Bell Timson

by Marguerite Steen

  “Of course she didn’t!” cried Laura, flushing up and tossing her head as she touched up the cob, which was now too small for Stanley and had been broken into harness. “What impudence!” she said when we were trotting down the street; but we knew the tradesmen could not help sending in their bills, and we had guessed, from the fatness of Mr. Harding’s envelope, that his must be a shocking one.

  Of course our protests were just what Father needed to make up his mind. Laura had her new horse, and a new riding habit as well. Proud as Lucifer, Father took her with him when he went over to the training stables. Old Mr. Applegate, the trainer, a great admirer of Laura’s, insisted they should try the new horse round the gallops. It was one of those treacherous spring mornings, with a thin wind under the sunshine. Laura got very hot and caught a chill, waiting for Father. A week later she was dead.

  It was after Laura’s death that Father took steadily to the bottle. He had always been what is called a happy drinker, enjoying it as much for the company he drank with as for the liquor itself; and then of course he used to have his odd glass to ginger himself up — “a hair of the dog.” But now he soaked steadily, not troubling to crack his little jokes that were meant to excuse him to Mother when he got out the third or perhaps the fourth bottle in a day. About a month after Laura died he had the stroke from which he never recovered.

  I suppose I could have got married straight away; but I wasn’t in love with anybody, and if I had been I don’t think I could have left Mother, with the boys and all Father’s debts on her hands. We were able to sell the practice, of course, but the man who bought it did not want the house, although he made an offer for the stables. We were advised that the value of the house would depreciate, with a veterinary establishment actually in the grounds, and it was obvious that anyone who bought a house the size of the Cedars would want to keep their carriage and pair, as Lady Sophy had done. So that meant we did not get as much as had been agreed for the practice, as the purchaser pointed out that the premises were included in the good will; and we were left with the big place on our hands, which so frightened Mother that she lost her head and finally accepted a much smaller offer than she should have taken, just to be rid of it.

  I always felt that Mr. Hurcott, who was our solicitor, should have looked after Mother better and not let her do something which was so much against our interests; but there are always wheels within wheels. Mr. Hurcott’s wife had always been jealous of “the Lambton girls,” having daughters of her own who, poor things, were not much of a success socially. I expect she poked her nose in and would not let Mr. Hurcott do a lot of the kind things he would surely have done, for Father’s sake, if he had been left to himself. If a decent man acts in a disappointing fashion, cherchez la femme, I say, every time. It’s a funny point of view. I would always want a husband of mine to act kindly and generously, for the sake of my pride in him; but this never seems to strike some women. If they only saw that by encouraging their men to behave meanly they were belittling themselves, I’m sure they would take a different view of it.

  Well, we got the money, as much as it was; and when the debts were added up and the checks written in settlement we found we had nothing left to live on.

  Chapter III

  WHEN I LEFT George on the comer and set off to walk across the common I felt more cheerful than, perhaps, I’d the right. At last, after ten years, I was a free woman, and it felt like taking off a pair of smoked glasses and seeing things and people in their true colors for the first time since I was married. I wonder if other people feel the same way: that when you are blithe and happy all your senses sharpen — colors seem brighter and shapes more clear-cut and satisfying on the eye; you’re quicker to pick up a scent or a sound, and you get a funny little singing pleasure out of things you never notice when your mind is all knotted up with worry.

  I looked ahead at the nice long slope of the common, with trees dotted here and there, and there was just enough air moving over the grass to ruffle up the foliage, the way a hen’s feathers are ruffled when the wind gets behind them; then the breeze would drop and the beautiful solid shapes of the branches would remold themselves, green and steady against the slowly moving clouds. It was Mother who taught me to love trees; if she had had her way there would have been nothing but trees and grass in the garden, but Father had to have his sealing-wax-red geraniums and lobelia and calceolaria, “for show —”

  I walked across the common, pretending it was a beautiful private park where the children could roll and play and ask their friends to come and play with them — just as we children had done at home, with Snowberry to come trotting round the trunks of the chestnut trees, and pink and blue ribbons in her mane that flapped up and down like a little rocking horse. I could hear Jo call, and her answering whinny, and the pair of them up on her silvery back, galloping over the grass, with her little hoofs beating the hard, summer-dry earth and raising little puffs of dust each time they struck a bare patch.

  A kind of ache came over me, to remember that Kathleen and Jo had never known any of the real loveliness of childhood — its freedom and its security, and all the adventures children invent and the imaginary dangers they pile up for themselves. They had known only mean streets and paving stones and little back yards crowded with the sordid rubbish for which there is no accommodation in poor people’s houses. They had never known that education of the eye which, honestly, was the only education Laura and I had ever managed to pick up in spite of our expensive boarding school, and they had never had so much as a kitten or a puppy to fondle, because in our kind of district the poor little beasts were bound to get run over or stolen, and it was asking for trouble just to try to keep one.

  When I got to Alice’s there she was, by good luck, just putting her key in her front door.

