II
Mollie and George Addington had no parents. Their mother had died when they were tiny children and their father when Mollie was sixteen. He had been in business in Manchester; a cotton business of some sort, and they were brought up in a suburb of Manchester, in a big ugly red house a few miles out of the town. Mollie once showed me some photographs of their house, and it seemed to me odd that George and Mollie should come from a place like that. It was not like them at all. They were rather rich and had a motor-car long before every one did. Their father was interested in politics, and a Liberal. He used to read articles from the Manchester Guardian aloud to them in the evenings, and later on when they were older they used to read them to him. It was chiefly Mollie that did the reading; imports and exports and rates of exchange. I asked Mollie once if she had hated all that reading aloud, and she looked surprised.
‘No—not particularly,’ she said. ‘It never occurred to me to hate it, and I was sorry for Father.’
Mollie went to a High School in Manchester. She went in by train with her father in the mornings, and came back alone after tea.
George used to go to a day school too at first, and then he got his Winchester scholarship and went away. Mr. Addington was quite well off, but he had said from the beginning that George should not go to a public school if he did not get a scholarship.
‘And so I got it,’ said George with his broad smile. ‘I don’t suppose I should have, except for that. Father was like that; he was grim, and he made people do things.’
Mollie looked after them both. I think she would have looked after them anyhow, but her father put her definitely in charge of the house when she was fourteen. She was given the keys of the store-cupboard and the domestic cash-box, and three months later the housekeeper was dismissed. ‘I will give you three months’ apprenticeship,’ her father had said. ‘You will do the housekeeping with Miss Hopkins at first, then under her supervision, and at the end of three months you should be competent to undertake it without help.’
He gave her eight pounds a week, and she had to account for every penny she spent. On the first of each month there was an ‘audit day’ when she brought her account-book into the study and handed over to her father all the receipted bills. Everything had to be paid in cash, and she might not leave one penny unaccounted for. At first there were many discrepancies. She forget to enter tram-fares; sometimes she gave pennies to beggars and forgot to put them down. Her father was patient with her, she said. He would go over the whole account, checking each item to see if the missing pennies could be traced. Sometimes they could not, and he would write ‘3d. unaccounted for’ across the foot of the page. He did not punish her when this happened, but she felt it a disgrace, and sometimes she would cry about it in bed.
This did not happen often after the first year, and Mollie was a wonderfully capable person when I knew her.
Afterwards, when I tried to do accounts and couldn’t, I used to wonder if I should have learnt better if I had been trained to do it by Mollie’s father, but I don’t suppose it would have made much difference really.
Mr. Addington was a Unitarian and a teetotaller. George and Mollie used to go to a big chapel with Morris windows, and they were put into a ‘Band of Hope’ when they were eight years old, and signed ‘pledge cards’ to say they would never drink alcoholic drinks. When she was fifteen Mollie had to teach in the Band of Hope. She had to give lessons on the effects of Alcohol on the Human Body, and her father gave her books to read about it in. All this seemed very odd to us when we first got to know the Addingtons. It was so different a world from ours, and yet the Addingtons were like us in fundamental things.
Mollie showed me her ‘pledge card’ once. It had a picture of St. George fighting the Dragon, by Walter Crane, on it, and some rather fine texts round the sides. It seemed to me a queer, barbarous idea, like ‘unclean meat,’ or some old primitive taboo.
Mollie laughed when I said so.
She said:
‘I suppose it is. I should never make my own children sign anything like that, but I somehow didn’t like to give it up. I feel a sort of loyalty to Father. I don’t think it matters, but he did; if he was alive I think I should tell him I didn’t agree any more and give him back the card. But as he is dead I can’t. Perhaps that’s rather silly, but after all, there’s no strong reason the other way.’
George was not a teetotaller when we knew him. He had felt like Mollie for a time, he said, after their father’s death, and then he definitely broke through the feeling of taboo, as something irrational to which one should not give in.
‘Magnus pater sed maior veritas,’ he said, and Hugo laughed at him, and said he was a Puritan in his negation of Puritanism.
Neither George nor Mollie had remained Unitarians. Mollie’s scientific mind had overcome her loyalty here; also, as she herself told me, Mr. Addington’s religion had been far less vital to him than his political and social creed.
