by E. H. Young
“As you can imagine,” Miss Spanner said one day, “we were a great family for wearing mourning. If we lost a third cousin, my father’s hat band had to be changed. My mother nearly always wore black anyhow. The difficulty was to rig me out, without expense, but they always managed it.”
“How?” Rhoda asked.
“Oh, I’ll tell you about that another day. You’d better go home now, hadn’t you?”
Rhoda was not hurt by such abrupt dismissals. This was the sort of treatment she liked, but her actual arrivals and departures always made her a little nervous. What she feared most was encountering the young men of the house. She was aware of Flora’s interest in them and she herself was in an intermediate state which despised such interest but made her self-conscious when she met them, distrusting her own clumsiness, sure she would collide with something or drop the book she carried and look foolish, knowing she could not possibly produce the suitable light word in passing. She was old enough to know she was too young and too unattractive to get more than common courtesy from them; that was more than she wanted, and she was, therefore, surprised and momentarily embarrassed when one evening, a few days after Mr. Blackett had made his concession, James waylaid her in the hall and said, “I’ll come over with you if I may. I’ve got a book here for Flora.”
“I’ll take it for you,” she said sensibly.
He hesitated as they stood together on the doorstep. Mr. Blackett had been more successful than he had expected or perhaps intended. What with this parental fuss and the exciting prospects of his holiday and Flora’s silly, somewhat claimant tears, James regretted his slight indiscretions and felt the beginnings of distaste for a girl who seemed to take them seriously. It was just possible, he found himself capable of this thought, that she had carried her distress to her parents, but it would be unchivalrous, though he did not use the word, to break with her abruptly and he must show old Blackett he was not afraid of him and so, in spite of the temptation of Rhoda’s offer, he refused it.
“No, I’d like to come,” he said.
“What is it?’ she asked, peering for the title, and when she saw it she uttered a dubious “Oh!”
“You’d think it very dull, I suppose,” he said.
“No, I like that kind of thing.”
“So you are interested in farming too.”
“Too?” she said. “Like you, you mean?”
“Yes—and Flora.”
Rhoda, staring in her steady way at James and finding it surprisingly easy to do so, did not say anything. It would have been natural to her to give a blunt denial to this ridiculous assertion but, though she did not really like Flora and had always thought she was a fraud, acting the part which, at the moment, served her best and this particular part seemed more flagrant than usual because it was appropriating something of Rhoda’s own, she had never been a tell-tale and if she looked sceptical it was not on purpose. She would not even tell him that her own interests were out of doors and she meant to be a gardener, but she would have liked him to know. He had a nice face, he was not at all the grand kind of young man she had imagined and suddenly she wanted him to see her as more than an insignificant neighbour and Flora’s sister. But she could not bring herself to do anything towards that end.
“Well, come on,” was all she said.
Chapter XIV
“When I was courting you, Bertha,” said Mr. Blackett, “what would you have thought if I had offered you a technical book on paper making?”
They had finished their coffee. Flora had drunk hers hastily and disappeared. James’s visit had been short. He had left the house just as Mr. Blackett reached it and Flora, having awkwardly made them known to each other, had been living since then in apprehension of her father’s adverse comments. She had seen him pick up the book she had not had time to hide and drop it with a light, disdainful movement. If he could have flicked away so heavy an object, he would have flicked it, but he had said nothing then or at the supper table.
“What would you have thought?” he repeated.
“I expect I should have felt rather flattered,” Mrs. Blackett said.
“Oh.” It seemed, for a moment, that he had left something undone, but he quickly saw a way out of this difficulty. “I hope,” he said, “I should never have done anything so egotistical. I think what I generally brought you, Bertha, was flowers.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “But that nice boy from next door isn’t courting Flora, as you call it.”
“Then what is he doing? And I’m sorry you don’t like that expression. I think it is a charming one.”
“Just being friendly, I think,” and Mr. Blackett made a sceptical noise. He knew more than she did. “And even if they do have a little flirtation, it won’t do Flora any harm!”
“Flirtation!” Mr. Blackett exclaimed with disgust.
“Yes,” Mrs. Blackett said calmly. “Until lately, she has had a very dull life for a girl.”
