THE BEST OF FATHERS
1
Mrs. Holmroyd had not lived all her life in Daneborough. Only the
briefest, saddest and most tragic part of it. Nor had she, prior to this
time of sorrow, made and sold pork pies. They were a part of her
tragedy.
Less than an interminable year before, this ancient town of Daneborough
had, to her, been but a name. Then one day, weighted by the weeds that
proclaimed her recent sorrow, she had come to the town with her two
children, leaving behind the best of husbands and of fathers in the
crowded church-yard of the cruel city that had killed him.
The city was no crueller than other thriving cities are. And it had not
killed him. But a fine grief does not stand abjectly on fact. It demands
a spacious inconsistency to move in. To reduce the death of one so
dearly loved to a natural process of imperfect nature seems like a
denial of nobility; an utter dereliction of the duties of love. Mrs.
Holmroyd’s love transfigured her dead husband as a martyr whom, for his
very virtues, a cruel city slew. He had died defending her and his, his
last hours embittered only by anxious love for them.
The truth is, they had probably loved each other over well, these two.
Their lives had been too deeply interwoven; each grown too dependent on
the love and loyalty of the other. Marriages less ideal than theirs have
this advantage at least: they offer a better preparation for widowhood.
Union may be strength, but it is at the cost of the individual, and to
those who have once known the blessed liberty of bondage independence is
a cribbed and cruel thing. Her husband’s memory had been burden enough
to bear, without those deeper obligations weighting it. For though
Oswald Holmroyd discharged in full his debt to Nature, Nature was not,
alas, the only creditor demanding satisfaction.
Death, even the most exemplary, is no solatium to a man’s creditors.
Rather does it seem a source of fury and annoyance to them that debtors
should have liberty to die at all. The race of creditors is bigoted and
ruthless. It recognizes but one virtue in the world: the virtue that is
solvent. For a man to die without the least hatred of those to whom he
owes money, for him to forgive all his enemies, to take the tenderest
leave of wife and family, and steal unobtrusively away by life’s back
door whilst his creditors keep watch upon the front--is to them naught.
Man’s first duty to his fellow-men (they say) is to succeed. Those who
hold such exalted views of life as to be above making money by methods
disagreeable to their own pride, should be above owing it. Fine
feelings, lofty principles, elevated ideals--these things are well
enough for those who can afford them, but they have got to be paid for
as surely as suites of furniture and Persian rugs.
They were right. Oswald Holmroyd admitted they were right. In the weeks
before he died, no creditor could have passed more scathing judgment on
his conduct than himself. He acquired almost a creditor’s clairvoyance
for seeing facts, who had till then seemed blind to everything but
absurd ideals. What justification, indeed, is to be found for an
architect who looks only at the sublimities of his calling, and who
maintains the stubbornest resistance to adulterate its standard with
the mercantile dilutions of the age?
What justification is to be found for an architect who will not cry his
abilities abroad nor hook fingers through the button-holes of mammon,
nor conciliate councillors nor flatter aldermen nor hob-nob with the
jerrybuilder. He had had a business and he had lost it, chiefly because
of inability to reconcile his theories with life. He saw how success was
to be won, and shirked it, always hoping that the principles he held by
would prevail. More than once, in the bitterness of failure, he told his
wife: “The time is gone by for architects. Houses are turned out by
machinery, nowadays. There is no work for me.... I ought to have been a
butcher.”
The cry was but another plea for his incompetence. He would have
succeeded no better as a butcher, no better as a baker, no better as
anything at all in this degenerate world that refused to sink to the
world’s own level in order to draw inglorious profit from it. For there
were architects--architects on every hand around him--who did succeed.
Though, as he asked himself at times with the bitterness that
disappointment breeds even in the gentlest of us: “But _how_!”
How? Ah well! Certainly not by leaving their abilities to a busy age to
discover for itself. Not by drawing elevations of imaginary cathedrals
during idle hours, or working out competitive designs for workhouses and
public buildings, to be implicitly submitted in accordance with the
published terms.
Perhaps marriage--such a perfect marriage as his had been--did not evoke
the best in him. This atmosphere of love and sympathy might be too
enervating for a man temperamentally tender. A wife of sterner mould was
what he needed; a home less dear to him than the one he had. And
perhaps, too, their dispositions--his and hers--were too unfortunately
akin. His faults were her faults; his failings her failings; her
sympathies and weaknesses his. She was too prone to take his side, to
justify in him what prudence had done wiser to condemn. She half
suspected it, indeed. The dead weight of a too-loving wife (she dared to
hint) had handicapped him. For her and for his children’s sake he had
essayed to do too much, to furnish them with comforts and a home beyond
his means. They should retrench; give up this house that had been so
dear to both, sink their pride; face life afresh on a lower level and
with humbler eyes. The fateful topic, long imprisoned in their anxious
looks, was forced to their lips at last. For the first time in his
wife’s knowledge Oswald Holmroyd buried his head in his hands with a
dreadful gesture of despair and told her: “God forgive me Margaret. We
can’t go on like this. I am a failure. Help me to face it.”
