This Was Tomorrow (5 page)

D
EAR
S
YLVIE
,

I’m sorry you missed it here—on Christmas night I looked round the drawing-room at Farthingale and had a sort of private panic. It was too good to last, I thought, and I couldn’t but wonder if there would ever be another like it.
The whole thing was a beautiful anachronism, “dated” like an old play revived, or a novel you read years ago and then re-read in the light of later experience. Well, I mustn’t be literary, must I, all you want to know is who was there and what we did.

Virginia, of course, is always a little sad at Christmas-time because her husband used to run these Christmas shows, read off the gifts and make impromptu toasts and so on—Archie died in the war. His brother Oliver acts as host now in his place, not quite so funny, they tell me, but I’ve always considered him just about perfect ever since the day I first set eyes on him as my mother’s second husband. Needless to say, I never knew her first one. She gets lovelier each year, I think—quite grey now, but with a kind of
glow,
as though she was happy just to be alive day by day as they come—and life for a woman married to Oliver must be very desirable, I should think. Hermione—don’t forget to
pronounce it Her-
my
-o-ne, will you!—came with them, of course, and I still can’t abide that girl. We’ve loathed each other since we were children and she snootered me unmercifully because she didn’t approve of her father’s marrying my mother, though from what I’ve learned about
her
mother, here and there, she was a very nasty little piece of work and Hermione takes after her—jealous, spiteful, ingrowing, unfriendly. She doesn’t like me any better than I like her, and our little feud is all against the rules in the family, which expects people to get along with each other. I can, with all the rest of them. Hermione can’t get along with anybody, including herself. Charitable ones, like my mother, are able to feel sorry for her. I’m not. Charitable nor able. She’s asking for it, and so far as I’m concerned she’s got it. And the fact that she is her own worst enemy doesn’t seem to me sufficient excuse. For anything.

That, with Dinah and Bracken, who were just as usual and always will be and God bless them, made up my immediate household circle. But there were a lot of other people there, of course. Virginia’s four children, the two older girls with children of their own—Irene’s daughter and I fell shamelessly in love. She was christened Mavis, but everybody forgets and
calls her Mab. She is going on ten, and has greenish eyes. I may as well tell you at once, it’s serious. The fact is, we held hands. Please don’t deduct from this that I am naturally a goof about children. The jolly bachelor uncle with his pockets full of surprises for the little ones. Not me. There are always rafts of children at these family parties and heretofore I never knew one from another and nobody cared. I must have seen Mab before but I don’t remember it, and this time we saw each other. I would like to keep her in my pocket from now on, but as she points out, this won’t be feasible because pretty soon she will be too big.

Virginia’s youngest is the present problem child—we always have one, you know, and they tell me Virginia herself was it once. I’ve always been afraid of Evadne myself, even when we were kids—it’s hard to say why, and I don’t mean I dislike her, as I do Hermione. I think it is mostly because she is a born Crusader. The games she used to want to play, the stories she used to like best, were always so Intense. Jeanne d’Arc used to be her favourite heroine, and for all I know still is, and then she passed through a phase of wanting to be a nun. That’s over now, but she’s got all caught up in a highly informal religious movement of which I—
and
the family—take a very dim view. We nearly had a fight, she and I, but were pulled apart and made to shut up just in time. She’s two years younger than I am, and very pretty, but an utter nitwit.

Johnny and Camilla Malone turned up unexpectedly from Berlin, where Johnny has had his news bureau headquarters for years. I think Dinah got Bracken to have them come here because she simply couldn’t bear to go to Germany again just yet, and they were only too pleased to get away for a while. Johnny and Bracken had their usual weatherwise confabs on the state of the world, and I was allowed to listen to some of it, and it isn’t pretty. Germany is arming again, and she has a not-very-secret and entirely illegal air force, uniforms and all, led by Goering, who was one of Richthofen’s aces, if that means anything to you. Johnny attended the Nazi Party Congress at Nuremberg last autumn and describes himself as
appalled. That’s strong language for him. The whole German nation is playing tin soldiers again, and Hitler is regarded as a god, especially by the women.

