XXXVI
Mrs. Hammond's elder daughter left Marshington with far less ceremony than had attended Connie's departure. When it actually came to the point of telling her mother that she was going to London, Muriel was astounded at the ease with which she gained permission. Mrs. Hammond of course, would not find it at all pleasant living alone without her only daughter. Aunt Beatrice might be persuaded to stay, but nobody would consider that quite the same thing. And then, what would people say? People, who saw that Muriel was leaving her mother, and with Delia Vaughan of all people, and for the Twentieth Century Reform League of all terribly "modern" and uncomfortable organizations.
"Naturally, you would not be expected to consider me, dear, I suppose," Mrs. Hammond had said, "but when you think what the Reform League is and how immensely people criticize it—I've heard that the new branch started in Kingsport has already upset the vicar of St. Simeon's, because several of the girls from his Bible-class have joined the club and are talking about politics and their votes and things—so very unwise, when most of them ought to go into service. The crèches and things may be a good thing, but I do think . . ."
Nevertheless, she had let Muriel go, publishing over the bridge table the news of her conversion to modernity.
"What I think," she had informed Mrs. Marshall Gurney, with a delicacy in refraining from comparisons that could not fail to point more strikingly at Phyllis, "is that it's so very wrong of mothers, in these days, to stand between their daughters and progress. The girls nowadays are doing such splendid work. Of course it needs a certain amount of brains, but Muriel always was so excellent with figures. I understand that Lady Ballimore-Fenton—the President of the League, you know—is a simply charming woman. Muriel will find it most interesting."
Muriel found it interesting, but the interest hardly surprised her so much as the difficulty, and this Delia had in no way exaggerated.
Muriel arrived at King's Cross with her ham sandwiches still untasted, her mind confused, and a terrified determination to be successful. She had half hoped that she would find Delia waiting for her at the station, and a flat waiting for her ready warmed and furnished in some convenient part of London. She found instead a gloomy, indifferent terminus, a rattling taxi, and the comfortless austerity of Morrison House, the interior of which reminded her more nearly of the Kingsport Baths than anywhere else. The small guest-room into which she was shown by a slatternly maid had been christened "The Morgue" and lived up to its name.
She heard that Delia was ill in bed, and went along the passage to her room. She found her propped up by pillows dictating letters to an obviously intimidated but competent secretary.
"Oh, Muriel—wait a minute. Yes, yes, Miss Beach? Where were we? 'The demonstration proposed to take place on July 15th in the Kingsway Hall will be postponed in order that an answer from the Home Secretary may first be received. As the deputation has been fixed for July 30th, we hope to hold the Kingsway Hall meeting on August 1st, which will just avoid Bank Holiday. I hope that the altered date will not affect your kind promise to speak for us—Yours truly . . .' That's all, I think. Well, Muriel? Arrived? Found a flat for us yet? I've got an internal chill or something and can't get up, as you see."
Muriel, who had caught the early train, forgotten to eat her lunch, and found her own way to Morrison House with much fear but with considerable self-congratulation, felt that this was a cold reception.
"You'll have to do it yourself," continued Delia. "Get a furnished one. I'll give you the addresses of some agents in Bloomsbury. Miss Beach, have you a directory there? You might go round this afternoon, Muriel. The sooner the better."
But, after Miss Beach had left the room, she had turned to Muriel with her rare swift smile.
"My dear child, you are in for a dreadful time. I've got my hands full of work. I'm feeling perfectly rotten—which means bad tempered and you'll have to do everything yourself. Can you face it?"
"Do you want me?"
Delia glanced comically round the room. A cup half full of boiled milk that stood on a pile of papers on the dressing-table had grown cold; the washstand paraphernalia had been swept aside to make room for a typewriter; ink pads, stamps, directories and ledgers strewed the chairs and floor; and in the middle of the litter Delia lay on the disordered bed with a coat buttoned over her blue striped pyjamas.
"Now, doesn't it rather look as though I wanted you?" she said.
That was enough for Muriel.
House agents scared her, but furniture shops offered her unalloyed delight. Her instincts of economy refused to allow her to take a furnished flat. She braved motor-buses and tubes, she faced landladies, caretakers and decorators. When Delia, nearly convalescent but still shockingly unfit for work, departed northwards on a speaking tour, Muriel worked almost day and night to prepare a home for them both. She spent part of her own dress allowance on blue curtains and hand-painted lamp-shades and the most luxurious of soft arm-chairs for Delia's weary body. Here at last Delia, who had missed the softer things of life, should find a home.
