The Balliols

by Alec Waugh

  “It is a long time,” the article began, “since the world has experienced so uneventful a year as that which closes to-day.” The main episodes of the year were marshalled in review. There had been a financial crisis in America. There had been an imperial conference of Premiers. There had been that Peace Conference at the Hague, which had come to nothing. A very foolish affair, he had considered it—as though there could be such a thing as disarmament. There was a dangerous agitation in India—there always was. The Vatican had issued an Encyclical attacking “Modernism.” Asquith had reduced income tax from a shilling to ninepence. Some people imagined he ought to have done something instead about Old Age pensions—as though the taxed classes only existed for the benefit of the poor. But on the whole it had been an uneventful year—from the public point of view, that was to say. To him it had been, on the contrary, one of the most eventful years of his life. That was the odd thing about history. The periods that might be dramatic for a nation, for the individual might be placid. People might wish they had been alive at the time of the Armada, whereas if they had, they might have been supremely bored. Nobody, reading in fifty years’ time The Times’ review of 1907 would say “I’d like to have been living then”; yet Balliol knew very well that for him the year now ending was very much more dramatic than the years that were land-marked with Sedan, Majuba Hill, Mafeking and the accession of King Edward.

  He would have laughed if anyone had told him twelve months back that he would find himself at the year’s end in a house that he had built himself on the edge of Hampstead: that within a few weeks he would be for the fifth time a father. He would not have believed it. But it was not so much the actual changes as the incidents that had led to them, and the incidents that had risen out of them, that had made, because of these two main changes, the year that was just ending so dramatic. There had been his father’s death that had made the purchase of such a property possible. There had been that business with young Rickman that had made it desirable. Had not the emotional state of mind that young Rickman created in Jane produced for himself and her a period of separation with a subsequent almost honeymoon reconciliation, there would have been no need in this new home to make one room so definitely a nursery.

  There were other consequences. There was the liberation that her father’s death had brought to Stella. She was now free, financially and emotionally. And heaven knew to what ultimate use she might not put that freedom. Every Sunday she addressed meetings from a cart on the White Stone Pond. She had been in prison once. She was likely to be again. The militants thought very highly of her, he had been assured.

  There was that consequence; there were others. In particular the enlargement of Peel & Hardy’s tobacco side. That enlargement would never have been approved unless he had backed Prentice, so that he might himself be backed in the matter of Rickman’s appointment. The innovation had led to consequences so considerable that had Balliol not had his own axe to grind, he would assuredly have asked for a more detailed account. It had led to the introduction into the business of a young man from whom he most certainly suspected trouble in the future. Smollett was one of those people who combine alarmingly a number of contradictory characteristics. He was alert, but cautious; he was bumptious but obsequious; he was well-read but ignorant; he was young but he had experience. He was anxious to learn but ready to teach. He was twenty-three years old. He was pale, tall, pimply; with hunched shoulders from which his head emerged like that of some bird of prey. He was extremely ambitious and clearly regarded his present position as a stepping-stone. Balliol wondered whether he regarded his present position as a stepping-stone to promotion in the firm of Peel & Hardy, or to a superior position in some other firm. If his ambition was directed towards Peel & Hardy, Balliol likened the situation to that of the Frankenstein Saga. Prentice had contrived his own destruction.

  Such troubles lay, however, in a very distant future. The present and the immediate future were lit with a comfortable sunlight. Seated in the first house that he had ever really owned, he felt a security that was new to him. Everything seemed soundly based. That very uneventfulness to which The Times’ article referred was the proof and promise of security. His business was sound and long-established; he had the friends and the kind of life he needed. His home life was placid and familiar. He had suspected from the start that he would have difficulties with Jane some day. He had been prepared, had known how to handle it. It was in the past now. Jane would be unlikely to trouble him that way again.

  He felt confident about his children.

