by F. M. Mayor
To Mary she appeared an all-conquering beauty, but she had not had a very fortunate life. There had been long visits with relations, often with the uncongenial guardian aunt and uncle, with whom she was at Buxton when she met Mr Herbert. Her relations were more interested in themselves or some one else than in her. Her brother’s house was supposed to be her home, just as she and his wife Lesbia were supposed to be allies, but Lesbia was jealous of her beauty. Various advantageous offers had been made her. The attraction of being no longer in the way had been considerable, but not sufficient to make her accept any. She had seen some unsuccessful marriages, her brother’s among the number. It was before the war; there had been no idea of settled occupation for her. She was well·off; necessity did not urge exertion. She had associated with people richer than herself, who had lived in a rush of amusements; but she did not pine after their luxuries when she was without them. She was not one of those who demand everything that life can offer. She was perfectly happy leading a jog-trot existence in the country with two dogs, a horse, and her husband.
Her happiness did not last. Mr Herbert became moody, irritable and silent. Sometimes he poured out a flood of sarcasm. She neither understood the sarcasm, nor what had brought it about. Her own wit and sarcasm were just a schoolgirl’s. She had no defence against him.
Her slang was a constant annoyance. One day he burst out, ‘I cannot conceive where you have picked up that excruciating jargon. I don’t imagine even a boy in the Lower Third of a Modern Side* maltreats English quite as you do. If slang enriched the language there might be something to be said for it, but as it happens it invariably impoverishes it. Yet it always seems considered a humorous embellishment, which view you evidently share. Could you explain why?’
She got very red and answered, ‘I think you’re jolly rude.’
‘I beg your pardon,’ he said. ‘I was detestably rude.’
‘You were,’ she replied, and walked out of the room. She could walk with the dignity of an angel, though she usually rolled about with her hands in her pockets. He was ashamed. His irritation partly came from the reaction of nervous excitement and the strangeness of living with some one after years of congenial solitude. Ever since he had been ordained he had had no one to consider but himself, only short visits from and to his mother, or two or three nights with men friends.
He had had many doubts, many fears, before he married, but merely the delightful doubts and fears of love – that he might not be worthy, that such a heavenly being could not care for him, that some younger, more attractive man would be preferred. She was not a stately goddess after all, but a child, defenceless against the hardness of life, to whom he was rough and impatient. The burden of his unkindness weighed him down. A looker-on might have made more allowance, seeing that he also was a child in experience, quite as incapable as Kathy. And that this love should all end in his irritation against her, when she had so much more right to be irritated against him! He felt the degradation for her more than she did for herself, and lay awake in remorse when she was calmly sleeping.
She had refused him when he first proposed, intoxicating him with adoration for her by her words, ‘It wouldn’t do. I’m not at all brainy, and you’re top-hole. I can’t think what on earth you want it for.’ When she had accepted, she said, ‘Righto, I’ll take the risk if you will, but it’s a big risk for you.’ The last thing he had ever felt himself was top-hole. Before her wonderful face he had specially realized his unworthiness – greater unworthiness than he had felt with Mary.
Mr Herbert’s mother came on a visit at the end of September. The visit was to be longer than usual that she might get to know the bride. Miss Herbert was left behind. They had met hitherto at interviews in which both sides were determined to be pleased. Mrs Herbert had been ill at the time of the wedding, and for the greater part of the year following.
She was not a difficult guest to entertain, having many resources. Beside her good works, which could not be carried on away from home, there was refined playing (getting slow now) of classical music, intricate embroidery, and a study of books other than fiction: Ancient Babylon, the Catacombs, and English Cathedrals for Sunday; for week days, The Flora of the Andes, a study of Italian verse, and French memoirs of the eighteenth century, not with the spicy bits left in and the dull historical parts left out, but solid memoirs in several volumes.
Most old ladies do not like paying visits. Mrs Herbert tried not to long for home, but she missed her good works, her own chair, own habits, her sister-in-law to sit on. She had found years ago that Mr Herbert would not be sat on.
