In the second year of William’s marriage, after a child had been born, he took Julia for a holiday abroad, leaving the baby in the care of Jinny who had a nurse and a youngster of her own. In many ways this was a significant step in this history, which never let it be forgotten, is the story of James and the permutations of James.
William and Julia availed themselves of the services of Mr. Thomas Cook, but only in so far as their tickets were concerned. Julia wept when William proposed “joining the party”; not only did she suspect the clergyman’s daughter and the widow with the son and the bride with the young husband, all of making one concerted effort to allure her William, but she felt that travelling in a party like an orphan school outing was not at all what her “dear Pa” would have subjected her to even though he was a mere greengrocer.
William felt rather the same way about it himself, but for economy and convenience there was nothing to beat Mr. Cook’s little books of tickets, and it was very convenient to have a courier who could at least speak the language on a foreign quay where there was no one but a pack of jabbering Mossoos to deal with one’s somewhat complicated baggage.
In the end they went in typical British fashion with the party and not with the party, and those foreigners who observed them doing this thought they were mad. William and Julia were not much worse than some of the other Britons whose good money let them loose sightseeing over an exhausted warring continent at that time. It was the period when the British got their bad name with other Europeans, the name they have been trying to live down ever since.
William and Julia went to Germany, for of all the Mossoos the Germans were then thought the least impossible. German Mossoos were considered almost human beings, honest, religious, romantic people. But Italian Mossoos were thought to be oleaginous and always dressed absurdly in evening black; Spanish Mossoos were no better, and even less lively; Dutch Mossoos spoke English as if they had a cold; Greek Mossoos were dangerous and sly, and French Mossoos worst of all, a frog-like people only happy when surrounded “by a general atmosphere of Mossoo tawdriness and trumpery.” At any rate so said Edmund Yeats who invented the generic name, when speaking of the foreigners who came over to England for the Great Exhibition; and if they were like this when on a visit to London, God alone knew what fantasies they might get up to in their own benighted countries.
Some days later William and Julia found themselves seated side by side at a huge but nearly empty table in “The Three Moors” at Augsberg. They had discovered that to eat at the table d’hôte was the only means of getting a really good meal in this uncouth land, but had still refused to take their main dinner at the proper time, which was two o’clock. Since they were not alone in this conservatism the proprietor had instigated a five o’clock English table d’hôte for which the food was warmed up from the earlier meal. No foreigner ate at the English table if he could help it, so it usually fell out that William and Julia dined at teatime with the distrusted members of their own party, together with a few stragglers who had missed the day’s great culinary occasion.
On this particular evening, the rest of the Cook’s party was absent, having gone off on some excursion, and the couple were alone save for a German, who ate in the less attractive fashion of the country, holding his fork like an awl and flicking the chopped meat into his mouth with a knife, and one other man. The second stranger was thin and dark and inclined to smallness, so that William and Julia decided immediately that he was French. He was a little older than William, and although he did not stare his quick bright eyes took in the fair young man and his wife and noted every detail of their appearance. No one spoke, even Julia and William passed the salt to each other in silence, and it was not until the end of the meal that any word was exchanged. When it came it was unfortunate.
Having finished his food, the German belched faintly, and taking out his case lit a cigar. He behaved quite naturally, as might any man in a latter-day restaurant, but as the first pale blue stink curled across the table towards Julia, it was not what he said (sir, a lady is present), which incensed the native, for the words were unintelligible to him, nor yet the tone which was at most reproachful. It was the Look, the awful British Look.
William had the face for the Look and he stared at the cigar as if it were something so vulgar, so utterly disgraceful and disgusting that he could scarce credit his eyes. It is probable that no insult gets under the skin quite so successfully as the Look; for the simple reason that its meaning has no limit; it implies the worst the other man can think. William’s victim took it very seriously. He sprang to his feet, small-eyed with rage, and let out a stream of threats which amazed the Englishman and made Julia cry. The noise was considerable and waiters came hurrying in, while the proprietor himself hovered anxiously in the doorway. The situation was saved by the dark man who spoke rapidly and deferentially in German. William could not understand him, but to his indignation he appeared to be apologizing to the vulgarian. He appeared to be successful, for finally the German laughed abruptly, eyed William with insolent amusement, and went out.
