Sir William Read online

  … believe me I am allmost distrackted, I have never hard from Sir H….. what shall I dow, good God what shall I dow …. I think my friends looks cooly on me, I think so….. O dear Grevell write to me … Don’t tell my mother what distress I am in and dow aford me some comfort.

  He is delighted. Things have worked out to plan. He will afford her some comfort, if not much. Though he feels ambition to be vulgar, and no doubt he is right, Greville does have plans. This time they have been successful. At the cost of handing the girl a bundle of franked covers, he is now in a position to have her on the cheap. He is pleased, for though knocking up tuppence tarts in Green Park does well enough for a commoner, it is not prudent; it is not comfortable; it is not sedate; it does not satisfy. And besides, there is always the Peril to Health. So he can afford to be generous. Not only is the girl prepared to be discreet, but her mother will make an excellent gouvernante of small economies.

  “My dear Emily,” he writes, and considers he is being kind, as indeed, for him, he is, and tells her she has been imprudent (she has: she is with child), and extravagant (Sir H. allowed her the use of a carriage). It is best, in emotional matters, to establish the business arrangements in writing. He says he will look after the child. He has no love of children, being one himself—he has no love of rivalry in anything, for there is the risk of failure, the no less embarrassing possibility of success—but these things are sometimes important to women, and besides (noblesse oblige) the child may just be his. He would not dream of acknowledging it, but he cannot bring himself entirely to reject it, either. He is like this in many things, which no doubt explains why he has just lost his seat in Parliament.

  He has not kept his seat, but he wishes to keep Emily. Therefore he encloses money—with an adjuration not to spend it—seals the letter, and settles back to wait. He is content to wait. Indeed, poor man, he will wait his life away, patient, sly, cunning, bland, adroit, not entirely deficient in charm, but doomed always to sit at the wrong mouseholes, for the right ones have been taken up already by larger, quicker, more aggressive cats. Still, in his small way he does know how to manage a catnip mouse, and how is he to know that this time he has a catamount by the tail instead? She scarcely knows it herself.

  *

  She is disconsolate in Wales, where she is about to receive his letter; or rather, since it is better in this world to put all pain behind us, and since the only way to do this is to modulate present events to the past tense, endure, and hope for pleasure presently, Wales was where she was.

  Indiscretion had brought her there. It was not her fault. In a world which preferred the huffy distinction of immobility, a trait imported from the imagined French, she had had the vulgarity to be born vivacious. As the country daughter of a village blacksmith, and hence trite, she could not help but be. The world was alive to her, not merely a charade, for she had seen it in color; and after you have seen the world in color, the gray ground of the English water-color school does not suffice.

  Wales, however, was damned cold. The Reverend Gilpin in his works upon the Picturesque, admired that countryside but spent his winters in a comfortable parsonage, whereas Emily was imbedded in what could scarcely be called a crofter’s cot. Icicles bayoneted the eaves, and the thatch was slimy with hoarfrost, which gave it the mucous glitter of elvers in a pail. The chimney smoked. Indeed, it had smoked the owners, so that Granny Morgan looked like some Frisian curiosity, freshly extracted from a Danish bog.

  Had it been any other season, Emily could have gone for pensive strolls in the ivied ruins of the nearby abbey, to be caught up and rescued by a passing nobleman; but paper shoes, which were what she had fled in, cannot withstand the snow. Therefore she had no choice but to sit indoors and wonder which answer she would get to her letter, yes or no; for if one were bad, the other would be worse. Why this misfortune had befallen her, she did not know, for she had meant no harm. She never did.

  *

  She had only tried to better her situation, first by taking one with the family of a fat-faced physician named Dr. Budd, and then in other ways. Dr. Budd’s house was near Blackfriars Bridge, and Emily had not been happy there, and what was worse, it was the time of the Gordon Riots, which had frightened her.

  “Nonsense, my girl, so long as you stay indoors you’ll not come to harm,” said the cook; but a rock came through one pane of the kitchen window, smash, and something very like a gunny sack smacked into the areaway, but was human, and had its bones cracked, and bled and died.

