The Man Who Did the Right Thing: A Romance
She never talks about anything but Queen Victoria, but I find
that--somehow--awfully soothing--takes me back to the happy old time
when I was a care-free girl, proud of my secret engagement to you.
* * * * *
_Dear_ Roger. I have lost _all_ my good looks. That's why I don't want
you to see me till I recover them--a little. Meantime, dearest of
friends and cousins, if you believe in _Anything_ with a power to
save--alas! _I_ don't--pray to it to save me from this terror that hangs
over me--especially in the silent watches of the night--and bring me
back safe from my world-tour, with at least another ten years of life
before me.
Whilst I am away, remember Engledene is entirely at your children's
disposal. I have written to the head gardener to see that fresh flowers
are sent every now and again to Lucy's grave. You will tell him when?
Lucy was a _real good sort_ and I think she came to understand me and
forgive....
Ever yours,
SIBYL.
Roger spent the remainder of 1909 as he had planned: looking after his
boys and girls to some extent, trying to get interested in his children.
The girls bored him with their chatter of surface things: school
quarrels and rivalries, school friendships, school mistresses; their
individual tastes in chocolate creams and caramels; their school sports;
the actors whom they adored--at a distance--and whose photographs they
collected; their disdain for those silly asses the Suffragettes--_they_
themselves would _never_ want a vote! The two boys were not much less
shallow with their Sandhurst and school-boy slang--"top-hole, sir,"
"ripping," "ruddy," "rotters," "we rotted 'em a bit"--their school-boy
games of such vast importance; their dislike of anything sincere,
original, warm-hearted; their rash criticisms of great writers, frantic
admiration for great sportsmen, religious reverence for cut and colour,
style and form; enthusiasm in general for things that did not matter and
contempt for things that did.
Was he like that at their age? Had Sibyl the elder at sixteen been such
a goose as Sibyl the younger? Was it the hollow falsity of a classical
education, the dreary sham of School Christianity which had made his
boys so cynical, so coarse in their tastes? His children were good to
look at, handsome, healthy, physically well-bred. But weren't
they--weren't their contemporaries a bit heartless? These in particular
had forgotten their mother completely. Yet surely they might have
remembered Lucy's unceasing tenderness and the many sacrifices of health
and convenience she had made for them?
In the press of that day and in the books and plays most in vogue you
were supposed to make everything give way to the pleasures, needs,
caprices, expectations of the young, of the coming generation. But why
had no author the courage to point out the lack of interest which youth
under twenty-one possessed for most persons of matured mind? Girls of
eighteen wrote novels entirely without experience and direct observation
of life, merely based on their wishy-washy recollections of books
written by "grown-ups"; boys of eighteen published sardonic poems and
green-cheese essays for which they ought to have been birched, not
boomed. How infinitely preferable to Roger, when he put his secret
thoughts into words, was the society of middle-aged friends and
relations of his own period in life, who really had brain convolutions
moulded by sad and joyous, sharp and unusual experience.
Aunt Maud said there was something evidently very wrong with his liver,
and his sons and daughters in an interchange of eye-glances gave a tacit
assent. They had felt (though they had never dared to say so in his
hearing) a tiny bit ashamed of their ineffective mother. Wasn't it
rather _infra dig._ to have been a school-teacher and a missionary? But
of their father they all stood in awe, because he was considered in his
time a handsome man, was now of distinguished appearance, and was
respected in the best circles as an explorer, a big-game shot, a
naturalist, and a man who had made some part of Africa pay. But if he
stooped to their level and attempted to justify this eminence by talking
technically on African subjects or on home problems they soon showed
they thought him a bore.
Aunt Sibyl they spoke of warmly, and wailed over the illness which kept
her absent from their circle. She was their ideal of a modern great
lady. Her cynical speeches appealed to their own lack of convictions;
there was nothing "soppy" about Aunt Sibyl.
So Roger escaped whenever he could from his home circle and travelled in
Germany, France, Holland, Italy, in order to study the game of foreign
politics, find out why in most people's light-hearted opinion a great
war was "inevitable" as a solution of conflicting ambitions, and whether
it might not be possible to avert it completely if only Britain,
Germany, the United States and France could form a League for the
maintenance of peace.
The Schraeders made much of him in Germany. Rather timidly they stood up
against Potsdam, tried to create an opinion in the South German
States--their Alsatian origin carried them in that direction--favourable
to a Naval and Colonial understanding with Britain. At their
instigation Roger gave a series of addresses in western and southern
Germany in 1910 which were deemed a great success, though they were
rather frowned on in Berlin. He promised to renew his visit and his
lectures in the autumn of 1911.
Meanwhile, Sibyl had returned to London in the early autumn of 1910. It
was of course the dead season, but it gradually dawned on Society that
she intended to entertain no more. She was probably going to write a
book about the British Empire; she had turned quite serious, others
said, and was going in for religion. She had evidently lost her health
and--no doubt--her appearance.
