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by Laura (Riding) Jackson


  Miss Man did somehow get fun out of Lady Port-Huntlady— by thinking of her as a wicked little woman who was clever and dainty in local intrigue. She imagined sinful episodes between her and the various men who made sudden departures from Port Huntlady. "Ah," she would say knowingly, "there goes another." And yet she got on very well with Lady Port- Huntlady, precisely by pretending that she understood her. Lady Port-Huntlady felt sympathetic towards anyone who made a pretence of understanding things, no matter by how far they missed the mark; she liked an intelligent atmosphere, and intelligent expressions on people's faces. Miss Man and Lady Port- Huntlady generally conversed in a code of ambiguous allusions which were just as incomprehensible to themselves as to others. But it had the effect of making Miss Man seem familiar with Lady Port-Huntlady's past. And Lady Port-Huntlady realized that this suggestion of a mysterious life behind her sold her, so to speak, to a great many people over whom her influence would have otherwise been only intellectual. There were some people who had no respect for a woman unless they felt that she was at heart a bad woman. The relations between Miss Man and Lady Port-Huntlady were like those between an illustrious daughter and an ill-bred mother whom she indulges as a whimsical reminder of old times. Perhaps, indeed, Lady Port- Huntlady had not always been illustrious.

  Although Miss Man had been Mother-Leader of the Salvation of the Flesh Society, she was not a motherly character, except in the sense that she had a kindly talent for loving people for their vices; Tomatoes had not loved people, he had only loved their vices. Thus Miss Man became extremely fond of Lady Port-Huntlady, seeing her as a wicked person whose wickedness lay decently hidden under conversational delicacies and who could therefore satisfy her craving for the cultural side of life without blunting her appreciation of its baser realities. In the case of Lady Port-Huntlady's friendship with Dan the Dog, Miss Man saw through the idealistic devotion of a young man to an older woman of indefinite age, appearance, history and purpose in life—saw through to the baser motives of the understanding between them. "That boy wants nothing from her but lessons in worldliness. And she—well, that sort of flattery makes an older woman enjoy being an older woman and keeps her from wanting to be a girl again." And it is true that Dan the Dog's devotion had a tonic effect on Lady Port- Huntlady. It brought into play the full exquisiteness of her technique, which she did not in every case have an opportunity to practise: being frivolous without lessening her seriousness, and serious without lessening her frivolousness—an imperceptible see-sawing; and taking nothing from people and yet making them feel that they were giving her their best.

  Lady Port-Huntlady certainly determined the tone of life at Port Huntlady. Yet she was careful not to be 'a personality'. She was an atmosphere, and it was the others who supported the atmosphere—who did all the work. Had she allowed herself to be a personality she would have been always under the strain of having to impose herself on weaker personalities at an expense of energy disproportionate to the sense of triumph that her power gave her. There was no major triumph to be got out of her position as the strategical center of Port Huntlady life, only the cold, private gratification of being safe from emotional entanglement in other people's affairs while playing a decisive part in them. But, although she was thus deprived of a drama of her own, she was spared, on the other hand, the tragic fatigue that she might have brought on herself had she been a degree less fastidious in her rejection of the more personal advantages of her position. Nor did she lay herself open to the attack of vanity: no one could accuse her of holding herself apart. She exposed herself to the criticism of other people without their being able to criticize her in any tangible way. She neither wasted nor stifled herself; she breathed in living air, the air of other people's ephemeral expansions of themselves, their wasted vanities. As for herself, one might say, simply, that she had a virginal soul. Is this a crime? Perhaps. But against what? Against life, perhaps. But are there not other things besides life? Surely it can be no crime against death to have a virginal soul. But then, how many of us have patience with such distinctions?

