“You and I ought to understand each other, Mary,” he said. “You married a monkey and I married half a dozen of them. Lord, what a marriage night I spent, surrounded by gibbering homunculi. Monkeys are queer beasts, they push a man to the very bitter end of imagination. It was difficult to be decently affectionate under the circumstances. Sarah and I quarrelled about it for years, that is to say, I quarrelled and Sarah wept, until I gave it up and troubled her no more. It’s queer that I’m only now beginning to understand her after being married to her for twenty-five years. I used to think she was wrong and I a righteous man plagued to death, and I’ve only just realised that since I never had any decent liking for her the whole fault was mine from the beginning. I wanted her, and disliked her for it, and can you blame the poor wretch for taking refuge behind her hairy little friends? I don’t. They might have been worse—parsons or talking women or radicals. . . . I’ll tell you what it is, Mary, we’re far too ready to change the people we live with. Actually, it can’t be done: only misery comes of trying. You couldn’t change Archie, though you’ve more brains in your little finger than he has in his whole body, and Sarah has as much right to her monkeys as I to this ridiculous belly. Don’t you go about trying to alter people. It’s a fool’s game. Life is so full of better and more amusing games that a man of taste has all he can do to try his hand at the finest of them. I wish I were not so fat, Mary. It generates thought, which is a bad thing at my age.”
Sarah drifted in and out of these monologues as she drifted through her days. She was a gentle soul, and so long as she was not worried by unkind attempts to pin her down, a happy placid one. She had the simplicity of thought and manner that comes from long communion with animals. She explained to Mary that if she had had any children she would never have felt they belonged to her as the creatures did. “They would have gone off and laughed at me when I tried to stop them, Mary. Naughty little girls and fat impudent little boys.” Sarah sighed. “My cats know when it’s time for morning prayer and they sit as still as china beasts until I’ve finished. As for the others”—she came close to Mary and whispered in her ear—“you may think me very foolish, but I baptise them all with Jordan water to make them acceptable to heaven.”
Mary discovered in herself a new gentleness. A year ago she would have told Wagener about Sarah and laughed with him at her simplicity. Now she felt that Sarah was groping towards some truth from which Mary herself was still a very long way. She found Sarah soothing, and on the night dreadful to Mary when her son was born, the older woman displayed a strange firmness and serenity. It was Sarah who wiped Mary’s forehead and knotted a towel to the bed-head for the young girl to grip in her agony. Sarah received Mary’s son and bathed it, and only when all was over did she lapse so far as to be discovered trying to stuff the child into a hat-box. Dissuaded, she wandered away, but Mary was asleep and did not miss her. . . .
It seemed to Mary—looking back—that during the next few months she was truly happy and peaceful. When spring came, with its thin intoxicating scents, she passed whole days in the grounds of Roxby House, playing with her son. Richard was a very attractive baby, with Mary’s eyes and a fat friendly smile. Mary loved him with a tenderness into which she poured all her longing for Charlotte, her frustrate worship of ships, her homesickness for Danesacre, and, though she would not have acknowledged it, the memory of Gerry. She thought of him a little now, since it was all so far off that it was part of another life or a dream. But chiefly she thought of Richard, and planned for him, and kissed his wet slippery little body in the bath, and behaved with the immemorial folly of mothers with first-born sons. She had some follies that were in advance of her time. She bathed Richard all over twice every day and kept the windows open in his rooms on the coldest night. Where she got these notions from she did not know, but she clung to them in spite of Sarah’s laments and Archie’s fretful orders. Wagener upheld her and her native obstinacy did the rest.
She was very thin now, and in the tight-fitting bodice of her long frock she looked more than ever like a little girl in borrowed clothes. She wore her hair in heavy bands round her head and over her ears. It weighed her down, and she was never sorry when it tumbled over her shoulders as she romped on the grass with the other child. Then she plaited it and let it hang. So happy was she in her recovered health and the abounding energy of her body that when Wagener told her Archie was looking ill, she dismissed the news with impatience.
