The confessions of a well-meaning woman

by Stephen McKenna

You must not ask me what happened. I have never been forced to study the methods of campaign which a woman adopts for such a purpose. No doubt she tried first of all to attract him innocently. Whatever success she had, poor Will is not free to marry where his heart leads him, unless his heart leads him where there is some money (I have always, as you know, dreaded an entanglement with some girl whom he would simply have to support all his life); and Will is too honourable to give any encouragement to some one he has no intention of marrying. You will understand me, too, when I say that no one could have called it a very suitable alliance—for him or for her; it is no kindness to a girl to transport her from her own world, though—poor souls!—they all fancy that, if they can achieve a great match, they will be happy, and the rest will come by the light of nature. Goodness me, have we not seen that tragically disproved with Ruth Brackenbury and Kathleen Spenworth? Will and this girl had nothing in common. If she married him, it would be over my dead body...

If she did not see this, at least she saw that she was making no impression on my boy; and then I am sadly afraid that she deliberately laid herself out to tempt him. I have seen enough of life to know that, when a woman abandons herself to this kind of thing, very few even of the purest and best are proof against her wiles. This Molly had made up her mind to get a hold on Will; and, once she had decided on that, she would stop at nothing.

I never knew a thing at the time. When my boy suddenly arrived in London, when the mad clergyman followed him and insisted on seeing Arthur, I thought that she would content herself with making him compromise her. If they could be discovered kissing ... as they were... And that was all that even her father was allowed to know at the time, though she talked about a promise of marriage. But she was clever enough to know that she couldn't make a man marry her because he had kissed her...

So far as I can see, there is no doubt at all... I did not ask Will, because I could not bear him to tell me an untruth; and the code ordains that a man must never admit such a thing, always the woman must be shielded. One did not need to be his mother in order to see that he was worried. Remorse... The sense that nothing could ever again be the same... Hatred of himself... Hatred of her... And, all the while, I had to sit with my hands in my lap, seeing his health and happiness ruined. He could not eat, he could not sleep; Sir Appleton kept writing and telephoning to ask when Will was coming to see him, but there was no question of trying to find fresh work... And at any moment this wild man of the woods might descend upon us again.

The first time he came—I, if you please, was not allowed in the room—, Arthur would only stamp up and down, saying that Will—our boy—was a scamp and deserved horse-whipping. I begged for enlightenment, but at this period the wild man only claimed that Will had compromised his Molly and that there had been a promise of marriage... Exactly what one would have expected! Precisely what the girl was working for! That was the moment to strike and to strike hard. "A promise of marriage? Prove it!" I well knew that Will was too instinctively wise to write her letters—and they were in the same house!—or to give her presents. But I was informed that this was not a woman's province. So we dragged on, waiting for the blow...

I quite dreaded the Morecambe post-mark. The girl wrote every other day, and every letter seemed to plunge poor Will into deeper gloom. The code would not let him make a confidant of his mother, but one day I saw one of these letters. It bore no name and opened with a flood of mingled passion and reproach; only when I saw "Your heart-broken Molly" at the end did I realize that the letter was intended for Will. She was begging him to come back and talking a great deal about his "promise"... I should have paid no attention if there had not been other things as well: talk about her "honour" and so on and so forth... Her "soul"... God would never forgive her—the egotism of the girl! ... Then I felt that, to get a hold on Will, she had stopped at nothing...

I wonder what you would have done in my place? ... Constant dripping wears away a stone, and this dazing attack would in time have broken down my boy's resistance. Suppose he had let himself be blackmailed into marrying her! No money on either side—and Will's parents could do nothing to help—, not a taste in common, two people drawn from different worlds... And this terrible, blasting knowledge that he—and she—and I had of the girl's character. Ruin, misery lay before them. And nothing else...

I had to save Will from any temptation to yield. If he could have fallen in love with some nice girl and forgotten the whole episode... If I could have sent him right away... It was not easy, and you know better than any one that my hands have been fairly full. At one time I thought that South American woman was attracted by him, at another my niece Phyllida roused to interest. He was so much preoccupied that he seemed indifferent to women; one after another, they gave him up in despair. Then I bethought me of my second string and cast about in my mind for means to send him far away where he could forget this girl and her importunity...

You have met Sir Appleton Deepe in this house. You have met him more than once and you have always been too dear and too discreet to ask, to hint, to raise an eyebrow in mild wonder that I should be liée with such a man. Of his kind I believe he has no rival. As a mere boy he was sent out to one of the Chinese branches of the business; and by sheer hard work, by studying the natives and learning their requirements he had, before he was forty, built up the trade of his firm to its present gigantic dimensions. Now he is senior partner and a millionaire many times over, with patronage beyond one's wildest dreams. Curious! These "merchant princes" are all the same—never content to stick to their business, always looking for fresh worlds to conquer. I met Sir Appleton—he was plain Mr. Deepe then—in the early days of the war; and, though any intimacy was out of the question, I felt that he was a man to keep one's eye on for the days when the war would be over and all our boys would be wondering what to do next. He had great ideas then of going into politics—something that Lady Maitland let fall had started the train, and he was convinced that the business man had the world at his feet. (I could not help wondering whether she hoped to exploit him on behalf of that worthless youngest boy of hers, the one who evaded military service by hiding in one of the government offices.)

"No, Mr. Deepe," I said. "To use one of your own phrases, you have missed your market. The business men have got in before you." And, goodness me, in those days, Whitehall was like a foreign capital! Even the ministers were unheard-of, and every one seemed to be a mining magnate or a shipping magnate or a railway magnate or the keeper of a shop... If one had a favour to ask, one quite literally did not know whom to approach. And they were always changing... "No, Mr. Deepe," I said, "some enter society through politics, others enter politics through society; but no man ever rose to the top of the political tree—and stayed there—without backing"...