Part 13

A diversion was created by the entry of Bunny. He tried to conceal an air of desperate purpose under the affectation of breeziness.

‘Hullo, by Jove!’ he exclaimed. ‘How are you, Mrs. Fairfield? How are you, sir? How do, Ted? And how are you, Miss Dyrle? Myself, I’m jolly fine. Thanks for kind inquiries.’

‘That’s a comfort anyhow,’ said Mrs. Fairfield grimly. ‘You seem a little upset.’

‘Upset! Me!’ cried Bunny. He calmed a little to add: ‘Bit excited perhaps. Got some news for you, Mrs. Fairfield.’

‘Ha!’ The light of triumph gleamed in Mrs. Fairfield’s eye. ‘You’ve agreed to be president of the Workers’ Federation after all.’

‘No, not exactly.’

‘You haven’t!’ Mrs. Fairfield became the picture of righteous indignation. ‘You refuse to do a little thing like that for me, when your name would be so valuable to us!’

‘It wouldn’t be fair to my father. He’s a bit old-fashioned, I dare say, but there it is. He can’t help being an earl. He makes rather a point of my not getting too deep in the movement.’

The Honourable Richard Bunnard stood on one toe and twirled once round to assure every one that he was perfectly at ease.

‘Please don’t fidget, Bunny, when you’re talking to me, even though I _am_ only an old woman. Once again I ask you, and for the last time: will you do the right thing, the public-spirited thing?’

Bunny tried to soothe the exasperated lady.

‘My dear Mrs. Fairfield, I’ve already promised my father.’

The storm burst.

‘Your father! Fiddlesticks your father! Hypatia’s at the bottom of this!’

‘Don’t get excited, mother,’ urged Edward.

‘I will, I will,’ retorted his mother. ‘I’ve a perfect right to get excited. You young people, you’ve got hearts of stone. All the love we mothers lavish on you is nothing to you. Do we get any gratitude? Not a bit! _Scorn_, yes, plenty of it! Scorn of our grey hairs and our silly ways and our ignorance. But gratitude--the last thing in the world.... Some chit of a girl comes....’

Edward shrugged his shoulders in cold disgust.

‘Ah!’ exclaimed Mrs. Fairfield. There was an ominous pause. Her husband rushed towards her.

‘It’s all right, me dear. I’ve got you safe and sound. Sit down and have a bit of a rest.’

The afflicted lady sighed.

‘She’s going to faint,’ cried Mr. Fairfield. ‘Why didn’t you let her have her way, you young devils, you!’

‘Of course she’s going to faint,’ said Edward. ‘That is the last scene of the melodrama.’

Sheila watched the scene with a mixture of indignation and compassion. The indignation was short-lived: it died suddenly at sight of Edward’s complete detachment. He seemed utterly devoid of the filial sentiment that would have made allowances for his mother. For she was, after all, his mother, Sheila reflected. She had faced death to bring him into the world. He was flesh of her flesh, bone of her bone: for him she had spent herself, and he was still the centre of her life. Had Edward shewn anger, Sheila would have been wholeheartedly with him, but this cold disdain, this resolute refusal to be stirred a hair’s breadth either to pity or to wrath seemed to Sheila’s warmer heart almost inhuman, although it extorted from her an unwilling admiration.

‘I think I’d better clear out,’ said Bunny, moving towards the door. ‘Sorry to have been the cause of a disturbance.’

But Mrs. Fairfield’s recovery was as abrupt as her collapse had been. From the arm-chair into which her husband had placed her she urged the young man to stay.

‘Don’t go, Bunny. I’m better now. It was my son upset me, not you. Come and tell me your news?’

She spoke in a languid faded tone, the tone of one bearing bravely an immense burden of wrongs.

‘Well ...’ began Bunny nervously, glancing towards Sheila.

Edward, intercepting the glance, asked: ‘Are we _de trop_, Bunny?’

Mr. Fairfield intervened. ‘Edward and Miss Dyrle have just come to an understanding, Bunny.’

‘An understanding?’ asked Bunny.

‘Yes. Bit of sweethearting, you know.’

‘Really!’ cried Bunny, beaming. ‘I congratulate you. Well, that makes it easier for me. There’ll be a double event.’

‘A what?’ demanded Mrs. Fairfield, all the languor gone from her.

