Changing Winds Part 60

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Mrs. Graham and Mary and Rachel Wynne dined with them on the first night of "The Magic Cas.e.m.e.nt." Rachel, fresh from a Care Committee, composed mostly of members of the Charity Organisation Society and the wives of prosperous tradesmen, was inclined to tell the world what she thought of it, but they diverted her mind from the iniquities of the Care Committee by congratulating her on her engagement to Roger. She blushed and gave her thanks in stammers, looking with bright, proud eyes at Roger; and when they saw how human she was, they forgot her hard efficiency and her sociological angers, and liked her. Gilbert urged her to tell them tales of the C.O.S. and the Care Committee, and rejoiced loudly when she described how she had discomfited a large, granitic woman ... the Mayor's wife ... who had committed a flagrant breach of the law in her anxiety to penalise some unfortunate children whose father was an agitator. "If I were poor," Rachel said, "I'd hit a C.O.S. person on sight! I'd hit it simply because it was a C.O.S. person! That would be evidence against it!" She enjoyed calling a C.O.S. person, "it," and Henry felt that perhaps some of the difficulty with the Mayor's wife was due to the pleasure that Rachel took in rubbing her up the wrong way. He suggested that tactful treatment....

"You can't be tactful with that kind of person," she a.s.serted instantly.

"You can only be angry. You see, they love to badger poor people. It's sheer delight to them to ask impertinent questions. There's a big streak of Torquemada in them. They'd have been Inquisitors if they'd been born in Spain when there were Inquisitors!" She paused for a second or two, and then went on rapidly. "I never thought of that before. Why, of course, that's what they are. They've been reincarnated ... you know, transmigration of souls ... and that fat woman, Mrs. Smeale...." Mrs.

Smeale was the Mayor's wife ... "was an Inquisitor before she was ...

was dug up again. I can see her beastly big face in a cowl, and hot pincers in her hands, plucking poor Protestants' flesh off their bones ... and she's doing that now, using all the rotten rules and regulations as hot pincers to pluck the spirit out of the poor! Of course, she does it all for the best! So did the Inquisitors! She doesn't want to undermine the moral character of the poor, and they didn't want to let the poor heretic imperil his soul.... I'd like to inquisit her!..."

"There isn't a word 'inquisit,' Rachel!" said Roger.

"Well, there ought to be," she answered.

Henry pictured her, in her committee room, surrounded by hard women, opposing herself to them, fighting for people who were not of her cla.s.s against people who were, and it seemed to him that Rachel was very valiant, even if she were tactless, much more valiant than he could be.

Rachel belonged to the fearless, ungracious, blunt people who are not to be deterred from their purpose by ostracism or abuse, and Henry realised that such courage as hers must inevitably be accompanied by aggressiveness, a harsh insistence on one's point of view, and worst of all, a surrender of social charm and ease and the kindly regard of one's friends. "I couldn't do that," he thought to himself. It was easy enough to sneer at such people, to call them "cranks," but indisputably they had the heroic spirit, the will to endure obloquy for their opinions. "I suppose," he reflected, "the reason why one feels so angry with such people is partly that nine times out of ten they're in the right, and partly that ten times out of ten they've got the pluck we haven't got!"

And he remembered that Witterton, a journalist whom he had met at the office of the _Morning Record_, had climbed on to the plinth in Trafalgar Square during the Boer War and made a speech in denunciation of Chamberlain and the Rand lords, and had been badly mauled by the mob.

"By G.o.d, that's courage!" he murmured. That was the sort of person Rachel was. He could see her opposing herself to mobs, but he could not see himself doing so. Probably, he thought, he would be on the fringe of the crowd, mildly deprecating violence and tactlessness....

He came out of his ruminations to hear Mrs. Graham telling Rachel how pleased she was to hear that Roger and she were engaged. "My dear," she said, "I'm very glad!" and then she kissed Rachel.

"Come here, Roger," she added, and when he had ambled awkwardly up to her, she took his head in her hands and kissed him too....

"I've a jolly good mind to get engaged myself," said Gilbert.

"Well, why don't you?" Mrs. Graham retorted.

"I would, only I keep on forgetting about it," he answered. "Couldn't you kiss me 'Good-luck' to my play?"

"I could," she replied, and kissed him.

