Mrs. Ames (23 page)

Mrs Ames was not very imaginative, but it occurred to her that the newly planted magnolia had not been prospering.

‘No real cause for anxiety,' he said. ‘But the fact is that I went to see Dr Evans this morning - don't be frightened, my dear - and got thoroughly overhauled by him, thoroughly overhauled. He said there was no reason for anxiety, assured me of it. But I'm gouty, my dear, there's no doubt of it, and of course you remember about your poor Aunt Harriet. Well, there it is. And he says Harrogate. A bore, of course, but Harrogate. But no cause for anxiety: he told me so twice.'

Mrs Ames gave one moment to calm, clear, oysterlike reflection, unhurried, unalarmed. There was no shadow of reason why she should tell him what Mrs Evans' plans were. But it was odd that she should suddenly decide to stop in Riseborough, instead of going to Harrogate, having heard from Harry that the Ames' were to remain at home, and Lyndhurst as suddenly be impelled to go to Harrogate, instead of stopping in Riseborough. A curious coincidence. Everybody seemed to be making plans. At any rate she would not add to their number, but only acquiesce in those which were made.

‘My dear Lyndhurst, what an upset!' she said. ‘Of course, if you tell me there is no cause for anxiety, I will not be anxious. Does Dr Evans recommend you to go to Harrogate now? You must tell me all he said. They always go in August, do they not? That will be pleasant for you. But I am afraid you will find the waters far from palatable.'

Major Ames felt that he had not made a sufficiently important impression.

‘Of course, I told Dr Evans I could decide nothing till I had consulted you,' he said. ‘It seems a great break-up to leave you and Harry here and go away like this. It was that I was thinking of, not whether waters are palatable or not. I have more than half a mind not to go. I daresay I shall worry through all right without.'

Again Mrs Ames made a little pause.

‘You must do as Dr Evans tells you to do,' she said. ‘I am sure he is not faddy or fussy.'

Major Ames' experience of him this morning fully endorsed this. Certainly he had been neither, whatever the difference between the two might be.

‘Well, my dear, if both you and Dr Evans are agreed,' he said, ‘I mustn't set myself up against you.'

‘Now did he tell you where to go?'

‘He gave me the address of his own lodgings.'

‘What a convenient arrangement! Now, my dear, I beg you to waste no time. Send off a telegram, and pay the reply, and we'll pack you off tomorrow. I am sure it is the right thing to do.'

A sudden conviction, painfully real, that he was behaving currishly, descended on Major Ames. The feeling was so entirely new to him that he would have liked to put it down to an obsession of gout in a new place - the conscience, for instance, for he could hardly believe that he should be self-accused of paltry conduct. He felt as if there must be some mistake about it. He almost wished that Amy had made difficulties; then there would have been the compensatory idea that she was behaving badly too. But she could not have conducted herself in a more guilelessly sympathetic manner; she seemed to find no inherent improbability in Dr Evans
having counselled Harrogate, no question as to the advisability of following his advice. It was almost unpleasant to him to have things made so pleasant.

But then this salutary impression was effaced, for anything that savoured of self-reproach could not long find harbourage in his mind. Instead, he pictured himself at Harrogate station, welcoming the Evans'. She would probably be looking rather tired and fragile after the journey, but he would have a cab ready for her, and tea would be awaiting them when they reached the lodgings …

A
WEEK
later Mrs Ames was sitting at breakfast, with Harry opposite her, expecting the early post, and among the gifts of the early post a letter from her husband. He had written one very soon after his arrival at Harrogate, saying that he felt better already. The waters, as Amy had conjectured, could not be described as agreeable, since their composition chiefly consisted of those particular ingredients which gave to rotten eggs their characteristic savour, but what, so said the valiant, did a bad taste in the mouth matter, if you knew it was doing you good? An excellent band encouraged the swallowing of this disagreeable fluid, and by lunch time baths and drinking were over for the day. He was looking forward to the Evans' arrival; it would be pleasant to see somebody he knew. He would write again before many days.

