by F. M. Mayor
It tired Mary out transferring Miss Davey to different coigns of vantage, and steer as one might, Miss Davey in her energy for exploring always fell against something.
Mrs Plumtree was higher in the social scale, and pretended to wider interests. She talked to Canon Jocelyn at dinner about politics. She did not care for them, but felt it her duty as a guest to talk about what would interest her host. She bored him terribly. Her poverty forbade him to snub her. If the Archdeacon had said what she said he would have fared badly.
Mrs Plumtree did not like games; she said plainly they were a waste of time. Miss Davey liked them if dear Mary liked them; but she could not tell the difference between clubs and spades, so that anything beyond beggar-my-neighbour was a strain. Mary would not resort to it till she felt something must snap inside her if Miss Davey did not stop talking. There were times alone in her bedroom when she could hardly tear herself from her moment’s respite to face the six hours of chat which lay between her and bed. She would go downstairs, and the effort was easier; the hours passed quicker than she imagined. At any rate, beggar-my-neighbour broke the six hours, so did their music, each more stumbling than the other. Mary preferred the virgin soil of no culture to the half-tilled field of Mrs Plumtree; but Mrs Plumtree’s anti-ritualist society gave her more occupations in the morning. ·
Both thanked her with tearful voices when they left. She might feel she had made two harmless people happy for a month. She recognized that the ceaseless conversation was their means – almost their only means – of returning hospitality. It was, too, the bulwark they put up to hide their loneliness from the world. Such loneliness would probably be her lot. Would she be like them?
Ready to give thanks and live
On the least that Heaven may give?
She hoped so, and shuddered at the hope.
The days passed somehow, though she thought certain afternoons, when she was in bed with mild influenza, never would come to an end. One was a Thursday; on that very Thursday Mr Herbert called. She had been fractiously insisting she must get up; she was so tired of being ill. She heard his voice; her heart leapt; she went back to bed. Emma came to say, ‘I’ve just taken in tea, and the Canon hopes you will be coming down.’ She said, ‘Tell him I am very sorry I am not so well.’ Canon Jocelyn was fussed at managing a teapot, and sent a second message; she refused.
She was up, but still feeble, when her father was asked by the Archdeacon to make a Lenten address at Yeabsley on whatever subject he chose. In spite of his contempt for the Archdeacon, he was gratified.
On the morning of the meeting he lost the address. Hours of agitation followed. He could not speak extempore. Writing, though he wrote as well as ever, had grown laborious to him. As he became more distracted, the weakness and querulousness of age were apparent. The prospect, which sometimes terrified Mary, that his mind would go, seemed perceptibly nearer. Something began thumping inside her; she became burning hot. The terror passed. She was able to soothe him and pursue the search, though she felt as if her own faculties would be the next to fail. The servants shared in the incapacity and despair. At last the paper was found; they could set off. They were lunching with the Archdeacon. The harshness of his tones were magnified to Canon Jocelyn by his deafness. Mary strove, not always successfully, to keep him from piercing the thick skin of his host with the needle of his sarcasm, or from sinking into himself, crouching up and hardly answering, as if his keen faculties were asleep. She knew she was irritating him by aggressive cheerfulness. When she was younger he had called it boisterous. She was not, and never had been boisterous, but it was unnatural.
Canon Jocelyn had looked forward to the gathering. While affecting contempt for the present generation, he could not altogether reconcile himself to being unwanted by it. He had, as was habitual to him, taken the utmost pains with his address. The Parish Hall was sparsely scattered with elderly ladies – the bulwarks of all meetings, orthodox or unorthodox. Mary felt tears spring to her eyes. She was disappointed for herself, and she read the mortification in his heart as if it were her own. She remembered how he had spoken of himself to Mr Herbert as a cumberer of the ground.
Mrs James, a clergyman’s widow, came up afterwards and shouted sympathy. ‘How d’you do, Canon Jocelyn. How d’you do, my dear. What a wretched attendance. When I heard there was to be so few I felt I must come, though my lumbago is bothering me dreadfully, and I can’t hear a word your dear father says, and we had such numbers last time. It’s most disappointing.’
She saw her father flush the feeble flush of age as he bowed his acknowledgements. Nor were the Archdeacon’s apologies happier. ‘That was a magnificent thing, Canon, packed with learning. You ought to make your father publish it, but I’m afraid the subject put our people off. They’re not quite learned enough for Tertullian, and I say we spoil ’em a little with lantern and cinema shows. We had a big missionary rally last week, and the lads said it was as good as the Elite picture-house at Cayley.’
Canon Jocelyn wreaked his irritation, and punished her cheerfulness, by contradicting most of Mary’s timid statements during the drive home. They were old remarks, which she had often made because he liked them. He was very weary when he got back, but he would not, of course, give up or shorten evensong. She knew he would be vexed if she sat down during the service, but the influenza and the strain of these last weeks had made her often feel as if her legs must give way under her. She envied the wonderful frame, which even in its decline could so easily tire her out.
