Green Mirror — Book 3, Chapter 1
BOOK III KATHERINE AND ANNA
CHAPTER I KATHERINE ALONE
It happened that in the middle of July there was to be a Trenchard-Faunder wedding in London.
It was to be a quite especial Trenchard-Faunder wedding that no Trenchard or Faunder must miss. A Miss Dorothy Faunder, daughter of Colonel Faunder of Foxley Park, Wilts, was to marry her cousin Humphrey Trenchard, second son of Sir Geoffrey Trenchard of Tredent Hall, Truxe, in Glebeshire, and 22 Bryanston Square, W....
The wedding was to be towards the end of the season, before Goodwood and Cowes; and St. Margaret’s, Westminster, was to be the scene of the Ceremony.
Of course the George Trenchards of Garth would be present—there was never any question of that—but at the same time it was an inconvenient interference with normal life.
Trenchards and Faunders saw, as a rule, little of London in the season unless there was a daughter coming out or a wedding or a Presentation at Court.
George Trenchard greatly disliked being torn from Garth during July and August, and it was only an exceptional demand that could uproot him.
This demand _was_ exceptional.
Of course they must all be there.
On the evening before the departure for London Katherine sat alone in her bedroom looking through her bright window on to the garden beneath her.
The July evening was close and oppressive—the garden was almost black, with a strange quivering bar of pale yellow light behind the trees.
The scents came up to the open window heavily—there was no breeze.
Now and then a dog barked as though it were challenging someone.
Although there was no breeze, the trees sometimes shivered very faintly.
One star glittered between the black clouds.
Katherine sat at the open window smelling the pinks and the roses, her room dim behind her with a pale metallic glow.
She felt oppressed by the evening, and at the same time strangely excited, as though something was about to happen.
But beyond this she was conscious of a curious combative loneliness that should have been a miserable thing, but was in reality something challenging and almost defiant.
Defiant of what?
Defiant of whom?
She thought of it as she sat there.
Her thoughts went back to that day that she had spent with Philip at Roche St. Mary Moor.
Her loneliness had begun quite definitely from that day.
Only a fortnight later Philip had departed.
She had not seen him since then.
But even had he been with her she thought that he would not, very greatly, have affected her loneliness.
He might even have accentuated it.
For Philip had behaved very strangely since that afternoon at Roche St. Mary.
It was, Katherine thought, as though, having made his bolt for freedom and failed, he simply resigned himself.
He only once afterwards alluded to the affair.
One day he said to her quite suddenly: “After all, it’s worth it—so long as you’re there.
” “What’s worth it?
” she had asked him.
“But if you were to leave me,” he went on, and stopped and looked at her.
“What’s worth it?
” she had repeated.
“Being swallowed up,” he had answered her.
“Your mother and I are going to pay calls together this afternoon.
” He had during these last weeks been wonderful about her mother; he had agreed to everything that she proposed, had run errands for her, supported her opinions, “been quite a son to her,” Aunt Betty, happy at this transformation, had declared—and he had been perfectly miserable.
Katherine knew that.
And his misery had kept them apart.
Katherine had never loved him so intensely as she did during those last days, and he had loved her with a kind of passionate, almost desperate, intensity.
But their love had never brought them together.
There had always been someone between.
It was as good as though he had said to her: “We have still another six months before our marriage.
You have told me definitely that you will not give up the family.
Your mother is determined not to surrender a bit of you to me, therefore I am to be surrendered to your mother.
I am willing that this should be so because I love you, but if I change, if I am dull and lifeless you mustn’t be surprised.
“There’s the earlier life, which one can’t forget all at once, however deeply one wants to.
Meanwhile, I hate your mother and your mother hates me.
But she’ll never let me go unless you force her to.
She knows that I can’t break away so long as you’re here.
And she means you to be here always.
What would a strong man do?
Forget the earlier life, I suppose.
So would I if I had you all to myself.
But I have to share you—and that gives the earlier life a chance.
” Although he had never opened his lips, Katherine heard him saying all this as though he were there in front of her, there with his charm and his hopeless humours about himself, his weakness that she had once thought was strength, and for which now she only loved him all the more.
But the terrible thing about those last weeks had been that, although she knew exactly what he was thinking, they had simply avoided all open and direct discussion.
She had wished for it, but what could she say?
Only the same things again—that it would be all right when they were married, that he would love the family then, that she would be _his_ then and not the _family’s_....
Always at this point in her argument she was pulled up sharply, because that was a lie.
She would not be _his_ when they were married.
She knew now, quite definitely, that her mother was utterly, absolutely resolved never to let her go.
And meanwhile there was Anna....
Katherine, putting Philip aside for a moment, thought of the members of the family one by one.
They were all separated from her.
She summoned this ghostly truth before her, there in her dim room with the hot scented air surrounding her, quite calmly without a shudder or a qualm.
