Last night Mummy had spent at least two hours at the prie-dieu in her bedroom, weeping softly and praying. Pearl had no such refuge. Father had paced the floor, his eyes glaring, and at one time foam, unmistakable foam, had appeared at the corners of his mouth. He had talked of a plot, on the part of a considerable number of unknown persons, to bring him into disrepute and mockery. He had been darkly conscious of this plot for some time; indeed, it had begun before he had been done out of his rightful dignity as Dean of Arts. That was when the late Professor Bridgetower had been voted into the dean’s chair. Bridgetower! A scientist, a geologist if you please, who would not even have been in the Arts faculty if the composition of the Waverley syllabus had not been ridiculously out of date! What if the man was called Professor of Natural Philosophy; in the present day such terminology was as ludicrous as calling a man Professor of Phrenology. They had been out to defeat him and they had done so. But, not content with that shabby triumph, they now sought to disgrace him through his family. Through his only child—a daughter! What would they have contrived, the Professor demanded of the world at large, if he had had a son?
The first part of the Vambrace Mixed Concert had come to an end, and Pearl rose to put a new pile of records on the turntable. But that which was uppermost in the group she had chosen was a violin rendition of The Londonderry Air, and she felt suddenly that she could not bear anything Irish, however good it might be. So she put on Tchaikovsky’s Symphony Number Six, and in no time, in that vast imaginary concert hall, the great woman conductor, Pearl Vambrace, was letting an enchanted audience hear how unbearably pathetic the Pathétique could be.
No, decidedly nothing Irish. Pearl was pleased, in a vague way, to be of Irish blood on both sides of her family, but she had had enough of Ireland last night. Professor Vambrace was strongly conscious of his own Irish heritage, and in periods of stress it provided him with two character roles which appealed deeply to his histrionic temperament. The first of these was the Well-Born Celt, proud, ironical and aristocratic of manner; was he not a cousin of the Marquis of Mourne and Derry? The other was the Wild and Romantic Celt, untrammelled by petty Saxon considerations of reason, expediency, or indeed of fact. When this intellectual disguise was on him he assumed a manner of talking which was not quite a brogue, but which was racy, extravagant and punctuated by angry snorts and hollow laughter. His mode of expression owed a good deal to the plays of Dion Boucicault, which the Professor had seen in his boyhood. It was a hammy performance, but Pearl and her mother were too near to it to be critical; they feared the Professor in this mood, for he could say very bitter things.
Last night the Professor had given one of his most prolonged and elaborate impersonations in this vein. He was, he said, being persecuted, hounded, mocked by those who were jealous of his intellectual attainments, of his integrity, of his personal dignity. People who hated him because he was different from themselves had found a new means by which they hoped to bring him low. Ha, ha! How little they knew their man! He was unpopular. He needed no one to tell him that. His letters to the City Council about garbage disposal had won him no friends; he knew it. His wrangle with the Board of Education, when he had refused to have Pearl vaccinated at their request, still rankled; no one needed to tell him that. He had spoken out at meetings of the faculty of the University; no man who attacked incompetent colleagues—in public, mind you, and not like a sneaking, night-walking jackeen—need hope for popularity, let alone preferment. His success as an amateur actor was bound to create jealousy; his performance as Prospero had been something of a triumph, in its small way, and every triumph created detractors. He had fought in the open, like a man, against stupidity, and Bumbledom, and mediocrity, and he knew the world well enough to expect a bitter return.
But that he should be attacked through his daughter! Even his realism had not foreseen that! A false announcement of an engagement when they all knew that no suitor had ever so much as darkened the door of his house! That was cruelty. That was catching a man in a place where he could hardly be expected to defend himself. He was, ha ha, surprised that they could rise to cruelty, for cruelty on that level demanded a touch of imagination, and that was the last thing he had expected. If they could accuse his daughter of being engaged, they would next be spreading a report that his wife was a witch.
