‘Elimination, eh, Rona?’ he said at last. ‘Well, that’s a nice, big, efficient word. But the result seems to be much the same as capital punishment.’
‘The result perhaps,’ Rona agreed, ‘but not the logic – if it’s logic you want, though I’m afraid it’s only sentimentality.’
Waterhouse stretched his feet a little nearer the fire and shifted his large frame comfortably in the big armchair which he had bought especially to contain it.
‘You Communists are so ruthless,’ he complained.
‘Ruthless,’ nodded Harold. ‘That’s the word exactly.’
Rona laughed. ‘But am I a Communist? I’m sure I don’t know. The only practising Communists I’ve met seemed to me rather half-baked. But if you mean, as Harold said, that I judge people first and foremost by their value to the community – yes, I do. And I’m not afraid to admit that I believe in the elimination of the community’s useless members: most certainly in the elimination of those who are a drag on the progressive ones.’
‘Dear me!’ Waterhouse knocked out his pipe and felt in the pocket of his capacious dinner jacket for his tobacco pouch. ‘Then I suppose I should be one of the first to go? I’ve done my work in the world – I’m finished. And Douglas, sitting there as silent as an owl and living on his unearned increments –’
‘Owls aren’t silent,’ I interrupted. ‘At any rate the ones in your woods that make our nights hideous aren’t. And I’m not an idle rich. I’m a fruit farmer.’
‘Douglas, living on his unearned increments and wasting half of them on the expensive hobby of fruit farming. And what use is Harold to the community, if it comes to that? So what would you like to do with us, Rona? Make a bonfire of us and pile all the true-blue Conservatives in the district on top? Poor old Sir Charles Fenchurch. But don’t forget that he’d have all his yokels round him on the pyre. There’s no one so rigidly conservative as your agricultural labourer.’
‘You’re just trying to confuse the issue, John,’ Rona smiled. ‘And anyhow, I’ll exempt you from my pyre, if only because your work in the world isn’t finished. One day you’ll find you can’t stand this idle existence any longer and go out to do a job of work again.’
‘I’ve never been able to understand how he’s stuck it here so long,’ Harold put in provocatively.
Waterhouse finished ramming tobacco into the bowl of his pipe and began to light it. ‘Circumstances,’ he said between puffs. ‘Besides, I’ve settled down for good. Anyhow, who’s confusing the issue now? What I was going to say is, no, Rona, you’re not a Communist, so you can stop flirting with the idea. Communism belongs to the towns. No one can live in Anneypenny and be a Communist.’
‘I’m not so sure of that,’ Rona replied reflectively. ‘In fact I believe you’re a bit of a Communist at heart yourself, John. I’m sure you are. A Christian Communist. Every intelligent person must be.’
‘Am I intelligent?’ Waterhouse pulled at his pipe. ‘I know you tell me so, Rona. But I don’t think I’m convinced.’
‘And that from the man whose name, I understand, is now almost synonymous throughout the Far East with electricity. Besides, electricity is a thing I’ve never been able to understand, so I’m naturally convinced that anyone who does must be intelligent. In any case, fiddlesticks, my dear John! You and I are the only two intelligent persons in this village,’ asserted Rona equably, ‘and you know it as well as I do. Except Harold, of course.’
‘Thank you, Rona,’ said Harold. ‘I’ve no false modesty either. I am intelligent, and I know it.’
‘But not Douglas. No one could be intelligent and a fruit farmer.’
‘Not without a little more protection, which I suppose you wouldn’t allow us,’ I said, not without bitterness.
‘You mean not without the common sense to combine and market your own produce, instead of allowing the retailer to treat you like a lot of milch cows,’ Rona retorted.
‘In any case, Rona,’ Waterhouse interposed, ‘I don’t hold with too much intelligence about the place. You, for instance, are far too pretty to be intelligent. Pretty women oughtn’t to be intelligent, you know. It upsets the balance.’
