O, These Men, These Men!

by Angela Thirkell

  There was another long pause, while Francis, his heart torn by Caroline’s unresisting acceptance of sorrow, did his best to choke down his natural wish to utter maledictions upon James. It was her child-like submission to a cruelty that she couldn’t understand which most moved him. Never once, since that day he took her to Beechwood, had he seen her otherwise than quiet, anxiously polite, trying to behave well in the middle of bewilderment.

  “It is frightfully difficult to talk about it at all,” he said at last. “You see, it’s no good pretending that I don’t hate James, but I don’t know what you feel about him, and I wouldn’t for the world say anything that could give you the slightest pain. Do you mind?”

  “I don’t think I mind anything, at least not anything about James,” said Caroline, thinking how deeply she would mind if Hugh didn’t presently come in and ask her to dance. “I can even say his name now quite comfortably. I don’t want my feelings to be an embarrassment to you, Francis, dear. I don’t particularly want to talk about James, but if there is anything you want to ask, don’t feel that I should be hurt. It is so impossible to express anything that one means. Hurt is a bad word, because it means too much. One is hurt by almost anything that people do or say, because one is stupidly reminded of things. A flower, or a piece of music, or the smell of tobacco, or the name of the newspaper James used to be on, they all press a nerve that runs right back to something happy or horrible that once happened. Even sausages and mashed potatoes are simply more than I can bear sometimes, because we had a joke about them when we were first married. Don’t laugh. I may laugh at myself, and I will. But you mustn’t laugh at me – not yet.”

  “I don’t want to laugh in the least,” Francis assured her.

  “That kind of hurt is something that suddenly goes through you like a sword and can’t be helped,” Caroline went on. “But I don’t have the kind of hurt that means being offended, at least I hope I don’t. And in any case, dear Francis, you couldn’t give me either kind of hurt – chiefly because you wouldn’t.”

  She turned her face from the fire, at which, she had been gazing while she spoke and looked straight at Francis with such candor and affection that he could hardly sustain her glance.

  “But if it doesn’t bore you too much to talk about me,” she went on, “do you think I ought to have a job? I mean legally, economically, quite apart from being a cousin or an old friend.”

  No, was Francis’ immediate reaction, but the common sense part of his mind told him to consider the matter and reflect whether a young woman with health and strength wouldn’t bury an unhappy experience better by doing regular work than by living in great comfort where the ghost of the past would be before her at every turn. Another question then rose: had she really the strength for it.

  “How are you now, Caroline?” he asked.

  “How am I? Oh, quite well, thank you.”

  “No, honestly. Suppose you had a nine to six job every day, could you do it?”

  Caroline’s face clouded.

  “That’s what I don’t know,” she said. “Dr. Herbert talks about not overdoing it and taking things easily, but I’m not sure if it wouldn’t be a better plan to work very hard and take the consequences. If one bursts, one bursts, and that’s all. Francis, I am so tired of being tired that I don’t know what to do. Do you think being dead is less tiring than being alive?”

  To this question, Francis could not give an answer.

  Hugh came in looking for cigarettes.

  “Don’t you want to dance?” he asked his cousin. “Poor darling, you are tired. That comes of gadding about to lectures. Never mind, you rest comfortably and Francis will look after you. Julia and I did a superb tango and now we are going to do the rumba again, only drawing the line at the place where you put your foreheads together. She is the best dancer I ever met, and such fun.”

  “She is a darling,” said Caroline, “so is her father. I don’t know what Anna and I would do without them at Beechwood.”

  Hugh had now found his cigarettes. All unconsciously, he had further depressed his cousin’s low spirits by praising that pretty young Julia, while Caroline, trying to be generous, had no less unconsciously wounded Francis by her mention of Colonel Beaton as an indispensable darling. Hugh merely conscious of having done a kind action in encouraging Caroline to stay with Francis, returned to the drawing room where Colonel Beaton and Anna were comfortably conversing over the gramophone while Julia practiced steps by herself. As he shut the drawing room door behind him, she swirled up into his arms and they moved away together.

