“How, Mother?”
“I mean that he might see that women have quite enough to go through without being teased about their children when they have got them. All those stupid rules and that kind of thing! Really, you know, I think that anyone who has had a child—I mean any woman, of course,—deserves to be let alone. Now those poor women I saw last week——. I don’t know that it is a very nice subject for you, Teresa, but as you have taken to work among the poor you are bound to hear of it, and you are going to be married yourself—what I was going to say is that those poor women I saw at Christmas have been most foolish, there is no doubt, and the law ought to oblige the men to marry them. But if it won’t do that, at least it might be made more easy for the mother to keep the child with her instead of her living alone with that matron, who I am sure, is extremely kind, but with such a cross face. The poor little child has to be brought up elsewhere because the mother has lost her character! Men lose their characters quickly enough in the public-house, and no one says anything. They are allowed to take the bottle home with them, too, and it is not thought a disgrace, although they do it deliberately. Whereas a child——” She paused, becoming suddenly aware that Cyril’s eye was fixed on her with delighted interest. “Cyril, dear,” she said, “are you sure you want to wait up? There is really no need.”
“I wouldn’t miss a word, Sue, I assure you,” he said politely. “Dicky, pass me the syphon, would you?” Teresa passed it, and said nothing. No one spoke for a short time, and then a bell rang upstairs and another sound, a sort of rapid, angry mewing, was heard as Susie opened the door of the study and Strickland vanished up the stairs. Susie disappeared into the passage and presently Strickland ran down again. “It’s a dear little girl, sir, the doctor says,” she remarked, thrusting her head round the study door, “and now you get to bed, Miss Teresa, please, while I get a cup of something for the nurse. The doctor will be pleased to join you, sir, presently, but he won’t stop to have nothing but a glass of wine and a biscuit. He’s got another case waiting for him he says.” She disappeared before Teresa had grasped the wonderful details of her déshabille. This was indeed a new Strickland, or at least one unknown to the family. “My brother’s wife” and Evangeline were one and indivisible in Strickland’s heart that night.
CHAPTER XXI
Lady Varens and David stayed for some weeks with Mr. Manley, and then took a furnished cottage by the sea, at a place not far from Millport. It was a place of everlasting winds, sandy as the desert, flat as a tablecloth, ugly as every other nest of the speculative builder. It is true that the owners of the land had imposed restrictions on the invaders, but the only result of this was to make a certain style of architecture a duty, instead of an unfortunate occurrence, so the town had as little chance of achieving beauty as a society for the suppression of marriage would have of evolving true love. The little caskets of the home, that were dumped down in groups along the shore, roofed to excess in the prevailing fashion, neatly gardened with rock plants that could not blow away and might be disinterred from an avalanche of sand without obvious damage, were designed to catch the greatest possible quantity of ozone. Painstaking mothers, whose husbands were occupied in Millport, immured themselves heroically there all the year round for the good of their offspring, who rewarded them by thriving exceedingly on the hurricanes of health that swept along the mud flats. The tide rose from time to time—generally in the night—, took a rapid survey of the villas, and fled back into the distant sea. Squadrons of perambulators were marched daily along the most exposed part of the shore, which the speculative builder had kindly laid with asphalt for the purpose. There, prevented by stout iron railings from being blown into the sea, the mothers and sisters and aunts and nurses of young Millport wrestled up and down twice a day, their skirts lashed impedingly against their knees or their calves, according to whether they were going to or coming from, the butcher. Their faces were set with a permanent expression of having been blown crooked, nose slightly aslant and a little richer in tone on one side than the other, eyes half closed to keep out the volleying sand, ears all but inside out, and the mouth set at the gasp, owing to the nostrils having been banged to as soon as the owner struggled out of her front door; heads were mostly a little on one side, cocked to meet the shouts of a succession of acquaintances all endeavouring to hear whether Reggie would come to tea with Edna on Thursday or Friday, or whether the bridge party began at three or four. But then, as the inhabitants say when strangers are critical about the place, “we do have such beautiful sunsets. They say it is something phosphorescent about the mud.” So there’s always something either way to keep the balance between good and evil.