‘Really, John, I can’t let you scrape out of the argument by paying me compliments. That’s the unfairest type of the argumentum ad hominem when it’s directed against a woman.’ But Rona was obviously delighted by that same compliment nevertheless. I found myself wishing that some remark of mine could bring such a look of pleasure into her face; for I think we all liked to please Rona. I remember reflecting, too, how odd it is that women should attach so much importance to the spoken word, for Rona could scarcely have been unaware of her own looks. Not that she looked much younger than her thirty-four years, or anything like that; but she did look as if thirty-four was exactly the age which suited her best – an impression which she had conveyed, as I had had every opportunity of knowing, at every age since she was sixteen. Anneypenny tongues had taken much exercise in speculating why Rona had never married, but they were agreed that it could not have been through want of chances.
‘What was it you took at Oxford, Rona?’ Waterhouse bantered. ‘A first in classics, was it?’
‘I took a first in Greats, if that’s what you mean. And they taught me logic too, John. Not that I need logic to know that you’re not nearly so stupid as you pretend and that you really think much the same as I do on any subject that matters. But I won’t try to explain why you should think it necessary to make out that you don’t.’
‘Do I, though?’ Waterhouse took his pipe from his mouth and rummaged in its interior with a match stalk. ‘No, I’m not so sure about that. I’m afraid I’m not ruthless enough. I suppose it takes a woman to be really ruthless.’
‘It takes a woman to pretend to be ruthless,’ Harold said. ‘You don’t believe Rona really means what she says, do you?’
‘I’m not sure that she doesn’t.’ Waterhouse eyed Rona doubtfully, and she gave him her gentle smile, with its faintest hint of mockery. ‘No, you can call me a sentimentalist if you like, Rona, but I can’t subscribe to your ideals of treating mental patients, for instance, with prussic acid instead of psycho-analysis. Nor, I’m sure, does Glen.’
Rona glanced at her brother, who was turning through an album of records on top of the grand piano with undisguised boredom.
‘Glen’s very conventional, of course,’ she said, her smile deepening. ‘A doctor has to be.’
Brougham, catching his own name, looked up. ‘Eh? What’s that about me?’ He uncoiled his sinuous length from the extraordinary position into which it had been twisted and sauntered over to our side of the room.
‘I can’t make that chap Bax out,’ he went on, ignoring his own question and any possible answer to it. ‘I’ve managed to educate myself up as far as Beethoven, but that seems to be about my limit.’
‘Well, this sounds like the end,’ Harold pointed out.
‘Thank God,’ said Brougham simply and went back to stop the machine.
The interruption had broken up our talk, and one by one we followed him back into the main part of the room.
Frances smiled at me. ‘Well, Glen?’ she said. ‘Did you enjoy it?’
Brougham yawned. He has appallingly bad manners, but curiously enough one does not seem to mind them in him. Both Frances and I detest bad manners, but we agree that in Glen they play no small part in his undoubted charm.
‘I’m afraid Angela’s taken on too much of a job,’ he grinned, ‘trying to cram Bax into me. There doesn’t seem to be room.’
‘Oh, but, Glen, you must try. He’s wonderful. Really he is.’ Angela has a plaintive voice, as befits an invalid. It is her custom to appeal for support in any assertion to the nearest person. ‘Isn’t Bax wonderful, Rona?’ she appealed now.
‘Well, you know I’m not very musical, Angela,’ Rona said gently. ‘I can’t pretend to und
erstand Bax myself, but if you tell me he’s wonderful I’m quite ready to believe you.’
‘Oh, but he is wonderful,’ Angela repeated, and looked helpless.
As if in response to a cue Waterhouse lumbered over to the couch on which his wife was lying. He had a curious rolling gait, more suited to a sailor than to an electrical engineer.
‘Not feeling tired, dear, are you?’ he asked, looking down at her.
‘Well, perhaps…a little.’ Angela looked at the rest of us apologetically.
‘Come along, Glen,’ said Rona. ‘Time for us to clear out.’
‘Douglas,’ said Frances.
‘Oh no!’ Angela wailed. ‘Rona, you know I didn’t mean that. You make me feel horrible, breaking things up. It’s terribly early, too. I’ll just slip off, and you can all go on talking. John, give them some drinks and make them stay.’
‘Of course they’ll stay,’ John assured her.
‘I can’t,’ said Daisy. ‘I promised them I’d be back by eleven. If you don’t mind I’ll go and put my things on. It’s all right, Angela; don’t you bother.’ She bustled out of the room. The door banged behind her. I had known it would. Doors invariably banged behind Daisy.
Angela looked round with an apologetic little smile. ‘Then if nobody minds, I think I’ll…’
‘Like me to carry you upstairs?’ Waterhouse asked.
‘That’s sweet of you, darling, but I’m not quite helpless yet, you know.’
Angela rose gracefully from the couch, a slim, straight figure in her exquisitely cut black evening dress, conveying an ethereal effect as much by the extreme pallor of her ash-golden hair as by the general delicacy of her colouring. A greater contrast to the robustness of her husband it would have been hard to find. Angela, I knew quite well, was thirty-six if she was a day, but unlike Rona she looked, at any rate in the heavily shaded light of her own drawing-room, no more than twenty-five. Persistent ill-health since she was a young girl at least had not destroyed her looks.
She hovered now in the middle of the room, smiling vaguely at all of us and conveying, as somehow she always managed to do, a kind of mild surprise at finding herself where she was and an inability to get elsewhere without help.
Then Daisy came back in her cloak; and I even welcomed the bang of the door behind her in spite of the patent suffering which it brought to the invalid’s delicate nerves; for when Angela looks like that, I always feel a fool. I don’t know why I do, and there is no reason why I should; but I do.
‘Well, goodbye, Angela, and thanks for a topping evening. It’s all right, John, don’t you bother; Harold will see me home, won’t you, Harold?’
‘Certainly, Daisy,’ said Harold.
I like Daisy. She is what is called a real country girl. That is to say, she goes out in all weathers, uses the slang of the last generation, always means what she says but can’t always say what she means, and gets her man in the end.
3
I suppose I am becoming introspective as I grow older. For instance I don’t think I used to be so much interested in the workings of my inferiority complex as I am now. It amused me that evening, after Harold and Daisy had gone, to notice that there was not a single person left in the room who did not call this inconvenient appendage into play. I am not a particularly humble person, but it may be that I am too quick to discern qualities which I do not possess, and too quick to assess them at a higher value than my own. On the other hand, I am equally quick to recognise my mental inferiors; though perhaps too apt again to despise their powers compared with my own. However it may be, there is the cut-and-dried division, and everyone I know has his or her place clearly defined on one side of the line or the other. Harold Cheam, for instance, is a person who never gives me any feeling of inferiority, and I am in consequence decided that I am Harold’s superior in everything that matters (put like that, the criterion sounds rather a negative one, and perhaps it is); that is not to say that I do not sometimes envy Harold’s temerity in rushing in where I would hesitate to tread – though here again I consider it a mark of superiority to know and observe one’s own limitations.
There are certain attributes which at once set my own inferiority in action, and I do not suppose I am in any way unique. Feminine beauty, for instance, leaves most men slightly tongue-tied; feminine intelligence is notoriously still more alarming. Achievement is another thing that makes me feel rather humble, never having achieved anything myself – not even a really good peach crop. And before notoriety I feel exasperatingly unimportant. Still more exasperatingly, I cannot resist a feeling of inferiority in the presence of someone better born than myself; against all reason, for my own stock, though undistinguished, is a sound one, and I am convinced with my intelligence that, individual for individual, I am a good deal better than most persons of more distinguished birth. Few things are more irritating than when instinct is at odds with reason.
To the six persons left in the room after Harold and Daisy had gone, each of whom was to play some part in the drama which, little as we knew it, was even then upon us, I was ready to take sixth place.
Of Frances I need say nothing more than that any proper man who has the kind of wife I have will feel a slight depression at his end of the balance. Rona Brougham represented female intellectuality, and so went at once to the head of the list. Waterhouse stood for achievement, and ran her a close second. I resented having to admit Glen to a higher place, for I had known the Broughams all my life since we had been children together, and a couple of years’ superiority in childhood is an advantage not easily to be sacrificed; but I had had to give way for some years now to his superb nonchalance, his complete disregard for the other person, so devastating as to be positively kind. To anyone who is over-sensitive for the other person, that is impressive. Glen had quite a local reputation, too, as an extremely clever surgeon; and I am not even a good fruit farmer.
As for Angela, I think that, like county cricketers and industrial barons, she would set the inferiority complex of any man working.
I must try to give a picture of Angela, for in view of what was to happen later it is essential that her outlines should be as clear as one can make them, though descriptions are at best vague and unsatisfactory things. To begin with, she was not beautiful. ‘Beauty’ is a strong word, and, like most strong words nowadays, much misused. But she was very pretty: quite pretty enough for a man to pull any string to get an introduction to her, and then, having got it, not know what to say to her. She had that kind of fragile prettiness which appeals most to men; but there was not enough character in her face for beauty.
I have mentioned her peculiar air of bewilderment. Strangers meeting Angela for the first time were apt to be disconcerted by this, and to ascribe it to a disinclination on her part, courteously but by mischance not completely veiled, to have anything to do with one so alien. If they knew something of her background, and the excellent and ancient family from which she came, this feeling would be intensified; for, after all, there is nothing like social snobbery to set the inferiority complex in motion. I know I am not unique in that – which annoys me all the more.
Waterhouse himself, who was well aware of this effect of his wife’s, having suffered from it at one time himself, had once confided to Frances that he always wanted to explain to the victims that her manner meant nothing at all beyond a vague apology for something of which she was not quite certain, that she had been an invalid since she was seventeen, and that if there was an inferiority complex anywhere in the offing it was probably her own. But whether Waterhouse was right in this estimate or not is another question. He ought to have known his own wife, no doubt. But how many of us really know our own wives? Do I even really know Frances?
4
I may have dealt at too great length with the trivialities of that evening’s talk, but I feel that I ought to show exactly what led up to that momentous conversation about which each
of us was questioned and cross-questioned later so many times. Not that it was a conversation so much as a series of desultory remarks and retorts. Certainly I imagine that none of us attached any more importance to it at the time than that it was perhaps a little bit awkward.
It began with John’s return from the front door, after seeing Harold and Daisy out. I have had my memory sharpened by the police, and I can recall that Angela had turned back from the door to ask Rona something about the next meeting of the Literary Society, of which Rona was the honorary secretary. It was pretty obvious, therefore, that so far as Angela was concerned the thing was unpremeditated; for she could not have known that John would be back so soon.
For that matter it must have been unpremeditated by everyone, for it began quite by chance with an attack of indigestion on the part of John; and that could certainly not have been foreseen by anyone. I believe I myself vaguely noticed that John seemed to hesitate as he came into the room and then went forward again, but I have heard it stated so many times since that I cannot be sure. Frances says she had her back turned to him and saw nothing. As it happened, only Rona was standing in such a place that she could see John’s face; and it was an exclamation from her that precipitated the whole incident.
‘John! Whatever is the matter?’
I do remember that John’s voice was a little gruff as he replied: ‘Nothing. Why?’
‘You looked for a moment as if you were in agony.’
John laughed. ‘Oh, just a twinge. Indigestion. I’ve been having a bit lately.’
‘You must get Glen to overhaul you,’ Rona said.
‘No need,’ Glen put in, in the lazily drawling voice which I believe his female patients find so attractive. ‘I can diagnose it from here. Incipient gastric ulcer, caused by eating too much rich food, drinking too many pegs during too many years, and smoking that foul pipe of yours too much and too often. Give up all three for six months, and no more twinges.’
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