§ 17
It was the ambition of Mrs. Sheldrick and her remaining daughters—some of them had married—to make their home on Downshire Hill “a little bit of the London Quartier Latin.”
Mr. Sheldrick had worn out the large, loose, tweed suit that had held him together for so long, he had gone to pieces altogether and was dead and buried, and the Sheldricks were keeping a home together by the practice of decorative arts and promiscuous hospitalities. Mrs. Sheldrick was writing a little in the papers of the weaker among the various editors who lived within her social range; little vague reviews and poems she wrote, with a quiet smile, that were not so much allusive as with an air of having recently had a flying visit from an allusion that was unable to stay. Sydney Sheldrick was practising sculpture, and Babs was attending the London School of Dramatic Art, to which Adela Murchison had also found her way. Antonia, the eldest, was in business, making djibbah-like robes.
There was downstairs and the passage and staircase and upstairs, a sitting-room in front, and a sort of oriental lounge (that later in the evening became the bedroom of Antonia and Babs) behind. It had all been decorated in the most modern style by Antonia in a very blue blue that seemed a little threadbare in places and very large, suggestive shapes of orange, with a sort of fringe of black and white chequers and a green ceiling with harsh pink stars. And the chairs, except for the various ottomans and cosy corners which were in faded blue canvas, had been painted bright pink or grey.
Into this house they gathered, after nine and more particularly on Saturdays, all sorts of people who chanced to be connected by birth, marriage, misfortune, or proclivity with journalism or the arts. Hither came Aunt Phœbe Stubland, and read a paper called insistently: Watchman, What of the Night? What of it? and quite up to its title; and hither too came Aunt Phyllis Stubland, quietly observant. But quite a lot of writers came. And in addition there were endless conspirators. There was Mrs. O’Grady, the beautiful Irish patriot, who was always dressed like a procession of Hibernians in New York, and there was Patrick Lynch, a long, lax black object, ending below in large dull boots, and above in a sad white face under wiry black hair, grieving for ever that grief for Ireland—Cathleen ni Houlihan and all the rest of it—that only these long, black, pale Irishmen can understand. And there was Eric Schmidt, who was rare among Irish patriots because of his genuine knowledge of Erse. All these were great conspirators. Then there was Mrs. Punk, who had hunger-struck three times, and Miss Corcoran-Deeping the incendiary. And American socialists. And young Indians. And one saw the venerable figure of Mr. Woodjer, very old now and white and deaf and nervous and indistinct, who had advocated in several beautiful and poetical little volumes a new morality that would have put the wind up of the Cities of the Plain. And Winterbaum drifted in, but cautiously, as doubting whether it wasn’t just “a bit too marginal,” to bring away his two frizzy-haired sisters, very bright-eyed and eager, rapid-speaking and au fait, and wonderfully bejewelled for creatures so young. They were going in for dancing; they did Spanish dances, stupendously clicking down their red heels with absolute precision together; they took the Sheldricks on the way to the Contangos or the Mondaines or the Levisons, or even to the Hoggenheimers; they glittered at Downshire Hill like birds of Paradise, and had the loveliest necks and shoulders and arms. Outside waited young Winterbaum’s coupé—a very smart little affair in black and cream, with an electric starter wonderfully fitted.
Here too came young Huntley, who had written three novels before he was twenty-two, and who was now thirty and quite well known, not only as a novelist of reputation, but as a critic eminently unpopular with actor managers; a blond young man with a strong profile, a hungry, scornful expression and a greedy, large blue eye that wandered about the crush as if it sought something, until it came to rest upon Joan. Thereafter Mr. Huntley’s other movements and conversation were controlled by a resolution to edge towards and overshadow and dominate Joan with the profile as much as possible.
Joan, by various delicacies of perception, was quite aware of these approaches without seeming at any time to regard Huntley directly; and by a subtlety quite imperceptible to him she drifted away from each advance. She did not know who he was, and though the profile interested her, his steadfast advance towards her seemed to be premature. Until suddenly an apparently quite irrelevant incident spun her mind round to the idea of encouraging him.
The incident was the arrival of Peter.
Early in the afternoon he had vanished from Mrs. Jepson’s, where he and Joan were staying; he had not come in to dinner, and now suddenly he appeared conspicuously in this gathering of the Sheldricks’, conspicuously in the company of Hetty Reinhart, who was to Joan, for quite occult reasons, the most detestable of all his large circle of detestable friends. That alone was enough to tax the self-restraint of an exceedingly hot-tempered foster sister. (So this was what Peter had been doing with his time! This had been his reason for neglecting his own household! At the Petit Riche, or some such place—with her! A girl with a cockney accent! A girl who would stroke your arm as soon as speak to you!...) But though the larger things in life strain us, it is the smaller things that break us. What finally turned Joan over was a glance, a second’s encounter with Peter’s eye. Hetty had sailed forward with that extraordinary effect of hers of being a grown-up, experienced woman, to greet Mrs. Sheldrick, and Peter stood behind, disregarded. (His expression of tranquil self-satisfaction was maddening.) His eye went round the room looking, Joan knew, for two people. It rested on Joan.
