The New Warden

Gwendolen walked into the sitting-room. There were Mrs. Potten and Lady Dashwood sitting together and talking, as if they intended remaining there for ever.

"Here's your collar, Mrs. Potten," said Gwen, coming in with the prettiest flush on her face, from the haste with which she had mounted the stairs.

She handed the roll of mauve paper and stood looking at Mrs. Potten. Now, she would find out whether Mrs. Potten knew she had flung away her precious ten-shilling note or not. If she was so stingy why was she so careless? She was very, very short-sighted, of course, but still that was no excuse.

"Thanks, my dear," said Mrs. Potten. "I doubt if it is really as nice as the one we saw that was sold. Thirty shillings – the receipt is on the paper. It's the first time I've ever had a receipt at a bazaar or sale. Very business-like; Mr Harding, of course. One can see the handwriting isn't a woman's!" So saying Mrs. Potten, who had been peering hard at the collar and the paper, passed it to Lady Dashwood to look at.

"Charming!" said Lady Dashwood.

Now Lady Dashwood knew Mrs. Potten's soul. Mrs. Potten had come into Oxford at no expense of her own. Mr. Boreham had driven her. She had also, so Lady Dashwood divined, the intention of helping the Sale as much as possible, by her moral approbation. Nothing pleased Mrs. Potten that she saw on the modest undecked tables. Then she had praised a shilling pincushion, had bought it with much ceremony, and put it into her bag. "There, I mustn't go and lose this," she had said as she clicked the fastening of her bag. Then she had praised a Buckinghamshire collar which was marked "Sold," and in an unwary moment had told Lady Dashwood that she would have bought that; that was exactly what she wanted, only it was unfortunately sold. But Lady Dashwood, who was business-like even in grief, had been equal to the occasion. "I know there is another one very like it," she had said in a slightly bullying voice; and when Mrs. Potten moved off as if she had not realised her luck, murmuring something about having to be somewhere almost immediately, Lady Dashwood had swiftly arranged with Mrs. Harding that the other collar, which was somewhere in reserve and was being searched for, should be sent after them.

This was why Lady Dashwood had conveyed the reluctant Mrs. Potten into the quadrangle, and had made her climb the stairs with her into these rooms and wait.

So here was Mrs. Potten, with her collar, trying to believe that she was not annoyed at having been deprived of thirty shillings in such an astute way by her dear friend.

"Am I wanted any more?" asked Gwen, looking from one lady to the other.

She took the collar from Lady Dashwood and returned it to Mrs. Potten.

Mrs. Potten opened her bag disclosing the shilling pincushion (which now she need not have bought) and placed the collar within. Then she shut the bag with a snap, and looked so innocent that Gwendolen almost laughed.

No, Gwen was not wanted any more. She turned and went. Mrs. Potten deserved to lose money! "Yes, she did, and in any case," thought Gwen, "at any moment I can say, 'Oh yes, I quite forgot I had the note. How stupid, how awfully stupid,' etc."

So she went down the stairs and out into the terrace.

A few steps away she saw Mr. Bingham, coming back again. This time alone.

As soon as Gwen had gone Mrs. Potten remarked, "Now I must be going!" and then sat on, as people do.

"Very pretty girl, Gwendolen Scott," she added.

"Very pretty," said Lady Dashwood.

"Lady Belinda wrote to me a day or two ago, asking me if Gwen could come on to me from you on Monday."

"Oh!" said Lady Dashwood, but she uttered the exclamation wearily.

"I have written and told her that I'm afraid I can't," said Mrs. Potten. "Can't!"

Lady Dashwood looked away as if the subject was ended.

"If I have the child, it will mean that the mother will insist on coming to fetch her away or something." Here Mrs. Potten fidgeted with her bag. "And I really scarcely know Lady Belinda. It was the husband we used to know, old General Scott, poor dear silly old man!"

Lady Dashwood received the remark in silence.

"I can't do with some of these modern women," continued Mrs. Potten. "There are women whose names I could tell you that I would not trust with a tin halfpenny. My dear, I've seen with my own eyes at a hotel restaurant a well-dressed woman sweep up the tip left for the waiter by the person who had just gone, I saw that the waiters saw it, but they daren't do anything. I saw a friend of mine speaking to her afterwards! Knew her! Quite respectable! Fancy the audacity of it!"

