Noble in Reason

by Phyllis Bentley

  “Don’t cry, Netta,” said John, jerking her from my knee into his arms. “You’re not hurt, love.”

  “Why tell the child lies? She is hurt,” said Henry hotly, passing his long fingers over her forehead.

  Though his touch was gentle, Netta winced and struck his hand away and began a loud sobbing wail which I realized, with a sinking of my heart, would penetrate to our parents’ ears downstairs. Sure enough the door of the dining-room was abruptly thrown open and my father called in his sharp impatient tones:

  “What is the matter up there?”

  “Nothing!” shouted John, smothering Netta’s cries by burying her face against his shoulder.

  “Don’t be absurd, John—we must tell, and get the doctor to Netta,” said Henry.

  “The doctor? Don’t be such a fool. You are a fool, Henry,” shouted John as Henry tore open the nursery door and ran down the stairs.

  We heard Henry’s explanation in passing to my father: “Netta’s hurt her head—I’m going for the doctor,” and then the bang of the front door.

  “Bring the child here!” cried out my father, at the same time beginning to run upstairs.

  “This is all your fault, you silly little fathead,” said John crossly to me as he went out of the room.

  I followed, sunk in shame and anxiety, and witnessed the meeting of father and son on the half-landing. My father snatched Netta from John’s arms; frightened by the serious view taken by her family of her accident, Netta screamed, and large tears rolled down her rosy cheeks.

  “Bring her here, Edward,” cried my mother in sleepy tones.

  Exclaiming angrily—which made Netta cry the louder— my father hurried into our front room. John scowling, and myself trembling, followed him. My mother lay on a settee pulled in front of the fire, her dark hair (as usual) flowing in disorder over the cushions behind her head. She held out her arms.

  “Come to me, my darling,” she drawled in her slow rich tones.

  My father frowned and hesitated, but those outstretched arms could not be denied; he handed Netta over. My mother making soft sounds of comfort drew Netta to her breast; the child’s wail sank to a soft whimper and by the time the new doctor from next door, the huge bearded Dr. Darrell, came in —at the run, led by a breathless and snow-covered Henry— she was asleep. Not for the first time I admired my mother’s aristocratic calm as opposed to my father’s vehement fuss, which struck me as excessive, useless, vulgar. (How I hated scenes in those days!)

  Netta was unhurt save for a small bruise, said Dr. Darrell as he bent over her; the only casualty was Henry, who caught a severe cold. He was already sneezing as we three brothers returned to the nursery upstairs. My father followed, and harangued us sharply.

  “To think that sons of mine care so little for their sister that she injures herself under their very eyes! I’m disgusted—yes, disgusted!” concluded my father. He turned and stalked from the room, leaving the door open behind him.

  I hung my head; Henry and John glared at each other in anger.

  “It’s hardly fair to blame me, however,” said Henry in a low tone of suppressed rage. “I did all I could to help Netta.”

  “None of this row need have happened if you hadn’t been such a prig,” said John. “You like yourself too much, Henry Jarmayne. You always want to be better than everybody else. There was no need to rush off and tell father.”

  “You’d rather Netta’s skull had been cracked, I suppose,” returned Henry.

  “No, I would not!” shouted John, crimsoning, and suddenly snatching up Henry’s pencil which lay on the table, he dashed it back and forth in great scrawls across the sheet of music paper just laboriously ruled by Henry.

  “You are an unmannerly boor, John,” said Henry contemptuously.

  John, his heavy lower lip protruding with rage, threw down the pencil and raised his fist. I gave a cry of alarm. My two brothers turned on me.

  “Come to that,” said John in a much milder tone, “the whole thing was Christopher’s fault, really.”

  Both my brothers turned and gazed at me. I stood and suffered.

  “Yes, I’m afraid that is true,” said Henry.

  “He probably didn’t see what was happening,” said John.

  This stung me into protest. “It was Sambo’s fault,” I cried.