The dark man smiled shyly at the English people.
“I’m afraid sir,” he said to William, “we strangers have to be very diplomatic over here. These minor officials think themselves tremendous swells.”
“Officials?” said William with disgust.
“Yes. He’s a Government servant; they’re important here.”
“God bless my soul!” William was astounded. “I have to thank you, sir. I’m deeply indebted to you. It’s their own country, I suppose.”
“Yes,” said the dark man, “yes.”
The incident was considered an introduction, and they fell to talking. The stranger turned out to be a compatriot. He had a curious accent which was slightly uneducated, and there was a friendliness in his manner which was not fashionable. William was interested in him, though, for there was a strong flavour of wealth about him which made a favourable impression on the shrewd young proprietor of The Converted World. They exchanged cards, and the man’s address in the then elegant Westbourne Terrace, West, convinced William that his impression was correct and that Mr. Walter Raven was ‘perfectly all right really.’ He told the suspicious Julia so afterwards, and as he reassured her, he looked so much like his grandfather that James would have confused them.
However, the effect that Mr. Walter Raven had on William was trivial to the effect Mr. William Galantry had on Walter Raven. Mr. Raven was an extreme example of a familiar type not then nearly so common as it became later. He was one of those nerve-wracked, over-sensitive, over-fastidious, gifted men, who are a prey to violent likes and dislikes. As soon as William spoke to him he was afraid, not of William but of himself. It is all very well to say this when events which happened later are known, but the instinct was there in the beginning, or so Raven always said. He said afterwards (but he was not himself at the time), that he saw William sitting across the table at “The Three Moors” at Augsberg looking like a yellow nemesis, golden and horrible. He said as soon as he heard William’s voice he knew that there would come a time when it would be unpleasantly familiar. He said—but the things that man did say one way and another! He was always talking, always lying, if one took some people’s word for it, always inventing something anyway.
Invention flowed from him. It trickled from his finger tips like dew from the leaves. He would invent a pudding if he had to feed himself for a day, or a game if he had to wait on a railway station, or a new kind of buttonhook if he bought a pair of French boots, or a device for drawing curtains if a lady asked him to shut the window, or an excuse if she asked him where he had been. He was, so he said in moments of expansion, not quite in control of his genius or of himself either, for that matter. The fact was that he had a great working mass of creative power in him, and only a wet brown paper vessel with which to hold it together.
Many people wondered if he was quite sane, but had he not been, then the various crises of his life would have sent him taki
ng up the floor boards or putting straws in his hair, and even when he was drunk as a regiment he never did that.
On this occasion he was playing a little game with himself; he was pretending to be somebody else. He often did this, as, of course, do many other people. His rôle for the mealtime was the wealthy business man looking round Germany for ideas, and this character was not entirely untrue; there were elements of reality in it, but he was not wealthy, had no more idea of business than an artless child of six, and it was he and not the Germans who had the ideas. The confusion was typical of him. Nearly everything he said or did had something to do with the truth, but was never on the bull, never exact. It was very difficult to catch him out and he drove lawyers and precision craftsmen into hysterics.
On this occasion he did not want to talk to William but he could not stop himself, and as he talked he could not help inventing. His account of himself was like an impressionist painting; he hinted, threw in an indeterminate rose-coloured something in one corner, gilded with a single word the figure in the foreground, cast an exciting mist here, or a mysterious but inviting wiggle there. It was a good portrait, for he got away with it, and that in spite of his accent, his revealing slang and his ease, which was not ease at all.
