# After Noon (Ertz)/Chapter 8

LYDIA and Charles paused in front of a Mantegna. The pictures had failed to engage their whole attention, which was not surprising in view of the news Charles had to impart. He had been telling her about Caroline, and she had listened with the keenest interest and sympathy, asking a question here and there, fully aware of Charles's pain, which he tried to hide, but not failing to point out to him the inevitableness of the thing.
"Yes, that's lovely," she said. "The face of that child is exquisite—and those reds in the dress. But surely you realise it had to come, sooner or later."
Sooner or later. That was just it, he explained. He had counted on its coming later. Ten years later. But no, at the first—at almost literally the first opportunity—his daughter was ready to rush into the arms of a comparative stranger.
"It isn't decent," he protested. "Good God! I may be a grandfather by this time next year."
Lydia found this very laughable. He looked ​little more than thirty to-day. His suit, of some brownish mixture, became him. He wore a new felt hat. His clean-shaven face was always youthful, and at the moment it was even boyish. He made his protest against fate humorously. He was genuinely unhappy, but he saw the absurdity of his own position.
"Are you ready to swear," she asked, "that that fact isn't the real cause of your worry?"
Charles swore, somewhat indignantly, that it wasn't. The thought of being a grandfather had only just occurred to him as a probability, and he admitted that he found the idea shattering.
"But that's neither here nor there," he said. "The point is, is Robinson a good fellow or isn't he? Is she or is she not making a ghastly mistake? Could I prevent it? Ought I to try to prevent it? And how?"
"How indeed?" she asked. "You couldn't, in the case of an independent and determined girl like Caroline. She seems to know what she wants perfectly well. You may or may not like the young man, but from what I've seen of them I think they were made for each other. Why, they're the very echo of each other."
"Revolting!" exclaimed Charles.
"Wonderful, and rather mysterious," she said, "when you realise they've only known each other a few months. But it's true all the same. With ​a girl like that, interference would only be mischievious and useless. I wouldn't try it, if I were you."
"I'm not going to try it," he said. "I agree with you. I don't like Robinson. That is, I would never have chosen him for a son-in-law. But I think he'd always do the right thing by Caroline. I believe he'll cherish her, if you understand what I mean. He's a pacifist when one country makes war upon another, and yet he'd doubtless arm himself to the teeth in a political struggle, if he believed force was necessary. I can even imagine him contemplating a world revolution which would make millions of widows and orphans, and flinching at the sight of a dead sparrow. I can imagine him on a platform hurling abuse and strong words at his opponents that would make a sergeant-major blush, and then going home and singing lullabies to the baby after he'd given it its bath. That's the sort of fellow he is. A little mad, hopelessly illogical, mentally confused, of course, but capable of being a tender and loving husband and father. Do you think I've been fair to him?"
"You've drawn him," she said, "as he is."
Charles sighed, and they walked on into another room.
"Well, well," he said, "I mustn't complain. I have Venetia."
​"What about that perfectly charming Captain Cary?" she inquired.
"Oh, you like him, do you? So do I. I always wish he'd call me Charles." He added: "Thank Heaven there's nothing in that."
"Are you quite sure?"
"Perfectly. It's just one of Venetia's little fluters. She's had dozens, and she'll have dozens more. No man with eyes in his head can fail to find her attractive, and she knows it, and enjoys it, quite naturally. She's never unkind. There's nothing of the cold coquette about her. She likes men too much for that."
"But I feel all the same," she persisted, "that there's something more than just liking between those two."
He turned and looked at her.
"Are you trying to frighten me?" he asked.
It was the first time he had seen her dressed in anything but black. She was wearing a brown tailor-made, a small brown felt hat, a little brown fur around her neck. Charles found her far more approachable and also more attractive than before. She seemed less remote, and less like a heroine of one of Mr. Henry James's novels. He had always felt he would be frightened of these ladies, and he had begun by finding Lydia, for all her friendliness and charm, a little alarming. To-day they were, for no reason that he ​could find, on much easier terms with one another.
She shook her head.
"No, of course not. But I should be prepared, if I were you. It's no use living in a fool's Paradise."