  “I suppose you see quite a lot of the Beatons,” said Francis when he and Caroline were alone again, miserably unable to keep away from the horrid subject.

  “Oh, yes, at Beechwood we do. I used to go long walks with Colonel Beaton at Beechwood and I miss them so in London.”

  “I expect he is very interesting,” said Francis, determined to be fair.

  “I expect so, but he doesn’t talk to me. We just walk along very fast and I feel much better afterwards.”

  This evidence of a silent communion was even more exacerbating to Francis than the thought of his rival imparting useful information.

  “And Julia is a darling,” said Caroline again, anxious to persuade herself that her heart was not aching for Hugh. “But however nice one’s friends are, Francis, it doesn’t prevent one being lonely – oh, always unspeakably lonely.”

  “Poor Caroline.”

  “Not that I miss James,” Caroline went on, more interested in trying to explain herself to herself than in talking to Francis, “because I don’t. I think I had stopped loving him long before I knew I had. But just desperately lonely.”

  “Have you ever thought about marrying again?” said Francis. “You see I am taking you at your word about asking questions.”

  To his surprise Caroline’s face flamed darkly as she said: “Oh, yes. I suppose people always think about that.”

  Francis, who could not know that the words Hugh had spoken to her in the taxi were responsible for her unashamed confession, felt a stirring of hope.

  “You have tremendous courage,” he said.

  “Courage? I don’t think so. One doesn’t need courage with you, Francis, you are so safe. Do you think we ought to go and dance now?”

  But Francis, desperate at the thought of an indispensable Colonel Beaton waiting in the next room, would not be denied.

  “Darling Caroline, I love you more than anything in the world,” he said. “I adore your lovely hands and your courage and the way you look straight into my eyes and make my heart turn over like a pancake. Could you, dearest, think of marrying me?”

  Caroline sat up in her chair and looked at him in astonishment and terror.

  “I don’t mean now, this very moment,” said Francis, alarmed by his cousin’s panic stricken face. “I mean in a year, in two years, a lifetime, whenever you like.”

  Still Caroline said nothing, wrapped in fear and amazement. Francis came and knelt down beside her.

  “If I have frightened you, my darling, I am more sorry than I can say. Can’t you say one word?”

  “I am so cold,” said Caroline in a small remote voice.

  Francis took her hands, which were indeed ice cold. She made no effort to withdraw them, seeming to find a kind of comfort in the warmth of his own. Francis was content to remain by her side and would have been all too happy for this firelit moment to last forever. He was entirely at a loss to understand what had happened, unless it was that the very thought of marriage after her unlucky venture was enough to freeze her into dumb terror. Yet she had admitted that the thought was not strange to her. He could only humbly fear that while she could entertain an abstract idea of a second husband, she had some feeling against himself, or some stronger feeling for another man – he would not allow himself even to think the name Beaton – which made his suit an outrage to her too sensitive mind. When she had said that she felt safe with him, this dependence had touched
him to the quick. Now perhaps he had destroyed this confidence for ever. Sick at heart, he bowed his head over her cold hands, lifting them to his lips. Caroline still made no attempt to release herself, but her hands trembled so that Francis could do nothing but let them go. They both stood up and Caroline said with the polite voice of the Caroline he had taken to Beechwood on the day when her life’s foundations were destroyed:

  “I think we might see what the others are doing. Anna and I mustn’t be late, because there are people to dinner.”

  She put on her hat before a mirror over the fireplace. Francis, looking at her reflection, his heart torn by the sight of her adored face strained and harassed as he had hoped never to see it again, blaming himself for his haste, his swift unprepared proposal of marriage, suddenly felt an insane desire to force her to drop the mask of an indifferent courtesy, to penetrate her frozen armor and wring some kind of feeling from her.

  “Who is it then, Caroline?” he asked her reflection.

  “I don’t quite understand,” said the too polite voice.

  “Is there another man that you love?” said Francis, furious with himself, pulling Caroline around by the arm.