The question that Peter was asking Joan mutely across the room was in effect this: “Are you behaving yourself, Joan?”
Then, not quite reassured by an uncontrollable scowl, Peter looked away to see if some one else was present. Some one else apparently wasn’t present, and Joan was unfeignedly sorry.
He was looking for Mir Jelalludin, the interesting young Indian with the beautifully modelled face, whom Joan had met and talked to at the Club of Strange Faiths. At the Club of Strange Faiths one day she had been suddenly moved to make a short speech about the Buddhist idea of Nirvana, which one of the speakers had described as extinction. Making a speech to a little meeting was not a very difficult thing for Joan; she had learnt how little terrible a thing is to do in the Highmorton debating society, where she had been sustained by a grim determination to score off Miss Frobisher. She said that she thought the real intention was not extinction at all, but the escape of the individual consciousness after its living pilgrimage from one incarnate self to another into the universal consciousness. That was the very antithesis of extinction; one lost oneself indeed, but one lost oneself not in darkness and non-existence, but in light and the fullness of existence. There was all the difference between a fainting fit and ecstasy between these two conceptions. And it was true of experience that one was least oneself, least self-conscious and egotistical at one’s time of greatest excitement.
Mir Jelalludin received these remarks with earnest applause. He made as if to speak after her, rose in his place, and then hastily sat down. Afterwards he came and spoke to her, quite modestly and simply, without the least impertinence.
He explained, with a pleasant staccato accent and little slips in his pronunciation that suggested restricted English conversation and much reading of books, how greatly he had been wanting to say just what she had said, “so bew-ti-fully,” but he had been restrained by “impafction of the pronunsation. So deefi’clt, you know.” One heard English people so often not doing justice to Indian ideas so that it was very pleasant to hear them being quite sympathetically put.
There was something very pleasing in the real intellectual excitement that had made him speak to her, and there was something very pleasing to the eye in the neat precision with which his brown features were chiselled and the decisive accuracy of every single hair on his brow. He was, he explained, a Moslem, but he was interested in every school of Indian thought. He was afraid he was not very orthodox, and he showed a smile of the most perfect teeth. There had always been a tendency to universalism in Indian thought, that affected even the Moslem. Did she know anything of the Brahmo Somaj? Had she read any novel of Chatterji’s? There was at least one great novel of his the English ought to read, the Ananda Math. No one could understand Indian thought properly who had not read it. He had a translation of it into English—which he would lend her.
Would she be interested to read it?
Might he send it to her?
Joan’s chaperon was a third year girl who put no bar upon these amenities. Joan accepted the book and threw out casually that she sometimes went to Bunny Cuspard’s teas. If Mr. Jelalludin sent her Chatterji’s book she could return it to Bunny Cuspard’s rooms.
It was in Bunny Cuspard’s room that Peter had first become aware of this exotic friendship. He discovered his Joan snugly in a corner listening to an explanation of the attitude of Islam towards women. It had been enormously misrepresented in Christendom. Mr. Jelalludin was very earnest in his exposition, and Joan listened with a pleasant smile and regarded him pleasantly and wished that she could run her fingers just once along his eyebrow without having her motives misunderstood.
But at the sight of his Joan engaged in this confabulation Peter suddenly discovered all the fiercest traits of race pride. He fretted about the room and was rude to other people and watched a book change hands, and waited scarcely twenty seconds after the end of Joan’s conversation before he came up to her.
“I say, Joan,” he said, “you can’t go chumming with Indians anyhow.”
“Peter,” she said, “we’ve chummed with India.”
“Oh, nonsense! Not socially. Their standards are different.”
“I hope they are,” said Joan. “The way you make these Indian boys here feel like outcasts is disgraceful.”
“They’re different. The men aren’t uncivil to them. But it isn’t for you——”
“It’s for all English people to treat them well. He’s a charming young man.”
“It isn’t done, Joan.”
“It’s going to be, Petah.”
“You’re meeting him again?”
“If I think proper.”
“Oh!” said Peter, baffled for the time. “All right, Joan.”
A fierce exchange of notes followed. “Don’t you understand the fellow’s a polygamist?” Peter wrote. “He keeps his women in purdah. No decent woman could be talked to in India as he talked to you. Not even an introduction. Personally, I’ve no objection to any friends you make provided they are decent friends....”
“He isn’t a polygamist,” Joan replied. “I’ve asked him. And every one says he’s a first-rate cricketer. As for decent friends, Peter——”
The issue had been still undecided when they came down for the Christmas vacation.
So far Joan had maintained her positions without passion. But now suddenly her indignation at Peter’s interference flared to heaven. That he should come here, hot from Soho, to tyrannize over her! Indians indeed! As if Hetty Reinhart wasn’t worse than a Gold Coast nigger!...