  “Why — Bell!” And she stood there smiling, with the door wide open behind her. We didn’t kiss or shake hands or anything; when I walked into Alice’s house it was like walking into my own.

  I’ve had two good friends in my life: George and Alice. Plenty more, of course, for I’ve always been one to make friends, especially with my own sex. Yes, I like women best, though I see all their weaknesses; perhaps that’s what makes me like them. I feel sorry and want to help them, or I admire them for the way they get away with it; and, above all, I take my hat off to their courage! I’m not a feminist, and I never went in for the vote racket. What do women want in Parliament anyway? Let the men make up the laws, and if we can’t find our own way of getting round them we aren’t worthy of the name of women! But I am in a position to know what I am talking about when I say that, morally and in some ways physically, women are the strong sex. They know it, and perhaps that’s what makes them so soft and silly with the men; it’s their chivalry makes them that way.

  George and Alice were my best friends, because they knew me at what you might call my lowest ebb. I always knew I had only to go to them — and of course, knowing that, my silly pride made me hang back until things were, perhaps, worse than they need have been. But getting rid of Harry had helped me to get rid of some of that false pride of mine, and this time I had made up my mind to ask Alice straight out for her help and advice, since it was quite certain I could not start out for myself and the girls on my own little knowledge.

  At the time of which I am speaking Alice had been married seven or eight years. The year after their marriage her husband met with an accident which left him completely paralyzed in his legs. He was insured, of course, and I think they drew quite a good sum on his policy, but there was no question of their being able to live on it for the rest of their lives; so they talked it over and agreed, not very willingly on his side, that, as Alice was going to be the breadwinner in the future, part of the money should be spent in giving her a training.

  One of the things that make Alice a good friend is that she’s a good listener; she never interrupts or tries to drag in her own affairs, as most people do; she never lets you feel she is in a hurry or tha
t she should be doing something else. That is how it is, I find, with busy people; it is the idle ones who are always in a fluster and a flurry, pretending they have twenty things to do but doing none of them. Alice never looked at the clock; she just sat there, as quietly as if I hadn’t upset her plans for the afternoon (she must have had them, for Alice is not one to waste a minute), and although my mind was all set on my affairs I was not so self-centered as not to think how good she was to look at, with her beautiful pale skin and red lips, her soft straight hair parted in the middle and done in a plain knob on the nape of her neck — a style that was unusual in those days — and her serious eyes, rather dark for the rest of her coloring, and made more striking by her black brows and lashes. She had a beautiful figure too — rather full, but slim-waisted and straight-backed; and there wasn’t an unhealthy speck in her from head to foot. A beautiful, flawless fruit she was, the kind born for motherhood, and I often felt it was a tragedy that Alice was tied for life to a man who could never be a husband to her. I knew she was as good as gold, although she had not a cold nature, as I begin to think mine must have been, and she had a way of looking at a man which would make him ashamed of anything he happened to have in his mind.

  “Well, Bell,” she said after I had finished. “I don’t know what to say, I am sure.”

  From some people that would have been discouraging, but not from Alice, who was never one to come out with some facile solution of other people’s troubles, and I could tell from the kind of inward look in her eye that she was thinking of something. So I just gave her a smile and waited. Alice and Mother had the same quality; they made you feel you could depend on them.

  Then she did an odd thing, for Alice; she was leaning forward, with her elbows on the table, and she unfolded one arm and reached out and picked up my hand, which was lying in front of me. As a girl I used to have nice hands. Now I was ashamed of it, as Alice took it in hers and looked at the broken nails, the rough cuticles, and little shading of grime in the knuckles. It wasn’t dirty; it just looked what it was: a neglected hand which might have been good-looking and was not, which is worse than a hand which is so ugly that its owner can’t take a pride in it.

  “I’ve not had much time for manicure lately,” I excused myself; but Alice did not seem to notice. She was lifting the fingers, one by one, and twirling them slowly round, as my music master used to do, when I was learning to play the piano.

  “You see, your certificate isn’t worth much, because it’s so long since you practised.”

  I should have mentioned the certificate before, especially as it is the only one I ever gained in my life. But I got tired of writing all about ourselves after Father died, and it did not seem worth while to mention that, after we left Crowle, and Stanley got an office job, and Alf and Ozzy had to leave school and start to earn

  their living in ways that neither of them cares to remember, I went into a cottage hospital, which is where I met Alice, got some sort of a training, and was given some sort of a certificate. I qualify it like this, because you must remember that in the days I am speaking of, round about 1900, training was much less specialized than it is now, and it was easy to get qualifications which nowadays mean a long course of study and practical experience. In 1900 I was twenty-two, and I’d just taken up midwifery when I met Harry and got sidetracked — although we weren’t married for another two years. You see: it wasn’t even a whirlwind wooing. It was just the boneheadedness of a girl too stubborn to take the good advice she got from every quarter. I may say I have been chary of giving advice ever since; in my experience, the better the advice the more liable it is to send people off on the wrong track, just out of contrariness.

  “Midwifery isn’t going to make much of a living for the three of you,” Alice was saying while she twiddled my fingers about as if they were bits of putty.

