About Sylvia, her dear friend, she did not trouble her head at all. Sylvia had had enough experience, and could look after herself. Still, she wondered. Was Sylvia merely amusing herself with the boy, or was she really in love with him? Anyhow, however much in love she might be, Sylvia could be trusted to see that no unpleasantness resulted. Supposing that George, for instance, suddenly unsealed the eyelids that had been so conveniently stuck together for all these years, and put his foot down as he most certainly would? What would Sylvia do then? Lucy’s knowledge of her friend and of her world gave the instant answer: prevent a scandal. The code was rigid. Within the closed circle of their own set, anybody might do as they pleased, but no scandal must leak out to the uninitiated. Appearances must be respected, though morals might be neglected. Sylvia knew and had always obeyed this unwritten law. Lucy had no cause to be uneasy, though she might perhaps have felt a tremor had she known how very passionately Sylvia had fallen in love with Sebastian.
The way in which Lucy had originally discovered her son’s infatuation perhaps deserves remark and record.
Houses such as Chevron enjoy not only their traditions but their minor habits. Raisins and almonds appear during Advent, when the last bunches of white grapes shrivel yellow like the skin of an old woman and are no longer decorative though still palatable; raisins and almonds, with oranges and bananas, are typical of the winter season when the home produce, but for the humble apple, gives out; yet there are certain imported fruits which persist irrespective of season throughout the year. Such a foreigner is the French Plum. Black, glossy, he remains a plum so long as he is offered in a bottle labelled J. & C. Clark, Bordeaux—his most expensive and luxurious form; in more modest households he is bought by the pound from the grocer, is stewed, served with custard, and becomes a Prune, even as a sheep becomes mutton once it is dead, or the deceased relict of a baronet, in the column headed Latest Wills, becomes Dame. The distinction between French plums and stewed prunes is thus not to be over-looked by those sensitive to these nice shades. French plums, then, were a constant adjunct to the Chevron dinner table, though stewed prunes never. French plums appeared regularly, in their squat tubby little bottle labelled J. & C. Clark, Bordeaux, and Viola, who detested them, had from her childhood upwards been enjoined to eat them—“So good for you, darling; another one, just to please mother”—but by the usual irony of life, Sebastian, whose complexion mattered less, had always consumed them in large quantities of his own accord. He had, indeed, been known to finish off a bottle at a single sitting, and to tell the chaplet, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor, Gentleman, Apothecary, Ploughboy, Thief, several times over in the garland of stones arranged round the edge of his plate. What more natural, therefore, than that his mother should notice that he now never ate more than four? or, if pressed, was consistent in bringing the tally up to nine? She tested him more than once, dining alone with him and Viola at Chevron: always four stones, or nine. “This year, next year, now, or never?” she twitted him; that fitted the four, but not the nine. Then it dawned on her: Elle m’ aime, un peu, beaucoup, passionnément—and she saw the arithmetic which would bring it to pas du tout. Then, being committed to numbers, how could she fail to put two and two together? Sebastian’s secret was hers.
