§ 22
It was Adela who inflicted Joan’s second shock upon her, and drove away the last swirling whispers of adolescent imaginations and moon mist from the hard forms of reality. This visit she had seemed greatly improved to Joan; she was graver. Visibly she thought, and no longer was her rolling eye an invitation to masculine enterprise. She came to Joan’s room on Boxing Day morning to make up dresses with her for the night’s dance, and she let her mind run as she stitched. Every one was to come in fancy dress; the vicarage girls would come and the Braughing people. Every one was to represent a political idea. Adela was going to be Tariff Reform. All her clothes were to be tattered and unfinished, she said, even her shoes were to have holes. She would wear a broken earring in one ear. “I don’t quite see your point,” said Joan.
“Tariff Reform means work for all, dear,” Adela explained gently.
Days before Joan had planned to represent Indian Nationalism. It was a subject much in dispute between her and Peter, whose attitude to India and Indians seemed to her unreasonably reactionary—in view of all his other opinions. She could never let her controversies with Peter rest; the costume had been aimed at him. She was going to make up her complexion with a little brown, wear a sari, sandals on bare feet, and a band of tinsel across her forehead. She had found some red Indian curtain stuff that seemed to be adaptable for the sari. She worked now in a preoccupied manner, with her mind full of strange thoughts. Sometimes she listened to what Adela was saying, and sometimes she was altogether within herself. But every now and then Adela would pull her back to attention by a question.
“Don’t you think so, Joan?”
“Think what?” asked Joan.
“Love’s much more our business than it is theirs.”
That struck Joan. “Is it?” she asked. She had thought the shares in the business were equal and opposite.
“All this waiting for a man to discover himself in love with you; it’s rot. You may wait till Doomsday.”
“Still, they do seem to fall in love.”
“With any one. A man’s in love with women in general, but women fall in love with men in particular. We’re the choosers. Naturally. We want a man, that man and no other, and all our own. They don’t feel like that. And we have to hang about pretending they choose and trying to make them choose without seeming to try to make them. Well, we’re altering all that. When I want a man——”
Adela’s pause suggested a particular reference.
“I’ll get him somehow,” she said intently.
“If you mean to get him—if you don’t mind much the little things that happen meanwhile—you’ll get him,” said Adela, as though she repeated a creed. “But, of course, you can’t make terms. When a man knows that a woman is his, when he’s sure of it—absolutely, then she’s got him for good. Sooner or later he must come to her. I haven’t had my eyes open just for show, Joan, this last year or so.”
“Good luck, Adela,” said Joan.
Adela attempted no pretences. “It stands to reason if you love a man——” Her eyes filled with tears. “Love his very self. You can make him happy and safe. Be his line of least resistance. But the meanwhile is hard——”
Adela stitched furiously.
“That’s why you came down here?” Joan asked.
“You haven’t seen?” Adela’s preoccupation with Sopwith Greene had been the most conspicuous fact in the party. “Once or twice a gleam,” said Joan.
“Ask him to play tonight, dear,” said Adela. “Some of his own things.”
But now the last checks upon Adela’s talk were removed. She wanted to talk endlessly and unrestrainedly about love. She wanted to hear herself saying all the generosities and devotions she contemplated. “There’s no bargain in love,” said Adela. “You just watch and give.” Running through all her talk was a thread of speculation; she was obsessed by the idea of the relative blindness and casualness of love in men. “We used to dream of lovers who just concentrated upon us,” she said. “But there’s something nimmy-pimmy in a man concentrating on a woman. He ought to have a Job, something Big, his Art, his Aim—Something. One wouldn’t really respect a man who didn’t do something Big. Love’s a nuisance to a real man, a disturbance, until some woman takes care of him.”
“Couldn’t two people—take care of each other?” asked Joan.
“Oh, that’s Ideal, Joan,” said Adela as one who puts a notion aside. “A man takes his love where he finds it. On his way to other things. The easier it is to get the better he likes it. That’s why, so often, they take up with any—sort of creature. And why one needn’t be so tremendously jealous....”
Adela reflected. “I don’t care a bit about him and Hetty.”
“Hetty Reinhart?”
“Everybody talked about them. Didn’t you hear? But of course you were still at school. Of course there’s that studio of hers. You know about her? Yes. She has a studio. Most convenient. She does as she pleases. It amused him, I suppose. Men don’t care as we do. They’re just amused. Men can fall in love for an afternoon—and out of it again. He makes love to her and he’s not even jealous of her. Not a bit. He doesn’t seem to mind a rap about Peter.”
She babbled on, but Joan’s mind stopped short.
“Adela,” she said, “what is this about Hetty and Peter?”
“The usual thing, I suppose, dear. You don’t seem to hear of anything at Cambridge.”
“But you don’t mean——?”
“Well, I know something of Hetty. And I’ve got eyes.”
“You mean to say she’s—she’s got Peter?”
“It shows plainly enough.”
“My Peter!” cried Joan sharply.
“You’re not an Egyptian princess,” said Adela.
“You mean—he’s gone—Peter’s gone—to her studio? That—things like that have happened?”
Adela stared at her friend. “These things have to happen, Joan.”
“But he’s only a boy yet.”
“She doesn’t think he’s a boy. Why! he’s almost of age! Lot of boy about Peter!”
“But do you mean——?”
“I don’t mean anything, Joan, if you’re going to look like that. You’ve got no right to interfere in Peter’s love affairs. Why should you? Don’t we all live for experience?”
“But,” said Joan, “Peter is different.”
“No. No one is different,” said Adela.
“But I tell you he’s my Peter.”
“He’s your brother, of course.”
“No!”
“Your half brother then. Everybody knows that, Joan—thanks to the Sheldricks. A sister can’t always keep her brothers away from other girls.”
Joan was on the verge of telling Adela that she was not even Peter’s half sister, but she restrained herself. She stuck to the thing that most concerned her now.
“It’s spoiling him,” she said. “It will make a mess of him. Why! he may think that is love, that!—slinking off to a studio. The nastiness! And she’s had a dozen lovers. She’s a common thing. She just strips herself here and shows her arms and shoulders because she’s—just that.”
“She’s really in love with him anyhow,” said Adela. “She’s gone on him. It’s amusing.”
“Love! That—love! It makes me sick to think of it,” said Joan.
“A man isn’t made like that,” said Adela. “Peter has to go his own way.”
“Peter,” said Joan, “who used to be the cleanest thing alive.”
“Good sisters always feel like that,” said Adela. “I know how shocked I was when first I heard of Teddy.... It isn’t the same thing to men, Joan. It isn’t indeed....”
“Dirty Peter,” said Joan with intense conviction. “Of course I’ve known. Of course I’ve known. Any one could see. Only I wouldn’t know.”
She thrust the striped red stuff for her Indian dress from her.
“I shan’t be Indian Nationalism, Adela, after all. Somehow I don’t care to be. Why should I cover myself up in this way?”
“You’d look jolly.”
“No. I want something with black in it. And red. And my arms and shoulders showing. Why shouldn’t we all dress down to Hetty? She has the approval of the authorities. Aunt Phœbe applauds every stitch she takes off. Freedom—with a cap of Liberty.”
“Hetty said something about being Freedom,” hesitated Adela.
“Then I shall come as Anarchy,” said Joan, staring at the red stuff upon the table before her.
Came a pause.
“I don’t see why Peter should have all the fun in life,” said Joan.