Dolores

by Ivy Compton-Burnett

  Mr Billing looked his appreciation and uncertainty how to express it; and Dr Cassell, after a moment’s pause, leaned forward with a clearing brow.

  “Do you know the reply—Mrs Blackwood—that Dr Johnson made, on being asked to take a walk in the country?”

  “No, doctor, no; let us hear it,” said Mr Blackwood in an easy tone.

  “His reply was,” said Dr Cassell, “‘Sir, when you have seen one green field, you have seen all green fields. Sir, I like to look upon men. Let us walk down Cheapside.’”

  “How very interesting,” said Mr Blackwood, “and how like Dr Johnson! I think he would have been such an interesting man to know, do not you, Mr Billing? Boswell’s ‘Life of Johnson’ is such an illuminating biography—the best biography I have read, I think; and I have always been so fond of biography as a form of literature. Do you not admire it, Mr Billing?”

  Mr Billing’s honesty was spared by the announcement that the vicarage trap was at the door. The Reverend Cleveland rose without pause, and stood with his eyes on the floor, frankly awaiting his wife’s movement for departure. When this was made, he shook hands in silence with his fellow-guests, showing Mrs Cassell and Mrs Merton-Vane some courtliness, and Dr Cassell and Mr Billing some coldness. He then observed to Mrs Blackwood, “We have to thank you for an exceedingly pleasant evening”; and took up his stand near the door, in waiting for the ladies of his family to precede him from the room. Mrs Blackwood escorted her sister and Dolores upstairs; leaving Dr Cassell to enlightenment of Mr Billing, whose attitude did not henceforth waver from the gratefully receptive; and a sisterly talk enlivened the assumption of wrappings.

  “So Cleveland and Bertram are going to walk on, dear,” said Mrs Blackwood.

  “Yes, dear,” said Mrs Hutton. “They leave the trap to us feminine creatures. It does not hold more than two.”

  “When we lived at Hallington,” said Mrs Blackwood, “we had a trap that only had room for one besides the man; and when Herbert and I went out, he used to wait to put me into it before he started himself. He used to say he felt so worried, when he thought of me clambering into it alone in the dark.”

  “Oh, that was such a dangerous trap,” said Mrs Hutton. “It really was hardly safe.”

  “Oh, no, dear,” said Mrs Blackwood; “it could not have been safer; it was only Herbert’s nervousness about me.”

  “Ah, those were your early married days,” said Mrs Hutton, adjusting her hood before the glass.

  “Oh, but Herbert has not altered in the least since then,” said Mrs Blackwood, her voice becoming a little higher pitched. “He fidgets so about me, that sometimes in company he makes me feel quite foolish.”

  Mrs Hutton pulled out her strings without sign of accepting this statement; and Mrs Blackwood felt urged to its elaboration.

  “I always think it is such a wrong theory that husbands are different after they are married. I think that as they begin, so they go on. You see Herbert worries about me just as much as ever; and Cleveland never has been anxious about you, has he? He does not let things like that disturb him.”

  “My dear Carrie, it is rather absurd to talk about Herbert’s being worried,” said Mrs Hutton. “I do not remember seeing him worried in his life.”

  “Oh, you do not understand him, dear,” said Mrs Blackwood. “He does not show his feelings on the surface. I often think what a sad thing it would have been for him, if he had married some one who did not believe in anything that was not under her eyes. I am so thankful that we were brought together.”

  “Thankfulness on that point is a needless self-exaction, dear,” said Mrs Hutton. “As you were cousins, special providential arrangements to bring you together were not required.”

  “My dear, our grandparents were second cousins,” said Mrs Blackwood. “People connected in that degree very often never meet. I always feel that Herbert and I were given to each other.”

  “I remember you so well when you were engaged,” said Mrs Hutton, with a little laugh.

  “I remember it too,” said Mrs Blackwood; “and how I used to pity you, for having no chance of getting married, though you were the elder sister. Girls are so amusing in the way they look at things.”