Does this bore you? It shouldn’t. If Hitler goes on living, and he takes great care to, he is bound to have some effect on all our lives—even yours, my far-away darling—and especially if he joins forces with Mussolini, which is on the cards. Call me Cassandra.

The whole German outlook has always interested the family here because my mother’s dearest friend since they were girls together is an Englishwoman who married a Prussian Prince, ’way back before 1914. I forget how much you may know of all this, so forgive me if I repeat myself, but Rosalind is important, it was because of her that my mother went abroad during the war, and it was our same Johnny Malone who got Rosalind out of Germany by the skin of their teeth, around about 1915. The story, as I first heard it when I was a child, always sounded like something straight out of
The
Prisoner
of
Zenda,
except that it had a happier ending. Rosalind came safely home to England and the man who had loved her always. They couldn’t marry because her husband was still alive in Germany and much too Prussian and Royal to give her a divorce. And although her Charles had inherited one of the oldest titles in England himself, he resigned from the Army and they simply went down into the depths of the country and lived there quietly, together, and pretty soon everybody sort of forgot there hadn’t been a wedding. But that’s not all, it doesn’t end there. Last June the German husband died mysteriously in the Nazi Purge—we were in Berlin then, you remember. And Rosalind’s German son, Victor, who was brought up by his father in the Prussian traditions, is now a Nazi. Our Camilla had met him on the Riviera, in the days when everyone met everyone there, all very romantic, and she
almost
married him instead of Johnny! The Purge cured her of that, pretty fast. We suspected that Victor was involved in the betrayal and death of his father, but it’s really best not to know too much about what went on then. Anyway, by being there
in the midst of it, we knew positively (as we might not otherwise have done) that Rosalind was free at last to marry Charles Laverham, which she did, very quietly, in the country, with not a ripple on the surface of their life together, and everyone is very happy for them. They live in the dower house at Cleeve—the big house is closed—and that’s only an hour’s drive from Farthingale, and they come to all our family parties, having no family of their own.

Let’s see, now, what else, besides the Christmas doings. Laval has succeeded Barthou in France, and that’s not good, but you wouldn’t understand, and why should you? In January there will be a plebiscite in the Saar, which is very important, but you won’t want to go into that either. And there is a war in the Chaco—(
where?
)—and Trouble in Spain. But I know what you are waiting for me to say—patiently, perhaps, but you won’t let me off. Yes, I love you—and I don’t forget it day or night, particularly night, and it doesn’t do any good not to talk about it, does it, because we both know nothing can stop it now till we die, and maybe not then….

D
EAR
S
YLVIE
,

Don’t believe anything they tell you, this Pact they are cooking up here is no good. Versailles, Genoa, Locarno, Paris, Stresa, none of it is any good any more. Scraps of paper. We
won’t
learn. And if you think I’m being pessimistic, you ought to hear Bracken! They are building public air-raid shelters in Berlin. When theirs are finished, and ours are still not begun, they can afford to risk retaliation.

Meantime the day will soon come when you will hate to see another letter from me arriving with its cargo of dreary news. And don’t think by these contents that your letters to me aren’t eagerly watched for and read again and again. Three of them have just caught up with me here, and are much the nicest
things that I have encountered for days. We sit in the well-known lap of luxury under southern spring skies—there is a South in Europe too—and watch future nightmares being born. Speaking of which, Mussolini during his attendance at this conference sleeps in, or at least occupies, the same bed Napoleon used before Marengo. Well, I just thought I’d mention it.

I started to say, I sometimes try to imagine where and when you will read a letter of mine—where and when you will write your reply—and now that you are not in Williamsburg any more I must necessarily fail. It’s a mixed blessing that the show is such a success, isn’t it—because the longer it runs there the longer we must wait for it to bring you to London. And the way things are going, I don’t see any hope of America for me in any immediate future. This is Jubilee Summer in England, and there will be a lot of special stuff to do there, beginning next month. After that, Geneva again, if this Abyssinian business develops. And so forth. Unsatisfactory letter-writer that I am, please don’t stop writing to me, even though at times it must seem rather like shouting down a well. If I appear to get out of touch, that is the curse of the life I lead, so that the house in Williamsburg and a girl coming in the door with her arms full of flowers are like something in a fairy tale. It is hard to believe that they ever existed or might still be found again only a week’s journey from where I now sit.