  She looked at him steadily till he released her and then said, “Yes.”

  *

  Hugh was delighted to see his cousin Caroline looking more rested. She said she and Anna ought to be getting home, but Hugh begged her to dance once with him. Julia insisted on dragging her father through some new steps, so Francis went to talk to Anna who was changing the records.

  “Have you been thinking again about our plan for Caroline marrying into your family?” she said, hunting among a pile of disks.

  “Yes,” said Francis truthfully.

  “Well, I still think it’s a nice family to marry into,” said Anna, and then wondered if she had said too much. But she need not have wondered, for Francis could hardly hear what she said, even with the well-trained social part of his mind. Caroline’s frank avowal, for that was what it came to, of her preference for Colonel Beaton, had almost stunned him. To feel that he had frightened and bullied his cousin was far from pleasant. When he thought of Caroline’s terrified immobility, her abandonment of her cold hands to the caress which she could not feel, he saw no reason to think himself better than James. A last glimpse of her sitting huddled in a corner of the taxi, white-faced and forlorn, while Anna and the Beatons said their goodbyes, was of little comfort. Before he could collect his wits, he found himself embroiled in dining with Hugh and the Beatons, who were returning to Beechwood that night, and then dancing. Or rather, in watching Hugh and Julia dance while he talked to Colonel Beaton and had to admit, reluctantly and dejectedly, that Caroline couldn’t have made a better choice.

  If he could have seen Caroline, he would have been even less comforted. She had moved through the evening as best she might, conscious that Anna’s loving eyes were uneasily following her, and praying that no one else was noticing her.

  The dinner guests stayed late and the last of them had not been long gone when Wilfred and George came in.

  “Where have you been, darlings?” said Mrs. Danvers.

  Both darlings, determined that this sort of thing must be put down with a firm hand, ignored their mother’s question, bursting though they were to talk of their evening. But there are other ways to approach a subject besides the direct.

  “Julia Beaton is quite a possible woman,” said George to Anna.

  “Of course she is,” said Anna, who found her youngest brother’s present affectation of calling all girls women inexplicably annoying.

  “Not bad for a kid,” continued George, feeling all the superiority that twenty-two has over twenty.

  “What made you think of Julia?” said Anna.

  “We were dining with some people at the Legation Club,” said George, “and who should be there but old Beaton with Hugh and Francis and Julia. Gosh, that woman dances well. Wilfred tried to get her to dance with him and got turned down. Julia wasn’t dancing with anyone but Hugh. It looked like a case, didn’t it, Wilfred?”

  “That’s about enough about that,” said Wilfred, on whom the rejection of his advances appeared to be preying. “All right, all right, George, you needn’t wink like that. That Russian girl you were dancing with wasn’t much class anyway, and she was as Red as they make them. I danced with her once, and I put her in her place pretty strongly.”

  “If your place was with your great feet walking all over hers,” said George, “I expect you did. By what she told me, Julia did the wise thing in turning you down. She couldn’t have driven her father down to Beechwood tonight with two smashed feet. I say, mother, we saw one of Wilfred’s blackshirt friends making a row tonight outside the Legation, and he was carried away kicking by two policemen. It was frightfully funny.”

  “Oh, frightfully,” said Wilfred bitterly, and would have said more, but was interrupted by his mother who said with much dignity that she would go up to bed and not keep them from their talk. Caroline followed her, and Anna only waited long enough to see Wilfred and George reconciled over a new jazz record. She feared to guess what was wrong with Caroline, but if, as she thought, Caroline was unhappy about Hugh and Julia, her heart ached for her ill-starred sister-in-law. Caroline, she hoped, was tormenting herself quite unnecessarily. If Hugh had danced with Julia that afternoon it was because Caroline was in the study with Francis. She couldn’t have both her cousins at once. And if Hugh had danced again with Julia that night, what else could he do? It was George who was to blame for talking such conceited nonsense.