Kathy was as busy as Mrs Herbert, but on different lines. After hunting, she liked gardening, the care of poultry and all animals, dress-making, and every game. She was just as annoyed with Mrs Herbert’s parti pris not to take bridge seriously as Mrs Herbert was with her refusal to be persuaded into refined tastes.
They were playing bridge one evening, not auction bridge – Mrs Herbert had not got so far – plain bridge. Mrs Herbert did not play very well, and was always surprised when the thirteenth trump took a trick at the last.
Now she chose clubs for trumps, having an equally good hand in hearts. When Kathy protested she answered that clubs had not been trumps all the evening; she liked to have a change.
‘But, confound it all,’ said Kathy, restraining her language with difficulty, ‘think what the score was, and you chose clubs. But that’s what happens if you don’t play for money; the game goes to pot.’
‘I don’t care what the score is. I like a game to be a game.’
‘If you don’t play for the score, what’s the good of playing at all?’
‘I think it’s a pity to play a game in that sort of way.’
‘A pity’ was a favourite expression with Mrs Herbert. ‘A pity’ to go out in the rain; ‘a pity’ to have a celebration at 7 a.m. instead of 8. It is to be translated ‘unfortunate,’ ‘disagreeable,’ ‘wrong,’ ‘infamous.’
‘Well,’ said Kathy, ‘I don’t know what you suppose yourself to be playing. Perhaps it’s spillikins. All I can say, it is not bridge.’
Mr Herbert had been called from the room by a parishioner. The timid curate from Cayley, who was making a fourth, afraid of Kathy’s beauty and very much afraid of Mrs Herbert’s snubs, did not know how to bring peace to the disputants.
‘I think bridge is a simply capital game,’ said he. This satisfied neither; each chewed the cud of real annoyance till Mr Herbert’s return.
That argument about bridge meant more than met the ear. There in a nutshell lay an important difference between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – what is passing away and what is taking its place. If Kathy had probed her, Mrs Herbert would only have repeated it was a pity. The ladies of her generation were incapable of discussion. They were as inarticulate as the uneducated, though often almost erudite. And why should they discuss, since everything they thought was right? Besides, they, never liked to expose their inner thoughts. Here Mrs Herbert’s inner thought was noblesse oblige. It was wrong to use hours of leisure – she never questioned her right to them – on anything so frivolous as bridge. To play it scientifically would be the misuse of a talent. To that proud idea the upper middle-class owed its thousands of cultivated homes, now all crumbling away.
Mrs Herbert did not exactly mourn the loss of her son through marriage. He had given her dutiful, but not ardent affection; his passion had been for his work and for books. She had longed for him to find in marriage what she knew sadly she had not been able to supply. But that he should have chosen such a girl as Kathy! How she regretted Mary. She was not far from actively disliking Kathy; therefore she was scrupulously polite. She had to approve and love before she snubbed.
She and her husband did not come from Kathy’s stock. Their forebears had been statesmen and bishops, distinguished in learning and courtliness. The contempt which the rustic, uncultivated county had for such as the Herberts they heartily returned. Neither side realized that bo
th alike were doomed, their one hope a combination against the ‘new rich.’
Mrs Herbert used all her powers of self-command to endure silently. She only expostulated after strangled coughs at Kathy’s cigarette in the drawing-room, though not merely had no one, male or female, ever smoked in her drawing-room, she did not know such a thing was a possibility.
‘My cig. Oh, cheerio. Sorry.’ Each word choked Mrs Herbert more than a cigarette.