At this point, Bracken would be feeling for his blue pencil. I love you. That’s words of one syllable, anyway….

M
AB
WAS KEEPING
quiet in the schoolroom upstairs because her governess had been to the dentist and was lying down after taking a pain pill. The house itself was very still. Everyone was out till tea-time, and besides, nobody was living there yet except herself and Miss Sim the
governess, and Granny Virginia and Aunt Evadne. Later, when the Jubilee began, they would all come—her father, who was something in the Home Office, and her mother, now making a visit in Kent; Johnny and Camilla from Berlin; Dinah and Bracken and Jeff, now in Paris on their way home from Stresa. Granny had taken this house in Curzon Street for the Jubilee Season, and everyone said what fun it would be, all together again, with weekends at Farthingale thrown in.

Jeff had sent her a letter from Paris, and there was no need to read it again, for she knew it by heart. It said that Paris was very beautiful still, in spite of the Russians, who were something of a Blot signing their beastly Pact with the French, and that he had just bought her a Gift, and had she grown any, and he had not forgotten that he had promised to take her to the theatre, a grown-up one,
not
a pantomime, and she might choose what it would be, within reason, if only she would not require him to sit through anything like
Romeo
and
Juliet
because he was not up to it, not just now, after all he had been through at Stresa, and would she please settle for something easier, with all due respect to Shakespeare and Mr. Olivier. Mab at once looked up
Romeo
and
Juliet,
which was in the Curzon Street library, and found she could take it or leave it, and had already chosen 1066
And
All
That,
which was a very modern piece of nonsense with music and Mr. Naunton Wayne. If Jeff didn’t approve of that either, she was quite willing to see something else.

As if it mattered what they saw together. She sat with her feet under her on the narrow window-seat, her forehead against the cool pane, so that she could watch the street below. In a few more days she would sit like this waiting for a cab to deposit Jeff at the curb. She had an unchildlike lack of curiosity about the Paris gift he had promised—whatever it was, she would cherish it because he had chosen it for her, but it was Jeff’s own presence she looked forward to, and she would have been just as glad to have him back if he came empty-handed. She had wondered more than once how she could convey this to
him without seeming ungracious about the gift—and of course he would bring gifts for the others too, it was not just singling her out as a baby to be pleased with baubles. People always brought back gifts from Paris. For Granny it was almost sure to be something in a jewel-like bottle which smelled exotic and expensive, for Phoebe it would be gloves, for Evadne—what would he bring Evadne?

Mab sighed, and sagged closer to the window-frame, a small, somehow resigned and lonely figure. Evadne was the right age for him, and very pretty. It wasn’t fair to
blame
Evadne, it was just the accident of when you were born that made you ten instead of twenty when Evadne was twenty-one. At twenty, one might have stood a chance against her. As it was, even if he didn’t marry Evadne, even if it turned out to be someone they had never heard of, it was hardly probable that he would remain a bachelor until one could so much as reach eighteen….

A cab drew up below. Not Jeff, not yet. She waited, her face against the glass. Aunt Evadne, home to tea. And oh, bother, Cousin Hermione was with her again. Ever since Evadne had joined what they called the Cause she had spent a great deal of her time with Hermione and had quite suddenly begun to behave as though she was Hermione’s best friend. When Granny commented unfavourably on this, Evadne replied that it was quite plain to her now that they had none of them given Hermione a fair chance, and that she was going to change all that. Oh, dear, said Granny,
must
you? The
things,
said Granny, those Cause people have to answer for!

Evadne happened to look up from the pavement and saw the brooding child’s face at the window above her, and waved, and made signs that Mab was to come down to the drawing-room for tea. Evadne was kind—so kind that she rubbed it in just a little, how thoughtful she was being. Like taking up Hermoine when no one else could bear her. It was almost like showing off, the way Evadne went out of her way to be good to people, but Granny said that was the way the Cause took you. If ever you had been rude to someone or had unkind
thoughts about them, or done them a wrong, even if they didn’t know, even if they deserved it at the time, you had to confess to them by writing a letter, and share it with them, and ask God how to make it up to them, and do exactly what He recommended as restitution.

