Authors: Elswyth Thane
“I have, so help me. That’s official.”
“Well, excuse me for butting in, won’t you. I mean—it’s all new to you here. Look, Steve—don’t fall for it, will you. This Cause she has taken up with is no good, not in its international scheme, certainly. They say, ‘If you want to stop war in the world, stop war in the home.’ They say, ‘Changed individuals mean Changed nations.’ Stuff like that. It sounds all right. But, Steve—all it means abroad is that we’ve gone soft in the head—easy pickings. They laugh at us, for trying to sell them that kind of thing. I’m convinced that Victor laughs himself sick at Evadne’s crowd, but he pretends to string along with them for what he can get out of it—what he thinks is inside stuff on British public opinion and psychology and so on—what he wants to believe is indicative of our state of mind—what he doubtless reports in Berlin as fatty degeneration of the democracies—
and
because he’s gone on Evadne.”
“He is?” Stephen was watching him soberly now.
“Mind you, he won’t ever want to marry her,” said Jeff gently, and watched Stephen curl up inside, like a steel spring. “Now, wait a minute, Evadne is sound, she won’t—won’t stand any downright nonsense from him if she sees it coming. She
is
honest and pure and—all those words they use out loud. But she’s all wound up in the idea of being a Good Influence over Victor, and through him over all Germany and the whole damn’ world. It’s her Joan of Arc complex again. You’re right up against it, Steve, and you’ve got a right to know that.”
“Thanks,” said Stephen thoughtfully. “Thanks, pal.”
“And look out for Hermione,” Jeff continued. “You can joke about Hermione. I do myself. But there again—the Cause defeats its own purpose. Hermione is using it to hold on to Evadne—she will use anything to do that. She’s got her, and she doesn’t mean to let her get away again.”
“You don’t mean Hermione is
queer!
”
Stephen demanded.
“No. Not as bad as that, I think,” Jeff answered without quibbling. “But it’s not good, Steve. I had to mention it.”
“I’m glad you did.” All the jester, all the clown and mountebank were gone from Stephen at that moment. “I hadn’t got it figured out as far as that.”
“You’re in time,” said Jeff. “But you’ve not got much time to
spare, the ways things are. Get on with it.”
“I will,” said Stephen. “Beginning now.”
‘There’s just one more thing,” Jeff added. “Evadne is obstinate as hell. Don’t give up.”
“Who, me?” Stephen’s grin came back. “Never mind the obstinacy, I’ll take care of that! And what else am I up against? A muscle-bound fritz and a sour old maid! If I can’t lick the pair of them I’d better go back to school!”
Bracken returned from Paris with the latest score there—which was that it was too late again to do anything. The Locarno Powers had met and expressed indignation, face to face with the grim fact that the Pact signed ten years ago was now extinct. France also expressed the opinion that there would be war within two years if Berlin was not forced at once to back down, but Britain could not guarantee military aid unless France’s borders were first violated. The detrainment points for German invasion of France had been advanced one hundred miles, and the Rhine would now be fortified by Germany. The chance of a short, quick war to hold down the Nazis, if not unseat them, had gone by again in inaction and indecision. And the worst thing about it, said Bracken, was that it made the Western Powers look like jackasses in Russian eyes. The League had failed against Italy in Abyssinia, but France nevertheless appealed to the League against Germany in the Rhineland, and sent troops into the Maginot Line.
The days slid by and still nothing went wrong. (Nothing more, Jeff pointed out.) So Sylvia got her first-night party,
including champagne, and everybody was there, and the general impression of brilliant success mounted. Even Mab was there, rigid with excitement—Jeff had had rather a battle over that, because her mother had insisted that she could just as well go to the first matinée with Miss Sim. Jeff put his foot down and said that Mab was going with him, in the box, as his particular guest, and what’s more, she was coming to the party afterwards and taste champagne. “It will be something for her to remember,” he said to Irene. “Stephen’s first night in London can only happen once, and the way things are, when Mab is what you call old enough there might not be any champagne parties after first nights. There might not be any first nights.” “Oh, Jeff, you
don’t
think there’s going to be another war!” moaned Irene, and gave in at once.
Even Midge was there, singing, in Sylvia’s dressing-room, and he went on to the party in his big cage, where he sat in state on the grand piano and sang, unheard, in the cheerful hubbub. “That canary ought to be in bed,” somebody said. “Part nightingale, no doubt,” somebody else said, and the evening had reached a point where that was considered very funny.
