When the front door closed, Ernestina allowed dignity to control her for precisely one and a half minutes, whereupon her fragile little hand reached out and peremptorily pulled the gilt handle beside her bed. A pleasantly insistent tinkle filtered up from the basement kitchen; and soon afterwards, there were footsteps, a knock, and the door opened to reveal Mary bearing a vase with a positive fountain of spring flowers. The girl came and stood by the bed, her face half hidden by the blossoms, smiling, impossible for a man to have been angry with—and therefore quite the reverse to Ernestina, who frowned sourly and reproachfully at this unwelcome vision of Flora.
Of the three young women who pass through these pages Mary was, in my opinion, by far the prettiest. She had infinitely the most life, and infinitely the least selfishness; and physical charms to match… an exquisitely pure, if pink complexion, corn-colored hair and delectably wide gray-blue eyes, eyes that invited male provocation and returned it as gaily as it was given. They bubbled as the best champagne bubbles, irrepressibly; and without causing flatulence. Not even the sad Victorian clothes she had so often to wear could hide the trim, plump promise of her figure—indeed, “plump” is unkind. I brought up Ronsard’s name just now; and her figure required a word from his vocabulary, one for which we have no equivalent in English: rondelet—all that is seductive in plumpness without losing all that is nice in slimness.
Mary’s great-great-granddaughter, who is twenty-two years old this month I write in, much resembles her ancestor; and her face is known over the entire world, for she is one of the more celebrated younger English film actresses.
But it was not, I am afraid, the face for 1867. It had not, for instance, been at all the face for Mrs. Poulteney, to whom it had become familiar some three years previously. Mary was the niece of a cousin of Mrs. Fairley, who had wheedled Mrs. Poulteney into taking the novice into the unkind kitchen. But Marlborough House and Mary had suited each other as well as a tomb would a goldfinch; and when one day Mrs. Poulteney was somberly surveying her domain and saw from her upstairs window the disgusting sight of her stableboy soliciting a kiss, and not being very successfully resisted, the goldfinch was given an instant liberty; whereupon it flew to Mrs. Tranter’s, in spite of Mrs. Poulteney’s solemn warnings to that lady as to the foolhardiness of harboring such proven dissoluteness.
In Broad Street Mary was happy. Mrs. Tranter liked pretty girls; and pretty, laughing girls even better. Of course, Ernestina was her niece, and she worried for her more; but Ernestina she saw only once or twice a year, and Mary she saw every day. Below her mobile, flirtatious surface the girl had a gentle affectionateness; and she did not stint, she returned the warmth that was given. Ernestina did not know a dreadful secret of that house in Broad Street; there were times, if cook had a day off, when Mrs. Tranter sat and ate with Mary alone in the downstairs kitchen; and they were not the unhappiest hours in either of their lives.
Mary was not faultless; and one of her faults was a certain envy of Ernestina. It was not only that she ceased abruptly to be the tacit favorite of the household when the young lady from London arrived; but the young lady from London came also with trunkfuls of the latest London and Paris fashions, not the best recommendation to a servant with only three dresses to her name—and not one of which she really liked, even though the best of them she could really dislike only because it had been handed down by the young princess from the capital. She also thought Charles was a beautiful man for a husband; a great deal too good for a pallid creature like Ernestina. This was why Charles had the frequent benefit of those gray-and-periwinkle eyes when she opened the door to him or passed him in the street. In wicked fact the creature picked her exits and entrances to coincide with Charles’s; and each time he raised his hat to her in the street she mentally cocked her nose at Ernestina; for she knew very well why Mrs. Tranter’s niece went upstairs so abruptly after Charles’s departures. Like all soubrettes, she dared to think things her young mistress did not; and knew it.
Having duly and maliciously allowed her health and cheerfulness to register on the invalid, Mary placed the flowers on the bedside commode.
“From Mr. Charles, Miss Tina. With ‘er complimums.” Mary spoke in a dialect notorious for its contempt of pronouns and suffixes.
“Place them on my dressing table. I do not like them so close.”