Tchaikovsky, filtered through the splendid machine, was dying by inches; his groans, his self-reproaches filled the room with Slavic misery. Pearl’s eyes were full of tears, and she reached for the second-to-last doughnut.
It had been Mummy who broke first, and went weeping to her room. Pearl knew that Mummy’s unhappiness was for her, as well as for her husband. Of course Daddy didn’t realize that it was painful to have it said so many times, and in so many different ways, that no young man had ever been interested in her. She didn’t care for herself, but she supposed a girl had a duty to her family in such a matter; nobody likes it to be thought that their daughter lacks charm.
Once, by an odd chance, this same Solomon Bridgetower had taken her to the Military Ball, the great event of Salterton’s social year. But that was when they were both in a play, and he hadn’t meant anything by it. Anyway, it was four years ago and she had not spoken a dozen words to him since. And he was the recognized property, though low on her list, of the local heiress and beauty, Griselda Webster. It was queer that anyone should think of playing a trick in which her name was linked with his. Anyway, no young man had asked her to go anywhere with him since then.
No; that was not quite true. No young man with whom she could be bothered had approached her. She had been conscious, recently, that Henry Rumball, a reporter on The Bellman who came every day to the University, seeking news, was persistently attentive to her. But he was a joke among all the girls in the Library.
Solomon Bridgetower, however, was not. That morning she had been aware as soon as she put her coat in her locker in the staff-room that something was in the air, and that it concerned her. The first to congratulate her had been her great enemy, Miss Ritson in Cataloguing.
“Well,” said she, “aren’t you the sly one? Carrying him off right from under Tessie’s nose! No ring yet, I see. Or don’t you choose to wear it at the daily toil? Congratulations, dear.”
Miss Ritson moved away, humming. It was an ironical hum, but it was lost on Pearl, whose father had been so determined that she must be an agnostic. For Miss Ritson was humming God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform.
Tessie was Miss Teresa Forgie, daughter and principal secretary to the Librarian. She was of classic features (that is to say, horse-faced) and formidable learning. It was obvious that she would make a wonderful wife for any ambitious young professor, and it was well known among her associates in the Library that she had chosen Solly Bridgetower as the recipient of this rich dower. But Miss Forgie was as high-minded as she was learned, and when she greeted Pearl no one would have guessed that she had cried herself to sleep the night before.
“I am so deeply happy for you, Pearl,” she said. “There is so much that a man in academic life needs—so much of simple femininity, as well as understanding of his work.” She glanced around, and continued in a lower tone. “So many needs of Body, as well as of Mind. I hope that I may continue to be a dear, dear friend to you both.”
Pearl understood the import of this very well. She was in charge of Reference, and that included a locked section of the book-stacks called Permanently Reserved, where books were kept which could only be read on the spot, upon presentation of a permit signed by the Librarian. Tessie plainly thought that Pearl had won Solly by subtle arts learned from the Hindu Books of Love, and from Havelock Ellis’ Studies in the Psychology of Sex.
All of the girls had congratulated her, in one way or another, within an hour of opening time. Some of them seemed genuinely glad that she was to make her escape from the Library. And Pearl had said nothing to arouse further curiosity. Was this wise? But with Daddy talking about lawyers and suits she did not k
now what else to do; there would be trouble enough in time. She had trembled, when she overheard some of the girls talking in whispers about arranging a shower for her.
A shower! She had intimate knowledge of these affairs, at which the friends of an engaged girl lavished everything from handkerchiefs to kitchenware upon her. What would she do if she suddenly found herself the recipient of twenty handkerchiefs, or a collection of candy-thermometers, lemon-squeezers and carrot-dicers? As Tchaikovsky moaned his last, Pearl cowered in the armchair, licking the sugar from the last doughnut off her fingers, and sweated with fright.
Suddenly the light flashed on in the dark room. It was old Mr. Garnett, the Library janitor, with his trolley of cleaning materials.
