Venus Over Lannery Page 10

  “O,” said Mrs. Dryden, “we all deserve to be hanged for one thing or another, and, that being so, we have to resign ourselves to hanging nobody.”

  Edna laughed, and slid her arm affectionately through Mrs. Dryden’s. “And what do you deserve to be hanged for?”

  “Goodness,” said Mrs. Dryden, “are you asking me to confess all my sins?”

  “Well, if it comes to that, what do I deserve to be hanged for?”

  “For bringing up your nice husband so badly,” said Mrs. Dryden with startling promptness.

  Edna dropped Mrs. Dryden’s arm and stood facing her on the gravel path. “Me? Bringing up Roger badly? Why, it never entered my head to bring him up at all—that is, until quite recently.”

  Mrs. Dryden took her arm and continued the stroll. “And recently?” she asked sedately.

  “Recently, I admit, I’ve begun to find that I have to stand up for myself, as I did just now. Roger, you know, can be awfully stubborn and awfully tyrannical.”

  “Of course. So can any child who has been accustomed to have his own way and is suddenly denied it.”

  “Do you think Roger used to have his own way?”

  Mrs. Dryden laughed. “I’ve seen him having it, my dear. I can see you still, when you and he came here before you were married, trotting about after him and drinking in everything he said as if it was pure gospel.”

  Edna took it with perfect good humour, in fact with evident interest. “It’s perfectly true,” she said; “but I was a child myself then. How can I be held responsible for his upbringing?”

  Mrs. Dryden shrugged her shoulders. “Unfortunately every child brings up every other child with which it comes into frequent contact. And then, Edna, quite suddenly, you grew up and ceased to accept the gospel without question. If you had done so from the first you would have made it easier for him. He was in love with you, and love, as St. Paul wisely remarked, suffereth long, and is kind. Your sudden change must be very upsetting to him. He probably doesn’t in the least understand what has happened. And yet it seems to me that you and Roger, whether by good judgment or mere good luck, made a very good choice. As soon as you have adjusted your balance you will make an admirably suited pair; and you’ll adjust it all the sooner if you remember that before you married he was more mature than you, and now, quite suddenly, you’ve become more mature than he. But don’t, for goodness’ sake, start trying to rule him by principles. You’ll only exasperate him and turn yourself into a prig. He at least never did that. The worst he did was to try to endow you with all that, in his honest but narrow-minded little way, he thought was the best.”

  Edna was silent for a moment; then she gave a contemptuous laugh. “A year or two ago I took a course in psychology: much good it seems to have done me.”

  “O, psychology!” said Mrs. Dryden with a sniff of scorn. “You and Roger are not an algebraical equation. Besides, don’t you remember, at school, how much easier it was to do other people’s sums than your own?”

  “Don’t I just! As a matter of fact, I got on all right in the earlier stages of this particular sum. I did discover, as you apparently discovered years ago, that Roger was trying to turn me into a replica of himself.”

  “You asked him to, Edna. You handed yourself over, heart and mind, to be remodelled.”

  “Yes, I suppose I did. And how hard he worked at it, poor boy. There was music, for instance: I preferred the Romantics, and I had to be made to prefer the Classics. And, of course, I believed he was right: I did my very best to become a good little Classic. But I did rebel once or twice in a fumbling sort of way. Ah, how well I remember one of the occasions: it was here, when Cynthia played a beautiful song by Richard Strauss. No, it’s only fairly recently that I discovered that Romantic and Classic are a matter of taste and not of the Ten Commandments, that I suddenly felt compelled to be myself. Poor Roger! Just when he was on the point of completing the transformation of an Edna into a Roger, I jump up like a jack-in-the-box and wreck the labour of years.”

  “And set to work, perhaps, Edna, to turn your Roger into another Edna? Mind you don’t do that. It would cause you endless misery and, if you succeeded, which I very much doubt, you wouldn’t like the result a bit.”

  Edna laughed. “Good Lord, am I as bad as that?”