Lady Dashwood now rested her head on the back of her chair and allowed Mrs. Potten to talk on.

"I'm afraid there's nothing of the Good Samaritan in me," said Mrs. Potten, in a self-satisfied tone. "I can't undertake the responsibility of a girl who is billeted out by her mother – instead of being given a decent home. I think you're simply angelic to have had her for so long, Lena."

Lady Dashwood's silence only excited Mrs. Potten's curiosity. "Most girls now seem to be doing something or other," she said. "Why, one even sees young women students wheeling convalescent soldiers about Oxford. I don't believe there is a woman or girl in Oxford who isn't doing something for the war."

"Yes, but it is the busy women who almost always have time for more work," said Lady Dashwood.

"Now, I suppose Gwendolen is doing nothing and eating her head off, as the phrase goes," said Mrs. Potten.

Lady Dashwood was not to be drawn. "Talking of doing something," she said, to draw Mrs. Potten off the subject, and there was a touch of weariness in her voice: "I think a Frenchwoman can beat an Englishwoman any day at 'doing.' I am speaking now of the working classes. I have a French maid now who does twice the work that any English maid would do. I picked her up at the beginning of the war. Her husband was killed and she was stranded with two children. I've put the two children into a Catholic school in Kent and I have them in the holidays. Well, Louise makes practically all my things, makes her own clothes and the children's, and besides that we have made shirts and pyjamas till I could cut them out blindfolded. She's an object lesson to all maids."

Lady Dashwood was successful, Mrs. Potten's attention was diverted, only unfortunately the word "maid" stimulated her to draw up an exhaustive inventory of all the servants she had ever had at Potten End, and she was doing this in her best Bradshaw style when Lady Dashwood exclaimed that she had a wire to send off and must go and do it.

"I ought to be going too," said Mrs. Potten, her brain reeling for a moment at this sudden interruption to her train of thought. She rose with some indecision, leaving her bag on the floor. Then she stooped and picked up her bag and left her umbrella; and then at last securing both bag and umbrella, the two ladies made their way down the stairs and went back into St. Aldates.

All the time that Mrs. Potten had been running through a list of the marriages, births, etc., of all her former servants, Lady Dashwood was contriving a telegram to Lady Belinda Scott. It was difficult to compose, partly because it had to be both elusive and yet firm, and partly because Mrs. Potten's voice kept on interrupting any flow of consecutive thought.

When the two ladies had reached the post-office the wire was completed in Lady Dashwood's brain.

"Good-bye," said Mrs. Potten, just outside the threshold of the door. "And if you see Bernard – I believe he means to go to tea at the Hardings – would you remind him that it is at Eliston's that he has to pick me up? There are attractions about!" added Mrs. Potten mysteriously, "and he may forget! Poor Bernard, such a good fellow in his way, but so wild, and he sometimes talks as if he were almost a conscientious objector, only he's too old for it to matter. I don't allow him to argue with me. I can't follow it – and don't want to. But he's a dear fellow."

Lady Dashwood walked into the post-office. "Thank goodness, I can think now," she said to herself, as she went to a desk.

The wire ran as follows: —

"Sorry. Saturday quite impossible. Writing."

It was far from cordial, but cordial Lady Dashwood had no intention of being. She meant to do her duty and no more by Belinda. Duty would be hard enough. And when she wrote the letter, what should she say?

"If only something would happen, some providential accident," thought Lady Dashwood, unconscious of the contradiction involved in the terms. The word "providential" caused her to go on thinking. If there were such things as ghosts, the "ghost" of the previous night might have been providentially sent – sent as a warning! But the thought was a foolish one.

"In any case," she argued, "what is the good of warnings? Did any one ever take warning? No, not even if one rose from the dead to deliver it."

She was too tired to walk about and too tired to want to go again into the Sale room and talk to people. She went back to the rooms, climbed the stairs slowly and then sat down to wait till it was time to go to Mrs. Harding's. Perhaps May would soon have finished seeing Christ Church and come and join her. Her presence was always a comfort.

