“I have made the worst mistake with you,” he concluded harshly.
“Then I won’t pay for it. I’ll run away—I’m not going to be spied on and treated like a baby now, after you’ve let me do just exactly as I like for years. Why weren’t you strict all along? I thought you were really broad-minded—that you really thought a girl had wants and claims ... that a girl is human ... and the marrying her off business is extinct, and that going wrong doesn’t matter so much, after all.” She was half-crying now, but gulped fiercely, and went on: “You let me suppose that you’d understand if I did—anything. But you’re just exactly the same when it comes to it—the old-fashioned parent, ready with the old-fashioned curse. Well, then, you should have looked after me in the old-fashioned way. You should have done before all that you say you’ll do now—examined my letters and disapproved of my friends and questioned my comings and goings. What do you suppose suddenly jerks a girl back, when she has read everything, discussed everything, seen everything——? Books and plays, jabber, and other people’s example—answerable to nobody. Why, they’re only preparation for—for ... the rest! It wasn’t as if I was answerable to anybody; you never bothered. I’d rather have been kept ignorant and innocent—much rather, dad. It isn’t fair to bring me up in the new way, and then expect me to be good in the old way.”
“And it is not fair to be for ever instructed by one’s children how one should rightly have behaved towards them!” Ferdinand was now at the end of his patience. “First Richard and then you: ‘Why didn’t you do this? Why didn’t you do that?’ God in Heaven, is the parent a beast of burden that all your troubles and wrongdoings should be piled on to his back? And supposing I had scolded and worried you and forbidden—then it would have been again: ‘You have ruined my life—a little more liberty, and I need not have been driven to—to—behave like a street-girl!’ Always the parent’s fault—you are shirkers, you who are so proud to call yourselves a New Generation—putting all responsibility on heredity, education, pre-natal influence—I know not what, so long as you safely escape self-reproach—so long as you safely escape the crying of your own conscience.”
“Conscience is religion. I’m not religious. If I were—but you never bothered about that either. I’m not Jewess nor Christian—I’m nothing at all—nothing—you never bothered.”
“We did bother; yes indeed, but we were afraid of bothering too much. We wanted you to feel free.”
“Well then—why?—now?”—wavering to a softer mood. When her father spoke with just that fondness ... turning aside her head to blink back the tears, she caught sight of his old silk handkerchief, plum and navy-blue dabbed together, knotted round the bed-post in the same way as he was wont to knot it round his neck, as long as she could remember.... And suddenly Ferdie was dead—and she saw that loop with the dangling ends, and it struck her painfully that she would never again see it round Ferdie’s neck, plum and blue stem to that genial rubicund face with the kind eyes ... Dad was dead ... everybody dies....
Whether she had been vouchsafed a swift keyhole peep at an inevitable future, or if the vision were merely a childish drench of sentiment—whichever it was, it sent Deb straight past grandfather’s sarcastic smile and Aunt Stella’s antagonism, to her knees beside Ferdie’s chair—snuggled up against him—Thank God, he was not dead yet!
“Dad—mayn’t I explain?”
He just touched her black urchin head so near his hand, but said nothing.
“It’s ... men,” Deb began. Such a maze of by-ways and turnings, and no centre. Could she ever hope to drag his understanding in the wake of her intricate journeyings ... and with the others present? “It was the same in our old set before we gave up Daisybanks, before the war. There were always men about, then; when they took me on the river in the evenings, in a narrow punt, or in taxis—or behind screens on the landings at dances ... screens put there generally by the hostess—what are they put there for? ‘Enjoy yourselves, children!’—Dad, what did you think then? You can’t possibly have imagined they all wanted to marry me, that they each wanted to marry every girl they took behind screens or up dark corridors—in the Empress Rooms or the Portman Rooms or the Grafton Galleries or Princes? But you must have thought something!”