But Archie was ill. He grew more and more like a hake every day. He ceased even to complain, but drifted about the house talking to any one who would listen of his royal blood. He was dreadfully distressed by the admittance of Jews into Parliament and said that it almost justified him in listening to certain proposals that had been made to him from a loyal quarter. He even evoked, out of some dim boyish romance, the memory of a mysterious message about the Succession and a messenger, and when he did die it was from a chill caught waiting for the messenger through the whole of one cold night, standing mute and obstinate on the terrace below the west front of the house, coughing, shivering, peering into the hollow night, while another Messenger than the one he expected came nearer and nearer.
He died very quietly and Mary hardly had time to realise that she was, at seventeen, a widow, when the house was turned upside down by the arrival of the other two Roxby brothers, with—as in an old play—their trains. They filled the house, trod on Sarah’s cats, screamed at the monkeys, and treated Mary herself with a mixture of scorn and deference. The scorn was for her years, and the deference for her position as mother of her son. He was, after George Roxby’s one son by his first wife, the heir. And as George Roxby the younger was a childless hypochondriac of forty-five, the rest of the family were inclined to pay the infant Richard too much respect. The youngest Roxby brother of all, John Roxby, had three children, but he had long since cut himself off from the family by going into trade. Early in the forties he had married the only daughter of a tea and coffee importer and gone into the business. When his father-in-law died he inherited. He lived in London, and though informed of his brother’s death, did not come to the funeral. No one thought of his children, the children of a Roxby turned tea merchant, as possible heirs, and Mary had to stand guard between her baby and the overwhelming attentions of his relatives. She soothed Sarah, helped her to nurse one monkey who had been foully assailed with a razor by James Roxby when he discovered it in his wardrobe, supervised the baking of huge glazed pies and roasting of sides of beef and killing of young ducklings, and found time to grieve a little for Archie.
“He was kind to me,” she said to Wagener, “as kind as he knew how to be. It was as hard on him to be married to an ill-behaved girl of fifteen as for me to be married to him. He must have been bitterly disappointed. 1 wish I hadn’t made fun of him, and I’m sorry he’s dead. I was getting used to him. The question is what am I going to do now? I don’t seem able to settle anywhere. Every friend I make is torn from me. Poor poor Archie.”
“Heaven preserve me and all decent men from the insolence of your pity when you’ve got rid of us,” Wagener observed. “I don’t know what you can do. I’ll think about it.”
Mary was walking away. She turned and flung herself impulsively into the tutor’s arms. “You’re all I have. Don’t you go away, too. Promise.”
Wagener promised. . . .
The day of the funeral was very hot. Before entering the darkened room where the Roxbys were waiting to walk to the chapel in a procession which even the ladies of the family were required to attend, Mary glanced in on the dining-room with its loaded tables. There were rounds of cold beef, ten hams that had been liberally soaked with sherry, huge raised pies with the Roxby arms in pastry relief and thick jelly between crust and meat, young geese and ducklings with green goose sauce made of sorrel juice, sherry and gooseberries, roast duck with port wine sauce, almond flummery, mince pies, jellies, cold soufflées, pickled walnuts, orange wine as potent as old brandy, shrub, white rum cellared in
1780, and on a side table a noble company of clarets and burgundies, with a few Rhine wines in thin bottles, like maiden ladies in a gathering of jovial citizens. Mary knew that every one for miles round, bidden and unbidden, would attend the feast after the burying, and she hoped fervently that she and Sarah would not be disgraced by a famine.
She reached the tiny private chapel fretted by Sarah’s complaints. At the last minute Sarah had announced her intention of taking two of her oldest animals to the service, and all Mary’s wits were called on in order to avoid an unseemly quarrel. Torn from her monkeys, Sarah wept bitterly. Mrs. James Roxby, who was not Mrs. James really but had to be accepted as such with as much civility as there was any need to show, was purple with emotion, and Charles Roxby was giggling. “Archie shall have a decent funeral,” Mary said. She spoke crossly to Sarah and quelled Charles with brutal zest.
