“Damn their insolence! It serves them right. Let’s come back to the car.”
XXX
Rachel Quarles had no sympathy with those sentimental philanthropists who blur the distinction between right and wrong, between wrongdoers and the righteous. Criminals, in her eyes, and not the society in which they lived, were responsible for their crimes. Sinners committed their own sins; their environment did not do it for them. There were excuses, of course, palliations, extenuating circumstances. But good was always good, bad remained bad. There were circumstances in which the choice of good was very difficult; but it was always the individual who made the choice and who, having made, must answer for it. Mrs. Quarles, in a word, was a Christian and not a humanitarian. As a Christian she thought that Marjorie had done wrong to leave her husband—even such a husband as Carling—for another man. She disapproved the act, but did not presume to judge the person, the more so since, in spite of what she had done, Marjorie’s heart and head were still, from Mrs. Quarles’s Christian point of view, “in the right place.” Rachel found it easier to like a person who had acted wrongly, while continuing to think rightly, than one who, like her daughter-in-law, Elinor, thought wrongly, while acting, so far as she knew, in a manner entirely blameless. There were circumstances, too, in which wrong action seemed to her almost less reprehensible than wrong thought. It was not that she had any sympathy for hypocrisy. The person who thought and spoke well while consistently and consciously acting ill was detestable to her. Such people, however, are rare. Most of those who do wrong, in spite of their sound beliefs, do so in a moment of weakness and afterward regret their wrongdoing. But the person who thinks wrongly does not admit the wrongness of bad actions. He sees no reason why he should not commit them or why, having committed them, he should repent and mend his ways. And even if he in fact behaves virtuously, he may be the means, by his wrong thinking, of leading others into wrong action.
“An admirable woman,” had been John Bidlake’s verdict, “but rather too fond of fig leaves—especially over the mouth.”
Herself, Rachel Quarles was only conscious of being a Christian. She could never imagine how people contrived to live without being Christians. But a great many, she sadly had to admit, did so contrive. Almost all the young people of her acquaintance. “It’s as though one’s children talked a different language,” she had once complained to an old friend.
In Marjorie Carling she discovered someone who spoke and understood her own spiritual idiom.
“You’ll find her, I’m afraid, a bit of a bore,” Philip had warned her, when he announced his intention of lending his little house at Chamford to Walter and Marjorie. “But be nice to her, all the same. She deserves it, poor woman. She’s had a very thin time of it.” And he detailed a story that made his mother sigh to listen to.
“I shouldn’t have expected Walter Bidlake to be like that,” she said.
“But in these matters one doesn’t expect anything of anybody. Things happen to them, that’s all. They don’t do them.”
Mrs. Quarles did not answer. She was thinking of the time when she had first discovered one of Sidney’s infidelities. The astonishment, the pain, the humiliation … “But still,” she said aloud, “one wouldn’t have thought he’d knowingly have made somebody unhappy.”
“Still less that he’d knowingly have made himself unhappy. And yet I think he’s really made himself quite as wretched as Marjorie. Perhaps that’s his chief justification.”
His mother sighed. “It all seems so extraordinarily unnecessary.”
Mrs. Quarles called on Marjorie almost as soon as she had settled in.
“Come and see me often,” she said, as she took her leave. “Because I like you,” she added with a sudden smile for which poor Marjorie was quite pathetically grateful. It wasn’t often that people liked her. That she had fallen so deeply in love with Walter was due, above everything, to his having been one of the few people who had ever shown any interest in her. “And I hope you like me,” Mrs. Quarles added.
Marjorie could only blush and stammer. But she already adored.
Rachel Quarles had spoken in all sincerity. She did like Marjorie—liked her, even, for the very defects which made other people find her such a bore: for her stupidity—it was so good and well-meaning; for her lack of humour—it was the mark of such earnestness. Even those intellectual pretensions, those deep or informative remarks dropped portentously out of a meditative silence, did not displease her. Mrs. Quarles recognized in them the rather absurd symptoms of a genuine love of the good, the true, and the beautiful, of a genuine desire for self-improvement.
At their third meeting Marjorie confided all her story. Mrs. Quarles’s comments were sensible and Christian. “There’s no miraculous cure for these things,” she said; “no patent medicine for unhappiness. Only the old dull virtues, patience, resignation, and the rest, and the old consolation, the old source of strength—old, but not dull. There’s nothing less dull than God. But most young people won’t believe me when I tell them so, even though they’re bored to death with jazz bands and dancing.”
Marjorie’s first adoration was confirmed and increased—increased so much, indeed, that Mrs. Quarles felt quite ashamed, as though she had extorted something on false pretences, as though she had fraudulently acted a part.
“You’re such a wonderful help and comfort,” Marjorie declared.
“No, I’m not,” she answered almost angrily. “The truth is that you were lonely and unhappy and I was conveniently there at the right moment.”
Marjorie protested, but the older woman would not permit herself to be praised or thanked.
They talked a good deal about religion. Carling had given Marjorie a horror for all that was picturesque or formal in Christianity. Piran of Peranzabuloe, vestments, ceremonials—everything remotely connected with a saint, a rite, a tradition was hateful to her.
