CHAPTER V

Jealousy is one of the faults which it is hardest for human beings to confess.

It is the least successful of the vices, for by its nature it implies that you find yourself less attractive than somebody else, and you are conscious that in the exercise of it, you become less attractive still. Fortunately righteous indignation often looks very like it.

Miss Onoria Strickland never dreamed that she suffered from jealousy. She considered it a slave vice confined to women and exceptionally feeble men.

She knew that her sisters-in-law were monsters of human iniquity; she realised that the other school teachers belonged to a bygone age and were unfortunate products even of that debased period. She saw that modernity and youth had lost alike their innocence and their ardour, at about the time when she herself had ceased to be young; and she despised women: but she did not realise that there was a connecting link between these criticisms, and that her own self-love was the connecting link.

She was taken completely by surprise when Peter Gubbins and Elsie Andrews conspired behind her back to make a fool of her.

This was her instant definition of their timid attempts to form a separate relation. Onoria might not have been so astonished if she had been a quicker hand at reading the silences of others. But like most great talkers, she was apt to take for granted, unless directly contradicted, that some form of agreement had taken place. She did not realise that the silence which gives consent is only one out of many others far less accommodating.

Neither Elsie nor Peter had ever openly disagreed with Onoria, but their souls had rebelled in a wordless determination—rather like that which precedes the back kick of a mule.

They could not, for instance, see the harm of Peter Gubbins singing, to Elsie’s accompaniment, old Scotch ballads. Peter Gubbins had a great fancy for Scotch ballads, no knowledge of the dialect, and a tenor voice liable to those spasmodic interludes which sometimes take place upon a gramophone.

Onoria had, not without justice, decided that he ought not to sing in public. She had put it to him perfectly plainly. “You only make a painful noise,” she had asserted, “disagreeable to listen to and bad for your weak throat, and you live in a semi-detached villa. The sooner you break yourself of a bad habit like this, the better!”

Peter had broken himself of the habit, but he still indulged in occasional orgies which took place while Onoria was at school.

He could only pick out the air with one finger on the piano by himself; and to his great delight Elsie agreed to accompany him.

She arranged to come early to Onoria’s before school hours were over and meet Peter in Onoria’s music room.

When Onoria became due, Peter hurried out of the window into the garden, and crossed by the wall into his own domain. On Onoria’s arrival, she found Elsie, punctual and passive, waiting for her usual rites upon the piano.

Ostriches would have known better than Peter and Elsie. They do not, when they plunge their heads in the sand to escape an enemy (even while exposing the rest of their person to view), sing Scotch dialect songs with voices like a damaged kettle.

Peter’s voice carried, and on one still day it reached Onoria coming up the road. She had a faultless ear and she knew it was Peter’s voice, and that it came, not out of his window, which would have been a misdemeanour, but out of her own, which was a crime; and she knew that Peter could not play his own accompaniments.

She hastened to the gate, but by the time she had reached it Peter had already vanished—he did not know what he was leaving his accomplice to face, but there is no reasonable doubt that if he had known he would still have left her.

Onoria rushed into the music room, breathless and terrific.

“What,” she cried with piercing incisiveness, “are you doing here?”

Elsie was in the act of lifting her muff to her face—it was not much of a protection, but she had seized upon it when she heard the front door bang. She felt that it was the bang of a discovered crime. It took Elsie a long time to say “Nothing—” but at last she said it; and then she looked all round the room for a way of escape, but there was none.

It would be difficult to say which of the two criminals Onoria was angriest with. She had been angry with Peter Gubbins all her life—for being Peter Gubbins; his character irritated and at times eluded Onoria. Elsie she loved; probably she was angriest with Elsie.

“Please don’t tell me lies,” she exclaimed with deadly patience. “I heard perfectly well what you were doing, as I came up the road. I could no more mistake Peter’s voice than a donkey braying. It came from my room—and _you—you_, Elsie, were playing his accompaniments!”

Elsie bit a piece of fur out of her muff in anguish.

The situation was too large for her. She cowered under it, speechless and overwhelmed. But something at the bottom of her heart told her it was not fair and she would not be overwhelmed.

“What do you mean by such atrocious behaviour?” went on Onoria with fluent passion. “Using my house, behind my back, to do what you _know_ I have forbidden? How _dared_ you do such a thing, Elsie? How can you come here now and look me in the face with that treacherous secret upon you?”

Elsie made a gesture of despair: she put the muff down; it had protected her from nothing.

It was a late autumn evening, a river fog had crept into the room, everything was a little indistinct, like a scene in a nightmare; only the bitter, sharp voice of Onoria pelting at her was as distinct as a succession of stones flung against a wall.

“Oh,” she gasped, “I didn’t mean—we didn’t think!”

“Mean! think!” cried Onoria. “What have you ever thought or meant, either of you? How can I tell now? How can I believe you? Don’t you see what you’ve done? You’ve undermined my confidence! How many times have you played here without my knowledge? I don’t believe this is the first!”