Roger had hastened to greet her in the much shut-up house in Carlton
House Terrace. Here she sat, generally with her back to the light. He
was prepared to find her greatly altered. What struck him most was the
pathetic thinness of face and hands, and the shapelessness of the
figure. The new fashions in dress--straight up and down, no waist, one
of the greatest revolutions of our age--helped her here, but at the
expense of womanly charm. For Roger had the old-fashioned man-mind
which has for some twenty thousand years--did it not begin in
Aurignacian times?--admired the incurve below the well-furnished female
bust and the outcurve from waist to hip.
"I'm glad you came so promptly," said Sibyl, "because I'm turning out of
this gloomy mansion and surrendering it to Clithy. I simply can't
afford to keep it up _and_ Engledene too, and although he says of course
he will pay for everything and I can have my own suite of rooms, I
somehow fancy a cosy little flat which I could share with Maud, or Vicky
Masham when she comes back from the States.... Yes, I left her at
Washington, going to stay at the White House. I came back alone from
there, but I had sulky Sophie to look after me. One thing that makes me
think, Roger, that I am _really_ ill, really doomed, is that Sophie no
longer gives me notice whenever any whim of mine displeases her. I am
sure she is saying to herself now, 'The poor old gal won't be with us
much longer: better hang on with her and then she may leave me
something.' But about Vicky, for it really is a good story.... Only
first I'm going to--or you might--ring for tea. Of course you'll stay?
You couldn't in decency refuse.--Do you know, we haven't set eyes on one
another for ... for ... _three years_? We are both swallowing pungent
things we might say about one another's appearance, and both resolving
to bite our tongues off rather than say them." ... (To servant: "Tea
please; and ask Miss Mills to make the sandwiches, _my_ sandwiches, I
mean.") ... "I have to take these frame-foods in the form of sandwiches,
and Sophie has learnt the art of making them so seductive that I get
them down without any difficulty....
"About Vicky.--Do draw up your chair; you needn't be so frigid with a
moribund friend. Directly it became known in California that Vicky had
been a maid of honour to the late Queen Victoria, my dear, the Americans
nearly killed us with kindness! Our roles were reversed. _She_ was the
lady of distinction and _I_ was her travelling companion. You know the
Americans, especially in the west and east, have a _culte_ for Queen
Victoria, and Vicky's stories of her home life held them spell-bound.
She felt in her position it wouldn't be right to _lecture publicly_ on
her late mistress, but the difficulty was got over.--D'you still drink
tea without sugar? I'm told I _ought_ to take it--got over by
drawing-room meetings, tickets subscribed for, and no charge at the
door, a sumptuous tea--supposed to be modelled on the kind of tea the
Queen took at Osborne--served in the middle of Vicky's talk. She refused
to take any direct payment, so they sent her _thumping_ cheques for her
travelling expenses. And now she's going to put her talks on Queen
Victoria as Mother, Wife and Queen into a book.--One way and another,
she'll make five or six thousand pounds out of the whole business. And
I'm _jolly_ glad. It'll be some provision for her real old age, after
I'm gone--for I shan't have much to leave, and most of that I must give
to my sisters in the Colonies and to your Sibyl, and some of my
servants....
"Now: you've got _endless_ things to tell _me_. Indeed I really can't
see why we should be separated, now, except when we are put to bed. You
must be a mental wreck, and I am a physical one.... I got frightfully
tired in the States--it spoilt much of the good I derived from the long
steamer voyages.... We are simply two imprisoned souls in very battered
cages. All the gilding is off mine."
Roger saw as much of Lady Silchester as he could during the last months
of 1910. He and Maud assisted her to find just the right sort of flat,
where she would have no household worries, where, in fact, she need only
keep Sophie to look after her. They all spent a reasonably merry
Christmas at Engledene, where Lord Silchester joined them, and where
Fatima--Maud junior--expressed and perhaps felt such an intense interest
in his Keltic operas and reforms in stage scenery that a glint of the
match-maker's eagerness came into Sibyl's tired eyes; she pressed
Roger's hand and murmured, "_Wouldn't_ it be _too_ delightful...?"
During the first half of 1911 the Intelligence Division of the War
Office discovered Major Brentham as a really great authority on African
geography and African campaigns, and he worked there over maps, and gave
them in addition much other information. As some return he was gazetted
Colonel, and again there was talk of utilizing such an administrative
capacity in our own dominions.
In June, 1911, Sibyl's physician and surgeon were not altogether
satisfied as to her progress towards recovery, and suggested she might
derive great benefit from the waters of Villette, a thermal station in
the east of France near the Vosges. So she said to Roger: "_You look_
quite as ill as I _feel_. It's malaria. You never quite got rid of
that blackwater fever. Come to Villette later on. Maud and the girls
and Clithy could join us too. I'll have a month first of all, alone
except for Vicky. I'll give the closest attention to the cure, and then
perhaps when you arrive I may be able to sit up and take notice and even
do a little motoring...."
Accordingly the scene of this dwindling story changes in
Villette-es-Vosges, a _Ville d'eaux_ in eastern France, in the month of
August and September, 1911. Germany has spoilt the summer for all