 | CHAPTER III DAVID VAVASOUR WILLIAMS Mrs. Warren's Daughter: A Story of the Woman's Movement |  |
3. CHAPTER III
DAVID VAVASOUR WILLIAMS
It is in the spring of 1901. A fine warm evening, but at eight o'clock the dusk is already on the verge of darkness as Honoria emerges from the lift at her Chancery Lane Office (near the corner of Carey Street), puts her latch-key into the door of the partners' room, and finds herself confronting the silhouette of a young man against the western glow of the big window.
Norie (inwardly rather frightened): "Hullo! Who are you and what are you doing here?"
Vivie (mimicking a considerate, cringing burglar): "Sorry to startle you, lidy, but I don't mean no 'arm. I'll go quiet. Me name's D.V. Williams..."
Norie: "You absurd creature! But you shouldn't play such pranks on these respectable premises. You gave me a horrid start, and I realized for the first time that I've got a heart. I really must sit down and pant."
Vivie: "I am sorry, dearest. I had not the slightest notion you would be letting yourself into the office at this hour--8 o'clock--and I was just returning from my crammers..."
Norie: "I came for those Cranston papers. Mother is ill. I may have to sit up with her after Violet Hunt goes, so I thought I would come here, fetch the bundle of papers and plans, and go through them in the silent watches of the night, if mother sleeps. But do you mean to say you have already started this masquerade?"
Vivie: "I do. You see Christabel Pankhurst has
"Last autumn I began practising at night-time after all our familiars had left these premises. Purposely I did not tell you because I feared your greater caution and instinctive respectability might discourage me. Otherwise, nobody's spotted me, so far. I'd intended breaking it to you any day now, because I've gone too far to draw back, for weal or woe. But either we have been rushed with business, or you've been anxious about Lady Fraser--How is she?" (Norie interpolates "Very poorly.") "So truly sorry!--I was generally just about to tell you when Rose or Lilian--tiresome things!--would begin most assiduously passing in and
Norie (looking at her wrist-watch): "Violet has very kindly promised to stay with mother till ten.... I can give you an hour, though I must take a few minutes off that for the firm's business as I haven't been here much for three days..." (They talk business for twenty minutes, during which Norie says: "It's really rather odd, how those clothes change you! I feel vaguely compromised with a handsome young man bending over me, his cheek almost touching mine!"--and Vivie retorts "Oh, don't be an ass!")
Norie: "So you really are going to take the plunge?"
Vivie: "I really am. As soon as it suits your convenience, Vivie Warren will retire from your firm and go abroad. You must either replace her by Beryl Clarges or allow Mr. Vavasour Williams" (Honoria interpolates: "Ridiculous name! How did you think of it?") "to come and assist in the day-time or after office hours. You can say to the winds that he is Vivie's first cousin, remarkably like her in some respects.... Rose Mullet is engaged to be married and is only--she told me yesterday with many blushes--staying on to oblige us. Lilian Steynes said the other day that if we were making any changes in the office, much as she liked her work here, her mother having died she thought it was her duty to go and live with her maternal aunt in the country. The aunt thinks she can get her a post as a brewery clerk at Aylesbury, and she is longing to breed Aylesbury ducks in her spare time.--There is Bertie Adams, it's true. There's something so staunch about him and he is so useful that he and Praed and Stead are the three exceptions I make in my general hatred of mankind..."
Norie: "He will be very much cut up at your going--or seeming to go."
Vivie: "Just so. I think I shall write him a farewell note, saying it's only for a time: I mean, that I may return later on--dormant partnership--nothing really changed, don't you know? But that as Rose and Lilian are going, Mrs.--what does she call herself, Claridge?"--(Norie interpolates: "Yes, that was her idea: she doesn't want to blazon the name of Clarges as the symbol of Free Love, 'cos of the dear old Dean; yet Claridge will not be too much of a surrender and is sure to invoke respectability, because of the Hotel")--"Mrs. Claridge, then, is coming in my stead--He's to help her all he can--and my cousin, who is reading for the Bar, will also look in when you are very busy. I shall, of course, see about rooms in one of the Inns of Court--the Temple perhaps. I have been stealthily watching Fig Tree Court. I think I can get chambers there--a man is turning out next month--got a Colonial appointment--I've put my new name down at the lodge and I shall have to rack my brains for references--you will do for one--or perhaps not--however that I can work out later. Of course I won't take the final plunge till I have secured the rooms. Meantime I will use my bedroom here but promise you I will be awfully prudent..."
