Oh! the umbrella had a great deal to answer for!
III.
And Freddie was, as a matter of fact, faced that very evening, and a crisis arrived in the affairs of the Combers which must be chronicled, because it had ultimately a good deal to do with Isabel and Archie Traill, and indeed with everyone in the present story.
But whilst waiting for him downstairs, “dressed and shining,” as she used to like to say—with the dinner getting cold (for which disaster she was certain to be scolded)—she wondered in her muddled kind of way why it was that they should all have wanted to be so disagreeable, why, as a development of that, everyone always preferred to be disagreeable rather than pleasant. And she suddenly, facing the ormolu clock and the peacock screen with her eyes upon them as though they might, with their color and decoration help her, had a revelation—dim, misty, vague, and lost almost as soon as it was seen—that it wasn't really anyone's fault at all—that it was the system, the place, the tightness and closeness and helplessness that did for everybody; that nobody could escape from it, and that the finest saint, the most noble character, would be crushed and broken in that remorseless mill—“the mills of the gods”?—no, the mills of a rotten, impoverished, antiquated system.... She saw, staring at the clock and the screen and clinging to them, these men and these women, crushed, beaten, defeated: Mrs. Thompson, Mrs. Dormer, Miss Madder, her own Freddie, Mr. Perrin, Mr. Birkland, Mr. White—even already young Traill—all of them decent, hopeful, brave... once. The coals clicked in the glowing fire, and the soft autumn wind passed down the darkening paths. She felt suddenly as though she must give it all up—she must leave Freddie and the children and go away... anywhere... she could not endure it any longer. And then Freddie came in, irritable, peevish, scarcely noticing her. Moy-Thompson had changed one of his hours, and that annoyed him; the soup of course was stone cold, the fish very little better. He scowled across the table at her, and she tried to be pleasant and amusing. Then suddenly he had launched into the umbrella affair.
“Young Traill wants kicking,” he said. “What are we all coming to, I should like to know? Why, the man's only been here a month or two, and he goes and takes a senior master's things without asking leave, and then knocks him down because he objects. I never heard anything like it. The fellow wants kicking out altogether.”
Mrs. Comber said nothing.
“Well, why don't you say something? You've got some opinion about it, I suppose; and there's more in it than that—he's gone and got himself engaged to Isabel, I hear. What's the girl thinking of? They 're both much too young anyhow. It's absurd. I 'll tell her what I think of it.”
“Oh, no, Freddie—don't say anything to her. She's so happy about it, and I'm sure the dear girl has been so good to both of us that she deserves some happiness, and I do want them to be successful. After all, if Mr. Traill was a little hasty, he's very young, and Mr. Perrin 's a very difficult man to get on with. You know, dear, you've always said—”
“Well, whatever I 've said,” he broke in furiously, “I 've never advocated stealing nor hitting your elders and betters in the face, and if you think I have, you 're mightily mistaken.”
After that there was silence during the rest of the meal. Miss Desart was dining at the Squire's in the village, and, for once, Mrs. Comber was glad that the girl was not with them.