Introduction to Sally

XVI

But after ninety there is little scandal. The worst that was said of the Lukes was that they had got hold of the old man, and nobody who saw Sally believed that. Indeed, the instant anyone set eyes on her the Duke’s behaviour was accounted for, and after five minutes in her company it became crystal clear that she was incapable of getting hold of anybody. So young, so shy, so acquiescent,—absurd to suppose she ever had such a thing as an ulterior motive. And the husband, too; impossible to imagine that silent scholar, also so young, and rather shy too, or else very sulky,—impossible to imagine him plotting. On the contrary, he didn’t seem to like what had happened to him much, and showed no signs whatever either of pleasure or gratitude. But of Jocelyn no one thought long. He was without interest for the great world. He was merely an obscure young man at Cambridge, somebody the Duke’s amazing beauty had married.

Sally did, then, as she was told about Crippenham. It was given her, and she took it; or rather, for her attitude was one of complete passivity, it became hers. But she had an unsuspected simple tenacity of purpose, which was later to develop disconcertingly, and she refused to live anywhere except in the four-roomed cottage in the corner of the garden, built years before as a playhouse for Laura and Charles.

On this one point she was like a rock; a polite rock, against which persuasions, though received sweetly and amiably, should beat in vain. So the Duke had the little house fitted up with every known labour-saving appliance, none of which Sally would use because of having been brought up to believe only in elbow-grease, and two bathrooms, one for her and one for Jocelyn; and he attached such importance to these bathrooms, and he insisted so obstinately on their being built, that Sally could only conclude the picks must need a terrible lot of washing. Whited sepulchres they must be, she secretly thought; looking as clean as clean outside, fit to eat one’s dinner off if it came to that, but evidently nothing but show and take-in.

The Duke, much concerned at first, settled down to this determination of Sally’s, and explained it to himself by remembering Marie-Antoinette. She had her Trianon. She too had played, as Sally wished to play, at being simple. He consoled himself by speaking of the cottage as Little Trianon; a name Sally accepted with patience, though she told Jocelyn—who was so much stunned at the strange turn his life had taken that she found she could be quite chatty with him, and he never corrected, and never even said anything back—she wouldn’t have thought of herself. Some day, the Duke was sure, the marvellous child would grow up and get tired of her Trianon, and then, when she wanted to move into the house, she should find Versailles all ready for her, and very different from what it used to be.

So, on the excuse of seeing to the alterations, he was hardly ever away from Crippenham, and if he had been less than ninety-three there would certainly have been a scandal.

But Jocelyn, who woke up after the wild joy and relief of being reunited to Sally to find himself the permanent guest of a duke, didn’t know whether to be pleased or annoyed. The problems of his and Sally’s existence were solved, it was true, but he wasn’t sure that he didn’t prefer the problems. He rubbed his eyes. This was fantastic. It had no relation to real life, which was the life of hard work and constant progress in his cloister at Ananias. Also, its topsy-turviness bewildered him. Here was the Duke, convinced that Sally had married beneath her, and so unshakably convinced that Jocelyn had enormous difficulty in not beginning to believe it too. He couldn’t help being impressed by the Duke. He had never met a duke before, never come within miles of meeting one, and was impressed. That first afternoon, when he had been carried off in the Rolls Royce to Crippenham, he had spent the time between luncheon and tea shut up in the old man’s study being upbraided for having taken advantage, as he was severely told, of Sally’s youth and inexperience and motherlessness to persuade her into a marriage which was obviously socially disastrous for her; and he couldn’t even if he had wished to, which he certainly didn’t, tell him about Mr. Pinner, because he couldn’t get through the barrier of his deafness. There the old man had sat, with beetling brows and great stern voice, booming away at him hour after hour, and there Jocelyn had sat, young, helpless, silent, his forehead beaded with perspiration, listening to a description, among other things, of the glories which would have been Sally’s if he hadn’t inveigled her into marrying him. And so sure was the Duke of his facts, and so indignant, that gradually Jocelyn began to think there was something in it, and every moment felt more of a blackguard. In the old man’s eyes, he asked himself, would there be much difference between him and Pinner? And was there, in anybody’s eyes, much difference? More education; that was all. But of family, in the Duke’s sense, he had as little as Pinner, and if Pinner had been to a decent school, as Jocelyn had, and then gone to Cambridge—no, Oxford for Pinner—he would probably have cut quite as good a figure, if not in science then in something else; perhaps as a distinguished cleric.

He sat dumb and perspiring, feeling increasingly guilty; and if he could have answered back he wouldn’t have, because the Duke made him feel meek.

This meekness, however, didn’t last. It presently, after a period of bewilderment, gave way to something very like resentment, which in its turn developed into a growing conviction that he had become just a cat’s paw,—he who, if left to himself, could have done almost anything.

