by Alec Waugh
Hugh laughed away the implied criticism.
“I’m between the devil and the deep sea. If I don’t drink at night I feel like hell. And if I drink at night, I feel like hell next morning. On the whole I prefer good nights and bad mornings, to good mornings and bad nights.”
It would be a relief, when the war was over; when he could get away from the chill and draughts and damp of army huts. He’d never get colds and rheumatism when he was in a properly built house with fires and central heating, doors that fitted, windows that didn’t rattle, roofs that didn’t leak. He remembered the way Rickman had wheezed and groaned with asthma. He was never like that at home, he’d said. He would be all right himself, too, when the war was over.
Like Ruth and Francis, Lucy and Helen, like his parents too, in their way, he marked time, waiting for the war to finish.
Stella was the only one of them who was carrying on with her ordinary career; who was in full exercise of her capacities. For her every month brought new duties, new responsibilities. Wherever there was talk of women’s war work, whenever an article appeared on Women in the War, whoever’s name might be omitted or included, hers, invariably, inevitably, was there. She had not only organized the activities of women, she had harnessed them to her own leadership, inspiring them with a feeling of loyalty and trust very similar to that which had made her four years earlier one of the government’s most dreaded foes. So absorbed was she in her work, so occupied by it that it was with no more than the half of her attention that she followed the slow passage to the Statute Book of the Bill that would admit women to the suffrage. Within three years public opinion had completely altered: or it might be more accurate to say the cabinet had become aware of what on that particular issue public opinion was. For so long now the Bill’s passage had been accepted as a matter of course that Stella Balliol scarcely realized on the bleak January evening of the final House of Lords debate that the goal for which so many women had worked so long, so bravely, so recklessly, at times so blindly, had been reached at last.
Or rather, she could not believe that it had come like this: so quietly, without conflict, without opposition, with no parade, no celebration. She had thought of the Cause as her life’s work. She had sacrificed everything for it: comfort, safety, personal happiness; almost, she could say, her womanhood. She had pictured the day of triumph in terms of banners, processions, speeches, massed meetings in Trafalgar Square. Displays that would match the demonstrations of the pre-war movement. But it had come and there were no cheers, no speeches. Those who would have marched with waving flags, were scattered. They were in munition factories, working upon farms; they were driving lorries, sweeping hospital wards; they were in charge of ’uses, tubes, lifts: they were collecting tickets at railway stations; they were in danger, many of them; they were worn out with a day’s labour; they wore the uniform of service. They had other things than the Vote to think about.
Just as she herself had other things to think about.
She had imagined that with the Vote won, her work would be accomplished; that there would be no more for her to do. It was a high ridge beyond which from the valley of her struggle she could not see. Now that she had reached that ridge she could see the succession of ridges that lay beyond. No one could think of their work as having done more than pass a stage at a time like this, when the very liberty of the country was in danger; when beyond the Rhine the enemy were already massing for the last desperate assault, that might achieve who could tell what effects. Beyond that ridge of the moment’s immediate needs who knew what succession of ridges waited? You followed a dream that was beyond your dream. You set yourself a mark. When you reached that mark you found that the thing you sought was farther on. Admitted now to the franchise, women would have to prove themselves worthy of it.
As she walked westward through the chill dark night the solemn sentences of Curzon’s speech echoed through her mind. Curzon had been the most implacable enemy of the Cause. He was the leader of the House. It was from him if from anyone that opposition was expected. There was a slight shuffle in the gallery as he had risen; as he had lifted his head in that familiarly disdainful gesture as though there were a faintly unpleasant smell beneath his nose. The suffragettes had been prepared for opposition. But none had come. His speech had been an acceptance of the inevitable. He could not, he said, recommend their lordships to embark upon a conflict with a majority of 350 in the House of Commons of whom nearly 150 belonged to the party to which most of their lordships belonged also; a conflict from which their lordships would not emerge with credit.
