The Balliols

By Alec Waugh

First published in 1934, this book tells the story of the Balliol family as they exist through the suffrage movement and the end of the Edwardian era to the Great War.

The Balliol children are subject to the effects of the war - the harsh discipline and the subsequent laxness, the breakup of family loyalties, the post-war cynicism and, in the youngest child, the ultimate trend back to a sounder pattern of life.

The action of this book, which is swift, continuous and dramatic, develops side by side with the plot of its theme that "to build a sanctuary, you must destroy a sanctuary"; that the destruction to which these thirty years have been witness was an inevitable and necessary part of progress.

Vigorously pursuing the fortunes of an English family during the most turbulently shifting period in history, The Balliols combines the feeling of Cavalcade with the powerful narrative flow of the Forsythe Saga.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Oct 28, 2011
• ISBN: 9781448202218

Alec Waugh

Alec Waugh (1898-1981) was a British novelist born in London and educated at Sherborne Public School, Dorset. Waugh's first novel, The Loom of Youth (1917), is a semi-autobiographical account of public school life that caused some controversy at the time and led to his expulsion. Waugh was the only boy ever to be expelled from The Old Shirburnian Society. Despite setting this record, Waugh went on to become the successful author of over 50 works, and lived in many exotic places throughout his life which later became the settings for some of his texts. He was also a noted wine connoisseur and campaigned to make the 'cocktail party' a regular feature of 1920s social life.

Book preview

Book I

The Balliols

The Balliols

I

I had not meant this to be a novel.

A few weeks ago I became thirty-five, and though it is absurd, patently, to say on any one morning I have now lived half my life, it is impossible not to regard one’s thirty-fifth birthday as a landmark; as an excuse for stocktaking; for looking back and looking forward; for comparing the world as one found it with the world as it has become.

On the surface it is a very different world. At the beginning of the century not only were there no aeroplanes in the sky but there were no motor-cars upon the streets. There were no tubes. Londoners travelled smokily by the underground or slowly in horse-drawn buses. Rooms were more often lit by lamps than gas jets. The telephone, except in offices, was an unusual luxury. The gramophone was a nursery nuisance. The radio-set had not been prophesied, even in the scientific romances of Mr. H. G. Wells.

The immaterial differences are even greater.

Divorce carried a social stigma. Bridegrooms demanded inexperience. Women could not plead in court nor sit in Parliament. Ireland was under British rule. France was the only European republic. Communism was the creed of a few unwashed malcontents and an abstract subject of dispute among intellectuals in Chelsea. Catholicism was the hereditary handicap with which the worldly ambitions of certain families were burdened. Income tax was at a shilling.

Mrs. C. S. Peel in that classic of social history, A Wonderful Hundred Years, has recorded the windings of the stream of change across the ample landscape of nineteenth-century England. To-day that stream has become a torrent. The war telescoped events: achieving in five years changes for which a normal process of effect and cause would have required fifty; so that we who have lived through that period are only conscious of the speed and distance we have travelled at some such arbitrarily selected date as an uncle’s death, a nephew’s birth, a coming-of-age dance, a sister’s wedding; when we reverse the panorama and, looking back to 1900, exclaim, At this rate where on earth shall we find ourselves in 1960?

It was in such a mood, pausing at the half-way house of thirty-five, that I decided to draw up a survey of the period—not in the manner of a list (1906, the first taxi. 1910, Bleriot flies the Channel. 1913, the Hobble Skirt. 1918, Votes for Women. Not that. Other people have done that)—but a record of the way in which, in the midst of external change, men and women lived their ordinary lives; of how they thought, dreamed, acted, while history was happening about them.

That is the book that I had planned to write, that I began to write: the kind of book which is catalogued in public libraries under the amiably misleading label of Belles-Lettres. But the storyteller is interested not in groups, but individuals. His instinct is to avoid generalizations, to take an instance that seems typical, to say of it, That is how this one man, this one woman lived at such a time. Study their lives and you can guess at what the world was like.

But as I began my search for those typical, concrete examples, I found myself more and more turning to one family, of whose fortunes I have been occasionally the sharer and consistently the spectator. So that when I wanted to write of the family businesses that in 1910, seemed unassailable but are now struggling to declare dividends, it was of Edward Balliol’s directorate of Peel & Hardy’s that I thought first; when I wanted to write of the suffrage movement; of the pre-war débutante now a matron; of the unemployed ex-officer; of the young men, too young to serve in the war, who were brought up in the shadow of the war, who are as much a part of the war generation as their brothers; of the post-war girl, rudderless, on the tide of freedom; it was of Lucy, Ruth, Hugh, Francis and Helen Balliol that I first thought. So typical indeed is the Balliol family of upper middle-class life in London during the last thirty years that I had not written many pages of my book before I knew that I was on the wrong track, that if I wanted to tell the story of the last thirty years in terms of individuals, I had better tear up what I had written, start again, and tell the story of the Balliols.

II

The Balliols entered my world in the spring of 1907; when my father decided to leave the West London street where I was born, and build a house on the northern heights of Hampstead, on the edge of the new Heath extension.

At that time such a move was an adventure. For centuries the fields had run green to Hendon. Against the red-brick, stucco-crested tide of expanding London the high wind-swept hill of Hampstead had stood like a breakwater, protecting with its gorse and heather the narrow valley between itself and Highgate, diverting the streams of asphalt towards St. John’s Wood and Swiss Cottage, so that late into Edwardian days the Brent moved placidly between flower-fringed banks, the gibbet elm brooded over the deep-cut lane that Pitt had watched beside in his last dark days and a sign-post beside a pond marked the junction of the old Finchley Bridle Path with the Great North Road down which Dick Turpin had cantered to meet death: North End called itself a village.

