CHAPTER X

IN WHICH WE FIND OURSELVES IN THE BOSOM OF AN ENGLISH FAMILY AND WATCH A UTOPIAN IN LOVE

For some obscure reason Spanton has taken a fancy to me, and I must admit in return that I find something rather likeable in the scientific coolness of his mind and his dominating desire to see straight. Having taken a fancy to me, it follows that he wanted me to meet his betrothed, for although it naturally goes against his grain to do anything so conventional and banal as to be engaged, with the prospect of a legalized union in the future, human nature has been too much for him, and rather than lose his Nancy he has agreed to her father's very moderate wishes as regards an engagement and a registrar. But I need hardly say that he has given her no ring. In fact, his only presents to her so far, I understand, are a typewrriter and a pair of sandals.

Nancy is a Miss Freeland, one of a family of girls who live a few miles out of London in a roomy Georgian house, with a large untidy garden, near Richmond.

The first words that I heard on entering the Freelands' hall told me instantly that I was among a twentieth-century household: "Oh, father, don't be such an ass!"

The speaker--Jocelyn, a pretty girl in a soft Liberty dress--at once broke away to welcome her prospective brother-in-law, who was there humanized to Bob, and his friend; and Mr. Freeland laid his hard case before us.

"Tell me," he said, "is a man and a father an ass because he thinks that one visit to the theatre a week is enough for a growing girl of fifteen?"

I was hesitating in my reply when another of the daughters came to the rescue.

"I know what Mr. Falconer will say," she said: "he will say that he has always made it a point never to interfere in disputes between relations. But Bob's not like that. Bob's never so happy as when he can set relatives disputing; aren't you, Bob?"

Nancy here entered the room, bringing the number of the unmarried sisters to seven. She is the only one who is engaged, and is twenty-two. Jocelyn is older; the rest younger. Nancy is pretty too, but less pretty than Jocelyn. The married daughter is a Mrs. Gosling, of whom Jocelyn wickedly says that her husband is the only one of her suitors who has not married well.

At lunch-time Mrs. Freeland appeared, an easy-going, smiling lady, and we all sat down to a vast table covered with food and noisy with chatter. The great joke of the day--and in such families as these, where chaff is the grain of life (if I may so express it), each day produces its new joke--was their father's recent cleverness in the matter of the garden-party costume.

"Have you heard," Jocelyn asked me, "father's absolutely topping idea?" and entered upon the history; but beneath the Freeland roof no narrator is permitted to get to the end of anything unaided. Every story is composite. This one ran something like this.

"You see," Jocelyn began, "we all had an invitation to Lady Sydney's garden-party; and father wanted to go, but didn't know what to wear."

"Because," Mona explained, "it wasn't an ordinary garden-party. It was in connection with father's great educational scheme."

"Yes," said Mr. Freeland, "if there had been a nice little word like Tennis in the corner I should have had no qualms, but have gone in flannels, swinging a racket. But there wasn't, and a number of influential people were going to be there, largely to talk to me."

"Swank!" whispered Joan.

"So father turned on his wisdom-of-the-serpent tap," said Jocelyn, "with a vengeance. He began by dressing in tweeds with a straw hat."

"Don't forget the white slip and spats," said Phillida.

"Yes, and white spats. They're so white that beetles and other creeping things are blinded. It's like flashes of lightning down there."

"Oh, get on!" said Mona. "Let me tell Mr. Falconer."

"I assure you," said Mr. Freeland to me, "it's the tamest story you ever heard. The only chance of its being made attractive is for me to tell it."

"Well," said Jocelyn, "that was what he wore. But he also put into the car a complete suit of the tail-coat and top-hat variety, and then Harris and he drove off. The rest of us had to get there as best we could in a fleet of cabs. Well, Harris and he drove off and pulled up outside the party gates to see the others go in and count the straw hats and the top hats."

"It was very awkward," Mr. Freeland put in, "at first, because they came out equal. But then the toppers began to make the running, and when they were about six lengths ahead I decided that that was good enough, and so we turned into a narrow lane close by----"

"Where"--Jocelyn took it up again--"father changed."

"You see," Mona explained, "he'd started with his tweeds and straw hat."

"Mr. Falconer knows that," said Jocelyn.

"You can't make it too clear," Mona replied. "The whole story depends on that."

"Well," Jocelyn went on, her face kindling with excitement, "he had no sooner changed and got nicely into his tail coat and things--and he really can look quite decent, although to-day you wouldn't think it--"

"My dear," said Mrs. Freeland, "you mustn't say things like that. Your father always looks nice."

