Mrs. Ames (28 page)

It desired love, and in its desire it suffered all degradation to obtain it. And no leanness of soul entered into the gratification of its desire. Only when its desire was pinched and rationed, or when, by the operation of civilized law, all fruit of desire was denied it, so that the blossom of sex was made into one unfruitful bud, did revolt come. Long generations produced the germ, long generations made it active. At length it swam up to sight, from subaqueous dimnesses, feeble and violent, conscious of the justice of its cause and demanding justice. But what helped to make the desire for
justice so attractive was the violence, the escape from self-repression that the demand gave opportunity for, to many who, all their lives, had been corked or wired down in comfort, which no woman cares about, or sealed up in spinster-hood and decorous emptiness of days. There was justice in the demand, and hysterical excitement in demanding.

To others, and in this little league of Riseborough there were many such, the prospect of making those demands was primarily appalling, and to none more than to poor Mrs Ames, when the plan of campaign was discussed, decided on, and entrusted to the members of the league. It required almost more courage than the idea was capable of inspiring to face, even in anticipation, the thought of shouting ‘Votes for Women' when good-humoured Cousin James rose and said ‘Ladies and gentlemen!' Very possibly, as had often happened in Cousin James' previous candidatures, Lyndhurst would wish his wife to ask him and the President of the Board of Trade to dinner before the meeting, an occasion which would warrant the materialization of the most sumptuous of all the dinners tabulated on the printed menu cards, while sherry would be given with soup, hock with fish, and a constant flow of champagne be kept up afterwards, until port time. In that case Cousin James would certainly ask them to sit on the platform, and they would roll richly to the town hall in his motor, all blazing with Conservative colours, while she, in a small bag, would be surreptitiously conveying there her great Suffragette rosette, and a small steel chain with a padlock. She would be sitting probably next to the Mayor, who would introduce the speakers, and no doubt refer to ‘the presence of the fair sex' who graced the platform. During this she would have to pin her colours on her dress, chain herself up like Andromeda, snap the patent spring lock of the
padlock, and when Sir James rose … her imagination could not grapple with the picture: it turned sickly away, refusing to contemplate. And this to a cousin and a guest, who had just eaten the best salt, so to speak, of her table, from one who all her life had been so perfect a piece of propriety! She felt far too old a bottle for such new wine. Sitting surrounded by fellow-crusaders, and infected by the proximity of their undiluted enthusiasm, it would be difficult enough, but that she should chain herself, perhaps, to the very leg of the table which Cousin James would soon thump in the fervour of his oratory, as he announced all those Tory platitudes in which she so firmly believed, and which she must so shrilly interrupt, while sitting solitary in the desert of his sleek and staid supporters, was not only an impossible but an unthinkable achievement. Whatever horrors fate, that gruesome weaver of nightmares, might have in store for her, she felt that here was something that transcended imagination. She could not sit on the platform with Lyndhurst and Cousin James and the Mayor and Lady Westbourne, and do what was required of her, for the sake of any crusade. Curfew, so to speak, would have to ring that night.

She and Lyndhurst were dining alone the evening after this meeting of ‘ways and means', he in that state of mind which she not inaptly described as ‘worried' when she felt kind, and ‘cross' when she felt otherwise. He had come home hot from his walk, and, having sat in his room where there was no fire, when evening fell chilly, had had a smart touch of lumbago. Thus there were clearly two causes for complaint against Amy, and a third disturbing topic, for there was no shadow of doubt that it was his bouquet of chrysanthemums that he had found in the road outside Dr Evans' house, and even before the lumbago had produced its
characteristic pessimism, he had been unable to find any encouraging explanation of this floral castaway.

‘I'm sure I don't know what was the good of my spending all August,' he said, ‘in that filthy hole of a Harrogate, at no end of expense, too, if I'm to be crippled all winter. But you urged me to so strongly: should never have thought of going there otherwise.'

