The Three Sisters | Page 6

to the teeth, leaning from its ambush in the recess of the
fireplace, threatened both the retreat and the left flank movement of the
chair. The Vicar was neither tall nor powerful, but his study made him
look like a giant imprisoned in a cell.
The room was full of the smell of tobacco, of a smoldering coal fire, of
old warm leather and damp walls, and of the heavy, virile odor of the
Vicar.
A brown felt carpet and thick serge curtains shut out the draft of the

northeast window.
On a September evening the Vicar was snug enough in his cell; and
before the Grande Polonaise had burst in upon him he had been at
peace with God and man.
* * * * *
But when he heard those first exultant, challenging bars he scowled
inimically.
Not that he acknowledged them as a challenge. He was inclined rather
to the manly course of ignoring the Grande Polonaise altogether. And
not for a moment would he have admitted that there had been anything
in his behavior that could be challenged or defied, least of all by his
daughter Alice. To himself in his study Mr. Cartaret appeared as the
image of righteousness established in an impregnable place. Whereas
his daughter Alice was not at all in a position to challenge and defy.
She had made a fool of herself.
She knew it; he knew it; everybody knew it in the parish they had left
five months ago. It had been the talk of the little southern seaside town.
He thanked God that nobody knew it, or was ever likely to know it,
here.
For Alice's folly was not any ordinary folly. It was the kind that made
the parish which was so aware of it uninhabitable to a sensitive vicar.
He reflected that she would be clever if she made a fool of herself here.
By his decisive action in removing her from that southern seaside town
he had saved her from continuing her work. In order to do it he had
ruined his prospects. He had thrown up a good living for a poor one; a
living that might (but for Alice it certainly would) have led to
preferment for a living that could lead to nothing at all; a living where
he could make himself felt for a living where there was nobody to feel
him.

And, having done it, he was profoundly sorry for himself.
So far as Mr. Cartaret could see there had been nothing else to do. If it
had all to be done over again, he told himself that he would do it.
But there Mr. Cartaret was wrong. He couldn't have done it or anything
like it twice. It was one of those deeds, supremeful sacrificial, that
strain a man's moral energies to breaking point and render him
incapable of further sacrifice; if, indeed, it did not render further
sacrifice superfluous. Mr. Cartaret honestly felt that even an exacting
deity could require no more of him.
And it wasn't the first time either, nor his daughter Alice the first
woman who had come between the Vicar and his prospects. Looking
back he saw himself driven from pillar to post, from parish to parish,
by the folly or incompetence of his womankind.
Strictly speaking, it was his first wife, Mary Gwendolen, the one the
children called Mother, who had begun it. She had made his first parish
unendurable to him by dying in it. This she had done when Alice was
born, thereby making Alice unendurable to him, too. Poor Mamie! He
always thought of her as having, inscrutably, failed him.
All three of them had failed him.
His second wife, Frances, the one the children called Mamma (the
Vicar had made himself believe that he had married her solely on their
account), had turned into a nervous invalid on his hands before she died
of that obscure internal trouble which he had so wisely and patiently
ignored.
His third wife, Robina (the one they called Mummy), had run away
from him in the fifth year of their marriage. When she implored him to
divorce her he said that, whatever her conduct had been, that course
was impossible to him as a churchman, as she well knew; but that he
forgave her. He had made himself believe it.
And all the time he was aware, without admitting it, that, if the thing

came into court, Robina's evidence might be a little damaging to the
appearances of wisdom and patience, of austerity and dignity, which he
had preserved so well. He had had an unacknowledged vision of
Robina standing in the witness box, very small and shy, with her eyes
fluttering while she explained to the gentlemen of the jury that she ran
away from her