Just to contemplate so much publicity always made Mab squirm a little. She could not imagine, for instance, writing a letter to tell Miss Sim everything she had ever thought of her, or even Mummy, on bad days. Apparently if you liked a person, and had had only kind thoughts about them, you were not required to share that in a letter—which seemed to Mab the wrong way round, although with equally embarrassing possibilities. She would not like Jeff to know, as a matter of fact, quite how she felt about him, or how large a place in her innermost thoughts he occupied. And she wondered, along with the rest of the family, about the devastating results if Hermione became infected with the same beliefs which had taken Evadne, and began to tell everybody what she had thought about them, from time to time, because Hermione never seemed to like anyone very much, and always looked as though she were simmering with rude remarks even when she didn’t speak them. It was interesting to speculate, too, on the really miraculous transformation which would have to take place inside Hermione for her to begin being kind to people as Evadne now demonstrated kindness.

With some reluctance Mab got off the window-seat and started downstairs. Tea in the drawing-room could be fun. But with only Hermione and Evadne there it didn’t promise much. Perhaps Granny would come home in time for it today. Granny took the curse off anything, just by being there, with her pretty clothes and her jokes and her way of treating you as though you were grown up, too, instead of as though you were half-witted.

“Hullo, darling,” said Evadne affectionately as Mab entered the drawing-room. “What have you been doing with yourself all day? Granny is expected back at four-thirty, so tea will be coming in any minute, and I thought we’d wait for her and
then have it here together, won’t that be nice? You haven’t said good afternoon to Hermione.”

“Good afternoon,” said Mab as soon as she could without interrupting, and Hermione smiled perfunctorily and went on powdering her nose, holding up the mirrored lid of a small compact from her handbag and squinting into it.

Evadne, who like Granny never had to worry about her face anyway, had thrown her hat on a chair and run her fingers through her short chestnut curls. Mab noticed again the unusual lustre of Evadne’s hair, and the brilliance of her red-brown eyes which she got from Granny who was after all her own mother, and the generous curves of her crimsoned mouth. Evadne’s radiant, effortless beauty both fascinated and depressed Mab, who tried to see it dispassionately without thinking of how it looked to Jeff, and could only envy its ripe perfection. It did not occur to her that almost everybody else, including Hermione, was envious too.

People wondered why Evadne had not got married before now, or even engaged. Few of them could have realized, as Jeff did, quite how taxing her crusading spirit might become to a man inclined to approach her on a slightly lower plane. Not that people hadn’t tried, even so, and last autumn she had almost been engaged to her cousin, Mark Campion, six years a widower at thirty-one, who was floored to receive one of her share-letters after she was changed, in which she said that it had Come To Her in her quiet time that morning that her feeling for him was largely carnal and vain, because of his good looks and the Honourable attached to his name, and his position as the son—even though a younger son—of an earl, and that she was afraid she had thought far more of being kissed by him and of the fun of being presented as his wife than of fulfilling her sober obligations in his household as the stepmother of his little boy, and so was not really worthy of so grave a responsibility, etc., etc., etc. “I suppose,” cried poor Mark, trying to argue her out of the letter over the telephone from London while she was at Farthingale, “that if I had a hump and a club-foot and you couldn’t bear to touch me with a barge-pole you’d feel more
justified in marrying me!” Evadne replied patiently that she was only being Absolutely Honest with him, as God had bade her be, and that if only he would come and be Guided too he would understand what a wonderful feeling it was to have everything out in the open between them. “I
was
guided,” shouted Mark, just as the time-pips began for the second time. “No, no,
don’t
cut me off—I
was
guided to fall in love with you, and everything was working out just as it should have done, until suddenly you go right off the deep end about God and I can’t get near you! Please let me—” He was interrupted by laughter from Evadne which could only be called silvery. “Mark,
darling,
if only you would come to our meetings and learn to listen-in to God you would see how silly you are to resent it like that. Really, Mark, this is something so big, so revolutionary, it will change the whole world. I’m coming up to London on Wednesday, and perhaps you would like to take me to lunch and hear more about it, in a reasonable frame of mind.”