‘You see,’ Bunny explained, ‘I’m engaged to be married.’

‘Well I declare!’ said Mr. Fairfield. ‘Engaged! Why, everybody’s getting engaged. Time we set about it, mother, eh?’

Edward made a congratulatory noise. Only Mrs. Fairfield was silent, watching Bunny with feline intentness.

‘Well,’ she said sharply. ‘Who’s the young lady, Bunny?’

Bunny, with his hands in his pockets agitating a bunch of keys, stood first on one leg and then on the other.

‘That was what I came for,’ he said, blushing, ‘to ask your blessing, don’t you know. You see, Hypatia....’

‘Yes,’ said Mrs. Fairfield curtly. ‘What about Hypatia?’

Even the amiable Bunny had not unlimited patience.

‘Hypatia?’ he said. ‘Well, nothing about her. You asked me who was the young lady. I’ve told you.’

‘Hypatia!’ demanded Mrs. Fairfield.

‘Exactly,’ answered Bunny, and strode out of the room.

‘Herbert!’ cried Mrs. Fairfield to her husband. ‘Go after him. At once. Hypatia shan’t have him. She shan’t!’

‘You’d better faint again, mother,’ remarked Edward.

‘Oh, Edward, how can you!’ cried Sheila, stung to speech.

She beckoned him to the bay window, as Mrs. Fairfield followed her husband to the door.

‘Edward,’ Sheila said, ‘are you sure you want me?’

He looked at her in surprise. ‘You know I do.’

Sheila felt that her question needed an apology. ‘It’s only that I hate to cause a fuss. Your mother does loathe me, I’m sure.’

He took both her hands in his for a moment. ‘Sheila, you’re not going to forsake me, are you?’

‘Not ... if you really care,’ she answered in a low voice.

Mrs. Fairfield from the passage stepped back into the room.

‘Children!’ she muttered, regarding the lovers with malevolence, ‘children ... no, vipers!’

Her husband returned, followed by Bunny wrapped in his dignity and by Hypatia armed with invincible placidity.

‘Now understand this,’ began Mrs. Fairfield. ‘We old folk refuse to be ignored. We just won’t put up with this insulting behaviour. You think we don’t count, but we’ll see. Bunny, let’s hear no more of this nonsense about marrying Hypatia. You shall not marry her. You’re a young snob. And Sheila shan’t marry my Edward either. I won’t be robbed of my children by young stuck-up creatures who despise me and my husband because we’re in trade.’

‘What a wicked lie!’ exclaimed Sheila, with flashing eyes. ‘You know we don’t despise you! Everybody’s parents are in trade ... except Bunny’s, I suppose.’

‘Herbert!... Edward! Will you stand here and hear this girl call your mother a wicked liar?’

‘Where do you want me to stand?’ enquired Edward. ‘Besides, I’m not Sheila’s controller. I’m not even her parent.’

‘You will leave my son alone,’ said Mrs. Fairfield, struggling with her rising passion. ‘Marry the Honourable Richard, if you want to marry.’

‘But that would still leave Edward and Hypatia unmarried,’ objected Bunny, lapsing into weak humour. ‘They can’t marry each other, you know.’

‘And you leave Hypatia alone!’ Hypatia’s mother turned upon Bunny. ‘I’ll make father disinherit them both if they disobey me.’

‘Is that all you have to say, mother?’ asked Hypatia, with the patient smile of the Christian Scientist.

‘No, it is _not_....’

‘Well, it’s quite enough,’ Hypatia assured her. ‘Come along, Bunny. Come and buy the licence.’

Without a word, the young man followed Hypatia out of the room.

The flame of battle was awake now in Sheila’s heart, burning away all lingering reluctance, all doubts and fears. If there was to be a feud, there was no doubt upon which side she would fight. Age had declared war upon Youth, and all the spirit in her woke to the challenge. Edward, her comrade, was being threatened with disinheritance. Sheila knew now that she was irrevocably his: a hint of doubt would have been shameful treason. She forgot the cold formality of his attitude to his mother: she remembered only his strength, his glorious unyielding strength.

‘Look here, mother,’ Edward was saying, ‘you’ll have to readjust your ideas a little.’ He waved aside a hysterical interruption. ‘No, it’s no use indulging in heroics: your storming only makes me tired. Storm in a teacup, that’s all. Listen to me.’

