“My dear child!” He looked round, and with sportive tenderness gazed into his daughter’s eyes. “But where is the young man? Why haven’t you brought him upstairs with you, darling?”
Winnie, an expression of pain settling about her mouth, disengaged herself from the parental embrace.
“Papa, Harry has asked me to marry him.”
“I know, I know. He did it with my full approval.”
“I hope you won’t be angry,” she said, taking her father’s hand, with a look of entreaty. “You wouldn’t want me to do anything I didn’t like, father.”
“What on earth d’you mean?” he cried, surprised and uncertain.
“I had to say — that I couldn’t.”
The Canon started as though he were shot. “What! You’re joking. Oh, it’s a mistake! I won’t have it. Where is he?”
He went rapidly to the door as if he meant to call back the rejected lover.
“Papa, what are you doing?” cried Winnie, distracted. “He’s gone!”
The Canon stopped and came back grimly.
“I suppose you’re joking, Winnie? I’m quite bewildered with all this humour.”
“I don’t love him, father,” she said, with tearful eyes.
Canon Spratte, quite unable to comprehend, stared at her helplessly.
“The girl’s mad,” he cried, looking at Lady Sophia.
But Winnie felt it was no longer possible to hold back the truth. She braced herself for the contest and looked firmly into her father’s eyes.
“I’m already engaged to be married, papa.”
“You? And to whom, pray?”
“I’m engaged to Bertram Railing.”
“Good God!”
Lady Sophia also uttered a cry of dismay, and even her uncle, though he had maliciously suggested the possibility, was no less dumfounded. In his heart he had been convinced that Winnie was far too worldly-wise to commit herself to a doubtful marriage, and he would have sworn she was incapable of a daring act. Then, against his will, the humour of the situation occurred to him, and he smothered a little laugh. But Canon Spratte, infuriated, with all his senses on the alert, divined rather than noticed this offensive merriment. He turned upon his brother angrily.
“I think we shall proceed in this matter better without your presence, Thomas,” he said roughly, putting aside in his uncontrollable anger the studied urbanity upon which he prided himself. “I regret that I cannot expect from you either assistance or sympathy, or any of the feelings to be awaited in a nobleman and a gentleman. I shall be grateful if you will take your departure.”
Lord Spratte smiled very good-humouredly.
“My dear Theodore, I don’t want you to wash your dirty linen before me. Good-bye, Sophia.”
He kissed his sister, and held out his hand to the Canon, who turned away ill-temperedly, muttering indignant things. Lord Spratte, by no means disconcerted, smiled and went up to Winnie. She was looking down, listlessly turning over the pages of a book. He put his hand kindly on her shoulder.
“Never mind, Winnie, old girl,” he said, in his flippant, careless way, “you marry the man you want to, and don’t be jockeyed into takin’ any one else. I’ll always back you up in anything unreasonable.”
Winnie neither moved nor answered, but heavy tears rolled down her cheeks on to the open book.
“Well, I hope you’ll all have a very nice time,” said Lord Spratte. “I have the honour to wish you good-afternoon.”
No one stirred till he had gone. Canon Spratte waited till the door was closed; waited, looking at his daughter, till the silence seemed intolerable.
“Now, what does all this mean, Winnie?” he asked at last.
She did not speak, and Canon Spratte tightened his lips as he watched her. You saw now for the first time the square strength of his jaw. When angry he was not a man to be trifled with, and Lady Sophia thought there was more in him at this moment of the ruthless Chancellor than she had ever known.
“Am I to understand that you are serious?”
Winnie, still looking down, nodded. The Canon stared at her for one instant, then burst out angrily with harsh tones. None would have imagined that the sonorous, sweet voice was capable of such biting inflections. But Lady Sophia could not help thinking him rather fine in his wrath.
“Oh, but you must be mad,” he cried. “The child’s stark, staring mad, Sophia. The whole thing is preposterous. I never heard anything like it. Do you mean seriously to tell me that you’re engaged to that penniless, unknown scribbler — a man whom no one knows anything about, a rogue and a vagabond?”
But Winnie could not suffer to hear Railing ill-spoken of. The contemptuous words roused her as would have done no violence towards herself, and throwing back her head, she looked fearlessly at her father.
“You said he was a man of great intellect, papa. You said you greatly admired him.”