Norie: "I couldn't possibly have Beryl 'living in,' with a child hanging about the place; so I think if you do go I shall turn your bedroom into an apartment which Beryl and I can use for toilet purposes but where we can range out on book-shelves a whole lot of our books. Just now they are most inconveniently stored away in boxes. It's rather tiresome about Beryl. I believe she's going to have another child. At any rate she says it may be four months before she can come to work here regularly. I asked her about it the other day, because if mother gets worse I may be hindered about coming to the office, and I didn't want you to get overworked,--so I said to Beryl.... That reminds me, she referred to
Vivie: "Perhaps. But it may gain instead the sympathies of the lower and the upper classes. Why do you bother about Beryl? I agree with you in disliking all this sexuality..."
Norie: "Does one ever quite know why one likes people? There is something about Beryl that gets over me; and she is a worker. You know how she grappled with that Norfolk estate business?"
Vivie: "Well, it's fortunate she and I have not met since Newnham days. You must tip her the story that I am going away for a time--abroad--and that a young--young, because I look a mere boy, dressed up in men's clothes--a young cousin of mine, learned in the law, is going to drop in occasionally and do some of the work..."
Norie: "I'm afraid I'm rather weak-willed. I ought to stop this prank before it has gone too far, just as I ought to discourage Beryl's babies. Your schemes sound so stagey. Off the stage you never take people in with such flimsy stories and weak disguises--you'll tie yourself up into knots and finally get sent to prison.... However.... I can't help being rather tickled by your idea. It's vilely unjust, men closing two-thirds of the respectable careers to women, to bachelor women above all..." (A pause, and the two women look out on a blue London dotted with lemon-coloured, straw-coloured, mauve-tinted lights, with one cold white radiance hanging
Vivie: "You generous darling! Never, never shall I forget your kindness and your trust in me. You have at any rate saved one soul alive." (Honoria deprecates gratitude.) "No, I don't want money--yet. You made me take and bank £700 last January over that Rio de Palmas coup--heaps more than my share. Altogether I've got about £1,000 on deposit at the C. and C. bank, the Temple Bar branch. I've many gruesome faults, but I am thrifty. I think I can win through to the Bar on that. Of course, if afterwards briefs don't come in--"
Norie: "Well, there'll always be the partnership which will go on unaltered. I shall pretend you are only away for a time and your share shall be regularly paid in to your bank. Of course I shall meet Mr. Vavasour Williams now and again and I can tell him things and consult with him. If we think Beryl, after she is installed here as head clerk--of course I shan't make her a partner for years and years--not at all if she remains flighty--if we think she is unsuspicious, and Bertie Adams likewise, and the new clerks and the housekeeper and her husband, there is no reason why you should not come here fairly often and put in as much work as you can on our business."
Vivie: "Yes. Of course I must be careful of one predicament. I have studied the regulations about being admitted to the English Bar. They are very quaint and
"I already think of myself as Williams--I shall pose of course as a Welshman. My appearance is rather Welsh, don't you think? It's the Irish blood that makes me look Keltic--I'm sure my father was an Irish student for the priesthood at Louvain, and certain scraps of information I got out of mother make me believe that her mother was a pretty Welsh girl from Cardiff, brought over to London Town by some ship's captain and stranded there, on Tower Hill.
"However, I have still the whole scheme to work out and when I'm ready to start on it--which will be very soon--I'll let you know. Now, though I'd love to discuss all the other details, I mustn't forget your mother will be wanting you--I wish I had a mother to tend--I wonder" (wistfully) "whether I was too hard on mine?
