Authors: Elswyth Thane
“No. I just wondered. Anything about Mark’s coming home?”
“For the Jubilee, he thought.”
“Now, Mummy, don’t
begin.”
Evadne took her cup from Virginia’s hand without meeting her mother’s eyes.
“I didn’t say anything,” Virginia pointed out mildly.
“Hermione is coming to our meeting tomorrow night,” Evadne announced with a defiant change of subject, and Virginia glanced at Hermione under tilted brows.
“Have you decided to join?” she asked.
“It doesn’t commit me to anything to go to a meeting,” Hermione muttered, looking into her cup as she stirred her tea.
“Mummy, you can’t ‘join’ and you can’t ‘resign.’ It’s all according to the kind of life you live. You simply surrender, listen, and obey. If you keep open to guidance the inward peace will come.”
“I see,” said Virginia rather tightly, and Mab, advancing to the cake plate, remarked with an instinctive into-the-breach irrelevance that Jeff was bringing her a gift from Paris. “Jeff always brings wonderful gifts, doesn’t he,” Virginia agreed hastily.
“Like the Greeks,” said Hermione with her inevitable, often pointless sarcasm.
“Why don’t you like Jeff?” Mab asked directly, more from the tone than from the significance of Hermione’s words.
“But she does like him,” said Evadne in her clearest, most life-changing voice. “If only you would admit to yourself, Hermione, that you are in love with Jeff, and be
absolutely
honest
about it, it would stop hurting and then this foolish necessity to—”
Hermione’s spoon clattered into the saucer and she stood up, her small tense face quite white and her hands shaking so that the cup lurched as she set it down on the tray.
“Evadne, sometimes you go too far! It’s all very well to talk about Absolute Honesty, but that doesn’t give you the right to invade everyone’s life with a
scalpel!
Besides, I’m older than Jeff and he—I—you—I will
not
go to your horrible meeting and make a fool of myself, you can all let me alone, do you hear, and mind your own business!” And she begun rather fumblingly to collect her gloves and handbag, while Evadne rose with leisurely grace and went towards her, speaking in the soothing sort of tone one uses to a nervous horse.
“Now, now, darling, it only came to me a few days ago, that if only I could help you to get it all out in the open—if only you would talk things over with some understanding fellow human being—”
“Like yourself, I suppose! You think because you decided to turn Mark down you have a right—” Hermione’s voice was a little shrill, and she started blindly for the door.
“But it’s only because I’ve been through it all, with guidance, and I know exactly how you must feel, so I—” Evadne’s arm was round Hermione’s waist as they reached the door, but Hermione did not pause.
“You know nothing whatever about Jeff and me!” she cried furiously. “We’ve loathed each other for years, and I’ll thank you not to talk like that, especially in front of the children, you have absolutely
no
right
—”
“Darling, don’t be angry and put up resistance like this, I’m only trying to help you—”
There was a large, aghast silence in the drawing-room where Mab and Virginia were left staring at each other in mutual dismay.
“Well!”
said Virginia, as though they were also of an age. And then, “It’s so humourless!” she said unbelievingly. “Surely no child of Archie’s and mine—they seem to think they’re being so gay and helpful, and it’s all so—
heavy-
handed
—”
“But—
is
she?” said Mab.
“Who? What?”
“Is
Hermione in love with Jeff?”
“Oh, that,” said Virginia. “Well, now that it’s come up—I wonder—”
But Hermione did go to the meeting with Evadne, and bore witness publicly that she had always loved a man, since they were children, she supposed, though not, she was sure, in any Impure way—and that because the circumstances were impossible for love between them, and he had not reciprocated anyhow, she had tried to hate him and do him harm, for which sin she was now prepared to make restitution. She had not realized, she said, that it was love, or that it was a sin, till
Evadne’s loving fellowship and understanding had made her see that. There was quite a lot more, about how she meant to try not to make spiteful remarks and had started a Guidance Book that very morning, but nothing seemed to come through that was worth writing down, doubtless because she was so new at it, and that she meant to try very hard to get her uncle the Earl of Enstone interested in the Cause, because he needed guidance if ever a man did, though they must please believe that that was not said with any unkind implications in mind, but she realized that the addition of a famous name and title like his was always a welcome thing to the organization, and in the meantime she would like to make a small contribution of her own to the Funds, though of course nothing like what Uncle Edward could do if he surrendered, but just to show that she didn’t mean to be one of the lukewarm ones, and if only she could learn, with guidance, to be as happy and self-confident as the people she saw all round her that night she would gladly devote the rest of her life to changing other less fortunate fellow human beings, and to pay her own expenses no matter where they wanted her to go, or rather, where God wanted her to go, Africa, even, or Germany, or the East, and that she wanted to thank them one and all, particularly her Cousin Evadne, for this liberation from sin.
