Читать книгу Windlestraws - Bottome Phyllis - Страница 6

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Jean had never been afraid of people before. Even great scholars and learned ladies hadn't made her feel self-conscious or shy. They'd been kind, or they'd let her alone; she had known by a mere glance at them which course they meant to pursue, and had lent herself to following it.

But she hadn't any idea what these three beautiful but inexpressive human beings wished from her, or even if they wished anything at all.

Intercourse with them was like gazing over the placid expanse of a June sea.

There was the azure surface as smooth as a painted plate, with a kindly sparkle of sunshine resting upon it; but beneath the surface who could tell what wild wars of terror and anger were being waged? Or how suddenly out of the depths might rise the fin of a menacing shark?

If Jean only had to look at the mild expanse, it mightn't be so dangerous, but supposing it should ever be her duty to dive, wouldn't it be as well to know a little more of that ravenous underworld before she trusted herself to its shining surface?

By the time she had shaken hands with Sir Reginald he had become civilized, but there had been a moment, as he advanced to meet her, when his eyes had ripped off the centuries and left her defenceless.

She had to answer his courteous questions about her journey, his hope that she hadn't found the long drive from the station a bore, with the outraged feeling of a slave in a slave market, exposed to the mere elements of sex.

Beatrice looked on with a vague friendly smile; and Jean couldn't guess if she had seen Reggie's look, or shared her answering anger.

'Reggie thinks the moor's really Heaven,' Beatrice said lightly, 'and that no one in their senses could fail to be thrilled by it. Don't be misled by his apologies. He's got a nature like a dog's; he buries all his pet bones and won't even let you know where he's hidden them!'

'Please don't take my wife's view of my character as final,' replied Sir Reginald genially. 'She can't see the wood for the trees. We've lived together so long now that we only notice the corners we rub up against.'

Jean was struck, as they moved vaguely away from the hall, by the manner they had of never showing a purpose, even when they had one.

The dining-room was like a refectory, a high narrow room with a carved ceiling.

Tea-roses with colours like sunset clouds rose above a polished pool of silver and shining glass. There was very little light in the lofty oak-panelled room; and all that there was seemed concentrated upon their faces and the flowers.

'Yes, we've been married ten years,' said Beatrice casually. She smiled across the table at her husband; her dimples sprang out, but her laughing eyes held, behind their laughter, a curious watchfulness. 'Don't people say we ought to have a change of partners every ten years?' she went on blandly, 'or is it every seven, like small-pox? The inoculation wears off, you know, and you have to be done again.'

'It's the quality of duration which is the risk in marriage,' said Ian. 'No man can be perfectly charming to the same woman for more than two hours at a time, and a husband takes it on for a lifetime. That is my main reason for remaining unmarried.'

'I think a woman can remain charming to the same man rather longer than two hours,' said Beatrice speculatively.

'That's why a woman is more dangerous than a man,' replied Ian. 'She keeps her head the longest.'

'Unless she's in love,' objected Sir Reginald, 'then she promptly loses it, and insists on advertising the fact to any one in the neighbourhood.'

Their even voices and their challenging smiles, the easy way their eyes met and lingered on each other was the height of friendliness. There was no edge to their words, they sank or rose on the scented air, with the effortless ease of midges dancing on a summer evening.

'You're the best-tempered man I know,' said Ian suddenly. There was a touch of sincerity behind this blunt compliment which splintered their light speech into fragments.

Reggie, whose eyes had been on his wife, turned them quickly away from her; but there was no pause before Beatrice laughingly disposed of the challenge.

'You can't possibly tell,' she said laughingly, 'whether Reggie's good-tempered or not. What has he ever had to try his temper? He's young, he's strong, he has quite a nice place, his children are all they ought to be, and his wife is nothing that she ought not. Don't you think he should have the temper of an angel, Miss Arbuthnot?'

Jean hesitated. She knew definitely now that something sinister was alive under the shining surface. She had not seen the shark's fin, but she had felt the ripple made by it. 'I don't really see,' she said, trying to reach the security of the abstract, 'what happiness has to do with money, or children, or even health. I've always thought of it as a kind of special luck. You're happy if you like the taste of life, aren't you, and awfully unhappy if you don't?'

'Don't you think then,' Beatrice demanded, 'that some kinds of people are happier than others? Virtuous ones, for instance? I think good people are always happy, and rich people are almost always good--at least there's awfully little reason for them not to be! and I think the poor in a lump are bad as Tennyson's farmer thought.'

'I think bishops and pickpockets are rather happy people,' said Jean reflectively. They liked her choice of types; but they instantly demanded what she meant by it.

'Bishops,' Jean explained, 'always seem to me happy men, because they can live so long without losing their dignity or their influence. Most old men have to give up things, but bishops begin late and are holy and important till they die. Pickpockets, of course, have a different reason for being happy--theirs is the short run; but they must enjoy just what the bishops don't have to enjoy--their skilled risks! They have power too. They outwit constables; and hunger and chance and cold put an edge on their happiness.'

'I can see she backs the pickpockets,' said Reggie, with a genial chuckle. 'Obviously she's not a safe person to have in the house.'

'She'll do us all good,' said Beatrice decisively. 'We think too much of bishops.'