  “Sambo! That’s good!” said John with his jeering laugh. “If you looked about you a bit instead of always having your nose stuck in a book, Chris, you’d be a lot more use in the world.”

  “You shouldn’t try to escape blame which you’ve deserved, Christopher,” said Henry sternly.

  Trembling with fear and shame, I slunk away and hid in the lavatory—it was the only safe place in our house, I often thought. How was I to explain that Sambo, a money-box for children’s savings, was a contemptible phenomenon in my view, a symbol of my father’s parsimonious and grasping attitude to money, which I despised? How could I express my theory that people liked doing what they liked, and that if Netta wanted to play with Sambo or be a pony she should be allowed to do so? (I was never, it seemed to me, allowed to do what I liked.) How could I indicate that John’s jeering coarseness and Henry’s puritanic strictness both found their target in my continually lacerated heart?

  At this moment I heard sounds in the hall below: the turning of the front door latch, the howling of the wind, the soft slurr of snow; a light pretty laugh, the precise Scottish speech of Dr. Darrell, the purring tones my father kept for company which pleased him.

  “Boys!” called my father commandingly.

  My brothers burst obediently out of the nursery; Henry ran quickly, John lumbered, down the stairs. I crept quietly out of my refuge and followed them.

  Dr. Darrell stood on our hearthrug, beaming. (It gave me an extraordinary feeling in the pit of my stomach, half joy, half fear, to see how he towered above my father.) Mrs. Darrell, a small sweet quiet woman with a soft voice and very large dark eyes, elegantly dressed in a sealskin cape and a hat (toque, I believe, was then the word) to match, with a bunch of violets at her throat, sat on the couch beside my mother. At Dr. Darrell’s side stood a girl of about Henry’s age, whom I had seen in the distance and knew as Dr. Darrell’s daughter.

  “Beatrice has come to bring a doll for the little girl who hurt her head,” explained the doctor.

  “How very kind!” exclaimed my parents, as Beatrice with a quick smile advanced and put a parcel into Netta’s arms.

  The doll when unwrapped appeared new and expensive; it was dressed in gold brocade and had a quantity of fair hair and brown eyes which opened and shut. Netta in my mother’s arms at first took the doll with an air of diffidence, then suddenly hugged it to her in an ecstasy and passionately kissed the pink china cheek. Her childish pleasure was moving, and we all smiled.

  “It really is most kind of you, Mrs. Darrell,” said my mother, stroking Netta’s hair.

  “Oh, it was all Beatrice’s own idea,” explained the doctor proudly. “The snow’s so thick, I went in my new sleigh to fetch Beatrice and Mrs. Darrell from the dancing-class and I told her about little Netta and she insisted on bringing a doll to her.”

  “Will you dance for us, Beatrice?” suggested my mother.

  Beatrice hesitated. “I’d rather not if you’d excuse me,” she said politely in a light composed tone.

  My heart sank. Though I would like to have seen her dance, I approved the modesty and propriety of her decision; but 1 feared there would now be a “scene” of the kind I most disliked. Dr. Darrell would scold, Mrs. Darrell would plead, Beatrice would scowl, pout or cry—I felt all her misery in advance for her.

  “Very well, my dear, we won’t press you,” said Dr. Darrell.

  I was astounded. Such mildness, such urbane good manners, from a father!

  “Perhaps you’d take your coat off and show Netta your pretty dancing dress?” suggested my father.

  I was shocked by such a gross demand. But Beatrice after a moment’s hesitation gave he
r quick charming smile and began to unbutton her coat. When her wrappings and snow boots had been shed, we all gaped at her in astonished admiration. Her frock was of a pale green chiffon, accordion-pleated—at that time a new device—which billowed in the draught from the hearth; her heelless dancing shoes were of gleaming bronze. Beatrice was not what I then thought of as a pretty girl, for her face was pale and oval, not round and pink like Netta’s, but even then I was aware of the distinction of her appearance. She was tall and slender, with a thin, aquiline, aristocratic face, smooth straight hair of that familiar English shade known inaccurately as light brown—but it is difficult to find another adjective to describe it—and fine hazel eyes, in which light seemed to sparkle. She moved a pace or two; her dress waved and shimmered, she seemed poised like a butterfly on those agile gleaming toes.

