Читать книгу Kitty - Warwick Deeping - Страница 31

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Sons who tell their mothers everything a week too late can count on provoking maternal exasperation. Granted that youth can be very exasperating, and that Mrs St. George was not an average mother, and that Alex told his tale with sentimental and frank ruthlessness. For nothing can be more ruthless than the young male, especially when it writes letters under the stress of strong emotion, and writes them to a woman who has no facility for experiencing any sort of emotion save that of anger.

Mrs St. George was more than angry; she was shocked; she was furious. And her anger was her misfortune. At this moment in her life when so much depended upon a magnanimous self-restraint, she allowed herself to become a kind of Brünhilde of a woman. This one strong, vital emotion, kept like an animal in a cage, and allowed out upon proper occasions to administer a pat of the paw to a servant or a shopman, broke out beyond control. She made no attempt to control it. She let her one wild beast of an emotion go. It ceased to be a dignified emotion.

The deceit of the thing!

Never having been a woman who could regard life as a romantic affair, and having no warmth of compassion in her that could help to temper her condemnation of romance as mere sex foolishness, she felt immediately right with her anger. She allowed it to distort and colour the whole affair. She got it at once into her obstinate, cold head that Alex had been ambuscaded. He had been ashamed to tell her. Of course he had been ashamed to tell her.

But a shopgirl! O, this abominable war! It uncovered all the rawness of life, and reduced gentlemen to the level of shopgirls. And she had been congratulating herself on the fact that Alex had been spared one of these war entanglements. A shopgirl! Had Mrs St. George been able to use the word “woman” she would have been so much nearer to understanding the situation.

She raged. She assumed at once that her son had been trapped by cheap people, these Greenwoods, tobacconists. Anger itself is apt to be a cheap and sordid emotion, and in Mrs St. George there should have been a heritage of self-restraint, and of cold, wise graciousness. She should have behaved like a gentlewoman, and she didn’t. She behaved like a common woman, but without any of the common woman’s redeemings and excuses.

The whole thing was vulgar and abominable. It was the old tragi-comedy. Her son had been made to compromise himself, and then had been hustled into marriage. Not so mad—of course—from the Greenwood point of view. A nice piece of speculation, or rather—the acquiring of gilt-edged securities. What a sordid business! And her son! And he could sit down and write to her a fool’s letter full of crude sentiment. “I want you to be kind to Kitty.”

Mrs St. George rang up Prout’s garage, and ordered a taxi. Yes, she would go and see these people.