Chapter 18

Meanwhile the morning at the Manor was passing in its usual quiet yet busy dignity. Virginia attended to her household duties, while her mother and Stephen were at church, and herself cut the sandwiches that Stephen was to take up with him to London, because the ones the week before had been, he told her, highly unsatisfactory.

The cook looked on with the expression natural to cooks in such circumstances, and Virginia, who had never made sandwiches, but knew what they ought to taste like, was disconcerted by their appearance when she had done.

‘It’s how the master likes them,’ she said rather uncertainly, as she herself arranged the strange-shaped things in the aluminium box they were to travel in.

‘Yes, m’m,’ said the cook.

She came out of the kitchen and into her own part of the house with a sigh of relief. It was always a relief to get through those baize doors. The servants made her shy. She wasn’t able, somehow, to get into touch with them. What she aimed at in her relations with them was perfect justice and kindness, combined with dignity. She most earnestly wished to do her duty by them, and in return it seemed merely fair to demand that they should do their duty by her. Her mother’s reign had been lax. She had found, on looking into things on her marriage, many abuses. These she had removed one by one, and after much trouble had put the whole household on a decent economic footing.

Up to now the servants hadn’t quite settled down to it, but her mother-in-law, who was experienced in frugalities, assured her they would in time, and be all the happier and the better for it. She had gone so far as to explain to them, her serious young face firm in the belief that once they were told they would understand and even co-operate, that the more carefully the house was run the more would the poor, the sick, and the aged of the parish benefit. ‘No one,’ she said, earnestly striving to make herself clear, ‘has more than a certain amount of money to spend, and if it is spent in one way it can’t possibly be spent in another.’

The servants were silent.

She even tried, overcoming her shyness, to talk to them of noble aims, and love for one’s fellow-creatures.

The servants continued silent.

She went further, and in a voice that faltered because of her extreme desire to run away and hide, talked to them of God.

The servants became really terribly silent.

Carrying her aluminium box, she passed on this Saturday morning, with her customary sigh of relief, through the baize doors that separated the domestic part of the house from the part where one was happy, and went into the study to put the sandwiches in Stephen’s suit-case, along with his sermons and pyjamas. He, she knew, would only be back a short time before starting for the station, because of the sick-bed he had to visit, poor Stephen, but her mother would be back.

Virginia had made up her mind to devote herself entirely this week-end to her mother, and do her best to remove any suspicion she might have that she had not been, perhaps, quite wanted; and having shut the sandwiches in the suit-case she went in search of her.

Poor mother. Virginia wished, with a sigh, that she need never be hurt. She was so kind, and so often so sweet. But what problems mothers were after a certain age! Unless they were as perfectly sensible as Stephen’s, or else were truly religious. Religion, of course, was what was most needed, especially when one was old. Virginia had, however, long felt that her mother was not truly religious—not truly and seriously, as she and Stephen were. No doubt she thought she was, and perhaps she was, in some queer way; but were queer ways of being religious permissible? Weren’t they as bad, really, as no ways at all?

Virginia sighed again. One did so long to be able to look up to one’s mother, to revere...

The house seemed empty. All the big rooms, glanced into one after the other, were empty. Nothing in them but the mild spring sunshine, and furniture, and silence.

She went upstairs, but in her mother’s bedroom was only Ellen, arranging another bunch of flowers—another, when yesterday’s were still perfectly good—on the writing-table. Stephen disliked flowers in bedrooms, but suppose he hadn’t, would Ellen so assiduously see that they were always fresh? Virginia thought she wouldn’t, and very much wished at that moment to point out the extravagance of picking flowers unnecessarily at a time of year when they were scarce; but she was handicapped by their being for her mother.

She said nothing, therefore, and went away, and Ellen was relieved when she went. Just as Virginia was relieved when she got away from the servants, so were the servants relieved when they saw her go.

She fetched a wrap from her bedroom—the room already looked forlorn, as if it knew it was to be empty of Stephen for two whole nights—and went downstairs and out on to the terrace. Probably her mother was lingering in the garden this mild morning, and Virginia took two or three turns up and down, expecting every moment to see her approaching along some path.

Nobody approached, however: the garden remained as empty as the house. And time was passing; Stephen would be due soon to come back; her mother would want to say good-bye to him, and couldn’t have gone for a walk on this morning of departure. She would particularly want to say good-bye, quite apart from the fact that she would be gone before his return on Monday, because she wasn’t letting him stay in Hertford Street over the week-end. Stephen did so hate hotels. It seemed hard when no one was in the flat that he couldn’t use it. Her mother had made excuses—said something or other about Mrs. Mitcham having a holiday, but Virginia didn’t think she had felt quite comfortable about it. She would therefore certainly wish to make him some parting little speech of more than ordinary gratitude for his hospitality, seeing how from him she was withholding hers. And here was Stephen, coming across the grass, and in a few minutes he would have started, and her mother still nowhere to be seen.