He did not present all this picture in one post prandial go, at the first meeting he was becomingly modest, even reticent, but the three saw a good deal of each other in the next four days, and although he knew perfectly well it was not wise to cement the acquaintanceship, he conducted William and Julia to the Fuggerei, to The Golden Chamber, to the Fountains, and so on. They even went to Munich together, and gradually his self-portrait grew and he became complete in their minds.
Walter Raven emerged as a pathetic, if very comfortably-off man of the world. William and Julia understood he was secretly brokenhearted by the circumstance of a hopelessly invalid wife. They gathered that his affairs were sufficiently important to necessitate him taking trips to nearly every country on the Continent, and found out that his house was large and lonely and was managed by a dear sister, who was a godsend to him. They also saw plainly that he was brilliant. He had half a dozen languages, his general knowledge was phenomenal, and his air of sophistication was fascinating to William, who was beginning to realize that his own outlook was tending to become narrow.
William and Julia took leave of Mr. Raven with regret. He had interested them and they hoped to see him again.
As Raven saw them leave in the station bus, his mood vanished and he wondered morosely what the hell he had been up to. He made a resolution never, never in his life again to go anywhere near these wealthy, respectable, upper class, honest and religious people; but he knew he would. He liked their lack of any streak of the “bohemian,” the absence of mystery surrounding him, their obviously unblemished family record, and their quick acceptance of all the little niceties of life which he had had to learn and to which he clung with all the avidity of the convert. He thought he saw them so clearly, even, while with one part of his mind he decided to avoid them for ever, with another, he was already planning just the right little dinner party to impress their well-bred monied innocence.
A young man who was spending his large patrimony financing a religious paper, which could hardly on the face of it be a profitable concern, touched a chord of wistful admiration in Mr. Raven’s heart. It was the kind of thing he liked—wealth, and philanthropy, and nice people.
Meanwhile, in the “Express,” William thought shrewdly about Mr. Raven and wondered just what use might be made of him—in a perfectly nice way, of course.
Chapter Twenty-seven
It was soon after this that Jinny first began to grow uneasy about her William. She was glad he was successful, she forgave him his dignified arrogance, and whenever she saw him she felt young again and forgiven, but she did not like the faintly patronizing note which now came into his tone whenever he spoke to James.
It worried Jinny that William had no idea what he owed to James. She was only thinking of him and she wanted him to have every chance. William was very grand in these days; he was twenty-six or seven now, and things were booming.
The Converted World had become so well established that even Willitimson sounded envious when he spoke of it. Julia’s bonnets grew more and more expensive every time she called at Penton Place, and one blue and dusty summer’s day she arrived in a Victoria of her own, with a liveried boy to drive her, and little Jeffrey, her son, nodding on the seat at her side. William himself was soberly splendid. His honey beard was as glossy as his silk hat, and his beautiful London-made boots. His face had not softened with the surprise of success; he looked keener now, and even colder. He treated his mother like a duchess and James as a bit of a fool.
As far as Penton Place could hear, Laurel Lodge was the scene of much respectable junketing. William and Julia made it clear that they had many interesting friends. They mentioned casually that they often dined at Westbourne Terrace with the Mr. Walter Raven who was so brilliant, and that their circle was large but exclusive. Always there was a very strong flavour of decorum and piety and solidarity in everything they did.
Jinny listened to it all and was very pleased. She was not well in these days, and she was glad that Debby was coming home soon. She was so tired. Her old friend the Rector of the church at the end of the street (he looked on her son’s dissenting adventures with horror, but was too kind to say so outright) noticed a great change in her and wondered that James did not.
Jinny herself had no illusions. She felt that at forty-three she was old in body, and she thought it fair. All the same, as she became weaker, her anxiety about William grew. How could he be just if he did not know? Anyone could have told her that to tell him about Frank was a mad idea, yet it would not be true to convey that weakness and illness made Jinny irresponsible, whereas in fact they made her firm. Jinny was thinking of William’s good, or, to be exact, of that little in William which was good. That was all she was worrying about. Perhaps that was the explanation of Jinny and the reason why the Good seem so often the Daft.