Her mother was separated from her because, during the last six months, they had never, with one exception, spoken the truth to one another.
Aunt Aggie was separated from her because, quite definitely, ever since that horrible Sunday night, she hated Aunt Aggie.
Henry was separated from her because during these last months he had been so strange with his alternate moods of affection and abrupt rudeness that she now deliberately avoided him.
Aunt Betty was separated from her because she simply didn’t see things in the least as they were.
Her father was separated from her because he laughed at the situation and refused to consider it at all.
Millie—ah!
Millie, the friend of all her life!
—was separated from her because they were concealing things the one from the other as they had never done in all their days before.
Katherine faced these facts.
She had an illusion about her life that she had always been right in the very heart of her family.
She did not know that it had been their need of her that had put her there, and that now that she was turning away from them to someone else, they were all rejecting her.
They also were unaware of this.
They thought and she thought that it had been always a matter of Love between them all—but of course Love in most cases is only a handsome name for selfishness.
So Katherine sat alone in her room and waited for the thunder to come.
Meanwhile she was immensely surprised that this discovery of her loneliness did not immediately depress her, but rather aroused in her a pugnacity and an independence that seemed to her to be quite new qualities.
And then, following immediately upon her pugnacity, came an overwhelming desire to kiss them all, to do anything in the world that they wished, to love them all more than she had ever done before.
And following upon that came an aching, aching desire for Philip, for his presence, his eyes, his hair, his neck, his hands, his voice....
And following upon that came Anna.
Anna had become an obsession to Katherine.
If, in her earlier life, she had thought very intently of persons or countries remote from her, she would, perhaps, have known how to deal with the woman, but never before, in any crisis or impulse, had her imagination been stirred.
If she had ever thought about imagination, she had decided that Rachel Seddon’s “Imagination!...
you haven’t got a scrap, my dear!
” hurled at her once in the middle of some dispute, was absolutely true.
But her love for Philip had proved its preserver, had proved it, roused it, stirred it into a fierce, tramping monster, with whom she was simply unable to deal.
If only, she felt, she had been able to speak of her to Philip!
Surely then the questions and the answers would have stripped Anna of her romance, would have shown her to be the most ordinary of ordinary women, someone unworthy of Philip, unworthy of anyone’s dreams.
But bringing Anna into the air had been forbidden—anything better than to start Philip thinking of her—so that there she had lingered, somewhere in the shadow, romantic, provoking, mocking, dangerous, coloured with all the show of her foreign land, with the towers and plains and rivers of romance.
Nevertheless it had not been all Katherine’s imagination.
There had been in the affair some other agency.
Again and again Katherine had been conscious that, in opposition to her will, she was being driven to hunt for that figure.
In the middle of some work or pleasure she would start, half frightened, half excited, conscious that someone was behind her, watching her.
She would turn, and in the first flash of her glance it would seem to her that she caught some vanishing figure, the black hair, the thin, tall body, the laughing, mocking eyes.
It was simply, she would tell herself, that her curiosity refused to be quiet.
If only she might have known whether Philip thought of Anna, whether Anna thought of Philip, whether Anna wanted Philip to return to her, whether Anna really despised him, whether ...
and then with a little shudder of dismissal, she would banish the Phantom, summoning all her admirable Trenchard common-sense to her aid....
“That was past, that was gone, that was dead.
” She was, upon this afternoon, at the point of summoning this resolution when the door opened and Millie came in.
For a moment so dark was the room that she could not see, and cried: “Katie, are you there?
” “Yes.
Here by the window.
” Millie came across the room and stood by Katherine’s chair.
In her voice there was the shadow of that restraint that there had been now between them ever since the Sunday with the Awful Supper.
“It’s only the Post.
It’s just come.
Two letters for you—one from Philip that I thought that you’d like to have.
” Katherine took the letters, laid them on her lap, looking up at her sister with a little smile.
“Well ...
” said Millie, hesitating, then, half turning, “I must go back to Aunt Betty—I’m helping her with the things.
” “No. Don’t go.
” Katherine, who was staring in front of her now into the black well of a garden, lit by the quivering, shaking light, put out her hand and touched Millie’s sleeve.
Millie stood there, awkwardly, her white cotton dress shining against the darkness, her eyes uncertain and a little timid.
“I ought to go, Katie dear....
Aunt Betty—” “Aunt Betty can wait.
Millie, what’s the matter?
” “What’s the matter?
” “Yes, between us.
For a long time it’s been—and worse since Philip went away.
” “Nothing,” said Millie, slowly, then, quite suddenly, with one of those movements so characteristic of her, she flung herself on to her knees, caught Katherine’s hands, then stretched forward and pulled Katherine’s head down to hers—then kissed her again and again.
The two sisters held one another in a close embrace, cheek against cheek, breast to breast.
