Sir!' She Said

by Alec Waugh

  “Suppose we were to take our party on there with us?”

  “Have we been asked to take people with us?”

  “I could ring up Ferguson and ask. I know him well enough.”

  “A lot of people don’t care about accepting that kind of invitation.”

  “They needn’t accept it, then.”

  “They’ll probably be offended at your even making it.”

  “Mabel, that’s absurd!”

  “It isn’t absurd. I should be offended in their place. I shouldn’t care to be asked to dinner and then when I arrived being told that directly dinner was over. . .”

  “It wouldn’t be directly after dinner.”

  “More or less it would be. And anyhow, please let me finish. I wouldn’t care to be asked to dinner and then get told that we were going on to a party afterwards with people I didn’t know, that I needn’t come, of course, unless I want to, but that the rest were going. It practically amounts to being told that one’s got to go home at half-past ten.”

  “It doesn’t amount to anything of the sort.”

  “Doesn’t it? I should have thought it did. Anyhow, I don’t know why you should be so keen on going to this party.”

  She spoke fretfully. Her lips were drawn: her mouth compressed: her eyes bright with irritation: her forehead creased. Never had Leon thought her less attractive. What had happened, he asked himself, to the girl that he had married? By what stages had that bright-eyed, laughing girl become this sour, capricious woman? Even her looks had gone. No one would believe that she was under forty, that she was only three years older than he was.

  In the days of their engagement they had made fun of that three years’ difference.

  “I’m much too old for you,” she had laughed.

  “Centuries,” he had answered.

  He remembered the verses he had written her about time not mattering, about how they would always seem the same age to one another: remembered how he had believed those verses . remembered a sonnet he had written to her voice. Had he really described as “angel-toned” this harsh persistence that was nagging at him now?

  “I don’t know,” she was saying, “why you should want to go to parties. You know what it means. Late hours and too much drinking.”

  “I don’t drink too much. You’ve never seen me anything near drunk.”

  “I never said I had. I said that when you went to parties you drank too much. And you do. You’ve got to drink a lot if you’re to keep awake till four o’clock in the morning. You’ve said so yourself, often. And then you wonder that you’re not fit for work next day.”

  “I am fit for work.”

  “Nonsense! How can you be? Nobody can work properly who keeps hours of that kind. How often do you think you’ve come back after three during the last month?”

  “How on earth should I know?”

  “I’ll tell you, then. Thirteen times.”

  He looked at her in dismay. To think that she should have kept as close a watch as that upon him: that she should have kept a score: staying awake till his return. Thirteen times: as often as that, was it?

  “I haven’t been to as many parties as all that,” he said.

  “I don’t know where you’ve been. I don’t care. You’re your own master to go where and when you like. I’m merely telling you that last month you came home thirteen times after three o’clock, and that no man is fit to attend to his business properly who is leading that kind of life.”

  Her lips were compressed into a thin bloodless line. Her eyes were cold. With the exercise of the greatest difficulty he kept his voice calm as he answered her.

  “Aren’t I the best judge of that?”

  “The results are the best judge of that.”

  “What am I to take that to mean?”

  “That you’ld be a partner now if you were working properly.”

  Leon Carstairs bit his lip. If he were to speak he would lose his temper. He could not trust himself to speak. He must sit still and listen.

  “There’s no reason in the world,” she was saying, “why you shouldn’t take shop girls out to night clubs if it amuses you.”

  “It doesn’t,” he snapped.

  “Doesn’t it? Well, whoever it is you take. I don’t mind what you do. But you’ve daughters; you should consider them. You owe it to them to give them the best chance you can. They haven’t been a great expense to you yet. But they’re going to be. There’ll be school bills, and they’ll want to travel. They’ll need a background. We shall have to give parties for them. It’ll cost money. You ought to be consolidating your position, instead of spending your time and money rushing round to freak parties on training ships.”

  Carstairs shut his eyes. If he were to look at her he would go mad. He would be unable to restrain himself. How much longer would he have to stand, would he be able to stand the strain, the quarrelling, the incessant friction? It wasn’t fair. He ought not to have to stand it. One should not be bound for life by the kind of mistake that it was practically impossible for a young man to avoid. What had he known of life, what had he known of himself, in the days when he had fallen in love with Mabel? What conception had he of the manner of contract to which he was committed? He had had the best years of life ruined. Instead of being free to enjoy his youth, he had been bound by responsibilities, by a house, by children, by a wife who had lost her looks and was taking her vengeance of his youth for the loss of them. It wasn’t fair.