"D'you mind posting these letters as you go out? I shall change back to Vivie Warren in a dressing gown, give myself a light supper, and then put in two hours studying Latin and Norman French. Good night, dearest!"
Two months after this conversation Vivie decided to pay a call on an old friend of her mother's, Lewis Maitland Praed, if you want his full name, a well-known architect, and one of the few male friends of Catherine Warren who had not also been her lover. Why, he never quite knew himself. When he first met her she was the boon companion, the mistress--more or less, and unattached--of a young barrister, a college friend of Praed's. Kate Warren at that time called herself Kitty Vavasour; and on the strength of having done a turn or two on the music halls considered herself an actress with a right to a professional name. It was in this guise that the "Revd." Samuel Gardner met her and had that six months' infatuation for her which afterwards caused him so much disquietude; though it preceded the taking of his ordination vows by quite a year, and his marriage to his wife--much too good for him--in 1874. [The Revd. Sam, you may remember, was the father of the scapegrace Frank who nearly captured Vivie's young affections and had written from South Africa proposing marriage at the opening of this story.]
Kate Vavasour in 1872 was an exceedingly pretty girl of nineteen or twenty; showily dressed, and quick with her tongue. She was good-natured and jolly, and though Praed himself was the essence of refinement there was something about her reckless mirth and joy in life--the immense relief of having passed from the sordid life of a barmaid to this quasi-ladyhood--that enlisted his sympathies. Though she was always somebody else's mistress until she developed her special talent as a manageress of high-class houses of accommodation, "private hotels" on the Continent, chiefly frequented by English and American roués--Praed kept an eye on her career, and occasionally rendered her, with some cynicism, unobtrusive friendly services in disentangling her affairs when complications threatened. He was an art student in those
So one afternoon in June, 1901, she came to his little dwelling with its large studio, and asked to have a long talk to him, whilst his parlour-maid--he was still a bachelor--denied him to other callers. They had tea together and Vivie plunged as quickly as possible into her problem.
"You know, Praddy dear, I want to be a Barrister. But as a female they will never call me to the Bar. So I'm going to send Vivien Warren off for a long absence abroad--the few who think about me will probably conclude that money has carried the day and that I've gone to help my mother in her business--and in her absence Mr. Vavasour Williams will take up the running. David V. Williams--don't interrupt me--will study for the Bar, eat through his terms--six dinners a year, isn't it?--pass his examinations, and be called to the English Bar in about three years from now. Didn't you once have a pupil called Vavasour Williams?"
Praed: "What, David, the Welsh boy? Yes. His name reminded me of your mother in one of her stages.
Vivie: "Never mind, or never mind for the moment. Tell me some more about him."
Praed: "Well to sum him up briefly he was what school boys and subalterns would call 'a rotter.' Not without an almost mordid cleverness; but the Welsh strain in him which in the father turned to emotional religion--the father was Vicar or Rector of Pontystrad--came out in the boy in unhealthy fancies. He had almost the talent of Aubrey Beardsley. But I didn't think he had a good influence over my other pupils, so before I planned that Italian journey--on which you refused to accompany me--I advised him to leave my tuition--I wasn't modern enough, I said. I also advised him to make up his mind whether he wanted to be a sane architect--he despised questions of housemaids' closets and sanitation and lifts and hot-water supply--or a scene painter. I think he might have had a great career at Drury Lane over fairy palaces or millionaire dwellings. But I turned him out of my studio, though I put the fact less brutally before his father--said I should be absent a long while in Italy and that I feared the boy was too undisciplined. Afterwards I think he went into some South African police force..."
Vivie: "He did, and died last year in a South African hospital. Had he--er--er--many relations, I mean did he come of well-known people?"