So slowly indeed had the encircling sea trickled northwards towards Child’s Hill, swelling eastwards up the hill to Frognal, that the estate agent who persuaded my father into the purchase of a half-acre field below the Bull and Bush was able to convince him that the North End Road would remain bounded by fields in perpetuity. Out of the hill a few hundred yards below us would emerge during that summer the extension of the Hampstead Tube. Who would want to build a house whose foundations every few minutes would quiver to the roar of trains?

It sounded a reasonable contention. And it was with a feeling of some outrage that we watched during the autumn and the spring a mushroom growth of two-storied villas scamper to the hill’s very foot; to be welcomed there by such an efflorescence of shops that the tube officials decided to run every other train straight through to Golders Green instead of, as had been their first intention, stopping three in every four at Hampstead.

It was with considerable irritation that my father watched the village atmosphere of North End engulfed by this suburban tide; but it was with the most reverential awe that I, a boy of nine, watched the slow, majestic growth across the road, of a house fully twice the size of ours. From the morning that the first sod of the first trench was dug I watched with an avid curiosity. I had paced out the foundations of our own house: I had listened to my parents’ discussions of measurements and heights. I knew that the extra yard of length that looks so negligible when a house lies, marked out by trenches in an open field, makes an immeasurable difference when that space is enclosed by walls. From the first pacing-out of the intruder I returned home, hot-cheeked with excitement.

It’s going to be huge, I said. There’s a room running the whole length. It’s thirty-five feet long and twenty wide. Then across the passage there’s another, only it’s smaller: twenty feet long; and beyond that it’s built out a lot. Perhaps the kitchen. The hall’s as big as our dining-room. Isn’t it funny, though there aren’t going to be any bay windows; just flat. I do wonder who’s going to live there. I wonder what the garden’ll be like. It might be big enough for cricket. I wonder if they’re nice.

That curiosity persisted.

Just once it happens to almost everyone to know another family or group of persons so well that one sees their story as a consecutive piece of narrative. One has talked of them, one has heard them discussed so often that one forgets when or where one learnt this or that particular incident; how this or that gap in one’s knowledge was filled in; in the same way that one cannot tell how a jigsaw puzzle was put together. One sees it at the end complete. One remembers certain motifs and passages that were difficult. In consequence the narrator of such a story is not forced to protrude himself except where he shared the action. He is absolved from the responsibility that ordinarily rests upon a narrator telling his story in the first person, of explaining how he knew what happened on occasions when he was not present; or what certain characters felt at certain crises. To explain such things in such a story would be as unnecessary and as tiresome as to footnote in a history book the authority for such statements as Magna Charta, 1215.

Edward Balliol, when I met him first, was on the brink of forty. I thought of him, that is to say, as an old man. He seems no older now. But I cannot imagine that in 1907 he can have appeared even to his contemporaries and seniors as anything but advancedly middle-aged. It is not that he was grey-haired or bald or fat. On the contrary, his figure was slim and tall and straight; while his hair was of that yellow flaxen lightness that conceals the white streaking round the ears. It was his manner, not his appearance, that was elderly. He had a slow, precise, slightly mannered way of speaking more fitted to a highly-placed official in the treasury than to a wine merchant. He had constant resort to inverted commas; to such explanatory parentheses as, in the description of an umbrella, that article which the contemporary slang of my youth misnamed a ‘gamp’. He also brought to each subject under discussion an equal measure of concern, suggesting that he was not personally involved. You could not imagine him being excited. He had none of the boyishness that many men retain to their last day. At the same time, because he was interested in nearly everything, he was an interesting companion. The feeling he always gave that in the last analysis he did not care two-pence either way prevented him from ever making a close friendship. But his capacity to be interested ensured for him a large and affectionate acquaintance. To a schoolboy such as myself he had the great appeal of being able to discuss my interests without patronizing them. He definitely did want to know what I had been doing.

Jane Balliol on the other hand does not even now seem an old woman. Though she walks with a stoop, slowly, though her hair is white, there is still, in her slight stammer, in her vagueness, in the occasional look of bewilderment that comes into her grey-blue eyes, not girlishness—that would be tiresome—but a capacity to be surprised; a suggestion that she has not yet completely focused a world that is new and strange to her. Married at seventeen, she stepped straight from the schoolroom into the responsibilities of marriage and motherhood. She had no girlhood. It is possibly this suggestion of a search for something lost long ago that keeps her young.

Not even when I was a child did I think of her as old. I did not realize then, as I do now, that she was beautiful.

Occasionally there is a potential, a dramatic look in a person’s face; so that you feel as you discuss with him some matter of impersonal interest that he is not there at all, that his real life is somewhere else, yet at the same time he seems more alive than the people whose entire attention is fixed on the matter you discuss. Something’s happening to that man, you think. Occasionally it is like that. But very much more often you get no inkling that the man with whom you play a round of golf or argue about international tariffs in your club over a glass of sherry is the victim of an emotional typhoon. When later he gives you a hint of the kind of experience through which at that time he was passing, you recall with surprise the calm he then displayed. He had given no suggestion that that round of golf, that glass of sherry, was the half-hour of calm at the typhoon’s core. During the summer of 1907 I had no idea that the impressive couple who came evening after evening to watch the walis of their new home rise within the scaffolding were passing through a crisis.

For that matter nothing could have surprised them more than the warning that such a crisis was imminent on that first April afternoon when they walked up the hill from Hendon towards the first pile of cement and mortar, the first rough trench, the first poles of scaffolding that had scared the hill’s green flank.

It was a warm day with the sky blue and the sun only intermittently obscured by clouds. The estate agent’s clerk who stood watching the Balliols’ slow ascent of the steep hill had bicycled three miles from his firm’s office. He was tired and he was hot. A film of dust clotted his boots, under the clipped trousers. Drops of sweat glistened between the pimples on his forehead.