Then they insisted that she should kiss them all, and she did as they insisted. She was very gracious and very charming and her eyes were bright with her pleasure in their youth and spirits ... so bright that presently she cried a little ... and then they all talked quickly and kicked one another's shins under the table in order to enforce tactful behaviour.

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They sat in one of the two large boxes of the Pall Mall Theatre. Gilbert was nervous and restless, and after the play began, he retreated to the back of the box and sat down in a corner.

"What's up, Gilbert?" Henry whispered to him. "Are you ill?"

"Ill!" Gilbert exclaimed, looking up at Henry with a whimsical smile.

"Man, Quinny, I'm dying! Go away like a good chap and let me die in peace. Tell all my friends that my last words were...."

Henry went back to his seat beside Mary and whispered to her that Gilbert was too nervous and agitated to be sociable ... "some sort of stage fright!..." and they pretended not to notice that he was huddled in the darkest corner of the box. "Thank goodness," Henry said to the others, "a novelist doesn't get a storm of nerves on the day of publication!" Leaning over the edge of the box, he could see Lady Cecily sitting in the stalls, with Jimphy by her side ... and for a while he forgot the play and Mary and Gilbert's agitation. She was sitting forward, looking intently at the stage, and as he watched her, she laughed and turned to Jimphy as if she would share her pleasure with him, but Jimphy, lying back in his stall, was fiddling with his programme, utterly uninterested. She glanced up at the box, her eyes meeting his, and smiled at him.

"Who is it?" said Mary, leaning towards him.

"Oh ... Lady Cecily Jayne!" he answered, discomposed by her question.

"She's very beautiful, isn't she?"

"Yes."

They turned again to the stage and were silent until the end of the first act. There was a burst of laughter, and then the curtain descended, to rise again in quick response to the applause.

"Cheering a chap at his funeral!" said Gilbert, groaning with delight as he listened to the shouts and handclaps.

They turned to him and offered their congratulations.

"Five curtain-calls," said Roger. "Very satisfactory!"

"It's splendid, Gilbert," Mrs. Graham exclaimed. "I'm sure it'll be a great success!"

"Oh, dear, O Lord, I wish it were over!" Gilbert replied.

"Let's fill him with whisky," said Ninian, rising and taking hold of Gilbert's arm, and he and Henry took him and led him to the bar where they met Jimphy, looking like a lost rabbit.

"Hilloa, Jimphy!" they exclaimed, and he turned gleefully to welcome them. Here at all events was something he could comprehend. He congratulated Gilbert. "Jolly good, old chap! Have a drink," he said, and insisted that they should join him at the bar. "Of course," he added privately to Henry, "this sort of stuff isn't really in my line ...

jolly good and all that, of course ... but still it's not in my line.

All the same, a chap has to congratulate a chap. Oh, Cecily wants you to go and talk to her. You know where she is, don't you?"

He turned to listen to Ninian who was describing the accident which had happened when the _Gigantic_ started on her first trip to America. "She jolly near sank a cruiser," he was saying as Henry moved away from the bar. "That was the second accident. The first time, she broke from her moorings...."

He pushed his way through the crowd of drinking and gossiping men, and entered the stalls. Lady Cecily saw him coming, and she beckoned to him.

"Who is that nice girl in the box?" she asked, as he sat down in Jimphy's seat. "She sat beside you...."

"Oh, Ninian's sister," he replied. "Mary Graham."

"She's very pretty, isn't she?"

"Yes...."

He would have said more, but it suddenly struck him as comical that Lady Cecily should speak of Mary almost in the words that Mary had used when she spoke of Lady Cecily. He looked up at the box and saw that Mary was talking to her mother, and something in her att.i.tude sent a pang through his heart.

"I _do_ love Mary," he said to himself, "but somehow ... somehow I love Cecily too!"

Lady Cecily was speaking to him and he turned to listen.

"I want you to introduce me to Ninian's sister," she said.

"Yes," he answered reluctantly, though he could not have said why he was reluctant to introduce her to Mary.

"After the next act," she went on, and he nodded his head.

Then Jimphy returned, and Henry got up and left her, and hurried back to the box. The second act had begun when he reached it, and he tiptoed to his seat and sat down in silence. Mary looked round at him, smiling, and then looked back at the stage, and again he felt that odd reluctance to bring Lady Cecily and her together.

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