The post arrived; there was a letter for her in the Major's large sprawling handwriting, and she opened it. But it was scarcely a letter: a blister of expletives covered the smoking pages … and the Evans' - two of them - had arrived.

Mrs Ames' little toadlike face seldom expressed much more than a ladylike composure, but had Harry been
watching his mother he might have thought that a shade of amusement hovered there.

‘A letter from your father,' she said. ‘Rather a worried letter. The cure is lowering, I believe, and makes you feel out of sorts.'

Harry was looking rather yellow and dishevelled. He had sat up very late the night before, and the chase for rhymes had been peculiarly fatiguing and ineffectual.

‘I don't feel at all well, either,' he said. ‘And I don't think Cousin Millie is well.'

‘Why?' asked Mrs Ames composedly.

‘I went to see her yesterday and she didn't attend. She seemed frightfully surprised to hear that father had gone to Harrogate.'

‘I suppose Dr Evans had not told her,' remarked Mrs Ames. ‘Please telephone to her after breakfast, Harry, and ask her to dine with us this evening.'

‘Yes. How curious women are! One day they seem so glad to see you, another you are no more to them than foam on a broken wave.'

This was one of the fragments of last night.

‘On a broken what?' asked Mrs Ames. The rustling of the turning leaf of the Morning Post had caused her not to hear. There was no sarcastic intention in her inquiry.

‘It does not matter,' said Harry.

His mother looked up at him.

‘I should take a little dose, dear,' she said, ‘if you feel like that. The heat upsets us all at times. Will you please telephone now, Harry? Then I shall know what to order for dinner.'

Mrs Ames' nature was undeniably a simple one; she had no misty profundities or curious dim-lit clefts on the round, smooth surface of her life, but on occasion simple natures
are capable of curious complexities of feeling, the more elusive because they themselves are unable to register exactly what they do feel. Certainly she saw a connection between the non-arrival of dear Millie at Harrogate and the inflamed letter from her husband. She had suspected also a connection between dear Millie's decision to spend August at Riseborough and her belief that Major Ames was going to do so too. But the completeness of the fiasco sucked the sting out of the resentment she might otherwise have felt: it was impossible to be angry with such sorry conspirators. At the same time, with regard to her husband, she felt the liveliest internal satisfaction at his blistering communication, and read it through again. The thought of her own slighted or rather unperceived rejuvenescence added point to this; she felt that he had been ‘served out'. Not for a moment did she suspect him of anything but the most innocent of flirtations, and she was disposed to credit dear Millie with having provoked such flirtation as there was. By this time also it must have been quite clear to both the thwarted parties that she was in full cognizance of their futile designs; clearly, therefore, her own beau rôle was to appear utterly unconscious of it all, and, unconsciously, to administer nasty little jabs to each of them with a smiling face. ‘They have been making sillies of themselves,' expressed her indulgent verdict on the whole affair. Then in some strange feminine way she felt a sort of secret pride in her husband for having had the manhood to flirt, however mildly, with somebody else's wife; but immediately there followed the resentment that he had not shown any tendency to flirt with his own, when she had encouraged him. But, anyhow, he had chosen the prettiest woman in Riseborough, and he was the handsomest man.

But her mood changed; the thought at any rate of administering some nasty little jabs presented itself in a growingly
attractive light. The two sillies had been wanting to dance to their own tune; they should dance to hers instead, and by way of striking up her own tune at once she wrote as follows, to her husband.

‘MY DEAREST LYNDHURST,

‘I can't tell you how glad I was to get your two letters, and to know how much good Harrogate is doing you. What an excellent thing that you went to Dr Evans (please remember me to him), and that he insisted so strongly on your taking yourself thoroughly in hand.'

She paused a moment, wondering exactly how strong this insistence had been. It was possible that it was not very strong. So much the more reason for letting the sentence stand. She now underlined the words ‘so strongly'.