He was a young man, in the early twenties, with pretensions to dandiness. A bowler hat was tilted jauntily upon his head. A carefully greased lock of hair curled beneath its brim. He wore a high choker collar and a gilt pin set sideways in a stiff silk tie. He had a perky, not unlikeable confidence. He was pleased with himself. He had begun where his parents had left off. He represented progress. Just as the stack of bricks in the roadway represented progress. He was proud of both.

He tilted his hat backwards and patted at his forehead with a bandana handkerchief; his thoughts busied upon the Balliols.

It was after four. They were going to have tea in Golders Hill, he shouldn’t wonder; seated on the terrace looking out over the lawn. New bread, fresh butter, water cress, meringues. As a kid he had watched people, seated up there. How he had envied them; how he had wondered when the day would come for him to join them! It hadn’t, yet. But it would do. There would come a time when he’d be able to afford things like that. A time when he’d be like this couple here; in a position to buy a house.

He wondered if they were considering such a purchase. Their saunter had dwindled into a dawdle. They had stopped and were looking at the pile of bricks and mortar, the scaffolding, the barrels, the high-heaped clay.

They looked prosperous. The man’s clothes made an enviably band-box effect. He carried himself with the assured manner of those who have to work but not to fight for livelihood. His manner fitted comfortably, like his clothes.

The woman was of the kind that may have had to consider pounds but never shillings. He placed her at thirty-two. But she might be more. You could not tell with women of that kind; who could afford nice things, who had not to depend upon their youth to look attractive. She was slim and graceful, her movements supple. Her colouring was fresh, but that might be because she could afford to keep it so. She could afford creams and special kinds of soap. There were women in society who actually made up their faces, he’d been told; put powder on, and rouge, blacked their eyelashes. He hadn’t believed it. Decent women wouldn’t, surely. Certainly not women of this kind. All the same, as he had said to Alf Turner, There can’t be smoke without fire, if you get me. Those women did certainly know how to make themselves look young.

Yes: they were the kind of people who might want a house out here.

He moved across to them.

It’s worth looking at, he said. The first house to go up on this hill. It won’t be the last. You wait. All this business of bricks and mortar doesn’t mean just a few more houses, but a different sort of house. This isn’t going to be a row of houses; not just another London street. It’s going to be like a village. Garden Suburbs their name for it. Half town, half country, if you get me. Every family with a garden of their own that they can sit about in; arranging it the way they like; crazy pavement and all that. Not those miserable little strips you see up West, with a square in the centre that anyone can use. Every one on their own here; private, if you get me. Ten years ago it wouldn’t ‘ave been possible. Land in London cost too much. People had to live within three miles of their work. Not now, though, thanks to these tube railways. By June they’re going to have one out to here. You wait and see the difference it’ll make. A portent, that’s what it is, a portent.

He repeated the word as though to satisfy himself that he was using correctly a word that he had very recently added to his vocabulary. He then proceeded to develop his thesis. People were not going to go on living in hot, narrow, noisy streets when they could get away into clean and quiet air. Town might be all very well for people who wanted to be in the very centre of things and could afford houses in the country that they could go down to for week-ends. It might be all right for them. But for the others, who couldn’t afford week-end cottages and country houses, there was only one sane alternative.

Just think of the difference for a man to have something to look forward to during the day, something to come back to at the end of it. Greenhouse and a potting-shed. A lawn to mow, good exercise; something to show for it, if you get me. Flowers coming up; being able to say ‘These parsnips are from our garden’; pointing to a bowl of flowers, ‘Yes, our roses haven’t done so badly this year’; having a place where children can tumble about in old clothes. That’s a life worth living.

He spoke breathlessly, with an enthusiasm that was in part vicarious—his salesman’s capacity to reproduce the pictures and phraseology of a prospector—but was in large part personal, lit by his own memories of childhood; the drab gentility of the ‘nineties; the prim starched Sundays; the long winter evenings, with father coming back at seven; the long winter week-ends with father blocking out the fire; the afternoon walks through monotonous hard streets; the drear holidays when he had longed for the next term to start. The occasional treats to which days had been counted on a calendar, which had invariably ended in headaches, exhaustion, frayed nerves, ill-humour. The next generation would be spared all that. His eyes sparkled as he spoke. Whatever the past might have been, the future was rich and full.

London will be a different place within ten years. A transformation, that’s what it’ll be, a transformation. You wait!

He made the assertion with a confidence that was aggressive, but untruculent. He paused; the spokesman of the spirit of new things, wondering what effect his harangue had made. He was not really empowered to negotiate at all. He was just a clerk drawing his thirty-bob a week, who had been sent out as any clerk might be, with a message to a foreman. But he wasn’t going to stay a clerk all his life. It was by such an incident as this that people stopped being clerks. They saw an opportunity and seized it. Forced their employers to take notice of them, to recognize them as being out of the rut, worthy of promotion. It was a moment such as this that warranted the cards he had had printed at the cost of a month’s cigarettes and beer.

He drew a small envelope from his pocket, extracted from it a card in the corner of which was written the name and address of the agency for which he worked. With what he took to be a flourish he presented it.

I don’t know if you’re thinking of buying a property here, but if you ever do, well, it wouldn’t do any harm to be in touch with someone in the know; personal equation, if you get me.

That’s very nice of you.

And if… well, if you cared to let me have your card, I could send you along any prospectus that I thought might interest you.

Balliol hesitated; then with a smile drew a card case from his waistcoat pocket, and in his turn took a card from it and handed it across. The young man read it: the name, Mr. Edward Balliol, the club in the left-hand corner, the Oxford and Cambridge, the address at the other side, 22 Easton Square. As he had thought, the kind of address his firm wanted on its books.

