To Florence, however, this quarrel was another step in the slow process of defeat It was devastating to her, this sudden discovery that her temper could be ungovernable. For a few days she had abandoned herself to the reassurance of being loved, stifling her fears, doubts and regrets in that brief oblivion which was becoming for her, as it was for Lewis, a means of escape. Nothing had been done to reconcile their divergent points of view; the issues were merely shelved, for neither was really prepared to yield to the other. And when a dispute broke out it was somehow the more bitter because of their recent intense preoccupation with each other.
Always they seemed to fight about such foolish things. This time it was the old, wretched question of Teresa’s future. Lewis was determined that the child should not go to school again. He spoilt her outrageously. For the other two a settlement seemed possible, but about Teresa there was no agreeing. The fight became unbelievably fierce, until Florence noticed an inflection in her voice which reminded her of the railings of Linda Cowlard. She fell silent, horrified and ashamed, and Lewis got in the last word.
‘If Tessa leaves this house,’ he vowed, ‘I leave it. She’s the only thing that makes life tolerable. So I warn you!’
And he rushed out of the room and fell over Roberto, who was listening at the keyhole, so that the sound of cursing seemed to go on all across the landing and down the stairs. The absurdity of his last remark soon restored Florence to her normal serenity, but for a few minutes after he had gone she felt herself transported by a resentment so passionate that it seemed as if she had never been angry before,
17
‘Prester John’ was produced at the Nine Muses in the course of the Spring with a success which justified all the risks taken by an enterprising management on its behalf. Charles Churchill, at his breakfast table, read a glowing account of it in the newspaper, the very same paper which had reported Sanger’s death so bleakly a year ago.
‘We’ve changed all that!’ thought Charles, holding the column close up to his short-sighted eyes. ‘… “a masterly performance” … hm … hm … “surely the audience at the Nine Muses is the most intelligent in the world” … Why do they always say that I wonder? I suppose because it’s the sort of audience which reads the notices next morning … “the enterprise of this undertaking” … dammit! The whole column’s about the Nine Muses! Ah, no! Here we have it! … Sanger … “neglected too long … a national possession!” … Well, well! “A shattering message!” Heaven help us! … “and yet, surely, the most vocal music ever written … the second act one vast lyric!” … What’s this? What the devil’s this? “Mr Leyburn’s conducting” … Leyburn! … “we venture to think that Mr Leyburn a little mistook the subtle tempo of the first chorus!” … But where, I wonder, was my precious son-in-law?’
Lewis should have conducted the opera; Charles knew that. He also knew that Florence was building on its success; that she regarded the engagement as a great thing. He scratched his head and read the column again and tried to suppose that Leyburn was a printer’s error for Dodd, but it would not do. Very much dispirited, and wondering if some untoward accident could have occurred at Chiswick, he went on with his breakfast.
By the second post came a short, sad little note from Florence to say that the Sanger opera had gone off quite well, but that Lewis had fallen out with the management at the last moment so that Edward Leyburn had taken his place.
‘Edward did very well,’ she wrote, ‘considering the short notice.’
‘But she was set on it!’ muttered Charles, looking at her letter. ‘Since when has she learnt to take a disappointment quietly? This is serious! I shall really have to go and see.’
He had a horror of interfering parents. He had been determined, from the first, to let Florence manage her crazy marriage in her own way. He had said his say and she would not listen to him. She was old enough to know her own mind. But, on the other hand, he was very fond of her. He was sure that she was unhappy, and there was something in this note which read like an appeal for help. He thought he knew where he could assist her. She did not say so, but for some weeks he had guessed that she was growing rather tired of her young cousins. It was probably time they were removed from Chiswick. At least he could help her over that.
Soon after the production of ‘Prester John’ he discovered that he could spare a week-end to his daughter, so he packed his bag, wired to Strand-on-the-Green, and set off.
