Wheels within Wheels Read online

  His manner was as disconcerting as his appearance.

  While the prospectus of the house was being examined he set a series of questions that were meant to be flippant and amusing; but actually were aggressive and patronizing.

  “Now, how many sitting-rooms will there be?” he asked.

  “Four.”

  “That’ll be a library, a drawing-room, a coffee-room. What will you do with the fourth?”

  “One can always find something to do with an extra room.”

  “A gun-room, perhaps?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Or a separate room for Daphne. I think that would be a good idea. Don’t you think you’ll need a room to yourself, Daphne?”

  Rivers was trying, it was clear, to strike a note of bantering friendliness. But that was not the note he struck. He was more like counsel conducting a cross examination.

  “Now, let me see,” he went on. “How many bed-rooms will there be?”

  “Ten.”

  “And how many servants will you be able to run it on?”

  “Four. A cook, a parlour-maid, and two housemaids.”

  “Then you are going to live quietly.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “If you are going to have week-end guests, you will have to have more than two housemaids. Guests expect a lot, nowadays. The men want to be valeted: their studs put in their shirts, their coats brushed, their trousers pressed. Women want their frocks ironed, so I’m told.”

  He was aiming at bright, light irony. He achieved a sneer. Class-consciousness was at the root of his flippancy. A man who had had to make his own way, he must as a boy have been shy, silent, alert, watchful. Now, with a university and some measure of success at the back of him, he was self-confident, without having achieved composure. He was half ashamed, half proud of his simple origin: half resentful towards, half impressed by, those who had been reared to the amenities of a softer setting. He was anxious to appear at home in this new world: and at the same time to be ironic towards it. Which was difficult. One can satirize something foreign to one, that one at the same time both hates and loves, but one can only be affectionately ironic towards what is one’s own: as Punch is towards the upper-middle-class that it represents.

  He looked uncomfortable, he was uncomfortable. Newton wondered what it was in him that had attracted Daphne. Her friends could scarcely approve of him. She was at the age when a girl tends to value her admirers by the credit that they bring to her. He did not, moreover, appear to be making her particularly happy.

  Seated at her mother’s side she had taken no part in the conversation. It was her mother who had answered all Rivers’s questions. Her mother to whom Rivers had addressed his questions. There was an exhausted look on Daphne’s face. She seemed tired and pale, Mr. Newton fancied, in her rather dreary brick-coloured frock. Beneath their paint her lips were drooping. It might be that she was in need of country air: that London, with its kaleidoscopic succession of incidents was too dynamic for her. It might be that; or it might be that it was by her mother she was exhausted: that she was resenting her mother’s absorption of her young man; as young women generally did resent the mother who played the elder sister.

  Things had been easier when he was a boy, thought Newton. The Edwardians held that a man should sow his wild oats in the twenties and early thirties; then when the appetite for extravagance abated, he should endow some young and completely inexperienced girl with the benefits of his own experience. Which was admirable enough in the days when a woman was content to grow old early and would at the age of thirty match with her shawls and knitting the paunch and hardening arteries of her quinquagenarian husband. It was less satisfactory to-day when exercise and beauty parlours left a woman of forty with the energy and appearance of a schoolgirl. You could not expect such a woman to accept the lassitude of middle-age that her husband was increasingly approving. Particularly a woman whose home ran itself: who did not tire herself as her husband had to, with responsibilities. You could not expect such a woman to relax into quiescence. At the same time whatever elderly women might say about the advantages of being friends and sisters to their daughters, the daughters themselves would have infinitely preferred the old-fashioned type of mother who sat over the fire knitting, with a shawl about her shoulders. Just as sons did not want the kind of father who went into bars with them and swopped smoking-room limericks with their friends. They would much prefer the stern, unbending parent of Lyceum melodrama: erect and grizzled in his library with a cheque book in the pigeonhole of his desk. Daphne must often wish for another kind of mother.

  He looked questioningly at her as she sat at her mother’s side: looking at the prospectus, with that tired look upon her pretty features. He loved her so, and he knew so little of her: of what she thought and what she felt: of what her problems were.

  He had no key to her. Young girls had not been like that when he was young. He knew how a young wife felt, and how a woman felt. He knew how to cope with a woman of the world, or the kind of girl that he had flirted with as a young man in bars. But these independent young women, with their professions, their clubs, their latchkeys, their cheque books, their unsupervised acquaintance; what did they ask of life, what were they making of life? To what extent was his daughter typical of the novels he read and of the plays he saw? He did not know. She was a new product: this post-war woman. He had no key to her inner thoughts; could not guess at the side of her nature that was responding to young Rivers; or how much young Rivers mattered to her; whether he was anything more than any other of the innumerable young men whom she had from time to time presented to her family.

  “I must try and like the fellow,” he told himself.

