The burden

Chapter One

\T twelve minutes past nine on a bright frosty morning in December, 1919, Christine Wracke-Helyar entered the dining-room of her father’s house at Richmond. By fourteen minutes past she had completed her inspection of the room, and had satisfied herself that there was no devia¬ tion from an admirably organised normal. Dust had been removed, the fire was adequate but not extravagant, break¬ fast was ready. The Times was on the left side of her father’s plate and his letters were on top of The Times. The mustard pot, concerning the emptiness of which there had been a complaint on the previous day, had been refilled, and one window was wide open. Attention to detail, especi¬ ally in the morning, was a matter of importance at Boldre House, for Brigadier-General Eustace Wracke-Helyar, C.B., retired, with more than thirty years’ service in the Royal Artillery behind him, depended for his bodily ease and mental peace upon adherence to a punctiliously rigid rou¬ tine, and was quick to resent any divergence from it in his household.

Boldre House was one of a little group of flat-fronted buildings of the Georgian period lying behind Richmond Green, and approached from it through an archway of the old palace. The house and its neighbours formed one side of a triangle, of which the second side was a wing of the palace and the third a row of livery stables of black-andwhite painted wood. In the middle there was a grass plot.

Christine, dressed for golf in a short tweed skirt, knitted jumper and brogues, stood by the window and waited for her father to come in from his morning ride. She was a tall girl of twenty-five, w$ll made and with a full figure for her years, but too erect and athletic looking to be in any way clumsy. The sunlight, coming in through the window, showed that there were light tints in her brown hair and proved that her clear complexion was genuine. Taken as a whole, her features suggested refinement first and good looks immediately afterwards. She was more than pretty— there was nothing of the doll-like type about her—but, on the other hand, she was less than beautiful. A middle-aged man of no scruples might have looked at her and said to himself: “She’ll be a devilish fine woman some day—worth chasing”; and a dumpy-figured mother of six might have thought: “I wish I was like what she’ll be when she’s forty.”

The clock in the hall struck the quarter, and almost at the same moment she heard a clip-clop of hoofs. The gen¬ eral, punctual as always, rode in through the archway and handed over his horse at the stable door. She watched him cross the grass towards the house: tall and very straight he was, with beautifully cut breeches and an authoritative swagger in his walk. Then she turned towards the break¬ fast table, and as he entered the room she was adding the second lump of sugar to his coffee. It was thus every morning. The general liked precision in detail.

“Mornin’, Chris,” he said abruptly, and kissed her cheek. “Good sort of a day, but the frost won’t last with this sun.”

He helped himself to porridge and sat down.

“What’s the news?” he asked, and without waiting for an answer, which he evidently did not expect, he propped The Times up in front of him and started to find out for himself. Christine meanwhile acquainted herself with the world’s happenings as presented photographically in the Daily Mirror. Presently, bored with that portion of the Press which routine allotted to her, she drew from its envelope a two-page letter written in a small and very neat handwriting and began to read it for the second time that morning.

This was a provocative act, and she knew it to be so. But she had her reasons for being provocative. She was about to inform her father that she intended to go to a dance with her fiance on the following Friday. She knew that there would be objections. She knew that she would override the objections only after a fight, and she knew that she could fight better against her father, whom she loved, when she had provoked him to anger than she could when he was in the advantageous position of appealing to her affection for him. An upward glance as she turned the page of her letter showed her that he had seen what she was reading and was scowling. She pretended not to have noticed and went on, parting her lips in a faint smile, as though to convey to him that the contents of her letter were pleasingly sentimental. But behind her smile she was already growing angry. Her father’s features had assumed that expression of implacable antagonism with which she had become so familiar in the course of the past five months. She resented that expression. She regarded it as both humiliating and insulting, and she could never rid herself of the conviction that that hardening of his eyes and mouth was done deliberately and with the intention of wounding her feelings. Why, she asked herself, should he behave in this malignant, senseless way over her engagement? What right had he to declare that Alan Carnes, whom he scarcely knew, was totally unsuited to her, and that she was throwing herself away on a waster? Why—why, in heaven’s name —should he, who professed to be entirely devoted to her, set himself out to spoil what ought to have been one of the happiest times of her life?

