Sir!' She Said (21 page)

“But what can you want three afternoon dresses for by four o'clock?”

“I'm going to a cocktail party this afternoon. I shan't know which one I want to wear till I've tried them all on twice.”

Julia gazed at her in astonishment.

“If it's as important as all that,” she said, “who on earth are you going to it with?”

Melanie was half-way across the shop by now. At first she did not appear to have heard. But in the doorway she turned, to look round with a look of resourceful mischief in her eyes.

“Who am I going with?” she laughed. “Why, who would I be except Druce Mander?”

At half-past twelve Julia went out to lunch. She had an hour for lunch. And at the end of each week she and Jean cut cards to see who should go first and who wait till a later and more civilised hour. Lately Julia had been rather unlucky. Still, if she had won the cut she would not, she reflected, as she hurried up St. James' towards Piccadilly, be in the position now of being able to pay an unexpected call upon Druce Mander. “And I must see him,” she thought. “I must find out what he's driving at with Melanie.”

Not that it was going to be an easy interview. She knew that well enough. Mander and she were by no means on terms of close acquaintanceship. They called each other, certainly, by their Christian names. But only because they moved in the same crowd, because they had between them the connecting link of Leon Carstairs. Except when they had danced, they had never been alone together. It was not going to be an easy interview. “Perhaps I'm a fool to come,” she thought. “Perhaps I'm just imagining things.” But Melanie had frightened her last night and again this morning, and she wasn't, if she could help it, going to let Melanie get into the same mess that she had. It might be that she was only going to
make a fool of herself. But there were times when one could not consider the sacrifice of pride.

She had need of courage as she was shown up the stairs towards Mander's room. It was the first time she had seen him in his office, and seeing him there she had a feeling that she was seeing him for the first time. The man she had met at parties and at dances was the façade set up to conceal the real man who sat at a desk, his back to the light, with a telephone beside him, in an undemonstrative room with a deep pile carpet and padded chair, with brown papered walls, lined with shelves of sombrely bound books of reference, brightened by framed engravings of New College, Carfax and the High. For the first time she recognised the power, the capacity for controlling and directing power that lay at the back of Mander's worldly hedonism. She felt frightened at her audacity in coming.

Mander realised that. He had been surprised when she had rung him up to ask for an interview. But he had guessed the reason for that request and he had spent too many years in the lists of gallantry and commerce not to have learnt the value of directness.

“I suppose,” he said, “you've come to talk to me about your sister.”

Julia met him as directly.

“I want to know how much my sister means to you.”

Mander answered her as simply.

“Quite a lot,” he said.

“How much?”

“I can't say yet.”

“How do you mean, you can't say yet?”

“We haven't known each other long enough to tell.”

“Are you in love with her?”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“That's another of the things that it's too early yet to tell.”

“Does that mean that you are going to ask her to marry you?”

For the first time Mander hesitated; and when he at last answered, he spoke slowly, as though he were choosing his words carefully.

“I'm free: I've no objection to marriage,” he said. “On the contrary, I think I'd like to marry. I don't see why Melanie and I shouldn't marry if we find that we suit each other.”

“And how are you proposing to find that out?”

“By getting to know one another better.”

His meaning was very clear. He was going to make love to Melanie first and think about marriage afterwards. And Julia realised how useless it would be to prolong the discussion along those lines. She knew so well the arguments he would employ: the familiar specious arguments. They were modern people, he would say to her. Modern, emancipated people who had outgrown the Victorian idea that love could only exist within the bounds of marriage. People who might be divine as lovers might be impossible as wives and husbands. Why deny oneself a rapture because it fleeted? Why tie oneself for life to the consequences of an emotion one had outgrown once and might possibly outgrow again? Why run that risk of scandal and divorce? Love should be a house of
freedom. Yes, she knew the arguments: had herself endorsed them once; would even now, perhaps, be inclined to endorse them where other people were concerned. When it was a question of one's own sister, though. . .

“Do you realise that you may be ruining her life?” asked Julia.