By the time Jeff handed Mab his own glass for her first champagne, she was already aware that Sylvia was The One. Nobody, in Mab’s opinion, could hesitate between Sylvia and Evadne. And obviously, with Sylvia in the same world, the right age, and of course willing, Jeff would never wait for an obscure child cousin to grow up and improve her looks. Sylvia was there, a ready-made bride for Jeff, the most beautiful, perfect thing Mab had ever seen. She had manners too. She didn’t patronize the young, nor ignore them, nor pillory them with too much notice. She just treated them like human beings—people she was glad to see. And even then, Mab had no idea, of the miraculous extent of Sylvia’s good manners, that in the midst of a London first night she could manage to focus on a small, sensitive, ecstatic child and greet her with the exact mixture of friendliness and formality to win her everlasting worship. She
shook
hands,
Mab remembered over and over
again. She didn’t ask how old I was, and if I went to school, and if I had a dog. I might have been as old as she is. Sylvia not only sang and danced in a spotlight that followed her all over the stage, she knew how to behave when the show was over.
Almost,
she was good enough for Jeff.
Other people besides Mab were aware by now that Jeff and Sylvia were in love. It was Phoebe who called Bracken’s attention to it, and there was no need to remind him of the complications. There was not only Jeff’s health, which was more suspect than he believed, there was the cousinship, not so close as the blood tie that had wrecked Sue’s young romance with Sedgwick years ago, but close enough for consideration, much closer than the negligible link between Evadne and Stephen. “People don’t seem to make so much of it now as they used to,” Phoebe said hopefully. “And of course they might not have children. You don’t think we ought to bring it up?” “Hell, no, let ’em be happy if they can,” Bracken sighed.
It was obvious when the reviews came in that the show was good for a run, and Europe was apparently not going to blow up just yet, so Bracken took a large furnished flat in Upper Brook Street as family headquarters in London for the summer. The Italians were bombing the Red Cross in Abyssinia, and using poison gas on Haile Selassie’s native warriors. Addis Ababa fell, and the Emperor escaped capture by getting away to Palestine in a British cruiser. The
Illustrated
London
News
reprinted a full-page imaginative drawing from a German paper showing the presumable result of a gas attack from the air on a modern city—well-dressed women lying dead in the street, their clothing artistically disarranged, with dead children beside them, hats and handbags strewn about, every visible human being prostrate, though the surrounding masonry was only slightly damaged. The same reproduction had appeared in the
News
only a few years ago—when the possibility had seemed much more remote. Now it was accompanied by an article on refuge-rooms, garden dugouts, and gas-masks for civilians—in England itself.
Stephen brought Evadne back to the flat in Upper Brook
Street one afternoon at tea-time—they had been to a picture gallery—and they found Sylvia gazing at the gas-attack pages in horror. She made them look too, and Evadne said, “But it’s all so stupid and useless, if only people would
believe
that it needn’t happen!”
“But it’s no good half the people in the world believing that when the other half don’t,” said Stephen patiently. “Until Germans believe it too, we can’t afford to.”
“Victor says that’s just the way they feel about us!” cried Evadne. “They think they must do all this in self-defence
too!
”
“Rats,” said Stephen.
A little to his surprise, she did not pursue the argument in Victor’s defence, as she might have done a few weeks earlier. She was looking down at the magazine in Sylvia’s hands, their two heads bent above it—Sylvia’s soft honey-coloured hair falling in loose waves on her little neck, Evadne’s crisp chestnut curls cut shorter, swept back from a high white brow and childish temples. It struck Stephen forcibly in the little silence that fell how different they were, the two most precious women in his life—his cherished, light-hearted sister, serene and shining and secure in her birthright of peace and confidence, and the ardent, troubled creature beside her, so wrong-headed and provoking and unaware, this vulnerable, loving, pathetic Evadne whom he meant to marry if it took him all the rest of his natural life, and sometimes he thought it might, at the present rate of progress.
