The Balliols

by Alec Waugh

  “By whom else could it have been made?”

  “By the office boy who takes the letters to the post office.”

  “That is most unlikely, since these letters are collected outside each room in one large mail bag.”

  “The mistake might have been made in the post office.”

  “The post office does not make mistakes.”

  “Yet I remember your saying in your speech at the last annual meeting that one of the reasons why socialism would never succeed in this country was the proof which government departments had given of their inferiority, in matters of detail, to concerns that are directed by private enterprise. The post office is State-run.”

  He smiled as she produced this argument; chuckling as though he had enjoyed a good joke thoroughly.

  “Very cleverly argued. Caught at my own game. The pitcher that goes too often to the water. Explain, though, to Miss Webster that the fewer of these mistakes we have, the better.”

  Stella found Miss Webster waiting with an anxious expression on her face. Poor kid, I suppose this really matters to her. “It’s all right,” she said. “But another time, when you’re feeling like that, let me know. I’m a woman. I understand these things.”

  The drawn face from which the anxiety was swiftly banished had a look of trust, gratitude and reliance. “They do need me, these girls. They do feel that I’m their friend.”

  Stella was allowed three-quarters of an hour for her lunch. It was a barren meal, taken either at a Lyons’, an A.B.C. or at Eustace Miles’s. It cost her between eightpence and a shilling, and consisted of tea or coffee, a poached egg on toast, stewed figs or baked apple. Her sole variety was supplied by the company she chose for it. As far as possible she contrived to escape for that three-quarters of an hour from the office atmosphere.

  Her companion this morning was a tall, angular woman in the middle forties, whose sharp fleshless features and thin bony frame seemed to have been devised by nature to satirize the feminine fashion of the hour. The high whale-boned neck, with the sleeves fitting flatly in the shoulders, made her look like an encased mummie; while the high-crowned hat, precariously sustained by vast pins on a high perch of puffed and padded hair achieved a startingly Jack-in-the-box effect.

  Stella had known her for five years without discovering her Christian name. She signed her name as a man would, with initials, A. E. Draft. She was an active member of the Women’s Suffrage Movement.

  She entered the A.B.C., looked round for Stella, detected her in a single glance, strode across the room with the brush-braid of her skirt dusting her shoes, planked down a pile of books and papers, and leaning across the table announced in a sharp, clear voice, as though she had come to talk and not to eat, that she had just come from an extremely important committee meeting.

  “Trouble’s brewing. There are two parties. There are those who believe you can get what you want by quiet perseverance, who think the Mud March the most daring step ever undertaken by a woman. There are the others, the Pankhurst, Pethick Lawrence faction, who say that the Mud March is a first step; that since women have been outlawed by law they must behave as outlaws. Before the year’s through, there will be trouble. You watch.”

  Her eyes gleamed balefully. She was the kind of woman that men had in mind when they said that the women who wanted votes were not really women.

  A waitress came clattering up. “Orders, please.”

  Miss Draft snapped out her order as though she were a post office girl decoding a telegram. “Pot of tea. Poached egg twice. Mashed potatoes. Meringue. Roll, Butter, Honey.”

  “Within a year,” she went on, “we shall have to decide whether we are in the vanguard or just camp followers. There’ll be a clear-cut issue.… War, ruthless war, militant methods. You see how it will be. We shall be laughed at in the streets, in the Press, by our friends, our families, by our employers, by most other women; by all those women who rely on men, who have to keep in with men, who can’t afford to offend their fathers, their husbands, their employers.”

  Which was how most women found themselves, Stella thought. Just as most men had dependants, whose interests they could not ignore, so were most women under obligations of some kind to some man. It was only the very few who could behave as if they were alone; which was what Mrs. Shirley had meant when she had described Suffragettes as a minority.

  “We shall have to sacrifice ourselves,” said Miss Draft. “The Cause demands it. Nothing but the Cause has any claim on us.”

  Which is all right for you, thought Stella. You’ve independent means. But how would I stand, dependent on my job, that I daren’t lose, or a husband that I must consider?

  The waitress arrived with the dishes piled wide upon her tray. Though Miss Draft appeared to ignore and to despise food, she had ordered three times as much to eat as Stella had; and though she continued to talk as though the successive mouthfuls were no more than the punctuation marks of conversation, she swept up the last yellow fleck of egg with the soft centre of her roll, and continued to re-fill the teapot with hot water till its dark-brown faded to a drizzled ochre.

  “There is only one woman who can lead us,” she asserted. “The woman who will lead us anywhere.”

  Which was what Stella herself believed. The time for parleying was at an end. It was no good sending deputations to astute politicians, who understood every move of party tactics, who knew how to appear to promise without actual self-commitment. The time had come for drastic measures. Campbell Bannerman had exhorted them to exercise “the virtue of patience”; he had also told them to go on pestering. It was time to take him at his word.