Mrs. Fairfield turned her back on him.

‘Yes, listen like that, if you wish. It’s extraordinarily rude, but never mind. I was saying that you’ve got to readjust your ideas a little. They’re about a hundred years behind the times. We young people, as you call us, have as much right to live as you, and as much right to freedom.’

His mother wheeled round swiftly. ‘Freedom! You’ve had too much freedom!’

‘Please don’t interrupt,’ said Edward. ‘There’s been quite enough shouting and stamping. I want you to reason the thing out calmly. Freedom consists in being left alone, left with room to grow, not in being penned round with affection and told every minute of the day that of course we can do as we like if we don’t love mother and father.’

‘You’re hitting too hard,’ whispered Sheila.

‘You think,’ Edward continued, ‘because you’ve born and bred us and sacrificed yourself for us that Hypatia and I belong to you.’

‘Oh no, you don’t belong to me,’ said Mrs. Fairfield in fierce sarcasm. ‘I’m only your mother: that’s all.’

‘Precisely,’ said Edward. ‘Our mother, not our owner. We belong to nobody. We have our separate lives to live, and we intend to live them in our own way.’

‘You’re mine, mine, mine!’ protested his mother. ‘Don’t you feel any common gratitude for what I’ve done for you? I gave you life; I fed you with my body; and now--is this the end?’

‘Those are services that cannot be repaid,’ he answered, without any trace of emotion. ‘If in return for what you did for me I had to submit to be your doll for ever, it were better that I had not been born at all.’

‘Brutal, brutal!’ interjected his father, waking from a spell of bewilderment.

‘Perhaps,’ conceded Edward, ‘but it’s nature. Nature is brutal. Do you think that because you gave me life, as you say, that you have the right to take it away, or smother it, or confine it, at your pleasure? You shut your eyes to logical inference. See to what absurd conclusions your wild unreasoning would lead you if you dared follow it to the end. Time and again civilization has been hindered in its march....’

For a moment Sheila ceased her loyal silent applause to ask herself: Why does Edward talk like a parliamentary candidate? But Mrs. Fairfield quickly distracted her attention from that question.

‘I see,’ she said, ‘I’m nothing to you. I’m only your mother. This bit of a girl, who’s done nothing for you, whom you’ve known ten minutes, is more to you than your mother is.’

Edward assented gravely. ‘So much more than I propose to live with her and not with you. You were a bit of a girl yourself once, mother. If father had been more devoted to _his_ mother than to you, you might have been a childless spinster at this moment.’

‘Now then,’ said Mr. Fairfield, briskly asserting himself. ‘We’ve had about enough of this. Mother’s had her say. And you’ve had yours. You’ve got the gift of the gab all right. Now just you cut along and leave your mother alone.’

‘Herbert, he shan’t have a penny of your money!’ Mrs. Fairfield turned confidently to her husband for ratification of this threat. ‘Tell him so.’

‘We’ll see. We’ll see. I’m not dead yet,’ said the little man, with unwonted independence. ‘I hadn’t any pennies myself when I was his age.’

His wife turned upon him a terrible _Et tu Brute_ look.

‘Never you mind,’ he retorted, with incredible courage. ‘There’s sense in what the lad says, even though he is a bit of a hard nut. Gets that from his father perhaps.’

‘His father!’ cried the mother in scorn. ‘They’re their mother’s children, both of them. Else they’d never dare to treat me like this.’

There was pride as well as anger in the glance she flashed at Edward as she gathered up her skirts and rustled out of the room.

PART THE THIRD

_Sheila Fairfield_

1

All roads led to Edward Fairfield. His atheism, his sister, Aunt Hester’s opposition, all conspired to fling Sheila into the polite dispassionate arms of that rational young graduate from Cambridge. Kay had offered romance without intellectual comradeship: Edward offered a kind of business partnership in the propagation of rational atheology, and this proved an irresistible bait for a spirited girl hustled by disaster into premature cynicism. Edward concerns us no further, save that he married her, respected her, and practised upon her the editorials that appeared week by week in his own paper _The Iconoclast_. Everything that he did was in perfect taste and supported by a perfect reason. When, for example, she declared their marriage a failure, he provided her with a pair of admirable rooms in his own well-appointed house, and lived thereafter in contented celibacy. He was just to the point of inhumanity; but she, a disappointed woman, was not just. The efficient elegance of her home afflicted her. It seemed a mere piece of machinery for the daily manufacture of well-bred happiness. Her two rooms, until she had transformed them, seemed sleek, complacent: they announced to her, with the patient smile and in the incisive tones of a secularist lecturer, the supremacy of Reason. In herself, reason was far from supreme.

