And you should see Mrs. Trotter mimicking “Mrs. General” to the wives of Cyril’s staff, all of whom she knows intimately! Of course it got round in time to Susie through Mrs. Carpenter, who heard of it from the wife of the Staff-Captain, who was rather keen on getting into the University set.
Evangeline was happy at this time, living at a place we will call Drage, where Cyril had got Evan an appointment. He found there several men who had been with him in the trenches. Their recollections pictured him as a man who had been of the greatest value as an unfailing joke; a good joke, too, for you never knew when it mightn’t blow you sky high. It was always worth while raising him when you had a lot to think of, because his explosions of temper were entertaining enough to take your mind off any unpleasantness. And he was such a thoroughly good fellow; would do anything or go anywhere, and his mechanical genius had earned their admiration and gratitude for many improvised good things. Hicks remembered him taking a Hun’s watch to pieces in his dug-out and—the story that followed was always a success. It preceded his arrival at Drage, and Evan found everyone pleased to welcome him and his wife.
Evangeline’s enthusiasms and her naïveté were soon the talk of the place. Some of the women regarded her as a fool and some as “a very dashing young person.” She certainly was, as Strickland had prophesied, “a favourite with the gentlemen.” There is a pose of free speech and free living that is as closely bound by its self-imposed limits as any other doctrine, and it is particularly false because the naturally free have never heard of freedom; as Cyril would have pointed out, “it was knowledge of the damned thing’s existence that made Eve a slave to propriety.” Evangeline’s knowledge of good and evil was, as we have seen, gathered almost entirely from the newspapers, and was therefore negligible. So she thought freely (which is different from being a free thinker) and Evan, who had eaten his apple with attention, was scandalised, and the ladies of Drage, who wore their aprons merely as a class distinction, cutting them long or short or leaving them off altogether, as fashion dictated, were astonished at her behaviour. Indeed when her instincts did, as she once hoped they would, “burst with a pop in the sun” of experience, she loved creation with a generosity that might have led her into all sorts of trouble had she been as faithless a woman as her mother. She was fascinated by the idea of having a child of her own, “a brand new person, whom no one has ever seen before, conjured from the vasty deep,” she said (with some school recollection of a quotation connected with impressive magic). She adored Evan as the god behind the machine and lost a great deal of the interest in his character that had made her take pride in his reluctant confidences. Splitting hairs in argument about sin seemed to her an absurd waste of time when it was clear that no one would bother to sin if he were happy; and who could be other than happy when the war was over and a new generation coming into life? Evan’s friends enjoyed her hospitality in peace, for she never teased them by the militant chastity, provoking but unyielding, which turns many a good bride into a firebrand. The average Englishman does not often engage in illicit love affairs unless they are offered him; so Evangeline’s lack of decorum was regarded as a new and perfectly innocent game. Evan, with his explosive seriousness, had been a first-class jest in the old days, and here he was back again, married to some one just as funny in an opposite way, and the two together were simply splendid. The jokers were never tired of setting the one against the other in public, without an idea that differences of opinion could hold any danger for two people so obviously in love. They relished the stories that went round about Evangeline’s latest indiscretions and told how shirty old Evan had been and how the two had gone off together afterwards talking all the way and you could bet she got it properly in the neck when they reached home. One evening, these mischief makers who had egged on Evangeline to persuade poor old Hicks to do his Fiji dance, with young Blake lashed to a chair in the character of a maiden, went home to bed in the highest spirits, and left Evangeline and her husband alone.
“I shall chuck my job at once and leave here if you ever encourage that sort of thing again,” he said, standing in front of the embers of the fire that had made the little room so cheerful earlier in the evening. He had put young Blake’s chair back into its place with a savage push, and was now winding up the string that had been broken in the final ecstasy that brought the house down. Evangeline stared at him with round, startled eyes. “Darling Evan,” she said, “it was a game. What on earth is the matter?”
“It was outrageous. If you had ever been among savages——” he stopped, speechless.
“But I haven’t,” she argued. “That’s just it. I want to know. It was fascinating. I felt as if I were the girl and he were getting nearer and nearer—it was gloriously exciting. And anyhow—dear Evan—don’t be an ass; it was pure farce, and I don’t believe he knows anything about Fijians at all.”
“My mother would have died before she would have allowed such a thing in her drawing-room,” said Evan. “You have no womanly dignity. Everyone talks about you and the way you behave as if you were married to the whole staff.”
“Oh, what is the matter with you?” cried Evangeline. “I was so happy and I have done nothing whatever. I don’t know what you are trying to get at. How can I be married to the whole staff?”
“I assure you no stranger could point out which was your husband in a mixed gathering,” he replied coldly.
“Oh my dear, you’re like an eclipse of the sun,” she said, getting up and putting her arms round his neck. “I have been so happy that I had forgotten all your Mumbo Jumbo of this or that being right or wrong, that you used to make my flesh creep with till I thought you really knew about it. I believe you would blow out pleasure like a lamp if you could and make us all sit and eat repentance by corpse light. I am going to make another fire in my room and have tea and cake there, and if you don’t come and cheer up I’ll telephone for one of my other husbands to come instead.” So Evan relented until the next time.