  He had been taken off his guard. He had fallen in love as every young man practically did fall in love. Only most young men were not in a position to marry: were not in a position to become engaged. How many men married their first love? One in a thousand; scarcely that. But he had been in a position to marry, or rather there had been the possibility of his putting himself in that position. There had been that opening with Anderson, to work in part on salary, in part on a half-commission basis; an opening he would have never taken unless he had met Mabel. He would have preferred to stay on his own, building up his own clientele, sacrificing immediate returns for greater profit in the future. Waiting would have meant several years of cautious living. He had been prepared for that. But it would not have sufficed for Mabel. He would not have considered offering it to Mabel. It was a straightforward alternative. Mabel and the certainty of a comfortable life against the possibility of big success. Mabel had turned the scale. So he had married his first love. With the fate that usually befell first love. He had outgrown it. Most men did outgrow first love. First love was a stepping stone: a finding of one’s feet. That was what it should have been for him. Only in his case there had been nowhere for him to step. He could have had such a marvellous time, too, had he stayed free. He would have had soon, as a bachelor, enough money to enjoy London in the way that London should be enjoyed. As a married man he had always been pressed by lack of money. As a bachelor he would have made more money. He would have been able to run risks. He would not have had to play for safety; waiting with Anderson for the chance of a partnership. He had had his youth spoilt. It wasn’t fair that he should have had to pay so dearly for those few happy weeks. He had his children, of course. He was fond of them. But daughters were not sons. They took the name of another man: went where their men led them. Their grandchildren would scarcely know his name. Not only was his youth spoilt, but his future was marred, too. What lay ahead of him? What could lie ahead of him as long as he was bound by this tie of marriage? How long could he stand it? How long would he have to stand it?

  It would be simple enough when this business of this partnership was settled. He would be no longer the slave then of old Anderson’s Victorian prejudices. He would dictate his own terms. Till then he was at the mercy of Anderson’s caprice.

  He guessed that several other firms would be glad to accept him as a partner. He had the promise of capital and he had a tolerable clientele. He could probably have walked out of Anderson’s any morning, had there not been that maddening five years’ agreement
which had still two years to run. Though even of that he was not certain. In his present position he was not sure that he would care to run the risk of going to another firm. He had lost his confidence. He was not sure that his clientele would follow him. He felt safe with Anderson.

  He would have to wait till the time came when he would be free to live his own life: to make the most of what was left to him of youth.

  And there was a good deal left to him, he reflected as he stood looking at himself in the glass before he left his home. Mabel might have aged. But he had not. He had hardly changed since his marriage. He had put on no weight. His tall, well-built figure was no less straight. The curling hair whose blond-ness concealed a grey flaking about the ears, was just as thick. He had one of those sallow skins that do not grow blotched and florid. The few lines that were about his eyes made him more interesting: gave him character and an impression of experience and worldliness, of having lived and suffered, that would make him more attractive to women. There was no reason why in middle age he should not realise the dreams that had been denied him in his youth. It would not be his fault if he didn’t, he decided, as he travelled by tube from Kensington to his office in Ludgate Circus.

  In a mood of mingled anxiety and excitement he walked a couple of hours later down the passage to Anderson’s room to discuss with him before going down to the house, the proposition that Druce Mander had made to him on the previous day.

  A great deal, he knew, depended upon it. Old Anderson could hardly fail to be impressed by his having been entrusted with Mander’s business. It was the kind of thing that might turn Anderson in his favour, that might induce him to accept that suggestion of a partnership made such an intolerable number of months ago. If only this deal with Mander impressed Anderson as much as it had surprised himself.

  His very anxiety to impress Anderson, however, made his news sound the less impressive; made him, when Anderson lifted his eyebrows in surprise with a “What, Druce Mander asked you to do work for him?” disparage the extent of the commission, as though he were trying to explain a fault away. “It’s just a small thing,” he said, “something he didn’t want to be bothered with himself.”

  “I see,” said Mr. Anderson, “I see.”

  He was large, pot-bellied, treble-chinned. Seated back in his chair, his hands hanging limply along its arms, he looked like a Victorian caricature of commercial prosperity.

  “So it’s just a side-show of Mander’s that he preferred to have done quietly?” Anderson spoke without enthusiasm. Carstairs was unhappily conscious that he was not by any means making the best show for his good fortune.

  “Of course, it’s the kind of thing,” he said, “that might lead to any amount of other things.”

  “Of course, of course.”

  “It should be extremely valuable to the firm.”

  “Doubtless, doubtless. I’m sure the firm will be very grateful to you if you succeed in disposing of those shares.”

  His voice was infuriatingly slow and unctuous.

  If only, thought Carstairs, the firm would prove its gratitude.

  “I don’t think I shall have any difficulty,” he said.

  “I trust not, Carstairs, I trust not.”

  Lolling back there, his hands crossed upon his stomach, Anderson looked more than ever like a caricature in his smug complacency. Which he was, of course, Carstairs decided angrily. A caricature of Victorian ideas. A ludicrous survival. It was maddening to be associated with such a person. As though one’s private life mattered at all in business; as though people would think twice about bringing their business to a man because he had been involved in a divorce suit. As though anyone thought anything at all about divorce nowadays. Anyhow, about a first divorce suit. Nobody worried; nobody except Anderson, that was to say. And because Anderson did, other people’s not bothering did not matter. It was Anderson that counted. He could run no risks with Anderson feeling as he did. Till the partnership went through, that was to say. When it had, he would be free to do what he chose. And it might go through if he could only put this deal satisfactorily across.

  Once again, however, that very anxiety to put the deal through was to make him set out his proposition diffidently to John Terance.

  He went to Terance, in the first place because they were acquainted, in the second because Terance already owned a considerable block of shares. But Carstairs grew so nervous as he began to talk that Terance could not help looking at him with surprise.

