, for his tone was contemplative, musing, as if he were talking to himself.

‘I want,’ he went on, leaning forward and clasping his hands over his knee, ‘to convey in one sentence of dialogue that feeling of half-conscious imprisonment, the restlessness that was sewn into the er – the – er – the –’

Margaret waited, while he hesitated. Was he seeking for the right word, the perfect phrase of which he was a master? Or was it – she hardly liked to think that he did not know
what
it was that women sewed?

‘– the hemming of handkerchiefs,’ concluded Mr Challis, with delicate contempt.

‘Oh, but surely it wasn’t only –’ began Margaret eagerly, then stopped, horrified at herself.
What had she been about to say?

For the first time he turned his head slowly and looked at her. His face was in shadow by contrast with the brilliant day outside, and his eyes seemed bluer than usual and were shining with a strange reflected radiance. He looked like a seer.

‘I used “handkerchiefs” as a symbol,’ he said gently, as if he knew what she had been about to say and understood her difficulty and was compelling himself to be patient, ‘a symbol of the necessary, the commonplace, even the sordid.’

Margaret, in spite of her alarm at her recent narrow escape from having corrected him, was deeply interested in this discussion and longed to help; what tiny details dramatists had to contend with! And he had said that by the use of such details he wanted to convey, in one sentence, the vast emotions of all imprisoned womanhood! How she burned to have the courage to suggest dish-cloths instead of handkerchiefs! But it was useless; the courage would not come. And did one hem dishcloths? No; surely one knitted them or used a bit of rag. Tea-cloths? No; that suggested something quite different. But it’s fascinating, working it out, she thought, and then became aware that he was speaking again.

‘You understand what I’m doing here, don’t you?’

‘Oh, yes!’ she breathed. ‘Absorbing the atmosphere.’

‘Rather, letting it absorb me,’ he corrected, ‘and thus I shall become, for an hour, a part of it, and reproduce it, when the moment is ripe, in art.’

She sat with her hands folded upon her work, and her eyes fixed fervently upon his face. There was another long pause.

‘The woman I have in mind died thirty years ago,’ he said abruptly, ‘but you – you are alive to-day. The sunlight is warm upon your cheek and your hands experience the fine texture of the chiffon which you are sewing. And you think that you are free; free as that woman who died in Vienna thirty years ago never was. But
are
you?’

She was so confused by this sudden introduction of a personal note into the conversation, and so overjoyed at being taken into his confidence, that she could not assemble her thoughts in time to give a suitably subtle reply and made the mistake of giving a literal one.

‘Oh well, I am much freer than most girls of my age,’ she said with a nervous laugh. ‘I teach, and so I’m in a reserved occupation.’ (I wonder if I ought to tell him it’s not chiffon, she thought. Perhaps he said chiffon on purpose. He wouldn’t know, of course, about having to give coupons for chiffon and net being unrationed.)

‘I meant free in spirit,’ he said sharply, frowning. ‘Freedom of body is nothing.’

Now Margaret had a strong vein of common sense and sense of duty to her fellow beings which was inherited from her commonplace ancestors; and, in spite of the delightful confusion of her feelings, her immediate response to that authoritative
Freedom of body is nothing
was a vehement
Rubbish!
which, unuttered, caused the blood to rise to her face and thoughts of the prisoners in camps all over the world to rush into her mind with a sensation almost of audibility, as if she heard millions of voices imploring for liberty.

‘The mind is all, the body all too, but in a way so different that the comparison only provides an ever-expanding paradox,’ he went on. ‘In the case of freedom, the final victory is always with the mind.’

She murmured something about that being proved by the peoples of Occupied Europe, but Mr Challis, who never thought about the war except when at the Ministry, paid no attention to this and only repeated his question:

‘And you – are you free?’

It required considerable courage for Margaret to reply:

‘No, because I am not happy.’

‘The food of fools,’ said Mr Challis promptly, dashing her hope that he would ask her why, and that this would lead on to a long and wonderful talk which would change her whole life, ‘No fully adult being wants to be happy.’ He stood up and began to pace the room with his hands behind his back, which was a habit of his, while she wistfully watched him; wistfully, but also with a faint feeling of incredulous disappointment, for she did not agree with some of the things he had said!