And that, said Balliol, as he and Jane walked on out of earshot, is the kind of young man for whom I prophesy a quite early and a quite pronounced success. I can picture him in twenty-five years converted into a portly, pompous committee man with a son entered for one of our lesser public schools; a son of whom he will be immensely proud and secretly afraid, whose bills he will settle half a dozen times and who, each time that he accepts a cheque, will contrive to give the impression that he is conferring instead of receiving a favour; who will marry for worldly reasons and whose progeny will arrive in the bankruptcy, by way of the divorce courts. Which is what, my dear, we call progress nowadays.

Jane made no reply. The long walk had begun to tire her. Her steps were not dragging, her breath was not hurried, her movements had the same smooth rhythm that had attracted the young man’s appreciative eye as she began the heightening climb. It had rather the gliding grace of a liner as it swings into harboured water, its engines faintly purring.

Her husband continued his dissertation. And it is to compete with such a one that we of the upper middle classes are at this moment training our sons at Marlborough, Cheltenham and Fernhurst. It is like training a terrier to be pitted against a wolf. There is our own Hugh at the end of his second year at Fernhurst. His competitive eye has already sorted out his rivals. He has marked the chief obstacle to his captaincy of the eleven, his most redoubtable opponent in the classroom. He fancies, as far as he has concerned himself with the problem, which is I expect to no large extent, that all through the life for which this education is supposed to train him, he will find the graph of his ambition defined by such simple landmarks. He would be astonished were he to be informed that he will find himself in competition fifteen years from now with someone whose existence at this moment he would not deign to recognize: an alert product of the council schools, attending night-classes at the end of eight hours’ manual labour in a factory.

As always, Balliol talked as though the subject under discussion, in this case his son’s education, was not a problem personal to himself, but one aspect of the general, social and economic problem of the hour.

He continued on the same blandly impersonal note.

The trouble about such a competitor is this: Only one in ten thousand out of what our parents would have called the lower orders is born with sufficient ambition and capacity to enter the lists of such a competition. That one out of ten thousand has, in consequence, so many preliminary obstacles to face, that in passing them he acquires a momentum. He has started from so much farther back that he arrives at the starting post at a pace which within a few yards carries him right ahead of his opponents. He has, in fact, a flying start. In my day, when the masses were uneducated, we were spared such redoubtable opposition. I am convinced that Hugh has no conception of how different life is going to be for him. And I am extremely doubtful whether those who have been set in authority over him have recognized it, either.

Said Jane, I think it’ll be warm enough to have tea out on the terrace.

They had reached the brief plateau, before Pitt House, where the hill pauses before starting its final climb to the Spaniards Road. Three youths on bicycles went by abreast. Their machines were not free wheel. They had spread out their feet sideways, so that their pedals could revolve; their caps were pulled tight to their foreheads, back to front, the peaks low upon their shoulders. They screamed excitedly to one another as they reached the top of the steepest hill within a five-mile radius of Piccadilly.

As their machines rushed past, a motor-car with high scarlet bonnet, snorted, rattled, wheezed its way over the crest. It reached the plateau; it checked as though it were pausing to take breath; it groaned; it grunted; there was a grinding screech of tortured metal as the goggled motorist changed gears. Then with an abrupt jerk forward and a series of slight explosions the machine proceeded on its ascent.

Balliol shook his head.

Dangerous things. They’ve spoilt the road for bicycling. I should not care to take a machine out now. I am very glad that what the press now call the cycling era coincided with my own enjoyment of violent exercise.

The era had framed their courtship. During their decorous Victorian engagement when it was considered improper for women to ride in hansoms, and evening excursions had demanded chaperons, they had ridden out in parties of four or six; he in a knickerbocker suit and belted jacket; she with a high-necked white blouse and straw hat perched forward on her head; scouring northern lanes through long autumn afternoons; looking down from Harrow, Highgate, Hampstead on to the glitter of London’s roofs and spires; taking their tea in cottage gardens.

As they turned through the park gates he passed his arm under hers.

It must be over five years since we came out here, she said.

They had abandoned such excursions very early in their marriage. Their first child, Lucy, had been born within a year, and during Jane’s weeks of indisposition a friend had presented Balliol with a book in which the cycling enthusiast might enter his runs, the distances and times, the average of miles per hour. Within a very short time the fever of figures had bitten Balliol. He was always out to beat his own record. When Jane once again took the road it was to find that the care-free spirit had departed. Her husband no longer cycled for the pleasure of open air and open country; for exercise and the sense of speed; the freedom of being away from bricks and pavements. He cycled with one eye on the clock, the other on the cyclometer. He kept saying, Now, do you think we could reach Shenley within twenty-three and a half minutes? He grew resentful of wayside rests at the end of a long pull up a hill. He kept taking out his little book, writing figures, comparing figures. At the end of a day, instead of talking lazily before a fire, he would draw up charts by means of which he would invariably discover that there was some record or other that he had broken, even if it was no more than the speed record for the first twelve minutes after tea.

In such bicycling Jane could take no pleasure. When she found she was again pregnant, fully a year before she had really wanted, she had consoled herself with the thought that anyhow she would not need to bicycle for another year. Perhaps during that time she would have been able to devise an excuse for avoiding their weekend excursions.

She was spared that necessity, however. Before she was again fit the bicycle and the record book had been superseded. From a September holiday at Deal, Balliol returned with the announcement that he had taken up golf. That was not strictly true. Golf had taken him up. He argued that golf combined such pleasures as bicycling, fresh air, open country, pleasant companionship with professional advantages; that a great deal of business could be done at what I believe the younger members call the nineteenth hole. But neither was that argument strictly valid. Golf had captured him and the extent of his submission would have been no less complete had the list of his firm’s clients provided him with not a single partner or opponent to excuse the abandonment of an office desk at noon.

