Part 62 (1/2)
”Not a bit, Sally! He's just given up Lady Lucy. Going straight again, don't you know? Off to the seaside with his wife and kid.”
”How long has Lady Lucy lasted?” asked Gilly.
The Nun gurgled. ”I should like to have that set to music,” she explained. ”The alliteration is effective, Gilly, and I would give it a pleasing lilt.”
”I don't wish to hear you sing it,” said Billy, in a voice none too loud. Amaranth was looking about the room, and an implied reference to bygones was harmlessly agreeable.
”With his wife and his kid, to the Bedford at Brighton,” Billy continued, after his aside. ”From something he let fall, I gathered that the Freeres were going to be at the Norfolk.”
Amaranth did not see the point. ”I don't know the Freeres,” she remarked.
”We do,” said Gilly. ”In fact we're in the habit of turning them to the uses of allegory, Amaranth. I may say that we are coming to regard Mrs.
Freere as a comparative reformation--as the irreducible minimum. If only Harry wouldn't wander from Freere's wife!”
”But the man's got a wife of his own!” cried Amaranth.
”Yes, but we're dealing with practical possibilities,” Gilly insisted.
”And, from that point of view, his own wife really doesn't count.”
”And yet Vivien Wellgood--!” The Nun relapsed into a silence which was meant to express bewilderment, though she was not bewildered, having too keen a memory of her own achievement.
”Oh, you really understand it better than that, Doris,” said Billy.
”Harry can make it seem a tremendous thing--while it lasts. Andy's fault is that he never makes things seem tremendous. He just makes them seem natural. His way is safer; it takes longer, but it lasts longer too.
Neither of them is the ideal man, you know. Andy wants an occasional hour of Harry--”
”Dangerously long!” the Nun opined.
”And Harry ought to have seven years' penal servitude of Andy. Then you might achieve the perfectly balanced individual.”
”I think you're perfectly balanced, dear,” said Amaranth, and thereby threw her husband into sorest confusion, and the rest of the company into uncontrolled mirth. Moreover the Nun must needs add, with her most innocent expression, ”Just what I've always found him, Amaranth!”
”Oh, hang it--when I was trying to talk sense!” poor Billy expostulated.
His bride's remark--admirably bridal in character--choked Billy's philosophising in its hour of birth. The trend of the conversation was diverted, the picture of the perfectly balanced man never painted. Else there might have emerged the interesting and agreeable paradox that the perfectly balanced man was he who knew when to lose his balance, when to kick the scales away for an hour, when to stop thinking of anybody except himself, when to sink consideration in urgency, pity in desire, affection in love. All this, of course, only for an hour--and in the right company. It must be allowed that the perfect balance is a rare phenomenon.
Isobel Vintry had not sought it; it is to her credit that she refrained from accusing fate because she had not found what she did not seek.
Forgiving Harry over the Lady Lucy episode--his penitence was irresistibly sincere--and accepting Mrs. Freere as an orderly and ordinary background to married life, almost a friend, certainly an ally (for Mrs. Freere was now, as ever, a prudent woman), she recalled the courage that had made her a fit preceptress for Vivien, and Wellgood's ideal woman. She saw the trick her heart had played her, and knew--with Harry himself--that hearts would always be playing tricks. The poacher was made keeper, but the poaching did not stop. The thief was robbed, the raider raided. All a very pretty piece of poetical justice--with the unusual characteristic of being quite commonplace, an everyday affair, no matter of melodrama, but just what constantly happens.
She and Wellgood had so often agreed that Vivien must be trained to face the rubs of life, its ups and downs, its rough and smooth; timidity and fastidiousness were out of place in a world like this. The two had taught the lesson to an unwilling pupil; they themselves had now to aspire to a greater apt.i.tude in learning it. Wellgood conned his lesson ill. The gospel of anti-sentimentality fits other people's woes better than a man's own; his seem so real as to defeat the application of the doctrine. The first and loudest to proclaim that no man or woman is to be trusted, that he who does not suspect invites deception and has himself to thank if he is duped--that is the man who nurses bitterest wrath over the proving of his own theories. Aghast at having yourself the honour of proving your own theories! The world does funny things with us. To be taken at your word like that; really to find people about you as bad as you have declared humanity at large to be; to stumble and break your knees over a justification of your cynicism--it would seem a thing that should meet with acquiescence, perhaps even with a sombre satisfaction. Yet it does not happen so. The optimist fares better; he falls from a higher chair but on to a thicker carpet; and he himself is far more elastic. ”With what measure you mete, it shall be measured to you again.” Hard measure for hard people seems to fulfil the saying, and is not a just occasion for grumbling--even for internal grumbling, which is the hard man's only resource, since he has accustomed sympathy and confidence to hide their faces from his ridicule, and their tender hands to shrink from the grip of his contempt.
Isobel Belfield possessed just what Isobel Vintry had stolen. Neither Church nor State, no, nor the more primitive sanction of the birth of a son, availed to give a higher validity to her t.i.tle. In rebuking inconstancy she was out of court; she was estopped, as the lawyers call it. How could she refuse to forgive the thing which alone gave her the right to be aggrieved? Her possession was tainted in its origin. Or was she to arrogate to herself the privilege of being the only thief? Harry Belfield confessed new crimes to an old accomplice; severity would have merited a smile. Stolen kisses acknowledged recalled stolen kisses that had been a secret. Condemned by the tribunal of the present, Harry's offences appealed to the past. ”See yourself as Vivien--see her (Lady Lucy, Mrs. Freere, or another) as yourself!” Harry's deprecatory smile seemed to threaten some such disarming suggestion. Church and State and the little boy might say, ”There's all the difference!” Neither State nor Church nor little boy could deafen the echo of Wellgood's denunciation or blur the image of Vivien's stricken face. They were a pair of thieves; the court of conscience would not listen to her plea if she complained of an unfair division of the plunder. Hands held up in pet.i.tion for justice must be clean--an old doctrine of equity; an account will not be taken between two highwaymen on Hounslow Heath.
Origins are obstinate, leaving marks whatever variations time may bring.
She had begun as one of two--and not the legitimate one. She was to be one of two always, so it appeared, through all the years until the Nun's pitiless vision worked itself out, and even Harry Belfield ceased to suffer new pa.s.sions--or, at least, to inspire them; perhaps the latter ending of the matter was the more likely.
He did nothing else than suffer pa.s.sions and inspire them; that was the hardest rub. Where was the brilliant career? Where the great success of which Vivien had been wont to talk shyly? Isobel was a woman of hard mettle, of high ambition. She could have endured to be official queen, though queens unofficial came and went. But there was to be no kingdom!
There was abdication of all realms save Harry's own. He grew more and more contented to specialise there. Irregularity in private conduct is partially condoned in useful men; as a discreetly hidden diversion, it is left to another jurisdiction--_deorum injuriae dis curae_--but as the occupation of a life? The widest stretch of philosophic contemplation of the whole is demanded to excuse or to justify.
He made a strange thing of her life--a restless, unpeaceful, interesting, and unhappy thing. The old idea of reigning at Nutley, of skilfully managing stubborn Wellgood, of the seeming submission that was really rule (perhaps woman's commonest conception of triumph), did not serve the turn of this life. It was stranger work--living with Harry!