Mander smiled; ironically but not unfriendlily.

“Lives don't get ruined,” he said.

“A girl's may be. A girl isn't like a man. She puts more into these things than a man does. She isn't elastic like a man.”

“That's how the Victorians used to talk.”

“The Victorians weren't always wrong.”

“I never said they were. No generation could be so consistent as to be always wrong. But you can't quote Victorian standards. You can't get a thing both ways.”

“How do you mean?”

“Melanie's a Georgian. You can't get the advantage of being a Georgian without accepting the disadvantages of being a Georgian. If you're going to take the Victorian attitude that a woman's a weak, defenceless creature whose province is the nursery, and the kitchen, then you have a right to the chivalry and protection of men. But if you're going to take up the Georgian attitude that a woman is as effective and efficient as a man; that she is capable of meeting a man on equal terms, then she surrenders the right to chivalry and protection. It's a question of exchange, Julia. Most things are, you know, one thing precludes another.”

He smiled as he spoke, and his voice was kind.

He was nice, thought Julia. He was a hard man, but he was not a mucker. He'ld play straight with one. And it was true what he had said about getting things both ways, about one thing being precluded by another. In a way he was. And it was inevitable that he should see life in terms of bargain. His whole life had been spent in terms of exchange. But for Melanie, surely it needn't be. Why should she have to see life that way? Some one had to pick up all four aces sometimes. Anyhow she had not come here to agree with Mander.

“That may be so,” she said, “but I'm not going to sit by and see Melanie learn life that way.”

“Then what are you proposing to do about it?”

“There are a good many things that I might do.”

“Are there?” There was an ironical smile upon his lips: the kind of a smile that quivered there in the course of a business deal when he held every card, and was just waiting for the lead to come his way to play them.

“I don't think there are, you know. You can present Melanie with the kind of Victorian argument your parents produced for you. But I don't expect that they'ld have much effect. And you can tell her if you like that I'm a person of immoral life. But you couldn't produce any facts. I've been singularly discreet, and even if you could they'ld only interest her. In fact, my dear Julia, the only real argument you can produce is the very one you daren't.”

It was said so quietly that for the moment Julia
did not realise its import. When she did the blood went quickly to her cheeks.

“What are you trying to say?” she gasped.

“That people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.”

There was a pause of silence. In that pause Julia realised with what a sense of impotence must the men who had done hostile business with him have looked at that dark calm face. In the quiet way that a man who holds every trick leads card after winning card, Druce Mander went on speaking.

“You could go to your parents, of course, and tell them the exact story of your life: you could say, this is what happened to me, unless you take care of her, this is what will happen to Melanie. Probably if you did they would take away Melanie's freedom: probably Melanie would even agree that they had been justified. But I don't know that I should recommend you to do that. You would cause your parents great unhappiness. They would lose their faith in you. Melanie would lose her faith in you. Your freedom would be curtailed. You would be a suspected person. You would have to end an intimacy you value. It is not unlikely that the news of that intimacy would reach certain interested persons. If it did there would be no chance of that partnership upon which your own future as well depends.”

He spoke so quietly, so suavely that she could not exactly know what he implied: was he trying to blackmail her into silence with the threat of disclosure?

“Are you trying. . .?” she began.

He would not let her finish.

“To point out,” he interrupted, “what would be the result of your bringing forward that particular argument. Not more than that. I shouldn't do it if I were you. There's more to be lost than gained by it.”

From her point of view, yes. And from her parents'. She did not need telling how unhappy that disclosure would make her people. Nor what would be the result of that news reaching Leon's employer.

There would be an end of Leon's partnership, and the end along with it of her hope of marrying him. There would be just a mess. The three of them and no money; and when that sort of mess came it was the third party that was sacrificed, invariably. She knew exactly how it would go.

