Mrs. Dowdall

“ Will you come with me, dear Dicky? I wish you would,” said Susie.
Teresa said she would. Sometime the idea of Aldwych without David must be recognised and dealt with. She also wished her mother to forget that “a girl may regret some day” having refused a beautiful old place in the country and a really good husband “just for an idea.” Poor little Teresa supposed that any show of reluctance to go back to the house might be taken as evidence of a weak spot in her armour. Neither she nor Evangeline had ever known how much of the world their mother detected from behind her veil of misty sweetness. ”

“ Men go into the world and become accustomed to hardness and cruelty, especially in foreign countries, with which a great port like this is constantly in touch. They drink and quarrel, and their poor homes have so little beauty to encourage them. Is it to be wondered at that a young girl who dreams of romance and her own little home and the sound of baby feet should refuse to believe that these things are of less value to the rough sailor or soldier or merchant, drunk with wine and full of strong passions that have no place in her finer nature? ”

“ Then when she hid her sympathy from Ivor and forced herself to suffer for the sake of keeping him with her, she could see a look of childish judgment in his eyes that placed her unjustly in the category she dreaded, that of people who have grown up and are beyond the pale of confidence from the young. If she went on pretending for his sake, she said to herself, he would become like Romulus and Remus, living in his own thoughts without a mother. ”

“ Vachell explained. “Don’t you want to take your share in the world?”
“What sort of share?” said Evangeline. “I thought I had got one; but I am too stupid to do things, if you mean having a profession.”
“Have you ever tried, may I ask?” Mr. Fisk inquired. “Perhaps you hardly know your powers.”
“You like people to be happy, I know,” said Mrs. Vachell. “Why not take steps to make them so? Don’t you find, for instance, that men have too much power over their families?”
Evangeline’s private anxieties awoke. “Do you mean when they can say how children are to be brought up?” ”

“ Potter to such a remote corner of Teresa’s consciousness that when she did remember her again the recollection had no more sting than a bad dream. She ate her dinner, served by willing men and women who performed their duties like priests of Isis, instead of, as dear Strickland did, giving her the uneasy feeling that one course would have been quite enough if ladies were not so greedy. She had observed sometimes to Evangeline that Millport maids treated their mistresses as if they were parrots whose dirty cages had to be cleaned out, and whom it “took up people’s time” to feed. ”

“ I had meant to say a great deal about David Varens during this dinner party. But Millport has proved too strong for him. It always must have been and is now overpowering for the gentle, detached characters whose strength is in enjoyment of the immediate thing that circumstances have put in their way to be done as well as possible; people who accept inherited comfort and adventitious pain equally, as it comes; who love and hate by instinct without recognition of any outside interests to modify their decision and who never go back on a verdict given by this tribunal of taste. ”

“ There, down by the sea with his devoted mother and aunt and nurse, he played and bathed and went his own way in peace, asking nothing that was unreasonable, kind-hearted, courageous and merry; the kind of child that terrifies its weaker relatives by the thought of what it has to meet in the future; of candid eyes coming upon hatred for the first time, small hands roughened by work and stained with blood from the noses of hostile neighbours with predatory instincts and a perverted sense of humour ”

“ Which sex was it that used to say, ‘My dear, that is unladylike. Don’t imitate that nasty bold girl who handles mice as if she were a navvy’? Now they are allowed to be competent or incompetent, as nature made them, and you are doing your best to rebuild the whole obstacle by saying, ‘All women are not what you think them. They are all something else. They have all got lovely, pure, high-browed minds and all men have horrid brutish ones.’ You are only changing a guerilla war into a series of pitched battles. I detest Mrs. Vachell. She looks like a martyr, and she is only a hunger striker. ”

“ What don’t I believe in?”
“I mean his kind of religion, and rectitude, and making oneself uncomfortable about nothing, and all that misunderstanding of everybody and looking out for badness.”
“You don’t need to look far,” said Mrs. Vachell.
“Do you think so?” said Evangeline, surprised. “Now that is just what I don’t. I think there would be hardly any badness if people didn’t make it by believing in it. But why do you think men are so stupid? You can’t have thought so in the war——” She became suddenly indignant. ”

“ 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? ”

“ They sat talking until it was time to go in to tea. Evangeline began to feel her contentment in the outdoor life she loved give way gradually before the force of purpose that Mrs. Vachell brought with her. The Sphinx who looked so calm among hungry crowds had the opposite effect on Evangeline’s simple enjoyment of things as they are. The smothered rebellion that is hidden by pride so long as the enemy is overpowering may suddenly break out and inflame a peaceful party of shepherds and set them running and shouting for an end that they never contemplated or desired. ”

“ I do wish no one had ever told you the story. You think women are always tempting men to this day.”
“So they are when it comes to marriage,” he asserted. “Don’t you make any mistake about that.”
Evangeline felt desperate, as if she were caught and entangled. “Do you mean that men never fall in love with them?” Tears gathered in her eyes. She had had some weary work at the last stand of Hatton’s doubts, and now her father, whom she loved and believed in as a friend, was going to take the top off the morning of her happiness.
Cyril understood and repented. ”