Who could have helped him better? Here was the true wife for the hour of
trouble; the help meet for man. If she had once doubted him as he begged
to be doubted he might (who knows) have suffered his defeat more easily.
But she never doubted; she never accused. The faith that she had in him
cut deeper than reproaches. It was the world’s fault (she said) not his.
But the time would come (she pledged her word) ... the time was coming.
All too true. The time was coming indeed, more quickly than either of
them knew. It was not the first time that Death had rapped at the door
of Oswald Holmroyd’s life, and to that earlier summons charity might
attribute not unjustly all those latter misfortunes that the architect
charged against his own disposition, for he never regained ground after
that first illness. Neither of them had been forgetful of the dreadful
promissory note impending. But they had tried, both, to believe the bill
of infinite renewal. And because it was not pressed upon their notice
with the regularity of those other and earthly bills they dared to think
at last their creditor indulgent or the liability annulled. Death is
such an unmethodical creditor, to be sure, who, presenting his account
for instant settlement and terrifying the wretched client almost to the
point of payment, will waive the claim for years. But this time the
debtor entertained no doubt that the debt was to be collected. Death’s
call, at such a moment,--disclosing a visage not much darker than life’s
own--might be considered even opportune; a refuge from his own
reproaches and an escape from all enemies. Death, in this selfish guise,
revolted him. “I feel such a coward,” he told his wife, “to leave you at
a time like this.”
For her this speech, monstrously distorted through the tears with which
she looked back on it, presented always the blurred gigantic outlines of
an epic. Here was death rapping at the door; beneath, at the street
corner and all around, those other creditors planned and whispered. And
she, defending the stricken man, strove with all the love within her to
overcome his adversaries--even death--and free the citadel from its
investment. She failed, of course. Death is no respecter of love,
courage or womankind. And creditors are creditors. However much the
gravity of Oswald Holmroyd’s condition might be concealed from
friends--always scrupulous respecters of a trouble likely to make
demands on them--from these it could not be hid. From lip to lip the
rumour spread. Specialists had been consulted. Oswald Holmroyd’s state
of health was critical for all parties concerned. Another creditor was
in the field. A meeting without delay must be arranged. Some settlement
must be arrived at.
The meeting was arranged, that took place (out of regard for his
condition) in the dying man’s dining-room, where wrapped in his
dressing-gown with a shawl round his shoulders and propped in an arm
chair the dying man awaited it. Never would his widow forget that
assemblage of dark-faced men that gathered about the house in twos and
threes, short of the appointed hour, and made one ringing of the bell
admit them all. She watched them from the curtained fastness of her
bedroom window, with a rage at heart. Love is so illogical, so partizan,
that it never once occurred to her to consider these as fellow creatures
animated (conceivably) by a love not less intense or illogical than her
own, which led them here in pursuit of their rights for the defence of
homes as dear to them as this to her that their entry threatened.
When the last of them had been admitted, and the preliminary coughs and
shuffling of feet had sunk into a silence that seemed to suffocate the
very heart of the house, she stole downstairs and took her station by
the door,--to bear her share of suffering with Him; to clasp her hands
and watch and guard. At first the voices, subdued with consciousness of
the disadvantage under which they laboured in presence of one so
obviously stricken, rose no higher than a murmur. But after awhile, when
the spectacle of the sick man had lost its first impressive novelty, and
a sufficient consideration seemed (for all practical purposes) to have
been paid him, a warmer current crept into the tones of speech. Here and
there voices rose abruptly above the level of other voices, as if
impatient of the arbitrary limits within which their common grievance
was confined. One such voice--a soulless, toneless, grudging,
disputative voice, surmounted the murmur from time to time as if
actuated by intent to pitch the proper note of acrimony for the meeting.
Its mere inflection, aiming to accuse the sick man in his chair, smote
her solicitude across the lips, and made her draw sharp breath with a
gasp of pain. More than once, agitated by a surging impulse to rescue
her loved one from his martyrdom, she threw out her hand towards the
door. She heard the tired accents of her husband’s voice, and the
accents of this other voice that negatived or scorned it, and mingled
voices contending among themselves, and the sound of hortatory knuckles
rapped upon the table. And regardless of the promise given to her
husband, her outraged love could no longer be denied. Without reason,
without warning, driven solely by the power of her woman’s impulse, she
turned the handle of the door and made herself an active partner in his
shame.
Her entrance, during one short moment, struck all this animation to
stone. She had a perception--too instantaneously vivid, like the
lightning flash, for her startled senses to register--of faces curiously
turned, of figures seated and statuesquely standing, of arms extended,
of a table littered with hands and papers, of a meeting transfixed in
the supreme instant of intensity. At that, the force which had impelled
her thus far failed. Her eyes sought and fastened on the figure of her
husband, whose lips shaped her name reproachfully: “Margaret!” From him
she turned her gaze again upon his persecutors.