When she sat down, shaking and hot and with tears of excitement in her eyes, there was a little gentle laughter and some approving looks at her palpable agony of embarrassment, and when after a hymn and a prayer the meeting became entirely informal she was surrounded by a jovial knot of welcoming members who assured her of their understanding and fellowship and inquired democratically after the Earl’s health and whereabouts these days. Hermione stood looking from one to another of their smiling, interested faces, a bright spot of colour on each cheek, feeling oddly elated because she had never been the centre of so much admiring attention before. Evadne, watching her with proprietary pride, for Hermione was her first convert, thought, There, she looks better already—all she needed was a little encouragement.
Returning home that evening, still a little heady with her sudden social success, Hermione faced the colossal task of writing her share-letters, in which she would confess even those sins which were long past and which would now, with luck, never have come to light at all. Evadne had been quite clear about that, though. In order to get straight with yourself, you must get straight with everyone else first, even though they weren’t yet aware that things were crooked. Of course, they might be angry with you when it was brought to their attention, or they might not answer your letter in any way, or it might be the beginning for them too of a desire to come clean and ask for guidance in their own lives. You could only try, said Evadne, and do what was right to begin your own life afresh according to God’s plan for you.
What was to Hermione the most important and difficult confession to write struck Jeff amidships when he arrived from Paris the following week, and sent him in some confusion of mind to Virginia to inquire what Evadne had been up to now, because Hermione, apparently under influence, had gone completely batty and written him a letter.
“Yes, I know,” said Virginia wearily. “I thought you’d get one of those.”
“Well, what am I supposed to do now?” Jeff wanted to know. “It was always bad enough, but after this I don’t see how we can look each other in the face.”
“It’s the oddest sensation, you know,” Virginia mused, “to have Hermione being
pleasant.
She really is changed, Jeff, with a little backsliding now and then. Something has brought her out in a most remarkable way, and Evadne says it’s only the result of her having surrendered and stopped feeling greedy about sweets, and things like that.”
“Yes, and about me, when actually she hates me, or is it the other way round?” said Jeff.
“You’ll notice a difference in her, Jeff, really you will.”
“That’s fine, I could do with one,” he said. “But nothing would have convinced me till now that it could be worse instead of better. Oh, I see what you mean, perfectly. Hermione
is all wound up in herself, without any gift for making friends, and with a positive genius for putting people’s backs up. Now she has friends for the first time in her silly, misspent life. She’s landed among people who believe passionately in being friends, by main force, with everybody they can lay hands on. No wonder it’s gone to Hermione’s head.”
“But don’t you think—mind you, I’m only asking—don’t you think it might do her a lot of good in the end?” Virginia suggested hopefully. “I’m beginning to wonder if it isn’t a real godsend to a lot of harmless misanthropes who wouldn’t dream of going into a church even to look at stained glass, but who are slowly dying of loneliness because of their own pure cussedness. I mean, it’s not for you and me, but it must do some good that way.”
“Sure, sure, for some people it acts as a spiritual cathartic which is very good for their rudimentary little souls,” Jeff agreed promptly. “That part’s all right, I can go along with that. But it doesn’t stop there. People like Hermione get drunk on it and make untold trouble for other people like you and me, confessing mostly imaginary sins and injustices, and raking up embarrassing stuff that’s better left where it dropped years ago, mulling over motives that are best dead and buried. Well, excuse my eloquence,” said Jeff, “but when somebody like Evadne, with a perfectly good family background and no reason to scrape out the hedges and highways for companionship or affection, goes overboard on it and begins to behave like all twelve apostles at once, and as a result I get stuck with a thing like this letter from Hermione, my immediate impulse is simply to spank. Hard.”
