Wheels within Wheels

by Alec Waugh

  “You wouldn’t do any supremely good shot more than once in a thousand times.”

  “Then it’s a fluke.”

  “It isn’t a fluke; not if one tries for it.”

  “You aren’t going to tell us you played for that ball to land dead!”

  “I thought it might. I played for it. I told the caddy to take the pin out.”

  Her opponents laughed.

  “You told him to do that for a joke. You knew you were in trouble: that you’d need three strokes, whereas we could almost certainly hole out in one; as we did do. You just said that for bravado. You had not the faintest hope of getting down in two. Morally, in fact, we won.”

  “Morally, indeed! Now what would you say to that, father?”

  The warmth and heartiness of the young people’s return had blown like a chill wind upon Rivers’s animation. Newton, who was sensitive to atmosphere, was conscious of the young man’s withdrawal into himself. He wanted to avoid that: to bring him out of that retirement: to make him in the party generally the genial person that he could be in private. He was resolved to draw Rivers into the conversation.

  “In so difficult a matter an attorney should always defer to the opinion of an advocate. What would Seton Rivers make of it?”

  Rivers laughed: a short, quick laugh, that was almost a grunt. He tried to enter into the moment’s mood.

  “I should draw a simile from the cricket field,” he said. “You see a fieldsman in the slips shoot out a hand; the ball sticks. Every catch of that kind is problematic. The ball can only stick if it hits the hand in a certain place. Such a catch is not a fluke if the fieldsman in question can rely on getting some part of his hand to such a stroke ten times in ten. If he can do that, he will within the law of averages bring off such a catch nine times in ten. The player, however, who would only touch such a ball occasionally would only catch it by a fluke. It is a question in this case of how often a stroke played by Daphne from such a position could be trusted to land within a five yards’ radius of the hole.”

  The simile was sound enough, and the actual phrasing of the sentences was easy; but about Rivers’s voice there was something precise and patronizing that made impossible the further eager continuation of the discussion. It should have been easy after the throwing down of such a glove to argue as to the number of times in which Daphne could have got the ball from such a position to within five yards of the pin. But somehow it wasn’t. The players didn’t want to discuss the matter any more. There was no more to say. Their interest had evaporated.

  “I’m going to get tidied up for lunch,” said Daphne. The happiness had left her face; the strained, worried look had returned to it.

  “Confound the fellow for worrying her,” thought Newton. Yet at the same time he couldn’t help admitting that there was more to Rivers than to any of the obviously eligible young men he would have welcomed so readily as a son-in-law.

  • • • • •

  On the following afternoon Newton woke from his after-lunch siesta to the sound of voices. As this was a house party and he had felt that his guests would require all the rooms, he had retired to the small steam-heated sun porch instead of to the library. He was in the corner away from the glass door, so that no one coming casually into the room—no one that is to say who had not deliberately looked—would have realized that he was there. The voices that disturbed him were those of Daphne and Rivers. They were raised, and pleading.

  “I spoil your enjoyment. I can see how it is,” the young man was saying. “I don’t belong to your world. You’re happier without me. I spoil things for you.”

  “Oh, but you don’t, Seton. I promise you don’t. It’s only that … oh, I don’t know … why don’t you be easier? They’re nice people: they want to be nice to you. You keep them off.”

  “I’m not their kind.”

  “Nobody wants you to be.”

  “Oh, yes, they do. You do. You want me to be just like them: to talk their idiom: to play their games.”

  “It would be easier, wouldn’t it, if you did?”

  “Yes, there you go, you see: worried because I’m not turned out to pattern: wanting me to be different, yet resenting my being different; wanting me to look the same, yet be different underneath. So that you can say of me,’ Yes, isn’t it marvellous? He’s got such an original brain. He’s one of the coming men; yet to look at him you’d never think it. He’s just like everybody else: rides to hounds, and has a handicap of six.’” He mimicked her feminine inflexion.

  “You’ve got it wrong,” she said, and her voice was weary. “You haven’t understood me the least.”

  “I thought you were giving me a lecture on being what Americans call ‘a bad mixer.’”

  “In a way I was.”

  “Then I don’t see…”

  “No; you wouldn’t.”

  There was a pause, then the sound of a shuffle; the creak of springs as though one of them were rising to their feet.

  “Don’t I see? No, I suppose I don’t. I wouldn’t. It’s like talking in a foreign language, trying to explain anything to me. It’s like talking to a foreigner: which I am, of course. Well, it’s nothing new. I’m a bad mixer, here as everywhere. If I am, then other people will have to do without me. It’s their look out. I can do without them. I can stand alone. I have, up to now, and I can still. I can carry on alone.”

  “Seton, you mustn’t talk like that.”

  It was said almost in a whisper. There was a pause: the creak of a chair: then Rivers’s voice altered, muted, softened: made tender suddenly and sweet.

  “Oh, my dear, my own!”

  “You didn’t mean that, precious?”

  “Mean what, my angel?”

  “About not needing other people.”

  “Yes; about everyone but you. The rest can go. I can do without them all right, now, as before. But you. Now I’ve found you.…”

  “Darling, you shan’t lose me.”