“Please.... O! please,” she begged with a voice of shocked entreaty. “My
husband is....” “Dying,” truth might have added. “Dying” was the
dreadful word she stopped at, the word her helpless eyes confessed to
them. “My husband is ... seriously ill” she said instead. And obeying
the dictate of a sudden tenderness that burned almost to ferocity in its
desire to share his martyrdom, and prove to these hard faced men her
husband’s worth, she passed all swiftly to his side, drew his head into
the protection of her arms, and kissed him.
2
More dreadful than his death were the mocking obsequies and bitter days
that followed. While that serene countenance still shone from its
pillow her security seemed unassailed. Here, with her beloved dead in
the pure atmosphere of perfect sorrow, she felt raised above all reach
or soil of earth. From the world’s petty frets and cares; from ignoble
griefs and mean anxieties, she arose in company with the dead to this
impenetrable halting place betwixt the grave and heaven. For three days,
undying, she knew death; tasted its sweetness and tranquillity.
All this the funeral destroyed, rending pious illusion with the rough
hand of reality. The body, so passionately guarded, must be given up at
last; this fine sorrow must suffer admixture with coarse and worldly
impurities; with the muffled tramp of undertakers’ men; with the
creaking hearse, the oscillating coaches; the long, interminable
progress through Clothton’s busy streets--brimming with laughter and
animation, prying curiosity or stolid disregard--into the dismal area
slowly reached, whose heart was a minute-beating bell; where, beneath
the inken tower of a sooty church, amid a congregation of soot-blackened
tombstones, his last home yawned for Oswald Holmroyd at the foot of an
untidy mound of yellow clay.
To the mercies of this sacred place, wrapped in the mantle woven from
the belchings of a thousand chimneys, heart-rent and reluctant she left
her dead. Reality, doffing his specious habiliments of woe as utterly as
the sexton did, stood in readiness to remind her of her obligations to
an altered world. The mourning coach, rolling on its too responsive
springs, cast aside all pretence of consideration for wounded feelings.
Freed from the obstruction of a hearse it bowled homeward with the gay
inconsequence of a hackney cab. The uplifted blinds admitted a profane
and staring light into the so-recent sanctuary of sorrow, and revealed
its soulless void. Voices, that had for these three bygone days been
murmurous, mere attenuated shadows of themselves, became voices once
again, impinging too hard upon the flinching ear of trouble. Everything
that had made death bearable, or sorrow sacred, Reality removed. These
were mere drapery for the dead (Reality reminded her). To-day there was
no dead to be considered. No corpse availed her now. She was alone. Hard
facts, not sacred visions, confronted her.
She was Oswald Holmroyd’s widow, and the lesson of his death was wasted
on her, for she was very proud. Pride had been in large degree the
secret of her husband’s unsuccess. Pride had killed him. The pride that
reposes too confidently on its virtue like a strong man on his strength;
that thinks sheer merit should succeed; that will not use its elbows to
assist ability, or push when pushed in turn. Out of stern duty to the
insolvent dead must she be doubly independent now. She asked no aid of
charity. Her children were her own children. She should delegate to none
their care and love. Such independence was very reassuring to relatives
and friends, whom it enabled to take credit for an aid rejected, and to
retire with the most praiseworthy forebodings, submitting to a woman’s
foolish obstinacy that nothing short of the gentlest persuasion could
have overcome. Nor did her independence stop short of taking charity
alone. It went to lengths that caused her late husband’s lawyers to
shake their heads and show a very laudable concern for this misguided
creature whose quixotic duty sought to rise superior to the law. The law
had been framed, they wisely pointed out, for just such contingencies as
hers. Oswald Holmroyd’s creditors would benefit under the law to the
precise extent that the law allowed them,--which (though they could not
yet commit themselves to say for certain) might conceivably amount to
ten shillings or twelve and sixpence in the pound. Since her late
husband’s creditors were prepared to take advantage of the legal
position so far as it affected them, surely it was for her to do no
less.
But pride would not listen to such advocacy. Her senseless loyalty to
the dead insisted on making his debts, like his faults and weaknesses,
her own. The memory of that dreadful toneless voice, monotonizing its
reproaches in the dead man’s dining-room, stung self-respect to madness.
Those dwindling hundreds of surviving pounds--the last remnants of her
own small fortune, too sadly drawn upon in recent months--must lend
their aid to free the dead man’s name from the least whisper of
insinuation. She would take shelter behind none of the law’s invidious
distinctions. Into their lives no division had ever entered. He and she
had been but one. Their joys, their sorrows, hopes and fears and
consolations--all were shared. His defamation was her shame. She would
not hide behind a debt-dishonoured grave. To the last pound they should
be paid, some day, these dues, if God but gave her life and strength.
And so her pride prevailed, and the thin lips of the law, that a satiric
faint smile frosted at the edges, deferred to this perverse acceptance
of needless obligations, saying: “If she wished it so, Mrs. Holmroyd.”
And she wished it so. And it was so.
