Part 13

If nothing is sacred to a sapper, neither is anything sacred to temper, ostentation, vanity; and church as little as any place else. In those thronged show-places which have what is called a summer season, church is the great Sunday entertainment; and when the service is of an ornate kind, and the strangers' seats are chairs placed at the west end, where in old times the village choir or the village schoolboys used to be, a great deal of human life goes on among the occupants; and there are certain displays of temper and feeling which make you ask yourself whether these strangers think it a religious service, or an operatic, at which they have come to assist, and whether what you see about you is quite in consonance with the spirit of the place or not. If the church is one that presents scenic attractions in the manner in which the service is conducted, there is a run on the front middle seats, as if the ceremonies to be performed were so much legerdemain or theatrical spectacle, of which you must have a good view if you are to have your money's worth; and the more knowing of the strangers take care to be early in the field, and to establish themselves comfortably before the laggards come up. And when the best places are all filled, and the laggards do come up, then the human comedy begins.

Here trip in a couple of giggling girls, greatly conscious of their youth and good looks, but still more conscious of their bonnets. They look with tittering dismay at the crowded seats all along the middle, and when the verger makes them understand that they must go to the back of the side aisle, where they can be seen by no one but will only be able to hear the service and say their prayers, they hesitate and whisper to each other before they finally go up, feeling that the great object for which they came to church has failed them, and they had better have stayed away and taken their chance on the parade. When they speak of it afterwards, they say it was 'awfully slow sitting there;' and they determine to be earlier another time.

There sweep in a triad of superbly dressed women with fans and scent-bottles, who disdainfully decline the back places which the same verger, with a fine sense of justice and beginning to fail a little in temper, inexorably assigns them. They too confer together, but by no means in whispers; and finally elect to stand in the middle aisle, trusting to their magnificence and quiet determination to get 'nice places' in the pewed sittings. They are fine ladies who look as if they were performing an act of condescension by coming at all without special privileges and separation from the vulgar; as if they had an inherent right to worship God in a superior and aristocratic manner, and were not to be confounded with the rest of the miserable sinners who ask for mercy and forgiveness. They are accustomed to the front seats everywhere; so why not in the place where they say sweetly they are 'nothing of themselves,' and pray to be delivered 'from pride, vainglory, and hypocrisy'? That old lady, rouged and dyed and dressed to represent the heyday of youth, who also is supposed to come to church to say her prayers and confess her sins, looks as if she would be more at home at the green tables at Homburg than in an unpretending chair of the strangers' quarter in the parish church. But she finds her places in her Prayer-book, if after a time and with much seeking; and when she nods during the sermon, she has the good-breeding not to snore. She too, has the odd trick of looking like condescension when she comes in, trailing her costly silks and laces behind her; and by her manner she leaves on you the impression that she was a beauty in her youth; has been always used to the deference and admiration of men; to servants and a carriage and purple and fine linen; that all of you, whom she has the pleasure of surveying through her double eyeglass, are nobodies in comparison with her august self; and that she is out of place among you. She makes her demonstration, like the rest, when she finds that the best seats are already filled and that no one offers to stir that she may be well placed; and if she is ruthlessly relegated to the back, and stays there, as she does sometimes, your devotions are rendered uncomfortable by the unmistakable protest conveyed in her own. Only a few humble Christians in fashionable attire take those back places contentedly, and find they can say their prayers and sing their hymns with spiritual comfort to themselves, whether they are shut out from a sight of the decorations on the altar and the copes and stoles of the officiating ministers, or are in full view of the same. But then humble Christians in fashionable attire are rare; and the old difficulty about the camel and the needle's eye, remains.

Again, in the manner of following the services you see the oddest diversity among the strangers at church. The regular congregation has by this time got pretty well in step together, and stands up or sits down, speaks or keeps silence, with some kind of uniformity; even the older men having come to tolerate innovations which at first split the parish into factions. But the strangers, who have come from the north and from the south, from the east and from the west, have brought their own views and habits, and take a pride in making them manifest. Say that the service is only moderately High--that is, conducted with decency and solemnity but not going into extremes; your left-hand neighbour evidently belongs to one of the ultra-Ritualistic congregations, and disdains to conceal her affiliation. If she be a tall woman, and therefore conspicuous, her genuflexions are more profound than any other person's; and her sudden and automatic way of dropping on her knees, and then getting up again as if she were worked by wires, attracts the attention of all about her. She crosses herself at various times; and ostentatiously forbears to use her book save at certain congregational passages. She regards the service as an act of priestly sacrifice and mediation, and her own attitude therefore is one of acceptance, not participation.