She dropped her letter and fidgeted with the ring on her third finger, a very dark sapphire encircled with diamonds. The general, with his features still hard set, was opening his correspondence. She watched the precise, methodical way he slit the envelopes and laid them aside. She examined his profile—his straight nose below his obstinate forehead, his clipped and bristly grey moustache and his stiff, grey hair, which seemed to accentuate the obstinacy of his fore¬ head and to confirm the obstinacy of his chin. Motherless since she was three, she had grown up in the habit of looking to him as the pattern of probity and justice. During and since the war it was true that she had learnt to think for herself and, in disagreeing with many of his views, had ceased to regard him as the fountain-head of all wisdom. She loved him as much, even though she feared him less; but in the past five months, by his persistence in denying her the right to choose her own husband, he had severely tried her faith in him.

He looked up from his letters.

“The Vernons have asked us to dinner on Friday,” he said. “That will be all right, won’t it?”

At once she saw her difficulties increased.

“Friday ...” she answered. “I’m sorry, but . . . we’re going to a dance that night.”

“Who’s ‘we’?” he demanded sharply. She knew that he knew perfectly well. Her “we” had been merely the open¬ ing move in a game which she saw would have to be played to its inevitable conclusion—stalemate.

“Alan and I.”

He gulped coffee and displayed irritation in abstracting an obstinate piece of toast from the rack.

“Well, you’ll have to dance some other night.”

“But, father, it’s a private dance and we’ve accepted. And the Vernons don’t really matter.”

He turned angrily towards her.

“On the contrary, the Vernons do matter. They’re friends of mine, and they matter a great deal more than this young what’s-his-name. And I . .

“Alan Carnes is his name.” She caught him up brusquely, but then, suppressing her indignation, added half apolo¬ getically:

“I didn’t mean to be rude about the Vernons, father. I only meant that we often go there, and I’m sure that, if you explained, they would ask us next week instead. Tues¬ day would do.” She paused for a second before beginning an intentionally malicious explanation.

“I’m free that night because Alan ...”

But the general slapped the table with his folded Times.

“Do you think that I'm going to ask Mrs. Vernon to alter her arrangements to suit your convenience?” he demanded. “Do you imagine ...”

She was aware that interruption was useless and would certainly aggravate him further. Nevertheless she inter¬ rupted him.

“I’ll ask her, if you’d prefer it,” she offered. Her manner was polite, but it was manifestly her intention to be im¬ pertinent.

“You’ll do nothing of the sort. This confounded affair of yours seems to have turned your head—or perhaps it is that association with this fellow Carnes has deprived you of your sense of what’s decent behaviour and what isn’t. It’s bad enough to have you tearing off day after day and neglecting the house and everything else—you haven’t even time to see that the mustard pot is filled—but now, upon my soul, you seem to expect the entire universe to adapt itself to your wishes.”

“No, I don’t, father,” she protested. “I’m sure Mrs. Ver¬ non would understand. Still, if you’d rather, I’ll just write a line and say that I’m booked for that night.”

“Why can’t you do what I ask you for once in a way?”

She noticed with satisfaction that he gave her no order to attend the dinner. Time was when he had issued his orders to her in much the same way as he had been wont to issue them to his batteries. But her four years of inde¬ pendence away from him during the war had won her a certain freedom of action. Nowadays he did not lightly risk her defiance of him.

“No,” she answered firmly, “I can’t do that. You can go alone if you like. But it’s not fair to ask me to give up this dance. And it wouldn’t be fair to Alan either. It’s being given by friends of his.”

“I decline to consider Carnes in this matter—or in any matter, if it comes to that.”

“I know. But you might consider me a little.”