A woman with love must bestow it somewhere: Sheila poured it without stint upon her dream of Kay. Ten years divided them, and more, before that dream was finally destroyed. Sophie, his wife, gave birth to a child, and Sheila, impelled by who knows what medley of motives, visited her. They sat and talked about nothing in a room pervaded by yellow. A pale-brown flower perpetuated itself at intervals on the walls; a small occasional table set in the middle of a dark yellowish carpet was covered by a buff cloth; a gilt-framed oval mirror surmounted the mantelpiece. There were photographs on the mantelpiece of Sophie’s father, of Sophie’s child, of Sophie, and one of Kay standing stiffly with a book in his hand--a cruel photograph, courageously signed by the photographer. Sheila gave no second glance to it.

She interrupted a remark of Sophie’s about the chapel Dorcas Society by saying, ‘Oh I forgot to ask--you don’t mind Bernard being here, do you?’

‘Bernard?’ Sophie was mystified.

Sheila pointed to the Irish terrier that was frisking round her.

A little ripple of merriment came from Sophie.

‘Do you call the dog Bernard? How funny! I love dogs, but father doesn’t care for them.... But of course he won’t mind yours,’ she added hastily.

Sheila tried to puzzle out how Mr. Dewick could even have a chance of objecting to her dog, but just then a diversion was created by the entry of a rather plump old-young man in a morning coat rubbing his hands together and making an indeterminate noise in a vague endeavour to be hospitable. He wore a little brown moustache and short side-whiskers near the ears. His hair had receded considerably, more especially where the parting was, and had left an expanse of shining brow.

‘Well, well,’ he said, nervously cheerful. ‘How are you after all this while? I’m sure we’re very pleased.’

Sheila recognized him instantly, although there seemed indeed nothing of the old Kay left to recognize. Yet this was Kay. This was he who years ago under the moon had whispered to her, with eyes full of dreams, his boyish love. Shades of the meeting-house had closed on that boy for ever.

Almost sick with disappointment, she shook hands with him, and quickly sought refuge in responding to the terrier’s still frantic demonstrations.

‘I hope you like my dog,’ she remarked to Kay, shy of using his name.

‘Yes, yes, fine fellow,’ responded Kay. ‘Come on, good dog, good dog!’

He patted the dog awkwardly.

‘We call him Bernard,’ explained Sheila, afraid of the smallest hiatus. ‘George Bernard, because he’s Irish and vivacious.’

Kay looked puzzled. ‘But why ... do you call him George Bernard? I didn’t quite catch....’

‘After Shaw, you know,’ Sheila explained. ‘We suspect Bernard of having been a distinguished playwright in a previous incarnation.’

‘Oh I see!’ said Kay, his brow clearing.

But it was knitted again the next moment.

‘What was it the Reverend Aitken was saying about Shaw last Sunday, mother?’

‘I remember something,’ Sophie answered. ‘I think he said he was a mountaineer, didn’t he?’

‘Mountaineer,’ murmured Kay. ‘I think not. Ah no, mountebank! That was the word.’

Here Sheila joined the conversation in a mildly argumentative vein, but Kay sidetracked by waxing indignant over the attempted introduction of a liturgy into divine service. He had set his face against _that_, he assured them: every true nonconformist at the church meeting had set his face against _that_, and right feeling had ultimately triumphed over the incipient popery. It appeared indeed that the cosmos was being conducted in an entirely proper manner, except for the wanton behaviour of the east wind. He considered the east wind very dangerous. He became impressive and told a long story about a man of his acquaintance who ventured out in an east wind without his overcoat, caught a chill, developed pneumonia, and had to take to his bed.

‘Dead in a week!’ finished Kay, dramatically and with relish.

