‘My mother thinks you’re a fortune hunter,’ said Sheila with a smile. For a moment I was amused. But then I was seized by another thought, and felt ashamed and helpless.
‘I can’t come,’ I said.
‘Why can’t you? You must come. I’m looking forward to it.’
I shook my head. ‘I can’t.’
‘Why not?’
I was too much ashamed to prevaricate.
‘Why not? It isn’t because of Mother, is it? You never mind what people think.’
‘No, it’s not that,’ I said.
‘I believe my father doesn’t dislike you. He dislikes nearly everyone.’
She unfolded a new handkerchief.
‘I’m getting angry,’ she said nasally, but she was still good-tempered. ‘Why can’t you come?’
‘I haven’t got the clothes,’ I said.
Sheila sneezed several times and then gave a broad smile. ‘Well!’ she said. ‘For you of all men to worry about that. I give up. I just don’t understand it.’
Nor did I; it was years since I had been so preposterously ashamed.
‘It has worried you, hasn’t it?’
‘I don’t know why, but it has,’ I confessed.
Sheila said, with acid gentleness ‘It’s made me remember how young you are.’
Our eyes met. She was in some way moved. After a moment she said, in the same tone ‘Look. I want to go to this ball. They don’t give me much money, but I can always get plenty. Let me give you a present. Let me buy you a suit.’
‘I can’t do that.’
‘Are you too proud?’
‘I suppose so,’ I said.
She took my hand.
‘If I’d made you happier’, she said, ‘and then asked if I could give you a present — would you still be too proud?’
‘Perhaps not,’ I said.
‘Darling,’ she said. It was rare for her to use the word. ‘I can’t be articulate like you when you let yourself go. But if I ask you to let me do it — because of what’s happened between us?’
In a brand new dinner jacket, I arrived with the Knights at the charity ball. It was held in the large hall, close by the park, a few hundred yards away from where Martineau used to live. Perhaps that induced me at supper to tell the story of Martineau, so far as I then knew it; I had seen him leave the town on foot, with a knapsack on his back, only a few days before.
I told the story because someone had to talk. The supper tables were arranged in the corridors all round the main hall, and the meal was served before the dance began. As a party of four, we were not ideally chosen. Sheila was looking tired; she was boldly made up, much to her mother’s indignation, but the powder did not hide the rings under her eyes, and the painted lips were held in her involuntary smile. She was strained in the presence of her parents, and some of her nervousness infected me, the more so as I was still not well. With her usual directness and simplicity, Mrs Knight resented my presence. She produced a list of young men who, in her view, would have been valuable additions — some of whom Sheila had been seeing in the last few months, though she had resisted the temptation to let fall their names. As for Mr Knight, he was miserable to be there at all, and he was not the man to conceal his misery.
He was miserable for several reasons. He refused to dance, and he hated others enjoying fun which he was not going to share. His wife and Sheila were active, strong women, who loved using their muscles (Sheila, once set on a dance floor, forgot she had not wanted to come, and danced for hours); Mr Knight was an excessively lazy man, who preferred sitting down. He also hated to be at any kind of disadvantage. In his own house, backed by everything Mrs Knight could buy for him, he was playing on his home ground. He did not like going out, where people might not recognize him or offer the flattery which sustained him.
I picked up an example right at the beginning of supper. Mrs Knight announced that the bishop had brought a party to the hall. Shouldn’t they call on him during the evening? I could feel that she had not abandoned hope of getting her husband some preferment.
‘Not unless he asks us, darling,’ said Mr Knight faintly.
‘You can’t expect him to remember everyone,’ said Mrs. Knight, with brisk common sense.
‘He ought to have remembered me,’ said Mr Knight. ‘Heought to have.’
I guessed that conversation had been repeated often. She had always planned for him to go far in the Church; he was far more gifted than many who had climbed to the top. When she married him, she was prepared to find ways of getting all the bishops on the bench to meet him. But he would not do his share. As he grew older, he could not humble himself at all. He had too much arrogance, too much diffidence, to play the world’s game. Later on, I ran across a good many men who had real gifts but who, in the worldly sense, were failures; and in most of them there was a trace of Mr Knight; like him, they were so arrogant and so diffident that they dared not try.
Mr Knight was miserable; Mrs Knight indignant; Sheila strained. We did not talk much for the first half of supper, and then, in desperation, I brought out the story of Martineau.
‘He must be a crank,’ said Mrs Knight as soon as I finished. ‘Well, Mrs Knight,’ I said, ‘no one could call him an ordinary man.’
‘Harry Eden’, she decided, ‘must be glad to see the back of him.’
‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘Mr Eden is devoted to him.’
‘Harry Eden was always a loyal person,’ said Mrs Knight.
Sheila broke in, clearly, as though she were thinking aloud: ‘He’ll enjoy himself!’
‘Who will?’ her mother asked obtusely.
‘Your Martineau.’ Sheila was looking at me. ‘He’ll enjoy every minute of it! It’s not a sacrifice.’
‘Of course’, said Mr Knight, in his most beautifully modulated voice, ‘many religions have sprung up from sources such as this. We must remember that there are hundreds of men like Martineau in every century, Those are the people who start false religions, but I admit that many of them have felt something true.’ Mr Knight was theologically fair-minded; but his nose was out of joint. If anyone was to act as raconteur to that party, he should do so. He proceeded to tell a long story about the Oneida community. He told it with art, far better than I had told mine, and as we chuckled, he became less sulky. I thought (for I was irritated at not being allowed to shine in front of Sheila) that his story had every advantage, but that mine was at any rate first-hand.
After supper I danced with Sheila and Mrs Knight alternately. They had many acquaintances there, who kept coming up to claim Sheila. As I watched her round the hall, my jealous inquisitiveness flew back, like a detective summoned to an unpleasant duty: was this one with whom she had threatened me last year? But, when I danced with her, she did not mention any of her partners. Her father was behaving atrociously, she said with her usual ruthlessness. And she had to talk to all these other people; she wanted to be quiet with me. So, much of the night, we danced in a silence that to me was languorous.
It was far otherwise in my alternate dances. Mrs Knight disapproved of me, but she demanded her exercise, and dancing with her became vigorous and conversational. She took it heartily, for she had a real capacity for pleasure. I was an unsatisfactory young man, but I was better than no one to whirl her round. She got hot and merry, and as we passed her friends on the floor she greeted them in her loud horsy voice. And she surprised me by issuing instructions that I was to take care of myself.
‘You’re not looking so well as you did,’ she said, in a brusque maternal stand-no-nonsense manner.
I explained that I had been working hard.