  • • • • •

  Newton was inclined to think a first impression of more matter than a considered judgment. An instinct was invariably right: reason explained and justified those instincts: but rarely contradicted them. Sometimes you thought you had been wrong, but usually you came back in the end to that first unreasoned feeling. In the same way that in a judge’s summing up you might be certain at the start which way he was going to throw his weight, but in the course of his speech as he set out the evidence you might be unsure as he unravelled and set out that evidence which way his bias was directed, yet at the end you saw how his arguments were returning upon themselves to the point started from.

  At the same time Frank Newton never denied his judgment the opportunity of contradicting his first impression.

  Although he was resolved that there should be nothing that approximated to a formal interview between himself and Rivers, he was decided that the young man should not leave the house without giving him an opportunity for a talk alone.

  He arranged the meeting diplomatically. It was close on seven and they were discussing the political future of Mussolini.

  “He’s bound to fall soon,” said Rivers, “a dictator can only keep himself in power by a successful war. There’s no one that Italy could go to war with.”

  “Which is just what may keep him in power,” Newton replied. “It’s by unsuccessful wars that dictators have been flung from power.”

  “But wars kept them there. Napoleon would never have stayed so long if he hadn’t been winning battles.”

  “Only because of his bad luck: when he had won enough battles to make himself safe just after the peace of Amiens, he was resolved on building up a trade empire. If his generals had not let him down in the West Indies there would have been no Russian venture.”

  Rivers raised his eyebrows sceptically.

  “That isn’t what the historians usually tell us.”

  “The historians usually never realize the importance of San Domingo because English history does not touch it. Ludwig doesn’t, I believe, even mention it. But….”

  He paused: drew his hand slowly along his chin, as though he were thinking of something.

  “I came across a really very interesting passage in Las Cases’ reminiscences on this v
ery point. It shows quite clearly that Napoleon’s idea was to keep no more than he already had, and build up a large colonial empire: in the West Indies, and along the Mississippi. I’d like to show it you. I have it in my library.”

  Rivers rose to his feet. As he did so Newton glanced at the clock.

  “It’s latish,” he said. “I expect my wife and Daphne take longer over their evening dressing than you and I do. You’d best say good-bye to them.”

  • • • • •

  It did not take Newton long to show Rivers the particular passage in Las Cases. He had not meant it to take long. He wanted to give Rivers a chance of talking about himself.

  “I’m glad you’re going in on the Conservative side,” he said. “So many of the cleverest young men are becoming Liberals. They think there’s a more immediate future there. But they’re wrong. A young man is wise to come on the ground floor of the future, but he’s very foolish to take a first floor flat in the past.”

  Rivers was as ready as most men to discuss his own concerns. He needed small encouragement to embark on a political harangue.

  The Conservative party had got to be what the Liberal party was under Asquith, he asserted. It had got to beimperial: with a trade, not a military imperialism. Our future lay not with India but the Dominions. The coloured colonies would have to go. The natives would demand the right to make their own mistakes: they were entitled to it. Sooner or later they must go. But if London could be to the empire what Washington was to the United States: if the Dominions could concentrate there and be guided from there, then there was a future for England. But England would have to get rid of the old fogeys who thought of the Dominions as colonies. There must be a clearing out.

  He spoke with a quick impatience. His Conservatism was the old radicalism. It was built upon class distinction; almost class-hatred. Joseph Chamberlain and Balfour would not have recognized it as Conservatism. It was Conservatism only as far as it was anti-Communism. Rivers was as resentful of the old-fashioned leaders of his party as he was of his opponents. It was a matter less of personal conviction than the realization that he could never perfectly fulfil his ambitions in a world which was ruled by an aristocracy of land and birth. He would have eagerly resented the suggestion that his talk of a better world was the desire to create the kind of world that would be atmospherically congenial to his own talents and character: a competitive world, that was to say, where the rewards went to scholarship, worldliness, resolution: where good manners were independent of good breeding: where elegance counted for less than solidity. He would have denied that. But it was true. In a communistic society Rivers’s capacities would be undervalued: in a feudal world his deficiencies over-stressed. In a capitalist and competitive world he would be handicapped, but his capacities should be equal to those handicaps. Newton wondered by what steps the young man proposed to realize his ambitions. He asked Rivers whether he would run for Parliament at the next election. Rivers shook his head.

  “I haven’t time to work up a constituency. They’d give me a seat to contest that I should be sure to lose. I haven’t the capital to finance myself to their likings. I have got to get myself known first.”

  “At the bar?”

  “That and Journalism.”

  “I’ve read some of your articles.”

  Rivers’s face brightened.

  “Which ones?”

  From time to time Daphne had shown him articles signed Seton Rivers. He had glanced through one or two of them. But what they were about he could not for the life of him remember. He could recall the style of them: sharp, combative, lean prose: each sentence telling: informed by a note of impatience as though the author were addressing an audience of low intellectual calibre. A “surely you must realize” note that in the law courts would antagonize a jury but would often in cross examination exasperate a witness into indiscretion. Newton wished he could remember the title of one article: or even one of the arguments in any of the articles: anything that would provide him with the material for comment of some kind. He was inclined to think they had been in the Week, End Review.