Mary obediently removed them there and disobediently began to rearrange them a little before turning to smile at the suspicious Ernestina.
“Did he bring them himself?”
“No, miss.”
“Where is Mr. Charles?”
“Doan know, miss. I didn’ ask’un.” But her mouth was pressed too tightly together, as if she wanted to giggle.
“But I heard you speak with the man.”
“Yes, miss.”
“What about?”
“’Twas just the time o’ day, miss.”
“Is that what made you laugh?”
“Yes, miss. ‘Tis the way ‘e speaks, miss.”
The Sam who had presented himself at the door had in fact borne very little resemblance to the mournful and indignant young man who had stropped the razor. He had thrust the handsome bouquet into the mischievous Mary’s arms. “For the bootiful young lady hupstairs.” Then dexterously he had placed his foot where the door had been about to shut and as dexterously produced from behind his back, in his other hand, while his now free one swept off his ^ la mode near-brimless topper, a little posy of crocuses. “And for the heven more lovely one down.” Mary had blushed a deep pink; the pressure of the door on Sam’s foot had mysteriously lightened. He watched her smell the yellow flowers; not politely, but genuinely, so that a tiny orange smudge of saffron appeared on the charming, impertinent nose.
“That there bag o’ soot will be delivered as bordered.” She bit her lips, and waited. “Hon one condition. No tick. Hit must be a-paid for at once.”
“’Ow much would’er cost then?”
The forward fellow eyed his victim, as if calculating a fair price; then laid a finger on his mouth and gave a profoundly unambiguous wink. It was this that had provoked that smothered laugh; and the slammed door.
Ernestina gave her a look that would have not disgraced Mrs. Poulteney. “You will kindly remember that he comes from London.”
“Yes, miss.”
“Mr. Smithson has already spoken to me of him. The man fancies himself a Don Juan.”
“What’s that then, Miss Tina?”
There was a certain eager anxiety for further information in Mary’s face that displeased Ernestina very much.
“Never mind now. But if he makes advances I wish to be told at once. Now bring me some barley water. And be more discreet in future.”
There passed a tiny light in Mary’s eyes, something singularly like a flash of defiance. But she cast down her eyes and her flat little lace cap, bobbing a token curtsy, and left the room. Three flights down, and three flights up, as Ernestina, who had not the least desire for Aunt Tranter’s wholesome but uninteresting barley water, consoled herself by remembering.
But Mary had in a sense won the exchange, for it reminded Ernestina, not by nature a domestic tyrant but simply a horrid spoiled child, that soon she would have to stop playing at mistress, and be one in real earnest. The idea brought pleasures, of course; to have one’s own house, to be free of parents… but servants were such a problem, as everyone said. Were no longer what they were, as everyone said. Were tiresome, in a word. Perhaps Ernestina’s puzzlement and distress were not far removed from those of Charles, as he had sweated and stumbled his way along the shore. Life was the correct apparatus; it was heresy to think otherwise; but meanwhile the cross had to be borne, here and now.
It was to banish such gloomy forebodings, still with her in the afternoon, that Ernestina fetched her diary, propped herself up in bed and once more turned to the page with the sprig of jasmine.
In London the beginnings of a plutocratic stratification of society had, by the
mid-century, begun. Nothing of course took the place of good blood; but it had become generally accepted that good money and good brains could produce artificially a passable enough facsimile of acceptable social standing. Disraeli was the type, not the exception, of his times. Ernestina’s grandfather may have been no more than a well-to-do draper in Stoke Newington when he was young; but he died a very rich draper—much more than that, since he had moved commercially into central London, founded one of the West End’s great stores and extended his business into many departments besides drapery. Her father, indeed, had given her only what he had himself received: the best education that money could buy. In all except his origins he was impeccably a gentleman; and he had married discreetly above him, a daughter of one of the City’s most successful solicitors, who could number an Attorney-General, no less, among his not-too-distant ancestors. Ernestina’s qualms about her social status were therefore rather farfetched, even by Victorian standards; and they had never in the least troubled Charles.