  Full of foreboding, she turned on the light in her own room and looked through into Caroline’s. Even as she had feared, Caroline, self-control thrown to the winds, was lying on her bed, still fully dressed, shaken with sobs from head to foot. Anna approached her with every endearment her affection could devise, asked no questions and persuaded her to undress and get into bed. But all the time, Caroline’s tear were flowing freely and Anna had to get her three clean pocket handkerchiefs to cry into.

  “Now,” she said when Caroline was safely in bed, a miserable tear-drenched sight, “what is it all about?”

  To her immense surprise Caroline answered in a choked voice, “Francis.”

  Anna conceived that Caroline had taken leave of her senses and must mean Hugh.

  “But Francis didn’t dance with Julia,” she said.

  “Why should he? It wouldn’t matter if he did. It was what he said. Anna, Anna, I can’t bear it.”

  “But, darling, what did Francis say? Something about Hugh and you? There is nothing dreadful in that.”

  “Hugh? Why should Francis say anything about Hugh? Hugh doesn’t care if I am dead or alive. Francis asked me to marry him. I could die of shame that he could do such a thing. Francis, whom I always trusted. And then he asked me if I cared for anyone else. Oh, how could he? But I told him the truth, I said yes. I hope it hurt him as much as it hurt me.”

  At these words Anna knew, fatally, that her own hurt would be before long almost unbearable. Francis, Francis, rose like a cry in her heart. But knowing that her fiercest grief would not reach her till her numbed senses began to live again, she turned to her task of comforting Caroline. Ever since the day that Francis had brought Caroline to Beechwood, since she had learnt the depths of her brother’s infamy, she had appointed herself Caroline’s guardian sister. Even her parents did not feel more keenly than she the disgrace that James had brought to them all by his callous unkindness to so gentle a creature as Caroline, and very strong in her was the feeling that atonement could be made in some measure by a devotion of herself to her sister-in-law. In the nights when she sat by Caroline’s bed, in the days when she had tried to bring Caroline’s remote mind back to the quiet comfort of daily life, she had come to love her as a generous nature must always love the object of its generosity. That Francis had given Caroline into her hands in that dark hour was an additional reason for cherishing her. Without her help, Caroline would hardly hav
e been recalled to life. It was she who had gently forced Caroline to take her place in family life, to make friends with the Beatons, to walk the hills with Colonel Beaton. And if truth were known her parents’ plan to spend the winter in London was more than half her doing. Here, she thought, Caroline would find old friends again and discover how little people were thinking about her. Now she trembled to think of the harm she might have done. She had hoped that Caroline, taking up a busier life again in London, would see more of Hugh. Caroline must not be hurried. Any sign of interference would, Anna knew, drive her into her cold fastnesses again, but with time surely Hugh, for whom Caroline had again and again betrayed to Anna her deep diffident affection, would help his cousin to forget the past, would make her life revive. Anna had not consciously looked forward very far, but if she could plan for Hugh to refashion Caroline’s life, could she prevent herself from imagining sometimes what might be her own fate? Was it not possible that Francis, grateful for her care of his cousin, would see that she too would be glad of help, glad to lay down the burden, dear though it was, of sustaining Caroline, and make her own happiness his care?

  Now she must never think more of this, must put every thought of herself aside till Caroline could rest. Never, never could she grudge Caroline a possible happiness, but for a moment she suffered a bitter pang. With what gratitude, with what silent awe would Anna have stretched out her hands to receive the gift from which Caroline averted her gaze in fear and horror.

  The abandonment of what Anna knew to be an intensely proud and reserved nature was painful to see, difficult to soothe. Caroline, fighting herself at every step, had succeeded in mastering her hysteria, only from time to time she let the name of Hugh escape on a sobbing sigh. Anna longed to tell her that all would be well, that Hugh could not help caring for her, but she was afraid to treat so dangerous and comforting a hope as fact. It was impossible for her to tell whether Hugh cared for Caroline, or for Julia, or indeed for anyone at all, and to tell a kindly lie to Caroline now might mean more unhappiness later. So she soothed her sister-in-law as best she might, till Caroline was able to drink a glass of water and dry her eyes for the last time.