"It's the only one I know of," said Charles.
"I mean, she's certain to want to marry, and sooner than you think." She added: "She's lovely, and so unspoilt. Oh, an exquisite girl, I think."
They paused in front of a Botticelli and contemplated it. Charles turned abruptly away.
"Well, when they both leave me, I shall become a recluse and read Plato, only emerging from my retirement to go to the City and make more money. A recluse," he said, throwing back his head, "with a damned good cellar and a damned good cook."
Lydia smiled. "The prospect doesn't excite my pity."
"It ought to," said Charles.
"If you hadn't mentioned the cellar and the cook, perhaps . . ."
"They would merely be gestures of defiance," he explained.
"After all," she said, "it's no worse than what I have to look forward to myself. And I'm less interested in food and drink. No, I shan't waste any pity on you. I shall reserve it for lonely old ​women, and over-worked horses, and for myself, at odd moments."
Charles turned suddenly and looked at her.
"What a nice woman you are," he said.
She laughed and coloured a little, his remark was so unexpected.
"Yes, I am," she admitted. "Where's that Francesca you were going to show me? The one with the angels in it."
Charles looked at his watch.
"We've just time for that," he said. "I must be back at the office by three. We'll do this again. A short lunch, and then half an hour or so here afterwards."
Lydia said she would be glad to, and he immediately wondered why he had suggested a repetition of it. Once was delightful. Twice would be less pleasant. Three times would be tiresome. He would have to watch himself. The irresistible and human desire to please at the moment was getting the upper hand.
Not that he didn't enjoy being with her. He did, surprisingly. Her oval face and clear grey eyes, her fair hair, very soft, like a child's, her voice with its transatlantic inflection, her quiet elegance, all pleased him. And he liked her mind. It was not too feminine. It had a way of not shying at facts. He found her a very companionable woman altogether. And she never bored ​him. She wasn't constantly comparing her own nation with his. She didn't discuss the prices of things ad nauseam. She seemed to have accepted England quite calmly and without effort, and while she undoubtedly observed much and made pointed comments now and again, she was never exclamatory, nor was she moved to silly mirth by little differences of speech or of custom.
Rupert Hinkson's letter, which had arrived a few days previously, had overstated nothing. All the same, charming as she was, it was a relief to him to hear that she had re-found old friends. Now that spring had come to England, people were returning from the South; from the Riviera, from Algiers, from Egypt. She spoke of a Madame de Ferrière, an American who had married a Frenchman, and who was now in London, and of a Mrs. Wilmot, an Englishwoman she had once met on the train going to the Lakes. She would soon find plenty of people to amuse her, and to like. She told him she had two theatres and a ball in prospect within the next few days.
He was glad to hear it, for her own sake. And, besides, he wanted to see as much as possible of Caroline, of Phil, whose better acquaintance he felt it very necessary to make, and, as always, of Venetia. He didn't want to lose a moment of her loved society that she was willing to bestow on him. And in his spare time he ​wanted to get on with his anthology. Rupert Hinkson had spoken of it in his letter.
"There aren't enough good prose anthologies," he said. "There is considerable demand for them here, where people have little time for browsing among books and like something they can pick up and put down again."
They emerged from the doors of the Gallery and stood for a moment under the portico, looking out over Trafalgar Square. She asked Charles if he would come and dine with her one night at the Berkeley and bring Venetia. She would ask Captain Cary, too, if Charles were willing.
"Just the four of us," she said, "and we can dance, if you do dance. Do you?"
Charles said he didn't; he only liked the polka, and it had recently gone out—well, twenty years or so ago. Lydia said she didn't care particularly about dancing, either.
"But the other two can. Or don't you want them to be thrown together?"
"They throw themselves together anyway," said Charles. "What's the difference?"
He put her into a taxi.
"You might lunch with me again the day after to-morrow," he said, "if you've nothing better to do."
She said she hadn't, and she would. He walked ​to the Strand to take a bus to the City, and wondered why he had asked her, and so soon.
