Clare turned and turned a china figure, in front of the wood fire. She had not foreseen this visit. Now were conjoined the forces of creed, convention, and comfort, and against them was only a defence that it was hateful to lay bare. She waited for her mother to speak.
“You see, darling, you haven’t told us anything.”
But how tell one who looked and spoke like that? She flushed, went pale, and said: “I can only say there’s a beast in him. I know it doesn’t show; but there is, Mother, there is!”
Lady Charwell, too, had flushed. It did not suit her, being over fifty.
“Your father and I will help you all we can, dear; only, of course, it is so important to take a right decision now.”
“And I, having made a wrong one already, can only be trusted to make another? You’ve got to take my word, Mother; I simply can’t talk about it, and I simply won’t go back with him.”
Lady Charwell had sat down, a furrow between her grey-blue eyes which seemed fixed on nothing. She turned them on her daughter, and said, hesitating:
“You’re sure it’s not just the beast that is in nearly all men?”
Clare laughed.
“Oh! no. I’m not easily upset.”
Lady Charwell sighed.
“Don’t worry, Mother dear; it’ll be all right once we’ve got this over. Nothing really matters nowadays.”
“So they say, but one has the bad habit still of believing that it does.”
At this near approach to irony Clare said quickly: “It matters that one should keep one’s self-respect. Really, with him I couldn’t.”
“We’ll say no more then. Your father will want to see you. You’d better take your things off.”
Clare kissed her and went out. There was no sound from below, and she went on up to her room. She felt her will-power stiffening. The days when men disposed of their women folk were long over, and—whatever Jerry and her father were concocting—she would not budge! When the summons came, she went to the encounter, blade-sharp, and hard as stone.
They were standing in the General’s office-like study, and she felt at once that they were in agreement. Nodding to her husband, she went over to her father.
“Well?”
But Corven spoke first.
“I leave it to you, sir.”
The General’s lined face looked mournful and irritated. He braced himself. “We’ve been going into this, Clare. Jerry admits that you’ve got much on your side, but he’s given me his word that he won’t offend you again. I want to appeal to you to try and see his point of view. He says, I think rightly, that it’s more to your interest even than to his. The old ideas about marriage may have gone, but, after all, you both took certain vows—but leaving that aside—”
“Yes,” said Clare.
The General twirled his little moustache, and thrust the other hand deep into his pocket.
“Well, what on earth is going to happen to you both? You can’t have a divorce—there’s your name, and his position, and—after only eighteen months. What are you going to do? Live apart? That’s not fair to you, or to him.”
“Fairer to both of us than living together will be.”
The General glanced at her hardened face. “So you say now; but we’ve both of us had more experience than you.”
“That was bound to be said sooner or later. You want me to go back with him?”
The General looked acutely unhappy.
“You know, my dear, that I only want what’s best for you.”
“And Jerry has convinced you that IS the best. Well, it’s the worst. I’m not going, Dad, and there’s an end of it.”
The General looked at her face, looked at the face of his son-inlaw, shrugged his shoulders, and began filling his pipe.
Jerry Corven’s eyes, which had been passing from face to face, narrowed and came to rest on Clare’s. That look lasted a long time, and neither flinched.
“Very well,” he said, at last, “I will make other arrangements. Good-bye, sir; good-bye, Clare!” And turning on his heel, he went out.
In the silence that followed, the sound of his car crunching away on the drive could be heard distinctly. The General, smoking glumly, kept his glance averted; Clare went to the window. It was growing dark outside, and now that the crisis was over she felt unstrung.
“I wish to God,” said her father’s voice, “that I could understand this business.”
Clare did not move from the window: “Did he tell you he’d used my riding whip on me?”
“What!” said the General.
Clare turned round.
“Yes.”
“On YOU?”
“Yes. That was not my real reason, but it put the finishing touch. Sorry to hurt you, Dad!”
“By God!”
Clare had a moment of illumination. Concrete facts! Give a man a fact!
“The ruffian!” said the Generaclass="underline" “The ruffian! He told me he spent the evening with you the other day; is that true?”
A slow flush had burned up in her cheeks.
“He practically forced himself in.”
“The ruffian!” said the General once more.
When she was alone again, she meditated wryly on the sudden difference that little fact about the whip had made in her father’s feelings. He had taken it as a personal affront, an insult to his own flesh and blood. She felt that he could have stood it with equanimity of someone else’s daughter; she remembered that he had even sympathised with her brother’s flogging of the muleteer, which had brought such a peck of trouble on them all. How little detached, how delightfully personal, people were! Feeling and criticising in terms of their own prejudices! Well! She was over the worst now, for her people were on her side, and she would make certain of not seeing Jerry alone again. She thought of the long look he had given her. He was a good loser, because for him the game was never at an end. Life itself—not each item of life—absorbed him. He rode Life, took a toss, got up, rode on; met an obstacle, rode over it, rode through it, took the scratches as all in the day’s work. He had fascinated her, ridden through and over her; the fascination was gone, and she wondered that it had ever been. What was he going to do now? Well! One thing was certain: somehow, he would cut his losses!
CHAPTER 13
One who gazes at the Temple’s smooth green turf, fine trees, stone-silled buildings, and pouter pigeons, feels dithyrambic, till on him intrudes the vision of countless bundles of papers tied round with pink tape, unending clerks in little outer chambers sucking thumbs and waiting for solicitors, calf-bound tomes stored with reports of innumerable cases so closely argued that the light-minded sigh at sight of them and think of the Café Royal. Who shall deny that the Temple harbours the human mind in excelsis, the human body in chairs; who shall gainsay that the human spirit is taken off at its entrances and left outside like the shoes of those who enter a mosque? Not even to its Grand Nights is the human spirit admitted, for the legal mind must not ‘slop over,’ and warning is given by the word ‘Decorations’ on the invitation cards. On those few autumn mornings when the sun shines, the inhabitant of the Temple who faces East may possibly feel in his midriff as a man feels on a hilltop, or after hearing a Brahms symphony, or even when seeing first daffodils in spring; if so, he will hastily remember where he is, and turn to: Collister v. Daverday: Popdick intervening.
And yet, strangely, Eustace Dornford, verging on middle age, was continually being visited, whether the sun shone or not, by the feeling of one who sits on a low wall in the first spring warmth, seeing life as a Botticellian figure advancing towards him through an orchard of orange trees and spring flowers. At less expenditure of words, he was ‘in love’ with Dinny. Each morning when he saw Clare he was visited by a longing not to dictate on parliamentary subjects, but rather to lead her to talk about her sister. Self-controlled, however, and with a sense of humour, he bowed to his professional inhibitions, merely asking Clare whether she and her sister would dine with him, “on Saturday—here, or at the Café Royal?”