  “I never can understand how women can marry boys,” said Mrs Hutton, surveying her reflection in the mirror.

  “My dear, when a woman marries as young as I did, she naturally marries a young man,” said Mrs Blackwood. “Of course a man is getting on in years when he has one life behind him.”

  “I meant I could not understand a woman’s accepting a man younger than herself,” said Mrs Hutton; “as though she would secure a husband at any cost.”

  “My dear Sophia, Herbert is only a few months younger than I am. He was asking the other day which of us was the elder. The difference is so small, that he never remembers which way it is.”

  “Is it really so small as that?” said Mrs Hutton. “It hardly seems possible, does it? Well, we must be going down, dear. Our menfolk must be nearly home. We have had such a pleasant evening. It has been quite a break for Dolores after her term’s work.”

  In the drawing-room Dr Cassell was found seated on the edge of his chair, and leaning towards Mr Billing, with hand upraised; his wife’s eyes fastened on his face, and the Blackwood family listening in the background—that is to say, Lettice listening; Elsa exposing his mannerisms with silent mimicry; and Mr Blackwood twirling his moustache as an effort against sleepiness. Dolores and her stepmother drove to the parsonage in silence; and parted on the threshold for the night, the latter to win the Reverend Cleveland to some difficult mirth, by her sallies at the expense of her kindred.

  Chapter IV.

  Before you is a room whose innocence of toy or draping holds it with the figures within it in subtle sympathy. Within it are some women who in some way stay your glance; who carry in their bearing some suggested discord with convention—a something of greater than the common earnestness and ease. Those who are laughing give unchecked heart to their laughter. The one who is distributing cups of some beverage, does it as the unobtrusive service of a comrade.

  The scene has a meaning which marks it a scene of its day. It is the common room of the teaching staff in a college for women.

  The dispenser of the beverage is crossing the room with movements of easy briskness. She is a woman of forty, older at a glance; with a well-cut, dark - skinned face, iron - grey hair whose waving is conquered by its drawing to the knot in the neck, and dark eyes keen under thick, black brows. That is Miss Cliff, the lecturer in English literature.

  The companion to whom she is handing a cup—the lecturer in classics, Miss Butler,—and who takes it with a word in a vein of pleasantry, is a small, straight woman, a few years younger; whose parted hair leaves the forehead fully shown, and whose hazel eyes have humour in their rapid glancing.

  “I cannot but see it as ungenerous to brew the coffee with such skill,” she is saying; “in purposed contrast to my concoction of last week.”

  “A meanly revengeful comment on my general manner of brewing it,” said Miss Cliff. “Well, you may put its success down to my being out of practice. It is the only reason I can think of for it.”

  “I remember the last time you made it,” said a genial, guttural voice at the side of Miss Butler—the voice of Miss Dorrington, the lecturer in German, and a strong illustration of the power of moral attractiveness over the physical opposite; which in her case depended on uncouth features, an eruptive skin, and general ungainliness. “It was that week when you kept getting ill, and at the end I had to make it for you.”

  “Hoist with your own petard?” said Miss Butler, smiling at Miss Cliff.

  “I think it is a great accomplishment to make good coffee,” said Miss Cliff, in a consciously demure tone; “a very seemly, womanly accomplishment. I cannot feel justified in relaxing my efforts to acquire it, if you will all be generous. Cookery, you know, is the greatest attainment for a woman.”

  A short, qua
int - looking, middle - aged lady, with a pathetic manner which somehow was comical in its union with her calling of mathematical teacher, looked up with a slow smile. “I fear we are but a boorish set, if that be true,” she said.

  “Oh, I know it is true, Miss Greenlow,” said Miss Cliff, meeting Miss Butler’s eyes. “I read it in a book, so of course it was true.”

  “Of course,” said Miss Dorrington, in her breathless guttural, no genial quality unsuggested in her face and voice.