‘My dear, you have only been crippled for half an hour at present,' she observed. ‘It is a great bore, but if only you will take a good hot bath tonight, and have a very light dinner, I expect you will be much better in the morning. Parker, tell them to see that there is plenty of hot water in the kitchen boiler.'

‘It'll be the only warm thing in the house, if there is,' said he. ‘My room was like an ice house when I came in. Positively like an ice house. Enough to give a man pneumonia, let alone lumbago. Soup cold, too.'

‘My dear, you should take more care of yourself,' said Mrs Ames placidly. ‘Why did you not light the fire instead of being cold? I'm sure it was laid.'

‘And have it just burning up at dinnertime,' said he, ‘when I no longer wanted it.'

It was still early in the course of dinner.

‘Light the fire in the drawing room, Parker,' said Mrs Ames. ‘Let there be a good fire when we come out of dinner.'

‘Get roasted alive,' said Major Ames, half to himself, but intending to be heard.

But Mrs Ames' mind had been feasting for weeks past on things which had a solider existence than her husband's unreasonable strictures. Since this new diet had been hers, his snaps and growls had produced no effect: they often annoyed her into repartee, and as likely as not, a few months
ago, she would have said that his claret seemed a very poor kind of beverage. But tonight she felt not the smallest desire to retort. She was very sorry for his lumbago, but felt no inclination to carry the war into his territories, or to tell him that if people, perspiring freely, and of gouty habit, choose to sit down without changing, and get chilly, they must expect reprisal for their imprudence.

‘Then we will open the window, dear,' she said, ‘if we find we are frizzling. But I don't think it will be too hot. Evenings are chilly in October. Did you have a pleasant lunch, Lyndhurst? Indeed, I don't know where you lunched. I ordered curry for you. I sat down at a quarter to two as you did not come in.'

It was all so infinitesimal … yet it was the mental diet which had supported her for years. Perhaps after dinner they would play picquet. The garden, the kitchen, for years, except for gossip infinitely less real, these had been the topics. There had been no joy for him in the beauty of the garden, only a pleased sense of proprietorship, if a rare plant flowered, or if there were more roses than usual. For her, she had been vaguely pleased if Lyndhurst had taken two helpings of a dish, and both of them had been vaguely disquieted if Harry quoted Swinburne.

‘I lunched with the Evanses,' he said. ‘By the way, I met your cousin James Westbourne this afternoon, when I was on my walk. Extraordinarily cordial he gets when there's business ahead that brings him into Riseborough, and he wants to cadge a dinner or two. It's little notice he takes of us the rest of the year, and I'm sure it's a couple of years since he so much as sent you a brace of pheasants, and more than that since he asked me to shoot there. But as I say, when he wants to pick up a dinner or two in Riseborough, he's all heartiness, and saying he doesn't see half enough of us.
He doesn't seem to strain himself in trying to see more, and there's seldom a weekend when he and that great guy of a wife of his don't have the house packed with people. I suppose we're not smart enough for them, except when it's convenient to dine in Riseborough. Then he's not above drinking a bottle of my champagne.'

Mrs Ames was eager in support of her husband.

‘I'm sure there's no call for you to open any more bottles for him, my dear,' she said. ‘If Cousin James wants to see us, he can take his turn in asking us. And Harriet is a great guy, as you say, with her big fiddle-head.'

Major Ames shrugged his shoulders rather magnificently.

‘I'm sure I don't grudge him his dinner,' he said, ‘and, in point of fact, I told him he could come and dine with us before his first meeting. He's got some Cabinet Minister with him, and I said he could bring him too. You might get up a little party, that's to say if I'm not in bed with this infernal lumbago. And Cousin James will return our hospitality by giving us seats on the platform to hear him stamp and stammer and rant. An infernal bad speaker. Never heard a worse. Wretched delivery, nothing to say, and says it all fifty times over. Enough to make a man turn Radical. However, he'll have made himself at home with my Mumm, and perhaps he'll go to sleep himself before he sends us off.'