She went up to her room after service with every nerve on edge. She flung herself on the bed sobbing, ‘I can’t bear it. If only the door had never been unlocked. I was contented before, at any rate I had accepted my lot. Now I have seen what happiness can be, and I am never to have any more.’ She sprang up, went to the box, and began rummaging to get the letter.
The gong rang for dinner. Her father hated unpunctuality, and she went downstairs. He was still snubbing at dinner. She began to be sure – she had often suspected it – that, far from comforting, she wearied him, wearied him more than she used to do; she would weary him still more. Her head burned with nervous fear; she felt she could bear it no longer.
Suddenly, for no reason, she was quite happy. She felt her lips breaking into smiles. From a child she had been occasionally seized with what she used to call ‘transports of bliss.’ They were a counterbalance to her depression. ‘Thou shalt also light my candle; the Lord God shall make my darkness to be light.’ The words flashed through her mind, and at the same moment the candle went out. But by its light she had become tranquil and able to look at the present with common sense, and leave the future to itself. She owned, when she did so, that her father’s irritability, which had sometimes made her almost hopeless, was less, not more; he was growing gentler.
It could not be expected from one of his generation that he would apologize; but he was sorry, and the happy circumstance of his gammoning her three times running made him say pleasantly, ‘No one ought to be as unlucky as you, my dear.’ Half an hour earlier she could have echoed in the bitterness of her heart, ‘No indeed.’ She did not feel herself specially unlucky now.
Next day Emma had one of her attacks, about which she always enjoyed consulting Dr King. Her business disposed of with the attention due to the Rectory parlourmaid, he turned to Mary, saying, ‘You don’t look up to the mark. What have you been doing to yourself?’ It was a relief when, on examination, he declared she ought to have a change immediately. ‘Go to a bright sunny place, and see plenty of fresh people.’
He made a point of speaking to her father and frightening him about Mary. He and his wife thought of Canon Jocelyn as an ogre father, battening on his daughter’s vitality. If Mary had known how much conversation was spent in pitying her, she would have felt much less benevolent towards her neighbours. When Mary next saw her father he was off his pinnacle, a little fussy and muddled with anxiety. ‘Fred had better go over to Cayley at once for your prescription,’ s
aid he. Fred had been gardener’s boy ten years before. ‘Or did not some one say Fred had sprained his ankle? What are we to do? I don’t quite see what is to be done.’
‘Dr King is sending up my medicine this afternoon, Father, thank you, so that there will be no difficulty about that.’
‘You are sure that will be in time enough? You are not ill, Mary, are you? Why did you not tell me?’
‘Oh, not ill in the least, only –’ She hesitated. She knew it would not do to say, ‘Only one gets run down in the spring,’ because he hated any weather, particularly mild weather, upsetting anybody, or ‘only influenza,’ because there was no such thing as influenza, though affected people pretended there was. ‘Only that little cough I had left me rather weak.’
‘That cough, yes, I remember your cough. Stay away till you are quite well. Cook and Emma will take very good care of everything.’
His affectionate smile warmed her; for the first time since Mr Herbert’s kiss she felt that she might be happy again in her ordinary life.
18
Now was the time to pay that long-promised visit to the Redlands. She wrote proposing herself. An enthusiastic letter from Mildred welcomed her. ‘Dora, unluckily, is still away,’ ran the letter, ‘for,’ with the slight note of pity the robust spinster sister feels for the helpless married, ‘poor Gertrude is expecting again, so Dora will look after things generally as long as she is wanted. We don’t know when we shall get her back.’
To miss Dora was a disappointment, but also a relief.
The little house at Southsea was a hive of good works. Each of the three daughters was busy over something. Linda, a middle one, had, in addition, the charge of ‘dear mother’ – not an onerous charge. She had always been the placidest, most good-tempered woman; now, in old age, placidity was passing into drowsiness. She smiled as sweetly as ever, and Mary could not but admire the way in which she was content to live in a fuss. Lunch was always late for somebody, tea always early, dinner always turning into cocoa and buttered eggs, because they had to scramble off to a meeting. What were still called ‘the girls’ were hearty and affectionate, offering cups of tea and hot-water bottles, and Mary was to put her feet up all day long if she liked, though they never put theirs up themselves. And Mildred, the youngest, made time by getting up early to take Mary a walk by the sea every morning. Though the household was so busy, there was one place in which it appeared no one did anything. That was the drawing-room. Apparently the main idea in its arrangement – the pictures, sofa, cushions, little tables, ornaments – was to form pyramids and circles, and combinations of pyramids and circles. Implements for all employment were hidden away. It looked a kind of temple dedicated to boredom. But no one was ever bored there. If it was a temple, it was a temple to birthdays and sales of work. Every year there were sales, and all the sisters went to buy presents for each other and dear mother, and out of pity chose the fancy objects that were hanging fire. There were, therefore, all sorts of pieces of needlework, bags, mats, cushions, chairbacks of pink, green, and mauve, faded into greyish-brown by continual washing. The Redlands deserted nothing that was down in the world, not even an antimacassar. There were photographs of cheerful, plain, like-minded friends, and those large portraits of ladies in court-dress, which somehow find their way into many villa drawing-rooms. As to the books, numbers of Christmas anthologies, gems from Wordsworth, Tennyson, Longfellow, Browning, Whittier, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, and Matthew Arnold (with all the doubts expurgated) were planted about in miniature shelves, whose manufacture had been just up to the level of deserving cripple lads. They had little skimpy, home-made curtains hung over them, for Mrs Redland had a feeling against books in the drawing-room. It was odd to think that such a room should be the deliberate choice of people as easy and cheerful as the Redlands.