  “It’s not a matter of goodness or badness: it’s the simple fact that most of us have enough of ourselves as it is, without having another to cope with. What we want in a husband or wife is not a double but a counterpart, not a slave but a self-respecting companion.” Emily was silent for a moment. “It seems to me a lamentable thing,” she said, “that we humans, who after all have reached a certain stage of civilisation, should not yet have evolved a sane and certain method of choosing our mates.”

  “Our chief difficulty in that,” said Edna, “is this glorious and ridiculous business of falling in love. Just when we ought to have all our wits about us we go absolutely blind with infatuation.”

  “Precisely. If I had the job of remaking the human race, I would suppress—though with the greatest regret, Edna—but I would suppress infatuation. It works admirably for the animals with their temporary mates and numerous families, but it’s the worst possible beginning for the relation of a lifetime. Fortunately a good many of us make lucky shots—more by good luck than good management. But that’s no excuse for the method. We are making a brave attempt to evolve from the animal to the angel, and yet, in the most vital matter of our lives, we obey the instinct of the animal. No wonder things get into an awful muddle sometimes. How well I remember, not so very long after my marriage, waking up to the fact that I had bound myself body and soul to a comparative stranger, a man with all sorts of ideas and habits and prejudices which I had never suspected. After that startling discovery I spent a good deal of time and energy in trying to turn my husband into myself, and a hopeless enterprise it was, because two people could hardly have been more different than Arthur and I. Not that we hadn’t a good deal in common, but we had even more in which we disagreed violently. For instance, I loved music and he hated it; I liked the French Impressionists and Whistler and he was all for the Pre-Raphaelites, so that when Whistler threw his paintpot in the face of the public and Ruskin threw his inkpot at Whistler we were on opposite sides. Then Arthur was a Tory and I was a Socialist and we could neither of us express the mildest political opinion without exasperating the other.” She laughed tenderly. “As soon as we had settled down from our first infatuation we used to have the most awful rows. Not noisy ones, of course: they were quite quiet, but all the worse for that. It would really have been much better if we had thrown plates. But we agreed about literature, that was one comfort; and there was much, besides, that we liked in one another. After all, we had been very good friends at the start: it was the close contact of marriage that was too much for us, at least at first. He was at home all day, you see, so we were denied the respite of office hours, and soon I discovered all sorts of qualities in him that irritated me. For example, he would never face things: he preferred to glide past them in his gentle fashion. Whereas I, in my bumptious selfconfidence, preferred to tackle them like a lion-tamer.” She laughed softly to herself. “I’m inclined to believe, now that I’m an old woman, that it comes to the same thing in the end, whichever way you deal with things: it’s merely a difference of method. And then—poor Arthur—he had all sorts of fads and mannerisms that used to drive me crazy—perfectly innocent little things as I see them now and, I’m thankful to say, as I came to see them years before he died. Even when the children came they didn’t do us much good. We discovered at once that we had all sorts of different views about children. At last, five or six years after our marriage, we reached a point at which I felt I couldn’t bear it any longer, and I put a few things into a knapsack and went away by myself for a few days to think things out. I believe I started out with a very strong sense of my own righteousness and Arthur’s sins, but the weather, by a lucky chance, was perfect, and with everythi
ng so lovely around me I soon began to find my grievances an awful nuisance. I felt as if I were forcing myself to hold up a great weight which it would be much easier to drop. I tried to think, but I couldn’t be bothered to think. I decided to enjoy myself for the first day and put off the thinking till the next. But next day the business of thinking seemed even more of a nuisance than before. It was not simply, I found, that I didn’t want to think: the fact was that I was actually not interested in my grievances: they seemed, at that range and in those surroundings, to have shrunk considerably in importance. What had happened, I told myself, was that I was enjoying myself enormously and was therefore not in the proper frame of mind for serious thought. But it never occurred to me to doubt the reality of my grievances. I believed that somewhere or other goodness knows where: in some sort of Platonic heaven or hell, perhaps—they still existed in all their original importance. It wasn’t till I had arrived one evening in a charming little village, till I had had my supper and was looking into a little pocket Shakespeare which I had taken with me, that common sense came to me like a revelation.” She broke off and turned her face to the young woman at her side. “I wonder if you have found, as I have, that the most extraordinary coincidences are constantly occurring in life. If one believed in guardian angels, it would be obvious that one’s guardian angel had drawn one’s attention to some small truth that is of vital importance to our needs. But I don’t hold with guardian angels, and so I have never been able to explain how the thing happens. As often as not, in my case, it is something in a book that comes to the rescue, and in this particular instance it was Shakespeare. I was rummaging about in my small Shakespeare, too tired and too contented to read consecutively, when I came upon a phrase—I’ve forgotten now which play it was in—which at another time might have made no impression on me; but on this particular occasion it was like ... well, like a lighted match to a gas-burner. ‘There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.’ You see how pat it came to my requirements. It enabled me to take the step I had unconsciously been longing to take, but which pride or principles or some other absurd obstacle had prevented me from so much as seeing. All I had to do, I saw, was to push my precious grievances overboard. Up till then I had been an opinionated, overbearing, inhuman creature... .”

