The New Warden Part 28

"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 cla.s.ses. 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 s.h.i.+rts 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. Sat.u.r.day 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 cla.s.sical 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 mediaeval 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 n.o.ble 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 a.s.ses 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!"