‘Don’t you think that that’s what most people want?’ she said timidly.

‘Most people are fools,’ he answered with his faint, frosty smile. ‘No, it is not happiness that should be the aim of our minds and bodies; it is intensity and integrity. And the shaping power – which forges and tempers the human spirit and renders it fit to serve integrity with intensity – is not happiness but suffering; privation, abnegation.’

At this moment the door was opened quickly, and round it came a face under a madly silly spring hat while two eyes, softly grey as pewter, glanced ironically from Mr Challis’s inspired countenance to Margaret’s solemnly attentive one.

‘Hullo, Pops!’ said Hebe. ‘I heard you holding forth all down the corridor. Have you seen my brats anywhere? Hullo –’ and she raised a finger to Margaret, who was far from pleased to see her and found her greeting of her father highly inappropriate.

Mr Challis looked disconcerted, and seemed to recall his thoughts to the visible world. ‘Oh – er – no – hullo, my dear, I think your mother is with the children somewhere.’

Hebe nodded, and looked round the room. ‘This place still smells of old rags,’ she said. ‘What are
you
making?’ and she bent quite closely over Margaret with her mocking smile and a waft of flowery scent. ‘How chaste. Well –’ and she nodded and withdrew.

The glamour was dispersed and he seemed to feel it, for he looked uncertainly about him, then muttered something about an appointment and with a courteous inclination of his head in her direction, as if he were saluting a stranger, left the room. Margaret was not familiar with those parties in which an absorbing tête-à-tête is broken up by an expert hostess bent on circulating her guests, but her feelings were exactly those of a guest thus interrupted, and in addition she felt the pain inflicted by his abrupt change of manner and the bewilderment caused by her disagreement with his views. But she bent over her work again and tried to concentrate upon it, and as her feelings became calmer she was able to reflect that the greater part of their talk had provided not pain but pleasure; true, a pleasure of that too intense kind to which she was accustomed to associate with him, but certainly pleasure, and she began to recall his changes of expression, his every word, and above all his confidences about his work, and by degrees her discomfiture subsided; all was glowing recollection, except for the increasing conviction that Hebe found her amusing and that she disliked Hebe.

Mr Challis was a man not happy in his relatives: as well as the burden of three grandchildren and the prospect of more when his sons should marry, he was also plagued, as we shall see, at the other end of the family scale where a man might reasonably expect his relatives to be dead. On his way to his study – for his talk of an appointment was of course untrue – he encountered a procession (why did his grandchildren so often present themselves as a procession, accompanied by nurses and grandmothers and mothers carrying and supporting them as their slaves support and augment the triumphal marches of Eastern monarchs?), consisting of Hebe, Jeremy – who was now a fair baby, very large for his months, with his mother’s sleepy grey eyes – Seraphina holding Emma by the hand, and Barnabas and Zita bringing up the rear and
engaged in argument.

‘Hullo, darling,’ said Seraphina, as the convoy swept past him, compelling him to stand aside at the head of the staircase, ‘we’re just going to spend our sweet ration. Great-granny rang up about ten minutes ago; she wants you to ring her up before four.’

‘It is ten minutes to now,’ said Mr Challis irritably, glancing at the clock with delicately painted flowers upon its sky-blue face which stood on a boule table at the head of the staircase. ‘Did she want anything particularly?’

‘To arrange about our going down I should imagine, darling,’ said Seraphina, and Hebe made a face.

Mr Challis, looking impatient, followed them downstairs, necessarily at a slow pace because of the uncertain steps of Emma, who was still at the stage when each marble precipice had to be a matter for separate management. Just in front of Mr Challis were Barnabas and Zita, still arguing.

‘Well, well, do as you wish, Barnabas. I do not care. But when at der end of der month you cry for sweets and no sweets there are, remember what I haf said.’

‘Why can’t I buy some more?’

‘Stupid boy! Because Mr Churchill will not let you buy dem. You haf so many a month and no more. If you buy all to-day, there will no more be for three week.’