  Edna laid her hand on Mrs. Dryden’s arm. “I don’t believe it,” she said with a smile.

  “O, but it’s true, my dear. Ask the Buxteds. Ask Mr. Elsdon. And quite suddenly I had become human. It was what religious people would call conversion. Next morning I started for home: I was anxious to get back to Arthur. It was all I could do not to beg his forgiveness. But I didn’t. I felt instinctively that if I were to bring it all to the surface we would both become horribly self-conscious. So I said nothing. And soon an extraordinary thing happened. All those little mannerisms and fads of Arthur’s which had irritated me so much—they not only ceased to irritate me, they actually ceased to exist. They no longer had anything to feed on. I had driven him into them, and now, by mere nonresistance, I had driven him out of them. You remember Tolstoi’s ‘ Resist not evil’? Well, in this case at any rate, it worked miraculously. For the rest of our life together we were the best of friends. Years afterwards I told him of the whole business. ‘I knew there was something wrong,’ he said, ‘but I thought it better not to enquire.’ How like him that was, and how it would have irritated me in earlier days. But it didn’t irritate me then: it seemed to me, by that time, that his method had been the right one.” She sighed. “He was an extraordinarily gentle creature.”

  Chapter XII

  It was sunday evening and five of the visitors to Lannery had already left. Edna and Roger, and Joan with them, had taken the afternoon train, and Eric and Daphne, refusing an early tea, had set off in Eric’s car. Cynthia and Todd were allowing themselves a few days more in the country in honour of their engagement, and Elsdon and the Buxteds were staying on for a week. The house seemed quiet and empty as they sat round the fire in the drawingroom. Emily, with an amused smile at Elsdon, had just asked him for his new opinion of the departed guests. “Last time, I remember,” she said, “you complained that they were restless.”

  Elsdon nodded. “And I was surprised, this time, to find them still in the same state. One can understand it in Daphne: she hasn’t even yet, I gather, permanently collared her young man, and in fact it rather seemed to me that, at the moment, she has ceased to try.” He paused for a moment, but as no one rose to this indiscreet observation, he did not pursue it further. “But the others,” he went on, “Edna and Roger and Joan, they seem to be as unfocused as ever. Marriage doesn’t seem to have done them any good. Edna, I admit, has matured surprisingly, but she and Roger are obviously at loggerheads, and that poor little girl Joan seems to be terribly unhappy. Emily, you ought to start a school for prospective husbands and wives. I know I’ve no right to boast, but it does seem to me that in our day we did, as a rule, make a better job of marriage. What’s the matter with them all nowadays?”

  “It’s not them, primarily,” said Emily; “it’s the conditions they’re born into. The old principles and the old conventions have gone, or almost gone. They’re much freer than we were, and their freedom leaves them shiftless and bewildered.”

  “They’re simply undisciplined, that’s their trouble,” said the Colonel. “You can’t run life, any more than you can run a battalion, on freedom. They fancy they can and we see the result.”