And when the last dread formalities of death and debit had been
confronted, Oswald Holmroyd’s widow took her two children by the hand
and turned her back on all that earth held dearest to her.
The act seemed like desertion of the dead. But there was no alternative.
A hundred reasons rent her heart and strengthened her resolve. The very
friends that might have helped necessity offered a stumbling block to
pride. So long as she remained in Clothton would she perpetuate a living
memorial to his failure. It could not be. Her pride and love were all
in conflict; each cancelling the other. She must go where humility might
be free. Where love might sink upon its knees, if need were, on any
service consecrate to him.
3
Through every act of woman’s life there flows a hidden stream of
instinct whose winding course the footsteps of her conduct follow. Her
acknowledged reasons are but the straws that float upon it, marking a
current beyond their guidance or control; a current that gives direction
to her logic, and force to her convictions, flowing uninterrupted from
the primal source of her sex.
So, the reasons that led Mrs. Holmroyd to Daneborough were, in man’s
conception of the term, no reasons. For she knew little of this quiet
market town beyond its name. But the name attracted her. Once, indeed,
in his latter moments of despondency her husband had inclined to utter
it, saying that this place (perhaps; who knows ...) might have served
them better than grimy Clothton. Other reasons too there were, all of
them drawing hallowed authority from death. An old, well-trusted servant
in her mother’s days had come from Daneborough, or near it, returning
ultimately to her native place to die. Now, by that communicable grief
that holds out hands to every other grief, and kindles tapers of
affection above remote and long forgotten graves, the feeble glimmer
from this distant tomb assumed a brightness almost stellar in its
comfort. Those lips unsealed from their long slumber spoke again to Mrs.
Holmroyd as they had familiarly spoken in earlier days. Led by such
unexceptional woman’s reasons, therefore, she brought her family to
Daneborough.
At first she took refuge in apartments, till sorrow should be weaned;
till it should be made conversant with its altered whereabouts, and
learn the character and lineaments of the strange place from which its
living must henceforth be won. These rooms were in the Horse
Green--which is the open space abhorrent to maternity when Daneborough’s
horse fairs are being held, and quadrupeds with malice in their rolling
eyeballs and puffed nostrils, and murder in their iron heels, thunder
riotously up and down like hurricanes on four legs, attached to pigmy
grooms by precarious headropes, threatening the brains of infancy. For
anybody but Sorrow, with two small children to support, these
rooms--albeit small--might have been comfortable enough, for only
infrequent passers-by darkened their flat windows, and across the open
square in front of them stood but the rampart of a stone-coped wall
between the eyes of sorrow and the vista of illimitable green it sighed
for.
But for sorrow these rooms were cramped and hateful. Clean, after their
manner, they might be. Nevertheless, to sensitive nostrils they exhaled
the alien odours of the lodging house: an odour of necessitous stuffs
and hard-used furniture divested of all individuality by years of
loveless service, hinting too dreadfully at her own future still
unperceived and feared. Worst of all--though she knew this not till
later--these rooms were graduates in sorrow like herself. They knew what
it meant to have lost a good husband. Why, to be sure, the very best;
whose virtues had been imposed on, and whose life had been laid low by
qualities which, out of a native gentleness of soul (it seemed) he had
lacked the necessary firmness to subdue. He had been too good to people;
he had studied them too much, and himself too little. These rooms
understood what it was to leave a good home. They had felt the same as
Mrs. Holmroyd when fate summoned them to surrender their lovely large
kitchen and two gas stoves and come here. They understood only too well
what it meant to come down in the world. If their husband had only
listened to the advice they gave him they might have been driving their
pony trap to-day, for it was a good House they had to leave, possessed
of an old established custom, with an off license and an excellent back
door.
One might have thought that sorrow, companioned by a sorrow so identical
and sisterly, should have found a well of healing in this providential
place. But no. As though sickened with the proffer of a sustenance too
familiar, her soul revolted. Sorrow possesses a religion of its own.
That her dead husband should be reduced to partake of God’s hospitality
in company with a promiscuous gathering of eleventh-hour repentants,
affronted her faith. Surely there must be differentiations even in the
guest house of God.
At base, perhaps, the matter was no more than the competitive jealousy
of widowhood in regard to the respective excellencies of dead husbands;
one of whom advocated the champion claims by assertion, the other by a
shocked and shrinking reticence. But here, at least, she could no longer
stay. The licensed victualler committed to the cemetery more than twenty
years before she rose up to make this transitory home untenable for a
husband so beloved as hers.
And then, too, she suffered a soul’s hunger for some place particular to
her own loves and hopes and doubts and sorrows, that she might
consecrate with the hallowed name of home. Can it be conceived in these
enlightened days, when woman has been educated to consider Home as part
of her martyrdom--can it be conceived with what passionate longing the
mother of Oswald fought to gain freedom from the odious bondage of
publicity, even in so pedestrian a place as Daneborough, and gather
round herself and children once again the pure untroubled ether of a
home?