“Consider you! My God! I’ve done nothing else all your life. I’ve done everything in my power to make you happy and to give you a good time. I’ve denied you nothing within reason, and IVe grudged you nothing— nothing. And yet when it comes to an absolutely vital matter like this you entirely disregard both my advice and my wishes.”

Purposely she affected to misunderstand him.

“But you surely don’t consider dining with the Vernons an absolutely vital matter, do you?” she asked.

“I don’t mean that—and you know I don’t,” he retorted. “I mean the question of your engagement to young Carnes.”

Her weary sigh and the slight movement of her shoul¬ ders were meant to be irritating.

“Oh, father, don’t let’s go over all that again! What’s the good? I’m sorry you can’t see it as I do. But I must consider myself first in this. It’s my life that’s concerned, you see.”

“Exactly. And you’re setting out to ruin it. Why in God’s name can’t you listen to reason, Christine? This fellow is not the man for you. Do you think that at my age and with my experience I can’t sum him up? He may have a certain amount of money and he may be going to have a lot more. I dare say he’s got brains of a sort, and he may seem very devoted to you. But he’s a Radical; he’s stuffed full of the most pernicious notions, which he doesn’t know how to keep to himself ...”

“I agree with lots of them,” she interposed hotly.

“More shame to you, that’s all. But there are other things besides. He’s not of our breeding. No, it’s no use your sniffing angrily like that. I know what I’m talking about. He’s been to Oxford, you’ll say. All sorts of people get to Oxford nowadays. He had a commission in the war: so did our butcher’s son, I believe. The fact remains that his father is simply a house agent on a big scale. He’s thoroughly common. I’ve had to interview him, and I know. It’s not good enough, Chris. We’ve got a name that counts, and we’ve got to respect it.”

She had heard it all before, not once or twice, but almost daily, in practically the same words, for weeks and weeks. Usually she was patient and submissive, but to-day her resentment overcame her. She stood up, flushed and in¬ dignant.

“I don’t care who or what his father is!” she exclaimed, with her brown eyes fixed defiantly on his grey ones. “I’m not going to marry his father. I’m going to marry Alan— not his relations, or his business, or his name, but him— him. Do you understand? I’m going to marry him because I love him. And I love him for what he is, not for what he does or owns. You’re not only being unreasonable over this, father; you’re being cruel, too. You ask why I can’t see reason. It’s not I, but you, who can’t see it. Why can’t you understand that I am the only person who can possibly decide whom I want to marry? And why can’t you realise that this isn’t a passing infatuation, but a solid, lasting thing? Do you think I could have endured all this persecu¬ tion otherwise?”

“Persecution! You’ve no right to use such a word.”

“I have; and I will use it. It’s true. It is persecuting me to behave as you are behaving. To refuse to see Alan or to let me have him to the house in spite of the fact that we are officially engaged; to look like thunder every time I mention his name or get a letter from him; to show your resentment of my going out with him as you do; to talk insultingly about him, calling him common, and a waster and selfish, when you’ve seen him scarcely a dozen times; to do everything you possibly can, day in and day out, to make me feel miserable when I could be so wildly happy — that’s what I mean by persecution, and that’s what you’re doing. But it’s useless, let me tell you. You think that you’ll wear me out and that in the end I’ll give him up. But I never will, never!”

She was standing close to the table, looking down upon him. But her shoulders were very square and her body was very erect. She had lost her temper, but not her dig¬ nity. For a moment he did not answer, but kept his eyes upon her. Then she saw his features soften and felt his hand close upon one of hers, which rested on the edge of the table. She knew from experience that he was going to appeal to their mutual fondness for each other. It was a recognised move: first bluster, then anger, then an appeal. She had been through it all before so many times, and she knew that his appeal was the most difficult to face. She hardened her heart and waited for him to speak.

“Chris, Chris,” he said gently, “I don’t mean to be cruel, God knows. But you’re all I’ve got left, you know, and I’m desperately proud of you. It will break me if you marry this man. You don’t want to see me—finished?”

