CHAPTER IV
When Ferlie was seventeen and a half, and the finishing school loomed ahead with its extra music lessons and picture gallery tours, Peter, too, began to have ideas about cages. He did not quite describe them in Ferlie's way but proved himself worthily her brother and, up to a certain point, allowed himself to be influenced by her opinions.
At nineteen, when Caius College claimed him, he showed signs of forging ahead at a pace which left her a little breathless. The enquiring expression had sobered, on the development of a well-chiselled nose, into the self-assured look of someone who has things to tell the world. To Ferlie he first imparted samples of these.
His reform scheme for the suffering Universe was to be based, of course, on psychics. As a first step towards bursting upon Humanity in the guise of Universal Healer, he had taken Havelock Ellis in large indigestible doses, concluding inflexibly that all trouble dated, not so much from Adam and Eve as from Lilith, who made of them Two, instead of One, like herself.
"Originally, we were in all probability One Perfect Sex," he told Ferlie. "Artificial experimenting caused the split, which, naturally, left one sex the complement of the other. We find the old allegory of Jupiter dividing by sword the race of gods which, having created, he had begun to fear. Ever since, each has been looking for its true half in order to regain the lost power the Perfect Whole first possessed."
"But surely the bi-sexual insects are the lowest in the scale of Evolution," argued Ferlie, shrinking somewhat from the suggestion that Peter's new Heaven and Earth, amalgamated, would contain no marrying nor giving in marriage. Because, though she, at fourteen, had pledged herself to eternally single blessedness, she rather liked to see other people marrying and driving away in their best clothes, looking happy. One never saw the same people again, somehow, after they had driven away. The couple which returned in their place seemed always to be a couple that asked nothing better of life than to sit still. The driving away spelt Adventure but, perhaps, they came back before they had reached that.
Ferlie was quite sure that, having once begun to drive away, she would never turn back.
"And you see"—she had lost Peter and returned with a jump to find him grazing in new pastures—"half the hysteria at the back of crime and all unhappiness is sexual. The economic conditions in this country which condemn so many women to single cursedness are disgraceful. And how can anything vitally important be accomplished for the Good of the Universe and the control of its illimitable forces, when this sex-hunt, and natural procreation, curtails such a disproportionate amount of human time and energy? The natural functions necessary for the continuance of the Race should be exercised almost as unconsciously as in the case of trees and plants, without stultifying analysation of emotion. It is time we strove for a simpler and less sentimental Ideal..."
Ferlie agreed that everyone who wanted to get married should be able to do so by means of a State Dowry, equal for all, but she did not see how Peter's Reform Scheme was to provide sufficient male mates even then.
"And is it a doctor you will call yourself, dear?"
"I shall be the First of my Kind," said Peter in tones which admitted no doubt of it. "Once through the usual exams, so as to give the old-fashioned geezers no handle—I have always felt Barker should have tempered the wind to the shorn lambs of his period—I shall strike out on Lines of My Own. I shall not attempt to explain them to you yet. But, first of all, there must come a Breaking Away!" He made a wide gesture with his arms, and Ferlie, furtively sympathizing with this draw-a-long-breath attitude, suspected that Peter would probably excel himself in the Breaking Away, whatever happened afterwards.
"I may have to deal a blow to many existing institutions and suffer a bit for my convictions," went on Peter, looking as if this would not prove the least enjoyable part of the campaign, "for instance, Marriage must go."
"Oh, really, Peter? I am rather sorry."
"It is a starkly barbarous survival of prehistoric ages; and now half the people who uphold, or at least weakly condone it, are making vows they do not intend to keep before altars whose sacrificial fires have long been cold."
He talked very well, thought Ferlie, and probably did not mean all he said.
"But, Peter, do you really think that the majority of people have stopped believing in God?"
"Few have stopped who ever believed. Many have never believed who assumed they did because the Christian ethics were necessary to the civilization which they found comfortable. Scientific minds are now demanding proof, and finding none, of many things upon which those ethics are said to be based. Therefore they begin to have the courage of their convictions. Lack of that has, up to now, caused them to accept marriage on the surface and to deny it by secret act. They have entered into lying contracts which are not only against Nature but against common sense, because they feared to be pioneers.
"In all great movements there must be pioneers. It's not a pleasant job, pioneering; nor is it for cowards. At present, my own brain refuses to admit the existence of a Personal God, who can be cajoled or roused to anger according to the behaviour of a swarm of little ants on one of the countless millions of whirling globes He is said to have made in His spare time. The Herd Law, developed by the strongest of those little ants, is followed by the weak majority under the guise of a Divine Law, until a stronger little ant than the first one comes along and amends it to suit himself, still sounding the Divinity slogan. Whatever name is given to this religion or binding principle, the non-courageous part of the Herd, which is the greater part, follow, etc., etc., and etc."