“Do but think,” he had once said to her, “how disgracefully plebeian a name Smithson is.”
“Ah indeed—if you were only called Lord Brabazon Vavasour Vere de Vere—how much more I should love you!”
But behind her self-mockery lurked a fear.
He had first met her the preceding November, at the house of a lady who had her eye on him for one of her own covey of simperers. These young ladies had had the misfortune to be briefed by their parents before the evening began. They made the cardinal error of trying to pretend to Charles that paleontology absorbed them—he must give them the titles of the most interesting books on the subject—whereas Ernestina showed a gently acid little determination not to take him very seriously. She would, she murmured, send him any interesting specimens of coal she came across in her scuttle; and later she told him she thought he was very lazy. Why, pray? Because he could hardly enter any London drawing room without finding abundant examples of the objects of his interest.
To both young people it had promised to be just one more dull evening; and both, when they returned to their respective homes, found that it had not been so.
They saw in each other a superiority of intelligence, a lightness of touch, a dryness that pleased. Ernestina let it be known that she had found “that Mr. Smithson” an agreeable change from the dull crop of partners hitherto presented for her examination that season. Her mother made discreet inquiries; and consulted her husband, who made more; for no young male ever set foot in the drawing room of the house overlooking Hyde Park who had not been as well vetted as any modern security department vets its atomic scientists. Charles passed his secret ordeal with flying colors.
Now Ernestina had seen the mistake of her rivals: that no wife thrown at Charles’s head would ever touch his heart. So when he began to frequent her mother’s at homes and soirees he had the unusual experience of finding that there was no sign of the usual matrimonial trap; no sly hints from the mother of how much the sweet darling loved children or “secretly longed for the end of the season” (it was supposed that Charles would live permanently at Winsyatt, as soon as the obstacular uncle did his duty); or less sly ones from the father on the size of the fortune “my dearest girl” would bring to her husband. The latter were, in any case, conspicuously unnecessary; the Hyde Park house was fit for a duke to live in, and the absence of brothers and sisters said more than a thousand bank statements.
Nor did Ernestina, although she was very soon wildly determined, as only a spoiled daughter can be, to have Charles, overplay her hand. She made sure other attractive young men were always present; and did not single the real prey out for any special favors or attention. She was, on principle, never serious with him; without exactly saying so she gave him the impression that she liked him because he was fun—but of course she knew he would never marry. Then came an evening in January when she decided to plant the fatal seed.
She saw Charles standing alone; and on the opposite side of the room she saw an aged dowager, a kind of Mayfair equivalent of Mrs. Poulteney, whom she knew would be as congenial to Charles as castor oil to a healthy child. She went up to him.
“Shall you not go converse with Lady Fairwether?”
“I should rather converse with you.”
“I will present you. And then you can have an eyewitness account of the goings-on in the Early Cretaceous era.”
He smiled. “The Early Cretaceous is a period. Not an era.”
“Never mind. I am sure it is sufficiently old. And I know how bored you are by anything that has happened in the last ninety million years. Come.”
So they began to cross the room together; but halfway to the Early Cretaceous lady, she stopped, laid her hand a moment on his arm, and looked him in the eyes.
“If you are determined to be a sour old bachelor, Mr. Smithson, you must practice for your part.”
She had moved on before he could answer; and what she had said might have sounded no more than a continuation of her teasing. But her eyes had for the briefest moment made it clear that she made an offer; as unmistakable, in its way, as those made by the women who in the London of the time haunted the doorways round the Haymarket.
What she did not know was that she had touched an increasingly sensitive place in Charles’s innermost soul; his feeling that he was growing like his uncle at Winsyatt, that life was passing him by, that he was being, as in so many other things, overfastidious, lazy, selfish… and worse. He had not traveled abroad those last two years; and he had realized that previously traveling had been a substitute for not having a wife. It took his mind off domestic affairs; it also allowed him to take an occasional woman into his bed, a pleasure he strictly forbade himself, perhaps remembering the black night of the soul his first essay in that field had caused, in England.