"The worst of these social contacts," he said to himself, "is that you want to put an artistic finish to each meeting and the only way to do that is to arrange for another meeting." He bought an afternoon paper and swung himself on a bus, where he mounted to the top. "If I had simply said good-bye and shut the cab door, the thing would have been incomplete. Not that she cares whether she sees me again or not; but she might have felt she'd failed to make herself sufficiently agreeable. And so it goes on. It's all very pointless and silly."
He felt more than a little depressed and irritated. He had promised to go with Caroline to see the Robinsons in their home in Hampstead after dinner that evening, and the prospect did not add gaiety to his mood. He had a horror of high-brows, and he felt certain that the Robinsons deserved the name, and that they would talk earnestly about all the things he wanted to take lightly, and would take lightly all the things he wished to talk about seriously.
"But one good thing about high-brows is," he said to himself, "that they place no importance at all on relations by marriage. Thank God for that."
He and Caroline took the underground after ​dinner in spite of his assurance that he was perfectly willing to pay for a taxi. When they emerged from the station it was raining, and there were no taxis to be had there. Caroline, dressed in a plain, dark afternoon dress and her winter hat and coat—the fur of the latter a little worn and shabby—put up her umbrella and walked beside him cheerfully, telling him of the excellences of the family they were about to visit.
"They have only one maid," she said, "and they call her Miss Spaggit."
"I dare say it serves her right," said Charles.
She ignored this. "She comes from what's called the servant class," she explained, "and think what it must mean to her."
"I don't know," said her father, turning up the collar of his coat; "if I were a footman I should prefer to be called Charles. I shouldn't mind Lester much, though it would remind me of school, but if they called me Mr. Lester I'd give notice."
Caroline was silent for a moment.
"Mr. Robinson, Phil's father, is the kindest man in the world," she said. "But you may find him a little abrupt sometimes."
"I shall love that," answered Charles. "If there's a quality in my fellow-man which really pleases me it is that one. Lack of abruptness is ​entirely responsible for social boredom. Only in abruptness do you find wit, my darling. And epigrams, think of them. If Mr. Robinson is only sufficiently abrupt with me I shall take him to my heart and love him like a brother."
"I think you're being very flippant and rather tiresome," she remarked.
"Flippant, yes," agreed Charles, "but I hope not tiresome."
"Yes, both," she insisted.
He took her arm.
"Caroline, darling, it's only to keep the tears away."
"How absurd you are, father," she said more gently, "to be making such a fuss. It isn't as if you were going to lose me."
"It feels just the same," Charles answered.
They reached a door in a wall and opened it, and walked up a short path, bordered with dripping laurels to a small semi-detached house of yellow brick. Caroline rang the bell and the door was almost instantly opened by Phil. Robinson. He was wearing a grey flannel suit and a soft collar, and his hair seemed to Charles deliberately uncombed. He carried a tin coffee-pot in one hand, and Charles, as he shook the other, wondered if this were a calculated effect, and decided, generously, that it wasn't.
"Just in time. I was taking the coffee in when ​the bell rang," said Phil heartily. "Take off your wraps, good people." He set the coffee-pot on the hall table, and helped Caroline off with her coat. "Caroline, my dear child, you're very wet. Go straight in by the fire. At once!"
"She would come by underground," grumbled Charles, concerned at the dampness of his daughter's clothes.
"It's the only way to come," said Phil. "But she ought to have worn a waterproof instead of that cloth thing."
They followed Caroline into the next room and found her talking to a middle-aged man and woman. Mr. Robinson was tall, like his son, but bearded and stooping, and less aggressive. Mrs. Robinson, who wore an ancient dress of flowered silk, was a handsome, upright woman, with good features and an abundance of dark, heavy hair streaked with grey, which she wore in two large coils over her ears.
The room was plainly furnished, and was like a thousand other rooms. The woodwork and floor were painted dark blue, the walls were distempered in white. They were adorned with coloured reproductions—German reproductions, Charles thought—of some of the best-known Dutch paintings, and a few photographs of the Swiss Alps. There were woven rugs on the floor, made, probably, by some village industry. There ​were a number of small bookcases filled with books, and the centre table was loaded with tidy piles of papers and periodicals. The chairs and sofa were covered with sober brown linen.
