The Constant Nymph

by Margaret Kennedy

  ‘A charming woman can be very well informed …’

  ‘Yes, but would you rather have an ignorant woman with charm or a well-informed woman without?’

  ‘You’re driving me into a corner! Of course I admit that the world would come to an end if women weren’t charming. But they’ll persist in being that, thank heaven, whatever sort of education they get. And, Teresa, one of the most charming women I ever knew came to grief simply, so it seemed to me, for want of a wider education … a better regulated mind …’

  He paused and sighed. Teresa looked at him and asked suddenly:

  ‘Was that my mother?’

  ‘Yes, my dear.’

  ‘Were you very fond of her?’

  ‘She was our only sister. We were very proud of her.’

  ‘Did she go to a school like Cleeve?’

  ‘Cleeve! Not she!’

  She saw that he had no high opinion of Cleeve, and presently she began to tell him funny stories of the good ladies there and her adventures during her brief school career. He found her very entertaining. Her way of talking had a turn that was at once innocent and shrewd, infantile and yet full of observation, adorned with a quaint, half literary idiom, and full of inflections borrowed from other languages. She was refreshing, after a long surfeit of cultured provincialism. He saw ignorance in her, and childishness and a good deal of untutored passion; but of pose there was no trace and she was without small sentimentalities or rancours. He thought that he discerned the delicate beginnings of a noble mind, a grandeur of outlook which would well repay development. It struck him that the Sanger genius, driving all the other children to some practice of the arts, might here take the form of a particular aptitude for companionship, that rare touch on life which makes some souls so valuable to their friends. He could not imagine why Florence had not written more warmly about her. She was such very good fun. And if, as he half guessed, there was some tragedy behind her, that was her own business and she was perfectly able to deal with it herself. She was a courageous little creature. He wished that he could have asked her how Florence and Lewis were getting on; it was a point upon which her opinion would have been useful.

  It was an odd thing, but he had a queer sort of liking for his son-in-law. If it had not been for their unfortunate relationship he could have seen several merits in the young man. To begin with, it was enjoyable to remember that this was the son of Fulsome Felix. A great deal could be forgiven to him on that account. Charles was forced frequently to put up with the company of Sir Felix Dodd, who was always coming to Cambridge in some capacity or other which could not be ignored. He could endure now the atmosphere of a glorified board school which always clung to that gentleman, remembering with inward chuckles the blot in the scutcheon. Lewis must have been too much even for the Dodd complacency.

  And that night, when Lewis joined Charles and Teresa in the drawing-room, he was at his unusual best. He brought with him his two friends, Dr Dawson, who was already known to Charles, and an obscure organist from somewhere or other. It was the first time that Charles had ever seen him in company of his own choosing, for his friends were a little nervous of coming to Strand-on-the-Green. He was talking of his work in a simple and modest way that showed how completely he was at his ease. Charles, by long habit, was quick to sift the cleverness of a clever young man for any grains of real gold that might lurk there. In this case he soon divined something more solid than mere promise. He knew nothing of music, but Dawson did, and he caught, now and then, a trace of something more than respect in the attitude of his old friend; there were signs there of affection and a deep admiration.

  ‘The fellow has real ability,’ thought Charles. ‘Dawson knows. Poor Florence! She’s right there, as far as I can see.’

  Presently it occurred to him, with a slight shock of surprise, how very well Teresa fitted into the picture. She seemed almost like Lewis’s belonging. She had made one or two quite pertinent remarks; that was natural, since they were on ground which was familiar to her. But her chief business was to minister to them and this she did rather nicely; her hospitality had no polish but it was suitable, somehow, to the company. She made a fresh pot of tea and, finding that Dr Dawson had missed his lunch, she fetched up some corned beef. Charles, watching how she slapped it down on the table with a kind of offhand geniality, thought that she would have made a very good barmaid. Then it struck him that it was her co-operation which had given Lewis the air of being so pleasant a host. He could imagine the pair of them entertaining with the greatest success, not in this house but in some queer, unmistakable house of their own. He told himself that no party can go well unless the host and hostess are inspired by the same social ideals. It is upon such occasions that the inner concord between man and wife is made most manifest. Only that Lewis and Teresa were not man and wife. For a moment he was almost thinking of them as if they were, because they ought to have been.

