Sir William (3 page)

However, though men are incurably given, for short periods of time, to the primitive pleasures of mere repetition, it is possible to hold their attention in other ways by the use of such ingratiating riddles and spells as “Oh, Harry, not now”; “Please don’t”; “Oh you shouldn’t! You are so silly,” or if all else fails, a simple fact of nature assures us three to five days a month of peace and quiet. So after a while things went better and she became a sort of mascot to Sir Harry’s two packs, the Snyder one he used for hunting, and the black, white and tan kind he hunted with. Both the Snyders and the Raeburn Hoppner packs piled up into imperial heaps in the evening, like Roman senators after an orgy; had the same sort of loose skin, raised a cry in the same manner, and wagged their tails. Some of them were nice, agreeable, healthy young men who smelled of leather and oatmeal soap, buckskins and gillyflower water, but she was not to be caught out.

Of Sir Harry she was now a little afraid, as the poor are of their landlords. Besides, she was with child.

“Then you’ll have to pack up and get out.”

He was behind his desk, in the household offices. Now for the first time she saw the raw cruelty of an amiable man who likes everybody well enough, but whose personal comfort has been endangered. It is the look good hosts have whose guests have stayed too long. Glimpse it once, and you will never dine there with the same ease again.

“But I
live
here …” Emily was bewildered.

“The season is over. We are all going away. Christmas is coming. At Christmas we go home to our families. Do you understand?”

Emily didn’t.

“Then I will make it plain. I would as soon pay another man’s gambling debts as acknowledge a trull’s child.” Turning to the housekeeper, he added, “See that the girl is packed up and sent off and pay her ticket to wherever she wishes to go. And that’s an end to it.”

Emily still didn’t understand. She wasn’t like that.

“Come,” said Sir Harry, not unkindly. “You have had an expensive summer. You have hired phaetons at five and a half guineas the day, ridden two Arabs lame, and drunk the cellar dry with the rest of us, at 8/6 the bottle. So now you must pay for it in your own time, for I shall not. I pay only for the summer, and a damned bore most of it was, too. You are very young. You will have other summers, my dear, somewhere.”

She now understood. “Oh its my dear, is it?” she shouted.

Sir Harry dreaded scenes almost as much as he dreaded wrinkles in his buckskins. Today’s were yellow and, flawlessly tight, as so they should have been, for he had had them wetted and then dried on him, which took hours.

“Get the girl away,” he said, “and see she does not write.”

The housekeeper got her away. Like the devils in a morality (and life was moral, was it not, if it was anything), she had her pitchfork ready, and wielded it with a will. To few of us is it given to participate in the drama of salvation, but she was lucky in her situation:
she had her chance once a year. Later she married him, by methods based upon what the others had done wrong.

Emily went first to her grandmother’s and then to Wales, with nothing to sniffle over but some dresses snipped of their buttons, for Granny had sold those to a passing tinker; and nothing to amuse her but the drama of her own life, which she thereupon enacted with vehemence. Feeling be damned. There’s always rhetoric, and even alone, we are at least assured of an audience of one, which is better than nothing. If we can render feeling convincingly, we need never undergo it again. The expression of feeling is nothing but
solfège.

“Loved, adored, feted, encouraged to dance upon the tabletops, and then cast out, with child—dropped, abandoned, hustled away by the back stairs on a frosty morning. Can any career have been so misfortunate as mine?” she demanded.

Like most audiences, Granny Morgan, though enthrallable, was tough minded. “Oh a good many, I imagine, dearie,” she said.

“I truly loved Sir Harry,” said Emily with dignity and pathos, besides.

“Nonsense, a man like that ain’t nothin’ but what he owns. And in my opinion not even that, unless he parts with some of it. If you had loved him, you would not have given in so easily, for a woman in love has nothing to offer but herself, so naturally that is the one thing she refuses to give. Whereas, merely to go to bed for cash—you did get cash, didn’t you, dearie?—allows her to hold herself in reserve, put something by, feel respectable, and none of your honeymooning hinghang-how off to Bath in a curricle, and blossoms in the dust in the morning, neither.”