There was a still wider gulf between them. Kathy was not mercenary, but she viewed with indulgence the hanging-on to rich people for what could be got out of them. Many of her friends were hard up. Money they must have for maintaining the old park and mansion – that came first with them – then for personal matters, hunters, motors, clothes, amusements. These things the vulgar could help to provide. Kathy herself never gave such people intimacy; she thought it reward enough to minister to the wants of a Hollings. But she described her friends’ clever plans for captivating the vulgar; she discussed what degree of wealth cancelled what degree of lowness of origin or occupation. This indelicacy was an open sore to Mrs Herbert. Needless to say, for no material possession or pleasure would she have condescended to be indebted to any one beneath her. She would have welcomed favours only from her sovereign or her elders. There was the tale of a Jew, light-heartedly related by Kathy. ‘Bernstein was a little pawnbroker beast, and he talks very hot stuff, but, after all, Valerie doesn’t have a bad time, though we all said he might have cleaned his nails for the wedding. See, you know Valerie Bassett, don’t you? Jim-jam told me you knew them when they were kids.’
‘Valerie Bassett, that lovely girl, she married the man you are speaking of?’
‘Yes, poor kid; what could she do? She hadn’t a penny, and he gives her topping pearls.’
This terrific tolerance, especially the sentence about pearls, made Mrs Herbert cry in her bedroom. Mrs Herbert would not for the world her son should realize what was amiss. She was not one who would relieve herself by pouring out the unfortunate story as soon as she got home. But Mr Herbert, his senses of the mind just now all on edge, could detect from her unnatural brightness when she spoke of Kathy most of what she felt.
Kathy had never had to do with old people before, except village crones, pleased at any notice. Deference, clear, soft, slow speaking, chit-chat about the coming out of buds, delighted acquiescence that the wind was in the north when it was in the south – such duties were unknown to her, and she would not have had any turn for them. The more athletic duties, picking up shawls, bringing footstools, a helping hand down steps (not too ready – Mrs Herbert did not like much helping, though she liked some) – these Kathy would have gladly fulfilled if the idea had occurred to her. She was not given to wondering whether people liked her; she had none of a bride’s nervousness at the first visit of a mother-in-law. She was neither jealous nor afraid of her. She thought of her as an old thing sitting in the drawing-room, of which she need take very little notice.
He was on tenterhooks with apprehension about her behaviour, and often on thorns with the certainty. His own scrupulous courtesy and respect to his mother escaped Kathy’s observation. They made her rudeness stand out the more. It was unintentional. She treated everybody who was not of her own generation and set with a brusque and almost imperceptibly condescending bonhomie. She had no shades and distinctions. She did not think, she was certain, that most of the world was far below her, because she was a Hollings. She was so certain that no one in Lanchester or elsewhere questioned it either. People, particularly working-class people, often prefer those who consider them inferior, and she was soon on very friendly terms with her neighbours in the village – men, women, children, and animals, being especially appreciated by dogs and little boys. She might have been criticized by the old women at Dedmayne, for she rushed through symptoms faster than Mary; but it is not every village that has a Mary, and her smiles made up. They adored her beauty, after that her smart clothes. Even her own faithful Dedmayne would have thought more of Mary – they could not have loved her more – if she had dressed better. Kathy was not a confidant; she was too gay for the post. Nor could she induce the feeling Mary did, that it was hardly possible to be polite enough to her, because she was so tenderly polite herself. But whereas Mary might be put upon, Kathy could not. She did not disturb herself, with certain exceptions, to be interested in any one who was indifferent to hunting. This excluded most elderly and all old ladies. It was a remarkable tribute to Mr Herbert that she could have got over his terrible lack to the extent of falling in love with him.
Although the Herberts had recently had little connection with Lanchester, he and his were treated with the honour due to the family. The village and household showed their sentiment by calling Mr Herbert ‘he’ and Mrs Herbert ‘she.’ ‘He’ and ‘she’ standing by themselves meant them and no one else. In like manner to Kathy and Mr Herbert ‘they’ standing by itself meant the household and village. The tie that bound them was still so far feudal that each had a special importance for the other, they felt differently, if not more warmly, to one another than to the rest of the world. The doctor, known to Kathy by his surname tout court, ‘I shall send for King,’ was of no account in her mind. She put him somewhere among the chemists and bank managers of Cayley. Her manner did not convey this too unpleasantly. He liked to talk of ‘that charming girl, Mrs Herbert.’