  Ruth and Hugh were of the kind for whom life always did, more or less, go well. They met it in the right spirit. They put it to their own uses. They were easy, cheerful, with a zest for living. Ruth was the kind of girl who might break off two engagements, but would make an extraordinarily successful marriage. Hugh was not the type who would ever be news value to a paragraphist. But he would fill effectively the place that was awaiting him on the Board of Peel & Hardy. He was a man’s man. He would have enough impersonal interests to find life full and varied. Balliol did not worry about Ruth or Hugh.

  He did not worry about Francis and Lucy, for that matter. Francis was difficult, he recognized that: a secretive, moody boy. His mother had spoilt him; that was what was really wrong with him. Francis thought he was entitled to the whole world. He’d settle down, alter his views, when he went to school, met other boys of his own age, realized that he was a cog in a machine, not the whole machine. His mother worried about him. There would be time enough for worry when he was faced with actual issues.

  Lucy was in the same position from that point of view. She was difficult and moody. He had probably spoilt her, just as Francis had been spoilt by Jane. But girlhood wasn’t the carefree easy time that poets pictured it. A young girl’s mind was in part a miasma of unhealthy impulses and intimations, in part a selfless idealistic yearning for perfection. A young girl had secrets that she could not share. A parent could only wait and watch.

  So he mused, sitting there before the fire.

  From the hill’s foot came the sudden screech of syrens. The New Year had started. 1908. The year of his child’s birth; a child who would come of age in 1929; when he himself, as likely as not, would not be here to toast its health: a child whose own children would see the century out; who might see it out himself: ninety-two. The elixir of youth was a medieval dream. But doctors knew nowadays how to keep a sluggard blood alert. When he and Jane had been dead for forty years, there would be someone sitting in this room, looking back to 1908; thinking, “That’s when all this began.”

  What manner of change in men’s mind, in the surface of men’s lives, would not that man have seen. How astonished he would have been as a child had the motor-car been prophesied. Since the dawn of history men had longed to fly. It was possible that before the child born in this year had come to middle age men actually would have mastered that last obstacle. His grand-children might see the day when people travelled by air as light-heartedly as they travelled now by train. It was not impossible. No one could tell what changes science might fifty years from now achieve. He could picture Hugh and Francis reading at the year’s end a review of the year’s achievements; the discovery of this; the remedy of that; remedies and discoveries that would be expected to revolutionize that whole structure of man’s thought and attitude. And yet for Hugh and Francis, as individuals, that future year of such high and manifold achievement might appear in retrospect as this uneventful year appeared to him in terms of those permanent, personal problems that had not altered since the flood and whose outcome made life full or sad, petty or happy, for the individual.

  II

  In the middle of April, a year to a day, very nearly, since Edward and Jane Balliol had walked slowly up the North End Road, Helen Balliol was born.

  Francis was the only one of the family in the house. Hugh was staying with a school friend. Ruth and Lucy had joined a pension in Wimereux, where they were presumed to be learning Fr
ench. Francis felt very lost and lonely in the large, empty house. He was not noticed. He was not wanted. His mother could not see him. His nurse left him to eat his meals alone. He was told that he could not have any of his friends to visit him; that he must be quiet and keep out of the way. There was nowhere for him to go, nothing for him to do. There seemed a great deal of activity from which he was excluded. There were arrivals and departures. A strange nurse appearing; and his father returning home at half-past four.

  During the night he heard doors opening and shutting; the sounds of footsteps in passages. When the nurse came to call him in the morning, it was with the announcement that “a dear little sister had arrived during the night.”

  “When can I see it?”

  “Later on.”

  He was not taken to see it till ten o’clock. It looked very much like any other baby. His mother was pale, and tired. She smiled. He wanted to tell her how lonely he had been, with nothing to do, and nowhere to go. But she did not want to listen. He could see that.

  “You must go now, Master Francis,” the nurse said.