“Not a shilling,” said Emily.

“Oh, dearie, that’s bad.”

“But I learned how to ride, across the fields in the morning, and dew on everything, and steam off the horse; it was an h’Arab, a great-great-grandson of Eclipse. He said I reminded him of Rubens; of course that was early on.”

“Rubens is all very well for a musty old country house, but means little to the modern connoisseur of taste or beauty,” snapped Granny Morgan, holding one of the dresses up. It looked bedraggled. “I’m afraid they don’t suit, dear. There is nothing for it but to wait for a new style.”

“I wrote him seven times. I exposed my heart.”

“Oh that! But did you write the other one, the practical one—about the money and all?”

“Yes,” said Emily, brought low. “But I fear he is
very
practical.”

That was when the postboy came.

*

“Well, what does he say?” asked Granny Morgan.

Emily had been frowning. Charles Greville did not write an easy hand, and besides, you had to twist the paper around to follow the sentence, because he would not waste a fresh sheet—not him.

“He holds out promise of reform.”

“But will he pay for it?”

“He
says
so.”

“Then let him reform as much as he pleases,” said Granny Morgan. “Some men are like that, you know. One of my men, now, wouldn’t touch goose until it was green. It gave me the shivers, bumping into it in the dark in the pantry, hung high and a-slitherin’.”

A log fell in the grate.

“You know, tainted meat,” explained Granny Morgan. “And I suppose he wants you to have the child
here?
”

“Well, he says
not
there.”

*

Definitely not there.

Like most humane men, Greville did definitely shrink from the human. To be human is to be smirched. To be humane, requires nothing more intimate than benevolence. The singular success of that bucolic
pasticcio,
Love
in
a
Village
(still performed) arose in large measure from its irreality. So Greville moved out toward the villages, where a cottage would be cheaper. He was determined, for he did not overestimate his own charms
(he never overestimated
anything
), to keep Emily a virginal distance from town. He found what he wanted in a series of small two-storied builders’ huts run up for speculation on Edgware Row, way out in the country, the nearest excitement an occasional hanging at Tyburn Hill, with the town on the horizon and Hyde Park not too far away.

It was a bargain. There would even be room for his mineral specimens. “Nature’s jewels,” as he would explain to Emily, and, to others who might notice the absence of busts after the antique, “Her sculpture, too.” But since Greville was art dealer for his uncle, in a good season there would be
bustos
enough, and what furniture was not worth the selling could be used here when he had gotten rid of the town house in Portman Square, for he planned to combine pleasure with economy—a thought that made the snow outside (he was returning from his solicitors’ in a carriage) sparkle to him like ermine in a pantomime.

“Please, dear Greville, tell my poor, distraught mother that I am
saved,
and that I recommend her to my Benefactor,” Emily had written. He had done so, and far from finding her distraught, had found her a brisk, practical woman of that class. She would make an excellent housekeeper for little more than the household allowance and a share of Emily’s pin money. It did not occur to him to ask why, any more than it occurred to him to ask why she chose to call herself Mrs. Cadogan, when there was no evidence of a husband, and Emily called herself Lyon. He took such things for granted. It did not occur to her to tell him why, either. So did she.

She had received him in the public room of a coaching inn, in dim light, would have preferred to have interviewed him in her own parlor, but at that moment had none. She was a good-humored woman, too experienced to be budged by the mere blandishments of vice, but respectability had, for her, the irresistible appeal of novelty. In her turn she was as impressed as he had been, and in much the same way. When it came to members of the upper orders, she had seen worse.

“He is a fine gentleman,” she wrote to her daughter. “A
fine
gentleman. He likes everything proper and sedate, if you catch my meaning. It is a
fine
chance to improve yourself. The other gentleman was not. You have been very giddy, but I was a young girl once myself, and say
nothing.
However, now you have had your lesson, you must be a girl of spirit, and snatch the opportunity. He would prefer you have the child
alone.
My thoughts are with you, if my body is not. Do nothing indelicate.”