“Quite,” nodded Virginia. “And that’s not all, either. Now they’ve got some crazy idea of going to Germany and working on the Nazis.”
“Oh,
no!
”
pleaded Jeff, with an involuntary hand to his head. “How you ever came to have such a lunatic child is beyond me. She mustn’t go
near
Germany, they’d make mincemeat of her in no time!”
“How can I stop her?”
“Stop her allowance, can’t you?”
“Hermione’s got enough money in her own right from her mother to do about as she likes. And she regards it as a part of her restitution to finance some sort of travelling team, they call it, to go to Berlin and work a miracle there. I thought perhaps you and Bracken could help me think of something to do.”
“You mean they think they can change Hitler?” Jeff suggested, and in spite of himself was shaken with sudden laughter. “I know it’s serious,” he apologized at once, “but I can’t help seeing the funny side.”
“There isn’t a funny side,” said Virginia.
“I agree that Hitler isn’t funny any more,” he conceded, and again was overtaken by unwilling mirth. “Think of the share-letters he’d have to write!” he said. “All right, I know, I know—now, let’s see, Johnny and Camilla arrive tomorrow, don’t they? Maybe they’ll carry more weight than anything we can say. Johnny hasn’t any delusions about the Nazis, anyway.”
“Jeff, there’s something else I want to ask you.” Virginia’s heart-shaped face was a little drawn, her eyes were wide and shadowed. “I don’t want to go on about it in front of the others, but—Jeff, was there something about air-raid drills while you were in Paris?”
“I’m afraid there was. Even in Paris.”
“And something about gas warfare, too,” she insisted unwillingly.
“In the drills, yes. They used gas-masks, of course. It was a routine sort of thing, with dummies or sometimes co-operative people to simulate casualties, and so on.”
“
Routine!
”
cried Virginia bitterly. “Shall we have that sort of thing here too?”
“Probably, before long. Most of the big Continental cities have done something of the sort—Naples, and I think Venice too. There’s something brewing in Italy, as a matter of fact.”
“But—could that affect us here?”
“Yes Because of the Suez Canal.”
“Oh, Jeff—” She reached for him blindly, and he caught and held her hand. “I thought that was all behind us!”
“We’re working on it,” he said. “Disarmament is dead, of course, but we may still work out something at Geneva.”
“What does Bracken
really
think?” It always came down to that now, in the family, as once it had been Bracken’s father.
“I don’t know,” said Jeff truthfully. “Nobody does. Why don’t you ask him?”
But meanwhile it was Jubilee Summer, and King’s weather prevailed. London was floodlighted at night, Covent Garden was ablaze with Grace Moore, Lehmann, and Melchior, the Royal Academy was full of Laverys and Salisburys and Brocks; the theatres were full of Ivor Novello, Dodie Smith, Gertrude Lawrence, Leontovich, Hardwicke, and Gielgud; Wimbledon was full of Perry, Austen, von Cramm, Helen Jacobs, Mrs. Moody, and Kay Stammers; and England was full of strangers and some old friends returned.
And Mab saw Jeff almost every day.
She wanted to hear what he had been doing, but mostly she wanted the latest news from America. As there was no point anyway in dwelling on the uneasy European situation and its futile pacts and conferences and air-raid exercises and sinister rumblings, when he was with her Jeff allowed his natural nostalgia to come out. There was a joke in the family about Mab’s American blood, which came to her from Virginia through Irene with two British sires. Ever since she had heard last Christmas about Jeff’s inheriting the house in Williamsburg Mab had gone American in a big way. Now he had sent for pictures of the restored buildings in the town as the Rockefeller project proceeded on its painstaking way, and Sylvia had found some snapshots for her of more personal subjects, even one of Jeff as a boy, down by the College Gate. Mab put them all carefully into a scrapbook, even the cheapest postcards of the
rebuilt Capitol and the Raleigh Tavern. She asked for American books, and was inclined to argue with Miss Sim about the finer points of that little spot of bother in 1776. She even read up about Red Indians, though Jeff assured her they were no longer a daily feature of American life.