Non-combatants and Others Part 25

'Nine. No, I'm too young for that, like the porter--let's say three. Oh, I don't know--I don't count really. Quite few. Cousin Emily doesn't really like it much. She and Kate don't smoke at all, and Evie's only just learning. We're not a vicious household; our chief excesses are chocolates and hot milk.'

'Well, my outside rule is five, you know, in peace time, and now it's three. I should advise only two for you. Linda Durell is for starting and selling Health Cigarettes, but I won't have it, I think they are too disgusting. One must draw the line somewhere.... Is this Clapton? Who _lives_ in Clapton, by the way? I know the secretary of the Women's Wage Increase Committee does--but who else? Of course people _used_ to, in the nineteenth century. Your great-grandfather did. And Cowper, I think--or was it Dr. Watts? Some one who wrote hymns. Those look like good people's houses there.'

'Yes. Oh, bishops live here, and retired generals, and stockbrokers, and thousands of babies. And the Vinneys. And lots of dreadfully common people, Kate says. They all play tennis in the Park. This is Spring Hill.'

'So I see. And there's Primmerose. Tell him to stop.'

'No, darling, Primmerose is some one else's. It's Violette we want; do remember, mother, because the Primmerose people are common, and we don't like being confused. Here we are.'

3

They got out. Daphne, having decided without discussion the probable size of the chauffeur's family, judicially tipped him and told him to return for her at half-past five. She then entered Violette and met Mrs.

Frampton in the hall. Mrs. Frampton, like Alix and so many others, was much smaller than she was; Daphne had to bend graciously to shake hands.

Mrs. Frampton was a little shy of the tall, distinguished, clever, beautiful cousin of her clever, distinguished, little-known second husband. Daphne, was, in a manner, a public personage; most people knew her name. She had for long been at once ornamental and useful, a fountain-head of a perpetually vigorous stream of energies, some generally approved, others regarded by many as harmful, that watered England; but Violette, for good or ill, was outside their furthest spraying. Mrs. Frampton looked from far off, as she had looked at Professor Frampton, at the brilliant, not-to-be-understood energies of a worker in worlds by her not realised. This makes one shy, even if one believes oneself to be a denizen of a superior world, and Mrs. Frampton lacked this consolation. She was a humble person, and knew that Daphne and Professor Frampton had the best of it.

They sat in the drawing-room, where there would soon be tea. Daphne looked round the room with an inward gasp: she really hadn't expected it to be quite so bad as this. The Summertown drawing-room, which she vaguely remembered, had been a little the drawing-room of her cousin Laurence. She took it all in rapidly, and, as if hypnotised, came back to rest on 'Thou seest me' and the watching Eye.

'My poor child,' she thought. 'I must take her away _at once_. It's a wonder she's not actually had a _crise de nerfs_, with the wretched nervous system she inherits from Paul, and that Eye always watching her....'

Mrs. Frampton meanwhile was amiably talking, nervous but pleased.

'It's been so delightful having dear Alix all these months. So nice for the girls, too. We've made quite a little party of young people, haven't we, Alix? And other young people drop in quite frequently--Alix's brother, of course, which is always so very nice--he's wonderfully clever, isn't he--and that pleasant Mr. Doye, who lost his finger; I'm sure we quite miss him now he's gone back to the army again; and friends of my girls, and friends of Alix's. Often we're quite a party. It keeps us all quite cheerful and merry, even in these dreadful days, doesn't it, Alix?'

'Yes,' said Alix.

'Only this child works so hard at her drawing and painting all day, she doesn't get much time for play. I'm sure they work them too hard at these art schools. She looks quite overdone and poorly, don't you think so, Mrs. Sandomir?'

'Oh, she'll be all right directly,' said Daphne, who didn't approve of discussing people's poor health in their presence, thinking it made them worse.

'It's mostly nerves and fancy, I expect,' she added, giving a light pat to Alix's arm. 'Shouldn't be given way to. I expect you've been spoiling her.'