He was received by his niece Teresa, who told him that Florence had gone into the country for the day, before his wire came. The children, she said, were out fishing, and Lewis had some men with him. Would Charles have tea with her, or would he rather sit with Lewis? Charles voted for tea promptly, whereupon she went to the top of the stairs and launched a flood of shrill, abusive Italian downwards at Roberto. Then she came back into the drawing-room and sat herself down to entertain her uncle.
Charles looked her over sharply and with a sense of surprise that was faintly pleasant. He had only seen her once, just after her arrival in England. Since then she had grown a good deal and he rather liked her looks. She was plain, perhaps; at least, she was not like any of the Churchills. But she was a friendly creature and seemed ready to be civil to him. He began at once on his mission and asked how long she intended to stay at Strand-on-the-Green. She said she supposed she would stay until she had to go.
‘Oh,’ said he. ‘Then you are depending on my daughter to turn you out?’
‘You mean she doesn’t want us?’ said Teresa, looking startled.
‘I’ve never heard her say so. Still, as a guest, you must feel it a little …’
‘A guest!’
She opened her eyes.
‘Aren’t you a guest? What is a guest, do you think?’
‘A person who’s been invited …’ she began, and pulled up, turning quite pink. Then she recovered herself and said: ‘But children, you know, are forced to be somebody’s guest, if they have no home of their own. It’s part of the undignified state of being a child.’
‘Do you call yourself a child, Miss?’
‘I do not. But your daughter Florence does, and on that account she has to keep me in her house.’
‘I see. Fourteen, aren’t you?’
‘Fifteen. I’ve had a birthday since I last saw you.’
‘Dear me! I’d forgotten. Very remiss of me!’
‘Let me give you some tea.’
He recognised a slight inflection of Florence in the way she said this. But there was nothing of Florence in the meal which she had ordered; it consisted largely of a cottage loaf and a trayful of breakfast cups.
‘I said the big cups,’ she commented, with some complacency. ‘Men always like them.’
Charles beamed. He liked but seldom got them. He said:
‘Fifteen! An uncle has no business to forget these things, has he? Yes! Two lumps if you please, my dear.’
He pulled out his pocket-book.
‘I think it’s clever of you to have got it right within a year,’ said Teresa. ‘Bread? What is this for? Me? Oh!’
‘Rather belated, I’m afraid. You’ll be telling me you’re sixteen before we’ve finished tea.’
‘What am I to do with it?’
‘Get yourself …’
He could not at all guess what she would be likely to get for herself, so he said vaguely that it was to be something pretty.
‘A pretty thing,’ said Teresa thoughtfully, looking at the note in her hand. ‘With all my heart; the next pretty thing I see. Have another cup?’
‘And how did “Prester John” go off?’ asked Charles boldly.
‘Really … I … couldn’t say …’ she answered slowly.
‘Why? Weren’t you there?’
‘Oh, yes. We were all there. But we don’t understand the people in this country. We thought it was very bad. It was only half rehearsed. And that Mr Leyburn can’t conduct, can he?’
‘That I can’t say. Why didn’t my son-in-law conduct?
’
‘Lewis? Of course! He’s your son-in-law. How funny! I never thought of you and him as being related. Well … no … He was going to do it, and then he couldn’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well, you know, “Prester John” is such a very poor opera. Sanger thought so himself; my father, I mean. It was awful that they chose just that one; Lewis hated it. He was very, very fond of Sanger. And at the rehearsals he got wild because it was so bad. And at last he couldn’t bear it and they had a quarrel.’
‘So that was it! Then it wasn’t a success?’
‘But it sounded like one! They clapped! And cheered! I’ve never seen Sanger’s work better received, not even the good pieces. Always it’s been just a few people. But these were all so enthusiastic; and the papers next day didn’t any of them say how bad it really was. We couldn’t help laughing at first. It was so ridiculous. And Lewis laughed too, quite loud. And then, when Florence told us to be quiet, I looked round and saw that nobody else was amused.’
