§ 1
From the time when he was christened until he was ten, Lady Charlotte Sydenham remained only a figure in the remotest background of Peter’s life. Once or twice he saw her in the downstairs room at The Ingle-Nook with his aunts bristling defensively beside her, and once she came to the school, and each time she looked at him with a large, hard, hostile smile and said: “And ha-ow’s Peter?” and then with a deepening disapproval: “Ha-ow’s Joan?” But that did not mean that Lady Charlotte had done with Joan and Peter, nor that she had relinquished in the slightest degree her claims to dominate their upbringing. She was just letting them grow up a little “according to their mother’s ideas, poor woman,” and biding her time. She wrote every now and then to Aunts Phyllis and Phœbe, just to remind them of her authority, and she wrote two long and serious letters to Oswald about what was to be done. He answered her briefly in such terms as: “Let well alone. Religion comes later.” Oswald had never returned to England. He had been in Uganda now for five long years, and her fear of him was dying down. She was beginning to think that perhaps he did not care very much for Joan and Peter. He had had blackwater fever again. Perhaps he would never come home any more.
Then in the years 1901 and 1902 she had been much occupied by a special campaign against various London socialists that had ended in a libel case. She was quite convinced that all socialists were extremely immoral people, she was greatly alarmed at the spread of socialism, and so she wrote and employed a secretary to write letters to a number of people marked “private and confidential,” warning them against this or that prominent socialist. In these she made various definite statements which, as her counsel vainly tried to argue, were not to be regarded as statements of fact so much as illustrations of the tendency of socialist teaching. She was tackled by a gentleman in a red necktie named Bamshot, of impregnable virtue, in whom her free gift of “numerous illegitimate children” had evoked no gratitude. Her efforts to have him “thoroughly cross-examined” produced no sympathy in either judge or jury. All men, she realized, are wicked and anxious to shield each other. She left the court with a passionate and almost uncontrollable desire to write more letters about Bamshot and more, worse than ever, and with much nastier charges. And it was perhaps a subconscious effort to shift the pressure of this dangerous impulse that turned her mind to the state of spiritual neglect in which Joan and Peter were growing out of childhood.
A number of other minor causes moved her in the same direction. She had had a violent quarrel about the bill with the widow of an Anglican clergyman who kept her favourite pension at Bordighera; and she could still not forgive the establishment at Pallanza that, two years before, had refused to dismiss its head-waiter for saying “Vivent les Boers!” in her hearing. She had been taking advice about a suitable and thoroughly comfortable substitute for these resorts, and meanwhile she had stayed on in England—until there were oysters on the table. Lady Charlotte Sydenham had an unrefined appetite for oysters, and with oysters came a still less refined craving for Dublin stout. It was an odd secret weakness understood only by her domestics, and noted only by a small circle of intimate friends.
“I don’t seem to fancy anything very much today, Unwin,” Lady Charlotte used to say.
“I don’t know if you’d be tempted by a nice oyster or two, m’lady. They’re very pick-me-up things,” the faithful attendant would suggest. “It’s September now, and there’s an R in the month, so it’s safe to venture.”
“Mm.”
“And if I might make so bold as to add a ’arf bottle of good Guinness, m’lady. It’s a tonic. Run down as you are.”
Without oysters neither Lady Charlotte nor Unwin would have considered stout a proper drink for a lady. And indeed it was not a proper drink for Lady Charlotte. A very little stout sufficed to derange her naturally delicate internal chemistry. Upon the internal chemistry of Lady Charlotte her equanimity ultimately depended. There is wrath in stout....
Then Mr. Grimes, who had never ceased to hope that considerable out-of-court activities might still be developed around these two little wards, had taken great pains to bring Aunt Phœbe’s Collected Papers of a Stitchwoman (Second Series) and her little precious volume Carmen Naturæ before his client’s notice.
These books certainly made startling reading for Lady Charlotte. She had never seen the first “Stitchwoman” papers, she knew nothing of Swinburne, Ruskin, Carlyle, the decadents, nothing of the rich inspirations of the later Victorian period, and so the almost luscious richness of Aunt Phœbe’s imagination, her florid verbiage, her note of sensuous defiance, burst almost devastatingly upon a mind that was habituated to the ordered passions and pearly greys of Mrs. Henry Wood’s novels More Leaves, Good Words, and The Quiver.
“’With what measure ye mete,’” she read, “’so shall it be meted unto you again,’ and the Standard that Man has fixed for woman recoils now upon his head. Which standard is it to be,—His or Hers? No longer can we fight under two flags. Wild oats, or the Immaculate Banner? Question to be answered shrewdly, and according to whether we deem it is Experience or Escape we live for, now that we are out of Eden footing it among the sturdy, exhilarating thistles. What will ye, my masters?—pallid man unstained, or seasoned woman? Judgment hesitates. Judgment may indeed hesitate. I, who sit here stitching, mark her hesitation, myself—observant. Is it too bold a speculation that presently golden lassies as well as golden lads will sow their wild oats bravely on the slopes of life? Is it too much to dream of that grave mother of a greater world, the Woman of the Future, glancing back from the glowing harvest of her life to some tall premonition by the wayside?—her One Wild Oat! the crown and seal of her education!”
“Either she means nothing by that,” said Lady Charlotte, “or she means just sheer depravity. Wild Oat, indeed! Really! To call it that! With Joan on her hands already!”
And here again is a little poem from Carmen Naturæ, which also impressed Lady Charlotte very unfavourably:
THE MATERIALIST SINGS
Put by your tangled Trinities
And let the atoms swing,
The merry magic atoms
That trace out everything.
These ancient gods are fantasies,
Mere Metaphors and Names;
But I can feel the Vortex Ring
Go singing through my veins.
No casket of a pallid ghost,
But all compact of thrills,
My body beats and throbs and lives,
My Mighty Atom wills.
“I don’t know what the world is coming to,” said Lady Charlotte. “In other times a woman who ventured to write such blasphemy would have been Struck Dead....”
“Thrills again!” said Lady Charlotte, turning over the offending pages. “In a book that any one may read. Exposing her thrills to any Bagman who chooses to put down three and sixpence for the pleasure. Imagine it, Unwin!”
Unwin did her best, assuming an earnest expression....
Other contributory influences upon Lady Charlotte’s state of mind were her secret anxiety for the moral welfare of the realm now that Queen Victoria had given place to the notoriously lax Edward VII., and the renascence of sectarian controversies in connexion with Mr. Balfour’s Education Act. Anglicanism was rousing itself for a new struggle to keep hold of the nation’s children, the Cecils and Lord Halifax were ranging wide and free with the educational dragnet, and Lady Charlotte was a part of the great system of Anglicanism. The gale that blows the ships home, lifts the leaves.... But far more powerful than any of these causes was the death of a certain Mr. Pybus, who was Unwin’s brother-in-law; he died through an operation undertaken by a plucky rather than highly educated general practitioner, to remove a neglected tumour. This left Unwin’s sister in want of subsidies, and while Unwin lay in bed one night puzzling over this family problem, it occurred to her that if her sister could get some little girl to mind——...