  The recent sight of three thousand women marching from Hyde Park Corner to Caxton Hall with banners and bands, their long skirts trailing on the ground on a day of relentless rain had been hailed as an unprecedented demonstration. The public had been outraged at the idea of ladies appearing like that, in public. The “Mud March“ had been regarded as the flaunting of every popular conception of womanly qualities; of all that the Victorians had revered: modesty, delicacy, sensibility. The Mud March had been a gesture, a terrific gesture. But it was useless to regard it as a final gesture. It was only the beginning. That Stella knew. At the same time, the issue for the majority of women was not nearly so simple as Miss Draft fancied.

  “You do realize, don’t you, that the majority will have to be spectators?”

  “I don’t see that at all.”

  “Married women can’t rush about the country heckling ministers.”

  Miss Draft sniffed impatiently.

  “Why ever not?”

  “They’ve got their homes to consider; their children probably.”

  “You’re talking like Lord Curzon.”

  “I’m talking common sense.”

  “It sounds common sense to-day. It won’t to-morrow. You’re saying that a woman becomes a slave the moment that she marries; that she becomes a housekeeper and a mother; that she must have no life of her own. A hundred years—fifty years—ago, men thought that married women had no right to property. We’ve disproved that. We’ve proved that a woman has a right to a career; we’ll soon prove that she retains her independence when she marries; just as a man does.”

  There was a hard resolute look on her face.

  And it’s true enough, thought Stella. In theory she’s right. Women should be independent in marriage, just as men are. But at the same time people like Miss Draft were wrong because they would not argue from the particular to the general. They took general theories, not human nature, as their basis. They would try to fit people into plans. Their second mistake was a corollary to their first. Miss Draft had never realized that women as a whole did not think of themselves as slaves. They did not regard marriage as a prison house and the state of marriage as a long battle for personal liberty. They did not think of their husbands as tyrants and oppressors, but as associates and friends. Though women from the political aspect were treated with tyranny and injustice, as private
individuals they were treated with chivalry, kindness, consideration.

  Miss Draft made these mistakes because she was, as Mrs. Shirley had argued the night before, a woman who was not a woman. She had made herself the mouthpiece of women’s wrongs without understanding what women thought and felt.

  On her way to lunch Stella had thought of telling Miss Draft about Alan Cheyne’s proposal. But she realized now the futility of that. Miss Draft was incapable of appreciating the various implications of the problem.

  For Stella knew that there were those implications. She was not a cheat. She would not accept the advantages of marriage without making her payment in return. If you took a man’s name and his position you were not justified in behaving in a way that would bring your husband into ridicule. However Miss Draft might argue, Stella did not believe that a woman had the right to follow in public a course of action of which her husband disapproved, and expect to remain under her husband’s roof. And Alan was in the Foreign Office.

  That afternoon her attention was only intermittently focused on her work. She was too involved with the first really personal problem she had had to face. She looked through the glass partition of her cubicle at the thirty girls who were working under her. They were the kind of girls that you would expect to find in such a place. Four-fifths of them had come without any ambition, because they wanted to get away from home, because they wanted to earn the few shillings that would make them independent of their parents’ authority. They were there definitely to mark time till they were married. Most of them would marry. Those who did not would join the remaining fifth; the minority who for one reason or another would never marry; the girls who were kept in attendance on mothers till their prettiness had passed; the girls who had come to London with visions of careers, who had imagined that because women had been conceded the right to work, they possessed the capacity to work profitably: the orphans, the deserted wives, the widows, who depended for their existence on their weekly envelope.

  Looking over the group of thirty women, it seemed to Stella that the only ones who were definitely better off, who were definitely happier because of their permission to work, were those of the minority, that fifth, who were now spared the ignominy of dependence. It was for their sakes that the long battle for women’s rights had been waged through the nineteenth century. The others would have always been able to manage. They belonged to that vast brigade for whom the word “so-so” describes the life and outlook; who possess the capacity to adapt themselves to an environment; who, like animals, assume the particular kind of protective colouring that their defence demands; who contrive to fulfil themselves, no matter what the opposition, because they are for the most part unconscious of that opposition. They muddle through.

  Looking at them as they sat there, bent over their desks, she wondered whether the long battle were worth while, if it only gave privileges to those who did not care whether they had them; and to women who were hardly worth them. Did it really matter much what happened to sour, ineffectual spinsters? Were they really any better off now in city offices than they had been in medieval days in convents? Particularly when it was by women like Miss Draft that the fight for those privileges was waged. It would be very drear to spend an entire life with people like Miss Draft. It would be very nice to be able to answer Mrs. Shirley’s captions with orange blossom and white satin; to advance heretical views from the pedestal of conformity.

  VI

  A few mornings later Jane was woken by a series of heavy thumps. They seemed to be coming from the street. She sat up, puzzled and alarmed. She struck a match. It was a quarter to four. The knocking continued, the thumps growing heavier and more frequent. She jogged her husband’s elbow.

  “Edward, there’s someone at the front door, I think.”

  He stirred, grunted, sat up in bed.

  “What time is it?”

  “Quarter to four.”

  “Who could it be at this hour?”

  They sat up, listening. The thumps continued.

  “Why doesn’t one of the servants go down?”

  “They’re frightened, I suppose.”

  They waited. The volume of the blows increased.

  “Darling, do go down. I don’t want Francis woken.”

