The Parts Men Play | Page 5

tributary farms. The tenants
gave her an address of welcome; her husband's mother gracefully
retired to a villa in Sussex; the rector called and expressed gratification;
the county families left their cards and inquired after her father, the
ironmonger.
Unfortunately the new Lady Durwent had the temperament neither of a
poet nor of a lady of the aristocracy. She failed to hear the tongues in
trees, and her dramatic sense was not satisfied with the little stage of
curtsying tenantry and of gentlefolk who abhorred the very thought of
anything theatrical in life.
On the other hand, her husband was a man who was unhappy except on
his estate. He thought along orthodox lines, and read with caution. He
loved his lawns, his gardens, his horses, and his habits. He was a pillar
of the church, and always read a portion of Scripture from the
reading-desk on Sunday mornings. His wife he treated with simple

courtesy as the woman who would give him an heir. If his mind had
been a little more sensitive, Lord Durwent would have realised that he
was asking a hurricane to be satisfied with the task of a zephyr.
They had a son.
The tenants presented him with a silver bowl; Lord Durwent presented
them with a garden fête; and the parents presented the boy with the
name of Malcolm.
Two years later there came a daughter.
The tenants gave her a silver plate; Lord Durwent gave them a garden
fête; and he and his wife gave the girl the name of Elise.
Three years later a second son appeared.
There was a presentation, followed by a garden fête and a christening.
The name was Richard.
In course of time the elder son grew to that mental stature when the
English parent feels the time is ripe to send him away to school. The
ironmonger's daughter had the idea that Malcolm, being her son, was
hers to mould.
'My dear,' said Lord Durwent, exerting his authority almost for the first
time, 'the boy is eight years of age, and no time must be lost in
preparing him for Eton and inculcating into him those qualities which
mark'----
'But,' cried his wife with theatrical unrestraint, 'why send him to Eton?
Why not wait until you see what he wants to be in the world?'
Lord Durwent's face bore a look of unperturbed calm. 'When he is old
enough, he must go to Eton, my dear, and acquire the qualities which
will enable him to take over Roselawn at my death'----
At this point Lady Durwent interrupted him with a tirade which, in
common with a good many domestic unpleasantries, was born of much

that was irrelevant, springing from sources not readily apparent. She
abused the public-school system of England, and sneered at the county
families which blessed the neighbourhood with their presence. She
reviled Lord Durwent's habits, principally because they were habits,
and thought it was high time some Durwent grew up who wasn't just a
'sticky, stuffy, starched, and bored porpoise--yes, PORPOISE!'
(shaking her head as if to establish the metaphor against the whole of
the English aristocracy). In short, it was the spirit of the Ironmonger
castigating the Peerage, and at its conclusion Lady Durwent felt much
abused, and quite pleased with her own rhetoric.
Lord Durwent glanced for courage at an ancestor who looked
magnificently down at him over a ruffle. He adjusted his own cravat
and spoke in nicely modulated accents: 'Sybil, nothing can change me
on this point. In spite of what you say, it is my intention to keep to the
tradition of the Durwents, and that is that the occupant of Roselawn'----
'What! am not I his mother?' cried the good woman, her hysteria having
much the same effect on Lord Durwent's smoothly developing
monologue as a heavy pail dropped by a stage-hand during Hamlet's
soliloquy.
'Sybil,' said Lord Durwent sternly, 'it was arranged at Malcolm's birth
that he should go to Eton. I shall take him next Tuesday to a
preparatory school, and you must excuse me if I refuse to discuss the
matter further.'
Lady Durwent rushed from the room and clasped her eldest child in her
arms. That young gentleman, not knowing what had caused his
mother's grief, sympathetically opened his throat and bellowed lustily,
thereby shedding tears for positively the last time in his life.
When he returned for the holidays a few months later, he was an
excellent example of that precocity, the English schoolboy, who cloaks
a juvenile mind with the pose of sophistication, and by twelve years of
age achieves a code of thought and conduct that usually lasts him for
the rest of his life. In vain the mother strove for her place in the sun; the
rule of the masculine at Roselawn