The chapel was almost warm, and bees droned in and out of the open door. A sense of abundant life outside mocked the handful of mourners within. Mary tried to listen to the service and to think of Archie, but her thoughts were beguiled by drifting summer scents and distracted by her own perplexities. “Hath but a short time to live and is full of misery.” Archie was full of misery. Mary wondered what ambitions had died in him, what dreams he had drowned in an excess of spleen, and brandy. “He fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.” “That’s me,” Mary thought. “I never continue anywhere. I wish I did. I’d give anything to have my feet on something solid. Archie had much more stability in his life than I have. . . .”
Late in the day James Roxby came to her and began a long discussion about the unlegalised Mrs. James, whose name was Susan Putt.
“I have made the acquaintance of a lady of thirty-five, a person of great excellence, combining strength with sweetness. Every one speaks in favour of her active piety and kindness. She is very well off in the world, and is prepared to behave to me—if she becomes my wife—with great generosity and affection. Don’t mention this matter to any of my brothers at present, Mary, but give me your opinion, as Archie’s widow, on my prospect.”
“What about Susan?” Mary began bluntly.
James’s face expressed deep concern. “Susan has lived with me for twenty-five years,” he said. “She has never had any other association, and she has gradually, with my help and example, refined herself to such a degree that I have repeatedly raised her allowance. My affection for her is unchanged, but I cannot help thinking that it is my duty to sacrifice both of us to a reputable marriage.”
“If respectability is what you want, why not marry Susan?” Mary suggested.
“Sin can never be made respectable,” James pointed out. “After all, Susan and I have sinned, though on my part, at any rate, with the most delicate and disinterested sentiments. You can’t put that right, after the lapse of so many years. Besides, I am in the greatest need of money. Do you think that George will raise our allowances now that Archie is dead? After all, you and a young child cannot possibly require so much money as Archie did.”
Mary left him to his speculations. He revolted her, but she preferred him to Charles, the youngest but one, who was a fool and tried to make love to her. He sidled up to her in the garden after her interview with James and excused himself from kissing her hands.
“So much too hot for fleshy contacts,” he minced. “How young you are, and fresh and exquisite. It seems almost foolish to have made anything so charming for the very short space of time in which you will be permitted to retain your charm.”
He gave her one of the embroidered cloths that he spent his time making, showing the utmost ingenuity in designing patterns and blending silks. “To remember me.” His long pink face, a milder version of Archie’s, the Hanoverian profile gone soft, peered into hers.
“I’d rather not remember you,” Mary said tartly. “I wish you and James and all your women would go away. The house is like a bedlam and the servants can never get anything done because James is being scolded by Susan in one room and you are pilfering brandied cherries in another. I can’t hear myself think for you all. . . .”
Her thoughts, when at last they did go, led her to no solution of her problem. She wanted to know how much money she and Richard had, but George Roxby either would not or could not tell her. He suggested instead that she should strengthen her position by marrying his son, and in spite of Mary’s protest that she did not want to spend the rest of her life in marrying Roxbys, he sent for the second George, a retired major-general of Hussars. He arrived at Roxby House with an ugly mistress of forty whom he insisted on retaining, although he said he was very willing to marry Mary, peering at her in her flowing hoopless black, with real kindness in his myopic little eyes.
“You would be reasonable about Catherine, wouldn’t you?” he asked her anxiously. “I can’t afford to pay her off, and she’s used to my system. She would be of service to you. You see my point?”
Thinking pitifully of Susan Putt Mary said she did, but she refused to marry him. He stayed on in the house inventing household economies and seeing to it that they were practised by administering calomel and jalap ruthlessly and impartially for thieving, breakages, immorality and waste.