  There was nowhere to run but up to the attics to hide. There is nothing for anyone of common sense to do but that, in any age, with the devil right behind you; but still, if you can get to the top first, by the time he gets up he’s winded himself—he’s just like you are—so he has to behave himself after that. He hasn’t the breath for his original intentions. He can only marvel that he made it to the top at all.

  If anything, the Budds were worse than the riots, what with the starched-cambric rustle of intrigue belowstairs, and such sounds as she overheard of the same thing going on with a silken swoop above, among the quality. So what with the giggles and buckteeth of the second parlormaid, a most superior person, and the gravelly eyes of Dr. Budd’s lady, who always had a plump arm to interfere—and Lord, how the wicked man did pinch—Emily soon came to regard herself, without complacence, as a pretty creature, though not, though never, with him.

  With, as it happened—but she could not quite remember this clearly—a real officer, a lieutenant in the Navy, who had sworn eternal devotion; but unfortunately he had had to sail away, as they so often do, so down she went with a bump again, and how was she to rise? What she had done immediately after that, except that there had been a great deal of it, she neither could nor would remember.

  “My child,” said an old crone, in cheap night lodgings, “why are you here? You are too young and pretty. You do not belong here for another fifteen years at least.” And she peered about the slumside dormitory, where ugly women crept drunkenly from cot to cot, the youngest of them thirty-five.

  Since no one had spoken kindly to her for several days, Emily tumbled her story out, among these dank and greasy shadows, and begged for sympathy.

  “I saw no harm in it,” she said (indeed she had enjoyed herself). “But then the Budds turned me out, so I want employment.”

  “The harm is in the getting caught,” said the old crone. “And as for employment, we women have but one, but in the future you must mind your wage.”

  Emily was indignant. “I could not go with any man I did not like,” she said.

  “No woman ever does, but grant, the rich are always likable,” said the old crone. “If nothing else, ’tis money makes them so. But never spend your earnings, for as you can see about you, that is a fair cruel thing for any woman to do. And if you are seriously minded to reform, perhaps I can assist you, for I have among my acquaintance a Dr. Graham, a most philanthropic man.” And she gave a lopsided, well-intended, but dissembling leer.

  *

  So Emily went to work for Dr. Graham’s Temple of Health, an establishment in Adelphi Terrace much patronized by the voyeur; and as for the old crone, she spoke privately with the learned proprietor, pocketed her 2/6, and was never seen again.

  Two gentlemen at the Temple of Health attracted Emily’s attention, the first because he stared at her so, the second because she could not help it; he reminded her of her naval gentleman. They came day after day, to watch her while she impersonated the Goddess of Health and gave old gentlemen their mud baths. She had several weeks to gather her impressions.

  Greville had the eyes of an affronted pig, though in actuality pigs have vivacious eyes; and though she liked him well enough, she did not like him very much. She thought him stuck up. “I am not,” he seemed to say, “as other men. Tinsel goods are all very well for your present situation, but when you wish quality, as no doubt in time you will, you may have me.” What girl of spirit would accept so grand a proposal made upon a scal
e so small?

  The other gentleman, Sir Harry Featherstonehaugh, had eyes of a warmer, softer quality, like soaked raisins. He was handsome, sleek, boisterous and seductive. He knew how to put you at your ease. He made jokes (Greville never made jokes); he never gave lectures (Greville had with him always an invisible podium); he asked her to go to the country with him. He did not seem disappointed when she said, “Not likely.” Instead he gave her things, sweetmeats, a shawl, a good dinner or something silly. Then, if she liked it, he asked her again. He was hearty and never vulgar, he knew how to treat you properly, and they became friends.

  So what was the harm in it?

  What fort would not capitulate upon such terms, in short, everything, and a truce with life. She had been besieged too often. In time one comes to dread manning the same defenses every day, just as many a wary bitch has allowed herself to be taken during the season, merely to litter and have done with it.