“Dear one,” she could hear Leon's weak, pleading voice. “You see how it is, don't you? I can't possibly leave my wife unless I leave money behind me with her.” If Leon were to lose that partnership every chance of her marrying him was gone. And even if she were to fulfil her threat, to tell Melanie all she knew of Mander, would it amount to so very much, at that? Would any of her arguments be convincing without the final conclusive argument of her own experience, unless she could say, “Look, then, what it's done for me!” Without that, what would her arguments amount to? And she couldn't use that, she couldn't. The shame to herself. The pain that she would cause her parents. No, no, that was outside the question. “It's a mess,” she told herself, “a ghastly mess.”

As so many had done and would do, she walked out of Mander's office feeling that all capacity for fight had been taken from her.

She returned to Brooke Street to find a pensive expression on Jean Ryland's face.

“I suppose,” said Jean, “you couldn't manage to come away with me to Deauville in a fortnight's time?”

“Is it likely?”

“You could take your holiday then.”

“Both of us at the same time?”

“No, I suppose we couldn't. You see,” Jean went on after a pause, “I want an alibi.”

Julia raised her eyebrows.

“Gavin Todd's playing in a championship there,” she explained. “It would be easier if I could tell my people I was going with some one.”

“I thought your people let you do what you liked?”

“Oh, yes, they do, of course; but they ask questions, naturally. They're interested in what one's doing. They are bound to say, ‘Why Deauville?' I must find some friends of mine that are going there. And of course I can't tell them I'm staying at the Normandie. They know I couldn't afford that. I'll have to take a room in some cheap pension, where I can leave a suit-case and have my letters sent. I'll have to have that in case I run into anyone. Which I'm pretty sure to do, I suppose. It'll be rather fun leading a double life like people do in detective stories.”

She paused: there was a bright eager look upon her face.

“Of course, in a way,” she went on, “one feels
rather rotten about one's people—one hates deceiving people who have trusted one. But one can't help that. It's much kinder to keep people in the dark. One's really entitled to do anything provided one doesn't hurt people. And it is exciting.”

Julia nodded her head. Exciting. That's what she had thought three years ago; and that was how she had shrugged away as a necessity the campaign of deceit she had embarked on. Step by step Jean was following in her footsteps. It would be Melanie's turn next.

And the afternoon passed on, slow and harassing; with telephone bells ringing, and customers worrying her with complaints and questions. Noise, noise, noise; never a moment's peace.

“And they call this being an independent woman,” she moaned bitterly to Jean Ryland in the one quiet moment of the afternoon. “And this is the freedom that all those Victorian women talked so much about and fought so hard for. I don't know what we've got out of it. No more fun as far as I can see. We've got to get up so early and work so hard, that by the time the evening comes we're too sunk to enjoy ourselves. Freedom. It is the thing we're all talking of, the thing we're all fighting for. We think it's this and we think it's that, and then when we've got our way we find that it isn't this and it isn't that. I'm beginning to wonder whether there's such a thing.”

She remembered once hearing her mother say that all that modern freedom and modern science had done for the woman of forty was to make her fair game for any man who chose to take advantage of her. But
was not that, she thought, what modern methods, modern ideas, modern education had done for every woman? What else but fair game were any of them? She, Jean Ryland, and now Melanie. Druce Mander had been right. What man was going to bother to be chivalrous to women who claimed the right to meet men on equal terms? What chance did any of them stand now the standard of chivalry by which previously their sex had been protected was removed? At the moment Jean Ryland was happy; glad-hearted in a dawning tenderness. But already she had embarked on a campaign of treachery. Already there was in her eyes the first signs of that fretful, harassed look that would deepen soon into the restless defiant impatience of which she was herself the victim. That was the way things went. First of all one was like Melanie: gay, confident, with the world at her feet: then one was like Jean, proud and happy in the delight of loving: then that confidence and delight sank into the despondency that she knew. The wheel came full cycle—Melanie, Jean and herself were stages in an inevitable process. As Jean Ryland was last week so was Melanie to-day, as she, Jean, was to-day, Melanie would become tomorrow, and later for both Melanie and Jean, waited the disenchantment that she knew herself.