The most that could be said for her father’s friends was that they meant well; but oh, what trouble the well-meaning could bring into an otherwise simple situation! From them she hid — it was inevitable — in Wemyss’s arms. Here were no arguments; here were no misgivings and paralysing hesitations. Here was just simple love, and the feeling — delicious to her whose mother had died in the very middle of all the sweet early petting, and whose whole life since had been spent entirely in the dry and bracing company of unusually inquisitive-minded, clever men — of being a baby again in somebody’s big, comfortable, uncritical lap.
The engagement hadn’t leaked out so much as flooded out. It would have continued secret for quite a long time, known only to the three and to the maids — who being young women themselves, and well acquainted with the symptoms of the condition, were sure of it before Miss Entwhistle had even begun to suspect, — if Wemyss hadn’t taken to dropping in, contrary to expectations, on the Thursday evenings. Lucy’s descriptions of these evenings and of the people who came, and of how very kind they were to her aunt and herself, and how anxious they were to help her, they of course supposing that she was, actually, the lonely thing she would have been if she hadn’t had Everard as the dear hidden background to her life — at this point they embraced, — at first amused him, then made him curious, and finally caused him to come and see for himself.
He didn’t tell Lucy he was coming, he just came. It had taken him five Thursday evenings of playing bridge as usual at his club, playing it with one hand, as he said to her afterwards, and thinking of her with the other— ‘You know what I mean,’ he said, and they laughed and embraced — before it slowly oozed into and pervaded his mind that there was his little girl, rounded by people fussing over her and making love to her (because, said Wemyss, everybody would naturally want to make love to her), and there was he, the only person who had a right to do this, somewhere else.
So he walked in; and when he walked in, the group standing round Lucy with their backs to the door saw her face, which had been gently attentive, suddenly flash into colour and light; and turning with one accord to see what it was she was looking at behind them with parted lips and eyes of startled joy, beheld once more the unknown chief mourner of the funeral in Cornwall.
Down there they had taken for granted that he was a relation of Jim’s, the kind of relative who in a man’s life appears only three times, the last of which is his funeral; here in Eaton Terrace they were immediately sure he was not, anyhow, that, because for relatives who only appear those three times a girl’s face doesn’t change in a flash from gentle politeness to tremulous, shining life. They all stared at him astonished. He was so different from the sorts of people they had met at Jim’s. For one thing he was so well dressed, — in the mating season, thought Miss Entwhistle, even birds dress well, — and in his impressive evening clothes, with what seemed a bigger and more spotless shirt-front than any shirt-front they could have imagined, he made them look and feel what they actually were, a dingy, shabby lot.
Wemyss was good-looking. He might be middle-aged, but he was good-looking enough frequently to eclipse the young. He might have a little too much of what tailors call a fine presence, but his height carried this off. His features were regular, his face care-free and healthy, his brown hair sleek with no grey in it, he was clean-shaven, and his mouth was the kind of mouth sometimes described by journalists as mobile, sometimes as determined, but always as well cut. One could visualise him in a fur-lined coat, thought a young man near Lucy, considering him; and one couldn’t visualise a single one of the others, including himself, in the room that evening in a fur-lined coat. Also, thought this same young man, one could see railway porters and taxi-drivers and waiters hurrying to be of service to him; and one not only couldn’t imagine them taking any notice that wasn’t languid and reluctant of the others, including himself, but one knew from personal distressing experience that they didn’t.
‘My splendid lover!’ Lucy’s heart cried out within her when the door opened and there he stood. She had not seen him before in the evening, and the contrast between him and the rest of the people there was really striking.
Miss Entwhistle had been right: there was no hiding the look in Lucy’s eyes or Wemyss’s proprietary manner. He hadn’t meant to take any but the barest notice of his little girl, he had meant to be quite an ordinary guest — just shake hands and say ‘Hasn’t it been wet to-day’ — that sort of thing; but his pride and love were too much for him, he couldn’t hide them. He thought he did, and was sure he was behaving beautifully and with the easiest unconcern, but the mere way he looked at her and stood over her was enough. Also there was the way she looked at him. The intelligences in that room were used to drawing more complicated inferences than this. They were outraged by its obviousness. Who was this middle-aged, prosperous outsider who had got hold of Jim’s daughter? What had her aunt been about? Where had he dropped from? Had Jim known?
Miss Entwhistle introduced him. ‘Mr. Wemyss,’ she said to them generally, with a vague wave of her hand; and a red spot appeared and stayed on each of her cheekbones.
Wemyss held forth. He stood on the hearthrug filling his pipe — he was used to smoking in that room when he came to tea with Lucy, and forgot to ask Miss Entwhistle if it mattered — and told everybody what he thought. They were talking about Ireland when he came in, and after the disturbance of his arrival had subsided he asked them not to mind him but to go on. He then proceeded to go on himself, telling them what he thought; and what he thought was what The Times had thought that morning. Wemyss spoke with the practised fluency of a leading article. He liked politics and constantly talked them at his club, and it created vacancies in the chairs near him. But Lucy, who hadn’t heard him on politics before and found that she could understand every word, listened to him with parted lips. Before he came in they had been saying things beyond her quickness in following, eagerly discussing Sinn Fein, Lloyd George, the outrageous cost of living — it was the autumn of 1920 — turning everything inside out, upside down, being witty, being surprising, being tremendously eager and earnest. It had been a kind of restless flashing round and catching fire from each other, — a kind of kick, and flick, and sparks, and a burst of laughter, and then on to something else just as she was laboriously getting under weigh to follow the last sentence but six. She had been missing her father, who took her by the hand on these occasions when he saw her lagging behind, and stopped a moment to explain to her, and held up the others while she got her breath.