It was a comfort, perhaps rather a miserable comfort, to Lady Dashwood because she had begun to suspect that May too was suffering, not suffering from wounded vanity, for May was almost devoid of vanity, but from – and here Lady Dashwood leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. It was a strange thing that both Jim and May should have allowed themselves to be martyrised, only May's marriage had been so brief and had ended so worthily, the shallow young man becoming suddenly compelled to bear the burden of Empire, and bearing it to the utmost; but Gwen would meander along, putting all her burdens on other people; and she would live for ever!

CHAPTER XVI

SEEING CHRIST CHURCH

Boreham had been very successful that afternoon. He had managed to secure Mrs. Dashwood without having to be rude to her hostess. He had done it by exchanging Mrs. Potten for the younger lady with a deftness on which he congratulated himself, though it was true that Lady Dashwood had said to May Dashwood, "Go and see over the College with Mr. Boreham."

Miss Scott was, most fortunately, absorbed in playing at shop with Mrs. Harding.

Boreham's course was clear. He calculated with satisfaction that he had a good hour before him alone with Mrs. Dashwood. He could show her every corner of Christ Church and do it slowly; the brief explanation (of a disparaging nature) that he would be obliged to make on the details of that historic building would only serve to help him out at, perhaps, difficult moments. It would be easier for him to talk freely and prepare her mind for a proper appreciation of the future which lay before her, while he walked beside her and pointed out irrelevant things, than it would have been if he had been obliged to sit still in a chair facing her, for example, and stick to his subject. It seemed to him best to begin by speaking quite frankly in praise of himself. Boreham had his doubts whether any man is really humble in his estimation of himself, however much he may pretend to be; and if, indeed, any man were truly humble, then, in Boreham's opinion, that man was a fool.

As soon as they had crossed St. Aldates and had entered the gate under Tom Tower, Boreham introduced the subject of his own merits, by glancing round the great quadrangle and remarking that he was thankful that he had never been subjected to the fossilising routine of a classical education.

"The study of dead languages is a 'cul-de-sac,'" he explained. "You can see the effect it has had in the very atmosphere of Oxford. You can see the effect it has had on Middleton, dear fellow, who got a double First, and the Ireland, and everything else proper and useless, and who is now – what? A conscientious schoolmaster, and nothing more!"

It was necessary to bring Middleton in because May Dashwood might not have had the time or the opportunity of observing all Middleton's limitations. She probably would imagine that he was a man of ideas and originality. She would take for granted (not knowing) that the head of an Oxford College was a weighty person, a successful person. Also Middleton was a good-looking-man, as good-looking as he, Boreham, was himself (only of a more conventional type), and therefore not to be despised from the mere woman's point of view.

Boreham peered eagerly at his companion's profile to see how she took this criticism of Middleton.

May was taking it quite calmly, and even smiled. "So far, good," said Boreham to himself, and he went on to compare his larger view of life and deeper knowledge of "facts" with the restricted outlook of the Oxford Don. This she apparently accepted as "understood," for she smiled again, and this triumph of Boreham's was achieved while they looked over the Christ Church library.

"The first thing," said Boreham, when they came again into the open air – "the first thing that a man has to do is to be a man of the world that we actually live in, not of the world as it was!"

"Yes," said Mrs. Dashwood "the world we actually live in."

"You agree?" he said brightly.

She smiled again.

"Oxford might have been vitalised; might, I say, if, by good luck, somebody had discovered a coal mine under the Broad, or the High, and the University had been compelled to adjust itself to the practical requirements of the world of labour and of commerce, and to drop its mediæval methods for those of the modern world."

May confessed that she had not thought of this way of improving the ancient University, but she suggested that some of the provincial universities had the advantage of being in the neighbourhood of coal mines or in industrial centres.

Boreham, however, waived the point, for his spirits were rising, and the sight of Bingham in the distance, carrying his table-cloth and slippers and looking wistfully at nothing in particular, gave him increased confidence in his main plan.

"This staircase," said Boreham, "leads to the hall. Shall we go in? I suppose you ought to see it."