  “The one I particularly remember was in the Week End Review” he said, hoping that Rivers’s reply “The one about disarmament” would give him a clue to talk from. He could roughly assume what Rivers’s opinions would be on any given subject. The Week End Review was a bad shot, however. The brightness went out of Rivers’s face.

  “I’ve never written for the Week End Review. You’re probably thinking of the Saturday.”

  He spoke in an off-hand, almost rude manner, his vanity having been disappointed. A touchy fellow, Newton thought; sensitive to himself; completely insensitive to others.

  “Yes, that was it.”

  “A silly thing about companionate marriage. I don’t know why they asked me to write it. There’s nothing to say that isn’t completely obvious.”

  He had adopted his “surely you must realize” tone.

  “You think it’s as obvious as all that?”

  “What is there to say that hasn’t been said by Judge Lindsey and Bertrand Russell? Girls are emancipated nowadays, by education, by science. A hundred years ago they had to be protected or the world would be overrun with infants. Now there isn’t any need for that. Young men don’t want to be bothered by, are too busy and hard-worked for the responsibilities of marriage. But they do need and have a right to emotional relationships. There’s no sane alternative that I can see.”

  He spoke with an off-hand indifference. When he had talked of the future of Conservatism, he had talked persuasively, as though he were discussing a subject on which two opinions might be held. But on companionate marriage he spoke as though no intelligent person could think differently; as though he was enunciating axioms. It was a shock to Newton. Not on account of the opinions themselves: with those he was familiar; but of their expression in his house by his daughter’s friend. That made them personal to himself.

  When he had read Lindsey’s books and heard the views of Bertrand Russell discussed by fellow clubmen he had considered them in an abstract way: as an impersonal problem: as a condition that might one day universally exist. But when a young man whom his daughter had invited to his house, by whom his daughter was clearly attracted, expressed those opinions as part of his own philosophy, you could not feel impersonal about it. Here, in his house was a man who proposed to arrange his life in accordance with those tenets: who, if he fell in love with a girl would think of her at this stage of his career in terms of companionate marriage.

  Newton looked closely at Rivers. Yes, he would think of her in that way. He was not the kind of man who thought one way and lived another. He was consistent. One had to concede him that. Did he feel in that way about Daphne? It was an idea that had never occurred to Newton before. He had never imagined anyone could harbour any intention other than marriage towards his daughter. Looking ahead, he had fancied that he might have to protect his daughter against an unwise suitor; but never against a man who proposed that she should live with him for a term of years: squandering her youth on him: denying her instincts for him, till the time should come for him to settle down in a recognized form of marriage.

  The shock to his complacence was considerable. Things like this happened to other people’s daughters. Not to one’s own. He had never expected that life would present him with such a problem.

  “That’s too long a question to discuss now,” he said and held his hand out.

  • • • • •

  Five minutes before their guests were expected, he tapped on the door of his wife’s bedroom. She was seated at her three-sided mirror, trying first one necklace and then another. Her back was turned to him. It was so straight, so supple a back that it was hard to realize that it was twenty-five years ago that he had brought her here as a bride. Catching sight of him in the mirror, she swung round quickly. Her face was bright with animation.

  “Tell me, Frank. What do you think of that house?”

  “I was ju
st going to ask you what you thought of that young man.”

  “Seton Rivers? All right. Nothing remarkable. Well enough. But the house. It’s the very thing we’ve been looking for.”

  “I didn’t know that we were looking for a house.”

  “Didn’t you? Oh, but I’ve always wanted to live in the country, surely you knew that. I couldn’t, of course, when you were working. But it’s different now. We could have such amusing parties. It would be the very place for Daphne. I don’t like her running about in London. Not right, whatever modern people may say or do. We could arrange things for her in the country.”

  Daphne’s future was, Newton suspected, one of the least of the reasons why his wife was so keen upon the house. It was just that she had subconsciously realized that she could best get what she wanted for herself by arranging that thing in line with Daphne’s needs. She did not in his opinion bother about Daphne much. Daphne was an intermittent craze in a life that was full of crazes. She might worry about Daphne for a week on end, as she would worry about some welfare committee meeting. But there was no steady, selfless devotion.

  All the same, she might be right in thinking that a house in the country would solve many of Daphne’s problems.

  • • • • •

  That evening, when his guests had gone, Frank Newton went as was his wont to his library alone. He rarely went to bed before two o’clock. He had found since his illness that a very few hours of sleep sufficed. The last hours of the day were his favourite ones. The house was silent. The business of the day accomplished. The square was empty. The main thoroughfare that flanked it shone like a dark river between its lamps. Sometimes he would spend those hours reading; sometimes writing letters; occasionally consulting his accounts. More often just sitting in his chair, ruminating; thinking over the events of the last fifteen hours; thinking over other days.