Resolutely she hardened her heart. But, oh, it was diffi¬ cult, this! He seemed to age before her eyes, and she saw him not as an angry and unreasonable tyrant, but as just an unhappy and careworn old man. Never before had she thought of her father as old; yet now he looked sixty-five instead of the fifty-three that she knew him to be. She felt her anger against him subsiding. She wanted to comfort him, to tell him that he need not worry any more. Almost she was ready to give way to him. Over any other question she would certainly have given way. But not in this—never in this. The happiness of two lives depended upon her steadfastness. She hardened her heart and braced herself to treat his appeal as of quite minor importance.

“Nonsense, father,” she replied coolly. “You w T on’t be broken or finished. You’ll be happy because you’ll see that I’m happy. Oh, do be more sensible and less jealous! There’s no need to be jealous, really there isn’t. I don’t love you any the less because I’m going to marry Alan.”

He withdrew his hand from hers.

“There’s no question of jealousy,” he asserted—wrongly, as she very well knew. “If you were engaged to a man worthy of you I should be pleased enough. But this man! I dislike him and, what’s more, I distrust him. And so will you some day, when it’s too late. You’re my daughter and a Helyar, in spite of yourself. I know you better than you know yourself, my child.”

She stamped an angry foot.

“Oh, don’t use that exasperating phrase!” she cried in irritation. “You don’t know me better than I know myself. Nobody does, or could. Not even Alan. And I’m not a child. I’m twenty-five and I’ve knocked about a bit. While you were in France I was in London—remember that. I’ve learnt enough about life to know my own mind and to make my own judgments. I’m not going to change. You seem to look upon me still as a sentimental schoolgirl of sixteen. But I’m not blindly in love with an impossibly perfect Prince Charming out of a fairy book. I’m sensibly in love with an honest, straight man. I know Alan isn’t perfect. Who is? But I love him for his faults just as much as for his good points. I’ve gone into this with my eyes open— yes, wide open. And, in spite of all you’ve done, I’m . . . I’m happy.”

“Happy! I suppose so, yes—now. You don’t give a thought to me. Nothing matters to you so long as you can slip off to your ‘honest, straight man.’ ” He looked at his watch. “I’m ten minutes behindhand now—and all through you. It will take me half the morning to get settled down to my work. You, I’ve no doubt, are so wrapped up in your own doing and in him that you can dismiss this sort of thing from your mind easily enough. But I can’t. It upsets me. I hate it. I hate the whole damned business.”

He picked up his letters and the newspaper. “Now say no more about it, for God’s sake!” he commanded.

But she stood between him and the door.

“I’m sorry, father, if I was rude,” she said penitently.

“But not sorry enough, I imagine, to do what I ask you on Friday instead of what he wants.”

Behind the bitterness in his tone, she was aware that he was putting a tentative question to her. She saw his aim. He was offering an armistice—but on his own terms. He wanted to leave the room as the winner of a definite point in this endless contest. Momentarily she was inclined to yield. After all, the dance was not of such vast importance; and she knew that by giving way she would obtain respite. But she remembered Alan’s very sensible comment on the situation.

“Every time you give in to him you make the future harder for yourself. Every time you show firmness you make it easier.”

And that, she felt—indeed, she knew from experience— was quite certainly true.

“No, father,” she answered him. “I’ve promised, and I’m not going back on what I’ve said.”

He walked out of the room without looking at her and without another word.

She stood over the fire for a minute or two with her elbow on the mantelpiece and her head resting rather wearily on her hand. She tapped her brogue-shod foot on the fender and sighed. It was all so wearying and so entirely unneces¬ sary. Dispute, nothing but dispute, day after day, week after week. When would he realise that she was irre¬ vocably determined? Would anything short of a fait accom¬ pli convince him? Sometimes she was inclined to think that it would end in that: in their appearing before him and stating bluntly, “We couldn’t stand it any longer. We’re married. Do your worst.” But she recoiled from that as a solution. She was prepared for it if no other were possible. But not yet, not yet. She wanted her father’s blessing. She wanted him to see Alan as she herself saw him—as an honest, straight man, a man of big ideas, who was going to do big things. She wanted the two beings whom she loved best in the world to understand and appre¬ ciate each other. She dreaded her father’s curse. Time, only give him time, she kept declaring both to herself and to Alan, and he will come round. He’s fond of me, and he thinks he’s doing his best for me. He doesn’t realise how cruel he is. But meanwhile—oh, it’s so exhausting! . . .