“I’ll take you to lunch with pleasure, but
not
if you go on talking about God as though he were on the BBC!” said Mark regrettably, and was rewarded by another tinkle of laughter from Evadne, for workers in the Cause were advised to refrain from arguing with a patient who put up resistance barriers, and never to lose their tempers over rudeness or flippancy from people who had not yet surrendered. “But it’s very much the same thing, really,” she said indulgently. “We were saying at our last meeting that anyone can pick up divine messages if only he will put his receiving set in order.” At this point Mark had made a very rude sound and hung up. The next day he took off for the south of France, leaving his six-year-old son in the competent care of the devoted woman who had had charge of Alan ever since his mother’s death when he was born. Mark’s family had not seen him and had scarcely heard from him since, and needless to say, Evadne was no longer very popular with that branch of cousins. Even Virginia in this case sided with the Earl against her younger daughter. “Ruining Mark’s life with her whim-whams,” fumed Lord Enstone. “Getting him all worked up and then behaving like a
ruddy nun or something, all because of some new bee in her bonnet! ’Tisn’t even as though it was something you’d ever heard of, like Chapel and that—they tell me America is full of these new religions. What’s the matter with the ones we’ve already got?” Virginia, who had long since ceased to defend her own American origin against her tactless Tory brother-in-law, said that Mark had been rather childish, to put it mildly, bunging off to the Continent like Byron or somebody, and not remaining on the spot to assert himself, but she agreed emphatically that Evadne could be maddening when she got a bee in her bonnet.

Virginia was now letting herself into the house in Curzon Street, just in time for tea, without a cloud on her beautiful brow. She checked slightly on the drawing-room threshold at sight of Hermione, with an inward groan of
What,
again?
while her face maintained a careful brightness, quite genuine in its response to Mab’s affectionate greeting and Evadne’s filial kiss.

“Tea,” said Virginia, throwing down her handbag and gloves. “Somebody ring for tea at once, I walked home through the Park and there was only salad for lunch at Clare’s. Everyone is reducing but me, and I
starve,
lunching with them!”

“Well, we can’t all be lucky like you,” said Hermione in that voice which gave her least remark a faintly sardonic if not catty effect. Hermione’s own figure was as slim as Virginia’s, but she ate no sweets in order to keep it so, and she liked sweets, which created what Evadne called an inner conflict. Evadne both ate sweets and kept her figure, which wasn’t fair of somebody somewhere.

“Mummy,
have
you thought it over?” Evadne was plainly bursting with the question. “Did you talk to Clare? Won’t you be an angel, and—”

“
Not
if it’s that weekend party you’re talking about,” said Virginia firmly.

“But, Mummy—”

“For the last time, Evadne, and I don’t need Clare to back
me up on it, you cannot have Farthingale to entertain those people who talk about God as though He were coming to tea!”

“But He
does,
in a way, don’t you see, God is
everywhere,
one only has to tune in and He—”

“Evadne,
please!
”
moaned Virginia, with a glance at the rigid countenance of the ancient butler Bascombe as he arrived with the silver tea-service, which he placed on a low table beside her, while Trevor the parlourmaid followed with sandwiches and cakes.
“Pas
devant
les
domestiques!”
she added in quotation marks as the servants left the room, and the first crack showed in Evadne’s lacquered self-possession as a childish frown settled on her face.

“Really, Mummy, do you think it’s wise or kind to make fun of things in front of people?”

“My dear, sometimes you leave me no choice. Have we heard from Bracken? Does anyone know when they’re coming?”

“Thursday,” said Mab with a certain pride in her knowledge.

“Well, that’s good Who told you—Jeff?”

Mab nodded.

“He wrote from Paris. They saw Mark there.”

A slight pause occurred. Then Virginia said, “How was he?”

“Jeff? All right, I think.”

“And Mark?”

“He didn’t say. Was anything the matter with Mark?”