Praed: "I fancy not. His father was just a dreamy old Welsh clergyman always seeing visions and believing himself a descendant of the Druids, Sam Gardner told me; and his mother had either died long ago or had run away from her husband, I forget which. In a way, I'm sorry David's dead. He had a sort of weird talent and
Vivie: "Thank you for the double-edged compliment. However what you say is very interesting. Well now, my idea is that David Vavasour Williams did not die in a military hospital; he recovered and returned, firmly resolved to lead a new life.--Is his father living by the bye? Did he believe his son was dead?"
Praed: "Couldn't tell you, I'm sure. I never took any further interest in him, and until you mentioned it--I don't know on whose authority--I didn't know he was dead. On the whole a good riddance for his people, I should say, especially if he died on the field of honour. But what lunatic idea has entered your mind with regard to this poor waster?"
Vivie: "Why my idea, as I say, is that D.V.W. got cured of his necrosis of the jaw--I suppose it is not invariably deadly?--came home with a much improved morale, studied hard, and became a barrister, thinking it morally a superior calling to architecture and scene painting. In short, I shall be from this day forth Vavasour Williams, law-student! Would it be safe, d'you think, in that capacity to go down and see his old father?"
Praed: "Vivie! I did think you were a sober-minded young woman who would steer clear of--of--crime: for this impersonation would be a punishable offence..."
Vivie: "Crime? What nonsense! I should consider I was justified in a Court of Equity if I burnt down or blew up the Law Courts or one of the Inns or broke the windows of the Chartered Institute of Actuaries or the Incorporated Law Society. All these institutions and many others bar the way to honourable and lucrative careers for educated women, and a male parliament gives us no redress, and a male press laughs at us for our feeble
Praed: "Really, Vivie, you are unnecessarily coarse..."
Vivie: "I don't care if I am, poor outlaw that I am! Every avenue to an honest and ambitious career seems closed to me, either because I am a woman or--in women's careers--the few that there are--because I am Kate Warren's daughter. I am not to blame for my mother's misdeeds, yet I am being punished for them. That beast of a friend of yours--that filthy swine, George Crofts--set it about after I refused to marry him that I was 'Mrs. Warren's Daughter,' and the few nice people I knew from Cambridge days dropped me, all except Honoria and her mother."
Praed: "Well, I haven't dropped you. I'll always stick by you" (observes that Vivie is trying to keep back her tears). "Vivie--darling--what do you want me to do? Why not marry me and spend half my income, take the shelter of my name--I'm an A.R.A. now--You needn't do more than keep house for me.... I'm rather a valetudinarian--dare say I shan't trouble
Vivie (recovering herself): "Thanks, dear Praddy; you are a brick and I really--in a way--have quite got to love you. Except an office boy in Chancery Lane and W.T. Stead, I don't know any other decent man. But I'm not going to marry any one. I'm going to become Vavasour Williams--the name is rotten, but you must take what you can get. Williams is a quiet young man who only desires to be left alone to earn his living respectably at the Bar, and see there if he cannot redress the balance in the favour of women. But there is something you could do for me, and it is for that I came to see you to-day--by the bye, we have both let our tea grow cold, but for goodness' sake don't order any more on my account, or else your parlour-maid will be coming in and out and will see that I've been crying and you look flushed. What I wanted to ask was this--it's really very simple--If Mr. Vavasour Williams, aged twenty-four, late in South Africa, once your pupil in architecture or scene painting or whatever it was--gives you as a reference to character, you are to say the best you can of him. And, by the bye, he will be calling to see you very shortly and you could lend further verisimilitude to your story by renewing acquaintance with him. You will find him very much improved. In every way he will do you credit. And what is more, if you don't repel him, he will come and see you much oftener than his cousin--I'm not ashamed to adopt her as a cousin--Vivie Warren could have done. Because Vivie, with her deplorable parentage, had your good name to think of, and visited you very seldom; whereas there could be raised no objection from your parlour-maid if Mr. D.V. Williams came rather often to chat with you and ask your advice. Think it over, dear friend--Good-bye."