Visions of Peter followed by a Herd released from lawful matrimony caused Ferlie an instant's misgiving.
Of course it was admitted that the marriage service had been somewhat unfortunately reformed already once in the past by Cranmer, who, influenced by German relatives, had introduced the Germanic idea of servile obedience for the woman, absent in the old Catholic form. The modern Anti-Reformationists were rightly demanding fresh revision and omissions. "Stronger ants," she supposed. But, if they proved less strong than the Peters, would Free Love make a superior substitute to an institution hitherto regarded as God-given, though Cranmerized? Even if God had become, for the Scientific Mind, as obsolete as Cranmer? Whoever re-created two imperfect sexes out of One Perfect Sex had made a very thorough job of it. Besides, were all Peter's ideas quite so shiningly new as he touchingly considered them?
"You really have remarkable powers of assimilation for your age," said Peter, "and, unlike many women, are not hysterically upset by the Unobvious." (Ferlie hoped that Cyprian might, also, appreciate these newly-developed qualities when he came home.) "And, therefore, I feel inclined to trust you with an important secret."
"You know you can, Peter."
He braced himself for confession.
"I have met a woman," said Peter.
Somehow Ferlie had thought as much.
"Slightly older than myself," he went on. "She is a hospital nurse and, naturally, we have discovered much common ground to explore in discussion. The nurse, I always maintain, can form a more accurate estimate of the patient than can the doctor. Phyllis agrees with me that, in most cases, mental control should be established first, and hypnotic influence be given a more important place than medicine. The theory should be practised, not talked about. The advertisement earned by Coué and Hickman and their friends, becoming mingled with ridicule, injures their cause. Jesus of Nazareth avoided advertisement. He wisely foresaw the harm it did; and he never pretended to be doing anything that a disciple could not also do who sufficiently developed his will-power and self-confidence."
"You—you won't talk like this to Martha and Mary? At present, you see, Peter, they think you are so nice."
He waved a lofty hand at the mention of these shorn lambs of his generation.
"I have told you I believe in tempering the wind."
Nevertheless, although it was splendid to be considered fully protected against the searching elements of Truth, Ferlie felt that her wool might have been thicker after his final announcement.
"Phyllis and I, likewise, see eye to eye on this pioneering question. We are convinced we have a mission. It shall be carried out, not by word of mouth, but by example. We suit one another. We are healthy and, from a medical point of view, know all there is to be known about contraception. At present we meet in secret. I feel I owe it to the Old Folk to put my views squarely to them before coming fearlessly out into the open to state that, in the eyes of the God we serve, we consider ourselves married without the intervention of a priest or State official. Phyllis has no parents—thank goodness!—to bring pressure to bear upon her in the form of hysterical tears. We shall live together without cheapening our private relationship by becoming parties to a ceremony which, in our case, is tantamount to a farce. We shall remain faithful to one another without the urge of a public vow, loyal without the necessity of bonds to keep us so. Should we, eventually, decide to have children, they will be brought up on like principles and taught the utter unimportance of sex except for purposes of healthy propagation, and it will be a point of honour for each parent to do his, or her, utmost to fulfil the responsibility entailed at their birth, uncoerced by any Court of Law. Since the whole union will be based on reason, not sentiment, everything is bound to run smoothly. It is all very simple, really."
Ferlie knew that Cyprian would consider it lamentably complicated. And wasn't Cyprian a little more experienced than Peter? If Cyprian had married Muriel—and an unaccountable coldness stole over Ferlie at the thought—it would certainly have been according to Herd Law, if not God's.
"You mean, Peter darling—Do you mean that you are living with this woman now?"
"Please remember that you are referring to My Wife, in the Eyes of God."
But Ferlie was considering the eyes of their uncle, the bishop. She wondered whether, as an only sister, she had done her duty by Peter. Mary might be a stupid old thing but she was led to believe, in spite of oneself, that she walked with God. Inspired by this realization Margery had conquered the pudding.
The Influence of The Good Woman was Mary's favourite subject for a Sunday Talk.
Mankind, she would say—she never called them "Men"—were uplifted by it, comforted in sorrow, healed in sickness, converted on death-beds.
"A lady with a lamp shall stand, etc...."
Peter, despite his lordly airs, was slightly pinker than usual and his eyes sought space above Ferlie's head. He had a beautiful skin, she thought. She did hope Phyllis was nice. She knew that her mother would have given up hope right away but, perhaps, parents, and even Cyprians, were a little out of date.