By such emotions animated at last she came to choose the house in
Springbank Gardens that we have already seen by night. Not that
Daneborough was for ever wrapped in mist or municipal fog. By day the
Gardens--that at an earlier age were said to have been beautiful enough,
but that the incursions of successive hordes of builders had driven into
servitude behind brick walls,--shewed a not uncheerful face to the
enquiring sun. Where Mrs. Holmroyd dwelt the houses were of three
storeys, single-fronted. Higher up the street they dispensed with a
story, and the bay window of the front room receded into a flat and
inconspicuous sash. In one of these latter, by rights, she should have
been. These were the houses (her prudence told her) meet for sorrow such
as hers. But still the influence of early training clung about her, and
impeded her actions like a wet skirt. Pride was yet recalcitrant. It
stooped a little to necessity, but would not kneel. Those womanly and
worthless reasons, thronged with memory and surgent with emotion, rushed
up to oppose reality. A dreadful optimism persisted through all she did.
She must not choose a house too modest or too small. The handicap of
such a dwelling-place might prove too heavy for her children. At all
costs she must strive to keep before their eyes the memory and standard
of that better, lovelier life from which (but for a while) they were
exiled; of that best of fathers lost to them.
So the house in Springbank Gardens was chosen with the energy of fear,
lest the precarious white paper, pressed like a wan forehead against the
uncurtained window-pane, might vanish ghostly on a sudden and leave them
homeless yet again. Out of the cherished wreckage of the old home was
this new home made; from the familiar furniture of her girlhood’s days,
pensioned by love when Oswald Holmroyd offered her his heart. The Piano
on which she had practised so many wretched, happy hours as a girl. The
cradle of mahogany in which her mother and her mother’s mother had
rocked in infancy, and she in turn; and both her children after her. The
old bureau belonging to her grandfather, and those Victorian ornaments
devoid of any value outside the market of affection that had been
relegated to a pious limbo at Clothton and were now restored, with tears
of reconciliatory joy, to the intimate bosom of the new life.
True, in the first revulsive throes of pride she had talked of
sacrificing even these, averring she would take nothing from a home
which was in substance hers no longer. But after the first paroxysm of
her pride more temperate counsels had prevailed. The law, if
occasionally it oppress, does sometimes succour. And if the legal
confidant of her dead husband charged--as to the last unwavering six and
eightpence he ultimately did--for such service as legal skill could
render to Oswald Holmroyd’s widow, it was to him at least she owed the
restoration of this precious furniture. For he had said: “I think you
are making a great mistake, Mrs. Holmroyd. Why should you sacrifice your
own property of such trifling financial consequence to the estate, and
of such sentimental value to yourself, when there is no need to do so?”
The presence of these familiar and treasured things--as we may be sure
so astute and versed a lawyer must in his legal wisdom have
foreseen--helped to fortify his client; to make the strange walls
beneath their strange crude wallpapers bearable. At least, life was not
altogether broken; not altogether severed from the sacred past. These
old things reconciled her to the new. In course of time they would
transmit their quality to the unfamiliar features of the house and
permeate all its spaces with the spirit of intimacy and love.
4
The new home at length completed, she turned her energies towards the
new life. It dismayed her.
For she had believed, when she broke free of Clothton, her chiefest
difficulty was escaped. She had believed that Clothton’s bricks and
mortar and busy streets, its friends and memories and deterrent prides
were the true realities contesting purpose. Coming to Daneborough, her
love--it seemed to her, for those dear sakes involved--was capable of
any sacrifice, was capable of doing anything. But now she was here; now
she had made remote acquaintance with the human elements to be
encountered: the eyes to be endured, the lips to suffer, the suspicions
to wince under--she realized what philosophers of the practical school
have long ago acknowledged: that Anything is Nothing. In the struggle
for a livelihood gentlefolk with fine feelings suffer a heavy handicap
against ungentle folk without. The willing doer of Anything is at a
discount, pushed aside by the hardened specialists in Something whom no
shame deters. And doubly does afflicted widowhood stand at a
disadvantage before the world. Widows with encumbrance, in reduced
circumstances, are notoriously to be apprehended, as all well-wishers
will allow. Especially in the first year of their widowhood does it
behove the cautious to beware. They darken the doorway; they suffocate a
room; the odour of their weeds is left behind them when they go, a
depressing atmosphere of tears and sooty crape and deathbeds.
O, she was aware, this widow, in what small repute her state was held.
She had herself--now God forgive her--in better days lent doubtful ear
to pleas of suppliant widowhood, divided betwixt pity and suspicion.
To-day she was become the thing she judged. Distressed gentility,
offering vague service, inspired not confidence but doubt. She must
pursue a firmer course than that; take up a bolder attitude. The
inspiration followed on resolve. She would inaugurate a school.
Yes. A school. Not a pretentious school, straining the sinews of her
purse and knowledge. A small and manageable school at first, till
learning found its feet. Here was an enterprise not unbecoming in a
lady, susceptible, even, of a certain dignity. Her very widowhood,
indeed,--although she shrank from putting so exalted an estate to
profit--should be of value to her here, affording anxious parenthood a
surety of her seriousness in the supervision of youth.