Early in July, Norie and Vivie were standing at the open west window in their partners' room at the office, trying to get a little fresh air. The staff had just gone its several ways to the suburbs, glad to have three hours of daylight before it for cricket and tennis. Confident therefore of not being overheard, Vivie began: "I've got those rooms in Fig Tree Court. I shall soon be ready to move my things in. I'll leave some of poor Vivie Warren's effects behind if you don't mind, in case she comes back some day. Do you think you can rub along if I take my departure next week? I want to give myself a fortnight's bicycle holiday in Wales--as D.V. Williams--a kind of honeymoon with Fate, before I settle down as a law student. After I come back I can devote much of the summer recess to our affairs, either openly or after office hours. You could then take a holiday, in August. You badly need one. What about Beryl?"
Norie: "Beryl is well over her accouchement and is confident of being able to start work here on August 1.... It's a boy this time. I haven't seen it, so I can't say whether it resembles a policeman more than an architect. Besides babies up till the age of six months only resemble macrocephalic idiots.... I shall be wary with Beryl--haven't committed myself--ourselves to any engagement beyond six months. She's amazingly clever, but I should say quite heartless. Two babies in three years, and both illegitimate--the real Mrs. Architect very much upset, no doubt, Mr. Architect getting wilder and wilder in his work through trying to maintain two establishments--they say he left out all the sanitation in Sir Peter Robinson's new house and let the builders rush up the walls without damp courses--and it's killing her father, the Dean. It's not as though she hid herself away, but she goes out so much! They are talking of turning her out of her club because of the things she says before the waitresses..."
Vivie: "What things?"
Norie: "Why, about its being very healthy to have babies when you're between the ages of twenty and thirty; and how with this twilight sleep business she doesn't mind how often; that it's fifty times more interesting than breeding dogs and cats or guinea-pigs; and she's surprised more single women don't take it up. I think she must be détraquée.... I have a faint hope that by taking her in hand and interesting her in our work--which entre nous deux--is turning out to be very profitable--I may sober her and regularize her. No doubt in 1950 most women will talk as she does to-day, but the advance is too abrupt. It not only robs her parents of all happiness, but it upsets my mother. She now wrings her hands over her own past and fears that by working so strenuously for the emancipation of women she has assisted to breach the dam--Can't you imagine the way the old cats of both sexes go on at her?--the dam which held up female virtue, and that Society now will be drowned in a flood of Free Love..."
Vivie: "Well! We'll give her a six months' trial here, and see if our mix-up of advice in Law, Banking, Estate management, Stock-and-share dealing, Divorce, Private Enquiries, probate, etc., does not prove much more interesting than an illicit connection with a hare-brained architect.... If she proves impossible you'll pack her off and Vivie shall return and D.V. Williams go abroad.... Don't you think there is something that ought to win over Providence in that happily chosen name? D.V. Williams? And my mother once actually called herself 'Vavasour.'
"Well, then, barring accidents and the unforeseen, it's agreed I go on my holiday next Saturday, to return never no more--perhaps--?--"
Norie (with a sigh): "Yes!"
Vivie: "How's your mother?"
Norie: "Oh, as to her, I'm glad to say 'much better.'
Vivie: "Then, dearest ... in case you don't come to the office any more this week, I'll say good-bye--for--for some time..."
(They grip hands, they hesitate, then kiss each other on the cheek, a very rare gesture on either's part--and separate with tears in their eyes.)
The following Monday morning, Bertie Adams, combining in his adolescent person the functions of office boy, junior clerk, and general factotum, entered the outer office of Fraser and Warren and found this letter on his desk:--
Fraser and Warren
Midland Insurance Chambers,
General Inquiry Agents
88-90, Chancery Lane, W.C.
July 12, 1901.
DEAR BERTIE--
I want to prepare you for something. If you had been an ordinary Office boy, I should not have bothered about you or confided to you anything concerning the Firm. But you are by now almost a clerk, and from the day I joined Miss Fraser in this business, you have helped me more than you know--helped me not only in my work, but to understand that there can be good, true, decent-minded, trustworthy ... you won't like it if I say "boys" ... young men.