“ It seems to me sadder than any amount of difficulty in making ends meet.”
“Yes, indeed, it does,” said Mrs. Abel, greatly touched, poor little thing. “When I think of my own home and how difficult things are just now, and yet how we have been kept from all unhappiness, I think I hardly know how to be thankful enough.”
“It must be so delightful to have your husband with you in everything,” Susie said with a little sigh. “It must make up for any anxiety. If one is thoroughly understood nothing else matters. ”

“ General Fulton looked at her in exasperated admiration as she sat there, quietly warming her toes in front of the fire, meditative and candid; the typical gentle wife who patiently adds up the problems of life for her husband, and leaves his wisdom to unravel the answer. ”

“ Look how women fight!” Evangeline exclaimed in amazement, “and all about nothing! Men fight for something, and—I can’t bear to hear you say beastly things about them when they did——” Her voice broke and she stopped. Her eyes were bright and troubled as she looked at Mrs. Vachell in the hope of having mistaken her words.
“Don’t take what I say so much to heart,” Mrs. Vachell said gently. “You are a very feminine woman. You ought to turn your sympathies on to your own sex, who have to endure seeing their lovers and sons killed because countries are governed by brutes and knaves and idiots. ”

“ Vachell said that men will only help to clear up a mess. They won’t ever make a plan to prevent it.”
“Oh,” said Cyril, “so the plot is pretty deep, is it? How big is the membership?”
“Just us three,” said Evangeline.
“Not Dicky?”
“No, no, Dicky is impossible. She wouldn’t give it away, but she would want me to fight it out with Evan. But I can’t, Father,—I can’t, I can’t. He has broken my nerve. I would fight for myself, but I can’t risk it when it is for Ivor. I can’t afford to lose. It is Evan’s own fault. I never thought of being deceitful until I met him.”
“And Mrs. Vachell?” added Cyril. ”

“ Vachell coolly. “I do the best I can and am proof against black looks. Angry faces are as soon dead as merry ones and their memory is not kept green.”
“Do you think a man’s feeling about children is always different from a woman’s?” Evangeline asked presently.
“Yes, very different,” Mrs. Vachell replied. “I think, if you ask me, they are the most ram-headed, firebrand, poker-fingered lumps of folly that could have been planted on an unhappy world to wreck its comfort.” ”

“ They knew by ancestral experience that the top dog is the thing to be. They sat as near the top as they could and gazed with admiration at those who pressed on them from above. No one who understood Cyril could suspect him of being impressive, but he took no interest in the Prices, so their natural inference from his behaviour was that he must be used to something better than themselves, and that would be something very good indeed. The train of thought runs easily to the conclusion that Cyril was worth cultivating. ”

“ So long as Britons never shall be slaves let us allow the Potters their public-house, the Carpenters their tea-table, the Fisks their blood and the passionate philanthropists their feast of reason and flow of soul. ”

“ It is rather like statistics; two people can add up the same figures and prove different results with them, one showing that trade is prospering and the other that it is going all wrong.”
“You know, I agree with him,” said Evangeline. “I don’t think you could do any good by selling everything. There is nothing you can give to people to make them happy if they don’t want to be. I have found that out.”
“But the people I am talking about do want to be happy,” Teresa argued passionately. “They are starving for what other people are throwing away because they can’t use all of it.” ”

“ There are some, I think, who want a revolution because they are miserable, and others who are miserable because they want a revolution, another lot who make other people’s misfortunes an excuse for making a row and some more who put all their misfortunes down to other people’s love of making a row. If you take a human body in that sort of contradictory mess into a doctor’s consulting room, he pays no attention to the details, but tells the patient to wash in the Ganges or eat a lightly-boiled onion an hour before sunset with his back to the north ”

“ We are making ourselves miserable about nothing. Go up to him now and spoil him to your heart’s content. But think over what I have said. You have so much good in you, Evangeline, if you would only not let yourself be carried away by this terror of all pain and discomfort.”
“I didn’t make a sound when Ivor was born,” she said in amazement. ”

“ How can a man be so mean as to force his wife to filthy, low tricks to keep their only son with her while he is a baby and she has done nothing wrong. How dare he do it! I shall be a wicked woman before he has done with me.”
Mrs. Vachell again shrugged her shoulders. “Wait,” she said, “it is coming. There can be no stopping it in the end. We are in Parliament; we are almost in the Law; we have one foot in the Church. Wait, Evangeline, my dear. And in the meantime we won’t throw away the old weapons till the new are ready. They haven’t done bad service in the past.” ”

“ Fisk contemptuously. “We’re going to alter all that; we’re going to make new laws by which man will have the right to live.”
“Yes, but not to stop others living,” said Teresa. “It’s silly; you know you can’t make laws; and who is going to carry them out if you do? You can’t make people do what you want just by telling them that you have made a law. There’s the army and navy too—but what is the good of arguing. You must know it is silly.”
“The army and navy are also learning to think, you’ll find,” said Mr. Fisk. ”

“ Susie agreed, “but it might be necessary until he got something else. He probably would very soon. He is so popular with everyone and so high principled. Anything to do with engineering delights him, and I should think there must be a great deal of that sort of thing going on everywhere just now. The whole world is making an effort to better everybody’s lives—except ours, of course, who have to pay for it. But one doesn’t grudge that. Personally I don’t mind how simply I live so long as I can have the things I want.” ”