His son’s intolerable dullness exasperated the elder George Roxby to such a pitch that he had a long-threatened stroke and lay helpless for a week. Mary nursed him. During this week a comet that had been filling the heavens with fire and the faithful and unfaithful alike with horrid expectations of a Last Judgment, reached its menacing height. Every night, when the old man slept fitfully, Mary stood at his window to watch it flung like a sword across the sky. Silent, blazing, sinister, it gave her an exultant sense of danger. George Roxby’s stertorous breathing echoed in the dark room behind her, the comet flared, Sarah’s animals chattered and wailed in a fever of excitement, and Mary’s mind was filled with the thought of approaching change. George Roxby died and George Roxby succeeded, and Sarah woke Mary up a week later in the cold darkness of early morning to tell her that her husband had appeared to her and prophesied the death of his son. Mary sat bolt upright, shivering, among a sea of bedclothes like receding waves of sleep. Her scepticism received a shock when a few months afterwards George broke his long neck in the hunting field and was brought home to the house that had seen three dead Roxbys in the last year.
“But he rode so badly that any one could have prophesied he’d be killed,” Mary protested, trying to explain away her own superstitious awe.
Sarah pointed out triumphantly that only George, speaking through herself, had done so. James and Charles returned nervously for another funeral and mere began an examination of the Roxby estate. It was found to be in the most frightful confusion. Mortgages were falling due and there was no money to meet them. Rents were in arrears and in the middle of it all George’s bailiff disappeared for America taking with him all the money he had in hand, together with various deeds and documents. James and Charles quarrelled and argued day and night in a disorder of guttering candles and empty decanters. Charles was for leaving things as they were, renewing the mortgages and applying to the Jews.
“We’re all done for,” he said. “The old gay England is doomed. The machines have dug its grave and our oh so liberal politicians and our swollen traders are its undertakers. We shall never be gay again. We shall only be noisy. Let us sell what we can and live like gentlemen to the last.”
James snorted, and Mary caught at a sensible word. She tried to think how Mark Henry would act. She was fighting for her son, and she had no intention of letting these older Roxbys cheat him of his inheritance. Early in the new year Wagener fell ill and Mary was impatient because he was failing her when she needed his advice. He knew it, and roused himself to wrestle with her over papers and figures until even Mary could see that he was too ill to go on. Then she was seized with panic and sent for a doctor, two doctors. “You’re not really ill,” she told him.
The dying man laughed at her. “I’m too lazy to work,” he said.
“I should have sponged on you, buying my bread with advice you wouldn’t follow, until I Was old enough to be shovelled decently aside, like Miss Flora, and forgotten. I’d rather die at this melancholy and romantic moment. I’ll give you a last piece of advice. I wouldn’t give it to you if I weren’t sure, moderately sure, that you have too much character to make a feminine success of your life. Go back to Danesacre and try your luck again with Mark Henry Garton. I’ve a queer feeling that this is your moment. Try it.”
“I was thinking of doing that myself,” Mary said, surprised.
Wagener nodded. “Go back as soon as you can. And Mary, one thing more. Don’t expect too much of people. You’ll be horribly disappointed. Try to believe in advance that your best friends will play you the worst tricks, and you’ll save yourself a deal of pain. Remember.”
“You shan’t die,” Mary said fiercely. But he did die, and she, absorbed in her struggle with James and Charles, hardly noticed his going.
She had come to the conclusion that it would be better to sell two-thirds of the estate and keep an unencumbered third for Richard. The two Roxbys joined forces to defeat her. They pointed out that the part she wanted to sell included their houses and their land. Mary found herself arguing with these two middle-aged aristocrats as if they were tiresome and unreasonable children. “It isn’t your land,” she said. “It’s entailed on the eldest surviving line. It’s Richard’s. You can all come and live in this house—it’s large enough to hold both of you and Sarah—and look after the place for Richard. I have a feeling that this is the third we ought to keep. Besides, it will fetch less than any other part and we need all the money we can raise.”
The Lovely Ship Page 9