Your neighbour on your right is a sturdy Low Churchman, who sticks to the ways of his father and flings hard names at the new system. He makes his protest against what he calls 'all this mummery' visibly, if not audibly. He sits like a rock during the occasional intervals when modern congregations rise; and he reads his Prayer-book with unshaken fidelity from first to last, making the responses, which are intoned by the choir and the bulk of the congregation, in a loud and level voice, and even muttering _sotto voce_ the clergyman's part after him. In the creed, when the Ritualistic lady bends both her knees and almost touches the ground, he simply bobs his head, as if saluting Robinson or Jones; and during the doxology, where she repeats the obeisance, and looks as if she were speaking confidentially to the matting, he holds up his chin and stares about him. She, the pronounced Ritualist, knows all the hymns by heart and joins in them like one well accustomed; but he, the Evangelist, stumbles over the lines, with his _pince-nez_ slipping off his nose, satisfied if he catches a word here and there so as to know something of his whereabouts. She sings correctly all through; but he can do no more than put in a fancy note on occasions, and perhaps come in with a flourish at the end. There are many such songsters at church who think they have done all that can be demanded of them in the way of congregational harmony if they hit the last two notes fairly, and join the pack at the Amen.

Sometimes the old-fashioned worshippers get put into the front row, and there, without prayer-stool or chair-back against which to steady themselves, find kneeling an impossibility; so they either sit with their elbows on their knees, or betray associations with square pews and comfortable corners at home, by turning their backs to the altar, and burying their faces in their rush-bottomed seats. The Ritualist would have knelt as straight as an arrow and without quivering once all through.

People are generally supposed to go to church for devotion, but, if they do, devotion and vanity are twin sisters. Look at the number of pretty hands which find it absolutely necessary to take off their gloves, and which are always wandering up to the face in becoming gestures and with the right curve. Or, if the hands are only mediocre, the rings are handsome; and diamonds sparkle as well in a church as anywhere else. And though one vows to renounce the lusts of the world as well as of the flesh, there is no use in having diamonds if one's neighbours don't see them. Look too, at the pretty faces which know so well the effect produced by a little paint and powder beneath a softening mask of thin white lace. Is this their best confession of sin? And again, those elaborate toilets in which women come to pray for forgiveness and humility; are they for the honour of God? It strikes us that the honour of God has very little to do with that formidable, and may be unpaid, milliner's bill, but the admiration of men and the envy of other women a great deal. The Pope is wise to make all ladies go to his religious festivals without bonnets and in rigid black. It narrows the margin of coquetry somewhat, if it does not altogether remove it. But dress ever was, and ever will be, as webs spread in the way of woman's righteousness; and we have no doubt that Eve frilled her apron of fig-leaves before she had worn it a day.

All sorts of characters throng these strangers' seats; and some are typical. There are the men of low stature and awkward bearing, with stubbly chins, who stand in constrained positions and wear no gloves. They look like grooms; they may be clerks; but they are the men on whom _Punch_ has had his eye for many years now, when he portrays the British snob and diversifies him with the more modern cad. Then there are the well-dressed, well set-up gentlemen of military appearance, who carry their umbrellas under their arms as if they were swords, and are evidently accustomed to have their own will and command other people's; and the men who look like portraits of Montague Tigg, in cheap kid gloves and suspicious jewelry, who pray into their hats, or make believe to pray, while their bold eyes rove all about, fixing themselves most pertinaciously on the old lady with the diamonds and the giggling young ones with the paint. There is the bride in a white bonnet and light silk dress, who carries an ivory-backed Church Service with the most transparent attempts at unconsciousness, and the bridegroom who lounges after her and looks sheepish; sometimes it is the bride who straggles bashfully, and the groom who boldly leads the way. There is the young widow with new weeds; the sedate mother of many daughters; paterfamilias, with his numerous olive-branches, leading on his arm the exuberant wife of his bosom flushed with coming up the hill; the walking tourist, whose respect for Sunday goes to the length of a clean collar and a clothes-brush; and the female traveller, economical of luggage, who wears her waterproof and sea-side hat, and is independent and not ashamed. There are the people who come for simple distraction, because Sunday is such a dull day in a strange place, and there is nothing else to do; and those who come because it is respectable and the right thing, and they are accustomed to it; those who come to see and be seen; and those--the select few, the simple yearning souls--who come because they do honestly feel the church to be the very House of God, and that prayer with its confession of sin helps them to live better lives. But, good or bad, vain or simple, arrogant or humble, they all sweep out when the last word is said, and the cottagers and small townsfolk stand at their doors to see them pass--'the quality coming out of church' counting as _their_ Sunday sight. The women get ideas in millinery from the show, and discuss with each other what is worn this year, and how ever can they turn their old gowns into garments that shall imitate the last effort of a Court milliner's genius--the result of many sleepless nights? Fine ladies ridicule these clumsy apings of their humble sisters, and long for the old sumptuary laws to be in force on all below them; but if Sunday is the field-day and church the parade-ground of the strangers, we cannot wonder if the natives try to participate in the amusement. If Lady Jane likes to confess her shame and humiliation on a velvet cushion and in silk attire, can we reasonably blame Joan that her soul hankers after a hassock of felt, and a penance-sheet of homespun cut according to my lady's pattern?

_IN SICKNESS._

Life not being holiday-making throughout, we have to allow for the bad half-hours that must come to us; and, if we are wise, we make provision to pass them with as little annoyance as possible. And of all the bad half-hours to which we are destined, those to be spent in sickness need the greatest amount of care to render them endurable. Without going to the length of Michelet's favourite theory, which sees in every woman nothing but an invalid more or less severely afflicted according to individual temperament, but always under the influence of diseased nerves and controlled by sickly fancies, there is no doubt that women suffer very much more than men; while their patience under physical ailments is one of the traditional graces with which they are credited. Where men fume and fret at the interruption to their lives brought about by a fit of illness, calculating anxiously the loss they are sustaining during the forced inaction of their convalescence, women submit resignedly, and make the best of the inevitable. With that clear sense of Fate characteristic of them, they do not fight against the evil which they know has to be borne, but wisely try to lighten it by such wiles and arts as are open to them, and set themselves to adorn the cross they must endure. One thing indeed, makes invalidism less terrible to them than to men; and that is their ability to perform their home duties, if not quite as efficiently as when they are up and about, yet well enough for all practical purposes in the conduct of the family. The woman who gives her mind to it can keep her house in smooth working gear by dictation from her sick couch; and what she cannot actively overlook she can arrange. So far this removes the main cause of irritation with which the man must battle in the best way he can, when his business comes to a stand-still; or is given up into the hands of but a makeshift kind of substitute taken at the best; while he is laid on his back undergoing many things from doctors for the good of science and the final settling of doubtful pathological points.

Another reason why women are more patient than men during sickness is that they can amuse themselves better. One gets tired of reading all day long with the aching eyes and weary brain of weakness; yet how few things a man can do to amuse himself without too great an effort, and without being dependent on others! But women have a thousand pretty little devices for whiling away the heavy hours. They can vary their finger-work almost infinitely, and they find real pleasure in a new stitch or a stripe of a different colour and design from the last. In the contempt in which needlework in all its forms is held by the advanced class of women, its use during the period of convalescence, when it helps the lagging time as nothing else can, is forgotten. Yet it is no bad wisdom to remember that the day of sickness will probably come some time to us all; and to lay in stores of potential interest and cheerfulness against that day is a not unworthy use of power. Certain it is that this greater diversity of small, unexciting, unfatiguing occupations enables women to bear a tedious illness with comparative patience, and helps to keep them more cheerful than men.

But when the time shall have come for the perfect development of the androgynous creature, who is as yet only in the pupal state of her existence, women will have lost these two great helps. Workers outside the home like their husbands and brothers, like them they will fume and fret when they are prevented from following their bread-winning avocations; calculations of the actual money loss they are sustaining coming in to aggravate their bodily pains. And, as the needle is looked on as one of the many symbols of feminine degradation, in the good time coming there will be none of that pretty trifling with silks and ribbons which may be very absurd by the side of important work, but which is invaluable as an invalid's pastime. Consequently, what with the anguish of knowing that her profession is neglected, and what with the unenlivened tedium of her days, sickness will be a formidable thing to women of the androgynous type--and to the men belonging to them.

Again, care and tact are required to rob sickness of its more painful features, and to render it not too distressing to the home companions. A real woman, with her instincts properly developed--among them the instinct of admiration--knows how to render even invalidism beautiful; and indeed, with her power of improving occasions, she is never more charming than as an invalid or a convalescent. There is a certain refined beauty about her more seductive than the robuster bloom of health. Her whole being seems purified. The coarser elements of humanity are obscured, passions are at rest, and all those fretful, anxious strivings, which probably afflict her when in the full swing of society, are put away as if they had never been. She is forced to let life glide, and her own mind follows the course of the quieter flow. She knows too how to make herself bewitching by the art which is not artifice so much as the highest point to which her natural excellences can be brought. If the radiance of health has gone, she has the sweeter, subtler loveliness of fragility; if her diamonds are laid aside, and all that glory of dress which does so much for women is perforce abandoned, the long, loose folds of falling drapery, with their antique grace, perhaps suit her better, and the fresh flowers on her table may be more suggestive and delightful than artificial ones in her hair.

Many a drifting husband has been brought back to his first enthusiasm by the illness of a wife who knew how to turn evil things into good, and to extract a charm even out of suffering. It is a turn of the kaleidoscope; a recombination of the same elements but in a new pattern and with fresh loveliness; whereas the androgynous woman, with her business worries and her honest, if impolitic, self-surrender to hideous flannel wraps and all the uglinesses of a sick room crudely pronounced, would have added a terror to disease which probably would have quenched his waning love for ever. For the androgynous woman despises every approach to coquetry, as she despises all the other insignia of feminine servitude. It is not part of her life's duties to make herself pleasing to men; and they must take her as they find her. Where the true woman contrives a beauty and creates a grace out of her very misfortune, the androgynous holds to the doctrine of spades and the value of the unvarnished truth. Where the one gives a little thought to the most becoming colour of her ribbon or the best arrangement of her draperies, the other pushes the tangled locks off her face anyhow, and makes herself an amorphous bundle of brown and lemon colour. Her sole wish is to get the bad time over. How it would be best got over does not trouble her; and to beautify the inherently unlovely is beyond her skill to compass. Hence her hours of sickness go by in ugliness and idle fretting; while the true woman finds graceful work to do that enlivens their monotony, and in the continuance of her home duties loses the galling sense of loss from which the other suffers.

In sickness too, who but women can nurse? Men make good nurses enough out in the bush, where nothing better can be had; and a Californian 'pardner' is tender enough in his uncouth way to his mate stricken down with fever in the shanty, when he comes in at meal-times and administers quinine and brick tea with horny hands bleeding from cuts and begrimed with mud. But this is not nursing in the woman's sense. To be sure the strength of men makes them often of value about an invalid. They can lift and carry as women cannot; and the want of a few nights' sleep does not make them hysterical. Still they are nowhere as nurses, compared with women; and the best of them are not up to the thoughtful cares and pleasant attentions which, as medical men know, are half the battle in recovery. And this is work which suits women. It appeals to their love of power and tenderness combined; it gratifies the maternal instinct of protection and self-sacrifice; and it pleasantly reverses the usual order of things, and gives into their hands Hercules twirling a distaff the wrong way, and fettered by the length of his skirts.

The bread-winning wife knows nothing of all this. To her, sickness in her household would be only a degree less destructive than her own disablement, if she were called on to nurse. She would not be able to leave her office for such unremunerative employment as soothing her children's feverish hours or helping her husband over his. She would calculate, naturally enough, the difference of cost between hired help and her own earnings; and economy as well as inclination would decide the question. But the poor fellow left all day long to the questionable services of a hired nurse, or to the clumsy honesty of some domestic Phyllis less deft than faithful, would be a gainer by his wife's presence--granting that she was a real woman and not an androgyne--even if he lost the addition to their income which her work might bring in; as he would rather, when he came home from his work to her sick bed, find her patient and cheerful, making the best of things from the woman's point of view and with the woman's power of adaptation, than be met with anxious queries as to the progress of business; with doubts, fears, perplexities; the office dragged into the sick room, and unnecessary annoyance added to unavoidable pain.