  “I could play for you if you would dance,” said Henry suddenly from the rear.

  Beatrice looked at him with interest but decidedly shook her head.

  “Some other time, perhaps,” said Mrs. Darrell placidly.

  “Yes. We must be off now, in any case,” said Dr. Darrell, helping Beatrice into her coat with large white skilful hands. “It’s almost my surgery hour already.”

  The Darrells left us.

  “Pretty little girl,” said John consideringly as the Jarmayne brothers returned upstairs to the nursery. “Vain, though.”

  “She’s an angel!” said Henry hotly.

  “Oh, chuck it, Henry!” said John disgusted.

  I sighed. What a terrible family we were, I reflected; how disunited, how mutually antagonistic, how rude, how vulgar, how quarrelsome. How inferior to the Darrells! The Darrells’ appearance, their manners, their quiet affable speech, I thought yearningly, were infinitely superior to our own. The very name of their house, Ashleigh, sounded far more genteel to me than the more Yorkshire name of our own, Ashroyd. I was ashamed that we Jarmaynes should be so unlike what a family ought to be; indeed I positively dreaded, although I longed for, another visit by the Darrells to our house, for they would be sure to perceive our oddness, our abnormality, especially of course my own. At the same time as I dreaded this possible adverse criticism, I also resented it; for in spite of my dislike of my father and brothers I was of course in-dissolubly bound to them by the ties of blood; I knew I would defend them with my life, though without in the least wishing to do so.

  Tired by this weight of responsibility accepted though detested, I was yet too restless to sleep. The childish little stories with which I had hitherto comforted myself in my lonely little back bedroom near the cistern seemed inadequate that night. But as I mused on the Darrells’ visit, these stories took on a new form; they expanded, they glowed suddenly into colour; they became daydreams of a splendid world where a simulacrum of Christopher Jarmayne performed deeds of noble heroism before a brilliant and admiring audience. Trembling, sweating, my mouth parched, I lay with eyes tightly closed, inventing rapturous scenes.

  From that night onwards I was a daydreamer. My dreams in sleep were usually anxious, but before sleep came, what a rich, exciting, satisfying world I roved in! The dream Christopher who fulfilled the wishes of my heart, by the way, never belonged to a family—his parents had always perished in suitably honourable disasters and his brothers and sisters had never been born.

  2

  Looking back now from an achievement, a happiness, which, though in reality moderate enough, would have seemed to me then Olympian, a positive blaze of glory, I am able to see that my passionate feelings then were true to my own situation only, false to all the others concerned. For when examined in the light of reason and knowledge, all that sinister atmosphere, that tumescent rancour, vanishes away. We were, in fact, a perfectly normal family—indeed we were positively admired, by the Darrells and others, for the warmth of our mutual devotion.

  I was then ignorant that for a child to fall in love, so to speak, with the parent of the other sex and therefore to resent the parent of its own sex was a normal phase in the development of children, through which almost all safely passed. To me this state of mind seemed unique and permanent: I suffered agonies of martyrdom on behalf of my oppressed mother, agonies of resentment against my despotic father. Nor did I understand, of course, the strength and kind of my feeling for Netta.

  I was ignorant, too, of the laws of heredity discovered by Mendel; I regarded the variations of character amongst the Jarmayne children as alarming and wicked quarrels. Yet in fact we showed these variations in their most natural and normal form: the physical and mental characteristics of my parents mingling in each of us in different proportions, quite in the expected style. John had my mother’s massive sensuous nature mingled with my father’s business shrewdness; my father’s fair colouring with my mother’s texture of skin and hair. Henry had my mother’s height and dark colouring, but my father’s quivering, electric energy and disdain. In Netta, my father’s blond quality was strongly emphasized, but she had little of his mental fibre, being pliant, slow and simple.