But now came Everard, and in a minute everything was plain. He had the effect on her of a window being thrown open and fresh air and sunlight being let in. He was so sensible, she felt, compared to these others; so healthy and natural. The Government, he said, only had to do this and that, and Ireland and the cost of living would immediately, regarded as problems, be solved. He explained the line to be taken. It was a very simple line. One only needed goodwill and a little common sense. Why, thought Lucy, unconsciously nodding proud agreement, didn’t people have goodwill and a little common sense?
At first there was a disposition to interrupt, to heckle, but it grew fainter and soon gave way to complete silence. The other guests might have been stunned, Miss Entwhistle thought, so motionless did they presently sit. And when they went away, which they seemed to do earlier than usual and in a body, Wemyss was still standing on the hearthrug explaining the points of view of the ordinary, sensible business man.
‘Mind you,’ he said, pointing at them with his pipe, ‘I don’t pretend to be a great thinker. I’m just a plain business man, and as a plain business man I know there’s only one way of doing a thing, and that’s the right way. Find out what that way is, and go and do it. There’s too much arguing altogether and asking other people what they think. We don’t want talk, we want action. I agree with Napoleon, who said concerning the French Revolution, “Il aurait fallu mitrailler cette canaille.” We’re not simple enough.’
Th
is was the last the others heard as they trooped in silence down the stairs. Outside they lingered for a while in little knots on the pavement talking, and then they drifted away to their various homes, where most of them spent the rest of the evening writing to Miss Entwhistle.
The following Thursday evening, her letters in reply having been vague and evasive, they came again, each hoping to get Lucy’s aunt to himself, and on the ground of being Jim’s most devoted friend ask her straight questions such as who and what was Wemyss. Also, more particularly, why. Who and what he was was of no sort of consequence if he would only be and do it somewhere else; but they arrived determined to get an answer to the third question: Why Wemyss? And when they got there, there he was again; there before them this time, standing on the hearthrug as if he had never moved off it since the week before and had gone on talking ever since.
This was the end of the Thursday evenings. The next one was unattended, except by Wemyss; but Miss Entwhistle had been forced to admit the engagement, and from then on right up to the marriage her life was a curse to her and a confusion. Just because Jim had appointed no guardian in his will for Lucy, every single one of his friends felt bound to fill the vacancy. They were indignant when they discovered that almost before they had begun Lucy was being carried off, but they were horrified when they discovered what Wemyss it was who was carrying her off. Most of them quite well remembered the affair of Mrs. Wemyss’s death a few weeks before, and those who did not went, as Miss Entwhistle had gone, to the British Museum and read it up. They also, though they themselves were chiefly unworldly persons who lost money rather than made it, instituted the most searching private inquiries into Wemyss’s business affairs, hoping that he might be caught out as such a rascal or so penniless, or, preferably, both, that no woman could possibly have anything to do with him. But Wemyss’s business record, the solicitor they employed informed them, was quite creditable. Everything about it was neat and in order. He was not what the City would call a wealthy man, but if you went out say to Ealing, said the solicitor, he would be called wealthy. He was solid, and he was certainly more than able to support a wife and family. He could have been quite wealthy if he had not adopted a principle to which he had adhered for years of knocking off work early and leaving his office at an hour when other men did not, — the friends were obliged to admit that this, at least, seemed sensible. There had been, though, a very sad occurrence recently in his private life,— ‘Oh, thank you,’ interrupted the friends, ‘we have heard about that.’
But however good Wemyss’s business record might be, it couldn’t alter their violent objection to Jim’s daughter marrying him. Apart from the stuff he talked, there was the inquest. They were aware that in this they were unreasonable, but they were all too much attached to Jim’s memory to be able to be reasonable about a man they felt so certain he wouldn’t have liked. Singly and in groups they came at safe times, such as after breakfast, to Eaton Terrace to reason with Lucy, too much worried to remember that you cannot reason with a person in love. Less wise than Miss Entwhistle, they tried to dissuade her from marrying this man, and the more they tried the tighter she clung to him. To the passion of love was added, by their attitudes, the passion of protectiveness, of flinging her body between him and them. And all the while, right inside her innermost soul, in spite of her amazement at them and her indignation, she was smiling to herself; for it was really very funny, the superficial judgments of these clever people when set side by side with what she alone knew, — the tenderness, the simple goodness of her heart’s beloved.