Naturally he didn’t like this. But how, for the moment, could he help it? Sally was going to have a baby. They had to live somewhere. It was really heaven-sent, the whole thing. Yet—Sally, whom he had been going to mould, was moulding him. Unconsciously; nothing to do with any intention or desire of her own. And what she was moulding him into, thought Jocelyn, as he drove himself backwards and forwards every day between Crippenham and Cambridge, between his domestic life and his work, between the strange mixture of emotions at the one end and the clear peace and self-respect at the other, turning over in his mind with knitted brows, as he drove, all that had happened to him in the brief weeks since he had added Sally to his life—what she was moulding him into was a cat’s paw.

Yes. Just that.

Were all husbands cat’s paws?

Probably, thought Jocelyn.

§

Mrs. Luke also reacted to the Moulsfords in terms of meekness. Hers, however, lasted. She found them permanently dazzling. Besides, there was nothing to be done. Jocelyn had gone; she had lost him for ever; he would never come back, she very well knew, to the old life of dependence on her. And if he must go, if she must lose him, there really was no one in the world she would more willingly lose him to than the Duke of Goring. For certainly it was a splendid, an exalted losing.

When she had had time to think after that visit from Lord Charles—he had, she considered, a curious attractiveness—and was more herself again, when she had recovered a little from the extreme misery she had gone through and began not to feel quite so ill, she found it easy to forgive her mauvais quart d’heure. The Moulsfords were heaping benefits on her boy. They were settling all his difficulties. That morning when she was so unhappy, Lord Charles had been most delightfully kind and sympathetic, and had told her that the Duke, his father, intended to help the young couple,—‘You know my son won this year’s Rutherford Prize,’ she had said. ‘Indeed I do,’ he had answered in his charming, eager way, adding how much interested his father was in the careers of brilliant young men, especially at Cambridge, helping them in any way he could—and who would not, in such circumstances, forgive?

Mrs. Luke forgave.

The fact, however, remained that she was now alone, and she couldn’t think what her life was going to be without Jocelyn. For how, she wondered, did one live without an object, with no raison d’être of any sort? How did one live after one has left off being needed?

That year the spring was late and cold. The days dragged along, each one emptier than the last. There was nothing in them at all; no reason, hardly, why one should so much as get up every morning and dress for days like that,—pithless, coreless, dead days. She tried to comfort herself by remembering that at least she wasn’t any longer beaten down and humiliated, that she could lift her head and look South Winch in the face, and look it in the face more proudly than ever before; but even that seemed to have lost its savour. Still, she mustn’t grumble. This happened to all mothers sooner or later, this casting loose, this final separation, and to none, she was sure, had it ever happened more magnificently. She mustn’t grumble. She must be very thankful. She was very thankful. Like Toussaint l’Ouverture—Wordsworth, again—she had, she said to herself, sitting solitary through the chilly spring evenings by her fire after yet another empty day, great allies; only fortunately of a different kind from poor Toussaint’s, for however highly one might regard, theoretically, exultations and agonies and love and man’s unconquerable mind, she, for her part, preferred the Moulsfords.

But did she?

A bleak little doubt crept into her mind. As the weeks passed, the doubt grew bleaker. Invisible Moulsfords; Moulsfords delightful and most friendly when one met them, but whom one never did meet; Moulsfords full of almost intimacies; Moulsfords who said they were coming to see one again, and didn’t come; Moulsfords benignant, but somewhere else: were these in the long run, except as subjects of carefully modest conversation in South Winch—and South Winch, curiously, while it was plainly awe-struck by what had happened to Jocelyn yet was also definitely less friendly than it used to be—were these in the long run as life-giving, as satisfying, as fundamentally filling as Toussaint’s exultations and agonies?

Ah, one had to feel; feel positively, feel acutely. Anything, anything, any anger, any pain, any anxiety, any exasperation, anything at all that stabbed one alive, was better than this awful numbness, this empty, deadly, settled, stagnant, back-water calm....

And one evening, when it had been raining all day, after a period of standing at the drawing-room window looking out at the dripping front garden, where the almond-tree by the gate shivered in the grey twilight like a frail, half-naked ghost, she turned and went to her writing-table, and sat down and wrote a little note to Mr. Thorpe, and asked if he would not come in after his dinner, and chat, and show that they could still be good friends and neighbours; and when she had finished it, and signed herself Margery, with no Luke, she rang for the little maid, and bade her take it round to Abergeldie and bring back an answer.

‘For after all,’ she said to herself while she waited, standing by the fire and slowly smoothing one cold hand with the other, ‘he has sterling qualities.’

THE END


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