“Sorry. Didn’t know anybody was here.”
“It’s all right, Mr. Garnett. I’ll just put away these records, and then I’ll be through. Please go ahead with your work.”
“O.K., Miss Vambrace. Looks pretty clean in here anyways.”
“There wasn’t any class this afternoon. I was listening to some music alone. You won’t tell anybody, will you?”
“I never tell what ain’t my business. You got a right to be alone, I guess. Won’t be alone much longer, I hear.”
“I’ll put these records away at once.”
“That’s what they say about marriage. Never alone again. Well, that can be good, and it can be pure hell, too. Ever think of it that way?”
“I’ll just throw this bag right into your wastepaper box, shall I?”
“What’s the fella’s name?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The fella. The fella you’re engaged to? Somebody mentioned it, but I forget, now. One of our fellas, isn’t it?”
“Oh, you know how people talk, Mr. Garnett.”
“It was in the paper. That’s not talk. When it’s in the paper, you mean business. What’s the fella’s name?”
“Oh. I forget.”
“What? How can you forget?”
“Oh—well—the name in the paper was Mr. Solomon Bridgetower.”
“Yeah. Yeah. Young Bridgetower. Well, I knew his father. I’ve seen worse.”
Pearl had replaced the records, and she fled. Oh, what despicable weakness! She had named him, as her fiancé, to someone outside the family! What would father say? How would she ever get out of this hateful, hateful mess?
IN TWENTY-FIVE YEARS of marriage Professor Vambrace and his wife had never reached any satisfactory arrangement about food; she was preoccupied, and thought food a fleshly indulgence; he liked food, but disliked paying for it. In consequence they lived mainly on scraps and bits. Now and then Mrs. Vambrace would parch, or burn, or underdo a large piece of meat, and the recollection of it would last them for two or three weeks. They never had sweets, because the Professor did not like them, but they ate a good deal of indifferent cheese. They never had fruit, because the Professor considered it a dangerous loosener of the bowels, though he made an exception in favour of stewed prunes which he thought of as regulators, or gastric policemen. Their refrigerator, which seemed to be in permanent need of de-frosting, and smelled, was always full of little saucers of things which had not been quite finished at previous meals, and they always seemed to be catching up with small arrears of past dishes. They were great keepers of bowls of grease in which, now and again, things were fried. They tended also to fall behind with their dish-washing.
Nevertheless the Professor, as became a cousin of Mourne and Derry, firmly believed that there was a formal programme which governed their eating, but which they had temporarily agreed to set aside. The most substantial meal of their day was always eaten at one o’clock, give an hour or so either way, but he would not permit it to be called dinner, for only common people ate dinner then. It was luncheon. Not lunch; luncheon. If he chanced to be at home during the afternoon he always suggested that they skip tea. They had never actually had tea in years. Supper, he maintained, was a meal which one ate before going to bed, and as the food they ate between six and eight could not possibly be called dinner, it was usually referred to as “the evening meal”.
When Pearl came home after her music-and-doughnut orgy at the Library it was well after six o’clock, but nothing had yet been done about the evening meal, so she prepared it. As she had acquired her notions of housekeeping from her mother, and as the cloth and such things as salt and pepper and sugar were never removed from the dining-table, this did not take long. She called her mother, who had been having a nap on her bed, and tapped at the door of her father’s study, and the evening meal began.
For a time no one spoke. Pearl, glutted with doughnuts, worried a plate of stewed prunes and some bread. Mrs. Vambrace ate a kind of cardboard which her doctor had recommended to her years before, as a bread substitute during a brief illness, and took a little jelly which had been left from luncheon two days ago, and which had withered and taken on a taste of onion in the refrigerator. The Professor, as became a man, was a heavier eater, and he had a saucer of cold macaroni and cheese, upon which he poured a little milk, to liven it; he followed this with the remains of a custard, the component parts of which had never really assembled, but which had a splendidly firm skin. Hunger partly satisfied, he was ready to talk.