Lady Varens took one of the villas for a few months. The place more nearly resembled country than any other in the neighbourhood where she could get a house; it was at least in the open air, or rather, as she said, in an open draught, and the mud stayed where it was, instead of going up into the sky and down again all the time. The sun shone a little when it was anywhere handy, and one could smell the sea, and even see it for a few minutes if one looked sharp about it. There was a golf course, and a train to bring Teresa and anyone else who had sufficient patience and a solid enough frame to hold together during the requisite period. Maids were found who, being attached by love to the butcher’s assistants, were willing to oblige a titled lady to whom money was no object. The villa was designed for a large family and attendants, so when Evangeline was well again, Lady Varens asked her to stay for a time with the children; she persuaded her that it would be good for them to be blown into the state of solidity that comes to the young of that scourging place from constant tossing between the consuming ozone and the replenishing butcher. Evangeline accepted, and at the end of a week or two the shadow of Millport and all the human vexatiousness which had darkened the last months for her began to stir and rise, taking with it her newspaper problems, Mrs. Vachell’s sphinxery and the episodes of her life at Drage that were stored in her recollection like toys broken in a long-forgotten quarrel. The dear inanities of that time were like poor Tweedledum and Tweedledee’s nice new rattle which had brought them both out armed with deceptions against each other, till the monstrous crow they had brought down frightened them apart. She laughed aloud one day as she thought of Teresa’s comparison, and presently she went to the nursery and brought Ivor’s copy of “Through the Looking Glass” into the drawing-room and sat down with it in the window seat, where she used to watch the sunsets. She turned up the part where the quarrel begins about nothing, when Tweedledum and Tweedledee have been sitting together under an umbrella. “That is exactly like us,” she thought and she laughed as she read. “But Evan will never see that. I shall have to explain the situation in some other way.” Her thoughts wandered back down a train of other things that she had tried to explain to him. Before their engagement she had expounded a good deal and listened very little. To tell the truth, Evan had been attending more to the distraction of her presence than to the matter of her speech, but she did not know that. He had been unaccustomed to the society of women who lulled, and she did lull his natural embarrassment in conversation by the largeness of her interest in everything that went on in the world. Such luxuriant living and lack of analysis was new to him. He had formed an idea of women from his sisters’ giggling little comments on every subject; they inspected life at too close quarters to make their view interesting to anyone with Evan’s passion for Universal study. The world was contained for them in their village interests; England was a garden where God lived and their village was one of His boundary lodges; foreign countries were something akin to a nobleman’s other residences, managed by agents and let to strangers; the mission field a wild region that must be brought into cultivation. Evan had loved his sisters while the war was on, for they thought neither to the right hand nor to the left. They had trotted out of their village in the wake of England, Harry and St. George, never doubting that God was with them as they bandaged and stitched and prayed that Ypres might hold out, and that Evan and the men from the village might come home safe. They never spoke of the enemy as sheep or devils. War was a medicine which England had to take now and then for the good of her health, and whether it was against Zulus, Boers, or Germans had nothing whatever to do with the village. The Graphic of the past or The Graphic of the present, depicted “the dead,” with troops advancing over them through smoke, and dropping as they came; or a hillock and a gun and a few figures lying bandaged—perhaps with the very bandages that Emily had made—and that was Victory, and would end someday in “The Soldier’s Return,” and a dinner in the village. Such a dinner! The sisters were at their best at such times; no one could be cross with them; but in private life, during peace, Evan found them trying beyond words. He was suffering from reaction against their village interests when he met Evangeline, and listened to her impersonal prattle of sunshine and wide spaces of the earth where parties are unknown and no man is obliged to ask the nymph of his choice how many theatres she has been to. Then, as we know, Evangeline encouraged him. She wouldn’t let him keep himself to himself as he had always done. She forced him, in the name of politeness to his General’s daughter, to say something, and it had to be something true. She refused all substitutes for his treasures; so he brought them out one at a time, and she handled them so respectfully, owing to a “gentleman’s” instinct, which was part of her inheritance from Cyril, that in the end he married her; married her, poor dear, supposing her to be what he called a lady. Then after a time they began to quarrel. He said his nice new rattle was spoiled, his lady was not ladylike. She always behaved “like a gentleman” towards him, but that wasn’t right; she must behave like a lady. Then Evangeline said that she had done nothing to the rattle. It was just as it was when he first got it. So he pointed to Mrs. Vachell and said that was what he wanted his rattle to look like, a ladylike woman who could understand a man’s idea of the way he wanted his sons brought up. They fought battles and separated in fear of the darkness that came down over everything after that and now——. “Really, really,” she thought, “it is too silly for anything. He knows by now that Mrs. Vachell was having him on and never cared twopence for what he said. If he could know that I love him he might see that his rattle isn’t broken at all. After all, we were happy—. Ivor doesn’t seem to mind very much whether he is approved of or not. Evan wouldn’t find his ‘moulding’ made much difference in a year or two’s time, and Father says Ivor is all right; he is not afraid of things and tells the truth; and perhaps Evan might let him alone if he came back now. What a good thing Susan is a girl. I don’t think he would be so keen about bringing her up to be ladylike after coming such a cropper. Oh, dear! I do wish we could begin all over again.” She remembered the daily event of Evan’s homecoming when they were at Drage; the pleasure of his being in to lunch unexpectedly; his atrocious singing while he had a hot bath; the general disturbance in every room; the comfortable, foolish conversations; the friendly disputes and dear kisses; one or two tiresome occurrences, as when there was a drunken cook to be dealt with and people coming to dinner and Evan was so decent and helpful. Then a happy, out-of-door summer, and later on their eagerness about Ivor. After that, Evan began to shun the nursery foolishness and she had got bored by his details of tinkering with the little car he bought. They had gone to Millport one Christmas and Ivor had screamed a good deal, and the nurse complained. There were no complaints now. Everything went like clockwork, and life was dull as ditchwater with no man to promote irrationality by treating all episodes with common sense. No household can be really merry without someone to supply the spectacle of common sense, meeting with little accidents from the mischievous contradictions of the human heart. Presently David came in.
“You can’t see to read there, can you?” he said.
“I wasn’t reading,” she answered. “I was wondering. I must do something about Evan, do you know? It isn’t really a quarrel if you come to think of it.”
David looked at her inquiringly, and sat down on the window seat. “I wonder what I had better do. Go out to him, or what?”
“The children would be all right with us here, but I suppose you would want them,” he said. “Your husband has never thought of leaving the army, has he? He could get something to do in England that would probably pay him better.”