The only outward manifestation of this wild storm of resentment had been her one instant’s scowl at Peter. Thereafter Joan became again the quiet, intelligently watchful young woman she had been all that evening. But now she turned herself through an angle of about thirty degrees towards Huntley, who was talking to old Mrs. Jex, the wonder of Hampstead, who used to know George Eliot and Huxley, the while he was regarding Joan with sidelong covetousness. Joan lifted her eyes towards him with an expression of innocent interest. The slightly projecting blue eyes seemed to leap in response.
Mrs. Jex was always rather inattentive to her listener when she was reciting her reminiscences, and Huntley was able to turn away from her quietly without interrupting the flow.
The Sheldrick circle scorned the formalities of introductions. “Are you from the Slade school?” said Huntley.
“Cambridge,” said Joan.
“My name’s Gavan Huntley.”
But this was going to be more amusing than Joan had expected. This was a real live novelist—Joan’s first. Not a fortnight ago she had read The Pernambuco Bunshop, and thought it rather clever and silly.
“Not the Gavan Huntley?” she said.
His face became faintly luminous with satisfaction. “Just Gavan Huntley,” he said with a large smile.
“The Pernambuco Bunshop?” she said.
“Guilty,” he pleaded, smiling still more naïvely.
One had expected something much less natural in a novelist.
“I loved it,” said Joan, and Huntley was hers to do what she liked with. Joan’s idea of a proper conversation required it to be in a corner. “Do Sheldricks never sit down?” she asked. “I’ve been standing all the evening.”
“They can’t,” he said confidentially. “They’re the other sort of Dutch doll, the cheap sort, that hasn’t got joints at the knees.”
“Antonia sometimes leans against the wall.”
“Her utmost. The next thing would be to sit on the floor with her legs straight out. I’ve seen her do that. But there is a sort of bench on the staircase landing.”
Thither they made their way, and there presently Peter found them.
He found them because he was making for that very corner in the company of Sydney Sheldrick. “Hullo!” said Sydney. “That you, Joan?”
“We’ve taken this corner for the evening,” said Huntley, laying a controlling hand on Joan’s pretty wrist.
Joan and Peter regarded each other darkly.
“There ought to be more seats about somewhere,” said Sydney. “Come up to the divan, old Peter....”
Of course Peter must object to Huntley. They were scarcely out of the Sheldricks’ house when he began. “That man Huntley’s a bad egg, Joan. Everybody knows it.”
For a time they disputed about Huntley.
“Peter,” said Joan, with affected calm, “is there any man, do you think, to whom so—so untrustworthy a girl as I am might safely talk?”
Peter seemed to consider. “There’s chaps like Troop,” he said.
“Troop!” said Joan, relying on her intonation.
“It isn’t that you’re untrustworthy,” said Peter.
“Fragile?”
“It’s the look and tone of things.”
“I wonder how you get these ideas.”
“What ideas?”
“Of how I behave in a corner with Jelalludin or Gavan Huntley.”
“I haven’t suggested anything.”
“You’ve suggested everything. Do you think I collect stray kisses like Sydney Sheldrick? Do you think I’m a dirty little—little—cocotte like Hetty Reinhart?”
“Joan!”
“Well,” said Joan savagely, and said no more.
Peter came to the defence of Hetty belatedly. “How can you say such things of Hetty?” he asked. “What can you know about her?”
“Pah! I can smell what she is across a room. Do you think I’m an absolute young fool, Peter?”
“You’ve got no right, Joan——”
“Why argue, Peter, why argue? When things are plain. Can’t you go your own way, Peter”—Joan was annoyed to find suddenly that she was weeping. Tears were running down her face. But the road was dark, and perhaps if she gave no sign Peter would not see. “You go your own way, Peter, go your own way, and let me go mine.”
Peter was silent for a little while. Then compunction betrayed itself in his voice.
“It’s you I’m thinking of, Joan. I can’t bear to see you make yourself cheap.”
“Cheap! And you?”
“I’m different. I’m altogether different. A man is.”
Silence for a time. Joan seemed to push back her hair, and so smeared the tears from her face.
“We interfere with each other,” she said at last. “We interfere with each other. What is the good of it? You’ve got to go your way and I’ve got to go mine. We used to have fun—lots of fun. Now....”
She couldn’t say any more for a while.
“I’m going my own way, Peter. It’s a different way——Leave me alone. Keep off!”
They said no more. When they got in they found Miss Jepson sitting by the fire, and she had got them some cocoa and biscuits. The headache that had kept her from the Sheldrick festival had lifted, and Joan plunged at once into a gay account of the various people she had seen that evening—saving and excepting Gavan Huntley. But Peter stood by the fireplace, silent, looking down into the fire, sulking or grieving. All the while that Joan rattled on to Miss Jepson she was watching him with almost imperceptible glances and wondering whether he sulked or grieved. Did he feel as she felt? If he sulked—well, confound him! But what if this perplexing dissension hurt him as much as it was hurting her!