"What a lovely roof!" exclaimed May, when they reached the foot of the staircase.

Boreham admitted that it was fine, but he insisted that it was too good for the place, and he went on with his main discourse.

When they entered the dining-hall, the dignity of the room, with its noble ceiling, its rich windows and the glow of the portraits on the walls, brought another exclamation from May's lips.

But all this academic splendour annoyed Boreham extremely. It seemed to jeer at him as an outsider.

"It's too good for the collection of asses who dine here," he said.

As to the portraits, he insisted that among them all, among all these so-called distinguished men, there was not one that possessed any real originality and power – except perhaps the painter Watts.

"It's so like Oxford," he added, "to produce nothing distinctive."

May laughed now, with a subdued laughter that was a little irritating, because it was uncalled for.

"I am laughing," she explained, "because 'the world we actually live in' is such a funny place and is so full of funny people – ourselves included."

That was not a reason for laughter if it were true, and it was not true that she was, or that he was "funny." If she had been "funny" he would not have been in love with her. He detained her in front of the portrait of Wesley.

"I wonder they have had the sense to keep him here," said Boreham. "He is a perpetual reminder to them of the scandalous torpor of the Church which repudiated him. Yes, I wonder they tolerate him. Anyhow, I suppose they tolerate him because, after all, they tolerate anybody who tries to keep alive a lost cause. Religion was dying a natural death and, instead of letting it die, he revived it for a bit. It was as good as you could expect from an Oxford man! When an Oxford man revolts, he only revolts in order to take up some lost cause, some survival!"

"I suppose," said May, "that if Wesley had had the advantage of being at one of the provincial colleges, he would have invented a new soap, instead of strewing the place with nonconformist chapels?"

This sarcasm of May's would have been exasperating, only that the mention of soap quite naturally suggested children who had to be soaped, and children did bring Boreham actually to an important point. He did not really care two straws about Wesley. He went straight for this point. He put a few piercing questions to May about her work among children in London. Strangely enough she did not respond. She gave him one or two brief answers of the vaguest description, while she turned away to look at more portraits. Boreham, however, had only put the questions as a delicate approach to the subject. He did not really want any answers, and he proceeded to point out to her that her work, though it was undertaken in the most altruistic spirit, and appeared to be useful to the superficial observer, was really not helpful but harmful to the community. And this for two reasons. He would explain them. Firstly, because it blinded people who were interested in social questions to the need for the endowment of mothers; and secondly, the care of other women's children did not really satisfy the maternal instinct in women. It excited their emotions and gave them the impression that these emotions were satisfying. They were not. He hinted that if May would consult any pathologist he would tell her that, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, a life like hers, seemingly so full, would not save a woman from the disastrous effects of being childless.

Now, Boreham was convinced that women rarely understand what it is they really want. Women believe that they want to become clerks or postmen or lawyers, when all the time what they want and need is to become mothers. For instance, it was a common thing for a woman who had no interest in drama and who couldn't act, to want to be an actress. What she really wanted then was an increased opportunity of meeting the other sex.

Boreham put this before May Dashwood, and was gratified at the reception of his remarks.

"What you say is true," she said, "though so few people have the courage to say it."

Boreham went on. He felt that May Dashwood, in spite of all her sharpness, was profoundly ignorant of her own psychology. It was necessary to enlighten her, to make her understand that it was not her duty to go on mourning for a husband who was dead, but that it was her duty to make the best of her own life. He entirely exonerated her from the charge of humbug in her desire to mother slum children; all he wanted was for her to understand that it wasn't of any use either to herself or to the community. How well she was taking it!

He had barely finished speaking when he became unpleasantly aware that two ladies, who had just entered, were staring at himself and his companion instead of examining the hall. The strangers were foreigners, to judge by the boldness with which they wore hats that bore no relation to the shape or the dignity of the human head. They were evidently arrested and curious.

May did not speak for some moments, after they both moved away from the portraits. Boreham watched her, rather breathlessly, for things were going right and coming to a crisis.

"You are quite right," she repeated, at last. "But people haven't the courage to say so!"