The Young were marching onwards, still soldiers, though not exactly Christian ones; because the old Christian Leader was out of date too. He was now just Jesus of Nazareth, the Founder of Christianity, as the Buddha was Gaudama Theiddatha, the Founder of Buddhism, and Mohammed the Founder of—was it Islam or Allah?
Said Peter, making a successful break-away from a pause which threatened to become uncomfortable, "I will introduce Phyllis to you, Ferlie; on the Q.T. We are relying on your support."
"Dear Peter," touched by this beautiful confidence in her affection. "Only I do hope you are both quite sure."
She wasn't a bit sure herself.
* * * * * *
Phyllis did nothing to decrease her uneasiness. That lady proved to be pale-faced and regular of profile, with quick dark eyes which never came to rest on any one object for long. Mrs. Carmichael had a weakness for people who looked at you, as she was in the habit of saying, "dead straight in the face." In thinking it out Ferlie remembered that very few ever did. Why should they? And, of those few more than one had been proved, later, own brother to Ananias. But, whether or no Phyllis was own sister to Sapphira, she scarcely glanced at Ferlie in shaking hands. She might, decided Peter's sister, be incessantly calculating sums in mental arithmetic. The fluttering of her eyelids apparently shut out visions which sought to steal between her brain and the addition and subtraction.
The interview was hardly a screaming success. Ferlie was irresistibly and unreasonably reminded of Muriel Vane and wondered, depressedly, on the way home, if she were going to develop into one of those women who mistrust their own sex.
She was Aunt Brillianna's guest at the time, and the latter swiftly noticed her problematical silences, but put them down to anxiety over the mail which brought distressing news of Mr. Carmichael. The doctors talked sagely of an operation and he was taking sick leave.
"If he should have to retire now he won't get his 'K,'" Ferlie reminded Aunt B., reading from her mother's inconsequent scrawl.
Aunt B. dryly tendered it as her opinion that the Family of Carmichael was great enough to survive that loss. "Leave us our nobility" had best described her attitude since the Houses of Trefusis and Carmichael had united. The ancestral title would ever carry more weight with her than any that might possibly be earned or bought by some Son of Trade with nothing to recommend him but Board School brains or a Bank Balance.
Ferlie, however, received a clearer idea of the workings of her mother's mind.
One returned from Exile with letters after one's name, the reward of thirty-odd years of labour, and in Europe people knew not what they meant nor even the order in which to write them. The Handle, an unmistakeable sign of services rendered, they could understand and respect, whether or no the man who wore it had received the just reward of his deeds.
"Your father," wrote Mrs. Carmichael, "will be the only one of the Family to have had his career cut short, if this illness presages early retirement. And this with you nearly grown-up and Peter becoming more expensive every term...!"
Ferlie could have foretold that, apart from the question of expense, Peter, at the moment, was unlikely to exercise a soothing influence on his mother's shattered nerves. She had an idea that Aunt Brillianna would prove the only satisfactory exponent of his case, but Peter had not been moved to confide in Aunt B.
* * * * * *
His parents came, heard, but found themselves unable to conquer him. Peter was a stauncher supporter of truth than of tact. His mother took refuge in unlimited tears; his father in the only ethics he favoured, i.e., those founded on the honour of the House of Carmichael. Decently-bred people simply "did not do" these things. Peter hotly denied that his bodily functions were at variance with those of the organ-grinder. This was the most unkindest cut of all. No Carmichael had ever ground an organ for a living and the comparison was odious.
Peter wanted to introduce Phyllis to them as his wife in the eyes of whatever God the Family severally worshipped. His father adopted the time-honoured attitude which forbade his son to bring That Woman in contact with the crystal purity of mother and sister. Ferlie, holding to the view that "better a little lie than much great unhappiness," refrained from publishing it abroad that she had already been subjected to the contamination of Phyllis.
Peter and his latch-key departed the house and were no more seen, and his irate father's emotions were presently smothered in a whirl of soft-footed nurses and suavely-smiling physicians.
"If Peter could only have waited!" wailed his mother. But Youth waits on nobody.
Once free of the Nursing Home Mr. Carmichael took a practical line: Peter found his allowance stopped. Then it was that he diabolically exemplified his theories regarding the common Brotherhood of Man by obtaining an organ and a particularly chilly-looking monkey who danced to the tune of "O solo mio," thus rendered by a Carmichael outside the paternal library window. No one could have guessed how the farce would end.
The last act was exclusively organized by Phyllis. The very opposition had lent Phyllis a fictitious value in Peter's eyes and his philosophy became for him the bread of life. To Ferlie, alone, he brought his accounts of Phyllis's unfathomable comprehension of his own soul. "Mixed into me as honey in wine," etc., etc.