  The house was as empty as it had been yesterday. There was no one to take any notice of him. He would have liked to have sat down and cried. But that would be girlish and contemptible. In silence he took a silent revenge on the family’s neglect. From his parents’ bathroom he went to the schoolroom bathroom, downstairs to the hall lavatory. Then by the way of the back door into the scullery. At each stage he turned full on every available tap, having first inserted every available stopper. He closed door after door to shut away the sound of running water, then, vindicated in his own esteem, he waited in the arboured extremity of the garden for the hand of retribution to descend.

  The immediate outcome of this exploit was for Francis deservedly such as he had anticipated. It had, however, another and more lasting outcome. It decided Balliol that the time had come for his younger son to be sent to school. He would clearly be a nuisance now that Jane would only be able to devote less of her attention to him.

  “But not a boarding-school,” she had pleaded.

  Hugh had not been sent to a preparatory school at the age of eight.

  “Francis is too young to be sent away,” she argued. “Could he go to that nice school, where the boys wear blue caps with yellow eagles? Between the White Stone Pond and Golders Hill. They always look very nicely mannered.”

  “I’m told that they are taught singularly little.”

  “Does that matter very much so early?”

  “That is a point on which my mind is still undecided.”

  He was not at all sure that it was not a mistake to train preparatory schoolboys to a scholarship pitch: that it was not wiser to let them take their first years quietly as a runner took the first lap of a long race. Preparatory schoolmasters for purposes of self-advertisement worked to make scholars of their pet pupils. But the boy’s career ended for the preparatory schoolmaster at the point where for the boy it was only just beginning. It might be interesting to try with Francis the experiment of an easy start. At any rate for a year or so.

  “We will send him there next term,” he said.

  Francis was overjoyed at the news. On the first morning of the summer term he roused the household at the hour of six by chanting like a bacchanal down the corridors:

  I’m going to school to-day, I’m going to school to-day,

  Oh, what bliss, oh what joy, I’m going to school to-day!

  III

  The flood of progress that had delayed for so long its descent upon the western slopes of Hampstead burst now over the crest of the hill in relentless, perceptible cascades. Not only did a steady stream of houses from North End village and Child’s Hill demand an appropriate allotment of shops at the hill’s foot, but from the north-east towards Finchley the roads and houses of the Garden Suburb enclosed Golders Green within a rough-cast barrier. Within two years no one walking on an April afternoon from Hendon to Golders Hill would imagine himself to be taking a country stroll. Balliol no longer talked of living in the country, nor was he for much longer to be allowed to describe himself as a resident of Hampstead. His vote lay in Hendon; his postal address was changed from Hampstead, N.W.3. to Golders Green, N.W.11. A change that considerably disturbed Balliol’s staff. A parlourmaid actually gave notice because she did not like telling her friends she lived in Golders Green. Though in the end she was persuaded to remain.

  “I should not let that worry you,” he said.

  “You can have your letters addressed to you at North End Road, Hampstead, N.W. And they will still arrive. If, when you write to your friends, you take the precaution of posting your letters in the pillar-box opposite the Hare and Hounds, they will be honoured by a N.W. 3 postmark. It is only if you descend this hill, to the Well-garth Road pillar-box, that they will be disfigured by a N.W. 11 postmark.”

  “Well, in that case, sir.…”

  For Balliol himself the pleasure of a garden amply compensated for the loss of caste that was implied in a servant’s eyes by a move from Bayswater to Golders Green. His garden was a great delight to him. Brought up in the atmosphere of an old garden, he had believed a gardener’s experienced assertion that calceolarias never would do in this soil; that delphiniums only looked really right in a southern border; that the tulips needed the particular kind of morning sun that could be got on the east lawn. Every experiment had been made; everything was known, there was nothing new to try. But here a garden was an adventure. You watched it grow. You had no idea how this plant and that would flower. Each plant had its own particular association. This rose bush had been given to them by that friend; those poppies they had brought back with them from a week-end in Sussex. The stocks were from their old Wessex garden. He had watched each flower come up for the first time. He had seen the blades of grass come slowly through the new-churned earth. He had seen the brown flat stretches become lawns. To his own surprise he found himself working in the garden: mowing the lawn, weeding the borders, trimming the privet hedge.