Trepid, and with an anxious heart, she set about her task. To some, such
labour had been light enough; to her, it cannot be described how onerous
it was. In one regard, indeed, it was a sort of death she underwent,
that all her vital processes resisted. Before she could be reborn to the
new life she must first die to the old. She died at last, expiring on a
selected doorstep, before the eyes of her two children.
Painters, poets, philosophers and theologians of all ages have depicted
death with the gusto for a topic to their liking. Generations of
writers, being happily at the time alive, have described the experience
of dissolution with such circumstance and detail as would convince the
dead, were the dead only open to conviction. The majority of these have
agreed to make Death terrible. In this, perhaps, they follow a wise
instinct, for if Death be not terrible, what is he? A mere ethical
nonentity, indeed, to be scorned by adults and flouted by children.
There is, to be sure, an increasing company of writers who, for some
reason, conspire to regard Death as a sort of super-sentimental tax
collector, who comes with soft music, wreathed in persuasive smiles as
beautiful as seven and sixpenny chaplets, to collect the earthly imposts
due to heaven. He is conceived so gentle that little children, unafraid,
take him by the hand. Old people, at the sound of his footsteps, sit up
eagerly in bed to greet him. Let these two schools dispute among
themselves. If Mrs. Holmroyd’s experience is anything for living people
to go by, then is Death indeed a most prodigious thing. She surged up to
the house door on a tidal wave of blood, that seemed for the moment as
if it had force enough to flood her to the very gates of heaven. Then,
as her fingers sought and found the bell, the tide relapsed and left her
impotent and stranded, the victim of a violent tinnitus as if a hundred
sanctus bells were ringing in her brain. The world about her reeled and
swam. This was death at last. No mere matter of wills and won’ts, of
likings or dislikes, but the inexorable Must that puts courage and
cowardice on one common footing. The door of the new world burst open.
The old life was dead. Her children, watching hand in hand, saw their
mother engulfed in this strange house, withdrawn from sight as utterly
as if the Lord had sent a flaming chariot drawn by fiery horses down
from heaven to fetch her.
Yet such is the innocence of youth, and so little effect have the most
prodigious happenings on the untutored mind, that they saw nothing
untoward in their mother’s disappearance. She had merely paid a call and
been admitted by a fresh-cheeked maid in streamers.
5
After this she died many times. She died daily. That there might be no
doubt about her death, no way left open for withdrawal, she took
official leave of life in the columns of the Daneborough Mercury, under
the heading EDUCATION. Thus:--
LADY. (Widow) patient and conscientious. Fond of children and
teaching. Seeks limited number of scholars to educate in small home
school along with own children. (Boy and Girl.) Every care and
attention. Thorough religious instruction. For terms etc. Apply Box
X. Y. Z.
Here was as painful a decease as any that anybody could ask for,
entailing pangs to purse and pride alike. For it meant she must undergo
an odious dissolution behind the gauze blind in the dingy office of the
Daneborough Mercury, and suffer the agony and shame of having her
announcement read aloud, to herself and two attendant advertisers, in
the clerk’s unmodulated voice, as if it were a police charge against
her. The clerk, an adolescent who had apparently overgrown his strength
for deciphering script, stumbled heavily over Mrs. Holmroyd’s
handwriting, asking “Patient and What? Patient and Scientific?” She
corrected him with a flushed face,--“Patient and conscientious ...”
loathing herself and the word that drew such odious notoriety on them
both. “Oh, Conscientious, is it!” decided the clerk, whose critical
faculty thus enlightened showed a contestant disposition. “It looks more
like scientific to me.” And, indeed, saying “Stop a minute. Let’s make
that plain,”--went over the prospective schoolmistress’ imperfect
handwriting with a pencil. That done, he concluded his recital of the
charge, devoid of mercy or of punctuation, and laid down the black-edged
sheet upon the counter at last, the better to take stock of his victim’s
general state of mourning and personal demeanour, asking her with his
eye fixed upon her upturned veil if “she were the Party.” She said she
was. “Six shillings,” said the clerk. “Will you call for them or have
them sent by post?” He referred now to hypothetic replies. She
hesitated. “Postage will be extra” the clerk threw in. She said (on
consideration) she would call. It had shocked her to note the dreadful
havoc wrought in the morale of her purse by the abstraction of six
shillings. Truly, the costs of death are almost prohibitive. And no
letters of condolence acknowledged the obituary notice. She wondered
why. She wondered if she had been wise to emphasize her widowhood, that
dubious state too publicly associated with the distressed disposal of
furs, cutlery, linen underwear and vertical overstrung pianofortes in
ebony and gold. Or if the qualities “patient and conscientious” might
not have been better expressed by “energetic and strict disciplinarian.”