  Miss Man, as has been indicated, came to be a privileged confidante of Lady Port-Huntlady's. Her hour was not five o'clock but four o'clock—a 'real' cup of tea, as Miss Man said, that took an hour to drink and was only filled once. "Dear me, how I do talk," Miss Man would say, taking another frugal sip. Miss Man talked to Lady Port-Huntlady about Lady Port- Huntlady. "Oh, you're a bad one," she would say. "Now, that Mabick fellow, he would eat his nose to marry you. But you know your moves months beforehand, like a Roman general. You keep 'em all guessing and hold on to the fort." Miss Man was the only resident of Port Huntlady for whom Lady Port- Huntlady laughed aloud. If Miss Man had ever gone away from Port Huntlady, Lady Port-Huntlady would have kissed her good-bye.

  4

  Cards was jealous of Miss Man. He was jealous of everyone in whom Lady Port-Huntlady seemed to confide. He did not feel that anyone could ever prejudice his favour with Lady Port-Huntlady—that was as eternal as Port Huntlady itself and the fated identity of their interests. But he did not like to see her perhaps stepping over the boundaries of these interests into more worldly interests. Their interests were unworldly: to make a world, and Port Huntlady that world, where life came to a standstill. And Lady Port-Huntlady was the static goddess of that world, and he was the outside man who brought in tidbits of human furniture to make things home-like inside. It spoiled the picture if she herself stepped outside. He was jealous of the picture.

  The purity of the picture was not affected by the people that he brought to her. They were dead people, people whose hearts he had taken out. Cards had a knack for taking people's hearts out. He never listened to what they said and yet did things for them, exactly the things they wanted. And this took the heart out of people; it made them feel like tables and chairs in a sensible household, well dusted and polished and tidily arranged but in themselves just silly bundles of sticks. Lady Port- Huntlady's intimacy with Miss Man prevented Cards from taking her heart out and reducing her to a silly bundle of sticks; Miss Man lived. Perhaps Miss Man would have lived even without Lady Port-Huntlady's partiality. There are people like that, immune in their own incorrigibility.

  People who insisted on keeping alive in Port Huntlady generally killed themselves, at the end, in a more absolute way than if they had permitted Cards to take their hearts out. There was Tomatoes, for example, lying quite, quite dead in the Port Huntlady cemetery. This, by the way, was a small plot of land behind a tea-shop. It had been presented to the townspeople by the proprietor of the tea-shop for this very purpose; he had wanted to call his tea-shop 'Graveyard Gardens'. He did not, of course, call it that, having soon understood that one could not make jokes in Port Huntlady in such a broad, farcical, nonchalant spirit; everything had to be carefully thought out and rather evasive, especially jokes. People in Port Huntlady were neither squeamish nor humourless, but they liked thoroughness. The tea-shop was now called the 'No Hurry', the proprietor having borrowed a serious idea from Mabick: that people in Port Huntlady were all on the verge of suicide but needed a more openly sympathetic spirit of co-operation to help them go through with it. The 'No Hurry' might be a sort of afternoon suicide club where it was taken for granted that people would sooner or later kill themselves, although on this or this afternoon there was no particular hurry. Suicide was a matter of getting the right rhythm of inevitability. Mabick himself always promised himself every night on going to bed to open a vein the next morning after shaving; but after shaving he looked so smooth and fresh that it seemed a pity, while before shaving he could never think in an organized way.

  There lay Tomatoes behind the 'No Hurry', although very few people troubled to notice—as they sat in the open at little grey enamel tables with that reposeful mastery that comes of people's feeling their lives their own, to end or prolong as they please—that on the little white stones in the garden just behind death sat winking at them. The proprietor himself, Jake Adams, once a prosperous cate
rer (he had ruined his self- respect by falling hopelessly in love with a prominent society hostess hopelessly in his debt), would soon be lying there himself. He would kill himself one day soon, never having taken the suicide idea seriously and thinking to prove it a joke like any other joke—something that one meant and then did not. And Mabick would leave Port Hundady in a sweat of pious horror at the morbid influence of Port Huntlady on their poor, simple minds—cursing Lady Port-Huntlady for making it all seem so plausible, so much the fault of the people who came there rather than the fault of Port Huntlady itself, indeed of Lady Port-Huntlady herself—cursing himself for having let himself fall so loftily in love with her (with an amateur philosopher's tendency to find any woman in the late thirties, who carried herself well, both wise and beautiful).