'No, I haven't--no, indeed.' Mrs. Frampton was pleased. 'I _have_ thought she looked thin and below par often, and I've made her take lots of milk, and that nice ovaltine, and even malt and cod-liver oil, but she wouldn't go on with that. There's a very nice stuff that's being advertised everywhere now--Fattine--and I want her to try that.'

'Oh, Alix was always thin. I don't believe in worrying with medicines.

We mustn't make her sorry for herself by talking about her like this....

That's Evie, isn't it? _She_ doesn't look as if she needed medicine, anyhow. I should like to have her for an advertis.e.m.e.nt in the windows of my Health Food shop.'

Evie was followed by Kate, Florence, and tea. Daphne thought Kate and the tea-cups both deplorable. Kate had been going round her district with parish magazines. She hadn't succeeded (district visitors never do) in collecting all the pennies for them, and told her mother which persons hadn't paid.

'And of course that Mrs. Fittle, in Paradise Court, lay low and pretended to be out, as usual. I expect she was--' Kate pursed her lips, which meant drunk. Mrs. Frampton nodded intelligently.

'The Clapton people are terribly difficult to deal with,' Kate explained to Daphne. 'Dreadfully ungrateful, too, very often. The clergy and workers may do anything for them, but it's all no more than what's their due, and no thanks, only grumbles. Do you find them like that in Cambridge?' (which was the town in which Daphne, if she had one anywhere, presumably had a district).

'Not a bit,' said Daphne briskly. 'The idea of expecting me to find anything so commonplace,' was her inward comment. 'This girl is the worst of the lot.'

'Kate does a great deal of parish work,' Mrs. Frampton explained. 'She's quite busy always, with church things.'

'Yes?' Daphne was vague, hiding how much she disapproved of church things.

'Now I'm afraid I'm used to a rather different sort of service from those Kate attends,' Mrs. Frampton continued. 'I'm old-fas.h.i.+oned, I know. Kate's church goes a touch too high for me.'

Something in her visitor's face, a certain blankness, suggested to her that probably Daphne knew no difference between high and low, but condemned both with impartial unfairness. She remembered that Alix hadn't been brought up to go to any sort of church. Alix, being of a later generation, had indeed a fairly open mind on these matters; but Daphne, the product of a more p.r.o.nounced and condemning age, rejected with emphasis. The Christian religion, as taught in churches, was to her pernicious, retrograde, the hampering relic of a darker age. Some glimmering of this att.i.tude filtered through to Mrs. Frampton, and fl.u.s.tered her. She added, 'But of course we can't all think the same way about things, can we?... I hope you enjoyed your trip round the world, Mrs. Sandomir.'

'Very much, thank you.'

'You visited the Balkans, didn't you? That must have been very alarming and wild. I'm sure it was wonderfully brave of you to go there, with all this upset, and all the natives so unsettled. I'm afraid I shouldn't have had the courage.'

'The upset,' said Daphne, 'was less advanced than it is now, when I was there. I had a most interesting time....' But not really, in the main, suitable to tell Mrs. Frampton about, so she rapidly selected.

'The Bulgarian babies--you never saw anything so pleasant. You'd love them, Mrs. Frampton. You should go there some time. And their teeth come through when they're about six weeks old, for some reason. It's just as well, because their ideas about milk cleanliness are most behindhand. I talked to a sort of mothers' meeting about it, but I don't think they even began to understand. I expect my Bulgarian wasn't idiomatic enough.

Oh dear, the _dirt_ of those infants....'

'Fancy! It does seem a wickedness not to keep little babies clean, doesn't it? There's one at a house in this road--Primmerose--and I'm sure it goes to one's heart to see the way it's kept.'

Kate said, fastidiously, 'Those Primmerose people aren't nice in any way, I'm afraid. There are some very regrettable people come settling round here lately--people one can't dream of knowing. It's a great pity.'