Traveling no longer attracted him; but women did, and he was therefore in a state of extreme sexual frustration, since his moral delicacy had not allowed him to try the simple expedient of a week in Ostend or Paris. He could never have allowed such a purpose to dictate the reason for a journey. He passed a very thoughtful week. Then one morning he woke up.
Everything had become simple. He loved Ernestina. He thought of the pleasure of waking up on just such a morning, cold, gray, with a powder of snow on the ground, and seeing that demure, sweetly dry little face asleep beside him—and by heavens (this fact struck Charles with a sort of amazement) legitimately in the eyes of both God and man beside him. A few minutes later he startled the sleepy Sam, who had crept up from downstairs at his urgent ringing, by saying: “Sam! I am an absolute one hundred per cent heaven forgive me damned fool!”
A day or two afterwards the unadulterated fool had an interview with Ernestina’s father. It was brief, and very satisfactory. He went down to the drawing room, where Ernestina’s mother sat in a state of the most poignant trepidation. She could not bring herself to speak to Charles, but pointed uncertainly in the direction of the conservatory. Charles opened the white doors to it and stood in the waft of the hot, fragrant air. He had to search for Ernestina, but at last he found her in one of the farthest corners, half screened behind ‘a bower of stephanotis. He saw her glance at him, and then look hastily down and away. She held a pair of silver scissors, and was pretending to snip off some of the dead blooms of the heavily scented plant. Charles stood close behind her; coughed.
“I have come to bid my adieux.” The agonized look she flashed at him he pretended, by the simple trick of staring at the ground, not to notice. “I have decided to leave England. For the rest of my life I shall travel. How else can a sour old bachelor divert his days?”
He was ready to go on in this vein. But then he saw that Ernestina’s head was bowed and that her knuckles were drained white by the force with which she was gripping the table. He knew that normally she would have guessed his tease at once; and he understood that her slowness now sprang from a deep emotion, which communicated itself to him.
“But if I believed that someone cared
for me sufficiently to share…”
He could not go on, for she had turned, her eyes full of tears. Their hands met, and he drew her to him. They did not kiss. They could not. How can you mercilessly imprison all natural sexual instinct for twenty years and then not expect the prisoner to be racked by sobs when the doors are thrown open?
A few minutes later Charles led Tina, a little recovered, down the aisle of hothouse plants to the door back to the drawing room. But he stopped a moment at a plant of jasmine and picked a sprig and held it playfully over her head.
“It isn’t mistletoe, but it will do, will it not?”
And so they kissed, with lips as chastely asexual as children’s. Ernestina began to cry again; then dried her eyes, and allowed Charles to lead her back into the drawing room, where her mother and father stood. No words were needed. Ernestina ran into her mother’s opened arms, and twice as many tears as before began to fall. Meanwhile the two men stood smiling at each other; the one as if he had just concluded an excellent business deal, the other as if he was not quite sure which planet he had just landed on, but sincerely hoped the natives were friendly.
12
In what does the alienation of labor consist? First, that the work is external to the worker, that it is not a part of his nature, that consequently he does not fulfill himself in his work but denies himself, has a feeling of misery, not of well-being… The worker therefore feels himself at home only during his leisure, whereas at work he feels homeless.
Marx, Economic and Political Manuscripts (1844)
And was the day of my delight As pure and perfect as I say?
Tennyson, In Memoriam (1850)
Charles put his best foot forward, and thoughts of the mysterious woman behind him, through the woods of Ware Commons. He walked for a mile or more, until he came simultaneously to a break in the trees and the first outpost of civilization. This was a long thatched cottage, which stood slightly below his path. There were two or three meadows around it, running down to the cliffs, and just as Charles came out of the woodlands he saw a man hoying a herd of cows away from a low byre beside the cottage. There slipped into his mind an image: a deliciously cool bowl of milk. He had eaten nothing since the double dose of muffins. Tea and tenderness at Mrs. Tranter’s called; but the bowl of milk shrieked… and was much closer at hand. He went down a steep grass slope and knocked on the back door of the cottage.
The French Lieutenant’s Woman Page 8