Phyllis assumed the same proportions for Peter as had Muriel Vane for Cyprian; she was the Perfect Mate. And then Phyllis met a well-to-do surgeon, with reputation already established, who was not merely ruling an ethereally beautiful Kingdom in the Clouds. To Ferlie came Peter, wild-eyed and incredulous.
"But she said—But she understood that she was My Wife," he repeated again and again, as if by the repetition he could find the key to the riddle.
"And, you see, Peter," said Ferlie simply, "if she had been married to you in the ordinary way——"
But that was going ahead too quickly for Peter.
"She said... She promised..." Surely that creed should be all-sufficient which admitted the word of a mortal soul to be its bond.
Mrs. Carmichael's sense of injury against That Creature for having caught Peter was now transformed into indignation because she had let him go.
His father, the danger safely over, resumed his man-of-the-world pose as though he had never departed from it, produced an extra ten-pound note, or so, and told his wife that boys would be boys.
Only Ferlie fully realized that by such means boys become men.
Aunt B., meeting Peter accidentally soon afterwards in the Tube, immersed in illustrated volumes whose pages unblushingly revealed to his neighbours on either side aspects of the human frame the existence of which they had, hitherto, blandly ignored, nodded her shingled locks in Sybillic understanding.
"Buses and Tubes are the most natural places to study the shapes of one's fellow-creatures," she remarked. "I see you are determined it is to be Medicine, Peter."
"Medicine must be the preliminary," Peter replied, unshaken in his resolve to arrive at summits unattained, albeit it seemed he would be obliged to scale them unpartnered.
"I am going abroad for the winter," Aunt B. informed him. "I may, or I may not, return with the swallows. When Ferlie is in her Parisian convent and you memorizing the seventeen Latin names for the stomach, or some equally uninspiring anatomical organ, in Caius, no one will be needing a garrulous old woman who finds it difficult to keep her fingers out of other folks' pies. I suppose when I see you and Ferlie again you will both have quite a lot of advice to give me as to where I should ornament a bath-chair for the remainder of my days."
If Aunt B. had been able to face the English winter, or, if on deciding not to do anything so disagreeable, she had left an address behind her for regular correspondents to bombard with the Family scandals, her departure might not have affected Ferlie's whole future. As it did.
* * * * * *
Peter had come down for the Short Vacation that Season, and Ferlie had clung in damp farewell round the high collars of Martha and Mary, and returned to town to lay in stores of more advanced underclothing than had been permitted under their care in preparation for her departure to be "finished."
The fortnight after Christmas she spent at the home of Margery Craven, now a red-cheeked Diana of the hunting-field, collecting brushes and masks of more than legitimate four-footed victims.
Thence, an unintelligible letter from Peter recalled Ferlie. It was so unusual for Peter to condescend to anything longer than a telegram that Ferlie took the train home with forebodings she tried vainly to allay. Something had gone wrong, he said. Plans for everyone had altered and she was needed.
She reached their town house to learn from the parlour-maid that her father had been taken back to the Nursing Home; that her mother was with him now there, at the moment, and that Mr. Peter had ordered tea in the library.
Ferlie sought him without even waiting to shed her muff and furs. It was always rather dark in the library, but the uncertain shadows cast by the red lick of flaming tongues in the deep grate, where a new log was crackling, could not altogether account for an odd bleared look about Peter's eyes. He was sitting in a crimson leather arm-chair, his shoulders hunched, his hands on his knees.
"Hullo!" he hailed her unconvincingly; and he spoke as if he had a cold. "I couldn't meet you—had to do some important messages for Mother." Then he explained.
Even if Mr. Carmichael's second operation proved successful, he would never return to Burma; in which case Ferlie could not go to Paris, nor Peter back to Caius. It would be impossible for his father to put him through the prolonged and expensive medical course on a pension reduced by high income tax, increased rates of living, and the expense of interminable doctors' fees which they might have to meet in the future.
The town house must, necessarily, be sold. Mrs. Carmichael would feel most the change to cramped quarters; she had been a Somebody among other Somebodies in the East. Moreover, out there, the "K" was considered a foregone conclusion with regard to her husband.
Ferlie's own disappointment receded into the background as she measured the full force of this second blow which Fate had dealt Peter.
"It will mean——" she faltered after a long pause, and stopped.
"Anything a fellow can get," said Peter, his air-castles a blur of undefined hues at his feet like the ruined rainbows of melted snow.
Ferlie wondered if it were true about the darkest hour coming before dawn. Wished that she could hear Cyprian's views on the subject.
During the next few weeks, however, she found herself consoling, rather than consulting, people. Her mother and Peter were too immersed in their particular aspects of the trouble to question whether Ferlie herself did not require most support, freshly transplanted as she was from a world devoid of responsibility to one teeming with seemingly unsolvable problems.