Except for an appreciative murmur from his wife, the story was received in silence. Sheila with a stunned sensation was telling herself: ‘I would never have let him get like this.’ But Kay, misinterpreting the silence, began another story. It concerned another man who ventured out in an east wind without his overcoat. This man had a similar series of adventures, his experience differing from the first man’s only in that he lingered for two days and then died, leaving a widow and five children. Kay could not remember whether there were three boys and two girls, or three girls and two boys. He began naming them on his fingers. There were Horace and George, Margaret and Vera. That made four. He was sure there was another one--he remembered the child perfectly as a baby, but he could not for the life of him recall its sex. He felt sure that its name began with F.

He became perplexed.

‘Mother, can’t _you_ remember?’ he asked. The question was an accusation.

‘Remember what, dear?’ inquired Sophie in her gentle way.

‘The name of Tomlinson’s youngest. You remember Tomlinson.’

‘I don’t believe I do,’ said Sophie.

Sheila sat silent, limp under the burden of her disillusionment. She felt something like fear when Sophie, with a rapturous cry, ‘She’s awake!’, rose and darted from the room to fetch her little girl. To hide her nervousness she said, ‘Such an unusual name you gave her, didn’t you? What made you think of Robina?’

While Kay was losing himself in explanations Sophie came back, leading her baby daughter by the hand. The mother’s face was shining.

‘Oh!’ A passionate cry broke from Sheila. In a moment she was on her knees gazing with adoration at the flaxen-haired, elf-like child. For from the big dreaming eyes her vanished Kay looked at her; the wonderful boy dead and buried in a prematurely old man, lived again in this two-year old girl. Hungrily Sheila kissed the tiny face ... and once again she felt his arm about her and heard his boyish whispers.

‘Oh, give her to me!’ she cried, looking up over the child’s head at its father.

Kay’s face lit up.

‘I’ve got it now. I remember,’ he said triumphantly.

‘What?’ asked Sophie, troubled by Sheila’s emotion, and yet gratified by it.

‘Why,’ said Kay, ‘the name of Tomlinson’s youngest. It was Freddie. I told you it began with an F.’

He looked round with modest pride, and was surprised to see Sheila burst into tears.

* * * * *

So that was the solution of the problem. The beauty of life was only for the young, the very young. In a child’s heart and nowhere else the kingdom of heaven was to be found, a frail gossamer thing vanishing with the years. This was the common lot: by contact with the world to rub the down of paradise off our souls, to grow drab and dull in spirit, drab and dull in mind, even before that waning of physical strength which alone could assuage the bitterness of the process. In Kay youth had died; in Edward--Edward had never been young; but in herself youth lived and craved more life. Yes, it lived still, but now it was stricken and dying.

It flashed upon her then that she too could renew her youth. In a child she could live again.

But a child had been denied her.

She deemed her life to be already virtually finished. She would age from this moment: after a brief fever her mind would dim and even the desire for beauty would sink into oblivion. She tried to hope it would be soon, but the struggling youth in her cried out against the hope.

2

The struggling youth in her cried out, and, years later, the cry was answered. Beauty became incarnated in the person of Stephen Redshawe, whose son she later encountered in the house at Maadi. The past rose in sad loveliness, enveloping her with the fragrance of pressed flowers; but of all the memories that surged in her, this one alone broke in pitiless splendour over her consciousness. In that moment Stephen Redshawe lived again, less as a man and a lover than as a gleam, an ecstasy, a chord of divine music, a symbol of all that she had longed for and lost. Other things she could recall minutely, but Stephen remained a vague splendour. She recalled how, in her little cottage near Mundesley, she had waited for his promised coming; how she had looked again and again, in wonder, to find in her mirror the face he had called lovely. It was a face ravaged less by her thirty-three years than by discontent. His sisters and his mother she remembered only as so many bundles of feminine hostility. They disapproved of her, and no wonder: was she not a married woman, holiday-making alone, who yet suffered gladly the admiration of an infatuated boy? They called her adventuress, no doubt, and she, even in the midst of the adventure, made allowances for them. She had neither the strength nor the will to renounce the fairest gift that life offered.

‘May I come in?’ Stephen’s tall figure filled the doorway.

‘You must,’ Sheila answered, with a smile. ‘I’m not going to give you any tea while you stand there keeping the sunshine out.’

‘This is our last meeting,’ blundered Stephen. ‘I want to tell you....’

Suddenly dreading to hear the words for which she longed, Sheila fended them away. ‘Eat your pretty cake,’ she admonished him.