  This idea grew upon Charles as he watched them, and it seemed strange to him that a thing so obvious should have occurred to nobody else. To his eyes it grew plainer every moment. The pair seen thus together, at a moment of unconscious ease, contrived to produce the united front, the pleasant assurance of a perfectly well-matched couple. Teresa was, probably, the only woman in the world who could manage this man; she would respect his humours without taking them too seriously, she would never require him to behave correctly, and, if he annoyed her, she would reprove him good-humouredly in the strong terms which he deserved and understood. How could they have failed to see it? Lewis was a fool! If he had married little Teresa she would have made a man of him, whereas mated with Florence he was nothing but a calamity.

  How much of a calamity was abundantly demonstrated when Florence returned, an elegant stranger breaking in upon them, the owner, one remembered, of a room which was not usually strewn with kitchen knives and corned beef. Immediately the party went to pieces; a sort of constraint settled upon them. Not that she failed in hospitality; she was most charming to everybody, and especially kind to the young organist because he was insignificant and had a provincial accent. Always she would be nice to her husband’s friends. Charles thought she managed very well, for nobody made any attempt to help her out. Her manner to her husband was, he noticed, a little staccato; she was nervous. He surmised that there had been a fine explosion after ‘Prester John’, but of this there were only the faintest indications. He hardly knew how to diagnose the sense of a false note, a roughness, a want of decorum in her posture. Something very wrong was happening.

  He watched her closely and at last discovered the flaw. It shocked him excessively. She was being, there was no other word for it, consistently nasty to her young cousin. In fact, she seemed scarcely able to let the child alone; her sarcasms and her biting reproofs were so continuous as to sound almost mechanical, like a bad habit. She was exhibiting in that quarter a most lamentable failure of the ‘bonté’, which used to be an integral part of her disposition. Circumstances were becoming too much for her natural generosity. She was not only jealous of Teresa’s standing with Lewis but of her intimacy with all his friends. They had been, when she came in, a close convivial group; she had tried to join in, talking cleverly, but they had not quite accepted her. She got homage for her beauty and her wit, but that was not entirely what she wanted, She wished them to consider her as one of themselves and this distinction they reserved for Teresa, an impudent chit, who had only to put in her oar, quote an opinion of Sanger’s, to make them stop and listen to her. Florence was not going to be cut out, in her own drawing-room, by an unformed schoolgirl, and she was consequently a great deal too profuse in small snubs.

  It was, in the father’s eyes, pitiful that a beloved daughter should thus expose her sufferings in an exhibition of petty jealousy. But he had not observed the situation for very long before he saw that it held great dangers. Teresa bore it all well enough; he could not help admiring the large, good temper with which she held her own in the contest. Perhaps she did not gra
sp the underlying spite of the attacks made upon her. It was for her friend to feel resentment on her behalf; nothing of their byplay was lost upon Lewis. He seemed to receive all Teresa’s wounds with a double bitterness. If Florence had wished to drive him from her, she could not have chosen a better way.

  ‘A pretty kettle of fish!’ thought Charles wrathfully. ‘Does she want to bully those two into making a bolt of it? The sooner that little girl is packed off to school, the better!’

  He had quite a good opinion of Teresa but, recollecting how she had been brought up, he had little reliance upon her principles or her prudence in such an affair. He was almost sure that she loved this undeserving wretch; when once he had suspected the thing every gesture that she made, every word that she spoke, bore witness to it. Should Lewis wake to his own need of her, nothing in the world could save her; her security lay in his blindness. She obeyed no laws; she knew none. She would inevitably follow the man if he beckoned to her; Charles could think of no possible reason why she should not. And here was Florence ordering her off to bed as though she were a tiresome baby, quoting some absurd doctor’s order about bed at seven three nights a week. She was skipping out of the room when she caught her uncle’s eye and came back to him.