“I have struck the first blow in my campaign, today,” he announced.
“Yes, dear?” Mrs. Vambrace had a calm and sorrowful face, which belied her character, for she was inclined toward hysteria. She had also a low and pretty voice.
“It is a good policy to carry the war into the enemy’s camp. I have instigated a suit against The Bellman.”
“Oh, Walter! A lawsuit?”
“Of course a lawsuit. What other kind of suit could I possibly mean?”
“But Walter! A lawsuit can be such a dreadful thing.”
“You should know, Elizabeth. Your family have been lawyers for long enough.”
“Did you talk to Ronny?”
“Yes, and little good it did me. Ronny shares your opinion, Elizabeth. He too thinks that a lawsuit is a dreadful thing. I would think that with his objection to suits he would get out of the law and find some other profession.”
“But Walter, I am sure that if Ronny advised against a suit he meant to spare you pain. Father always said that Ronny was a very good lawyer, for all his flippant way.”
“Your father himself enjoyed a great reputation as a lawyer, Elizabeth, and much of it was founded on his habit of persuading people not to go to law. He was a sentimentalist, I fear. It is the curse of a certain type of Irishman. Ronny would naturally appeal to him.”
“If you don’t consider Ronny competent, Walter, why did you go to him?”
“That is a ridiculous question, Elizabeth. He is one of the family. Of your family, that is to say. Family means something. Not much, but something. My own family is not entirely inconsiderable, though I do not attribute a penny-worth of my own success in my chosen career to that. Still, there is the connection with Mourne and Derry. There is what I suppose may be called the aristocratic tradition, which is chiefly a tradition of not allowing oneself to be trampled over by a pack of louts and cheapjacks. So far as family gives one courage to resist what is vulgar and intrusive and impertinent, family is a very good thing. Ronny may not understand that, but his senior partner certainly does so.”
“Mr. Snelgrove?”
“Yes.”
“Oh dear, Walter.”
“What about him?”
“Father always disliked him so.”
“Very possibly. Your father disliked many people.”
“Only superficially, Walter. But he really disliked Mr. Snelgrove. He said he was one of those men who gravitate to the law because they delight in mischief.”
“Your father was quick to find some fanciful reason for discrediting a man who had defeated him in court.”
“That is unkind, Walter. And Mr. Snelgrove never defeated Father anywhere. Father was a great advocate.”
“Everyone says so, El
izabeth. It is generally admitted that if it had not been for his weakness he could have done anything he chose.”
“He had a very large heart, Walter. We had such a happy home.”
“I dare say.”
The thought of that home made Mrs. Vambrace weep a few tears, perhaps because of the contrast between those laden tables and her loving, witty, drunk-every-night father, and the stewed prunes which she shared with the invincibly sober Vambrace. Pearl, who had not wanted to speak until she had heard more of her father’s campaign, cleared away the dishes and set in place the inevitable pièce de résistance of a Vambrace evening meal, a large plate of soda crackers and a pot of very strong tea.
“I also visited the editor of The Bellman,” said the Professor, when he had buttered a biscuit very thickly and sprinkled it generously with salt.
“Yes?” said his wife. Her resistance, such as it was, had been broken for the evening.
“There’s a fool, if you happen to be in search of a fool,” said the Professor, while crumbs flew out of his mouth. “Family is little enough, as I said. But there’s a fellow with no family. A self-made fellow. And what a thing he has made of himself! He crumpled up at once, when I told him what I intended to do. I despised him. First of all, he has no character. That’s where family comes in. Then he has no real education. That’s where the university comes in. To think that a mind of that quality should be in charge of a newspaper! Is it any wonder that the Press is the engine of mischief that it is! When I told him I meant to sue he went as white as a sheet.”
Leaven of Malice Page 11