  “Do any of you remember when you first realised that things in books need not be true?” said Miss Cliff, with the half - philosophising interest in her kind, which was one of her characteristics. “Do you remember feeling the ground you were used to walk upon, slipping from under your feet, and a mist of scepticism rising around you?”

  A lady who was standing apart came forward to join in the talk. She was a Frenchwoman, over fifty, with a sallow, clever face, and sad brown eyes which lighted with her smile; who had led a difficult life in the land of her forced adoption, and lived with its daughters, feeling that she owed it no gratitude.

  “I imagine most of us had that experience at an early stage for such power of metaphor to be born,” she said.

  “I did not mean the metaphors to be quoted from childish reflections,” said Miss Cliff. “I was putting a childish experience into unchildish language. But I remember the experience itself so well. It marks off a chapter in my life for me.”

  “Yes; we have so much faith as children,” said the remaining member of the band. “I daresay we could all mark off the chapters in our lives by loss of faith in something. We have to guard against losing faith in too many things.”

  The speaker was Miss Adam, the lecturer in history—younger than the others, and young for her youth; with her zeal for the world where she had her life, not untempered by a wistfulness on the world outside, and her faith in the creed of her nurture as untouched by any of the usual shattering forces, as by her special knowledge of its growth.

  “It seems we can mark age by steps in scepticism,” said Miss Lemaître. “It would be a help to our curiosity on both, to remember they correspond.”

  “It would be a very good way of guessing people’s ages,” said Miss Greenlow, with her inappropriate plaintiveness. “We should simply have to start some disputed topics; and having discovered the doubted points, calculate the chapters marked off.”

  “We shall have to warn people to be wary in conversing with Miss Greenlow,” said Miss Cliff.

  “She always has told us that all things can be reduced to mathematics, if enough is known about them,” said Miss Butler.

  “Well, perhaps we are abusing flippancy,” said Miss Cliff, observing Miss Adam’s silence. “I suppose it is true, after all, that the youngest-natured people are those who keep their beliefs in things; and we should try to keep youthful in nature, I suppose.”

  “Youthfulness of nature does not depend upon convictions, surely, speaking seriously,” said Miss Lemaître. “Convictions are a matter of intellect; and our intellects have little to do with our characters.”

  “That is a little dogmatic, is it not? “said Miss Butler, who was not very fond of Miss Lemaître. “Our intellects must influence our ways of looking at things and people, and our apprehension of them.”

  “Yes, yes; I think they must,” said Miss Cliff; “and our ways of looking at people especially. In our dealings with each other, faith is often another word for charity.”

  “Yes, very often,” said Miss Adam; “and charity for faith.”

  “That is coming rather near to heresy, I am afraid,” said Miss Lemaître. “Is not the relative value of those qualities settled for us? I am not sure that their interchangeability is doctrinal.”

  “No,” said Miss Greenlow, shaking her head; “it smells badly of schism.”

  “Miss Adam meant the word ‘faith’ to be understood in a general, not a particular sense,” said Miss Butler.

  “I should not have supposed that any of us meant anything,” said Miss Lemaître.

  “It is rather a philosophic subject for so soon after luncheon,” said Miss Dorrington.

  “I know that the time of day is said to breed mental inertia,” said Miss Cliff; “but I am constrained to the dubious course of spending it in reading essays. You must excuse my desertion of my post: my pupils have increased. Miss Dorrington, you will succeed me, I am sure?”

  “Deplorable irregularity on the part of one in office!” said Miss Butler, as Miss Dorrington changed her position willingly and clumsily.

  “The students are increasing very quickly,” said Miss Greenlow. “I don’t know what the opponents of women’s higher education would say to it.”

  “I imagine that class has resigned its delusion, that anything can be said for its view,” said Miss Butler, with the casual manner which covers strong feeling; while Miss Cliff, arrested by the subject, paused with her hand on the door.