The news that Mrs Herbert would sing at the parish concert brought hearers from the most scattered farms; rain and cold could not keep any one away. They returned to their homes well pleased when it was over, without much recollection of anything and no criticism, just a pleasant haze of fire, lights, fancy-dress, and sounds.
There was one stern exception. Mr Herbert visited the Dissenters of his flock in illness, for there was no resident pastor. He paid special attention to Mrs Prior, because she was so tiresome. She was a deacon’s widow, left well off, and a former beauty. These qualifications she felt called for unremitting notice, which Kathy had not given her.
A call on her was due a few days after the concert. Mr Herbert had not himself been present – he had been kept indoors by a chill – nor had Mrs Prior, but she knew more than if she had. After she had listened to Bible reading – when she made comments as if it were her special book, read by her permission – and had described her pains and medicines, she started a new topic. ‘Maybe she’s a dear young lady – she ain’t been nigh me, so that I can’t say – but she don’t sing songs what I think at all nice. Heavin’ up her legs, too, and her petticoats with pink bows and all. “Mother,” Amos says, “be glad you weren’t there. There’s a-many talkin” about it, and I says, “I shall certainly mention it to him himself, for he didn’t ought to let her misbehave herself.”’
‘Ah, yes,’ said Mr Herbert, looking out of window, ‘there are some nice wallflower plants you have out there. They don’t seem hurt by the cold as we are; gillyflowers, don’t they call them in some parts of the country?’
‘That I can’t take on me to say, Mr Herbert, but what I says to Amos was –’
‘I should think yours must be the best in Lanchester.’ He was not looking at them, nor were they fine wallflowers. Mrs Prior, as a bed-ridden old woman, possessed great advantages over a healthy clergyman and gentleman, but she was daunted. They talked of things for a few minutes. He endeavoured to throw the same good-will as usual into his farewells. This encouraged her to try again.
‘You don’t mind what I said to you, sir? I thought it only just you should know it.’
‘Yes, tell Amos I am sorry to have missed him. I thought I might have caught him coming so late. I hope your rheumatism will be better with the milder weather.’
He was out in the road now, his pride and self-respect wounded in their tenderest place. That his wife should be the subject of patronage, blame, and coarse scandal, gloated over by low, ignorant – his opinion of the village at the moment too much resembled Caius Marcius’ of the Roman mob. He did them wrong. Mrs Prior
had told her tale to one or two hearers; she got a snub back perhaps more severe than she deserved.
‘I don’t think you have any call to speak like that of our young lady. If the gentry will have smuts, that isn’t your business. She’s very young. I daresay she likes a little life. My mother used to say, “I’d rather cut my tongue out than speak a word against the family.” She always spoke very just, my mother, but, being chapel, you can’t be expected to know.’
If the snub was unmerited, so, perhaps, was the defence.
He must tell her. How was he to tell her? He brooded over it. He had no aptitude for correction and no confidence; no consciousness of superiority. Unless stirred up by irritability, he hated telling unpalatable truths.
He waited too long, till he was not angry, but miserable. At last he spoke.
‘What was the song you sang at the concert the other night?’
‘The song I sang? See, what was it?’ Kathy’s brain was untrained; her memory retained very little. ‘Oh, I remember. “Every time a little bit more.” We heard it in town, and Cocky made me get it, and we were always singing it. You know how it goes.’
She sang him a verse.
‘That’s more than enough,’ he said bitterly.
‘Don’t you like it? I sang it to you when we were engaged, and you didn’t mind then. You liked it.’
‘That I am sure I did not.’
He had, but all was a haze of bliss in his memory.
‘But why don’t you like it?’
‘If you don’t see yourself, what’s the good of explaining?’
‘Oh, they like rather hot stuff.’
‘There you are mistaken; it was people in the village who complained of it.’
‘Did they? Well, I call it very narrow-minded. I sang it at Merton Cross, and every one simply lapped it up.’