  Perhaps when this happened Miss Man would take over the tea-shop from Mabick, who had been a sort of patron to it and so inherited it from Jake along with its debts; perhaps, having agreed to relieve Mabick of it if he handed it over debt-free, she would take Baby in as a partner, on condition that he manage it and be responsible for the losses when there were no profits to share. Perhaps Baby would institute graveyard night-parties at which the guests romped among the graves, and perhaps one night Miss Man, who never needed drink to make her lively, would suggest a mock-burial, and offer herself as the corpse. She herself, perhaps, would make the grave; and everyone else, being as drunk as she was lively, would stamp the earth well down over her, except over her face; and to Baby would present itself the idea of covering her face as well—for a moment, with just a little earth, just to tease. And then, just to tease, everyone might throw just a little more earth, and a little more. And then Baby, who did not like complicated situations, would run away, followed by all the other guests, who would be getting bored by the introduction into the fun of a perhaps sober element: might they not be smothering Miss Man to death? And then Barney, left alone behind, would painfully lower himself to the ground, scratch the earth away from Miss Man's face, find her unconscious—perhaps dead—and cover her up again tidily.

  Miss Man would disappear, Barney would disappear, Baby would disappear, and with him Slick and Laura Manilla, to whom Baby was a stronger tie than their shop, and Dan the Dog as well, to whom Lady Port-Huntlady was not exactly what could be called a tie, however much he would have liked to be able to call her that. She took great pains, in fact, to be a tie to no one. People might have feelings of varying degrees of tenderness about her, as they wished. What they felt about her, and how they behaved towards her, was their business. By this time Baby would, in any case, have grown very rude, not calling at her tea-hour at all, and Cards would have ceased to be amused by him; perhaps, indeed, Baby might one day have said to himself, "Oh, hang Lady Port-Huntlady, and hang it all!" And, of course, by this time Dan the Dog would have developed nameless suspicions about Lady Port-Huntlady, from nothing happening in their relation beyond the meaninglessly privileged hours which he was permitted to pass in her little workroom (where she did nothing), reading or looking at her or talking (not necessarily getting an answer).

  That is, Dan the Dog would already have begun to tell himself that Lady Port-Huntlady was a fraud (and been encouraged in this feeling by Miss Man's manner with her), and yet have been unable to break her spell over him because—well— how could one prove anything against her, and, furthermore, did he not really, when he was with her, understand everything, and did not the identification that he made of himself with her give him the kind of dignity he wanted, a dignity based on no vulgar accomplishment of his own but merely on his indefinable conviction of her superiority over everyone, as if she were a secret of his and so the secret of his superiority? But little by little his suspicions about her being a fraud, and his inability to describe to himself or to anyone else the quality of his attachment to her in so many words, would have become a temptation to prove to himself that he was, at any rate, master of the situation. He would have asked her one day, "Are you as wise, as right, as perfect as you seem?" And she would have answered, seeming to smile, but not really smiling, "Yes, of course." And he would have answered quickly, with a soft, scarcely perceptible catch in his voice—the soft, scarcely perceptible catch in the voice of any bargainer who tries to cover up with a witticism the fact that he is bargaining, "Will you put that in writing, so that I can sue you for getting my friendship on false pretences if I should find you otherwise?"