She realised that the parlourmaid was clearing away breakfast and that she would have to hurry if she was to be in time for her appointment at the golf club. With her back to the servant, she dabbed her wet eyes and then walked briskly out of the room. On her way to the links she rang up Alan from a public call-office. To have used the telephone in the house for such a purpose would have brought fresh trouble. In the stuffy atmosphere of the post office box she recounted the main features of the morning’s “scene.” His comforting voice soothed her.

“Poor darling!” said the voice. “It’s worse for you than for me, I know. But don’t worry. It’s only for a little while longer, remember. And all this will make things even more wonderful afterwards. Don’t forget we’re having din¬ ner together to-night. Seven-thirty; don’t be late. Bless you, my Chris.”

She walked on to the club house. Her despondent mood had passed, as it always did when he had reassured her. The sun shone, the air was crisp and fresh. Undoubtedly the world was a better and a more cheerful place than she would have admitted half an hour earlier. Her father, she reflected, could do little more than storm. “Bless you, my Chris.” Was it not worth forty storms a week to hear that voice say just those words in just that particular tone? He was a wonderfully comforting person, her Alan, and amazingly patient.

Chapter Two

DINNER party of six, consisting of four persons of over fifty who liked bridge and two persons of under thirty who did not—such were the circumstances in which Christine had first met Alan Carnes.

The two persons of under thirty sat next each other at dinner, and discovered mutual tastes for golf and dancing. They also discovered a mutual dislike for a plump lady (unknown to either of them) who sat opposite them and, in the intervals of closing thin lips over large mouthfuls of food, talked like a Daily Mail leading article.

Christine glanced at him and smiled appreciatively. He smiled back, and she realised that she liked his smile. There was an intelligent eagerness in his expression which pleased her. “He’s a vigorous person,” she thought to herself. She was always attracted by vigour, whether mental or physical. She approved of his appearance—thick, fair hair growing low on a good forehead, humour in the corners of a wide mouth, thought as well as humour in eyes that looked very blue in a setting of tanned skin. She approved, too, of his talk. He entertained her throughout a dinner which she had expected to be devastatingly dull. She was attracted by him. In the drawing-room afterwards, when bridge was being arranged, he made it clear that he was equally attracted by her.

“But, really, I never do play,” he declared, and threw a quick glance at her behind the back of their hostess. His eyes said frankly and unmistakably: “Don’t play; let’s talk.”

She entered willingly into conspiracy with him.

“And I’m so bad that I should spoil the game,” she said.

They sat in two armchairs by the open French window, and summer dusk turned slowly into summer night while their talk ranged over subjects as diverse as tKe recon¬ struction of Europe and the reconstruction of the fifteenth hole at Mid-Surrey. He interested her. He had views on a variety of subjects, and he could express his views. With¬ out being either assertive or dogmatic, he displayed his enthusiasm in a way that seemed to stimulate her own enthu¬ siasm. They discussed books and plays and motor cars and jobs for women and homes for heroes; then drifted easily to themselves and their aspirations in a changing world. She told him of her three years in the corps of women motor drivers.

“The Great War for Freedom did have the surprising result of setting some people free,” she said, “and I was one. If it hadn’t been for the war I should never have had those three years of independence in London. I learnt a lot in that time—so much, in fact, that I find Richmond and the sheltered life pretty dull.”