  They were in many ways the happiest of Balliol’s life; while Jane was absorbed in her new child; while his business ran on its own steam; while Hugh worked his way up to the Sixth at Fernhurst, was at the V table and would be a house prefect in the following autumn; while Ruth was earning the kind of unflattering report from schoolmistresses that make parents feel they haven’t much to worry over; while Francis, with his sailor-suit abandoned for a satchel and blue cap, set out each morning for the day-school above the Bull and Bush.

  Lucy alone provided him with any real cause for worry. And that was worry of a kind that he did not consider likely to prove long-lived. It would end, in his opinion, the moment she met a man who was able to attract her. Balliol was convinced, like the majority of conservative-minded Englishmen, that those women only were suffragettes who could not find a man to marry them. And Lucy was at the moment an extremely militant-minded suffragette.

  During the two years since Stella Balliol had been arrested at the Colingdale Town Hall, the suffrage movement had spread rapid fire through political and social England. “Votes for Women” was no longer, like socialism, an academic subject for abstract argument. It was an issue. The suffragette movement was a force. The break between the moderate and the militants had grown complete, the militants were waging relentless war. They heckled Ministers at elections; they canvassed against Liberal candidates; they scrawled “Votes for Women” on pavements, walls, shutters; they broke windows; they dog-whipped policemen. No public function was immune from their interruptions. They were abused, imprisoned, derided. They were told that they were putting back the Cause of Women’s Rights by a hundred years; by illegal acts they had proved women to be unfit for franchise. They were told that they were unsexed. The music-halls made rich fun of them.

  “Put me upon an island where the girls are few,

  Put me among the most ferocious lions in the Zoo

  Put me upon a treadmill and I’ll never fret,

  But f
or heaven’s sake don’t put me near a suffragette!”

  Every Sunday morning a cart, hung with green, white and purple ribbons was drawn up beside the White Stone Pond. From this uncertain platform week after week were delivered arguments about equality that sounded as fantastic to the average Englishman as the arguments of Wilberforce against the Slave Trade had sounded a hundred, years earlier to West Indian planters. “How absurd,” the planters scoffed, “to talk of a negro’s rights! Negroes had been born slaves; they must live as slaves; they must die as slaves; they and their children in perpetuity.” In just that way the men of Edward Balliol’s generation argued about the Rights of Women. What nonsense to talk of women with a vote: women in parliament: women sitting on juries, pleading in court, directing companies. At many of their public meetings suffragettes were welcomed with over-ripe tomatoes and rotten eggs. At Hampstead on a Sunday morning a decorous regard for the Sabbath was preserved. There was heckling in plenty, but it was good-natured if persistent. Its persistence, however, made little effect on the validity of the speaker’s arguments. There was an answer for every question.

  Occasionally Stella Balliol would speak. She was now one of the dozen most prominent suffragettes. If a caricaturist were to select any one person to typify the militant movement, he was as likely to select Stella Balliol for his purpose as Annie Kenney, Lady Constance Lytton or Sylvia Pankhurst. Rather more likely; since the extreme and fashionable neatness of her appearance lent itself to caricature. She was always particular about her clothes.

  “I may be a suffragette, but I’m not going to look a frump.”

  She once seriously advanced the theory that suffragettes should wear a uniform. “It is the only way to make half of us reasonable. Do look at Miss Draft’s hat!”

  But in spite of the fashionable nature of her attire, there was no foppish femininity about Stella Balliol. Some speakers had a wooing, conciliatory method of addressing their audiences. But Stella marshalled her facts and arguments in a clear, straightforward way, her address lit now and again by irony; at times by oratory. She was not afraid of the purple or the bitter passage.