Being a girl of spirit, Emily tore the letter up. As for the lesson, she had not had it yet; it would be at least another two months until she had it, and she could scarcely wait to get rid of it. She did not like to be seen at a disadvantage. Meanwhile she struck a bargain with herself. She had been a hoyden; now she would be a lady—in Portman Square in March, or not later at the most than April. She had tried the Profession and failed. She did not think she liked young men. They jounced you too much. From now on she would remain content with old ones, for Greville, at thirty-three, had certainly the patina of age, and she did hope that was not a surface, merely.

*

Greville stood in the drawing room of his unsuccessful mousetrap. He was feeling joyous, but moldy. The joy was caused by anticipation; the mold, by the failure of the mousetrap. It had been built to catch an heiress, but when it came to cases, the girls were nothing but intermediaries between their parents and their fortunes, and Greville did not like to deal with intermediaries. He had dealt with the parents direct, and they, in their turn, had dealt as directly with him.

He was not discouraged. He still had confidence that in time he would discover the right parents. What he did not like, though he had no diffidence about taking commissions as a middleman for his uncle’s Italian antiques, was to be put to the indignity of selling his own excess furniture.

Mrs. Cadogan saw what the house was for and that it had failed. She even saw why.

“Oh, sir, you shouldn’t be fussing about furniture, that is what a housekeeper is for,” she said, and earned his gratitude; not his undying gratitude, for Greville’s gratitude was apt to perish unexpectedly from internal injuries, not differing in that respect from most other people’s gratitude, but still, it was a beginning.

It had been planned to be. Mrs. Cadogan had early observed that most men in Mr. Greville’s station needed not one woman but two; that is, one to keep them running, and one to keep them on the run—or to be blunt, a housekeeper and a whore. Not that it would ever do to be blunt; you could tell that by the way the poor gentleman hemmed and hawed, with yards and yards of padding around an almost invisible meaning, like something too fragile to be jounced.

Like Emily, she had expected to come here. But no, Greville said he had taken a cottage at Paddington. The air was salubrious there; it would be more suitable. A girl such as Emily, fresh, unspoiled (he winced), accustomed to the country, would naturally prefer country air and a quiet existence alone with him. We must assist our little flowers to unfold.

Mrs. Cadogan understood perfectly. He could not afford to keep the house.

“And will there be unsightly marks?” he asked.

Mrs. Cadogan blinked. “Marks?”

“It was my understanding that sometimes in these cases, because of the … ah, sudden change in … er, weight … I suppose you might say, that there were in that case, well … ah, marks.”

Mrs. Cadogan had once been forced to seek employment of a quack in Mecklenberg Square, but a quack, if he knows nothing else, as indeed he doesn’t, at least knows his terminology.

“You mean striae, sir,” she said. “Why no, I don’t expect so, for I told her not to move about too much. Besides, the birth was premature. It couldn’t have weighed that much.”

“I should have thought it was the pregnancy that was premature,” said Greville with asperity, but only because
he had caught sight of a scratch on a Sheraton chair. With his customary acumen in such matters, if in such matters only, he had been one of the first to buy from Mr. Sheraton’s workshop, while the price was cheap. How had it gotten there?

To that Mrs. Cadogan had no reply. It had happened before her time.

*

Emily had voided the miserable object, but had had to give it suck, and though impatient, what with one thing and another, did not want to see it go. But neither, if she could not have it, did she ever want to see it again.

The wet nurse, who had made a long journey to fetch it back to its grandmother—for at least they were sure who the grandmother was—paused in the doorway.

“Now, miss, be sensible.”

“I don’t want you to take it away.”

“You hired me to take it away, and what would I do without the money? And you love your grandmother, don’t you? You wouldn’t want to deprive your grandmother of its board and keep, would you? The poor old lady has little enough as it is.”

“But it’s mine.”

“And more shame to you,” said the wet nurse heartily. “That’s what I say, and I’ve had ten o’ me own. Each one of them,” she went on, “a shame. For unless they die at once, the lambs, then I have to find a wet nurse for
them,
at very high rates, I assure you, and where it will all end I’m sure I don’t know. It’s worse than taking in each other’s wash, and with wash, you can wash it more than once and you needn’t be too particular about the dirt on it, neither.”