“He did like singing the Scotch ballads so,” Elsie murmured defensively. “It was an accident the first time. We just tried them over: it didn’t seem any harm. He had come in to dust your books for you and I was early, so we just tried them over.”

Onoria changed her ground. She felt for a moment as if it was not so firm as she had expected.

The crime did not stand out well against the background of Peter’s services.

“Of course,” she said more mildly, “you mustn’t think I mind for myself.” (What jealous person has ever minded for themselves? It is the lowering of the beloved object which afflicts them most—and the beloved object is always lowered by a shared dominion.) “People do not as a rule care to have their houses used for other people’s meetings, without their consent, but I overlook all that. Has it never occurred to you what a scandal such performances produce? No doubt you are being talked about all over Ticklington at this moment. If your parents knew of it they would very rightly prevent your coming here again. And since it is my house I am in a sense responsible for you. I have never been placed in such an invidious position in my life—and by _you_, Elsie!”

Elsie was in tears now. She picked up the muff again, and wept bitterly into it. She was not an easy crier and the fur choked her.

“I didn’t mean any harm,” she sobbed. “We only played ‘Over the Sea to Skye.’ I don’t see why people should talk about it.”

“You were alone here with Peter in my absence,” said Onoria coldly. “That is what they will talk about.”

It was very unfair of Onoria to say this because she was constantly alone with Peter herself, and nobody in Little Ticklington had ever talked about it. Nobody in Little Ticklington thought any more about being alone with Peter than they would have thought of being alone with Prendergast.

“I am speaking for your own good,” added Onoria, more gently and even less truthfully, for like most people who think they are speaking for the good of others, she was merely speaking to relieve her own spiteful feelings.

The sight of Elsie’s tears softened her a little, but she mistook their meaning. They were not tears of penitence, as Onoria believed—they were the tears of an outraged sense of justice.

“I don’t see what particular good you think this is going to do me!” Elsie observed between her sobs. Onoria opened her mouth to reply and then shut it again. It took time to produce any tangible advantage to Elsie out of the vortex of her own bad temper—finally, however, she did produce it.

“I hope it will check you!” she said with dignity. “Before you do something more compromising still.

“My advice to you is not to see Peter Gubbins again. I will deal with him later, and let him know what I think of him for taking advantage of a young and I _hope_ innocent girl!”

“I don’t see where the advantage comes,” persisted Elsie, who had unaccountably stopped crying, “if he isn’t to sing his songs any more.”

“Don’t be puerile!” said Onoria sharply. “You know perfectly well what I mean. None of your green girl prevarications with me!”

“No I don’t,” replied Elsie with astounding obstinacy.

“You’ve often told me, it was always women who took advantage of men, and dragged them into things, and then complained about them afterwards. Well, if it is—Peter couldn’t have dragged me into anything, could he? And I’m _not_ complaining!”

Nobody likes to be convicted out of his own mouth, and Onoria liked it less than most people.

“Please don’t make such an absurd exhibition of yourself,” she said, with heightened colour and reduced softness. “I have told you what I think, and how I intend to act. I am always perfectly direct and straightforward. It is a pity that you cannot be the same. We will discuss this question no further! Do you wish to take your music lesson or do you not?”

Of course Elsie did not wish to take her music lesson, but habit is very powerful, and the habit of surrender to a stronger will is probably more difficult to break than any other habit. She gasped, put her muff down and took her lesson, as if it were a dose of medicine.

She even kissed Onoria good-bye when she left—but if Onoria had been an adept in kisses (which she was not) she would have felt something wrong about it.

The complete kiss lingers—Elsie’s was without warmth and swift.

It was not accompanied by any form of apology, but Onoria felt that she had the whip hand of the situation, and that those who hold the whip do not need to exact apologies. She patted Elsie on the back and told her to be a sensible girl. Elsie made a non-committal sound in her throat and vanished hurriedly into the fog.

The fog was very dense, and she may or she may not have met Peter Gubbins at the post box.

The scene between Peter and Onoria was far less drastic.

Onoria had quieted down before she saw him and she spoke as man to man. She pointed out to Peter that he had taken an unwarrantable liberty with her premises, and that he had acted in a compromising way with a girl very nearly thirty years younger than himself.

Peter did not tell her, as the more virile type of man whom Onoria admired might have told her, that she was a bad-minded old hen and was talking a pack of nonsense; he took what she said with extreme seriousness.

Peter quite saw her point about her premises and apologised.

He would not enter them again unless she were there herself.

He hoped that he had not done Elsie any harm: the practises had only taken place six times with interludes of a week, and it had never occurred to him that any one would dream of coupling their names together. The bare idea of it was painful to him. Still, he quite saw what Onoria meant. An unmarried man, even of his age, could not be too careful, and he hoped the whole thing would blow over and not bring any further trouble to any of them.

Onoria was quite genial and they smoked several cigarettes together and discussed whether it was any use taking Prendergast to the vet. for a tonic or not. They came to the conclusion that it was not.

Then Peter went home.

It was quite true that he meant to be careful, very careful indeed; but the person of whom he meant to be careful was Onoria.