  “I suppose I’d better.”

  “Come up at once and let me know.”

  “Very well.”

  He was slow, however, in returning. She heard the sound of a conversation in the hall. Then the closing and locking of the door. She waited for the sound of his footsteps on the stairs but instead she heard the creak of a turned handle. He had gone into his study. She listened, waiting for him to come, wondering what could be the matter, yielding to drowsiness. She was half-asleep when she heard his footsteps in the room again.

  “It’s bad news. My father’s dying.”

  “Oh, my dear!”

  “That was a telegram. It came by special messenger. That’s what comes of not having a telephone.”

  “What did it say?”

  “The least possible. ‘Your father dangerously ill. Come at once. Stella told.’ It was signed Carter. That’s the doctor there. I’ve looked up the trains. The first one that’s any use leaves Waterloo at 9. It’s at Exeter soon after twelve. I suppose Stella will be on it.”

  “Darling, come back to bed.”

  He lay on his back, his hands clasped behind his head.

  “He’s nearly eighty. He’s been lonely. I don’t suppose he’s sorry. You remember what Stella said. It was likely to come with any change of weather. But now that it’s come.…”

  It was too dark for her to see his face. But she knew the expression that it would wear: rapt, engrossed, unaware of her presence; talking to himself out loud. She had seen that expression sometimes when they were alone and their conversation had become a monologue. She had the feeling at such moments of being married to a stranger; to someone who had shared his life with her but not his thoughts. She felt lonely lying there beside him in the dark, unnoticed and unneeded, while two hundred miles away in an old manor house in the fold of the Devon hills an old man who had been kind to her lay dying.

  Balliol arrived at the station early. He felt certain that Stella would take a third-class ticket and he was not prepared to take a three-and-a-half-hour train journey in discomfort. He reserved two corner seats, took two tickets, and stood at the entrance to the booking-office. He expected that she would arrive seven minutes before the train was due to start. He also expected that she would arrive without any of the fuss that one associates with women on station platforms; none of the “have-I-got-the-time?” flutter.

  It was as he had expected. At eight minutes to nine she came into the booking-office with a quick, unhurried step, in a dark grey coat and skirt that was both countryish and neat. She had a knack of looking right. Her welcome of him combined appropriately a sisterly pleasure at seeing him, with the right regard for the occasion. There were times when it was a great relief to have Stella exactly as she was.

  On their way to the platform she indulged in none of the overemphasized chatter that might have been expected. The remarks she made were few and short.

  “I suppose there isn’t much hope. I was worried about that cold. Have you heard anything?”

  “Nothing for ten days. He was all right then.”

  “Temple will have brought the trap to meet us. He’ll tell us what we are to expect.”

  She was practical and undemonstrative. But her emotions were touched, he knew that. She had always been her father’s favourite.

  To his relief but not to his surprise he saw that she had no intention of making conversation on the journey down.

  She had brought a pile of papers. A solid volume with a green library shield upon its solid binding awaited the perusal of such lighter reading as The Times, Tribune, the Daily News. She settled herself in her corner and began to turn the pages of The Times with the concentrated efficiency of those who know not only the page but the precise
column in which they will find the particular piece of news with which they are concerned.

  At the station they found waiting for them the old coachman who, as a brisk young stripling, had driven Edward Balliol to school, to Oxford, afterwards to London. He was portly now, his red cheeks, flecked with stubble, hanging loose over his wide-winged collar. He wore a high square-shaped bowler. He raised his whip in salute, while the small boy who had jumped from the box helped to lift the Gladstone bags into the trap.

  “Good day, Miss Stella. Good day, Master Edward.”

  “How’s my father?”

  “‘E’s bad, Master Edward. ‘E’s bad, that’s certain. Come along, Sarah.” His whip flicked round the mare’s withers.

  They drove in silence for the five-mile journey along high-hedged lanes that Edward had made so often in the past and now would seldom make again.

  In the large four-poster bed in which he had been born, old Balliol lay looking with undimmed eyes through the half open window towards the curving hills which had been through so many years the first object on which his waking eyes had rested. He was dying, and he knew it. Each breath he took so shook his frame that the high canopy of the bed trembled. The effort of breathing grew heavier every hour. His heart grew less and less equal to the strain. He would lie panting softly for a few moments, then the need for air would key him to the big effort that would leave him limp, gasping, his fingers plucking at the bed-clothes. For a day and a half he had scarcely spoken.

  With a satiric eye he watched the doctor’s movements. They were old cronies. The doctor had an odd nervous chuckle. The worse his patient was, the louder that chuckle grew; approaching nearer and nearer to a laugh, but never quite arriving.

  “I’ll always know that I’m on my death-bed when I hear you laugh out loud,” Balliol had been used to say. Doctor Carter knew very well of what the old man was thinking as he lay there watching him, that quiet twinkle in his eye. “Come on, laugh! Now’s the time for it,” the twinkle said. They had known each other long enough to be able to guess at one another’s thoughts. Though the words he spoke to his old friend were comforting and cheerful, both knew the truth. They would not have referred to it any more than they would have referred to any of such other facts of life as were not discussed in the polite company of their day.