May Sinclair

“ Rickards and Elise Levitt. Elise, if you cared to be critical, had the same defects: short legs, loose hips; the same exaggerations: the toppling breasts underpinned by the shafts of her stays. Not Mr. Waddington's taste. And yet—and yet Elise had contrived a charming and handsome effect out of black eyes and the milk-white teeth in the ivory-white face. The play of the black eyebrows distracted you from the equine bend of the nose that sprang between them; the movements of her mouth, the white flash of its smile, made you forget its thinness and hardness and the slight heaviness of its jaw. ”

“ Waddington was going to die. Supposing his congestion turned to pneumonia? There was so much of him to be ill, and those big men always did die when they got pneumonia.
Mr. Waddington could hear Barbara's quiet voice saying something to Fanny; he could see her unhappy, anxious face. He enjoyed Barbara's anxiety. He enjoyed the cause of it, his illness. So long as he was actually alive he even enjoyed the thought that, if his congestion turned to pneumonia, he might actually die. There was a dignity, a prestige about being dead that appealed to him. ”

“ Fanny—Fanny. His wife. Why hadn't his wife the loyalty and intelligence of Barbara, the enthusiasm, the seriousness of Elise? He needn't have any conscientious scruples on Fanny's account; she had driven him to Elise with her frivolity, her eternal smiling. Of course he knew that she cared for him, that he had power over her, that there had never been and never would be any other man for Fanny; but he couldn't go on with Fanny's levity for ever. He wanted something more; something sound and solid; something that Elise gave him and no other woman. Any man would want it. ”

“ Ralph and Horace found themselves in the middle of the empty benches laughing into each other's faces. Colonel Grainger and Mr. Hitchin stood beside them, smiling with intolerable benevolence.
Mr. Hitchin was saying: "The men are all right, Mr. Bevan. They don't mean any harm. They just got a bit out of hand."
Horace saw that they were being magnanimous, and the thought maddened him. "I don't blame the men," he said, "and I don't blame you, Hitchin. You don't know any better. But Colonel Grainger ought to be damned well ashamed of himself, and I hope he is." ”

“ Bostock's Bank at Wyck, was a perpetual tribute to his power. Mr. Waddington had nothing like the same complacence in thinking of his own son Horace; but then Horace's existence and his activity were not a tribute but a menace, a standing danger, not only to his power but to his fascination, his sense of himself as a still young, still brilliant and effective personality. (Horace inherited his mother's deplorable lack of seriousness.) And it was in Mrs. Levitt's society that Mr. Waddington was most conscious of his youth, his brilliance and effect. ”

“ Waddington wished he would, and Horry too.
"He won't skid," said Barbara; "if he does I'll hop off."
"We'll come back," said Ralph, "if we don't get on all right."
They started in a duet of explosions, the motor-bicycles hissing and crunching through the light snow. Barbara, swinging on Ralph's carrier, waved her hand light-heartedly to Mr. Waddington. He hated Barbara; but far more than Barbara he hated Horry, and far more than Horry he hated Ralph.
"He'd no business to take her," he said. "She'd no business to go."
"You can't stop them, my dear," said Fanny; "they're too young." ”

“ But Elise was not in love with the fellow. No, no. He was sure of Elise; he knew the symptoms; you couldn't mistake them. But she might marry Markham, all the same. Out of boredom, out of uncertainty, out of desperation. He was not going to let that happen; he would make it impossible; he would give Elise the certainty she wanted now.
"You said I was different."
Playful reproach. But she would understand.
"So you are. You're a married man, too, aren't you?"
"I thought we'd agreed to forget it."
"Forget it? Forget Mrs. Waddington?"
"Yes, forget her. You knew me long before you knew Fanny. ”

“ He rang the bell and told Partridge to show Mrs. Levitt into the library and to bring tea there. The library was his room. He could do what he liked in it. The girl Fanny laughed at him out of the corners of her eyes as he went. Suddenly he felt tender and gentle to her, because of Elise.
When Elise came she found him seated in his armchair absorbed in a book. He rose in a dreamy attitude, as if he were still dazed and abstracted with his reading.
Thus, at the very start, he gave himself the advantage; he showed himself superior to Elise. Intellectually and morally superior. ”