Mr. and Mrs. Robinson were very friendly. Nobody was at all nervous, with the exception of Charles. Caroline was like a trout swimming happily in the waters of its own pool. She basked; she darted here and there; she played; she rose gracefully after flies. She was in her element. She was looked upon as the dear daughter of the house. Charles, fighting down his jealously and pain, realised that they loved her, but that they loved someone who was almost a stranger to him. The Robinsons laughed and joked and made puns, but their very merriment had in it a consciousness of their distance from him.
"You are not one of us," they seemed to say, "but we will try to disguise that fact by being very jovial and merry, and showing you that we understand good fellowship."
Mr. Robinson, with his bearded, near-sighted and rather lugubrious face, was, to Charles, by far the most interesting of the three. He was abrupt, as Caroline had said, but his words had point and sometimes humour. He was one of a small firm of printers, and there was a flavour of ink and presses and hurry about him that ​Charles rather liked. Mrs. Robinson was too much a mother and a female citizen to be merely a woman. She was, in fact, aggressively a mother and a citizen. Phil was aggressively a son. Just as, Charles imagined, he would one day be aggressively a husband.
The coffee was excellent. Phil had made it himself, Miss Spaggit's hours being from seven in the morning to seven in the evening. She prepared the evening meal, with Mrs. Robinson's help. After that her time was her own.
The food in that house, Charles imagined, would be efficiently cooked, in paper bags, probably. It would be selected less for its taste than for its nutritive properties. The Robinsons were not, to his surprise, vegetarians.
"It's ridiculous," Phil said, "to make all this fuss about killing animals when we permit cruelty toward our own kind to continue all through the ages. I'd rather be a well-fed animal on my way to the slaughter-house than be condemned to a life of poverty and wretchedness in a slum."
"Yes, better the abattoir than the almshouse, perhaps," said Charles.
"The endless agony of the poor . . ." began Mrs. Robinson, but she was interrupted by her husband, who had been silent for some time.
"Man's inhumanity to man," he said, "makes countless thousands pawn."
​This little joke was not very well received. Charles suspected that Mr. Robinson had a mind that recognised no closed season for joking. If he saw an opportunity he slipped one in, while Phil and his mother followed certain rules. "This subject we will take very seriously," he imagined them saying. "This one we will treat with levity."
They told Charles he must be very proud of Caroline. It was not entirely through Phil's influence that she had been put on the regular staff of the Vanguard, but chiefly through her own merits.
"We expect great things of her," they said.
Charles's heart ached.
"She's not mine any more," he said to himself. "I have suffered and planned and sweated and loved in order that these Robinsons might be pleased with her. It would be better to give one's children up to the State—whatever they mean by that—at the age of six, and spare oneself this intolerable pain."
The subject of her marriage with Phil was not touched upon till the end of the evening. Neither Caroline nor the Robinsons alluded to it, and Charles could not bring himself to speak of it. But Mr. Robinson, whose thoughts had evidently been running on the subject for some time, said ​suddenly to Charles while the others were toying with the Einstein theory:
"Well, well, we marry them, do we? And when?"
Charles turned to him and said: "Must we marry them yet? It's only a week since I first heard of it."
"Oh, better marry them," said Mr. Robinson, his near-sighted, bearded face close to Charles's. "They're meant for each other. There's no doubt about that. Better marry them, my friend."
"We've decided to get married next month," said Caroline, who had heard the word "marry." "After I'm twenty-one. My birthday's May the fifteenth."
Said Charles with a gesture of the hands: "What have I got to do with it? I didn't bring them together. I can't separate them. I suppose they must marry when they please."
"That's the sensible view to take," said Mrs. Robinson. "Caroline owes it to herself and to the community to do whatever makes for her own happiness and development."
"If she knows," agreed Charles, "what makes for it. If she knows that, she knows more than most of us do."
He suddenly liked Mrs. Robinson, with her air of the alert and competent female citizen, the least of the three.