  “I know that,” I answered, “and what’s more, I don’t really fancy a plate up on my door, with ‘Mrs. Timson, Certified Midwife.’ It’s not the kind of thing that will do any good for Kathleen and Jo.” I could imagine how the other children would tease my two. So I determined to take the bull by the horns. “What sort of a chance would I have in your line of business, Alice?”

  It was a long while before she answered.

  “What money have you got?”

  “The alimony. Not another penny in the world. And I may as well tell you, I’m owing nearly a year of it.”

  “But won’t they make him responsible for the debts you contracted while you were his wife?”

  “What’s the good? I’ve gone round to most of our creditors and told them it’s no use making Harry bankrupt or we’ll none of us see a penny. And I’ve given my word to pay off everything that concerns me and the children in three years from now. So you see the sort of a hole I’m in.”

  “You are a silly old Bell, aren’t you?” But she said it lovingly, and I knew she understood the sort of pride I had, which would not let me take advantage of the fact that I had been Harry’s wife to get out of responsibility for our debts. “You’ve got good hands” — she was pushing her thumbs down between my knuckles and forcing them apart — ‘good, strong, well-muscled hands: padded, but not fleshy in the wrong way. My word, I wish I had hands like yours!”

  “Alice, what does a masseur earn?”

  She gave me her slow, thoughtful look.

  “They say massage is still a thing of the future. It’s not been exploited here, yet, as it is in America.”

  “You mean there’s a future in it?”

  “There certainly isn’t much present!” She laughed at my crestfallen look. “I get five shillings an hour, working for the Institute, or between three and four guineas a week, according to the number of cases I take. It’s very hard work,” said Alice soberly, “and it’s no use going on when you’re tired; you lose your sense of touch and resistance, and either punish the patient or don’t get any results.”

  “Do you mean to say that’s all you make for the hours of work you put in?” It looked as if I had been barking up the wrong tree, and I felt suddenly very tired and blank, and, for the first time, frightened of the future.

  “Of course as a private practitioner you can make more. I have several private patients now, that I treat at their own houses, and they pay me double the Institute fee; but it means I have to cut down my Institute work, so what I make on the swings I lose — at any rate part of it — on the roundabouts.”

  “But I’d always heard there was a fortune in massage!”

  Alice had a delightful smile; it began very serious, then her eyebrows flew up and the corners of her mouth twitched and you saw her pretty red tongue between the two shining rows of her teeth.

  “Well, you know, there’s massage and — massage! They say the L.C.C.’s going to have an inquiry, and if that happens a good many brass plates will have to come down and some of the West End johnnies are going to miss a lot of fun.”

  That didn’t sound a very safe game to me.

  “How do you get private patients?” I asked presently.

  “People who come to the Institute recommend me, and a few of the doctors are taking massage seriously. Dr. Remington — don’t you remember him? He was house surgeon in our time — he’s married a rich wife and set up in Harley Street. He gives me quite a lot of work, and several of Weir Mitchell’s friends that I met in America remember me, I hope to give up the Institute soon and set up a practice of my own.”

  “Of course you’ve studied the Swedish, haven’t you?”

  She shook her head.

  “It doesn’t suit everybody. It’s useful with young patients, but I find it’s too much for most of the older people. You know what Lauder Brunton says about massage.” I didn’t, so I nodded to her to go on. “Its main object is to increase circulation and improve nutrition; you don’t need all that gymnastic stuff to do that. In fact it only exhausts the system and burns up tissue — the very things you want to avoid. So far as I’m concerned, the course I
took in Swedish was waste of time; the more I do, the more I come back to the manipulative work I learned with Dr. Mitchell. Have you read his monograph on neurasthenia?”

  Of course I hadn’t. I had been so long out of the nursing profession that I had lost all touch with modern developments, and although I had a vague idea that medicine had come on a long way since I was in the hospital, I had never heard the name of Weir Mitchell or of his famous “rest cure” until I talked to Alice.

  We talked for a long time, I getting more and more despondent, for it seemed from what Alice told me that massage was not at all the simple business, half trick work and half physical strength — of which I knew I had plenty — that I had been led to believe. I knew afterward that she was testing me, to find out how serious I was. Alice was like that; her work was her religion, and there was no question of trifling with either.

  “Well,” I said at last, “there doesn’t seem much point in discussing it, as I’ve got no money to pay for a training.”

  She put my hand down and folded her arms again; her brows went into soft folds in the middle and she looked me straight in the eye.

  “I can teach you all I know, Bell, if you give me your word you’ll use it in my way —”

  I was not quite sure of what she meant, but I nodded eagerly.

  “And then shall I be able to set up on my own?”

  “Yes, as things are now,” she answered. “But I wouldn’t be surprised if things tighten up in the future. There are a good many unqualified practitioners in London, and the medical profession is beginning to talk of bringing in a diploma.”

  “That takes me out! I’d never pass an examination in my life. Good gracious, don’t you remember what I was like in those tests at the hospital?”