“That proves only that I have good manners,” he retorted, with a disdainful toss of his head. “When a mother shows me her baby, I say it’s a beautiful child. I don’t think it’s a beautiful child, I think it’s a very ugly child. I can’t tell one baby from another, but I assure her it’s the very image of its father. That’s just common politeness.... How long has this absurd business been going on?”
“I became engaged to him yesterday.”
Winnie, though her heart beat almost painfully, was regaining courage. The thought of Bertram strengthened her, and she was glad to fight the first battle on his behalf.
“You perceive, Sophia, that I was not consulted in this.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Theodore.”
Winnie took her father’s hand, trying to persuade him. She felt that if it was only possible to make him comprehend how enormously the whole thing mattered to her, he would surely withdraw his opposition. He was angry because he could not see that to her it was an affair of life and death.
“Oh, don’t you understand, father? You can’t imagine what he’s done for me. He’s taught me everything I know, he’s made me what I am.”
“How long have you enjoyed the privilege of his acquaintance?” asked the Canon, satirically. “Six weeks?”
“I was a fool,” said Winnie, speaking very quickly, with flushed cheeks. “I was just the same as any other girl, vain and empty-headed. I was happy for a week if I got a hat that became me. And then I met him and everything was changed. He found me a foolish doll, and he’s made me into a woman. I’m ashamed of what I was. I’m proud now, and so grateful to him. He’s the first real man I’ve ever known.”
Canon Spratte shook his head contemptuously.
“I should like to know what you find in him that you cannot find in Wroxham or in — or in your father.”
“I don’t love Harry Wroxham.”
“Fiddlededee! A girl of your age doesn’t know what love is.”
“Harry doesn’t know me. He talks nonsense to me. He thinks I’m too stupid to be spoken to of serious things. To him I’m just the same as any other girl he meets at parties. For wife he wants a slave, a plaything when he’s tired or bored. I want to be a man’s companion. I want to work with my husband.”
“I’m surprised and shocked to hear you have such ideas,” answered the Canon, emphatically. “I thought you were more modest.”
“You don’t understand, father,” cried Winnie, with despair in her voice. “Don’t you see that I have a life of my own, and I must live it in my own way?”
“Rubbish! The new woman business was exploded ten years ago; you’re hopelessly behind the times, my poor girl. A woman’s place is in her own house. You’re full of ideas which are not only silly but middle-class. They fill me with disgust. You’re ridiculous, Winnie.”
Canon Spratte, who only spoke the truth when he said the whole matter appeared to him suburban and vulgar, walked up and down impatiently. He sought for acid expressions of his disdain.
“You’re making me dreadfully unhappy, papa,” said Winnie. “You’
ve never been unkind to me before. Think that all my happiness depends on this. You don’t wish to ruin my whole life.”
“Don’t be absurd,” cried Canon Spratte, unmoved by this entreaty. “I refuse to hear anything about it. I cannot make you marry Lord Wroxham. Far be it from me to attempt to force your affections. I confess it’s a great disappointment; however, I accept it as the will of Providence and I shall do my best to bear it. But I’m quite sure it’s not the will of Providence that you should marry Mr. Bertram Railing, and I utterly refuse my consent to his shameful, grotesque proposal. The man’s a scoundrel; he’s nothing better than a fortune-hunter.”
“That’s not true, father,” said Winnie, flushing with anger.
“Winnie, how dare you say that!”
“You’ve got no right to abuse the man I love better than the whole world. Nothing you can say will make me change my mind.”
“You’re talking nonsense, and I think you’re a very disobedient and unaffectionate girl.”
“After all, it’s my business alone. It’s my happiness that is concerned.”
“How selfish you are! You don’t consider my happiness.”
“I’ve made up my mind to marry Bertram Railing. I’ve given him my solemn promise.”
“Women’s promises are made of pie-crust,” cried Canon Spratte, contemptuously.
Lady Sophia raised her eyebrows, but did not speak.
“I’m over twenty-one,” retorted Winnie defiantly, for she was not without some temper of her own. “And I’m my own mistress.”
“What do you mean by that, Winnie?”
“If you won’t give me your consent, I shall marry without.”
Canon Spratte was thunderstruck. This was rebellion, and instinctively he felt that nothing could be done with Winnie by direct contradiction. But he was too angry to devise any better way. He walked up and down indignantly.