“You have never surprised me more,” he said, pursing his lips and, in his irritation, he rose from his comfortable chair, straightened a picture with nervous fingers and sat down again.
“Have I ever surprised you at all?” she asked.
“No.” He remembered that playing-card. “Well, very rarely. And why should you? And this surprise is very great. A dull life! Do you realize what you said? She has had everything I could give her—everything!”
“Too much, perhaps.”
“Too much!” He heard himself like an echo, but what else could he say?
“Not enough variety,” said Mrs. Blackett, “and very little fun.”
He just managed to stop himself from repeating her last word. “I set my face from the first,” he said slowly, “against this modern mania for amusement.”
“I meant at home, among ourselves,” Mrs. Blackett said. “We can’t help it, I suppose. We haven’t got a proper sense of it, you and I.”
“I deny that,” Mr. Blackett said. “I’m as ready for a joke as anybody.”
“And we can’t do anything about it,” Mrs. Blackett went on as though she had not heard his last remark, “so I want Flora and the others to find it where they can.”
“And you suggest flirtation! A strange suggestion, Bertha, and a strange word, from you!”
“Yes, it was the wrong word to use and the wrong thing to suggest. Flirting is out of fashion nowadays. Young people are too frank and girls have too much liberty and too much sense to want that kind of excitement; but then, Flora hasn’t had much liberty and I don’t think she has much sense.”
Astonishment at this calm and unexpected remark kept Mr. Blackett silent for a moment before he said, “I don’t understand you. I don’t understand you at all,” and then, remembering what Mrs. Fraser had said to him on the hill and refusing to acknowledge that she might be right, he modified his statement by saying, “I don’t understand you to-night. What will you say next? Flora is unusually intelligent. She always has been. I wish I could say as much for Rhoda. And of course I want them to have pleasure, but I shall be very much disappointed, I shall be displeased, if you encourage her to neglect her work for it. And how much gaiety did you have in your own youth?”
“Not nearly enough,” Mrs. Blackett said with unusual emphasis.
“I don’t agree,” he said. “How can I when I see what you are now? And, after all, Bertha, what is life for?”
Mrs. Blackett raised her head and looked round the room as though, vaguely, she searched for something and with a slow shake of her head she said, “I don’t know.”
“And yet,” he said, looking at her very kindly because, suddenly, she seemed a little pitiful and he had never seen her look like that before, “in everything you are and do, that knowledge is implicit.”
“Oh, don’t say that!” she exclaimed quickly. “Don’t talk like that!” and, if she had l
ooked at him then, she would have seen his tender smile changed to a complacent, teasing one. But she did not look at him. She was hurriedly gathering the coffee cups together with a little less than her usual neatness.
“No Bertha, don’t go,” he said, and still with that smile and lolling back in his chair, he stretched out a hand towards her. This was a happy moment for him. It was her humility he found so touching and his power to confuse her with a word of praise was much more gratifying than it had been before he married her. It assured him he had not lost his art: moreover, the reward was more immediate.
“Bertha, come here,” he said. But with a little hunched up movement of her shoulders, as though she held herself close instead of letting him hold her, she picked up the tray and went away without a look or word.
Even Mr. Blackett could not attribute this disappearance to the modesty he so much appreciated. His next resource was to fear or rather, more comfortably, to hope she was not feeling well, but again he remembered Mrs. Fraser’s words and he remembered her too, with some of the feeling he had wanted to bestow on Bertha. Mrs. Fraser, he was quite sure, would have welcomed it. And Bertha’s behaviour not only forced him to the thought of the other woman; it justified him in lingering over the remembrance of her as she stood on the hill, before she saw him, her hands on the railings, her body leaning back a little from them, motionless, yet with an effect of eagerness. That was how he always saw her, eager, with the pulse of spring in her, yet with a ripeness suitable to her age, like fruit at its perfection, still on the tree but very willing to be picked and, suddenly, he wondered whether she had been waiting there by appointment or in hope. That, of course, would account for the coldness of her manner towards him and why else should a woman with a family to look after and the hour for the evening meal approaching, be standing there, bare-headed, on a damp evening? She had been hurrying, too, when he first caught sight of her and it gratified him to think that the expected person had failed to appear, which must have been humiliating, or had been driven off by his own presence. Thus, inadvertently in this case though not as a rare occurrence, he had been on the side of the angels and he felt a glow of pleasure which sent him cheerfully, forgetting Bertha’s offence, in search of company, to the drawing-room which was empty, like the garden, and then to the dining-room where he found Rhoda standing at the window, a scattering of school books on the table behind her.