  “I don’t see why your client wants to sell,” he said, “or, rather, is so anxious to sell.”

  “Because he wants some ready cash. The Company’s a private one; his shares aren’t a security that his bank will take.”

  “Then why doesn’t he put them on the market?”

  “Because he’s afraid that that would lower the value of other shares he holds.”

  “Yes, I see that. I see that, of course. At the same time. . .” Terance looked suspiciously at Carstairs. He was in the habit of distrusting an eagerly made proposition. There was usually something dubious at the back of it. Under ordinary circumstances he would have been quite glad to take over a further share in that concern. In face of Carstairs’ curious insistence, he was doubtful.

  “I’ll let you know,” said Terance; but he had a very good idea that his answer would be a refusal as he walked that evening from his office to his club.

  Chapter XII

  A Modern Father

  Most evenings John Terance called in for a rubber of bridge between tea and dinner. There was a satisfying anonymity about a club. You could leave your troubles in the hall with your hat and stick.

  He arrived, owing to Carstairs’ visit, a little later than usual. At each of the three tables a rubber had been just begun. It looked as though there would be no time for him to play that evening. He walked upstairs. In the dark, cool drawing-room that looked over the green park he found Raymond Humphries, one of his oldest friends, his original proposer for the club.

  Humphries waved a hand at him. “It’s years since we’ve had a chat,” he said.

  Over a dark sherry they began to talk. Of their children to begin with. Humphries had two boys. One was in his second year at Cambridge. The other had been called to the Bar a few months back.

  “He’s going to do all right, I think. Both of them will, as far as I can see. I was pretty disappointed at the time that one of them was not a girl. But I’m glad now.”

  “Glad?”

  “Having daughters is a bit of a responsibility.”

  “Hasn’t it always been?”

  “Not so much as it is to-day. Our parents, certainly our grandparents, had really only one responsibility towards their daughters, to find them husbands. They had to train their daughters so that they would be the kind of girls that men would want to marry, and then invite to the house a goodish number of the kind of men that would make reasonable sons-in-law. That’s all there was to it.”

  “I don’t know that there’s so very much more to it to-day.”

  “Perhaps not, my dear John, but think of the conditions. They’re completely different. Forty years ago a father had the running of his daughter’s life. To-day she runs her own. You haven’t got to find eligible young men for her. It’s she who’ll find ineligible ones for you. We used to talk about the latchkey as being the symbol of emancipation. It isn’t now. Every girl has a latchkey. It’s a chequebook that’s the symbol. As soon as a girl’s got a banking account she’s free, and most of them have. It’s the war that did it. The war telescoped events. A process that should have taken fifty years got compressed into a third of a decade. Parental authority had to go when girls were W.A.A.C.S. and W.R.E.N.S. working at canteens, in camps, driving lorries, keeping their own hours. You couldn’t keep any control over their acquaintances then. You just didn’t know what they were doing. When the war was over they weren’t going to give up that freedom.”

  “Does it matter?”

  Humphries shrugged
his shoulders.

  “I don’t know. Perhaps it doesn’t. But I’m glad I’ve not the responsibility of daughters. It’s happened too quickly. I don’t believe that women were ready for this freedom. I don’t believe the world was ready for it. I daresay it’ll turn out all right. But it’s all very well to say that a girl and a man can be friends just as easily as two men can. Nine times in ten they can. But the tenth they can’t. Whom did we have our love affairs with when we were young? There were shop girls, and actresses, and married women. We never had affairs with the girls we met in our parents’ houses. The young man of to-day does. We were discussing it the other night, and my boy said that the man was a fool who expected the girl he married to be inexperienced. It’s not an atmosphere that one can be comfortable in about one’s daughters.” He paused. “Everything’s so uncertain,” he went on. “People have lost faith. There’s nothing they believe in. They don’t believe in religion; they don’t believe in duty. There’s nothing strong enough to stand in the way of personal inclination. People talk about their right to happiness and their duty to themselves. That’s about the only religion they’ve got, I fancy. Everything’s temporary and makeshift. There’s nothing you can rely on: the modern woman even when she marries doesn’t become a wife, she becomes a mistress. She drives a mistress’s bargain with a man. She doesn’t say: ‘We’ll make the best of one another. This is for keeps.’ She says: ‘As long as you amuse me, I’ll stay. But the moment you bore me, or the moment some one turns up that 1 like better, I’ll walk out.’ One feels one’s sitting on a volcano all the time. Just compare Faith with one of these modern women.”

  John Terance smiled. He and Humphries were such old friends that they could talk together without offence, almost impersonally of Faith.

  “I shouldn’t have thought she was too good an example,” Terance said. “She was a modern woman a decade ahead of her contemporaries.”

  “Ah, but think of the way she was one. You knew where you were with her. You were on firm ground. However many men friends she had you were sure of her. Her men friends knew it, too. She was the loveliest thing that most of us have ever seen. Most people fell in love with her. She knew it. She was too much of a woman not to. And she let them know very quietly, very firmly, very affectionately, that there was nothing doing and kept them as her friends.”