  “Oh no, they cling to it,” said Miss Lemaître, carelessly. “I was listening to two old clergymen talking the other day; and they were agreeing that learning unfitted women for the sphere for which they were fitted by nature and their life through the centuries, with all things included—I believe to the corroboration of Genesis.”

  “It is such a quaint argument—that women must not do a thing, because they have not done it before,” said Miss Dorrington, who had yet to take of a subject an other than genial view.

  “We are not to try the water till we have learned to swim,” Miss Butler said, in a slightly different spirit.

  “Oh, well, they were old,” said Miss Adam. “People can hardly be expected to give up the notions they were bred up in, at the end of their lives.”

  “And parsons as well,” said Miss Lemaître; which further light upon the insufficiency shown, Miss Adam gave no sign of accepting.

  “But I suppose there is something in the argument, that women must be what the development of ages has made them,” she resumed.

  “I think very little,” said Miss Butler. “You see, women are not descended only from women. Their heritage is from their fathers as much as their mothers. The development of one sex does not bear only upon that sex.”

  “A very good point,” said Miss Cliff from the door; “and one that is not made enough of.”

  “Yes, there is truth in that,” said Miss Adam. “But does not the life of one sex, carried on through generations, influence that sex? Do not some qualities go down in the female line and others in the male? In the evolution of any creature, is not that so?”

  “The historian looks across the ages, as the heir of all of them,” said Miss Butler, taking refuge in jest where she found it hard to keep cool. “Now I think of it, the lioness does not carry a mane in spite of her shaggy forefathers.”

  “She may owe much to her forefathers, nevertheless,” said Miss Cliff. “We must not confuse the physical attributes of one sex, with the mental and moral part which is transmitted from both to both, and which the others hardly bear upon. We have known women like their fathers, though they did not carry beards. But to leave the sphere of science—to our brothers, if Miss Adam wills,—and take a practical view; the women of civilised countries outnumber the men; and as a proportion cannot marry, there must be a class of self-supporting women.”

  “Unless polygamy becomes an institution,” said Miss Greenlow, the union of her manner and matter producing general hilarity.

  “And even if they do marry,” said Miss Butler, “why should learning unfit them for domestic duties? I suppose people think, if we heard a child screaming, we should wait to rub up Aristotle on the training of the young, before going to see what was troubling it. I have never seen evidence that learning has that effect. I am sure my cousin, Professor Butler, is the most erudite person, in mind and appearance, I have known; but to see his antics before his baby daughter, when she is at the point of decision between crying and not crying, is to lose faith for ever in the theory, that learning
is prejudicial to domestic ability.”

  There was a general moving amid the laughter; and the little band dispersed down the corridor.

  In her first treading of the same corridor, unpitiedly silent in a chattering stream, Dolores met the old, youthful experience of the earnest academic novice. On the brink of the student world, where the schooling was no longer a childhood’s need, she felt the sense of her child’s achievements fade into an older humbleness before better of her kind—saw it of a sudden a world of rushing generations, and quailed under youth’s clear knowledge of the transience of things. The principal’s greeting—the welcome accorded as part of another’s duty, strengthened in its formal well-wishing the sense of being a one where the many only was significant. The next hours passed as a dream—the setting in order of the narrow student chambers, the wandering in the corridors barren of the messages of memory. It was only the awakening that lingered. Returning from the evening meal, in the common hall, which seemed a sea of voices, she came upon a student standing in the corridor alone—turning from right to left with an air which marked her a novice.

  “Are you perplexed about anything?” said Dolores, pausing. “You are a newcomer, as I am, I suppose?”

  “Yes, that is what I am,” said the other; “and an unfortunate thing it seems to be. I am sure I wish I had arranged to be something else.”

  Dolores looked at the short, plump figure; and met an expression on the face, which brought a smile to her own.

  “Is there anything you want to find?” she said.

  “Nothing to matter. Only the rooms where I live. I do not know why you should trouble. I had come to the conclusion, that I was not a thing to be taken into account.”