“Chips could make a success of almost anybody who didn’t interfere with her,” Teresa replied. “She is not at all exacting and she is so affectionate. But Evan is a little like John Knox or that sort of person; then she does things without telling him and he gets all sorts of ideas into his head. I do hate Mrs. Vachell. I think she does more harm than a thousand mothers-in-law.” Lady Varens laughed.
“Do be careful what you say about mothers-in-law. When David marries I shall remind you of that remark and ask you not to suggest to my daughter-in-law that I interfere, because I don’t.”
Teresa blushed and looked vexed. “I had forgotten about you, really,” she said. “But Mrs. Vachell came to stay by the sea when Chips and I were there with Ivor, and it all went wrong after that. I don’t think they were ever happy again. And I believe she only did it out of sheer spite because she hates men.”
“Does she? I should never have guessed that,” said Lady Varens.
“No, nobody would. She never says a word, but she used to get at that wretched boy Fisk, at the University, and put him up to all sorts of revolutions; not because she cares twopence about the poor, I think, unless they are women, but she wants women to govern everything, and I think she got him to believe that they would all help a revolution for the sake of making laws to get what they want for themselves. Don’t you think that Miss Smackfield would probably drop her Bolshevism if there were any women capitalists?”
“I don’t know that I or anyone else knows exactly what a capitalist is. But do you seriously suppose Miss Smackfield cares a hang what any row is about so long as she can be in the front with an axe, shouting, ‘Off with his head!’ like the Queen of the pack of cards. She would be forgotten to-morrow if someone put a flower pot over her.”
They talked for some little time and at last Lady Varens said, “It is so difficult to remedy anything, from a disease to a grievance. There is always a ‘vicious circle,’ not one thing alone that is the matter. People are ill because they fuss and fuss because they are ill. There are some, I think, who want a revolution because they are miserable, and others who are miserable because they want a revolution, another lot who make other people’s misfortunes an excuse for making a row and some more who put all their misfortunes down to other people’s love of making a row. If you take a human body in that sort of contradictory mess into a doctor’s consulting room, he pays no attention to the details, but tells the patient to wash in the Ganges or eat a lightly-boiled onion an hour before sunset with his back to the north; or else he tries psycho-analysis or hypnotism.”
“Oh, does he?” said Teresa, who was quite bewildered by this time.
“Yes, he does, and once upon a time it was done with incantations and charms, or the fat of a dormouse was rubbed under the ear. There was Christianity too, with all sorts of by-products in the way of Reformations and Crusades—but you see my point. A really engrossing superstition or a creed with a ritual would be more useful than discussing symptoms of national neurasthenia. Any idea that is unselfish and clean would do, and Bolshevism isn’t either; it is both selfish and dirty.”
“But you can’t preach unselfishness to the unemployed,” Teresa objected, “not, anyhow, so long as there are ‘boudoir gowns for my lady when she snatches a moment’s rest in her strenuous afternoon,’ advertised in the papers. If I were an unemployed, I should want to tear my lady in pieces, and roll her beastly maid with the sofa and the pot of chocolate over and over in the mud on the Embankment.”