'Oh come!' said Ian plaintively, 'it's you who have a weakness for bishops. Reggie and I are awfully immune from clerical influence. It's such a bore to bone one's favourite stories or to have to avoid a friendly innocent damn.'

'I don't know which of them is the worst,' agreed Beatrice dispassionately. 'Reggie who won't take the Church seriously--though he goes now and then as an example to the parish, or Ian who won't go at all. I was properly brought up. I go to Church every Sunday, and I like it. I shouldn't enjoy my roast beef and apple tart afterwards unless I'd heard a sermon. I don't know if I think too much of bishops, but I do think they ought to be happy, they do so much good.'

'But she didn't say they were happy because they did good,' objected Ian, with a friendly look at Jean. 'She said that they were happy because they liked power, and didn't have to drop it. I think she's right. Nothing matters like power. That's why on the whole women are happier than men.'

'Are they?' asked Beatrice, raising her indolent arched eyebrows, and stretching out a dazzling arm towards a dish of salted almonds. 'I didn't know that we were happier than men, or had any power compared with theirs!'

For a moment no one spoke. Ian obviously couldn't, his eyes were on the shining curves of Beatrice's arm. Reggie's were held stiffly away, as if he knew how unbearably beautiful it was, and did not dare to risk even a glance.

'Women have power,' Reggie said after a pause, 'damnable power; and they use it damnably.'

'Perhaps,' Jean ventured, 'women have too little material to use their power on--and that is why they use it damnably!'

'Too little?' asked Reggie, fixing her again with derisive eyes. 'What d'you call too little? They have men.'

Jean ignored the personal thrust. 'But perhaps they ought not to have only men,' she said quietly. 'Perhaps they ought to have a little life!'

'I like her "only men"!' murmured Beatrice to Ian in an undertone.

'Of course it's better now,' Jean went on bravely, encouraged by Beatrice's friendly smile. 'When I saw Strindberg's "Father" in London I was awfully struck by how much more love of power old-fashioned women must have had--just because they couldn't have jobs or freedom.

'Strindberg made the wife in his play a fiend dragging her husband's mind to pieces; but the husband admitted with complacence that she was to have no control either over her own child, or over her own money, or over herself.'

There was a curious silence in the room, as if Jean's audience were not only listening to her, but to each other's inaudible comments on her words.

'I thought it the greatest Feminist play I ever saw,' Jean went on a little nervously, 'though I'm sure Strindberg didn't mean to defend women. He made the play out of his hatred of his wife; but even the hatred of a great genius has a flash of truth in it.'

'It must be a very entertaining play,' said Beatrice meditatively.

It was a harmless sentence, and yet Jean felt that she had never heard a woman say a more deliberately cruel thing.

Reggie never moved, he did not show by the flicker of an eyelash that her words had been a blow; but Ian looked at Beatrice, and his eyes had bare and unmistakable anger in them; he had forgotten all about the beauty of her outstretched arm. Why was he angry with her even if she had hurt her husband? If he loved her, why didn't he stand by her?

Jean felt a passionate pity for Beatrice. She wouldn't be cruel if she hadn't been hurt, and if her pain was in proportion to her cruelty, how deeply must they both have hurt her!

'Do tell us,' said Beatrice, ignoring with smiling eyes the anger in Ian's face, 'what the fiendish wife in the play does with her power? The little, I mean, which she contrives to get hold of!'

'She makes her husband think their child is not his own,' said Jean reluctantly. She didn't want to go on, but something in Beatrice's eyes forced her to continue. 'The Father cared awfully for his child; it was partly a mystic feeling as if his own life went on in her; she was his only hope of immortality. His wife didn't exactly deny his fatherhood but she deliberately shook his faith in it. So he went mad and died.'

'How funny,' said Beatrice. 'Do you think most men would care enough for that? I think they'd take it out of their wives instead. It would be so much simpler.'

No one answered her. The words and images out of the play seemed to become solid in the spacious shadowy room; Jean would have given anything in the world not to have told the story of the 'Father'; she felt as if she had created a monster which might turn and rend them all.

'I don't think men should kill themselves,' observed Reggie, looking at no one in particular; 'it isn't sporting.'

'He didn't kill himself,' said Jean gently, 'he died of pain.'

Beatrice rose to her feet. She looked across the table at her husband with smiling provocative eyes.

'What a mercy,' she said, 'for modern husbands that they rarely if ever take their wives seriously!'

Ian who was nearest the door opened it. The scent of the roses seemed to rest upon Beatrice's beauty and to pass with her out of the room.

When the men rejoined them, they talked only of horses and racing fixtures. They were all three friendly to Jean; they gave her the feeling that they liked her; but as if they had talked quite long enough about rather peculiar things.

They surrounded her with their unostentatious but perfectly settled kindness, so that it really didn't matter leaving her out of their talk.

She'd have been kept in it, if she had had anything whatever to say about flat-racing or the inhabitants of their neighbourhood; but as she obviously hadn't, they gave her cushions, cigarettes, and from time to time a curt but pleasant reminder that they expected her to feel at home.

Jean would have thought that the whole conversation at dinner--Strindberg, suicide, and Ian's unspoken anger--had been only the play of her own uneasy imagination, if it had not been for one singular omission.

All through this cheerful, desultory talk which took place equally between the three of them, Ian never once looked at Beatrice's face. He seemed, even when he turned towards her, to be addressing the air above her head.