Lucy laughed to herself in her happy sureness. She had miraculously found not only a lover she could adore and a guide she could follow and a teacher she could look up to and a sufferer who without her wouldn’t have been healed, but a mother, a nurse, and a playmate. In spite of his being so much older and so extraordinarily wise, he was yet her contemporary, — sometimes hardly even that, so boyish was he in his talk and jokes. Lucy had never had a playmate. She had spent her life sitting, as it were, bolt upright mentally behaving, and she hadn’t known till Wemyss came on the scene how delicious it was to relax. Nonsense had delighted her father, it is true, but it had to be of a certain kind; never the kind to which the adjective ‘sheer’ would apply. With Wemyss she could say whatever nonsense came into her head, sheer or otherwise. He laughed consumedly at her when she talked it. She loved to make him laugh. They laughed together. He understood her language. He was her playmate. Those people outside, old and young, who didn’t know what playing was and were trying to get her away from him, might beat at the door behind which he and she sat listening, amused, as long as they liked.
‘How they all try to separate us,’ she said to him one day, sitting as usual safe in the circle of his arm, her head on his breast.
‘You can’t separate unity,’ remarked Wemyss comfortably.
She wanted to tell them that answer, confront them with it next time they came after breakfast, as a discouragement to useless further effort, but she had learned that they somehow always knew when what she said was Everard’s and not hers, and then, of course, prejudiced as they were, they wouldn’t listen.
‘Now, Lucy, that’s pure Wemyss,’ they would say. ‘For heaven’s sake say something of your own.’
At Christmas Wemyss had an encounter with Miss Entwhistle, who ever since she had been told of the engagement had been so quiet and inoffensive that he quite liked her. She had seemed to recognise her position as a side-show, and had accepted it without a word. She no longer asked him questions, and she made no difficulties. She left him alone with Lucy in Eaton Terrace, and though she had to go with them on the outings she asserted herself so little that he forgot she was there. But when towards the middle of December he remarked one afternoon that he always spent Christmas at The Willows, and what day would she and Lucy come down, Christmas Eve or the day before, to his astonishment she looked astonished, and after a silence said it was most kind of him, but they were going to spend Christmas where they were.
‘I had hoped you would join us,’ she said. ‘Must you really go away?’
‘But — —’ began Wemyss, incredulous, doubting his ears.
It was, however, the fact that Miss Entwhistle wouldn’t go to The Willows; and of course if she wouldn’t Lucy couldn’t either. Nothing that he said could shake her determination. Here was a repetition, only how much worse — fancy spoiling his Christmas — of her conduct in Cornwall when she insisted on going away from that nice little house where they were all so comfortably established, and taking Lucy up to London. He had forgotten, so acquiescent had she been for weeks, that down there he had discovered she was obstinate. It was a shock to him to realise that her obstinacy, the most obstinate obstinacy he had ever met, might be going to upset his plans. He couldn’t believe it. He couldn’t believe he wasn’t going to be able to have what he wished, and only because an old maid said ‘No.’ Was the story of Balaam to be reversed, and the angel be held up by the donkey? He refused to believe such a thing possible.
Wemyss, who made his plans first and talked about them afterwards, hadn’t mentioned Christmas even to Lucy. It was his habit to settle what he wished to do, arrange all the details, and then, when everything was ready, inform those who were to take part. It hadn’t occurred to him that over the Christmas question there would be trouble. He had naturally taken it for granted that he would spend Christmas with his little girl, and of course as he always spent it at The Willows she would spend it there too. All his arrangements were made, and the servants, who looked surprised, had been told to get the spare-rooms ready for two ladies. He had begun to feel seasonable as early as the first week in December, and had bespoken two big turkeys instead of one, because this was to be his first real Christmas at The Willows — Vera had been without the Christmas spirit — and he felt it couldn’t be celebrated lavishly enough. Two where there had in previous years been one, — that was the turkeys; four where there had been two, — that was the plum p
uddings. He doubled everything. Doubling seemed the proper, even the symbolic expression of his feelings, for wasn’t he soon going to be doubled himself? And how sweetly.
Then suddenly, having finished his preparations and proceeding, the time being ripe, to the question of the day of arrival, he found himself up against opposition. Miss Entwhistle wouldn’t go to The Willows — incredible, impossible, and insufferable, — while Lucy, instead of instantly insisting and joining with him in a compelling majority, sat as quiet as a mouse.
‘But Lucy — —’ Wemyss having stared speechless at her aunt, turned to her. ‘But of course we must spend Christmas together.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Lucy, leaning forward, ‘of course — —’
‘But of course you must come down. Why, any other arrangement is unthinkable. My house is in the country, which is the proper place for Christmas, and it’s your Everard’s house, and you haven’t seen it yet — why, I would have taken you down long ago, but I’ve been saving up for this.’
‘We hoped,’ said Miss Entwhistle, ‘you would join us here.’
‘Here! But there isn’t room to swing a turkey here. I’ve ordered two, and each of them is twice too big to get through your front door.’
‘Oh, Everard — have you actually ordered turkeys?’ said Lucy.
She wanted to laugh, but she also wanted to cry. His simplicity was too wonderful. In her eyes it set him apart from criticism and made him sacred, like the nimbus about the head of a saint.
Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated) Page 250