It was also the property of the Chevron servants. Correct, distant, reserved, it was not to be supposed that they were without eyes in their heads, and it may also be imagined that they had their views upon the subject. This strange behind-the-scenes domestic world, indeed—so sharply segregated, yet so intimately concerned—had been thrown into a muddled state of mind upon observing the new complication in the affairs of their master. The upper servants, who regarded themselves as the discreet guardians of the house and family, suffered most from this confusion of their feelings, for they brought to the consideration of the matter two entire but conflicting systems of opinion, the one learnt in youth in a home decently regardful of the moral virtues, the other acquired through years of experience in an atmosphere where self-indulgence was the natural law. What was their own existence but one long pandering to this self-indulgence? Printed cards, with a list and timetable of duties, hung in all the underservants’ bedrooms. Wood must be cut and carried, hot water bottles put into beds, inkstands filled, breakfast trays prepared, blinds raised or lowered; housemaids must vanish silently if surprised at their tasks, hall-boys must not be allowed to whistle, Vigeon must wear London clothes in the country, no noise must be made anywhere lest her Grace should hear it and be annoyed—all this long creed was handed on and taken absolutely for granted in its observance. In a word, life for the great and wealthy must be made as pleasant as possible. Their pleasures came under the same heading; traditionally, the lords of Chevron had kept their mistresses for so many hundreds of years, that the charming cohort of the shades of these ladies peopled the corridors and insinuated their suggestions into ears well attuned to listen. If the fifth duke had made a scandal in the reign of Queen Anne, why shouldn’t his Grace make one now, if he was so minded? Thus thought Mrs. Wickenden stoutly; and tried to crush the small voice which said that this was not precisely the lesson she had learnt at her mother’s knee. Her mother had implied that married ladies cast down their eyes when in the presence of gentlemen other than their husbands, and that young gentlemen reserved their attentions for the young ladies they desired to marry; and although a lifetime of experience had taught Mrs. Wickenden that very different principles obtained in the society which she had the privilege to serve, her early training was still sufficiently vivid to cause her an occasional sigh. Lady Roehampton was a great beauty, of course, and one knew what young men were—said Mrs. Wickenden, who had never come within three yards of a young man in her life; still, one couldn’t help wishing that his Grace’s fancy had lighted on a nice young lady, so they might look forward to a wedding in the chapel and eventually—though Mrs. Wickenden was far too much refined to say so—to a nursery once more at Chevron.
Somewhat to this effect did Mrs. Wickenden disburden herself to her sister-in-law, the wife of Wickenden the carpenter, who had come in to tea. She had once been still-room-maid at Chevron, and was now Mrs. Wickenden’s only friend and confidante. Together the two elderly women could stir their tea and discuss the affairs of Chevron up and down, inside and out. For Mrs. Wickenden could make no friends within the house. The housemaid—even the head housemaid—were beneath her; the cook was a chef, and, anyway, the “kitchen people” were as separate as the Bandarlog; between herself and Miss Wace an avowed though inconvenient hostility existed, too complicated in its origins and ramifications to be detailed here; Button she considered pert and untrustworthy; Mrs. Vigeon and she were at daggers drawn; visiting maids, even Miss Hull, her crony, were ineligible for intimate confidences, since they formed no part of Chevron and Mrs. Wickenden’s sense of the closed circle was at least as strong as Lucy’s own; her sister-in-law, however, provided the ideal partner. Although not now of the house, she had once been of it, and had its workings at her fingertips; moreover, she was allied through marriage and followed every event, large and small, with a faithful and passionate interest; finally, her discretion in the outside world was assured. She just allowed it to be known that no secret of Chevron was hid from her; but she never went further than that. Mrs. Wickenden, in consequence, said things to her which she scarcely allowed herself to think in the privacy of her own bedroom.
It was very pleasant, having tea in the housekeeper’s room. It was a good tea—scones, plum-cake, Madeira cake, and several sorts of jam—all brought in and suitably disposed by a well-trained housemaid of the meaner sort. (Mrs. Wickenden was far more haughty and particular with the house-maid detailed to wait upon her than Lucy ever dared to be with Mrs.Wickenden.)Martha Wickenden much enjoyed the weekly teas to which she was invited by her glorious sister-in-law; not only did she relish the plum-cake, but she liked to feel herself associated with the lordly way in which the housekeeper rang the bell, said �
�Bring some more coals,” rang it again for more hot water, and rang it finally that the curtains might be drawn. She liked to loll on the sofa and gaze at the photographs standing in their frames: Lucy in her wedding dress; the late duke in the robes of the Garter; a Royal group with the King in the middle, wearing a Homburg hat, Lucy sitting beside him; Sebastian as a little boy; Sebastian and Viola as children, laughing on a toboggan in the snow; Sebastian, today, in uniform. The housekeeper never lolled. She sat prim and upright, jerking her shawl round her shoulders, for she was always chilly—a characteristic gesture, which interrupted the constant darting and stabbing of her crochet hook as inches of crochet lace dangled and lengthened with incredible rapidity. Sometimes she would have “one of my headaches”—for thus did she always refer to them, prefaced by the possessive and almost affectionate pronoun—and then the darting of the hook would be suspended as she rubbed her forehead with a stump of menthol that lived in her workbasket, screwed into a tube of yellow wood. Mrs. Wickenden never allowed these distractions to interfere with her conversation. In a low, even, and mournful voice she rambled on, as one whose function is always to deplore. Listening to her, you would have thought that the very beauty of Chevron was tinged with a mortal melancholy, and that Sebastian and Viola were tragically doomed from birth. Sebastian was her darling. Viola she of course spoke of with fitting respect, but with slight reservation; for secretly she thought Viola haughty. But Sebastian! How often had she not crept into his nursery, despite the black looks of his nurse, whenever a cold had kept him in bed, and had amused him by the hour, making dolls for him out of wish-bones, with sealing-wax heads and grey flannel cloaks. She had always been convinced that he would never reach manhood, and even now she maintained that he was not long for this world. Many a time had the carpenter’s wife, who was of a more robust temperament (and moreover, was enjoying her tea), entered a word of protest, “I’m sure, Jane, I never saw a better set-up young gentleman than his Grace,” but Jane would have none of it. “You may think so, Martha,” she would reply, “but you haven’t heard him cough in his nursery as I have, winter after winter—oh, dear, something pitiful; and what with the draughts that come down these passages, and the cold striking up from these stone floors—there, they didn’t think of those things in the old days; and now with this rackety life,” she added darkly, and Martha pursed her lips and nodded her head as she stirred her tea, for she knew what the allusion was to. It was the prelude to the most succulent moment of the whole afternoon. It meant that Jane, with many windy sighs, was about to embark on the topic of his Grace’s infatuation.
Lady Roehampton was not a young woman; but she was still, though not without taking a certain amount of trouble, beautiful. This question of the middle-aged woman’s beauty and desirability has never sufficiently been exploited by novelists. It is one of the minor dramas of life; yet who are we to call it minor, when to the women concerned it involves the whole purpose of their existence? Lady Roehampton, for instance, certainly thought she knew no other means of self-expression and believed that she desired none, though, as we shall presently see, she was to discover a human weakness within herself, which clashed uncomfortably with her scheme—but as for that, we must leave the story to take care of itself. In the meantime, we are concerned only with the Lady Roehampton who since the age of eighteen had been a professional beauty, wooed by some men thanks to sincere passion and by others thanks to sincere snobbishness, most suggestible of human frailties; the Lady Roehampton who had been mobbed in Rotten Row, and who by dint of sheer satiety had grown languid towards the compliments that had drenched her for so long that she took them as naturally as the rising and setting of the sun. Now she was arrived at middle age; and the compliments, though they still came automatically forth, had slightly changed their note; women said—ingenious women—“No one would believe that your Margaret was eighteen”; and men said—ingenuous men—“None of our young beauties can hold a candle to you”; and even as she absent-mindedly smiled, she winced. She neither relished nor appreciated this new note of wonderment which had crept into their expressions of admiration. It was one thing to be admired because one was so lovely, and quite another thing to be admired because one was still so lovely. She did not belong to the sort of woman who, halfway through her life, can change her manner and inaugurate a new existence; she possessed an art of her own, but that particular art was beyond her. Had she died at thirty, people would have exclaimed at the tragedy: they would have been better advised to exclaim at the tragedy of her living on to forty-two, the age when she caught her own fingers so badly in the trap she had set for Sebastian.