"Not in his green jodelling hat, anyway," said Mona. "No one can defend that honestly."

"I like it very much," said Mrs. Freeland.

"Of course," said Janet, "but then you're his wife. We're not."

"Anyway," Jocelyn went on, "father and Harris----"

"Harris is the chauffeur," said Joan.

"--were patting each other on the back for being so jolly artful, when what do you think happened?"

"Father, you tell," said Nancy, who has an eye for drama.

Mr. Freeland at once struck in. "This is what happened," he said. "Another car turned into the same lane and pulled up just round the corner, and, peeping through the trees, to our horror we observed a gentleman in a tall hat and morning coat stand up in it and begin changing into a straw hat and tweeds. I pass over the extraordinary coincidence that two guests should have hit upon an identical device to find out the correct thing to do----"

"And we pass over too," said Jocelyn, "father's terrible discovery that the neighbourhood contained another man as brilliant as himself."

"--and simply ask you to conceive of Harris's and my feelings. For if this other man was right we were wrong."

"Yes," said Mona; "but if he was wrong you were right."

"Exactly," I said.

"Very well, then," continued Mr. Freeland, "I instantly made up my mind."

"Napoleon at six stone," said Janet.

"'There is only one thing to do,' I said. 'I can't change again. We're too late as it is. We must therefore get there first. To follow this man in, in his vulgar clothes, would be a serious blunder.' So with infinite difficulty and the most perfect tact--carefully turning our heads from his quaint occupation (as though the lanes of England were meant to be dressing-rooms!)--we scraped past him, taking, I am pleased to say, a little varnish off his mudguard, and were away before his braces were properly fastened."

"There," said Jocelyn, "don't you think that a masterly move?"

"I do," I said.

"All brain work," said Mona.

"And when you were among the people," I said, "did you find that tall hats prevailed?"

"Absolutely," said Mr. Freeland.

"I counted them," said Jocelyn. "There were eighty-five straws, with tweeds or flannels; a hundred and ten tall hats; and forty-three Homburgs. Some of the Homburgs were worn with tail coats, so father could have taken his instead of his topper if he had liked."

"Thank Heaven he didn't!" said Janet.

"My dear Janet," said Mrs. Freeland, "how can you?"

There was also, I need hardly say, a joke against Mrs. Freeland. Herself the most temperate of women, she had lately been presented with an Aberdeen terrier named Whisky. Like all Aberdeens, he was just a mass of original sin, and naturally the last thing he would do on a walk was to keep near his mistress. The result was, as Jocelyn informed me with the keenest zest, that the neighbourhood had suddenly become painfully aware of Mrs. Freeland's repeated calls for whisky, ranging from the pathetic to the urgent, and was drawing its conclusions accordingly.

"Yes," said Joan, "poor father, the dipsomaniac's husband!"

I hope to see more of the Freelands, for life goes very easily among them, and it is amusing to be among so many fresh, unsophisticated young things, growing like grass upon the weir. It is one of those families where the skeleton seems never to leave the cupboard, and it is tonic to visit these now and then. Very different from the houses where it is the family that lives in the cupboard and one meets only the skeleton.

Spanton as a lover differs radically from Dollie Heathcote. Dollie lets his Ann go her own way and rather admires her for it; but Spanton is the influencing moulding type. The last infirmity of modern man, some one has said, is to force women to give up their sex; and Spanton is indulging it. His one idea is to make his Nancy not only a man, but another Spanton. He controls her. He arranges both her clothes and her reading. Being only an ordinary English girl, with no experience and a great joy and pride in being engaged, she has fallen in with his every suggestion, to the great disgust of her sisters. Gradually and surely she is ceasing to have any common ground with them; which is of course very foolish, for Spanton is not making her better, but merely different. Her Spantonisms are only veneer; the sound Freeland stock remains, and will remain underneath, although for the time being it is invisible.

"When half-gods go the gods arrive," says the poet. But it isn't generally true. More accurate would it be to say, "When gods arrive the half-gods go." That is a phenomenon which most families have witnessed and the Freeland family are witnessing now. Before the advent of the god Spanton, Nancy had been loyal to her sisters' and their friends' enthusiasms. She had had local heroes too--this cricketer, that tennis-player. But Spanton, although he may not be so proficient, has the only right way of behaving at these games, or else he despises them; while when it comes to the arts, he leads by lengths. Nancy used, for example, to be rather keen on musical comedy; but Spanton being all for Shaw, farewell to Gertie Millar. Nancy used to go to the Academy every May and revel in it; but Spanton believing only in the New Englishmen, farewell to the Hon. John Collier. And so it is, all over this little island.