But he had not on that account approved the measure.
When other peers had spoken in praise, he had spoken in dispraise of women’s political responsibility. He regarded the bill frankly as a mistake “vast, incalculable, almost catastrophic, without precedence in history, without justification in experience … the opening of floodgates to something more than a mere tidal wave.” There were the familiar arguments to which she had listened often in the past, by which she had been exasperated, to which no Englishwoman would be again forced to listen; arguments to which for that very reason she found herself listening for the first time with respect. Curzon’s solemn periods had the quality of prophetic utterance. By an irony of contrast, Curzon, a man destined by the world’s and nature’s gifts to success of the most marked order, precluded from full and proper employment of those gifts by the evil fairy who had denied him that leaven of humanity which would have preserved him from the insensitiveness, the pomposity, the arrogance that made his successes unpopular and harsh; Curzon, a man who, through being unlovable, was deprived of the leadership to which his gifts entitled him, possessed in a high degree that rare gift of being able to achieve dignity in defeat. In spite of his many triumphs, his biggest moments were moments of failure, not of victory.
His stern sentences rang through her head as she turned westward towards Piccadilly. A time would come when those sentences would seem justified. There were two pictures to women’s share in the war. There were the nurses, the lorry-drivers, the farm girls. the munition workers; but there were also the silly addle-pated flappers to whom the war had been one glorious Luna Park: a succession of night clubs and flirtations; an unparallelled opportunity for breaking parental discipline. When it was all over; when the men came back to their jobs; when there was no need for land girls and nurses and tram conductors; when women would be faced with the problem of finding an economic place for themselves in the economic structure, the frivolous and empty-headed would remain, flitting from night club to love affair. It was on them that the limelight would fall. They would justify the mocking comment, “Well, you’ve asked for freedom. Now you’ve got it, what use are you making of it? Aren’t you behaving just as we always said you would?”
That time would come. And those who disbelieved in progress, who saw only a change in externality that was at the most relative; who refused to look far enough back or far enough forward to appreciate how vast a way the human race had travelled towards civilized fellow-feeling, would shrug their shoulders, would say: “Well, and was the struggle worth it?”
The end of the war as far as women were concerned would mean the start of another struggle to hold the ground that they had won in face of what men would call the laws of economic necessity. For a moment Stella felt weary and disenchanted at the prospect of this opening panorama of fresh campaigns. Then she squared her shoulders. That was a long way off. She had this present business. She was due to make a speech to a detachment of Waacs going overseas to-morrow. She would only have time for a hurried sandwich supper. She dismissed the future and began to phrase in her head the opening and concluding sentences of her speech.
II
Nature can provide vivid contrasts to the moods of man. During that slow, sad March of 1918 over which hung the shadow of the big offensive, the sun shone with a gentle radiance from skies of watered cobalt. Day followed day in leisurely calm procession. Lord Hunter-coombe potte
ring about his garden, watching first snowdrops, then crocuses, spray the leaf-strewn copse with colour, found it difficult to believe in this atmosphere of sun-washed tranquillity that only a few miles away within earshot almost, plans were maturing for the greatest battle in the world’s blood-soaked history; that summer and peace were not already on their way.
Loitering down the moss-covered paths, pacing the smooth lawns, aware only of the blue sky above him, the sun’s warmth upon his face, deluded by the sun and warmth into a belief in summer’s actual return, he ignored the dampness of the ground beneath his feet, the treacherous chill that rose from a fresh-turned earth as the sun grew larger and redder behind the leafless trees; just as the sentries looking out over the plains of Picardy might have been lured out of suspicion by the seeming innocence of that long stretch of ground, within whose folds the plans of battle were concealed. Just as the sentry might not have recognized as the proof of a tunnelled mine shaft the sprinkle of new-turned earth upon a parapet, so the old man deliberating with the head gardener as to whether patriotism demanded that the archery should be planted with potatoes, suspected no danger in the slight huskiness with which for the last three mornings he had woken, the wheeziness which had troubled his breathing after dinner.