‘Where were you sitting?’
‘In the front; in the stalls. And we got there late, so we began badly, somehow.’
Charles was getting a fairly accurate idea of the sort of evening that Florence must have spent. She had admitted beforehand that she should feel a trifle conspicuous, escorting Sanger’s children to hear a first English performance of Sanger’s music. The most intelligent audience in the world was largely composed of her personal acquaintances. It was a pity if his nephew and nieces had attracted even more attention by behaving ill. And Lewis, too, had been told to be quiet. It was monstrous! Teresa got a severe little lecture upon civil manners in public places, which she took very meekly. She promised to do better another time.
‘There won’t probably be another time,’ Charles told her. ‘I don’t expect Florence will take you to another.’
‘Oh, yes, but she will. Lewis is to conduct his Symphony at the Regent’s Hall in May. We are all going to that, and I promise that we will behave.’
‘Oh?’ he murmured, half to himself. ‘She’s pulled that off, has she?’
‘Oh, no,’ said Teresa quickly. ‘That has nothing to do with her. My brother-in-law, Jacob Birnbaum, managed that. He’s Lewis’s friend. When we want anything of that kind done he always sees to it.’
Charles perceived that the word ‘we’ indicated a community to which his daughter did not, presumably, belong. Teresa gave him to understand that the concert at the Regent’s Hall would be a really important affair.
‘Why can’t she leave the fellow to paddle his own canoe?’ he thought. ‘If he really has a pull with these Jew financiers, they’ll do more for him than all her gentlemanly friends put together.’
Aloud he said:
‘So she’s forgiven you, has she?’
‘Not quite,’ said Teresa, after a little consideration. ‘But she will. She has so much …’ no adequate English word arrived, so she shyly tried another language: ‘… so much bonté!’
Charles agreed. It was the right word for that particular benevolence with which Florence seasoned her obstinacy.
‘But Uncle Charles!’
‘Yes, my dear?’
‘When you said about guests … Do you mean that we ought to go away?’
‘Not yet,’ he said hastily. ‘Not until some suitable establishment is found for you.’
‘You know that Sebastian has got a scholarship in Dr Dawson’s choir school? He wants to go there. And Lina wants to go on the stage. Only in France, because she can speak Racine. Have you heard her? She can really.’
‘No. But Florence tells me that she shows promise.’
‘Well, but there’s a school where she can go in Paris. Would that be a suitable establishment?’
‘I daresay. I’ve come here, partly, to discuss it. If you children have professions that you want to pursue …’
‘I know. I’ve none.’
‘Well. That’s no harm. It’s early yet.’
‘But Florence says that I’m to go to school again.’
‘Would you like that?’
‘I couldn’t endure it,’ she said, with a quiet intensity which startled him.
‘But my dear! What’s to be done with you? I’d be quite ready to fall in with your views if you wanted to specialise. With your upbringing, it’s late in the day to begin upon general education. I quite see that. I’m sure it’s best for the other two to go their own ways. But you say yourself you’ve no …’
‘I can’t help it. I know what it is to have talent. I know that I’ve none. I love music. But that’s not enough. I love apples, but I don’t mean to be a greengrocer. It has to be something more than that; something that comes so far first that there isn’t any question of a second.’
‘And there’s nothing that comes quite first with you?’
She was silent and he wondered how anyone could be so misguided as to treat her like a child. The sad thoughtfulness of her face was old; older, in its calm resignation, than any expression he had ever caught on the face of his daughter.
‘Everybody has something that comes quite first,’ she said at last. ‘But sometimes, you know, it’s complicated.’
‘Not always a thing,’ suggested Charles gently. ‘Often, especially for a woman, it’s a person. That is more complicated.’