On the afternoon of her expected return, Muriel could hardly keep still. Twenty times she went to the window, twenty times she looked back with satisfaction on the restful charm of the sitting-room. Roses in rough blue vases; dark bookshelves ranged against the plain buff walls, space, space everywhere and a complete absence of irritating decoration—surely the room meant the materialization of her dreams?
"She must like it, she must like it," she told herself, and for the first time in her life was confident that she had done well.
The electric bell pierced the silence with deafening shrillness. She ran to the door. Delia's figure stood in the passage. Delia, tall, dynamic, ruthless, swept in.
"Muriel, oh, thank goodness you're here! What did you do with Hansard for May 21st last year? That wretched Cutherlick man has threatened to denounce me for misstatements in my Lincoln speech. We shall have a libel action some time. I've got to fly down to South Cross by the 5.40 if I can catch it to answer him to-night at this meeting."
"What meeting? What speech? Oh, Delia, you can't; you're worn out. You must——"
But Delia brushed past her into the lovely little room. She never saw the blue vases nor the lamp-shade nor the cushions. She was down on her knees flinging books from the shelves on to the beautiful new carpet.
"Where in the name of fortune did you put the Hansards? I'll never catch that train. Why couldn't you put the things where I'd find them? Have you a kettle boiling? Can't I have some tea before I go?"
But, when Delia had found the Hansards and the notes of her Lincoln speech and had telephoned to Lady Ballimore-Fenton, no time was left to drink the tea that Muriel had prepared. She rushed away to catch her train, leaving the overturned dispatch case on the floor, the bookshelves in a chaos and her bedroom littered with the disorder of her haste.
It was then that Muriel realized the disadvantages of trying to please people possessed by an idea. For nearly two hours alone in the flat, she forced back a desire to run away—could she face this continual possibility of Delia's displeasure? Could she continue to please somebody who never acknowledged her efforts?
"I'm being just as unselfish as she is," Muriel told herself indignantly. "This is my flat as much as hers. I've spent far more money on it. I've had all the trouble of making it nice. She ought just to have said—it doesn't take a minute to say 'how pretty.'"
But Muriel's resentment passed when Delia, almost blind with fatigue, stumbled into the flat just after midnight.
"It's all right," she said, and that was all. But she allowed Muriel to take her hot tweed coat, to pull the hair-pins out of her heavy hair, to bring her soup in a blue and yellow bowl, and a fish soufflé made as only Rachel Hammond's daughter could have made it. For half an hour she accepted passively. She ate, drank, and allowed Muriel to prop the cushions behind her in the new arm-chair and put the bowl of yellow roses on the table by her elbow and light her cigarette. Then she lay back, smiled, and looked round the room.
"Well, Muriel," she said, "I always knew that you had discrimination, but this amounts to genius. One day your husband will be grateful to me for giving you a little training in the wifely habit."
"But I'm not going to marry," protested Muriel.
Delia flicked the ash off her cigarette. "You must learn never to argue with tired people," she said sternly, then smiled and fell fast asleep there in the big arm-chair without even waiting to be taken to her pretty bedroom.
After Delia's return, Muriel's life in London fell into its new routine. She spent her mornings in the office of the Twentieth Century Reform League, entering figures in big ledgers and reviving her acquaintance with double entry and other mysterious systems. She found that her old love of figures returned to her. Method was pure joy. She reduced to order the chaos of the office slowly and peacefully, taking each day a new section at which to work.
She organized the little household in 53a Maple Street, keeping a stern eye on the "daily help," the housekeeping books and Delia's appetite. She filled her days entirely with small trifles, seeing at first no farther than her ledgers and Delia's hollow cheeks, which surely began to fill out a little under her vigorous treatment of stout and milk and new-laid eggs. Yet somehow she did not feel completely safe. Such obvious things as there were to do she did and did quite competently, but always she felt that one day some problem would present itself or some crisis arise and that she would be lost again.