It had been, perhaps, imprudent to introduce so disputable a topic as
religion into her advertisement. But the mischief was done. Nothing
short of another six shillings could undo it. Newspaper defunction
(plainly) was not for such as her. It was an expedient unprofitable and
protracted. Education--like all life’s best and noblest things--was at a
discount: a frail plank to clutch at in the drowning moments of
necessity. Obviously it could not sustain the heavy advertising expenses
that might be justifiable in the case of lodgings (which heaven forbid)
or character delineations from handwriting, or second-hand harmoniums.
It seemed plain she must henceforth repose her hopes exclusively on
doorsteps and bell-pulls.
For such a quest she was but ill-prepared. She lacked the confidence of
the born canvasser. Too many considerations oppressed her, she realized.
Too many obstacles from the standpoint of those on whom she called. She
was too ready to condone excuses; to justify refusal with a smile.
Moreover, she had no system. No system, that is, reducible to any
standard of masculine order. But, sweep this test aside, and she was
actuated in all she did by a system as complex and as baffling as
woman’s own. She never visited the same street on two successive days,
or rang at more than one house in a single row, on a single afternoon.
She showed a woman’s partiality for contradictories; journeyed each day
in a direction diametrically opposite to that pursued the day before.
And far from any attempt to fix her personality on the consciousness of
Daneborough, she deliberately varied her goings and comings, to the end
that she might escape a too continuous publicity. If these houses
requited her human confidence reposed in them and received her kindly,
she raised her veil. Otherwise she kept it lowered, and took her leave
in a crape seclusion without seeing or being seen. And yet, her utter
lack of business aptitude apart, few women were better qualified to
plead. For when her veil was lifted it revealed a singularly sweet and
gentle face; the brows depressed by the weight of recent sorrow; the
eyes perhaps a little weary, as though too tired for laughter; the whole
countenance lit up by a smile like diffused sunlight, that softened and
sweetened it without ever sharpening to that hard and brilliant beam in
which the rays of malice or uncharity begin to glitter. Wherein the
smile interpreted its owner truly. For Mrs. Holmroyd’s nature stopped
short of that assured development which does not scruple to enhance its
stature by mounting on to the depreciated qualities of others. Nor had
nature lent her the voice for saying unkind things. Had such a voice
ever said them they would have been no longer quite unkind.
Timidly she prosecuted the canvass of her little school. At each fresh
door her fears revived; her heart beat heavily beneath her deep black
veil.
Yet the task, so hard at first to set in motion, once moved gathered a
measure of momentum that made it easier. Imperceptibly the system that
her sorrow so resisted, seeing no help in her, inaugurated itself. It
stereotyped the procedure of her calls. It taught her--as it teaches all
who have to live by asking--the comfort of a formula. No longer, in
attendance on the opening of doors, did she look vaguely to the spirit
to lend her words; she had them all rehearsed and ready. Nor did her
formula fail her within doors. This autocrat system, once admitted,
governed her completely; coerced her with phrases that she had scarce
believed her courage capable of uttering. She must apologize for
troubling them at such an inconvenient hour.... But.... And so....
Having to undertake the education of her own two children.... It had
been suggested to her.... That she might accept a small number of young
pupils to share their studies. It would be company for them and added
interest for her. She loved teaching. And children. Her little son was
eleven; her daughter eight. Far too young, she felt, to send to school
just yet. Therefore she had ventured....
Thus the system ran, imposing itself relentlessly upon her so-called
better feelings. For it is only consonant with Mrs. Holmroyd’s character
that the discovery of her growing acceptance of this system should fill
her with concern. She saw in it the ominous break-up of all true
womanhood, of all fine nature. So long as grief remained a dumb and
helpless thing, without leadership or direction, so long was it
hallowed. But when widowhood admitted the dictatorship of worldly
wisdom: when griefs grew practical--what, O! what was likely to become
of character? She feared her own had suffered hurt already. She went so
far as to enquire of her suspected conscience if these daily visits were
being paid out of submission to necessity alone. “Am I,” she asked
herself with pious concern, “Am I growing to like them? Am I being led
by a love of distraction; the curious desire to pry into strange houses;
the secret longing for conversation? By any motive, in a word, except my
duty towards Him and Them?”
It was a question on which she arrived at no definite conclusion--save
to Hope and Trust Not. For one thing, about this time the slowly
ripening fruits of system came to maturity, and all her conscientious
scruples were thrown into confusion by the acquirement of a first pupil.
Such success seemed like a shaft of sunlight divinely sharpened to
pierce sceptic doubt and sanctify courage. Success, whatever may be
alleged against it by reformers and fanatics, has an effect not less
stimulative of faith than of business energy. Within the week Mrs.
Holmroyd’s zeal was rewarded with a second pupil, and before the wave of
uplifted thankfulness had left her, with a third.
It was a school already. Before such a token of prosperity how could she
hesitate longer? Without delay she bought some benches for her school to
sit on, and two scholastic tables of soft white wood. Providence, in a
friendly mood and greatly pleased with Mrs. Holmroyd’s gratitude, guided
her footsteps to the window of a broker’s shop where a glazed and
jaundiced wall-atlas of the ancient world awaited her on a roller with
pink tape, at eighteenpence. Also an imposing ebony ruler somewhat too
heavy for the adroit rapping of knuckles, but useful to point with. A
basketful of scholastic books, graded in size to suit all ages,
completed the bargain. Filled with a new importance Oswald and his
sister took turns at carrying these proud possessions home.