“And this is the return I get for all the affection I have lavished upon my children,” he said, speaking to no one in particular. “I’ve sacrificed myself to their every whim for years — and this is my reward.”
Half afraid that he was beaten, Canon Spratte flung himself petulantly in a chair. As with his father before him, outspoken opposition dismayed and perhaps intimidated him; he was unused to it, and when thwarted, could not for a while think how to conduct himself. Through the conservation Lady Sophia had kept very quiet, and her calmness added to the Canon’s irritation. He gave her one or two angry glances, but could hit upon nothing wherewith to vent on her his increasing choler.
“And do you know anything about this young man, Winnie?” she asked now. “Has he anything to live on?”
Winnie turned to her for comfort, thinking the worst of the struggle was over.
“We shall work hard, both of us,” she said. “With what he earns and the little I have from my mother we can live like kings.”
“In a flat at West Kensington, I suppose, or in a villa at Hornsey Rise,” said Canon Spratte, with an angry laugh.
“With the man I love I’d live in a hovel,” said Winnie, proudly.
Lady Sophia quietly smiled.
“Of course, it’s a delicate question with that kind of person,” she murmured. “But had he a father, or did he just grow?”
Winnie faced her wrathful parent, looking at him defiantly.
“His father is not alive. He was first-mate on a collier trading from Newcastle.”
“That, I should imagine, as a profession, was neither lucrative nor clean,” said Lady Sophia, in her placid way.
Canon Spratte gave a savage laugh.
“At least it’s something to be thankful for that his relations are dead.”
“He has a mother and a sister,” said Winnie.
“And who are they, I should like to know?”
“I don’t know and I don’t care. He has told me already that his mother is not a very highly-educated woman.”
“So I should suppose. Where do they live?”
Winnie hesitated for the very shortest moment.
“Bertram says they have a little house in — Peckham.”
Canon Spratte jumped up, and an expression of real disgust passed over his face.
“Revolting!” he cried, “I wish to hear nothing more about it.”
He walked towards the door, but Winnie stopped him.
“Papa, don’t go. Don’t be angry with me. You do love me; and I love you, next to Bertram, better than any one in the world.”
Canon Spratte put aside her appealing hands.
“If you love me, Winnie, I don’t know how you can cause me such pain. Sophia and I will leave you to your own reflections. I can’t send you to your room as if you were a little girl, but this I must say: I think you ungrateful, disobedient, and unkind. It’s only from regard to your sex, and out of respect to the memory of your dead mother, that I don’t say, as well, that I consider you stupid and vulgar.”
Like a martyr, for none could assume more effectively than Theodore Spratte the appearance of outraged virtue, he stalked majestically from the room.
VII
A WEEK later Canon Spratte lunched with Mrs. Fitzherbert to meet Sir John Durant and his daughter. The eminent brewer was a stout gentleman of fifty, rubicund and good-humoured, with a gold watch-chain spread widely over his capacious paunch. The few hairs that remained to him were arranged at judicious intervals over a shining pate. His face was broad and merry. His little eyes were bright with hilarity, and when anything diverted him, he laughed all over his body. He was not tall, and his legs were disproportionately short, so that the slim, elegant Canon towered over him in a way that gratified the one without mortifying the other. Sir John’s appearance betokened great prosperity and a thorough satisfaction with the world at large. He knew that he made the best beer in England, and the British people knew it too, so he had good reason to be pleased with the state of things. He was a business man from top to toe, shrewd, blunt and outspoken, and he had no idea that there was anything disgraceful in his connection with trade.
When they sat down to luncheon and the butler asked if he would drink hock or claret, the brewer turned to him and in a loud, brusque voice inquired whether there was no beer.
“I always drink it to show I have confidence,” he explained to the company in general. “It makes me fat, but I shouldn’t be worth my salt if I hesitated at a few more pounds avoirdupois at the call of duty. I’ve told the British public on fifty thousand hoardings to drink Durant’s Half-Crown Family Ale, and the British public do. The least they can expect of me is to follow their example.”
The Canon was somewhat taken aback by the frankness with which Sir John referred to the source of his large income, but he was a man of tact, and with a laugh insisted on trying that foaming beverage.