Delia seemed to be both pleased and fattened by her ministrations, but that did not make her entirely contented with Muriel's companionship. One night she came in irritated and disturbed. A newspaper article had questioned her sincerity. She pretended to ignore such criticisms, and could not. They rankled while she laughed at them. She stalked up and down the flat, hurt and sore, and uncertain what to do.
"I'm awfully sorry. I wish I could do something," sighed Muriel helplessly for the fifth time.
"Do. Do? Oh, you never do anything except the things I tell you. You're always wringing your hands and looking sorry, but I always have to think of the things to do."
This statement Muriel felt to be true rather than kind, but she accepted it with chastened fortitude.
Between alternating doubt and happiness, Muriel worked throughout the summer and the autumn. There were weeks when she was oppressed by fear and wretchedness. Her life counted for so little. She was not really helping Delia much. Each week brought tenderly reproachful letters from her mother. They stirred Muriel to vague disquiet. All this sort of work was well enough—this Reform League, for instance. No doubt it was a good thing that a great society run by women should try to draw all classes into social service, by clubs and settlements in every town where mill girls might meet with daughters of barristers or squires to discuss crèches and canteens and recreation rooms, or to carry out political propaganda for the purposes of forcing through social legislation. Still, was it quite the thing for which she had been born, or was she only trying to cover the shame of her retreat? Delia would talk for hours of this dream of service; of an army without distinction of class or age moving forward towards the betterment of England. "Political knowledge, education in citizenship, co-operation, sympathy, no one class needs these things," she used to say. "We shall never see any improvement while the rich and the well-educated think that they can help the poor exclusively. The rich and educated need the experience of the poor. The poor need contact with culture and with leisure. We all need the organization of our capacity for citizenship. The realization of the corporate Will." Muriel sat and listened, thinking hard. Sometimes her own life seemed to her a very little thing, of bitterness born from brooding over folly, of petty disappointments magnified to tragedy, of imagination run riot. "But Connie?" she would say. "You can't argue away Connie's ruined life. Even if I have simply been foolish and mistaken, what was it that forced Connie to seek escape in such wild recklessness? There must be other people like her; what can we do?"
She was beginning to find a new foundation for her thoughts. Her concentration upon the intensely personal problem vanished.
She used to talk to Delia, in her soft, serious voice, feeling her way towards her new ideas.
"I can't help thinking that Lady Ballimore-Fenton rather likes a fight for the sake of a fight," she reflected. "Surely it doesn't do any good to pretend that all the people who don't quite agree with her are scoundrels. She knows it isn't true."
And Delia would smile and shrug her shoulders. "I believe that you think that we're a poor lot, Muriel."
"I don't. I'm awfully happy here. Only it does sometimes seem very difficult for people to be really interested in questions like housing or illegitimacy and to keep their sense of proportion. So often things are wrong just because nobody quite knows how to put them right. And gentleness is a great power and a great beauty."
Delia smiled her twisted smile. "You put all your platform pearls into your private conversation, Muriel. I wonder? I wonder how much you really care for all this. After all, you are right in one sense. We are all rather apt to lose our sense of proportion. But, because we deal with people in their social capacity, it doesn't mean that we disregard their private selves. We are all of us partly workers for some movement and partly men and women. It's a queer thing, this sex business. You go along quite happily disregarding it for years, then suddenly something comes along that rouses the sleeping thing—and away we go, over the windmills." She caught her breath.
"Martin?" whispered Muriel.
"I suppose so. We've all got a—Martin. That was physical as well as mental suffering. That was why it was so damnable. My mind misses him still—will always, I suppose. My body—well, thank God, who made a singularly imperfect world in order that men might work off their superfluous energies in order to straighten it!"
"But, Delia," cried Muriel, "you don't only do this work in order to forget—as a sort of faute de mieux?"
"No, no." Delia sat down in the arm-chair, her chin on her hand. "No. Two-thirds of me are wholly engrossed in it, and those two-thirds are of the more enduring part of me. You too. You won't always be content to stay with me. You've got the domestic instinct too, which I haven't. And you're not really absorbed heart and mind in the work. It interests you now—but—I wonder. One day some one will call to you, and back you'll go to Marshington."
"No. Not to Marshington. Never. Besides, nobody will call."
"Won't they? Won't they? You can't get out of it like that. Wait a little."
Muriel waited.