On returning from an afternoon of golf he would discuss scores over bogey, stymies and shanked approach shots with a minute elaboration of detail and theory. His handicap remained rooted in the lower teens, but a comparative study of his recent performances always convinced him that he was playing at least two strokes better than he had in the preceding month. And he invariably completed half an hour’s putting practice on the drawing-room carpet with the comforting pronouncement that he would be in single figures within a year.

Golf was the one subject that he did not discuss impersonally.

It was only indeed to the failure of a golfing partner that the present expedition was due. A telegram had arrived shortly before eleven. Returning lunch. Will go walk country afternoon. Edward.

Which was very typical of Balliol. It never occurred to him that what he wanted, his family would not too. Jane was convinced that he had refused to install a telephone simply so that he might send such messages.

He described the telephone, which he had only had installed at his office with considerable reluctance, as an extravagance and a nuisance. Actually, from the financial point of view it would have represented a considerable economy in telegrams, of which he rarely sent less than a dozen every week. While the nuisance, as far as he was concerned, would consist in the opening that it would afford his friends to alter the plans that he had made by telegram and letter. If they could have reached him by the telephone they would have rung up to question his decisions; and suggest alternatives. As it was, they shrugged their shoulders, thinking, It’s a nuisance, but it’s less trouble to do it the way he says.

In an unobtrusive way Edward Balliol was an extremely selfish man. He got his own way without appearing to force it upon other people, without apparently knowing that he was doing so. Jane was well aware of this trait in him. She smiled at it, knowing it was simple to deal with selfish people who knew their own minds and made up yours for you.

She had made other plans, as it happened, for that afternoon. She was going to have taken Francis, her second and five-year-old son, to sail his boat on the Serpentine. But Francis would be just as happy really with his nurse. And it was a long time since she had done anything alone with Edward. A long time, when it came to that, since she had really talked to him.

That was one of the strange things of marriage. You could see so little of a husband. You were never allowed to be alone. He returned from his office at the day’s end. He told you in brief outline what had happened during the day, whom he had seen, what he had been told; which in Edward meant a précis of the main contents of the evening papers. It would then be time for him to take his bath. Most evenings they would either have friends to dinner, or be going out. From their first guest’s arrival or the servant’s announcing of their names they would not see each other till the final farewells had been exchanged. Husbands and wives were not allowed to sit together; to be near each other; to join in the same conversation. At the end of the evening they had barely enough energy for the exchange of a few tired comments. Next morning there was the hurried rush of a busy man starting for his office.

One sees less of one’s husband during twenty years of marriage than one does during the twenty weeks of an engagement, she had once remarked to Stella Balliol.

The retort had been the kind of thing that she was accustomed to expect from her husband’s sister.

That’s the only reason why marriage lasts. If wives and husbands saw as much of each other as they think they are going to when they get engaged, the divorce courts would be as crowded as the police courts. Which was what one would expect of Stella. She could be trusted to take the unconventional view on any subject.

All the same, this little trip, the train journey to Hendon, the walk through the fields to Golders Hill, trivial though it might be, was the most intimate afternoon they had had for months.

And here they were now, seated on the terrace; a large tea, of watercress, meringues, strawberry jam, new-cut bread and butter set before them, with the breeze, after the long walk, cool upon her cheeks, the sky a luminous pale blue, the lawns green and dappled in the April sunlight sparkling towards the pond; with children tumbling over each other in the grass, their nurses, in prim blue uniforms, starched linen and white caps, seated on the wooden benches, slowly rocking at their prams with one eye upon their charges, the other upon the blurred print of a novelette, conducting at the same time an animated exchange of confidences, opinions and impressions with colleagues at their side; with tethered dogs, apparently asleep, waiting with cocked ear for the moving signal that would mean freedom and the sandy stretches of the heath.

It’s just as it used to be, he said.

She knew what he meant by that; just as it had been eighteen years ago, in their days of courtship, when they had escaped from chaperons. And a little sob rose in her throat, because it was the same and yet not the same; because there was the sunlight and the grass; the blue sky, the nurses, the dogs, the tumbling children; and in her heart the sense of spring and poetry.

There was all that here. But the elegant young man whose Bohemian attire had made him conspicuous but had charmed her, since it seemed right on him, had exchanged that loose elegance of dress for a modish dapperness; because a drawled voice that had said such absurd fond things as How wise of you to wear eyes that match an April sunlight; that had indulged in elaborately subtle sophistries over trifles, developing world philosophies from the cut of a waiter’s waistcoat, was no longer self-consciously but unconsciously affected. A pose had become a manner. With the direction of its wit altered, so that he spoke facetiously about what mattered, instead of seriously about what did not matter. The lavish tea that was spread before them was no longer a gesture to placate a waiter. Let’s order a great deal so that we can sit here a great while. I couldn’t think of food when I am with you, he used to say. But the high-piled plates were now very sturdily employed in the assuagement of a hearty appetite; while she herself, though her heart was light, stung with the sense of vanished winter and budding life, was no longer the reflection of a young man’s mood; was no longer to that young man as is a garden to the sun; bright and gay and coloured, when the sky is cloudless; lifeless and toneless when its light is hidden. Indeed, she was not thinking of that man, at all, but was wondering about the evening’s dinner party; was thinking of the low bowl of flowers, the clustered primroses and pansies that she would set in the centre of the table; of how the high-tapered candles would be reflected on the polished walnut; of the large bowl of tulips that she had set in the window to catch the eye of the guests as they arrived, so that they would feel, in spite of the dimming light and greying sky above the house tops, that spring had indeed returned. Of that she thought, and in particular of the frock with the long folds of turquoise blue that she would be wearing that night for the first time, that she was still half afraid would look too young for her.