  For myself, I was the only one in the family who inherited my father’s disability of the eyes to any serious extent; I had too all his over-conscientious zeal, and his slight spare frame. But at the same time I had all my mother’s responsive senses and distaste for personal restrictions. Indeed, my mother’s and my father’s temperaments were present in my make-up in proportions so equal that neither won the battle for dominance; they did not fuse but remained distinct, at war, while I was tossed from one to the other, or to change the metaphor, see-sawed between the two. Thus in my early life I was at one time invincibly lazy, at another invincibly energetic; puritanic and hedonistic by turns with equal conviction. Perhaps it was this experience of two such different attitudes to life which enabled me later to portray my fellow human beings, for I could sympathize with the most opposite dispositions. Perhaps too this see-sawing itself supplied the creative energy I required. But it was an uncomfortable character to own, for each side continually frustrated the other. Besides, in me all my father’s electric force was wired, as it were, to my mother’s slow deep passions, so that my susceptibilities had an immense voltage; my feelings tore me to pieces, and any rebuke almost disintegrated my personality.

  John and Henry passed, of course, through the same Oedipus phase as myself; that is to say, they were as devoted to our mother, as jealous of her affection and therefore as resentful of our father, as I was. But their natures moulded their resentment into different forms. John turned his dislike on my father’s manners, which he thought affected, and on all pretensions to gentility, fuss about detail and meticulosity of any sort. He prided himself on being robust, earthy, not finicking but full of blunt common sense; he wished to be ordinary, he loathed the pompous and high-flown. The name Etherton typified for him everything he detested. Henry on the other hand condemned my father for not being high-flown and refined enough; he thought him an unedifying, ignoble little man; Henry could not endure the small daily business compromises my father thought necessary. To me as I have explained my father was an angry and terrifying kill-joy, mean, ignorant and plebeian in his rejection of all forms of freedom and beauty and his pursuit of wealth. To Netta he was an adored, adoring, protective, indulgent father.

  All this, including my ambivalent feeling towards my kin, was entirely natural, nothing out of the way; phenomena shared by every human family; part of the price paid for human individuality; the common human lot. I see it now; and see the phenomena repeating themselves, endlessly varied in detail but basically the same, through generation after generation.

  But what was in reality the truth about my father, upon whom so much dangerous emotion was concentrated? It was, of course, impossible for him to satisfy all of us or indeed any of us completely. But to this general problem he added, naturally, those particular difficulties of circumstance which complicate each person’s life. I could not, really, have been more wrong in my estimate of his condition and intention.

  In his relation to my mo
ther, for instance. Years after, when living alone with my father, whose mind was then somewhat disturbed, I learned the realities of his marriage. He was living alone in lodgings at the time—owing to family troubles which I will presently describe—in a nearby West Riding town, when he first met my mother, whose youthful beauty was as great as I imagined. But far from having the aristocratic connections I invented for her, my mother was in fact a mill-girl, a weaver at the worsted mill where my father was employed. Lonely and miserable, the young Edward Jarmayne (then only in his early twenties) found solace in my mother’s passive beauty, just as we did. They became lovers, and in a very short time Ada found herself with child.

  The Appia family was of Irish descent. Ada’s father had first come to Yorkshire as a navvy employed on the construction of a moorland reservoir and had remained to work on the borough roads. A family large even by Victorian standards and swollen by several sets of twins, careless, slovenly and quarrelsome in their habits, the Appias lived in a fetid backyard in a poor quarter of the town where drink and brawls were rife. It was a household-where unwashed mugs and plates stood all day on a bare wooden table marked with innumerable rings; a household any member of which, if missing from the family circle, could usually be found in the Ring o’ Bells inn at the corner of the yard. The temptation, in those “respectable” Victorian days when poverty was a crime, to abandon a woman of such low connections, a woman moreover to whom an illegitimate child was a not unfamiliar spectacle, must have been very great. My father, with an integrity or a love for which in either case I respect him deeply, “stood by” Ada and against the recommendations of all his friends married her.