She wondered at herself for telling him that. It was true enough; two months of the old regime as mistress of her father’s household, after three years “on her own” in London, had been long enough to give her conclusive proof that it was true. But hitherto, out of loyalty to her father, she had kept the knowledge to herself. Yet now she had spoken of it to this stranger. Curious! And, more curious still, he seemed at once to understand her.

“You’re not the sort of person who’d be content with the sheltered life,” he said. “At any rate, not after you’d once experienced any other. You’ve got wide interests.”

“I want to have, any way,” she declared. “But I’ve got more chance now than I would have had. I oughtn’t to grumble.”

She learnt that he had qualified as an architect just before the war and had then served, first in France and later in the East, until after the armistice. Of the war he said:

“We had to go through with it, of course. But the results aren’t quite up to expectations, are they? I was full of zeal at the beginning, but, by Jove, I did hate it and everything to do with it before the end!”

“You lost some illusions, too, then?” His view was very much her view, she had discovered, and so she was pleased.

He nodded. “And you?”

“I was in England. The home front, as they called it, wasn’t an entirely noble affair, not if one observed it closely —and I did. I got—sickened.”

“But it’s no use looking back and it’s no use being bitter. The future is what really matters.”

They talked of the future with impersonal seriouness for some time. But she wanted to know more about him.

“And what are you yourself going to do?” she asked.

“I? Oh, I’m lucky enough to have got a job. I’m in my father’s business—Carnes, Rutler and Carnes, Estate Agents, etc. Not exactly a trade, you know, but scarcely genteel enough to be called a profession. We’re builders as well.”

“And you do the designs, I suppose? It must be good to feel that you are constructing something instead of destroying.” She noticed his hands—large, but shapely and competent; the sort of hands, she thought, which would be able to manipulate a hammer gently or a pencil boldly. “Constructing something!” she thought.

“I’m interested in the housing problem,” he told her. “I’m trying to persuade my father to experiment with a model village.”

She wanted him to tell her more, but he laughed and declined.

“You’re encouraging me to talk shop,” he said. “Some other time, perhaps.”

She inferred that he meant to see her again, and she was pleased. She did not wish this chance acquaintance¬ ship to lapse. At the end of a two hours’ talk she felt that she had known this man for a year.

She went home and thought about him. She described him to herself as “refreshingly sane,” by which she meant that his views agreeably resembled her own and, incident¬ ally, contrasted strongly with those of her father. Her father had emerged from retirement as a colonel in 1914 ard had returned to it early in 1919 as a brigadier-general, with two complete rows of medal ribbons to prove that he had vastly enhanced his reputation as an artillery com¬ mander. The war had aged but had not altered him. For him the vision of a civilisation dissolving in chaos had been obscured by his interest in problems of ballistics. He was of those who say: " Man is a fighting animal: therefore there win always be wars. 5 * Already he had begun the compila¬ tion of an abstruse treatise on The Development of Artil¬ lery in the Future.”

But the war had altered Christine. Before it she had lived under the domination of her father, who had applied to the upbringing of his motherless child the same methods which had proved successful in the training of his batteries. During the war, however, while her father was learning a great deal a bovst barrages. Christine, in her capacity of chauffeur to those whom the War Office delighted to trans¬ port, was learning a little about life. She had discovered, for instance, that young men could be impertinent and that old men could be nice in a very nasty way. Thus she had learnt self-reliance. Contact on terms of social equality with persons of all classes, in her garage and elsewhere, had given her an insight—not very deep, perhaps, but, never¬ theless. enlightening—into “the social problem.” Her awak¬ ened intelligence had been confronted with new and star¬ tling phenomena, and in the absence of her father, whose saews on ail subjects she had previously regarded as informa¬ tion passed directly on to her from God, she began to think for herself. Realities, as she came to see them, clashed with her ideals; and though she held to her ideals she lost many of her illusions. Thus it was that her father, whose ortho¬ doxy was beyond question, was alarmed to find, on his return home after the war, that his hitherto amenable daugh¬ ter had developed opinions of her own which were almost heretical. Thus it was that she found Alan Carnes “refresh¬ ing!y sane.”