“ She had been out, that is to say, she had judged it more becoming to her dignity not to be at home when Fanny called; and Fanny had been actually out when Mrs. Levitt called, so that they met for the first time at the garden party.
"It's absurd our not knowing each other," Fanny said, "when my husband knows you so well."
"I've always felt, Mrs. Waddington, that I ought to know you, if it's only to tell you how good he's been to me. But, of course, you know it."
"I know it quite well. He's always being good to people. He likes it. ”

“ Not, mind you, because it's perfect Tudor of the sixteenth century, nor because the Earl of Warwick gave it to his great-grandfather's great-great-grandfather, but because it's his Manor. Horatio Bysshe Waddington's Manor. Of course, it's got to be what it is because any other sort of Manor wouldn't be good enough for Bysshe."
"It's an extension of his ego, too?"
"Yes. Horatio's ego spreading itself in wings and bursting into ball-topped gables and overflowing into a lovely garden and a park. There isn't a tree, there isn't a flower that hasn't got bits of Horatio in it." ”

“ Levitt could see him plainly, no summons from her beautiful eyes invited his approach.
His behaviour became noticeable. It was observed chiefly by his son
Horry.
Horry took Barbara apart. "I say, have you seen my guv'nor?"
"No. What? Where?"
She could see by his face that he was drawing her into some iniquitous, secret by-path of diversion.
"There, just behind you. Turn round—this way—but don't look as if you'd spotted him.... Did you ever see anything like him? He's like a Newfoundland dog trying to look over a gate. It wouldn't be half so funny if he wasn't so dignified all the time." ”

“ But how can you be such an angel to her, Fanny?"
"I'm not. I'm only decent. I hate using our position to break her poor back. Telling her we're Waddingtons of Wyck and she's only Mrs. Levitt."
"It was the handiest weapon. And you didn't use it. I'm not a Waddington of Wyck. Besides, it's true; she can't blackmail him in his own county. You don't seem to realize how horrid she was, and how jolly dangerous."
"No," Fanny said, "I don't realize people's horridness. As for danger, I don't want to disparage your performance, Barbara, but she seems to me to have been an easy prey." ”

“ Waddington was afraid of his son. He was never the same man when he was about. The presence of young Horace—tall for sixteen and developing rapidly—was fatal to the illusion of his youth. And Horace had a way of commenting disadvantageously on everything his father said or did; he had a perfect genius for humorous depreciation. At any rate, he and his mother behaved as if they thought it was humorous, and many of his remarks seemed to strike other people—Sir John and Lady Corbett, for example, and Ralph Bevan—in the same light. ”

“ Impossible, therefore, to exaggerate the importance of this League, therefore impossible to exaggerate the importance of this meeting, of every man and woman who has come here to-night. And when you rise from your seats and step up to this platform to enroll your names as members of the National League of Liberty, I want you to feel, every one of you, that you will be doing an important thing, a thing necessary to the nation, a thing in its way every bit as necessary and important as the thing the soldier does when he rises up out of his trench and goes over the top. ”

“ Waddington doesn't like Bolshevism. None of us like it. He doesn't like Socialism. I think he's got some wrong ideas about that. But he's dead right when he tells you, if you're afraid of Bolshevism and a Soviet Government, that the remedy lies in your own hands. If there ever is a day of reckoning, what Mr. Waddington would call a revolution in this country, you, we, ay, everyone of us sitting here, will be done with according as we do. ”

“ Piquant. And then, her clothes. Mrs. Levitt wore a coat and skirt, her sister's white serge with a distinction, a greyish stripe or something; clean straightness that stiffened and fined down her exuberance. One jewel, one bit of gold, and she might have been vulgar. But no. He thought: she knows what becomes her. Immaculate purity of white gloves, white shoes, white panama; and the black points of the ribbon, of her eyebrows, her eyes and hair. After all, the sort of woman Mr. Waddington liked to be seen out walking with. She made him feel slender.
"My dear Mr. Waddington, how good of you!" ”