“What d’you think of it?” asked the brewer, when Canon Spratte at one draught had emptied his glass.
“Capital, capital!”
“I’ll send you some to-morrow. It’s good stuff, my dear Canon — as pure as mother’s milk, and it wouldn’t hurt a child. I’ve no patience with those brewers who are ashamed of the beer they make. Why, do you know, Lord Carbis won’t have it in his house, and when I stayed with him, I had to drink wine. The old fool doesn’t know that people only laugh at him. However many airs he puts on, he’ll never make them forget that he owes his title to stout and bitter. As far as I’m concerned, I don’t mind who knows that I started as a van boy. If I’ve built up the biggest connection in the trade, it’s to my own brains I owe it.”
Mrs. Fitzherbert laughed to herself when she saw the expression with which the Canon received this statement. His idea had been that Sir John belonged to the aristocracy of beerdom, with two or even three generations of gentlemen behind him who had prepared themselves for the manufacture of fermented liquors by a career at Eton and at Oxford. It was fortunate that his cursory inspection of the brewer’s daughter had been satisfactory. She was quite pretty, with a complexion whose r
obust colouring suggested the best of health; and her brown hair, rather abundant and waving naturally, grew low on the forehead in a way that Canon Spratte thought singularly attractive. He knew something about feminine costume, (there were few subjects of which the Canon was entirely ignorant,) and he observed with satisfaction that she was clothed with taste and fashion. He had no patience with the women who dressed in a mode they thought artistic, and he abhorred the garb which is termed rational. In a moment of expansion he had once told his daughter there were two things a woman should avoid like the seven deadly sins: she should never take her hair down and never wear a short skirt.
“A woman, like a cat, should always end in a tail,” said he.
Lastly, the Canon noticed that Gwendolen Durant’s handsome figure suggested that heirs would not be wanting to a union between herself and his son. This somewhat astonished him, for he would never have expected Lionel to set his affections on such a charming, but buxom, young person. He could not for the life of him imagine why she should care for Lionel.
“She’s worth six of him, any day,” he muttered, “though I’m his father and shouldn’t think it.”
But there was no accounting for taste; and if a strapping girl, with a dowry of one hundred and fifty thousand pounds, chose to make an alliance with his family, he was willing to overlook a parent who would not let an indulgent world forget his indecent connection with honest labour. Canon Spratte had that peculiar charm of manner which led people, after ten minutes’ conversation, to feel they had known him all their lives; and freeing himself from the dowager, who had hitherto absorbed his attention, he turned to Miss Durant. He laid himself out to fascinate her, and they made great friends in the hour they sat side by side.
When the remaining guests had gone their ways, the Canon asked Mrs. Fitzherbert if he might stay a little longer.
“Of course,” she said. “Sit down and make yourself comfortable. You may smoke a cigarette.”
The day was warm and the sun shone brightly. Pale blinds kept out the brilliancy, and delicately softened the light in Mrs. Fitzherbert’s drawing-room. It looked singularly restful to Canon Spratte with its gay chintzes and masses of summer flowers. It formed a fit and elegant frame for Mrs. Fitzherbert, who looked handsomer than ever in an exquisite gown, all flounces and furbelows. Its airy grace filled him with content, and he thought that feminine society was really very delightful. The world was a good place when you could sit in a pleasant drawing-room, away from the bustle of ecclesiastical labours, on a summer afternoon, and talk to an old friend who was also a fascinating woman. Yet at home there was much to make him irritable. For one thing he expected hourly a communication from the Prime Minister, offering the vacant See; and every time the bell of the street-door rang loudly, his heart leaped to his mouth. Almost unconsciously he assumed an attitude of dignified indifference, such as Cincinnatus at his plough might have used when the officers of the Republic came towards him. But Lord Stonehenge, dilatory as ever, hesitated to make an appointment. Winnie was an even greater source of annoyance. She made no sign of yielding to his wishes. She went out at all hours and none knew whither. She seemed to flaunt her legal independence in her father’s indignant face. At home she was silent, frightened and sullen. Canon Spratte pointedly ignored her. He had the useful, humiliating art of looking at people without seeing them, and was able to stare at his daughter blankly as though the space she occupied were empty.
Delphi Collected Works of W. Somerset Maugham (Illustrated) Page 96