  “Yes, there’s some truth in that, Bob,” said Emily. “In our time, marriage was, if not for all of us a sacrament, at least a sacred convention which it didn’t occur to us to question. We had a ready-made discipline imposed upon us and, on the whole, it made things easier. Nowadays marriage is simply a legal agreement which, with a certain amount of bother and expense, can be cancelled; and that, of course, cheapens it terribly.”

  “And yet, in one way,” said Todd, “the freedom is all to the good, if only they could use it, because it means that morals have become personal instead of merely conventional. It’s much more religious, in the best sense of the word, to behave well or accept a duty because you want to, than to stick to a rule because you’re afraid of public opinion.”

  “So you think,” asked Elsdon, “that the people of our day—those, I mean, who respected marriage not from conviction but from convention—were no better than those young folk of today who regard marriage as no more than a legal matter?”

  “Not a bit,” said Todd; “though I think they were luckier. The convention and their respect for it, however mercenary, did urge them to make the best of marriage: they were forced to adapt themselves and were probably the happier for it. But when you enter marriage, as some people do nowadays, with the idea that no adaptation and no compromise are necessary, because marriage is so easily annulled, you’re running the risk of making any sort of domestic happiness impossible. That’s the worst of freedom; to enjoy it, you’ve got to be free, free from inhibitions and complexes and all the rest of the old human failings to which we have given such impressive new names. If we were perfectly brought up we shouldn’t need authority.”

  “What? Free love, Padre?” asked the Colonel sharply.

  “Certainly,” said Todd, “as all real love is, in any case.”

  “Still, as a practical point,” said the Colonel, “you and Cynthia propose, I hope, to go through some sort of ceremony?”

  Todd laughed. “You flatter us, Colonel. Your question implies that we’ve both been perfectly brought up. But don’t be afraid: you and Mrs. Buxted will get your invitation in due course.”

  “But to go back,” said Elsdon to Todd, “to what you were saying just now. If we were all perfectly brought up, you said, we shouldn’t need authority. But the trouble, it seems, with the young people of today is that they haven’t been perfectly brought up and they don’t accept authority. Well, what are you going to do about them? You can’t impose authority on them as you can in the Colonel’s battalion, because authorit
y, in this case, has to be the authority of conviction.”

  “You can’t impose it even on a battalion, George,” said the Colonel, “unless the majority believe in it. If I tried to impose authority on a sceptical battalion, they would simply confine me to barracks, and a pretty fool I should look.”

  Elsdon turned to Emily Dryden. “It seems to me, Emily, that this is your job. Bob, representing the Army, confesses that he can’t dragoon their bodies, and Frank, representing the Church, apparently can’t dragoon their souls. As you don’t hold either with Church or Army, no doubt you have some other device up your sleeve.”

  “O, come—that’s not fair!” Todd broke in. “I don’t even want to dragoon their souls. It’s a monstrous notion.” He turned to Mrs. Dryden. “Forgive me for butting in.”

  “You were quite right to butt in, my dear Frank,” said Emily. “George was behaving in the most high-handed manner. If I dare to say, George, that I don’t approve of cutting off their heads, you’ll brush me aside at once, I suppose, without asking what I do approve of.”

  Through the murmur of laughter, Elsdon was heard apologising. “Bob, I’m a martinet! Frank, I’m a bigot! Forgive me! And you, Emily, tell us your remedy.”

  “Educate them,” she said.

  “What? Arithmetic, French, geography?” barked the Colonel.

  “Nonsense, Bob! I mean real education. Train their minds and emotions. Teach them about human nature and its reactions, behaviour and its consequences, the physical and spiritual facts of sex, and, in course of time, how to bring up the next generation.”

  “In fact,” said Todd, “give them the first elements of religion.”

  “Yes, Frank,” said Emily. “You and I always agree in everything but our terminology.”

  “But isn’t it rather late,” asked Elsdon, “to get hold, for instance, of our young friends who have just left us? They’re out of your reach.”