She turned, smiling, as he entered and he saw her face fall.
“Oh, I thought it was Mother,” she said, and feeling hurt, he checked the inquiry he would have made about her homework, the half-playful reproach for idling and, worse still, for looking out of the window. Though she always puzzled and irritated him, he would have been glad, at this moment, if the smile had been for him and he felt a desire to show her he deserved it.
“Anything interesting in the Square?” he asked genially.
“Nothing particular,” she said, moving away, but when he took her place—though, discreetly, he kept further back—he said bitingly, “I entirely agree with you,” for he saw Piers Lindsay at some distance from Mrs. Fraser’s door and felt sure he had not limped so badly before he turned the corner.
“Quite the pedlar to-day,” he said, “and that, Rhoda, is a word one might think was connected with the foot, but really, I believe derives from one meaning a basket. He has no basket, not even the modern equivalent for one in the shape of his ramshackle car. Why is that, I wonder? But,” he went on, “he is not altogether without his stock in trade. Well, let us welcome him. Go and open the door to him. You will save Connie a journey. But no,” he said sharply, “I see that will not be necessary. New friends for old! I don’t like that, Rhoda, do you?” he asked, smiling at her with his teeth set. “I’m afraid your mother will be hurt.”
“Why?” Rhoda asked, though she felt a bitter disappointment herself.
Mr. Blackett parted his teeth to make a little exclamation of vexation. Communication with Rhoda was impossible. She was extraordinarily stupid and he wondered how he could have fathered such a child and what suitable work in life he could find for her. He turned to look at the books on the table and shook his head at her sprawling handwriting.
“I don’t know what we are to do with you,” he sighed.
“But I know what I’m going to do with myself,” she said.
“Really? This is interesting and as you may need my help perhaps you’ll tell me what your plans are.”
“I’m going to be a gardener.”
“A gardener?” he said.
“Yes. There are places where you can be trained but,” Rhoda said eagerly, “if you can’t afford to send me there, I don’t mind just doing jobbing work, by the day, you know. I could easily do that already.”
“Well Rhoda,” he said slowly, “I think this is quite a good idea.”
“Do you?” Her surprise and gratitude ought to have touched him. “I’m sure I’d get a lot of work. Heaps of people would be glad of me. And then,” she went on, for he was listening with interest, he was looking at her gravely, almost respectfully, “if only I could get a lot of houses together, a whole row of little ones, I could sort of make them agree with each other. Of course I wouldn’t have them all the same, but I could make them look more like one big garden instead of ugly little separate patches. The people in those little houses always have their flowers too bright. They ought to have more nice soft greens and greys against their staring bricks, and blues, not reds and yellows. It would really be better to do that than to be a gardener in a grand place where everything is lovely already. Don’t you think so?”
Mr. Blackett did not reply at once. He seemed to be looking at someone he saw for the first time. The girl looked quite pretty, he thought. Her eyes were bright and the aggressiveness of her short nose had become alertness.
“Of course you must be properly trained, but I shall have to talk to your mother about this,” he said, and Rhoda had the good sense to refrain from telling him that she and her mother had talked about it many times. “And you must work harder at school,” he added.
“I’ll try,” she said. He had been nice to her, nicer than he had ever been before and she must be nice to him and she was generously ready to believe that all their little differences had been her fault.
“We seem,” Mr. Blackett continued, “to be turning into quite an agricultural little community, what with a daughter who wants to be a gardener, a cousin,” and now there came a familiar twist into his voice, “who hawks vegetables and another daughter who seems to take an interest in farming.”
And again Rhoda was loyal to Flora yet, in spite of that warning in her father’s voice, she was trustful enough to say, “I’d like to be a farmer myself, but that would be more difficult. I don’t suppose you’d like that. Still,” she said, “perhaps I’ll have to be.”