As time went on she began to be nagged by her conscience, but it was for this reason and not because she thought she ought to make a confession of guilt. She put it off again and again, but she knew quite well that in the end he must hear the story and see where he stood.
By this time Deborah had returned from the finishing school, and James was observing her and thinking about men and horses, and the astounding mystery of living blood. He reckoned Deborah was about three parts Shulie, but superimposed on the structure were all kinds of new environment-taught attributes and defects. It seemed to James sometimes that Deborah was three parts Shulie and one part Jinny in a glass jar; a jar with fanciful designs moulded on its surface.
The fashion of the day was still aiming to present every girl as the popular notion of the male animal’s ideal mother for his children, but there had been modifications in the original design. The gentler virtues were still at a premium, and health had been sacrificed for a clinging, delicate type both of form and mind. Innocence carried to the point of ignorance was still admired, and indeed with many another luxury it had become something of a necessity. So where circumstances made the genuine thing impracticable (when young ladies could not be kept on a lead) a very carefully designed substitute had been introduced.
Brains in women were still decidedly out of fashion; strong mindedness, intelligence, humour, all these possible menaces to male self-confidence, were still anxiously hidden, but were not entirely suppressed, since experience had already shown that a real absence of all of them in any woman was not a good idea. Now the fashionable girl put a great many brains into appearing as if she had none.
At the moment when Deborah returned from Miss Marchbank’s Select Seminary for the Education of Young Ladies, the artificial fashion had touched its peak, perhaps just a month or so after its original object had been achieved, and the middle classes were wrestling with the enormous families which they still felt were
at least half the secret of their ascendancy, but which were proving a tremendous strain on the other arm of their programme.
One day James sat in his chair at the head of the table in the dining parlour and looked at Debby. She was a fine, handsome girl, with Shulie’s strength and vitality, and much to her despair, James’s own dark skin. She had the round black eyes of a gypsy, which were quick and intelligent and slightly naughty-looking; there was Jinny’s good temper in her smile, James’s own obstinacy in her mouth, and her general appearance suggested sense and ability, but at the moment she was talking unmitigated rubbish. James could hardly follow it, it was so silly and affected.
Apparently Julia recommended rosewater for the eyes, but no rose-water would turn brown eyes blue, would it, Papa? James said he had a very good recipe for turning blue eyes black, and laughed immoderately at his little joke, which Deborah did not see. Noticing that she was not pleasing, she turned with Shulie-like eagerness to something else.
She begged her “dear Mama” to take a rest before “dear Julia” called with her “dear little boy” (“He’s not a bit like your side of the family, is he, dear Papa?”). “Dear Mama” looked very peaky, didn’t “dear Papa” think so?
James looked at Jinny and knew better even than Deborah that Jinny looked more than “peaky,” and that there was nothing to be done about it. The average doctor was still slightly more than a skilful vet., and James had no faith in vets.
He said abruptly that he hoped Mrs. Galantry would always take a rest whenever she felt like one, and Jinny, to change the conversation which was distressing, asked Deborah who had written a letter which had come to her that morning.
Deborah was only too delighted to be asked. She said it was from “dear Madeleine Deveraux,” who had been her “dear friend” at “dear Miss Marchbank’s,” and contained a most exciting account of a very elegant “pic-nic” in the Welsh hills, as well as a most romantic story of wifely devotion in the recent Crimean War. Apparently “dear Madeleine” had been introduced to a charming girl whose Mama had gone over in a friend’s yacht to Scutari at the very height of hostilities, and had only very narrowly escaped the terrible storm which had capsized all the supply vessels, and even battered some of the new ironclads, to find her “dear husband” who had been wounded at Balaclava. However, the most interesting thing of all, and the real reason why “dear Madeleine” had written, was because the girl’s name was Ethelinde Galantry, daughter of a Major Benjamin Galantry, and niece of a most distinguished gentleman called Sir William Galantry, down in the West Country. Was it not remarkable, and had “dear Papa” ever heard of such a person?
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