"You think so?" he replied eagerly. He now appreciated, as he had never done before, how much he scored by possessing, along with the subtle intuitions of the Celt, the plain common-sense of his English mother.

"I am preparing my mind," said May, as they approached the door of the hall, "to face a future chequered by fits of hysteria."

"But why!" urged Boreham, and he could not conceal his agitation; "when I spoke of the endowment of mothers I did not mean that I personally wanted any interference (at present) with our system of monogamy. The British public thinks it believes in monogamy and I, personally, think that monogamy is workable, under certain circumstances. It would be possible for me under certain circumstances."

The sublimity of his self-sacrifice almost brought tears to Boreham's eyes. May quickened her steps, and he opened the door for her to go into the lobby. As he went through himself he could see that the two strangers had turned and were watching them. He damned them under his breath and pulled the door to.

"There are women," he went on, as he followed her down the stairs, "who have breadth of character and brains that command the fidelity of men. I need not tell you this."

May was descending slowly and looked as if she thought she was alone.

"'Age cannot wither, nor custom stale thy infinite variety,'" he whispered behind her, and he found the words strangely difficult to pronounce because of his emotion. He moved alertly into step with her and gazed at her profile.

"When that is said to a woman, well, a moderately young woman," remarked May, "a woman who is, say, twenty-eight – I am twenty-eight – it has no point I am afraid!"

"No point?" exclaimed Boreham.

"No point," repeated May. "How do you know that thirty years from now, when I am on the verge of sixty, that I shan't be withered – unless, indeed, I get too stout?" she added pensively.

"You will always be young," said Boreham, fervently; "young, like Ninon de l'Enclos."

May had now reached the ground, and she walked out on to the terrace into open daylight.

Boreham was at her side immediately, and she turned and looked at him. His pale blue eyes blinked at her, for he was aware that hers were hostile! Why?

"You would seem young to me," he said, trying to feel brave.

"Men and women ought," she said, with emphasis on the word "ought" – "men and women ought to wither and grow old in the service of Humanity. I think nothing is more pathetic than the sight of an old woman trying to look young instead of learning the lesson of life, the lesson we are here to learn!"

Boreham had had barely time to recover from the blow when she added in the sweetest tone —

"There, that's a scolding for you and for Ninon de l'Enclos!"

"But I don't mean – " began Boreham. "I haven't put it – you don't take my words quite correctly."

May was already walking on into the open archway that led to the cathedral. Before them stood the great western doors, and she saw them and stopped. Boreham wished to goodness that he had waited till they were in the cathedral before he had made his quotation. Through the open doors of that ancient building he could hear somebody playing the organ. That would have been the proper emotional accompaniment for those immortal lines of Shakespeare. He pictured a corner of the Latin chapel and an obscure tender light. Why had he begun to talk in the glare of a public thoroughfare?

"Shall we go inside?" he asked urgently. "One can't talk here."

But May turned to go back. "I should like to see the cathedral some other time," she said. "I must thank you very much for having shown me over the College – and – explained everything."

"Yes; but – " stammered Boreham. "We can get into the cathedral."

She was actually beginning to hold out her hand as if to say Good-bye.

"Not now," she said; and before he had time to argue further, Bingham came suddenly upon them from somewhere, and expressed so much surprise at seeing them that it was evident that he had been on the watch. He had disposed of his purchases and was a free man. He had actually pounced upon them like a bird of prey – and stealthily too. It was a mean trick to have played.

"Are you coming out or going in?" asked Bingham.

"Neither," said May, turning to him as if she was glad of his approach.

"You've seen it before?" said Bingham.

"No, not yet," said May.

"It's as nice a place as you could find anywhere," said Bingham, calmly, "for doing a bit of Joss."

Boreham's brain surged with indignation. This man's intrusion at such a moment was insupportable. Yes, and he had got rid of his miserable table-cloth and shoes, probably taken them to Harding's house, and was going to tea there too. Not only this, but here he was talking in his jesting way, exactly in the same soft drawling voice in which he reeled off Latin quotations, and so it went down – yes, went down when it ought to have given offence. May ought to have been offended. She didn't look offended!