It was the last flare-up of her passing youth, compounded of sweet delirium and wild terrors. There were moments during that London season of nineteen hundred and six when she was either happier or more miserable than she had ever been in her life. Her relations with Sebastian would seem to have reached the crest of their perfection, until, as climbing in hilly country, yet another crest appeared and another, and still no limit came in sight. And everything that most delighted her was given to her now at the same time: the pageant of the Season, the full exciting existence in London, the crowds, the colour, the hot streets by day, the cool balconies at night, the flowers filling the rooms and the flower girls with baskets at the street corners, the endless parties with people streaming in and out of doors and up and downstairs; the display, the luxury, the wealth, the elegance that flattered and satisfied her—and to crown all this, the knowledge that everywhere she would meet Sebastian, and that he would be at her side, vigilant, proprietary, perfectly decorous of course, but occasionally looking into her eyes with a long glance charged with the full message of their intimacy. She wanted nothing more. Intellectually, her head was as empty as it was beautiful. To Sylvia, as to most of her acquaintance, the life of pleasure was all in all; neither books, art, nor music meant anything to her except in so far as their topicality formed part of the social equipment. Sometimes she went to a picture-show, and frequently she was to be seen in her box at the Opera; but she gave to the pictures and to the music just about as much attention as she gave to the horses at Ascot. Books she never read at all, and indeed among her friends they were seldom discussed. A biography might possibly come up for argument, especially if it referred to someone they had known; but it was easy enough to pick up a little information from hearing other people talk; and then to say either that, in one’s own opinion, Winston had rather overrated Lord Randolph, or else that Lady F. was really too much of a scandal-monger, and that her memoirs ought to be suppressed. One might, without too much effort, read the latest novel by H. G. Wells. But gossip, thank goodness, needed no brains beyond a certain shrewdness in human affairs. The gossip moreover was always of the most delectable kind, for not only did it concern people one knew intimately, but one enjoyed the additional savour of belonging to the very small band of the initiated. The free-masonry of Sylvia’s particular set, as Lucy had rightly remembered for her reassurance, was jealously guarded. Thus to all appearances the Templecombes were the best of friends, but everybody within the set knew that Lord Templecombe had once found Harry Tremaine in Lady Templecombe’s bedroom, and had not spoken to her except in public for twenty years. That had been a terrible affair, and was still remembered as the worst scandal of the ’eighties. Lord Templecombe had completely lost his head, and had behaved in an unheard-of way: he had threatened divorce, and it was said that he would have carried out his threat but for the personal intervention of the Prince of Wales. The great ladies of the day, in a panic—notably Lady L. and the Duchess of D., who between them ruled as dictators over society—had thrown in their weight also; they had severally sent for Templecombe, and in their darkened drawing rooms had told him that, whatever his private sentiments might be, he could not sacrifice his class to such an exposure. “Noblesse oblige, my dear Eadred,” they had said; “people like us do not exhibit their feelings; they do not divorce. Only the vulgar divorce.” They had expr
essed their sympathy with him; they were very sorry for him, but they had a duty to perform, and so had he. He bowed to them; he performed it. The Templecombes remained together, and no one in the outside world was any the wiser; what their private life was, nobody troubled to enquire, so long as Lady L. and the Duchess of D. were satisfied. Standards had slackened a little since those severe days, but still the code prevailed; there was only one Commandment which mattered, and that was the eleventh. Similarly, everybody knew that when a discreet, one-horse brougham waited outside a certain door, one must not ring the bell, for the lady was otherwise engaged. Being satisfied with such things, as Sylvia was amply satisfied, it was very delightful to move daily among people as conversant as oneself.
An uncomfortable idea was put into her head: what did Sebastian think of it all? Julia Levison put the idea there, for besides being one of Sylvia’s dearest friends she was also well known as owning the sharpest claws in London. Sylvia was disturbed, although she did not betray it. What did Sebastian think? Hitherto the question had not existed for her. “Is it possible,” she thought, “that I don’t know what he is really like?” and Sebastian, with his charm, and his chic, and his extravagance, was suddenly presented to her as wholly inscrutable. She remembered that intent way he had of looking at her; she had always attributed to it the meaning she desired to find; but now she wondered. What was he turning over in his mind? treacherous things, inimical things? She remembered small encounters with him, in which she had come up against a blank obstinacy that defeated all her wiles; and according to Sylvia’s creed a young man who resisted his mistress’ wishes was an intractable young man indeed. When he said quietly that he was going to Chevron for a few days, for instance, she knew by experience that the battle was lost in advance; if he said he intended to go, he went. Sylvia had to accept it. Remembering this, she took some comfort in her perspicacity at having guessed his passion for Chevron. “So I can’t be such a fool,” she thought with the pathos of an unwonted humility, “after all.” But her pride sagged again as she recognised that she never could get him to talk about Chevron. And if he withheld that from her, what else might he not withhold?
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