This, of course, represented the lumbago view. Major Ames had been fulsomely cordial to Cousin James, and had himself urged the dinner that he represented now as being forced on him.

‘Have you actually asked him, Lyndhurst?' said Mrs Ames rather faintly. ‘Did he say he would come?'

‘Did you ever know your Cousin James refuse a decent dinner?' asked Lyndhurst. ‘And he was kind enough to say
he would like it at a quarter past seven. Cool, upon my word! I wish I had asked him if he'd have thick soup or clear, and if he preferred a wing to a leg. That's the sort of thing one never thinks of till afterwards.'

Mrs Ames was not attending closely: there was that below the surface which claimed all her mind. Consequently she missed the pungency of this irony, hearing only the words.

‘Cousin James never takes soup at all,' she said. ‘He told me it always disagreed.'

Major Ames sighed; his lumbago felt less acute, his ill temper had found relief in words, and he had long ago discovered that women had no sense of humour. On the whole, it was gratifying to find the truth of this so amply endorsed. For the moment it put him into quite a good temper.

‘I'm afraid I've been grumbling all dinner,' he said. ‘Shall we go into the other room? There's little sense in my looking at the decanters, if I mayn't take my glass of port. Eh! That was a twinge!'

 

*
[Ed. note: An obsolete early Saxon word for a rabbit's white bob-tail.]

‘I
T
is no use, Henry,' said Mrs Altham on that same evening, ‘telling me it is all stuff and nonsense, when I've seen with my own eyes the parcel of Suffragette riband being actually directed to Mrs Brooks; for pen and ink is pen and ink, when all is said and done. Tapworth measured off six yards of it on the counter-measure that gives two feet, for he gave nine lengths of it and put it in paper and directed it. Of course, if nine lengths of two feet doesn't make eighteen feet, which is six yards, I am wrong and you are right, and twice two no longer makes four. And there were two other parcels already done up of exactly the same shape. You will see if I am not right. Or do you suppose that Mrs Brooks is ordering it just to trim her nightgown with it?'

‘I never said anything about Mrs Brooks' nightgown,' said Henry, who, to do him justice, had been goaded into slightly Rabelaisian mood: ‘I never thought about Mrs Brooks' nightgown. I didn't know she wore one - I mean - '

Mrs Altham made what children would call ‘a face'. Her eyes grew suddenly fixed and boiled, and her mouth assumed an acidulated expression as if with a plethora of lemon juice.
The ‘face' was due to the entry of the parlourmaid with the pudding. It was jelly, and was served in silence. Mrs Altham waited till the door was quietly closed again.

‘It is not a question of Mrs Brooks' nightgown,' she said, ‘since we both agree that she would not order six yards of Suffragette riband to trim it. I spoke sarcastically, Henry, and you interpreted me literally, as you often do. It was the same at Littlestone in August, when the bacon was so salty one day that I said to Mrs Churchill that a little bacon in the bath would be equivalent to sea bathing. Upon which you must needs tell her next morning to send your bacon to the bathroom, which she did, and there was a plate of bacon on the sponge tray, so extraordinary. But all that is beside the point, though what she can have thought of you I can't imagine. After all, your gift of being literal may help you now. Why does Mrs Brooks want six yards of Suffragette riband, and why are there two similar parcels on Tapworth's counter? If I had had a moment alone I would certainly have looked at the other addresses, and seen where they were being sent. But young Tapworth was there all the time - that one with the pince-nez, and the ridiculous chin - and he put them into the errand-boy's basket, and told him to be sharp about it. So I had no chance of seeing.'

‘You might have strolled along behind the boy to see where he went,' suggested Mr Altham.

‘He went on a bicycle,' said Mrs Altham, ‘and it is impossible to stroll behind a boy on a bicycle and hope to get there in time. But he went up the High Street. I should not in the least wonder if Mrs Evans had turned Suffragette, after that note to me about her not having time to attend the anti-Suffragette meetings.'