“ Barbara said.
"Of course you're happy. It isn't everybody who enjoys Ralph Bevan's society. I daresay you're like me; you find him a great hindrance to serious conversation."
"That's why I enjoy him," Fanny said. "We'll ask him for to-morrow night."
Barbara tucked her chin into the collar of her coat. The car was running down Sheep Street into Lower Wyck. She stared out abstractedly at the eastern valley, the delicate green cornfields and pink fallows, the muffling of dim trees, all washed in the pale eastern blue, rolling out and up to the blue ridge. ”

“ Fanny, will you tell Kimber to be careful?"
Her face trembled with anxiety as she held it to him to be kissed. At that moment he was her child, escaping from her, going out rashly into the dangerous world.
"I like going to see Granny," said Fanny as Kimber tucked them up together in the car. "She makes me feel young."
"You may very well feel it," said Mr. Waddington. "It's only my mother's white hair, Miss Madden, that makes her look old."
"I thought," said Barbara, "she looked ever so much younger"—she was going to say, "than she is"—"than most people's mothers." ”

“ As she waited she looked up at the picture over the bureau in the recess of the fireplace, the portrait in oils of Horatio Bysshe Waddington, Fanny's husband.
He was seated, heavily seated with his spread width and folded height, in one of the brown-leather chairs of his library, dressed in a tweed coat, putty-coloured riding breeches, a buff waistcoat, and a grey-blue tie. The handsome, florid face was lifted in a noble pose above the stiff white collar; you could see the full, slightly drooping lower lip under the shaggy black moustache. ”

“ Hear!" from Colonel Grainger. Ralph whispered, "Camouflage!" to
Horace, who nodded.
"There is nothing in the aims of this League contrary to the interests of Labour. On the contrary"—he heard, as if somebody else had perpetrated it, the horrible repetition—"I mean to say—" His brain fought for another phrase madly and in vain. "On the contrary, it exists in order to safeguard the true interests, the best interests, of every working man and woman in the country."
"Hear! Hear!" from Sir John Corbett. Mr. Waddington smiled. ”

“ It gives him a certain simplicity and purity. He isn't a snob. He doesn't think about his money or his property, or his ancestors—he's got heaps—quite good ones. They don't matter. Nothing matters but himself."
"How about his book? Doesn't that matter?"
"It does and yet again it doesn't. He pretends he's only doing it to amuse himself, but it's really a projection of his ego into the Cotswolds. On the other hand, he'd hate it if you took him for a writing man when he's Horatio Bysshe Waddington. That's how he's got it into such a mess, because he can't get away from himself and his Manor." ”

“ From her study of the ancestral portraits in the Manor dining-room Barbara gathered that he owed to his mother the handsome Roman structure that held up his face, after all, so proudly through its layers of Waddington flesh. He had the Postlethwaite nose. The old lady looked at her, gratified by the grave attention of her eyes.
"Miss Madden can't believe that a little woman like me could have such a great big son," she said. "But, you see, he isn't big to me. He'll never be any older than thirteen." ”

“ Waddington, "and I see no reason why it should strike you."
"I don't like the look of her," said Sir John, quoting Major Markham.
"If you're trying to suggest that she's not straight, you're reading something into her look that isn't there."
"Come, Waddington, you know as well as I do that when a man's knocked about the world like you and me, he gets an instinct; he can tell pretty well by looking at her whether a woman's that sort or not."
"My dear Corbett, my instinct is at least as good as yours. ”

“ It was only my job."
"Was it your job to save me from that horrible woman?"
"Oh, yes; it was all in the day's work."
"My dear Barbara, no woman ever does a day's work like that for a man unless she cares for him. And unless she wants him to care for her."
"As it happens, it was Fanny I cared for. I was thinking of Fanny all the time.... If you'd think about Fanny more and about Mrs. Levitt and people less, it would be a good thing."
"It's too late to think about Fanny now. That's only your sweetness and goodness." ”