  Besides, he took her to Up Park, and she had never seen a country house before, let alone driven sensuously between its gates, around the bend so accurately calculated by Capability Brown, and there was the house, an enlarged toybox upon an eminence, and all the retainers out to receive them, cap in hand, except for the housekeeper, who had the prim look of a Presbyterian gratified, but not amazed, by still more evidence of sin.

  “Never mind,” said Emily, who didn’t, not just then, “I am the image of a lady; I would confound Beau Nash,” and leaped down tomboy hoyden instead of waiting to be handed out, and went indoors to drawing rooms hung with yellow silk, and everything so fine.

  Over the wall of the local grange in Cheshire, where she was born, she had seen big fat blooms of white lilac as a child, and jumped to catch them, but they were too high, and there was no way in. Whereas here there were lilac trees everywhere, though the season was over and they would not bloom again until next year. She would stay.

  So for the next six months she lapped luxury not only with appetite but aptitude, the way a child tucks into gooseberry fool; for the decorum of an occasional bonbon may satisfy effete minds, but gooseberry fool is the epitome of porridge, and who can have enough of that? It is only the adult who makes choices. A child or a dog merely goes from dish to dish, whiffling down whatever’s there, without comparisons.

  It was the same with everything. There were horses, so she rode them, and rode them uncommonly well. There were pier glasses, so she peered into them and never saw any image but her own in them again. But then, women are seldom spontaneous; at most they consent to a plastic pose. Show me as I am, they cry, but what they mean is, give me back that first revelation at the mirror.

  She danced; she drank; she gambled. There were amateur theatricals. So, since she had a natural talent for the histrionic, she was the Empress in Kotzebue’s The Mother, and so felt real emotions for the first time.

  In short, she had all but two of the attributes of a courtesan. She lacked passion (but would have liked such things if they occurred at the right time, which they never did. Either she wished to enjoy the comfort of freshly ironed linen and a feather bolster all to herself or to examine her fingernails—and there was Sir Harry instead. Men never understand these things. It is useless to explain. So one must put up with it, though few people look their best with their hair out of place, or unshaven in the morning. He did not seem to realize that). The realization, one morning while he snored, that he was an animal, despite his good manners and bad taste, revolted her. For that was her other limitation: she liked things to be nice. It is part of the secret women hand around among themselves at teatime, like the head of St. John the Baptist on a plate; when all is said and done, they are merely animals. Whereas we, of course, are not.

  However, though men are incurably given, for short periods of time, to the primitive pleasures of mere repetition, it is possible to hold their attention in other ways by the use of such ingratiating riddles and spells as “Oh, Harry, not now”; “Please don’t”; “Oh you shouldn’t! You are so silly,” or if all else fails, a simple fact of nature assures us three to five days a month of peace and quiet. So after a while things went better and she became a sort of mascot to Sir Harry’s two packs, the Snyder one he used for hunting, and the black, white and tan kind he hunted with. Both the Snyders and the Raeburn Hoppner packs piled up into imperial heaps in the evening, like Roman senators after an orgy; had the same sort of loose skin, raised a cry in the same manner, and wagged their tails. Some of them were nice, agreeable, healthy young men who smelled of leather and oatmeal soap, buckskins and gillyflower water, but she was not to be caught out.

  Of Sir Harry she was now a little afraid, as the poor are of their landlords. Besides, she was with child.

  “Then you’ll have to pack up and get out.”

  He was behind his desk, in the household offices. Now for the first time she saw the raw cruelty of an amiable man who likes everybody well enough, but whose personal comfort has been endangered. It is the look good hosts have whose guests have stayed too long. Glimpse it once, and you will never dine there with the same ease again.

  “But I live here …” Emily was bewildered.

  “The season is over. We are all going away. Christmas is coming. At Christmas we go home to our families. Do you understand?”

  Emily didn’t.

  “Then I will make it plain. I would as soon pay another man’s gambling debts as acknowledge a trull’s child.” Turning to the housekeeper, he added, “See that the girl is packed up and sent off and pay her ticket to wherever she wishes to go. And that’s an end to it.”