So they stayed for some time.
At last Millie slid down on to the floor and rested there, her head, with all its fair hair ruffled and disordered, on Katherine’s lap.
“Well ...
” said Katherine at last, her head against her sister’s cheek.
“Why, all this time, have you been so queer?
Is it because you hate Philip?
” “No, I like him.
” “Is it because you hate me?
” “No, I love _you_.
” “Is it because you hate my marrying Philip?
” “No—if you’d do it at once.
” “Do it at once?
” “Yes—now—go up to London—Marry him to-morrow—” “My _dear_ Millie!...
our year isn’t up—nearly.
” “What does it matter about your year?
Better to break your year than to have us all at one another’s throats—miserable.
And then perhaps after all to lose Philip.
” “Lose Philip?
” “Yes.
He’ll go back to Russia.
” The words flashed before Katherine’s eyes like lightning through the garden.
Her heart gave a furious jump and then stopped.
“Why do you think he’d do that?
” she asked at last.
“Do you think he doesn’t love me?
” “No, it’s because he loves you so much that he’d do it.
Because he’d rather have none of you than only a bit of you, rather have none of you than share you with us.
” She turned round, staring into Katherine’s eyes.
“Oh, I understand him so well!
I believe I’m the only one in all the family who does!
You think that I’m not grown up yet, that I know nothing about life, that I don’t know what people do or think, but I believe that I do know better than anyone!
And, after all, it’s Philip himself that’s made me see!
He understands now what he’s got to give up if he marries you—all his dreams, all his fun, all his travels, all his imagination.
_You_ don’t want to give up anything, Katie.
You want to keep all this, Garth and the sea, even the oldest old man and woman in the place, above all, you want to keep all of us, mother most of all.
You know that mother hates Philip and will always make him unhappy, but still you think that it’s fair that you should give up nothing and he everything.
But you’re up against more than Philip, Katie—you’re up against all his imagination that won’t let him alone however much he wants it to—and then,” Millie finally added, turning her eyes back to the other garden—“There’s the other woman.
” “Why!
” Katherine cried—“You know?...
Who told you?
” “And _you_ know?
” cried Millie.
“He told you after all?
” “But who told you?
” Katherine insisted, her hand on Millie’s shoulder.
“Henry.
” “Then _he_ knows.
Who else?
” “None of the family, I think, unless Henry’s told the others.
I’ve never said a word.
” “Who told _him_?
” “A man at his Club.
” There was silence.
Then Katherine said: “So _that’s_ why you’ve been so queer?
” “Yes.
I didn’t know whether he’d told you or no. I was afraid to say anything.
I thought perhaps he’d told you and it was making you miserable.
Then I thought that you ought to know.
I thought sometimes that I’d speak to Philip, and then I was afraid of Henry doing something awful, blurting it all out to everybody.
I haven’t known what to do.
But, Katie darling, you aren’t unhappy about it, are you?
” “No—not unhappy,” said Katherine.
“Because you mustn’t be.
What does it matter what Phil did before he loved you, whom he knew?
What _does_ it matter so long as you take her place?
If ever anybody loved anybody, Philip loves you....
” Then she said quickly, eagerly: “What was she like, Katie?
Did he tell you?
Did
he describe her?
Was she lovely, clever?
What was her name?
” “Anna,” Katie said.
“Does he think of her still?
Does he want to see her again?
” “I don’t know,” Katherine said slowly.
“That’s what’s been so hard all these months.
We simply don’t talk of her.
He doesn’t want to think of her, nor of Russia, nor of any of that past life.
He says it’s all dead—” “Well,” said Millie, eagerly.
“But it isn’t to me.
I don’t hate her, I’m not jealous, it doesn’t alter one scrap of my love for Phil, but—I don’t know—I feel as though if we talked about it everything would clear away.
I’d see then that she was just an ordinary person like anyone else, and I wouldn’t bother about her any more, as it is, simply because I don’t know anything, I imagine things.
I don’t know whether Philip thinks of her or not, but I expect that he does, or thinks of my thinking of her, which is the same thing.
” “Well, _I’ve_ thought of her!
” Millie declared, “again and again.
I’ve wondered a thousand things, why she gave Philip up, whether she loves him still, whether she hates his being in love with someone else, whether she writes to him, what she’s like, what she wears....
Doesn’t it prove, Katie, how shut up we’ve always been?
Why, even in Paris I never really thought about anybody whom I couldn’t actually see, and life used to seem too simple if you just did the things in front of your nose—and now it’s only the things that aren’t anywhere near you that seem to matter.
” Millie said all this as though she were fifty years old at least.
It was indeed a real crisis that she should be admitted into the very heart of all this thrilling affair; she was rewarded at last with her flaming desire, that ‘she should share in life.
’ It was almost as though she herself had a lover.