  ‘Good night, Lieber Herr!’

  ‘Good night, baggage!’

  ‘How long are you staying with us, if one may ask?’

  ‘A week-end.’

  ‘Dear me! That’s uncommonly short! I’d hoped you might stay long enough to give me a classical education.’

  ‘I’ll begin to teach you Latin if you’d like. Then, later on, you can come to Cambridge and we’ll begin Greek.’

  It seemed to him that any snare was worth trying with so wild a little bird.

  ‘I know Latin!’

  ‘You do, do you?’

  ‘Some I do.’ She sang in a steady, poised little voice: ‘Cum vix justus sit securus.’

  Lewis, across the room, stirred slightly and turned his head to listen. Charles thought:

  ‘What’s the good of school? She’ll run away.’

  ‘That,’ she was saying, ‘means that even good people will scarcely be safe, poor things …’

  She kissed him and made off. Florence immediately called her back and reminded her that she had not said good-night to the rest of the company. Whereupon, she kissed them all rapidly but with much warmth, and was gone before any fresh reproof could fall upon her. Assuredly it was not easy to put her in her place. Florence had to laugh, though she offered quite unnecessary apologies for the manners of her young cousin.

  ‘Not at all,’ said Charles. ‘We like it.’

  The obscure organist, whose name everybody forgot, had been greatly captivated. He quoted softly:

  ‘Say I’m weary, say I’m sad …’

  ‘Say that health and wealth have missed me,’ chimed in Dr Dawson, with perfect truth, for he was a poor man and gouty.

  ‘Say I’m getting old …’ grumbled Charles rather glumly.

  Lewis said nothing, having no idea what they were talking about. A good many of Tessa’s kisses had already come his way so perhaps he regarded them as a commonplace.

  18

  Charles, Florence, Lewis and Teresa sat together at breakfast. Sebastian, who always rose early, had finished his meal and could be heard in the music-room practising the Forty-eight Preludes and Fugues with precision and energy. Paulina was not yet down and a lecture on unpunctuality was awaiting her. Teresa was blowing on her tea to cool it in a vulgar way; Florence wearily told her not to.

  ‘And why must you do your hair in that way?’ she complained. ‘Dragging it all back! It’s terribly unbecoming; your forehead is quite high enough as it is. Why don’t you cover it?’

  ‘If I did I’d look like one of those little girls in shops called “Cash”. Wouldn’t I, gentlemen?’

  Charles and Lewis left off reading their letters and looked at Teresa’s forehead. They liked it. Charles said:

  ‘If you want to look pretty, hussy, you’d better grow a fringe and hide it.’

  Lewis wondered; he scarcely knew why it was that he found Tessa so beautiful to look at. He said:

  ‘In a year or two, Florence, when you’ve fattened her, she’ll look like that picture in your bedroom … that very startled lady with a towel round her head.’

  ‘The Delphic Sibyl? What nonsense, Lewis!’

  ‘But she is,’ said Charles. ‘She’s very like! I hadn’t seen it before … It’s on a smaller, slighter scale, of course …’

  ‘The Delphic Sibyl has a very noble face.’

  ‘So has Tessa,’ said both the men.

  Florence pursed her lips and said rather acidly:

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m afraid I don’t see it. Except that there’s a sort of Michelangelo look about all the family …’

  ‘My admirers,’ said Teresa complacently, ‘are mostly of the opposite sex.’

  ‘I think you had better do that entrance examination today,’ Florence retorted. ‘If you go to Harrogate at Whitsun, they’ll want to know how to place you. You can do it in the drawing-room, this morning, where it will be quite quiet.’

  ‘I don’t expect I shall be able,’ said Teresa gloomily.

  ‘Oh, yes, you will. It’s quite easy. Only the junior entrance. Miss Cassidy thinks that, as you are under sixteen and very backward, you’d better be entered as a junior, till they have got you on a bit.’

  ‘How does she know I’m backward?’

  ‘Because I told her. It’s not your fault. You’ll pick up.’