​"We do know," said Phil, his eyes glistening behind his glasses. "We never doubted it from the first moment we met."
"Caroline," explained Mrs. Robinson, "will be infinitely more valuable to the world as a happy wife and mother than she could be in any other way. She'll fulfil herself in every respect. She'll even write better. You'll see."
"The point is," said Caroline sweetly but succinctly, "not shall we, but when shall we? I think either May the seventeenth or the eighteenth. Which do you think, father?"
Charles said it was immaterial to him, except that he favoured the eighteenth slightly as being twenty-four hours later.
Phil said, making a wry face, that he supposed they ought to talk about money. Charles, however, had no intention of talking to him in front of his mother and father, and as he couldn't very well invite him into his own dining-room, he asked him to lunch with him in the City the next day.
When Charles said it was time for them to go, Phil, with clumsy determination, got Caroline out of the room first and alone, and Charles saw, by the complacent looks on the faces of the older people, that the intelligentsia responded in much the same way as the bourgeoisie when it came to the good-night kiss of an engaged couple. The kiss or kisses went on for a considerable time, ​while Charles fidgeted and made conversation. At last Caroline came in with her hat and coat on, and her eyes shining, followed by Phil with Charles's hat and coat. In the hall, by the front door, they were asked to speak softly, because Miss Spaggit was presumably asleep in a room adjoining. Phil followed them to the gate, talking heartily with Charles, while Mr. and Mrs. Robinson stood at the top of the steps calling "Good-night" and saying it was a pity it was so wet, like any less earnest and intelligent host and hostess. Charles heard Phil whisper to Caroline as he parted from her at the gate: "Good-night, you little love," and his heart softened. The fellow loved her, at any rate. That was indisputable. But, oh, this marriage . . . !
"It's like putting your daughter into a dangerous scenic railway with a stranger beside her, and watching her whirled away out of your sight," he thought.
Caroline said, as they walked back to the underground station: "You did like them, didn't you, father?"
He found it impossible to say what he really thought, so he assured her that he did. They were types, especially Phil and his mother. They were ready to do battle, violently, for all the ideas that no one with any imagination or any heart disputed. They assumed a callousness on the ​part of the rest of mankind that Charles found intensely irritating. They seemed to say:
"We stand for a fair deal for everybody alike. You, wallowing in your trough with the other pigs, have never thought about this, and now that we are forcing you to think about it you will oppose it." Charles wanted to answer:
"The pain and the tragedy and the apparent injustice of things has afflicted me ever since I could think. It is a part of me. Let us agree to accept all that, tacitly, and go on to the remedies, if there are any."
"Mother Kate," said Caroline—it was her name for Mrs. Robinson—"has the biggest heart in the world. I do think I'm lucky to be marrying into such a family."
"And they," said Charles, "are not unfortunate in acquiring my Caroline."
The bitterness in his words was lost on her.
"I really believe," she said, "that they feel that too."
It was nearly twelve when they got back to the house. The rain had stopped, the pavements were drying, and a few stars were visible. They saw lights in the upper windows, and Charles said:
"Venetia's back already. It's early for her."
He opened the door with his key and they went upstairs. They found Venetia sitting over the fire, which she had been poking into a flame. ​She had her velvet evening cloak wrapped round her, and was warming her silken shins.
"Don't turn on any more lights, father darling," she said. "It's nice with just the lamp. I lit the fire when I got in. I felt chilly."
"How long have you been back?"
"About an hour or more. Clive and I dined alone, and then we meant to go to that charity ball at Grosvenor House, but we decided we couldn't face it, so I came home."
"I can't imagine how you ever thought of going," said Caroline.
"Oh, shut up, Caroline," said Venetia, with an irritableness unusual in her. "Don't be so damned superior."
The second after she sprang up and kissed Caroline on the cheek, and then kissed Charles.
"Good-night, father darling. I'm going to bed. I was on my feet all day at the studio."
She picked up her bag and went swiftly out of the room. From her clothes as she passed there came a soft silken sound, and a faint odour of Coty's Chypre. But Charles, wondering much, had seen, even in the dim light, that her eyes were red with tears.