And she felt sad suddenly on this April day because things were the same and yet not the same; since the world had the same look but the eyes and the heart were changed.

I think I shall put Mr. Rickman on my left, she said.

III

It was six o’clock when she returned to the large Bayswater house in the oblong rectangle of houses that in residential London is called a Square. She had lived in this house for sixteen years, since within a few months of the birth of her first child, Lucy, she had realized that she was again to become a mother. The face of London had changed greatly during those sixteen years, but no sign of that change had disturbed the formal quiet of the Square from which not only bagpipes, monkey-men and barrel organs, but all symbols of the new age, were rigorously excluded. The basemented, three-storied row of houses with their flight of seven white steps leading to a heavy portico, their flat stucco fronts, bright with sun-blinds and flower boxes, had faced steadily for fifty years the long strip of railinged garden whose branches for a few moments in early May were brightly emerald. A few yards away the crowded thoroughfare of the Edgware Road had reflected hour by hour along its jostled pavements, in its packed shop windows, on its high-flared hoardings, the rapid advance of the twentieth century. But over Easton Square a Victorian calm still brooded.

As her husband pushed open the front door, Jane hesitated on its threshold, as though something had occurred to her; but after a pause that was momentary she passed on in silence.

From the top of the house came the sound of a slammed door, a girl’s voice shouting, Yes, it’s they, and the door slammed. There was a clatter of footsteps on stairs, a girl of thirteen, bright-eyed, her cheeks flushed, was flinging herself into Jane’s arms. Mummie darling, how late you are.

A moment later a tall girl, thin and unformed at a girl’s awkward age, was self-consciously welcoming her father.

Mummie, Ruth was saying. "You are going to let us watch you arrange the flowers? You promised, didn’t you?"

Schoolroom tea was not till half-past six. To watch their mother arrange flowers had been always one of the children’s treats.

Come along, she said.

The two girls sat at the table, their elbows rested on it, while Jane filled the long oblong dish with primroses and pansies. As always, Ruth was the most talkative. At thirteen years old she was still a child, with the eager, un-selfconsciousness of a child; with the slim prettiness of a Baumer drawing. She was alert, vivid, like quicksilver. Lucy, in her sixteenth year, on the other hand, was awakened, self-conscious. She was scraggy; her movements were abrupt. She always seemed to be wondering where to put her hands; usually they were fiddling with her collar, or at her belt. She was dark, with a pale skin. There was normally a slightly sullen look upon her face. Until you looked into her eyes you did not realize that she might become a very lovely woman. Then you saw more than that. Her eyes were of a brown that was very near to black. They were large and long-lashed. They were not only beautiful, they were brave. You knew that she was capable of deep feeling, of devotion, of selflessness. You would think that. Then she would look away. You would see only her sullen profile. You would think, Whatever she may be in two years’ time, I know what she is now: a bad-tempered, not very pretty girl.

It was Ruth who received notice from the Balliols’ friends. It was she who made the advances, who made friendship easy. Leaning forward across the table, she asked question after question about the evening’s party.

Tell me all about it. How many will there be? Eight in all, that’s counting yourselves. And who’ll they be? Aunt Stella. She’s always here. I can’t think why you ask her. I know Lucy thinks she’s marvellous. But I think she’s dull. Too serious. And who else? Mr. Rickman. Who’s he? A friend of Daddy’s. He’s old, then. What? No, quite young? About twenty-five? Is he good-looking? You’ve never met him? How funny, asking someone that you’ve never met. Yes, I daresay, even if he is a friend of Daddy’s. And who else? The Shirleys. Oh, but I think she’s irritating. He’s all right. I like him. But she’s so la-di-da; sounds so kind and good, and really isn’t that at all. Mummie, I think it’s going to be an awful party. What’ll you do afterwards? Sit about and talk?

Darling, what else could we do?

So many things. You could dance, you could go out somewhere. There must be places somewhere in London where people can enjoy themselves.

We shall enjoy ourselves, in our way.

But, Mummie, in what way? I shall never give that sort of party when I’m grown up.

Lucy had taken no part in the conversation. She had let her sister babble on. Now that Ruth’s curiosity was in part assuaged, she interrupted.

Shall I have a chance of seeing Aunt Stella to-night?

Darling, I don’t see when.

Couldn’t she come up and see me before dinner?

There won’t be time. She’ll arrive just before dinner’s served. It would upset things.

Then couldn’t she come up afterwards, when Daddy and the men are sitting downstairs in the dining-room?

It’s rather difficult, that kind of thing breaks up the conversation. Besides, there’s the coffee.

Couldn’t she have the coffee with me? Mother darling, please, couldn’t she? I haven’t seen Aunt Stella for so long.

I can’t see why you should want to see her, Ruth interrupted. I don’t find her any fun.

You wouldn’t. You’re too young. Please, mother, you will try, won’t you?

I’ll try. But I can’t promise.

You’ll promise to tell her that I asked?

I’ll promise. And now you must run along, both of you. I’ve got a great deal to do and I’ve got to say good night to Francis.

Francis was already tucked up. He was the youngest by many years and had been actually born within the century. Jane had never thought she would have a baby after Ruth. Three were plenty. Francis coming after an interval of seven years touched feelings that she had thought never to know again. As a result he meant more to her than her other children. Yet with him she had the feeling she had with none of her other children that she loved him more than he loved her. He was a reserved child; not sullen as Lucy was, but secretive, as though he were harbouring grievances. Edward just shrugged his shoulders. If I were the kind of man to let myself be worried, I should be worried about that boy. He’ll be what the advocates of Montessori methods call ‘an interesting case’: which to a mother was not consoling.

Francis was still awake when she came into the nursery. Curled up in the corner of his bed, he was watching the lamplight from the street below flicker on the ceiling. He turned his head as the door opened, but he did not, as Hugh would have done at his age, jump up on his knees, with his arms stretched wide to fling about her neck. He just lifted himself upon his elbow.

She came across and sat beside him on the bed.

Did you have a nice day, darling?

Yes, I took my boat out.

You missed mummy, though, a bit?

Of course I did. Nurse isn’t really interested in my boat.

Were there lots of other boats there?

Lots and lots. And ever so many other boys. And… he paused, looking down and away from her, … when shall I go to school, Mummie?

Darling, I don’t know. Not just yet.

I’d like to go to school.

Why?

I’ve got no friends. Other boys have friends. I haven’t. They’ve got brothers and sisters of their own age, I haven’t.

Well, darling, you’re not six yet, you know.

How soon do boys go to school?

Not till they are seven, at the earliest.

I wish I were seven.

You’ll be seven soon enough. I must tuck you up now. Mother’s got to go and dress.

He doesn’t really love me, she thought, not really.

On her way down the passage she passed Edward. To a house containing eight bedrooms only two bathrooms were allotted. He looked inappropriately youthful in a silk, claret-coloured dressing-gown.

Preparing for the last charge of a forlorn hope, he said.

IV

The reference to a forlorn hope explained the nature of six out of the last nine dinner parties that the Balliols had given. Edward was trying to find a husband for his sister Stella. For a long time she had been a problem. She was rapidly becoming a situation. She was within a few months of thirty, and though Balliol readily agreed that the time had passed when a woman who was not married by twenty-three never would be married, and an unmarried woman was an unwanted parasite, in Stella’s particular case he did feel not only that in marriage lay her one salvation, but that unless she was married shortly she was destined for a regretably dramatic spinster-hood. He had come to this conclusion when she had expressed the opinion that if women really meant to get the vote they had better do something drastic.

What do you mean by something drastic?

You’ll see that soon enough, had been her answer.

And that means, he had told Jane afterwards, that before we know where we are, she’ll be waving banners in Whitehall.

From the start Stella had been a problem. At a time when most girls in the country were content to fill the period probationary to marriage with tennis racquets, croquet mallets, water-colours, crochet hooks, pianos and the novels of Marie Corelli, Stella had insisted first on a University education and a degree, then, as the prelude to a career, the independence of a latch-key and a chequebook.

That in itself might have not been too ominous. A number of girls were demanding such rights in the days of Ann Veronica. But whereas the majority of fathers knew that such campaigns and the consequent arguments in favour of careers were merely feminine excuses for cultivating masculine acquaintanceship with greater freedom, old Mr. Balliol had never in Stella’s case been able to console himself with that belief. She had demanded her right to an un-chaperoned life in London, simply so that she might exercise that privilege of which women in a lower walk of life were most anxious to be relieved; the right of earning her own living.

She’ll get tired of it soon, Edward Balliol had prophesied; within four years, she’ll be marrying as other women have married, for a home.

But four years had passed and six and seven, and Stella had shown no signs of dissatisfaction with her life. On the contrary, she appeared to derive an increasing satisfaction, not only from the work itself—she was now in charge of thirty stenographers in the Morrison Teach-Yourself-By-Post Institute—but from the position that that work gave her. She had attached herself to various phases of the woman’s movement. She sat on committees. She addressed meetings. In private she expressed her opinions not as though she were saying, I, Stella Balliol, believe this, but as though she were the spokesman of a group. She said We more often than I. Behind her trim, neat sentences you seemed to hear the steady rhythm of a march.

It was when this interest in the future of women generally began to declare itself in favour of a direct championing of women’s rights, that her brother felt it was high time she married.

We must find her a husband, he told Jane.

Jane was dubious.

Will that be easy?

On that point Balliol himself had been none too confident. He had tried by arguing with his wife to reassure himself.

She’s not old.

I know.

She’s not bad-looking.

No.

She’s good company.

Yes.

She’ll have a certain amount of money when our father dies.

I know, but all the same.…

Jane paused. It was difficult to define the exact nature of the obstacle. Clearly though one was aware of it. Stella was amusing, capable, and quite nice-looking. She was honourable and loyal. She would have a reasonable amount of money. She was the kind of woman of whom it would be possible to say, She’d make the right man an admirable wife. Yet her brisk manner, her self-confidence, her readiness to meet men on equal ground prevented you from thinking of her in terms of courtship. It was possible to picture her as a wife; but not as a fiancée.

The various unmarried men that Balliol invited from time to time to dinner parties at which she had been present found her conversation easy and entertaining. When the women had left the room they would invariably, before opening a masculine topic, make some such remark as By Jove, that sister of yours is an interesting girl, going on to some such generalization as We’ll have to be pretty careful or girls like that will be taking our jobs away from us. They’ll be ruling offices as well as roosts.

These professions of admiration were not, however, followed by the desire for any increased acquaintance with their inspirer.

It was when Balliol was practically at the end of his eligible acquaintance—of bachelors that was to say between thirty-five and fifty with worldly prospects or achievement—that Jane had suggested the possibility of a younger man falling in love with Stella.

You know what they say about the attraction of opposites. There are a great many weak, diffident men who want someone that they can rely upon, who expect their wives to take their mother’s place. Very likely Stella herself wants someone she can look after, instead of someone who’ll look after her; a thing she can do very well for herself.

It was to this suggestion that Roy Rickman owed his invitation.

I’ll ask him, but it’s a long forlorn hope, was Balliol’s comment.

It did not seem even that to him when Stella made her entrance at exactly twenty-nine minutes past seven; alert, animated, informative, taking the centre of the floor with her first remark.

"Have any of you seen the Peace cartoon in Punch?"

Punch had come out that evening and they had all seen it. At the head of a long flight of steps stood a house with its gate opened, headed Disarmament. On the steps were figures representing the various nations: Russia, England, Italy, France, Austria, Germany. Each figure armed to the teeth was pointing its neighbour to the door. After you, please, the caption ran.