  Teresa said nothing but gazed tearfully at her plate of porridge. Florence exclaimed, with a little laugh:

  ‘Oh, dear me! I don’t believe you like being told you’re backward! Funny, funny child! She’s getting quite pink!’

  ‘She’s saying all this for your good,’ put in Lewis, leaning round the table to see how pink Teresa was. ‘You should be grateful to her; I’ve often thought it was a pity you had such a high-stomached opinion of yourself.’

  ‘I can talk three languages besides English.’

  ‘Yes, your languages are good. But you know nothing else.’

  ‘I’ve read Shakespeare.’

  ‘I should hope you had,’ Florence told her crushingly.

  ‘The juniors at Cleeve went to bed at eight o’clock. And in recreation they did things for each other’s albums. And they mightn’t get books out of the library. I’d sooner go to hell.’

  ‘You must work hard and try to get into the senior school as soon as you can. And you must grow up a little. You’re such a baby for your age.’

  ‘Shall I have to play hockey? At Cleeve I didn’t.’

  ‘You won’t unless you’re fit for it,’ put in Charles testily.

  ‘Of course not,’ agreed Florence. ‘But by the Autumn term, when hockey begins, I daresay she will be able to play.’

  She knew this was not likely, but life would be unbearable if Teresa was allowed to make a fuss about her health. She needed bracing in every direction. Lewis asked gleefully how long she was to stay at this school.

  ‘Three years,’ said Florence. ‘Yes, Father! It will be quite that, I should think, before she catches up.’

  ‘Well,’ muttered Teresa, ‘there are some things I shall know. At Cleeve we didn’t know we had to pay to go to church. We thought it was free. We nearly died of fright the first time we saw that bag coming round. We thought we’d be turned out. I had to take sixpence belonging to the girl next me; she’d left it on her prayer-book and didn’t see me pinch it.’

  ‘Stealing! You’ve no morals, hussy!’

  ‘Not at all. The sixpence was going in the bag, anyhow. Poor Lina had to pull a button off her drawers to put in.’

  ‘I hope somebody told you that these things are not done,’ said Florence, with a frown at Charles, who guffawed.

  ‘Quite a number of people did. That was what we disliked at Cleeve, being taught how to behave by five hundred people at once. It�
��s the way they do things in this country.’

  ‘Well, if you run contrary to public opinion you must expect to suffer for it. But I hope you’ll be wiser now.’

  Lewis passed his cup for more coffee and got his guns into position. He thought that his wife ought to be paid out for the way she was baiting Teresa, and he embarked upon a counterattack.

  ‘I think I agree with Tessa,’ he said to Charles. ‘This is not a country I like. I’m leaving it for good as soon as my concert’s over.’

  Florence started and gave him a quick glance. In the heat of the scene she had made after ‘Prester John’ he had declared that he detested England and would live with her no longer. But he had not repeated the threat, and she had come to believe that he had not really meant it.

  ‘No,’ said Charles, blinking at Lewis over his spectacles. ‘Is that so?’

  ‘Didn’t Florence tell you we’ve almost agreed to part?’

  ‘It is fortunate that you can agree upon such a delicate subject,’ murmured Charles.

  ‘She, you see, can’t live in comfort anywhere else, can you, Florence?’

  ‘Not permanently,’ said Florence.

  She was determined that he should not draw her into an argument at this time and in this company. He was probably only teasing her. If he really persisted in his desire to live abroad she would let the house and go with him, but not just yet. He might change his mind again, and she could do nothing until she had disposed of the children. She thought that it might be a wise plan to let him go alone, after the concert, and when he had seen how he liked it he might give up this foolish way of talking. In any case, nobody in the world should know that it hurt her.

  Later, when she was alone with her father, she gave him her version of the affair. Lewis, she said, had got a temporary attack of nerves and was best out of England. She herself would follow him as soon as she had got rid of Teresa. Charles, at this, looked very thoughtful, and she was afraid that he was going to ask awkward questions. But at last he surprised her by saying: