Part 12
She has a beautiful character, and if only they had not frightened her as a little girl, no one could have been more charming. They began by telling her how easily shocked the angels were, and that there could be no moments of indulgence in moral carpet slippers and dressing-gown, because the angels never went down (or up) for meals, or even to fetch a handkerchief. They were “there all the while,” like the gentleman at the famous siege, and they were shocked if children did practically anything that their elders do. Later in life the bogy held over her head was what “people” would say. The angels apparently don’t concern themselves with any one over half-fare age. When she turned twelve they dropped off, and that vague creature “people” took on the job. You can imagine “people” buttoning on his uniform and taking over the name, age, and previous record of the young sufferer. Do you remember how you exploded the idea of “people” when we were at school? You walked down a whole street with your tongue out, and I ate peas with my knife at a restaurant, and no one said anything. You went home and told your mother that if “people” were ever going to say anything, now was the time to do it, and you didn’t believe that there were any “people” at all. Mrs. Merchant still “goes by what people say” a good deal, and I sometimes find it difficult to talk to her on this account. There is a “people” deposit left on her mind, which has to be scraped off before one can see what she is like. She and her husband came to supper at the Cambridges’ last Sunday, and after supper, when the men were downstairs smoking, we got on the subject of religion.
In that respect Mrs. Merchant does not altogether “go by what people say.” She goes by it for a time, and gets over a good many difficult bits with its assistance, but when it comes to plain ethics she does as she likes.
“I don’t think that bazaars are very nice, do you?” she asked Mrs. Cambridge. “People seem to like them very much, but I think it would be nicer if we all sent the money to the Archipelago if they really want it there, or if the natives’ work were introduced at some shop we could buy it if we wanted to. People did stare so at the stall holders, didn’t they?”
This gave me an idea. Suppose that “people,” who say all the horrible things that frighten us, are the ghoulish ladies who buy receptacles for hair! Suppose that they go about dressed like that because they are detectives (if you come to think of it they never look as if they had any legitimate business of their own to mind), and that after a visit from one of them this or that information “gets about,” “people are saying it,” etc. If I had thought for a moment when I was at the bazaar that I had run down my lifelong enemy, I should have taken a revolver and sacrificed myself for the good of humanity by shooting the lot of them dead and taking the consequences.
Then those two got on ethics in general. Mrs. Cambridge never goes by what people say, but she seems to incorporate their remarks with her own experience, and out of the two together makes a very serviceable guide which takes her down paths pleasant to herself and agreeable to her neighbours.
“Oh, I think most likely the Old Testament is true,” I heard Mrs. Merchant saying when next I caught them up. “At least people say that it is all quite possible if you think what conjurers do--and the East and all that: and even part of the New as well, it is possible--” but that was getting a little uncomfortable, and her voice died away in a self-reproving silence. “But I think,” she went on with apparent irrelevance, “that the clergy might be more strict in how they teach us to behave; they are a little vague, don’t you think?” “I don’t think they know themselves what they want,” was Mrs. Cambridge’s opinion.
“Oh, don’t you? Perhaps that is it,” said my dear innocent. “I am quite sure that if instead of taking the text we had to-day, ‘And Israel set liers in wait round about Gibeah,’ and just telling us that we ought to take a strong line against slackness in the education of our children--if, instead, they had said to us, ‘You mustn’t be hypocrites with your children and pretend that God makes one law for you and another for them----’”
“That we have the entrée to heaven, in fact, while they have to go round by the front and take the risk of being turned back,” suggested Mrs. Cambridge.
“And if they had said, ‘You must stop that everlasting talk about what other people ought to do, either as regards your children or your friends, and you must forget yourself when you want to be nice to people, and remember yourself when you want to be nasty to them----’”
This was too much for Mrs. Cambridge; it made her laugh, and Mrs. Merchant began to drink her coffee, which was quite cold, and the men came upstairs. Mrs. Cambridge, who is devoted to Mrs. Merchant, gave their husbands an outline of what had been going on. They took it up, but we had to stop them almost at once, because they left the nice personal line and began philosophizing and generalizing. It made us all yawn and get tired about the eyes. If they had really let themselves go and had told us what frauds public men are, and what their platform tears amount to in private, or if they had given us practical instances, in strict confidence (we were all among friends), it would have been so pleasant. But you never can bring men down to facts. Their conversation is a perpetual vague laying down of the law for everybody, and never following it by anybody year in and year out. I like getting at people individually, and then offering myself for a jab in return, don’t you?
Yours ever, GEORGINA.
_CHAPTER XIX_
“LONGMOOR,” MILLPORT.
MY DEAR LOUISE,--We have just come back from a wedding; the wedding of Miss Darling and Mr. Friseur. You remember, he is the young man I told you about at the first dinner-party. It seems such a long time ago since I first came here portrait-painting. I am getting so fond of them all that I believe I shall think you rather drunk and disorderly when I come back. The extraordinary innocence of every one amazes me. Most of them are as good as gold (nice refined gold with enough alloy in it to stand hard wear, and really quite good enough for all one wants). Perhaps they are innocent because they live within a short distance of the country, which makes them healthy and not morbidly civilized, and on the other hand, rumours of the Court and fashion filter through to them quite rapidly, which prevents them from relapsing easily into bucolic vices.
Miss Darling’s wedding was about as flat and comfortable and sensible a proceeding as you could well imagine. No passion in it to lead to possible disappointment and disaster; no marrying for money or position, as they are both already comfortably seated on the top branch of their social tree, and both have about the same amount of money, enough for perfect ease and to cover sudden emergencies, but not enough to lead to riotous living. Miss Darling loves everybody, so it is not likely that she will leave out her husband. Mr. Friseur loves himself chiefly, therefore, having chosen a wife, there is nothing to tempt him to ask for any other lady. If you like gooseberry-fool better than any other dish and are already eating gooseberry-fool, you don’t bother about the relative value of the other dishes on the table. You may need a biscuit of some sort to bring out the flavour of your choice, and Mr. Friseur has chosen Miss Darling to be his biscuit, so that he may enjoy himself more. But the other women may leave the world so far as he is concerned; his interest in the meal is at an end.
We had an early lunch, and got off afterwards in a great hurry. The coffee was late and too hot to drink. Our hair did not go so well as it did the last time we wore the same hat, and our gloves were a little tight, which made us flushed. It is only at a wedding that these _contretemps_ happen; one can get to any other sort of party quite calmly. It is all such a self-conscious ceremony from beginning to end. The crowd by the awning leading to the church seems to have one gigantic eye fixed on the first leg one puts to the ground in getting out of the motor. When it is a motor I can just bear the ordeal, as the step is broad and low, but when I have to shuffle out of a cab, and hit just the right spot on which to plant my toe, the eye of the crowd slays my ease for the rest of the day. “Eh, look! h’m”--says the eye, and off I go up the red carpet, thoroughly flushed, and with my dress up to the knees on one side and a tail of chiffon dragging in the mud at the other. I find this out when I get home, and the mark always shows afterwards. The church, again, is all eyes. Every one has been there for hours, in a state of acute observation. The young gentlemen with shiny hair and buttonholes don’t mind this much. Boys are more or less uncomfortable anywhere in society, and have to be brave about it, so this is not worse than any ordinary party. Besides, it takes them all their time to remember the things they have been told to do; to see that the right people get seats beyond the cord, and so on. We were just short of the cord and in a perfect nest of acquaintances. I saw Mrs. Bushytail and Mrs. County, and Mrs. Cambridge was tucked away comfortably under the lee of the mammoth, who sat down upon me that afternoon I told you about. The brazen serpent was also there, looking about her through a lorgnette. She is very religious, and therefore behaves in a church as if she were very much at home, and could sit in all the pews at once if she liked. She reminds me of a person one always meets on a sea voyage, who wears a yachting cap and examines the wheel and the barometer, and counts the knots at breakfast. I once met one who was seasick, and I was so pleased. I should love it if an angel came into the church and didn’t recognize the brazen serpent, and she had to explain who she was. She was taking charge of the whole wedding. I wish I had been sitting next to her! I should have tried to put on a face like G. P. Huntley’s, and drawled, “Oh, that’s the bride, is it? What’ll they do with her, now? Oh, do they? Very nice, yes. Who’s the old fellow dressed up in calico, what? Vicar--Ah, quite so, yes, very nice. Cuts the cake and finds a ring and a sixpence in it, doesn’t he? Yaas, thanks--what a lot you know about it!”
Miss Darling is, as I have told you, a velvet-hearted creature, and no doubt the life she is to lead will give her more opportunity of cultivating her good qualities than if she were marrying any one with intelligence enough to be a connoisseur in velvet. Mr. Friseur will know how to keep himself warm with the velvet, but that is all; he cares nothing for quality or light and shade.
Bridesmaids always look their worst, don’t they? whereas brides just look queer. Very often brides are persons rarely visited by emotion. But on that day they have an idea that emotion is not only natural, but necessary; it would be an opportunity missed if they did not have some then. So they either fish a little out of the pockets of their own consciousness, or they borrow some from friends and relations, who are all ready to contribute for the occasion. “It is quite right that dear Emily should be upset,” they say; so dear Emily manages somehow to get a little upset, and looks it, and the guests revel in her indisposition. Her red nose and trembling hand have the same luscious, nutritive quality for the wedding-guests as the implements of a murder or other work of the emotions have for the unemployed. People who are themselves sensitive to the varying weather of the passions are usually eager to keep those whom they love as warm and sheltered as may be when a storm threatens, but those who habitually lead the sheltered life like nothing better than to stare out of the windows at their friends who are being buffeted about in the gale.
Miss Darling, however, was not out in any storm. She walked to the altar as to a new plateau in an altogether agreeable country, where her Friseur figures as a picturesque object for the devotion which she lavishes on every human creature within her reach. He will need to beat her very hard indeed before she takes a dislike to him. But to go back to the bridesmaids. They were not queer, like the bride; they were just sticky, and they were suffering as we had suffered about our hair. I don’t know which of them were the worst--those who had done their own hair with trembling fingers, or those who had got in a man and had it waved. They were as solemn and self-conscious as a stuffed owl that tries to look natural with its foot on a real egg which has, unfortunately, been blown previously. Miss Darling’s awful father (as they described him in the hymn, with unnecessary rudeness, I thought) looked really detestable in a white waistcoat and spats, and a pink skin head. Men, when they get to that age, look so much better if they have been exposed to the weather a good deal. I should think that Mr. Darling had been kept too warm, and given too soft food. All the slyness and cupidity and harshness, which may be quite dignified when they form a horny skin over a heart full of natural fire, are in his case just spongy and unpleasant indications of general rottenness. I don’t think that Miss Darling has a mother, but the bridegroom’s was there--a bad woman, I should think, from the look of her: thick-skinned, over-dressed, and with short legs, which are always a sign of doubtful virtue. I don’t think that her son drinks; in fact, I am sure he does not; but she is the type of woman who schemes indefatigably to find a good young girl to marry her drunken blackguard of a son in the hope of keeping him straight. The bridegroom looked like the man who takes the leading part in that wearisome type of play where the old men are fossils, the young men are nonentities, the elder women are saints, and all are marshalled into a ritual of self-revelation by a girl of eighteen, who has sown some fairly commonplace wild oats. Well, that is all over, and they have gone off to the Riviera to listen to the Voice that breathed o’er Eden.
I spent the evening helping Mrs. Merchant with the accounts of a ball which she is getting up for her favourite hospital. Wherever one goes in this town, some one is doing something for his neighbour, or, rather, for an organized section of his neighbours. There is any amount of kindness to be had, but very little pleasure. There are parties--any number of parties--for all classes of society (the kind creatures give parties for the poor and for themselves), where the only practical difference is in the quality of the refreshments; but I have seen very little happiness since I came. People like everything very much, and it is all most enjoyable, but I have not seen any one make any attempt to jump over the moon. In fact, if a scheme were got up for hoisting the public over the moon, a good many would take advantage of it. And then, by and by, the lift would get crowded with the wrong sort of people, who smell and make a noise, so the parties would be discontinued. Probably by that time some bright spirit would have begun organizing trips to hell, and it would be so interesting getting special asbestos clothes to wear going down.
Last week I went with Mrs. Merchant to her hospital. It was her day for visiting there, and we also met Mrs. Bushytail going her rounds. She looked tremendously fat--fatter than usual--and was simply all over the place as regarded management.
“Well, now, how are you getting on, Mrs. Tibby?” I heard her ask at one bed-side.
Poor Mrs. Tibby looked at death’s door, but I believe she had a lurking instinct that it would be as much as her place in bed was worth if she were not found to be getting on nicely, so she made a weak profession of well-being, and lay patiently awaiting what might come.
“That’s capital!” said Mrs. Bushytail. “Capital! Such a pleasant day, isn’t it?”
Mrs. Tibby, who, by the way, had been taken to pieces like a clock only a day or two before, would, I think, have privately described the day as something a little short of pleasant; but you never know. I have met before now Mrs. Tibbys who found pleasure in sermons, in strong tea with sugar in it, in a visit from a lady, in a crochet petticoat, in all sorts of queer things, in fact, so perhaps she found disintegration pleasant.
“We all have to be thankful if we have our health, ma’am,” she observed.
“Quite so,” agreed Mrs. Bushytail. “And you are going to have yours now, Mrs. Tibby, and go back to your dear husband, and be able to take up all your duties again as fresh as ever. I never feel half myself if I can’t get about and attend to my house, and I’m sure you feel the same.”
I had a private vision of Mr. Tibby as the forlorn husband trying to decide whether the herring should be made into a soufflé, or served on toast as a savoury in the evening, or, perhaps, remembering to speak to the milkman, and write to the rent-collector. It would be a nice little occupation for Mrs. Tibby to take over the household again. These little tasks prevent us from dwelling on ourselves.
“And what are you going to do when you come out?” my fat friend asked a young girl with a deformed body and a face like clay. “You must look on the bright side, and not think of yourself, you know, or you will never get well.”
The girl smiled a feeble smile and twiddled the bedclothes.
“There’s plenty of work to be got,” the excellent lady continued, “if you apply in the right quarter. Everything is so splendidly managed nowadays that nobody need be out of work if they don’t want to. And it will be delightful--won’t it?--to think you are earning your own living and putting by a little for a rainy day. The great thing is to be thrifty and avoid spending money on things you don’t want. I am sure you must be very grateful for all the care that has been taken of you in this terrible illness. Yes, I am sure you are; that’s right. Always be grateful and happy, and you will never want. Now I am going to leave these flowers just where you can see them, and then I must be off. There are so many poor things like you, you know, who have to be cheered up. Good-bye--good-bye, Mrs. Tibby. Hope you will have a splendid night and be about again directly.”
I was so entranced by Mrs. Bushytail’s vigour and excellence that I forgot about Mrs. Merchant, who had in the meantime been quietly rambling through the wards, timidly passing the time for the patients one by one. She is not a vital person, and she is very shy, but they watched her with the idle, restful pleasure which, when one is ill, a cat performing its simple toilet may afford without raising one’s temperature. I was left to my own resources, and felt most grateful when a thin, wiry little woman addressed me from the end bed.
“Nice change in the weather, isn’t it, Miss?” she said.
We exchanged a few comments on the uncertain habits of the sun, and then she said, with considerable feeling, “My! I’ll be glad to be about again. I’ll be out next week if all’s well, and I’m just going to enjoy meself a bit.”
“How?” I asked.
“I’ll be out a bit of an evening and get to one of the ’alls, perhaps. Do you care for them places, Miss?”
“I love them,” I assured her, feeling as if a great weight of care had been lifted from my chest. “Bert Hoskyn is coming this week, I know, and I wish I were going to see him.”
“Is he, indeed, Miss?” she said politely. “I don’t know his name exactly, but there’s many of them that’s grand. I’ll take a good look round next week, and maybe see the one you mention. You do get a bit down-’earted lyin’ ’ere with nothing to think of all day, without it’s the nurses or the food or your own inside. I’d show you the place, and welcome, where they stitched me up, Miss, but maybe nurse wouldn’t like it.”
“No,” I said, “I am sure she wouldn’t like you to disturb it; but you must show me some other time, if I meet you again.”
“That I will, Miss,” she promised heartily. “Any time you’re passing. Do you come far from ’ere?”
Mrs. Merchant took me home before our conversation got more interesting, but I came away refreshed and with a feeling that pleasure is not dead as I had suspected during the last few weeks. After all, pleasure to be any good must be something that sprouts in one’s own senses, and may be called to life by anything. The Millport idea of it is something of which you buy from a purveyor as much as you can afford, and then you pour it over yourself and other people. It rather deadens the spontaneous kind.
Good-bye, Yours ever, GEORGINA.
_CHAPTER XX_
“LONGMOOR,” MILLPORT.
My dear Louise,--This day week will see me back. The portraits are finished. I huddled them all on to one canvas at last--all, at least, except papa. The children would not sit still without mamma, and mamma had a sort of unemployed, forcible idleness look about her without the children, so there they are. I won’t bore you by telling you any more about the pictures. I have told you about the people themselves, and if you don’t see their portraits in your mind’s eye it is owing to your slowness in the uptake.
My last experience in Millport has amused me as much as any. I had a whole day with Mrs. County, and I have not yet quite got back my power of moving naturally. Mrs. Merchant had to go last week to the other end of Cheddar to do some good work or other--sit on a Board or in a Chair, or something--and suggested that I should go with her for the run. Mrs. County, who, by the way, lives farther away than I thought, would give me luncheon, and had asked me to stay until the car picked me up again on its way home.
We motored miles and miles through something that certainly is not country, though neither is it town, sea, desert, or icefloe. Perhaps it is just arable land; I had not thought of that before. It looks like acres of brown paper, slightly wrinkled, and marked into irregular shapes by lines of the mixed rubbish that a bird makes its nest of. The dusty road runs alongside of these lines of dusty twigs and straw and rags, and every few minutes we passed a house built either of red brick or of that white mud that has had gravel thrown at it. Exasperating houses, planned often in imitation of a farmhouse with some cut about it, only, unfortunately, the builders have copied all the details and left out all the point. Any details they liked have been exaggerated, such as sloping roofs, odd levels, inconvenient entrances. These houses are the nurseries of Millport. Here the married sons and daughters live after they have left papa’s luxurious nest on the outskirts of his business, and before they have developed into full-blown county specimens, with a hunting stable and the supreme terror of all forms of discomfort, mental and physical.