  And then, in answer, she would have picked up a pen and begun writing things down on a large sheet of paper in a small, clear hand. And he would have waited, hating her more and more as she went on steadily from line to line, until she filled the page. Then he would have got up and started to leave the room, like a lover disgusted with intimacies he himself has insisted on. And she would have begun another sheet, not turning round. And he would have stood at the door, unable to leave. And then she would have folded the sheets, put them in an envelope, written something on the envelope, sealed it. And only then, getting up and handing him the envelope with an unanswerable gesture combining forgiveness and absolute dismissal, would she have definitely smiled—not at him so much as at his departure. And he would have put the envelope in his pocket and left, shutting the door, stepping back again to shut it better.

  He would not have looked to see what was written on the outside of the envelope until he had left the house: Dan the Dog. He would not have considered before that this was actually his name in Port Huntlady, although sometimes he had heard Lady Port-Huntlady call him that to other people— affectionately, as he had thought. He would have walked home in fast-wilting grandeur of person. At home he would begin packing his trunk. The dear little house would now seem a slavish little house; yes, he had been slavish, he would decide. Baby, not asking questions, would have opened the envelope, Dan having thrown it aside with his hat. Baby had studied psychology at the University. His studies had strengthened a point of view he was born with—as studies should: that there was not much difference between people. Without meaning to offend, psychologists do not regard the personal affairs of people as their private property; they do not believe in the existence of barriers at which one person leaves off and another begins. So Baby, puzzled by Dan's behaviour, and seeing an unopened letter that might perhaps explain it, would probably have opened the letter. And in it he would have found a detailed bill from Lady Port-Huntlady to Dan: meals, petty loans, personal favours, all nicely evaluated, and a large general debt—'Lessons in Understanding Things'—reckoned accurately by Dan's hours with her, which had always been fixed hours (not counting the tea-hour, this being the subject of a note pointing out that no charge was being made for it).

  And Baby, always cynically delighted to intervene in confused affairs of sentiment when they reduced themselves to clear economic terms, would have gone to Lady Port-Huntlady to settle Dan the Dog's debt with her. And perhaps Baby would have ended up with a secret admiration for Lady Port- Huntlady. For he would expect to find her angry, and to be able to punish her anger by humiliating her with an offer to pay Dan the Dog's bill, which she had perhaps written out in a fit of petulance, not meaning it to be taken seriously. But Lady Port-Huntlady, receiving Baby in her work-room, would have taken the money and been charmed to take it, as all self- possessed people are charmed to take money. And Baby would have been charmed to give it, and have forgotten to be rude, and have forgotten too about Dan the Dog, who by this time might perhaps have taken a train out of Port Huntlady, expecting to be followed on the next day by Baby. And perhaps Baby would not have followed. Perhaps Baby would have gone on sitting in Lady Port-Huntlady's work-room, and perhaps Miss Man, had she not by that time been dead, would have come in for her private tea-hour. And who can say what new, blasphemous Port Huntlady might not have begun to be concocted between them?

  This was exactly the sort of thing that Cards was afraid of with Miss Man; Baby never occurred to him as a possible danger, nor was he—nor, indeed, was Miss Man. Cards knew that he could trust Lad
y Port-Huntlady; but he could not help being jealous of Miss Man. He knew that in the end nothing would be left but Lady Port-Huntlady and himself, and he no more than—yes—a button to press when she felt lonely; and out of the nothingness surrounding her would come whatever conversational ghost she fancied. And he would be no more than a button; but this was better than being a ghost. And he did not want there to be any other buttons. Miss Man might flatter herself that she was a button and have to be put down, and that kind of thing delayed the end, when nothing would be left but Lady Port-Huntlady and himself. He did not like to seem anxious—in fact, he was not anxious. He was quite certain about the way things would turn out and could afford not to be anxious. But all the same he could not help being irritated by Miss Man, how she sat up close to Lady Port- Huntlady and always seemed on the point of poking her with her elbow nastily—making him feel how far off the end was, when nothing would be left but Lady Port-Huntlady and himself, and he no more than a button—making him feel how much more life still had to come to Port Huntlady and exhaust itself, how many more not really merry Foolish Island picnics must be got over.

 

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