I am going away for a considerable time, I cannot say how long--probably abroad. But Miss Fraser thinks I can still help in the work of her firm, so I remain a partner. A cousin of mine, Mr. D.V. Williams,
It is rather sad this change in what has been such a happy association of busy people, nobody treading on any one else's toes; but there it is! "The old order changeth, giving place to the new ... lest one good custom should corrupt the world"--you will read in the Tennyson I gave you last Christmas. Let's hope it won't be when I return: "Change and Decay in all around I see" ... as the rather dismal hymn has it.
Sometimes change is a good thing. You serve a noble mistress in Miss Fraser and I am sure you realize the importance of her work. It may mean so much for women's careers in the next generation. I shan't quite lose touch with you. I dare say Miss Fraser, even if I am far away, will write to me from time to time and give me news of the office and tell me how you get on. Don't be ashamed of being ambitious: keep up your studies. Why don't you--but perhaps you do?--join evening classes at the Polytechnic?--or at this new London School of Economics which is close at hand? Make up your mind to be Lord Chancellor some day ... even if it only carries you as far as the silk gown of a Q.C. I suppose I ought now to write "K.C." A few years ago we all thought the State would go to pieces when Victoria died. Yet you see we are jogging along pretty well under King Edward. In the same way, you will soon get so used to the new Head Clerk, Mrs. Claridge, that you will wonder what on earth you saw to admire in
VIVIEN WARREN.
This letter came like a cricket ball between the eyes to Bertie Adams. His adored Miss Warren going away and no clear prospect of her return--her farewell almost like the last words on a death-bed.... He bowed his head over his folded arms on his office desk, and gave way to gruff sobs and the brimming over of tear and nose glands which is the grotesque accompaniment of human sorrow.
He forgot for a while that he was a young man of nineteen with an unmistakable moustache and the status of a cricket eleven captain. He was quite the boy again and his feeling for Vivien Warren, which earlier he had hardly dared to characterize, out of his intense respect for her, became once more just filial affection.
His good mother was a washerwoman-widow, in whom Honoria Fraser had interested herself in her Harley Street girlhood. Bertie was the eldest of six, and his father had been a coal porter who broke his back tumbling down a cellar when a little "on." Bertie--he now figured as Mr. Albert Adams in the cricket lists--was a well-grown youth, rather blunt-featured, but with honest hazel eyes, fresh-coloured, shock-haired. Vivie had once derided him for trying to woo his frontal hair into a flattened curl with much pomade ... he now only sleeked his curly hair with water. You might even have called him "common." He was of the type that went out to the War from 1914 to 1918, and won it, despite the many mistakes of our flurried strategicians: the type that so long as it lasts unspoilt will make England the predominant partner, and Great Britain the predominant nation; the type out of which are made the bluejacket and petty officer, the police sergeant, the engine driver, the railway guard, solicitor's clerk, merchant service mate, engineer, air-pilot, chauffeur, army non-commissioned officer, head gardener, head game-keeper, farm-bailiff, head printer; the trustworthy manservant, the commissionaire
However, Bertie Adams was quite unconscious of all these possibilities, and thought of himself modestly, rather cheaply. Swallowing the fourth or fifth sob, he rose from his crouching over the desk, wiped his face with a wet towel, smoothed his hair, put straight his turn-over collar and smart tie, and went to his work with glowing eyes and cheeks; resolved to show Miss Warren that she had not thought too highly of him.
Nevertheless, when Miss Mullet arrived and giggled over the details of her trousseau and Lily Steynes discussed the advertisements of Aylesbury ducks in the current Exchange and Mart, he was reserved and rather sarcastic with them both. He intimated later that he had long been aware of the coming displacements; but he said not a word of Vivie's letter.
| CHAPTER III DAVID VAVASOUR WILLIAMS Mrs. Warren's Daughter: A Story of the Woman's Movement | |