It’s so typical, she said. "Punch confirms people in their prejudices. In a cartoon like that they see their own reflection in the glass. They dismiss the matter from their minds. They say ‘Of course disarmament is absurd. No one’s going to take the first step.’ That’s why we never get anywhere."

An animated argument began at once. Disarmament was a subject on which they all held opinions that they were anxious to express. Stella acted as a kind of chairman. A discussion continued with such zest that the announcement of dinner was not the relieved ending of the mauvais quart d’heure, but the annoying interruption of an interesting talk.

It was all very like Stella, Balliol thought, as he shepherded his guests into the dining-room. The particular kind of impression that she made on men was typified by her opening an argument with the one cartoon in Punch that precluded any kind of personal discussion; no reference to you and I was possible: there could be no alternative to a weighing of abstract points of view. In consequence his guests would think of her afterwards not as someone who was something, but as someone who held certain views.

That was the whole trouble about Stella. She wasn’t negative. Far from it, she was a personality, the most definite personality in the room. But she produced an impersonal impression. He looked at her as she took her seat beside young Rickman. Yes, that was what was wrong with her. She was handsome, with her firm, clear-cut features, her clear skin, her bright hazel eyes, her brown hair puffed forward high upon her forehead. Her dress was fashionably cut. There was nothing frumpish about her. At the same time he could not imagine a man wanting to make love to her. He strained his ears to hear what they were saying. As he might have suspected. Campbell Bannerman. Land values. Irish policy.

Two places away from her on the other side Jane Balliol was watching the effect that Stella was making on Roy Rickman. It was not going to be a success. She had been certain of that from the first sight of Rickman. He wasn’t the kind of young man to fall in love with somebody like Stella. He was handsome, broad-shouldered, athletic-looking; his hair was a lightish brown with a hint of red in it. It was longish, swept back and parted at the side. There was the break of a wave in its sleek expanse, that under the light gave it a burnished look. His manner was easy, open, rather confidential. His voice was deep. He was laughing half the time. It was a loud boyish laugh. It was almost a punctuation mark, so frequently did it round off his sentences. When he listened, it was intently, watchfully; with an encouraging smile, as though he were saying, Yes, yes, how right you are. I’ve never seen it in quite that way before. He must be good with men, she thought. I can understand that he’s good in business. What was it that Edward said he was? What they now call a representative and in our fathers’ day would have called a tout. He gets his friends to buy motor-cars and wine and insure their lives. I wonder if he likes doing that kind of thing. A young man has to take what he can get nowadays. But having to make use of one’s friends in that way. He looks too nice for that. I hope he’s enjoying himself now. It’s a good dinner. I wish Violet wasn’t so slow passing the side dishes. Mrs. Shirley’s practically finished her fish, and the sauce hasn’t reached her yet. I think she might have waited. Ruth’s right about her. She is la-di-da. I hope she and Stella don’t start quarrelling afterwards.

"Yes, Mr. Shirley, I quite agree with you. George Alexander is too well dressed."

Really, but Mr. Shirley’s very tiresome. I can’t think why we asked them; because he plays golf with Edward; which means that he buys port from Edward. But I don’t see why on that account I should have to be bored by his company and made uncomfortable by his wife’s. I don’t see why men can’t keep their business lives and their home lives separate. They ought to be able to. What else are offices for? They say that business friends get offended when you don’t invite them to your homes. Well, I don’t see why they shouldn’t be offended. If you’re useful to them in business they won’t cut off a nose to spite a face. I think it’s silly.

Of course, Mr. Shirley, there is this to be said, that if you give people what they want, if you put them in a good temper, that’s to say, you stand more chance of getting what you want out of them.

Oh, but I’m so bored. There’s the entrée. I do hope Martha hasn’t forgotten the cayenne pepper with the sweetbread. Well, that’s half the meal. Now I can start talking on the other side. I wonder what Mr. Rickman will be like.

She extricated herself from the conversation in the gradual monosyllabic manner that coincides with the removal of the fish plates. There was silence round the table that Edward, observing, broke up with an essay at general conversation, that in its turn subsided into the even flow of duologues, as each man turned towards his left.

Thought Jane, I shall know what he’s like now. I wonder how he’ll start the conversation. It’s always amusing to see what a man says first. Though it’s always the same thing, really. If you know him already it’s, Have you seen anything of the Jacksons lately? If you don’t know him, Have you seen Tree’s new show? Perhaps he’ll be different.

He was: surprisingly different.

He turned and looked at her, then smiled. It was the kind of smile with which you welcome an old friend in a crowded room; of whose presence you have been for a long time aware, but from whom you have been kept apart. You edge your way towards each other; your eyes meet across a sea of shoulders; you think, ‘in another minute, in two minutes at the outside’; and when you meet at last it is with a feeling both of relief and of excited anticipation. There was all that in the smile with which Roy Rickman turned to her.

One would think that he’s been waiting all the evening for a chance to talk to me. Perhaps he has.

Stella Balliol not only had no use for small talk, but possessed none. She not only did not want to discuss personalities, the theatre, servants, holiday resorts, income tax, except in their larger sense of a social and economic problem, but could not. In consequence, since she liked talking and since talk invariably centred round her, small talk was impossible in her company. Even when she was alone with other women.

Almost before the women had settled round their coffee, before anyone had had a chance of asking anyone whether they had seen anything recently of so-and-so, she set the ball moving with a sound, energetic kick.

"It’s quite clear that Campbell Bannerman doesn’t intend to do anything about giving us the vote. He’s going to prevaricate just as the Conservatives did. It just shows how short-sighted our leaders were to believe that they only had to wait for a Liberal government. They ought to have remembered