  Emily still didn’t understand. She wasn’t like that.

  “Come,” said Sir Harry, not unkindly. “You have had an expensive summer. You have hired phaetons at five and a half guineas the day, ridden two Arabs lame, and drunk the cellar dry with the rest of us, at 8/6 the bottle. So now you must pay for it in your own time, for I shall not. I pay only for the summer, and a damned bore most of it was, too. You are very young. You will have other summers, my dear, somewhere.”

  She now understood. “Oh its my dear, is it?” she shouted.

  Sir Harry dreaded scenes almost as much as he dreaded wrinkles in his buckskins. Today’s were yellow and, flawlessly tight, as so they should have been, for he had had them wetted and then dried on him, which took hours.

  “Get the girl away,” he said, “and see she does not write.”

  The housekeeper got her away. Like the devils in a morality (and life was moral, was it not, if it was anything), she had her pitchfork ready, and wielded it with a will. To few of us is it given to participate in the drama of salvation, but she was lucky in her situation: she had her chance once a year. Later she married him, by methods based upon what the others had done wrong.

  Emily went first to her grandmother’s and then to Wales, with nothing to sniffle over but some dresses snipped of their buttons, for Granny had sold those to a passing tinker; and nothing to amuse her but the drama of her own life, which she thereupon enacted with vehemence. Feeling be damned. There’s always rhetoric, and even alone, we are at least assured of an audience of one, which is better than nothing. If we can render feeling convincingly, we need never undergo it again. The expression of feeling is nothing but solfège.

  “Loved, adored, feted, encouraged to dance upon the tabletops, and then cast out, with child—dropped, abandoned, hustled away by the back stairs on a frosty morning. Can any career have been so misfortunate as mine?” she demanded.

  Like most audiences, Granny Morgan, though enthrallable, was tough minded. “Oh a good many, I imagine, dearie,” she said.

  “I truly loved Sir Harry,” said Emily with dignity and pathos, besides.

  “Nonsense, a man like that ain’t nothin’ but what he owns. And in my opinion not even that, unless he parts with some of it. If you had loved him, you would not have given in so easily, for a woman in love has nothing to offer but herself, so naturally that is the one thing she refuses to give. Whereas, merely to g
o to bed for cash—you did get cash, didn’t you, dearie?—allows her to hold herself in reserve, put something by, feel respectable, and none of your honeymooning hinghang-how off to Bath in a curricle, and blossoms in the dust in the morning, neither.”

  “Not a shilling,” said Emily.

  “Oh, dearie, that’s bad.”

  “But I learned how to ride, across the fields in the morning, and dew on everything, and steam off the horse; it was an h’Arab, a great-great-grandson of Eclipse. He said I reminded him of Rubens; of course that was early on.”

  “Rubens is all very well for a musty old country house, but means little to the modern connoisseur of taste or beauty,” snapped Granny Morgan, holding one of the dresses up. It looked bedraggled. “I’m afraid they don’t suit, dear. There is nothing for it but to wait for a new style.”

  “I wrote him seven times. I exposed my heart.”

  “Oh that! But did you write the other one, the practical one—about the money and all?”

  “Yes,” said Emily, brought low. “But I fear he is very practical.”

  That was when the postboy came.

  *

  “Well, what does he say?” asked Granny Morgan.

  Emily had been frowning. Charles Greville did not write an easy hand, and besides, you had to twist the paper around to follow the sentence, because he would not waste a fresh sheet—not him.

  “He holds out promise of reform.”

  “But will he pay for it?”

  “He says so.”

  “Then let him reform as much as he pleases,” said Granny Morgan. “Some men are like that, you know. One of my men, now, wouldn’t touch goose until it was green. It gave me the shivers, bumping into it in the dark in the pantry, hung high and a-slitherin’.”

  A log fell in the grate.

  “You know, tainted meat,” explained Granny Morgan. “And I suppose he wants you to have the child here?”