He was utterly unprepared for the sickness which struck him as suddenly as the big offensive broke upon the English troops in France. One afternoon he had come in rather earlier than usual from the garden; though the sun was shining he had felt cold. He had told the butler to bring him a rug to tuck round his knees as he sat after tea before the fire reading. But he had felt disinclined to read, although only that morning he had received from the library a detective story to which for several days he had been looking forward. He was content to sit there, dozing. At dinner he had no appetite. He had gone to his room early. He had taken two aspirins and a hot whisky. A good sleep and a sweat would put him straight.
He had woken out of a nightmare, with the hands of his luminous clock pointing to five to three; with the sensation that someone was kneeling upon his chest. He struggled, heaved himself with his elbows upon the pillow, rested there, half upright, his forehead damp from the effort, gasping, each breath coming like the quivering sigh which a runner takes at the end of a long and hard-run race; with the struggle growing harder instead of easier with each breath. He turned on the switch of his electric lamp. He turned so that he could see himself in the mirror above his dressing-table. “I’m in pretty bad shape,” he thought.
All through the day the sense of struggle gathered. It lessened towards evening. But only because his strength was lessening; not because the passages of his lungs were clearer. He lay there, his eyes closed, his cheeks flushed, his forehead damp, his chest rising and falling in short, quick gasps that gave the impression that he was gathering his strength for one sudden effort, one desperate heave to fill his lungs with the air that was being pressed inexorably from them. The doctor stood pensively by his side.
“He’s over seventy,” he said to Ruth. “His reserves of strength are scanty.”
For thirty-seven hours the fight went on, with sudden spasms of struggle, punctuated by lapses into inertia that grew longer and more frequent.
Most of the day Ruth sat beside him. It was the first time that she had watched the approach of death. It was less terrifying than she had expected. But it was no less sad. It was very like the action of a car that has run out of petrol. There is a period of short, jerky movement. Then suddenly, quite quietly it runs into a standstill. It was in very much that way that the life went out of the old man. He had ceased to struggle. He lay with his eyes closed. He might have been asleep. One moment he was breathing. The next moment he had ceased to breathe.
It was the first time that Ruth had looked upon the face of death. With a wondering reverence she stared down at the calm bloodless mask. Born not so much in an age of doubt, as in an age that accepted as insoluble the problem of an after life, Ruth did not know for certain what she believed and what she disbelieved. Standing at her father-in-law’s side alone, she knew for very certain, fully appreciated for the first time, that the body laid out below her on the bed was not the person she had known; that that person either had ceased to exist or was somewhere else.
Often during the long months when she had paced the gardens and avenues of Tavenham, awaiting the birth of her two children, Ruth had wondered how she would feel when she became its mistress. It was a lot that ninety-nine women in a hundred would envy her. But she was not certain whether at her age she would not find its responsibilities a rather overwhelming burden. It would be an end of freedom; of careless unreflecting action. She would become the kind of person of whom things were expected. Although she was in the early twenties, she would have to behave as though she were a person in the thirties. And she had had so little a time of freedom. That first year of war: that, and no more than that. She would feel cheated if, when the war was over, she was unable to have the irresponsible “good time” that her generation had promised itself.
Victor, she knew, quite frankly looked on his accession to the title as the curtain’s fall on what he imagined would appear in retrospect to be the happiest period of his life.
“Now our troubles begin,” he said, as he and Ruth presented themselves at the Chambers in South Square, Gray’s Inn, where his father’s will was to be read to them, and the conditions of the estate’s finances explained.
They had expected the interview to present them with a list of problems; they had not, however, expected it to be opened with the dramatic choice of alternatives that the family solicitor had prepared.