  Through sleep-numbed senses, inert, not wishing to eavesdrop, but scarcely awake, with his limbs languid and his eyelids drooping, Frank Newton lay back in his long chair among his cushions, slowly rousing himself to action. “I can’t stay here listening to this,” he told himself. He must disturb them, move his chair, rattle the door handle, give them a chance to change the subject so that they shouldn’t think he’d the least idea what they’d been talking about.

  Slowly he heaved himself to his feet, shuffled across the stone-paved floor, stretched out towards the handle; halted; dazed and astounded by what he saw.

  They were in each others arms, close-locked. Her fingers clenched tight upon his shoulder, her face lifted in a trance of passion that proved the kiss not to be the first, but one of many kisses. For a moment he stared, hardly comprehending what he had seen, then turned away; walking out through the door of the conservatory, into the bleak sunless garden. That brief talk, the brief picture of that kiss had explained to him all that had puzzled him before in his daughter’s absorption in young Rivers. He understood now. “What am I to do?” he thought. “What am I to do?”

  • • • • •

  Hatless, coatless, he walked past the formal, carefully tended garden to the narrow path that ran curving through the rough, soggy parkland. Mist rose from the tufted grasses. In the west the sky lightened to a greeny mauve. From the East dark clouds were moving at a steady, magisterial stride. Night would be falling soon: a dark and gusty night. The leafless branches were rustling one against the other. The poplars by the bank were bending their tall heads. He did not notice. With his mind’s eye he was seeing, with his mind’s ear hearing, other things.

  He understood now: both the reason for and the nature of Daphne’s love. He could understand how a man like Rivers would get beneath a woman’s skin. He was the future: and women were moved to the future, since it was the future their children would inhabit. Rivers was strong and independent: a woman turns to strength and independence since the man who can fend for himself can
fend for her. He was lonely: women liked loneliness in a man, since that man would be theirs alone. He had the weaknesses that would appeal to a woman, since they would deliver him into her power. In Daphne’s case there was the disarming fact of his reliance on her. Seton’s hardness and acidity towards others made his tenderness towards her the more endearing. She felt that he could not do without her: that she meant what no other woman meant. His weakness, his inability to relax, his deserved unpopularity, his prickliness and aggressiveness, were masculine weaknesses that she could turn to strength. He was a man who could dominate yet at the same time needed to be led: who it would be easy to lead if the right person held the bridle. A fighter who knew how to take, yet had the generosity to give. There was the adventure of the unknown about him. There was the contrast between his hostility towards the world and his defencelessness before one woman. Newton could understand how Daphne had come to love him.

  He understood, too, in what way she loved him. It had been a lover’s kiss. The woman who kissed like that, was what that man chose to make her. She was his, as Balzac had known, years before there was any talk of emancipated womanhood.

  And what was it that Rivers intended? Rivers who had written articles on companionate marriage: who had spoken of the views that “any reasonable man must hold.” Oh, but it couldn’t be that, thought Newton. A man who’s planning to seduce a young girl doesn’t come down to her parents’ house: doesn’t accept her parents’ hospitality: doesn’t confide in her father as Rivers had with him a few hours before.

  Though even as Newton argued that, he knew that he was seeing the situation in Victorian and Edwardian, not in Georgian terms. The word “seduce” did not exist in the lexicon of modern gallantry. There was no seduction; just people “having affairs” together. “I’ve got to see this from their point of view, not mine,” he thought.

  What were they planning? How far had things gone? “I must be calm. I must keep my head.”

  Deeper than any modern sophistry ran the primitive parental instinct that one didn’t beget a daughter, cherish her and work for her, to the end that she should satisfy for casual week-ends a capricious masculine desire. Though even that was a seeing of the situation in wrong terms. It was not a capricious masculine desire. The young man did love her.

  Thirty years ago it would not have been love; because if a man fell in love with a young girl of his own class he thought of her as a wife. If he didn’t think of her as a wife, his feelings for her were shallow. But to-day a young man could love sincerely a young girl; yet not think of marriage in connection with her.

  The post-war generation believed that love could and should exist outside marriage. They held marriage to be admirable only where it was to the advantage of two people to live together and raise a family. Very often it was; very often it was not. For adults it usually was better. For very young people it was more often than not a handicap. Seton Rivers would probably see marriage as a handicap. He had ten hard, ruthless years ahead of him. He could not afford to give points away: to hand hostages to fortune. Marriage, as he foresaw it, was a statement of self-establishment, and he was not established yet. Not by any means.

  What then was he doing with Daphne? What right had he to make love to any girl? To a girl like that, at least, since he could not marry her. He ought to keep away; stifle his feelings. That’s what a gentleman should do; that’s what a gentleman would have done thirty years ago: in the simple days when a father asked a young man what his intentions were: when a young man came to the father first, before he had spoken to the girl.