'People will settle, won't they,' Daphne said vaguely. 'It's better perhaps than being unsettled, like the Balkan people.' Daphne never punned except in absence of mind, rightly believing the habit to rise from weakness of intellect; but she was thinking now not of Clapton nor of the Balkan people, but of an address she was giving that evening to a meeting of the N.U.W.S.S. on her recent experiences, and which she had only inadequately prepared. She pulled herself together, however, and became charming, attentive, and intelligent for the rest of tea.

'And what did you think of the United States?' Mrs. Frampton inquired.

'Will they come in, do you think, or won't the President let them, whatever occurs? You met the President, didn't you? How did he strike you?'

'Oh, delightful. Like most governments; they're nearly all charming personally, I believe. So much stronger, as a rule, in the heart than in the head. They mean so much good and do much harm, poor dears. A curse seems to dog them. They're the victims of an iniquitous and insane system; and they lack fore-sight and sound judgment so terribly, for all their good intentions.'

'You would scarcely say the Kaiser had good intentions,' Mrs. Frampton suggested dubiously.

Daphne said, 'I don't know him, but I'm told he has all sorts, good and bad, like other mischievous people.'

'We all know, anyhow, where good intentions pave the way to,' said Kate, more epigrammatic than usual, so that Mrs. Frampton said, 'Hush, dear,'

and added, 'He'll have to face the consequences of his actions some day, when he's called to give account of his life. Perhaps we oughtn't to forestall his condemnation, poor man.'

Daphne said, 'Indeed, I'm quite sure we ought. Condemnation will be singularly little use at the moment you refer to,' and then, because that moment would be a fruitless, and indeed most unsuitable, topic of conversation between her and Mrs. Frampton, she left it, and talked about flats in town, a subject which she and Violette regarded from standpoints very nearly as far sundered as those from which they contemplated the last judgment.

After tea, Mrs. Frampton said she and Kate and Evie would now go away and leave Daphne and Alix alone together, which they did.

The door shut behind them, and Daphne pa.s.sed her long, capable hand over her forehead and shut her eyes for a moment.

'My dear child--what you have been through! It must end at once. So kind, and so unthinkably trying! No wonder--oh well, never mind, you'll soon be all right now.... Do they know _anything_ about anything that matters? No, quite obviously not.'

'I'd rather they didn't, mother. I don't like the things that matter.

I've been quite comfortable.'

'Comfortable! With that Eye! Nonsense, child.... The idea of our _having_ such relations, even by marriage.... Laurence Frampton was really too queer. I've often wondered whether his head wasn't a little going when he did it; he had been peculiar in several ways. Quite suddenly voted conservative--which year was it, now? I think myself life had tired him; people wanted to abolish Greek in Responsions, and so on, and he had some worries in his college, and private money difficulties too, I believe; Oxford people are so extravagant sometimes; so he fell back on a little cus.h.i.+ony wife as one might on to a pillow, and died quietly soon afterwards. Most tragic, really; such a brilliant fellow he was.... Now there's my taxi back again. I'm going first to Nicky's, then to dine at the Club with Francie Claverhouse, before addressing the N.U.W.S.S. By the way, I'm fearfully out of temper with them--have you been following their policy lately? They've been _criminally_ weak on Conscription.... We shall have to have a split, as usual.... Good-bye, darling. Run and fetch your cousin Emily to say good-bye to me. No, only your cousin Emily; I can't speak to Kate, she's the epitome of all the ages of the drab and narrow feminine. And Evie is immoral, and carries on with Gordon's jam. It isn't right that you should be here. None of them have any principles.'

While she talked, Daphne was collecting her bags, papers and furs, with her quick, graceful, decisive movements. Alix watched her, feeling, as she sometimes did in her mother's presence, as if she sucked up all the ozone in the air and left none for her.

They found Mrs. Frampton in the hall, full of shy and beaming kindness.

Daphne took her hand and looked down on her cordially.