At once he felt that he had been a little impertinent. He said hastily that she must not distress herself; very few people had got a profession at fifteen. She must not let herself be hustled by the precocity of the rest of her family. But in his heart he felt that he was misstating her case. Her trouble was not the bewildered groping of adolescence for a goal in life, but rather the sad finality of a woman who has beheld her destiny too young. His next attempt was towards another kind of consolation. Life, he suggested, was, after all, a very amusing affair. It was wise to cultivate a taste for it. There were so many entertaining things to be done. For a young woman, just entering upon the world, the opportunities of enjoyment were boundless. Didn’t she think so?
‘Not in a girls’ school.’
‘Well, no. Probably not. But education is a good investment.’
‘Is it? Are you educated?’
‘Comparatively speaking … yes.’
‘Are you so very happy? Happier than an uneducated man?’
‘I’ve been singularly fortunate in my life, Teresa. I’ve had remarkably little to bear; less I daresay than you have had already. But I can honestly say that, in such trouble as has come to me, a philosophic outlook, which is the fruit, one of the fruits, of a good education, has been of use to me.’
‘Can’t an uneducated person have a philosophic outlook?’
‘By the light of natural wisdom? Yes. But it’s harder and slower. And you must realise this, Teresa. Unhappiness is, to a certain extent, the sure lot of every one of us. We cannot escape it. We can only brace ourselves to endure it. But we have it in our power to do a great deal towards securing our happiness. That does lie in our hands. We can enlarge our tastes and interests and perceptions. That is the chief use of education, to widen the resources.’
‘Putting your eggs into a lot of baskets instead of one?’
‘It’s safer, you know.’
‘Oh, safety! I don’t think we care so very much about it.’
Again that odd use of ‘we’; Charles remembered it later. He agreed that too much is sometimes sacrificed for security.
‘Well, but you say that education helped you. What kind? What have you had that you value most?’ she asked.
‘A thorough grounding in the Classics,’ said Charles promptly. ‘For it’s the key to the humanities. And, on top of it, a man should travel and see life …’
‘Very well. I’ve travelled. And I’ve seen life.’
‘Pardon me! I disagree with you. I don’t think you have seen much life as yet. Of its raw beginnings you may have seen something, but not of the finished product. To see life to any purpose you must be conversant, at least, with the
ways of polite society. A polite society. I don’t care where.’
‘Society at school was not polite. I could tell you tales that would curl your hair! Upon my word, I often thought there was more civility in my father’s house. Have some more tea?’
‘Thank you. I will have a third.’
She did not tell him that he had had five, but pursued her theme, asking guilelessly:
‘Could I have a thorough classical grounding?’
Charles told her, in some detail, that she certainly could. It was a subject very close to his heart; all his life he had hoped great things from the higher education of women. Nothing, he maintained, could form the mind of a young girl better than the study of Latin and Greek. He would teach her enough arithmetic to enable her to keep accounts neatly, the elements of geography, the dates of the kings of England, and then he would plunge her into classical literature. In her teens, she should read nothing else. He had meant to educate his daughter in this way, but had been defeated by the other educationists who surrounded her. At fifteen she had been so very anxious to form his mind that she gave him no opportunity of meddling with hers. For this he blamed Cleeve; he had a suspicion that Cleeve was full of earnest, cultivated women who read Robert Browning and wanted degrees. A dreadful type! They had corrupted Florence. But the young female now so persistently supplying him with tea was virgin soil; none of these wretched, efficient governesses had been at her. And she seemed intelligent.
‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘that I’d get a classical grounding at school?’
‘Yes, I daresay,’ grumbled Charles, ‘in this disgusting new pronunciation that I can’t make head or tail of.’
‘I don’t believe that you have any more use for schools than I have.’
‘You must learn to get on with the other women.’
‘Must I?’
‘Yes, you must. A boy goes to school for that, to find his level in a crowd of youngsters of his own age. And so does a girl, I suppose. But I declare it’s all they’re good for, these places!’
‘Well, but which do you prefer? A woman who is very charming or a woman who knows a lot?’
The Constant Nymph Page 22
