It did not need many months in Millport to convince Teresa that idleness was not one of the snares of the city. She soon found that if any young person of the leisured classes were to attempt to “drift” she would have her aimless career brought to a standstill by some snag of “duty to the city.” No one in London had ever reminded Teresa of her civic responsibilities. On thinking it over one day after a particularly strong dose of “duty to the city,” administered by Mrs. Carpenter, she could not remember that the city of London and its chief magistrate had ever laid any personal claim to her services. She tried to imagine any such phrase as, “Have you seen the Mayor about it?” or, “What does Alderman Teazle think?” occurring in her father’s conversation at his club. It was impossible. In those days no one knew anything of her plans or her wishes but what she told them; in Millport it seemed that the very paving stones knew who was walking along and why, and that carrier sparrows flitted from chimney to chimney with little messages of information about everybody and an index of probable explanations for their conduct—all dead certain to be wrong.
Mrs. Carpenter had not trusted to the fowls of the air to inform the Fultons that Millport intended them to do their duty. She gave them a few weeks’ law, with full access to her own example. She never failed to explain in the street, in the shop, in the ladies’ club, across the family pew or on the platform that the fact of her being found where she was would mean the loss of so many heart beats to the city’s life. She would say, perhaps, “I ought not to be here, my dear, but I promised dear Mabel Somebody this little treat just to buck her up after the new arrival. Fancy! I was there just two hours before it happened, and my waifs and strays waiting for a tin of biscuits I had promised them, and Alderman McWhittock’s funeral at half-past two. I don’t know how I ever got there—but now what are you doing here? Up to the ears, I suppose, getting ready for the dance next week. What it is to be young! though I saw you resting like a wise girl at dear Emily’s party. The men are so naughty now, aren’t they? They won’t dance—absolutely won’t—except with their own old favourites. I always say to them now, ‘No, it’s no use. I am here to rest my old bones and you have just got to look in all the corners and pick out the plainest and dullest thing you can find and send her home happy.’ I condoled with Emily because I know the difficulties, and after all a dance must be a success if it is to be worth all the trouble, mustn’t it? Now what church do you go to——?” etc.
But Susie almost forestalled her remarks. She was there ready equipped by instinct before the call to battle came. Mrs. Carpenter didn’t know what to think of it. It is said that birds of prey have their own allotted beats and do not poach on their neighbours’ quarry; but they arrive, warned by some secret telegraphy wherever there is a vacancy and a corpse. Susie had evidently sensed the prevailing occupation of Millport and had descended out of the blue to fill a gap among the leaders of good works. She could not be said to “take an active part” in anything, because that was against her nature, but her name was soon in everybody’s mouth as a member of all the chief committees of private enterprises. Strangely shaped gentlemen in black used to call on her between meals with papers and she listened to them with her gentle smile of the mother was has suffered all things; she recognised them instantly when she saw them again and remembered with which particular good work they were connected; and that is really quite enough, as she herself would have said. Ladies with grown-up daughters, who are obliged to entertain a great deal and who have no head for organisation and so on, ought to leave the running about to those who will do it so much better; what the workers need is sympathy.
Evangeline and Teresa, being newcomers from a careless place of comfort, were particularly susceptible to the unfamiliar poison of depression for which there seemed no cure. The mud, the damp, the ugly streets, and indignant, tired faces, the grudging service of the working classes, the self consciousness of the well-to-do who walked everywhere in the limelight of recognition, the sharp division between those who thought everything was all right because they were comfortable and those who thought everything was all wrong because they weren’t—all this made the girls restless.
A vision of Hyde Park Corner on a sunny day used to haunt Evangeline’s mind. She contrasted the space of it, the blue sky, the buildings—“polite buildings” was the description that came to her as she recalled their appearance, perfectly groomed, keeping their private life absolutely to themselves. She felt a sudden hatred for the rows of pert little dwellings that she saw all round; “brick trimmings!” she thought with disgust as her eye fell on the oblongs and stars and cubes inlaid in musty red on a background of livid ginger. There was nothing polite about them; they seemed positively loquacious about themselves and their trimmings and the nice people that lived in them. Horrid houses, she thought.
Teresa, though she did not know it, was distilling for herself a sort of love potion from the drabness and hostility. As she once said to her sister, the smells and the mysterious purpose behind the faces in the fog intoxicated her. All that she knew about what she felt was that an insistent passion was dragging her towards some end that she could not see. The interest that she found in her conversations with Strickland gave her a clue towards the direction from which knowledge of her desire was coming to her, and gave her relief from the excitement at the same time because Strickland had no grievance against society; she only disliked people—ladies especially—talking “through their hats” about work. For instance, she did not mind Cyril or Teresa being untidy, because “it was their place to leave things about” and she was paid to look after them. They never referred to her duties nor seemed to think about them. Mrs. Carpenter and Susie implied by their manner that they were selected by Providence to lead comfortable lives for the reason that every one of their common attributes of humanity, such as their legs and their brains, were of such superior quality that their births, their lives and their deaths must not be confused with similar occurrences in other houses. Work! Of course they knew all about work! Did they not exhaust themselves in explaining how early rising and attention to detail actually saves labour? If you clean a room thoroughly every day there is no need to turn it out once a fortnight; if you clear up as you go, wipe the plates with paper and burn it directly to avoid clogging the sink, and if you wear gloves for the roughest work and put glycerine on the hands after washing, there should be at least two clear hours in the afternoon for mending stockings or even making clothes. That was the point where Strickland became “horn mad,” as she said. “I’d sooner earn me money by being starved and scolded as me mother was,” she declared, “than have it explained that there’s nothing to complain of. I’d rather have it all wrong and keep my liberty to object.”
“But Strickland,” Teresa interrupted, “don’t you remember when you first came you said you wouldn’t be blasted by father and you were going to leave?”
“Yes,” she replied, “and so I should have if he had made out, as some do, that it was all a misunderstanding. But when I saw that it was just his way, as you said, and he wasn’t aware of it, you will understand that it was no business of mine and I didn’t object. There’s never anything personal about the General’s language, I will say that for him. It seems it’s his nature, like my brother.”
She took no notice of Evangeline, neither liked nor disliked her. “She’s a young lady that will marry,” she observed, “and change her servants and not notice who comes and goes nor how the work is done. She won’t make much of a house, but no doubt she’ll keep a housekeeper and not notice how the money goes. She’ll always be a favourite with the gentlemen. My brother’s wife is like that. You never saw such a house—and the mess! I often tidy it all up for her and it’s all the same next day. And yet he thinks the world of her and keeps out of the public house so as he can take her about. And my cousin Gladys is just the opposite; everything tidy and as it should be, but she’ll talk, talk, talk the whole day, pointing out what she’s done; and her husband has taken to drink; he can’t stand it, he says.”
Strickland was right. Evangeline was already proving her capacity for being a favourite with the gentlemen by penetrating, one by one, Captain Hatton’s well-ordered defences. Being her father’s A.D.C. he was, as he had warned them on the first morning, so much about the house that he preferred they should not notice him; but then as Cyril counter-warned him, “they were a damned noticing family.”