Katherine waited, then she broke out suddenly: “But it’s all so stupid this.
Why can’t things be perfectly simple?
Why can’t Philip like them and they like Philip?
Why can’t Philip and I marry and spend part of the year here and part of the year away?
” “You’ve got to choose,” Millie said, “Mother or Philip—Philip or the family—Philip or Glebeshire.
The old life or the new one.
You’ve tried to mix it all up.
You can’t. Philip can change us.
He _is_ changing us all, but mix with us never.
If he is forced to, he’ll simply disappear.
” “My dear, what’s happened to you?
” Katherine cried.
“How wise you’ve become!
How you’ve grown up!
” “I am,” said Millie, with a solemnity that proved that ‘grown-up’ was the last thing that she really was.
She sprang to her feet.
She spoke as though she were delivering a challenge.
“Katie, if you let things go, if you let Mother have her way, one of two things will happen; either Philip won’t be able to stand it and will vanish to Russia, or he’ll endure it, will be smothered by us all, and there’ll only be the corpse left for your enjoyment.
“Katie!
” Her eyes shone with excitement, her voice quivered with the thrill of her intensity.
“You must marry him _now_—whilst you’re in London.
You must chuck us all, show Mother that Philip comes before everything, take it into your own hands, send that Russian woman’s ghost back to Russia ...
just as Browning and Mrs. Browning did, slip off one day, buy some smelling-salts at the chemist’s and be married!
” She laughed.
She clapped her hands.
“Oh!
Katie!
Katie!...
It’s the only way, the only possible way!
” But Katherine replied: “You’re wrong, Millie.
I can keep it all.
I
_will_ keep it all.
I love Phil, but I love Mother and you and Henry and This—This—all of it.
If I were to marry Phil now Mother would never forgive me—you know that she would not.
I could never come back.
I must lose it all.
” “You’d rather lose Philip then?
” “No. _That_ never!
” “Well—Anna’s after him, Katie.
Russia’s after him.
He’s awfully unhappy—and you’re unfair.
You’re giving him nothing, not even himself.
You say that you love him, but you want things all your way.
I tell you you deserve to lose ...
” then suddenly softening again: “But I’ll help you, Katie dear, whatever way it is.
Oh!
I’m so glad that we’ve spoken.
We’re together now, and nothing can part us.
” Katherine caught her hand and held her close.
“What would Mother do, do you think, if she knew about Anna?
” she said, at last.
“I don’t know,” Millie answered, “Mother’s so strange.
I believe she’d do nothing.
She’d know that if she dismissed him she’d lose you.
” Then Katherine suddenly, holding Millie so close to her that their hearts beat as one, said: “I love him so.
I love him so....
Everything must go if he wants it to.
” And then, as though the house, the land, the place that had always been hers, answered her challenge, a lightning flash struck the darkness and the rain broke in a thunder of sound.
* * * * * All through the wedding-ceremony Katherine felt insanely that she was no longer a Trenchard—insanely because if she was not a Trenchard what was she?
Always before in these Trenchard gatherings she had known herself wonderfully at home, sinking down with the kind of cosy security that one greets as one drops into a soft, familiar bed.
Every Trenchard was, in one way or another, so like every other Trenchard that a Trenchard gathering was in the most intimate sense of the word a family party.
At a Beaminster gathering you were always aware of a spirit of haughty contempt for the people who were still outside, but at a Trenchard or Faunder assembly the people outside did not exist at all.
“They were not there.
” The Beaminsters said: “Those we don’t know are not worth knowing.
” The Trenchards said: “Those we can’t see don’t exist”—and they could only see one another.
All this did not mean that the Trenchards were not very kind to the human beings in the villages and towns under their care.
But then these dependents _were_ Trenchards, just as old Trenchard chairs and tables in old Trenchard houses were Trenchards.
The Beaminsters had been broken all in a moment because they had tried to do something that their Age no longer permitted them to do.
The Trenchards were much more difficult to break, because they were not trying to do anything at all.
There was no need for them to be “Positive” about anything....
As old Mrs. Trenchard, mother of Canon Trenchard of Polchester, once said to a rebellious daughter: “My dear, it’s no use your trying to do anything.
People say that new generations have come and that we shall see great changes.
For myself, I don’t believe it.
England, thank God, is not like one of those foreign countries.
England never changes about the Real Things,” and by ‘England’ of course she meant ‘Trenchards.
’ Katherine knew exactly whom she would see at St. Margaret’s, Westminster.
From Glebeshire there would be Canon Trenchard, his wife and his two girls, also the Trenchards of Rothin Place, Polchester.
There would be Sir Guy Trenchard from Truxe, and Miss Penelope Trenchard from Rasselas.
There would be the head of all the Trenchards—Sir Henry Trenchard of Ruston Hall, in Norfolk, and there would be Garth Trenchard, Esq.