They were both Liberals, and this seemed to me the oddest of all. To Hugo too it seemed odd, but not so much to Guy. I believe that with a different environment Guy might have been a politician. It had always been a joke against Guy that he liked to read the newspaper; not just reviews or headlines, but the solid political articles. But even he had no particular party, and it was the party that seemed so curious to Hugo and to me. To suppose that one could agree, always, on all points, with one group of people, and that one must support one party.
‘How can you agree always with one group of people?’ Hugo asked George one day, in a punt.
‘I don’t always agree on every point,’ said George, ‘but mainly, on the most important questions.’
‘But you might agree with one party on one important point, and another on another. What would you do then?’
‘That doesn’t often happen, as a matter of fact. But if it does, I suppose one would go with the party one agreed with on most points. You must work together with some group if you want to get things done.’
‘Yes, getting things done. That’s the whole difficulty. I doubt, you see, whether this getting anything done is worth the intellectual dishonesty involved in it.’
George laughed.
‘But if you see something very wrong going on, a child working in a mine, or something like that, you want to do something about it. You want to stop it.’
‘No,’ said Hugo after a pause. ‘I am afraid I don’t. I only want to run away and not look.’
George laughed again.
‘I don’t believe that,’ he said, ‘I am afraid that is “intellectual dishonesty” on your part, Hugo. You don’t like to own to an ordinary good impulse.’
Then we all laughed, Hugo too. But he added presently:
‘It would not be a good impulse even if I did try to stop a child working in a mine; it would only be another sort of selfishness, removing something that was disagreeable to see.’
And George rejoined:
‘But I never said the Liberal Party was unselfish. I never suggested the motive that made them want to remove abuses. I only said they did want to!’
And so it would go on. I used to be interested listening to their arguments. I agreed most with Hugo, but what George said made things stand out quite differently from the way I had thought of them before. Chiefly, though, what interested me, was the fact that George and Mollie should be Liberals themselves. I had taken it for granted that political parties were silly; George and Mollie were not at all silly. That was more convincing to me than arguments on either side.
George was a few months younger that Hugo, Mollie a few months older than Guy. George and Hugo were in their first year at Oxford, Mollie and Guy in their third.
They were all together a great deal during the next two years, and the Addingtons came to stay at Yearsly in the vacations.
Once Guy and Hugo went to stay with them in Manchester, and once I did, but that house never seemed to belong to them as their rooms in London did.
When Mollie had finished at college they left the Manchester home and moved to London, to the flat in Chelsea which seemed afterwards so much a part of them and of our life in the next few years.
There had been a suggestion at one time that I should go to college. If my mother had been at home I expect I should have gone; but Cousin Delia had a slight inclination against the idea, and my grandmother also, and as I was undecided myself the balance turned against.
If I could have been there with Mollie it would have been different, but she would have left almost as I arrived, and after she had left I saw much more of her in London; and Hugo I should hardly have seen in term time. To be there with him, and rules keeping us apart, I should have hated; and I had had enough of being in a herd of other girls.
So after Christmas I was sent abroad, to a French family first, and then a German.
I stayed five months with each and came back for the summer in between.
It was dull with those families. I had thought it would be exciting to go abroad, but it wasn’t. They were kind people, but they never left me alone. I was taken about to museums and galleries and looked after all the time. It was almost less free than school.
When I came back, Mollie had left Oxford. She took only three years there, and went on with her biology in London.
I lived in term time with my grandmother again, and went to classes and lectures at Bedford College. I learned Italian and went on with my music, and Mollie came very often to Campden Hill, and I went to her in Chelsea; sometimes I would meet her at the laboratory where she worked, and we had lunch in an A.B.C.
Often, too, we went to Oxford and saw Guy and Hugo and George. We stayed in lodgings in St. John’s Street, generally from Friday till Monday, and we would go long walks, all together, over Shotover sometimes and a long way on towards Otmoor, or sometimes along the Upper River past Godstow and Bablockhythe. There was a ferry there that we used to cross. It was in autumn or winter, that walk. I remember it chiefly with a red frosty sun. And in the summer we would go up the Cherwell in canoes; right up beyond the branching of the rivers, to a place where the willows met overhead and their shadows met together in the water.