6
Thus the little school was founded. The varnished atlas went upon the
wall in the room on the first floor that overlooked the street. The new
planed benches flanked the two deal tables and contributed the bleakness
apposite to learning.
Here, day by day, from half past nine till twelve, and from two o’clock
till four, Mrs. Holmroyd directed the education of her charges. Of
these, including her own two children, there were a dozen all but one.
They constituted, for the most part, a mixed and sickly lot; the fragile
residuum of families too backward or too delicate for ordinary schools.
There was the little daughter of a confectioner in the Market Square
whose eyes were weak, so that their close application to books was out
of the question, and she must sit stanching them with her handkerchief,
gazing tearfully from her place as if she wept a parent dead and dear.
There was a feeble little fellow, too, the son of a neighbouring
plumber, who had swallowed part of his father’s soldering outfit in
infancy, and forthwith ceased to grow. There was the little daughter of
a nonconformist minister, suffering from a respiratory affection that
to-day would be unhesitatingly identified as Adenoids, who, furnished
with a slate and pencil, was convulsed to the verge of suffocation in
the tracing of a single pothook. Each seemed to suffer from some ailment
or a habit. The manners of most were tainted. They came from homes of
humble commerce and of petty trade, bringing with them their heritage of
congenital idiosyncracies: the shameless sniff, the hiccough unabashed;
an assortment of mannerisms as varied as it was unlovely. Mrs. Holmroyd
feared the influence of all these imperfections on her children--but
what was to be done? Such horrible habits (when providentially there
should be more of them) represented the daily bread for her and hers.
She must not quarrel with the crusts that fed them.
They fed them barely; they did not feed them quite. Twelve scholars all
but one (and two of these her unprofitable own) at thirty shillings a
quarter payable in advance or in arrear, or by arrangement, subject to a
reduction for sisters, brothers, near relatives, or even friends, do not
yield a superabundance. The afflicted offspring of the plumber, made
sickly by the inconstant piece of metal in its fitful travel through his
system, would absent himself at intervals from school. Despite the most
solicitous enquiries on the part of Mrs. Holmroyd, who wasted not a
moment after school was over in calling with her children at the
plumber’s home, these absences (consolidated like the plumber’s
time-sheet) reappeared at pay-day in the guise of a plea for reduction.
Similarly, the eyes of the pastrycook’s daughter which debarred her from
participating to the full extent in the advantages of Mrs. Holmroyd’s
instruction, furnished a tearful reason for rebate. The daughter of the
nonconformist minister alleged the closeness of the schoolroom as a
cause of headache; the nonconformist minister’s wife wondered, in making
reference to the subject, if Mrs. Holmroyd thought her room was really
large enough to serve the cause of education. The cold acquired by
another scholar was charged against the schoolroom’s too prevalent fresh
air. Only widows with two children and no means beyond the margin of a
precarious deposit at the bank can realize the awful responsibilities
incurred by the keeping of a school, where every sniffle overt or
concealed is viewed by apprehension as the possible precursor of an
epidemic calculated to bring scholasticism to ruin; where life’s
edifice, in short, is reared on no surer, stabler foundation that the
whims and healths of fitful children.
Thus was she, by a natural transition, led on to pork pies and sausages.
For it seemed clear that this home could derive no adequate security
from a dozen assorted ailments. Some other method must be thought of.
Her pride must make some further sacrifice if necessary. And as it was
necessary, her pride came down to pork pies and sausages. Not ordinary
pork pies. Not ordinary sausages. But pork pies and sausages such as had
been made in more prosperous days, by the faithful servant of her
girlhood, whose footsteps to Daneborough she had followed. Such pies as
Hannah once had made--if Mrs. Holmroyd could but recapture the
recipe--possessed a soulful flavour, a sanctity of their own. The finest
ingredients--care, skill, love, clean hands and a strict
conscience--were requisite to make them as Hannah used to make them, and
as they should be made. These qualities Mrs. Holmroyd had. Best of all,
the pies might be baked in her own kitchen; in the bosom of her family.
Composed faithfully to formula, and offered tentatively to the world at
first through the medium of her little school, within a month Mrs.
Holmroyd’s pies and sausages had achieved at least a minor reputation.
Every Friday evening when her scholars were disbanded for the week, and
the spirit of learning in the deserted schoolroom drew the mantle of
intensest silence about her shoulders and subsided into academic
abstraction, the kitchen fire was coaxed to glow.
And every Friday, tea being over, the little Oswald donned his cap and
gloves, and, when the dark nights needed--which, to his mother’s anxious
heart in the variable pork-pie season they generally did--his overcoat
and knitted muffler, and made the round of all their customers, filled
with manly self-importance and many fears.