The evenings, what there were left over from meetings, were always spent there, when four pairs of hands made articles for future bazaars. The fifth member of the party read aloud a novel from the library. As a treat for Mary they read Bleak House, and as a treat for Linda they read The First Violin;* they classed them together as the same sort of book. Linda and Mary were good-humouredly laughed at for liking ‘old books’ they had read as school-girls. ‘You two are so sentimental.’ It seemed there was thought to be an added intellectual aroma in what was new. Here they resembled Brynhilda’s set. Mary, on her side, wondered at their taste. Anything did that the girl at the library gave them as long as it was not indecent – they would have hated that – but the American sentiment and the vulgarity! And they in themselves were the absolute reverse of vulgar. Their books seemed as unlike them as their drawing-room. They were ready to take things as they found them; they liked what people round them liked, whereas Mary thought out her own opinions. She might have been happier if she had not. She would have had more in common with her generation.
Mary was vexed that after joining energetically in the hum of life all the first week, the stuffy, noisy clubs and the stuffy, fervent meetings made her head in a whirl. The whirl ended one day in a fainting fit. The doctor had to be called in. He told her to take a fortnight in bed. She would not trespass on her friends’ kindness by standing out and making a fuss, though she dreaded rest, for she still dreaded thought. She went to bed, and was surprised to find that she dozed most of the day and slept all night. She was thankful for the peace. Frances nursed her, and nothing pleased her more than plying an invalid with beaten-up egg and glasses of hot milk. Mrs Redland, too, liked stumping heavily upstairs and fussing over Mary. Her bedside tales were of kind landladies, grateful parishioners, devoted cooks. If her mind had not been so sleepy, Mary might have preferred now and then as a treat a tale of moral failure; it was almost too treacly. But Mrs Redland never seemed to have encountered anybody ungrateful or malicious. If they had been once, it was only that their eventual goodness might glow more richly. It was comforting to find this the verdict of a long life. If it was the haziness of old age, might it not be the haziness of a sweet September afternoon, when the sun is shining behind?
When she was allowed to get up, Mary was not yet considered strong enough for meetings; she had to own that she was still very languid. But she could be busy in many other ways. She could take round reports or send them off by post, remind dilatory subscribers of their shillings, prepare garments under Mildred’s supervision for the working parties and girls’ clubs, number tickets, make lists, enter things on different pages, all cherished occupations of the middle-aged, but not copy the text of the sermon into a little black book, or wind skeins of wool, or read aloud from the Daily Mail the movements of what newspapers call the ‘well known’ and the headlines in order of size. These were Mrs Redland’s duties, which none in that affectionate household could have borne to take from her.
Mary liked the whole family. If there was a ‘but,’ a something she wished otherwise, it was that they would not contradict one another, particularly all at once and about such trifles. The hubbub was sometimes bewildering to one accustomed to stillness. She hardly ever contradicted at home, unless goaded past bearing; when she disagreed, she disagreed as sweetly as if she agreed. She knew it was foolish to mind – contradiction was nothing to them; no trace of huffiness entered in. In the height of vociferation they said in the same loud, sure voice, ‘Oh, of course it was the 12th, not the l4th.’
They all had their jokes against Ella – not good ones. Neither they nor Ella saw that her and their various forms of activity were manifestations of the same spirit – the wonderful desire which is so strong in English spinsters to serve, to help, to be perhaps almost too busy in other people’s affairs.
Mary and Mildred had many talks – not interesting talks, which was all the more restful for Mary.
One day Mildred remarked, ‘Our nephew and nieces always seem to have something the matter with them. Poor Gertrude, she has rather a poor time. Walter is so selfish. I suppose husbands generally are, but then perhaps I don’t do men justice. I have never wanted
to marry at all. I shouldn’t think Linda or Frances did either, only I never happened to ask them. Dora at one time was rather taken up with your brother Will, I think, but it never came to anything.’
Mary wondered at the isolation in which even sisters can live together. ‘Life gets fuller and happier every year, don’t you find?’ Mildred continued, ‘and one does love the kiddies so.’
Mary had never felt at all as Mildred did, though she had often envied her comfortableness when she had seen her in girlhood and womanhood. Now there seemed a barrier between them. Her experience gave her – she hated herself for it – a tinge of superiority. It would have been inexplicable to Mildred. Some people might have thought the Redlands’ active contentment a pose, or abnormal, but one only had to look at Mildred’s clear eyes and round, rosy cheeks to see that she was a lay nun, a wholesome, though not very luscious apple. She was more pleased to love and be useful to other people’s children than to have them of her own. She was of those whose friends, or still more fellow-workers, find it necessary to get into corners, and whisper, ‘If only she would not be so –’ But the difficult things were left for her to do.