It was the first time that Ruth had met him. He was different from what she had expected. She had pictured a family solicitor in terms of the stage; a prim, precise little man, short-sighted, peering over spectacles, bald-headed, black-coated, with a black bag full of papers among which he fumbled. The guardian of the Tavenham finances was not at all like that. He was large, ample, untidy, with a soft loose collar, a draggled Old Etonian tie, a coat with bulging pockets of a different material from his trousers. The powdering of his waistcoat suggested snuff. His hands in contrast to the remainder of his person, were small and carefully tended. He gesticulated with them as he talked, twiddling the front lock of his hair into a Mephistophelean peak. He had at moments a boyish look, but was presumably in the latish fifties. His voice was genial but husky.
“Now, before we start looking at these figures, I’d better tell you what the situation as a whole amounts to. Does Tavenham mean so much to you that you are prepared to keep it on at the sacrifice of every other interest you have?”
He proceeded to explain. The estate had been mortgaged heavily when Victor’s father had inherited it. As a result very largely of the Budget of 1910 it had become more heavily mortgaged. During the last years increased income tax demands had been met by a further loan on the estate. The estate was solvent during his father’s life. But death duties would be very heavy.
“I don’t think your father realized how an estate that can pay its way during an owner’s life will become insolvent for the heir who has to raise further mortgages to meet death duties. When I tried to explain to him, he asked me how else the money was to be found. It was in its way a perfectly fair question. Under the present system of taxation any large estate is the victim of a process of diminishing returns. There are, at the rate things are going, few estates that could remain solvernt for six generations unless they were substantially added to. The old theory that what a man owns his family can keep, is not accepted in a democratic age. What one man wins returns into the open market unless his heirs can add to it.”
Victor cut him short. He was not prepared to listen to a lecture on the rights of property.
“Let’s get down to facts. Are you telling me that I can’t afford to keep up the place?”
“No. You can. But if you decide to keep it on, there’s nothing much else that you will be able to afford.”
“Y
ou mean that every penny I get will have to go on the upkeep of Tavenham?”
“Exactly. It is for you to decide whether or no you think that worth it.”
Ruth and Victor exchanged a glance. They could feel that each was thinking the same thing.
“We’ve got to keep it on for the boy’s sake,” said Victor.
The man of law looked at him reflectively.
“Do you anticipate any substantial addition to your capital?”
“No, how could I?”
“I mean either from your wife.…” He paused, looking across at Ruth; she shook her head.
“My father won’t have much over to leave to me, poor pet.”
“Or,” he continued, turning to Victor, “you might be yourself meditating some profitable excursion into finance?”
Victor, in his turn, shook his head.
“I don’t see myself as a king of commerce.”
“In that case I think you may assume that your son will never be in a position to make his home at Tavenham. The estate will just stand one instalment of death duties, it certainly cannot stand a second. You have to consider the issue entirely from your own points of view. Do you prefer to spend your lives at Tavenham, or in such places as your fancies under such restrictions as your income imposes, decide?”
He looked from one to the other with a bland, judical indifference.
“It’s a question that should need a great deal of thinking over. Shall we proceed with the other business?”
For a week they discussed the matter from every point of view: from their own and from their children’s. Whether they would get more fun maintaining the feudal atmosphere of Tavenham, or living as their fancies chose: Monte Carlo in the winter, a furnished house in London for the season, Scotland in the autumn; freedom to travel, to know variety, to be mobile at a time when speed was a religion. As far as they were themselves concerned, they were agreed that they would get more out of life if they were to put Tavenham on the market. If Tavenham were to prevent them from joining in the main currents of life, they might well come to think of it not as a home but as a prison. On the other hand, would the children stand a better chance brought up in the country, in its cleaner air, in touch with country things, learning to ride and shoot, to absorb that kinship with nature that no townsman ever had, in touch with the continuity of their own tradition, aware of their family, as living in a city they could never be? It might be that for their children’s sake it would be better to keep on Tavenham.