‘Of course the waters are disgusting to take, and I declare I can almost smell them when I read your vivid description, but, as you said in your first letter, what is a bad taste in the mouth when you know it is doing you good? And your second letter convinces me how right you were to go, and when things like gout begin to come out, it naturally makes you feel a little low and worried. I want you to stop there the whole of August, and get thoroughly rid of it.

‘Here we are getting along very happily, and I am so glad I did not go to the sea. Millie is here, as you will know, and we see a great deal of her. She is constantly dropping in, en fille, I suppose you would call it, and is in excellent spirits and looks so pretty. But I am not quite at ease about Harry (this is private). He is very much attracted by her, and she seems to me not very wise in the way she deals with him, for she seems to be encouraging him in his silliness. Perhaps I will speak to her about it, and yet I hardly like to.'

Again Mrs Ames paused: she had no idea she had such a brilliant touch in the administration of these jabs. What she said might not be strictly accurate, but it was full of point.

‘I remember, too, what you said, that it was so good for a boy to be taken up with a thoroughly nice woman, and that it prevented his getting into mischief, I am sure Harry is writing all sorts of poems to her, because he sighs a great deal, and has a most inky forefinger, for which I give him pumice stone. But if she were not so nice a woman, and so far from anything like flirtatiousness, I should feel myself obliged to speak to Harry and warn him. She seems very happy and cheerful. I daresay she feels like me, and is rejoiced to think that Harrogate is doing her husband good.

‘Write to me soon again, my dear, and give me another excellent account of yourself. Was it not queer that you settled to go to Harrogate just when Millie settled not to? If you were not such good friends, one would think you wanted to avoid each other! Well, I must stop. Millie is dining with us, and I must order dinner.'

She read through what she had written with considerable content. ‘That will be nastier than the Harrogate waters,' she thought to herself, ‘and quite as good for him.' And then, with a certain largeness which lurked behind all her littlenesses, she practically dismissed the whole silly business from her mind. But she continued the use of the purely natural means for restoring the colour of the hair, and tapped and dabbed the corners of her eyes with the miraculous skin food. That was a prophylactic measure; she did not want to appear ‘a fright' when Lyndhurst came back from Harrogate.

Mrs Ames was well aware that the famous fancy dress ball had caused her a certain loss of prestige in her capacity of queen of society in Riseborough. It had followed close on the heels of her innovation of asking husbands and wives
separately to dinner, and had somewhat taken the shine out of her achievement, and indeed this latter had not been as epoch-making as she had expected. For the last week or two she had felt that something new was required of her, but as is often the case, she found that the recognition of such a truth does not necessarily lead to the discovery of the novelty. Perhaps the paltriness of Lyndhurst's conduct, leading to reflections on her own superior wisdom, put her on the path, for about this time she began to take a renewed interest in the Suffragette movement which, from what she saw in the papers, was productive of such adventurous alarums in London. For herself, she was essentially law-abiding by nature, and though, in opposition to Lyndhurst, sympathetically inclined to women who wanted the vote, she had once said that to throw stones at Prime Ministers was unladylike in itself, and only drew on the perpetrators the attention of the police to themselves, rather than the attention of the public to the problem. But a recrudescence of similar acts during the last summer had caused her to wonder whether she had said quite the last word on the subject, or thought the last thought. Certainly the sensational interest in such violent acts had led her to marvel at the strength of feeling that prompted them. Ladies, apparently, whose breeding - always a word of potency with Mrs Ames - she could not question, were behaving like hooligans. The matter interested her in itself apart from its possible value as a novelty for the autumn. Also an election was probably to take place in November. Hitherto that section of Riseborough in which she lived had not suffered its tranquillity to be interrupted by political excitements, but like a man in his sleep, drowsily approved a Conservative member. But what if she took the lead in some political agitation, and what if she introduced a Suffragette element
into the election? That was a solider affair than that a quantity of Cleopatras should skip about in a back garden.