He had encountered Victor more than once by now, and they had preserved the amenities, but the enmity between them was high, wide and handsome. Stephen objected to Victor’s slightly bullying air of possessiveness with Evadne, affectionate but belittling, even dictatorial, as though she were some kind of pet, a little lower than a horse and a little higher than a dog. He objected to Evadne’s unquestioning acceptance of it, and of Victor’s flamboyant presence in her life, and to the effect it had on her own puppyish friendliness—so that one was reminded of the way a puppy will abase itself under a fondling hand, pleased and placating and hopeful, as though the favour
might not last. It was not, in Stephen’s experience, the way a pretty girl had a right to behave. It was Victor’s place to do the wagging and the worshiping, and damn lucky if she encouraged him at all. It would do Victor good, Stephen thought, to be one of Sylvia’s beaux for a while. Not that Sylvia took advantage or was a coquette. She simply knew her place, and if anybody didn’t like it they could lump it. Of course, Sylvia had always gone a bit out of her way for Jeff, but that was different, Jeff appreciated it, and anyway Jeff was—well, special. There was nothing special about Victor, so far as Stephen could see, and his manners were almost certainly only skin deep. Underneath their showy façade lay a brutal ingrained inconsiderateness and a humourless lack of imagination, especially about women. One wondered why Hermione tolerated Victor at the flat at all, the way he treated her—or rather, the way he ignored her, as though she simply wasn’t there, or as though she was a grandmother and cross-eyed.
Stephen didn’t like Hermione, he didn’t like anything about her, especially the way she bullied Evadne—(why did
everyone
bully Evadne?)—but at the same time he was handicapped by the fact that she was female and he was a Virginian, and naturally a kindhearted, easy-going man besides. In spite of pep-talks from Jeff, who was inclined to be tougher than Stephen with people who needed it, regardless of their gender, and in spite of Stephen’s own increasing exasperation with Hermione in all her ways, he still hoped that she was human, and could be won over and made to listen to reason, and therefore he was still polite to her, humoured her rudeness, and sometimes even included her in his presents and outings. As a consequence Hermione somewhat more than tolerated him. In fact, she almost bridled and preened. “She
likes
you,” Evadne reported with some
empressement,
as though Hermione were the Queen Dowager. “You’ve got round her.” That was all right with Stephen, he was used to being liked, but he had no idea where in this case it was leading.
He objected also to Evadne’s attitude of anxious compliance with Hermione’s wishes and moods. Hermione’s likes and
dislikes—the latter, it seemed, much more numerous—were constantly alluded to in Evadne’s conversation, even when Hermione was not present. “Hermione doesn’t like—” was sufficient reason for anything to be dispensed with or not done. “Hermione likes—” was ample excuse for going to any amount of trouble. But why, Stephen would put the question to himself soberly in his ruminations, why shouldn’t Evadne ever say’ “
I
like—” as a good reason for something sometimes?
Because of her inarticulate soft-heartedness and passionate loyalties, both stimulated and played upon by the doctrines of the Cause, Stephen had no way of knowing that Hermione was her first experience of living with someone who was not constitutionally kind, who worked up moods and grievances and inflicted them on bystanders, who liked to wound with well-chosen words and to create situations in which the guilt for ensuing unpleasantness somehow came to rest on the innocent instead of on herself where it belonged. And because of Evadne’s earnest, fumbling goodwill and total lack of the
arrière-pensée,
she was never able to see quite how these things got started or who was responsible, and so was reduced by apprehension to spending her life in a somewhat breathless effort to forestall the next crisis without having any idea which direction it was coming from.
Stephen so far saw only the result of this state of affairs, which was Evadne crawling to Hermione, and it puzzled him, for she had spirit enough about everything else. He was never there to encounter the cold, seething silences in which Hermione could exist for hours when he had left them alone together after making Evadne late getting home, or failing in some way to acknowledge Hermione’s equal desirability as a companion—nor to hear the devious ways she took to arrive at the conversational opening she needed to make the jibe she had devised. And anyway, if such a matter had been left to him to deal with, he would have reacted with his characteristic cheerful so-what logic instead of regarding each separate occasion as the end of the world which it always seemed to Evadne. Before she went to live with Hermione she was accustomed to the affectionate
tolerance of Virginia’s household, where if they had to come reproof and discipline were swift and mercifully brief. Therefore she first encountered Hermione’s Spanish Inquisition tactics with a kind of bruised astonishment. She protested innocence of intent, ignorance of fault, anxiety never to offend—she apologized, she offered extravagant amends, she meekly accepted a guilt which was never hers, she placated and appeased.