“Have to be?”
“Yes, if there’s a war we’ll all have to do something and I’ll work on the land. Perhaps I could help Cousin Piers.”
“You certainly won’t help your Cousin Piers. I doubt if he would let you. I think he would consider,” Mr. Blackett half glanced over his shoulder, “that other people had prior claims. And there will not be a war.” The little pink spots appeared on his cheeks. “You may be sure of that. Fortunately, we have wise men at the head of affairs and they will save us from that wicked folly. And who has been putting that idea into your head?”
Miss Spanner’s entertainment of Rhoda had not always been of a reminiscent kind and as her political opinions were exactly opposite to Mr. Blackett’s, Rhoda had readily adopted them, but her friendship with Miss Spanner must be concealed from her father—even in her trustful mood she knew this—and she said now, defensively, “Well, I read the newspapers.”
“When? I’ve never seen you doing that. I’ve often wished you would.” After a glance at The Times while he breakfasted, he carried it to his office and though
he brought it back each evening and at one time Flora had obediently read the articles he recommended, no one else had ever asked for it and Mrs. Blackett seemed quite content with hearing what he chose to tell her.
“I’m afraid,” Mr. Blackett said, “the extent of your reading is the sensational stuff you see on the placards. You ought not to call that reading the newspapers.”
“I don’t. I always look at Mother’s paper before I go back to school in the afternoon,” Rhoda said indignantly, but she saw at once, from the expression on her father’s face that, somehow, she had made a mistake, and again she had a fleeting conviction that life was an intricacy of dark and narrow passages in which she could never be sure of the right way.
Chapter XV
“And so,” Rosamund said to Felix when Sandra came running down the stairs to say that Mr. Lindsay had arrived, “I suppose I must try to look glum,” and after practising in the little mirror on the wall she turned to him and said, “How will this do?” But already the lips she had tried to turn down had sprung up again. The structure of her face resisted any effect of gloom and she won a reluctant smile from Felix.
“Don’t be absurd,” he said.
“And anyhow,” she took off her apron, “Agnes will do all the glumming that’s necessary.”
She was, in fact, a little afraid of what Agnes might do. Impelled by a sense of duty, she was quite capable of making unmistakable references to Fergus for, with her faith in Rosamund’s powers of attraction, she considered that Mr. Lindsay was being welcomed under false pretences. But this view of the matter, on Rosamund’s part, would have implied a quite unwarranted belief that she was the magnet drawing him. And yet that was what she wished to be, with the natural desire of a woman deprived of her rightful opportunities to exercise her gifts. Fergus’s unfailing appreciation of them had done much, too much, she thought now, to compensate for his faults and if he had been less satisfactory as a lover she might have taken earlier steps to improve him as a father. She had been selfish, she was selfish still, she decided unrepentantly. She knew it was just possible that she was misleading Piers Lindsay, but he was old enough to take care of himself and she had too much personal dignity, too much respect for him and she was too much of an artist in her own line, to be anything but simple and frank in her manner towards him. Moreover, he evoked such behaviour and in the long room where the whole family was gathered, everybody was at ease except Miss Spanner who had isolated herself as far as she could and wore the disagreeable expression of a consciously poor relation upheld by a sense of her moral value. This expression was unintentional but she was isolated by much more than a few feet of carpet. She had seen Rosamund’s happy youth and contrasted it with her own; now she saw the youth of Rosamund’s children, less happy because their world was more confused; the old certainties had become doubts and this alone put their lives immeasurably distant from the one spent in the dark house on the Green where only her innate independence and covert rebellion had prevented Miss Spanner from thinking, as she had to live, according to inviolable rule. And that life had stiffened not her mind but her manner. She had had no practice in gracious social dealings. No one had invaded Mrs. Spanner’s drawing-room except an occasional deacon, on chapel business with Mr. Spanner to whom she was chillingly polite, or, very rarely, the minister himself who expected and received a proper meed of laughter for his little jokes and rather pitied her for having a daughter who, though devoted, seemed somewhat stupid and lacked the soft ways he looked for in young women.