  What was a father to do now? Newton knew what he’d like to do. Kick the fellow into the street. Have Tomkins pack his bags; send him about his business. Yes, and a lot of good that would do. It wouldn’t prevent Daphne seeing him. She would probably be drawn to him all the more. He might talk to Daphne; might ask her what she was planning; might try and explain to her how barren a future waited for her with Rivers. But he knew how she would answer him. She would plead the young person’s right to make her own mistakes. “Don’t worry, daddy,” she would say. “I know what I’m about.”

  He might take her abroad a little. He might say that his doctor had ordered him a change of climate, would she accompany him? But it would be miserably dull for her, on some pleasure cruise; if she were to devote herself exclusively to the care of an old man. As probably as not, on the rebound, she would get herself involved with some other even less suitable man. It would be hard to arrange, in the first place; and its outcome was problematic. He could not stay away for longer than four months, and Rivers was the kind of man whose hold on a woman would survive a separation of that length. He did not stand for glamour, romance and excitement: for the things that are short-lived. Rivers was not to be got rid of as easily as that: with the old “out of sight, out of mind” formula. What was a father to do these days? Sit by and allow young people their right to make mistakes? You couldn’t do that: not if you loved them; not if you believed that your experience could be of value to them. There was something one could do: something one must do if one were worthy at all of parentage. Only what?

  • • • • •

  Pacing backwards and forwards along the leaf-strewn path he asked and re-asked himself that question. It was useless, he knew that, to solve the problem in terms of “should” and “should not.” It was a question of what existed, and what was the best way out for Daphne. In these modern days, with young people feeling as they did, there could be only one outcome to a friendship such as Rivers’s and his daughter’s. The fact was repulsive to him, but must be faced. He could not believe that anything but a searing unhappiness could attend the intrigue with such a man.

  He was prepared to concede that a young girl might be the better, might be more adjusted to life, by a love affair that was romantic, glamorous, swift-ended: that would rid her of unhealthy curiosities: that would be uncomplicated: that would fit her to assess the nature of a man. Such an experience might be valuable to a girl. But Rivers would provide her with no such experience. There would be a protracted, complicated relationship: a mental one: warped, since Rivers was himself warped; with acrimony, with recriminations: with many of the disadvantages of matrimony and few of its advantages: with the need of deceit: with Rivers’s inferiority complex fed by that deceit.

  There would be jealousies, and accusations, with a strain on Daphne that would grow hourly greater. Her loyalty would make her resist a severance of the relationship, because such a severance would not be simply the ending of a love affair but the criticism of Rivers himself. The wretched thing would drag on; when the joy and youth of it had withered. Such an experience would be permanently searing. “She must be saved from that,” he thought.

  Rivers was not the son-in-law he would have chosen. When as a boy he had read Victorian novels he had marvelled at the eagerness with which parents had sought to wed their daughters to the men by whom they had been wronged: men who had proved themselves completely devoid of honour: men who could be relied upon to make any woman wretched. Far better, he had felt, for a girl to have an illegitimate child than be tied forever to a cad. Was he now imitating those fathers, by seeking to marry his daughter to a man whom he was convinced would make her wretched in an affair? He did not think he was. Rivers in a marriage would be a very different person from Rivers in an affair. Marriage would establish him, give him a platform in the world, would shorten probably his difficult, self-conscious period. The woman who could bear with Rivers during that period would have the reward of gratitude. She would also in the later Rivers have a husband of whom she could be proud. Marriage between Daphne and Rivers might not only be the lesser of two evils: it might be a positive good: might be the best thing for both of them. “I have got to convince him,” thought Newton, “that marriage really is to his advantage.”

  • • • • •

  Frank Newton was a man of lengthy deliberations, but speedy actions. When he had once made up his mind, he did not waver.
He made his attack that night.

  After the women had left the room and the men had gathered round his end of the table, he turned to Rivers, islanding their talk, leaving the other three men to talk together. In his bath and while he had changed for dinner Newton had thought out the steps by which he would introduce the subject in the way that suited him.

  He began by discussing the recent Honours list.

  “It’s very pleasant for a man to be given a title at the end of his life. As a reward for his services,” he said. “But how useful it would be for a title to be given as a recognition and encouragement while he was performing those services.”

  He elaborated the theme. He said there was a time in every man’s life when he needed the wind behind him. Great success depended on the luck of getting that wind behind one, so that one could be hurried through the preparatory stages of a career. He took the simile of credit. A man in the twenties needed credit badly; and had not got it. He was hampered by lack of it. He knew he would in ten years’ time be able to settle his obligations; but no one would believe it. Later, when he had credit, he did not really need it.

  “One usually gets things too late.”

  Newton went on to speak of the false idea most people had of capital. They would invest in a government, a currency, a corporation; but never in an individual; as though a business or a government was not a collection of individuals.

  “I don’t quite follow the application of that,” said Rivers.

  “I’ll explain. Suppose a young man is left a thousand pounds. His aunts will say,’ Invest that in Government bonds. It will earn fifty pounds a year for you for life.’ They would be horrified if he told them he was going to spend it on a tour round the world. Yet such a tour would be an investment in himself. It would be an education. He would through it be able to earn a substantial income. A thousand pounds spent in travel might earn him infinitely more than the fifty he would earn from Government bonds.