(1915)
Of Miss Mary Postgate, Lady McCausland wrote that she was 'thoroughly
conscientious, tidy, companionable, and ladylike. I am very sorry to
part with her, and shall always be interested in her welfare.'
Miss Fowler engaged her on this recommendation, and to her surprise, for
she had had experience of companions, found that it was true. Miss
Fowler was nearer sixty than fifty at the time, but though she needed
care she did not exhaust her attendant's vitality. On the contrary, she
gave out, stimulatingly and with reminiscences. Her father had been a
minor Court official in the days when the Great Exhibition of 1851 had
just set its seal on Civilisation made perfect. Some of Miss Fowler's
tales, none the less, were not always for the young. Mary was not young,
and though her speech was as colourless as her eyes or her hair, she was
never shocked. She listened unflinchingly to every one; said at the end,
'How interesting!' or 'How shocking!' as the case might be, and never
again referred to it, for she prided herself on a trained mind, which
'did not dwell on these things.' She was, too, a treasure at domestic
accounts, for which the village tradesmen, with their weekly books,
loved her not. Otherwise she had no enemies; provoked no jealousy even
among the plainest; neither gossip nor slander had ever been traced to
her; she supplied the odd place at the Rector's or the Doctor's table at
half an hour's notice; she was a sort of public aunt to very many small
children of the village street, whose parents, while accepting
everything, would have been swift to resent what they called
'patronage'; she served on the Village Nursing Committee as Miss
Fowler's nominee when Miss Fowler was crippled by rheumatoid arthritis,
and came out of six months' fortnightly meetings equally respected by
all the cliques.
And when Fate threw Miss Fowler's nephew, an unlovely orphan of eleven,
on Miss Fowler's hands, Mary Postgate stood to her share of the business
of education as practised in private and public schools. She checked
printed clothes-lists, and unitemised bills of extras; wrote to Head and
House masters, matrons, nurses and doctors, and grieved or rejoiced over
half-term reports. Young Wyndham Fowler repaid her in his holidays by
calling her 'Gatepost,' 'Postey,' or 'Packthread,' by thumping her
between her narrow shoulders, or by chasing her bleating, round the
garden, her large mouth open, her large nose high in air, at a
stiff-necked shamble very like a camel's. Later on he filled the house
with clamour, argument, and harangues as to his personal needs, likes
and dislikes, and the limitations of 'you women,' reducing Mary to tears
of physical fatigue, or, when he chose to be humorous, of helpless
laughter. At crises, which multiplied as he grew older, she was his
ambassadress and his interpretress to Miss Fowler, who had no large
sympathy with the young; a vote in his interest at the councils on his
future; his sewing-woman, strictly accountable for mislaid boots and
garments; always his butt and his slave.
And when he decided to become a solicitor, and had entered an office in
London; when his greeting had changed from 'Hullo, Postey, you old
beast,' to Mornin', Packthread,' there came a war which, unlike all wars
that Mary could remember, did not stay decently outside England and in
the newspapers, but intruded on the lives of people whom she knew. As
she said to Miss Fowler, it was 'most vexatious.' It took the Rector's
son who was going into business with his elder brother; it took the
Colonel's nephew on the eve of fruit-farming in Canada; it took Mrs.
Grant's son who, his mother said, was devoted to the ministry; and, very
early indeed, it took Wynn Fowler, who announced on a postcard that he
had joined the Flying Corps and wanted a cardigan waistcoat.
'He must go, and he must have the waistcoat,' said Miss Fowler. So Mary
got the proper-sized needles and wool, while Miss Fowler told the men of
her establishment--two gardeners and an odd man, aged sixty--that those
who could join the Army had better do so. The gardeners left. Cheape,
the odd man, stayed on, and was promoted to the gardener's cottage. The
cook, scorning to be limited in luxuries, also left, after a spirited
scene with Miss Fowler, and took the housemaid with her. Miss Fowler
gazetted Nellie, Cheape's seventeen-year-old daughter, to the vacant
post; Mrs. Cheape to the rank of cook, with occasional cleaning bouts;
and the reduced establishment moved forward smoothly.
Wynn demanded an increase in his allowance. Miss Fowler, who always
looked facts in the face, said, 'He must have it. The chances are he
won't live long to draw it, and if three hundred makes him happy--'
Wynn was grateful, and came over, in his tight-buttoned uniform, to say
so. His training centre was not thirty miles away, and his talk was so
technical that it had to be explained by charts of the various types of
machines. He gave Mary such a chart.
'And you'd better study it, Postey,' he said. 'You'll be seeing a lot of
'em soon.' So Mary studied the chart, but when Wynn next arrived to
swell and exalt himself before his womenfolk, she failed badly in
cross-examination, and he rated her as in the old days.
'You _look_ more or less like a human being,' he said in his new Service
voice. 'You _must_ have had a brain at some time in your past. What have
you done with it? Where d'you keep it? A sheep would know more than you
do, Postey. You're lamentable. You are less use than an empty tin can,
you dowey old cassowary.'
'I suppose that's how your superior officer talks to _you_?' said Miss
Fowler from her chair.
'But Postey doesn't mind,' Wynn replied. 'Do you, Packthread?'
'Why? Was Wynn saying anything? I shall get this right next time you
come,' she muttered, and knitted her pale brows again over the diagrams
of Taubes, Farmans, and Zeppelins.
In a few weeks the mere land and sea battles which she read to Miss
Fowler after breakfast passed her like idle breath. Her heart and her
interest were high in the air with Wynn, who had finished 'rolling'
(whatever that might be) and had gone on from a 'taxi' to a machine more
or less his own. One morning it circled over their very chimneys,
alighted on Vegg's Heath, almost outside the garden gate, and Wynn came
in, blue with cold, shouting for food. He and she drew Miss Fowler's
bath-chair, as they had often done, along the Heath foot-path to look at
the bi-plane. Mary observed that 'it smelt very badly.'
'Postey, I believe you think with your nose,' said Wynn. 'I know you
don't with your mind. Now, what type's that?'
'I'll go and get the chart,' said Mary.
'You're hopeless! You haven't the mental capacity of a white mouse,' he
cried, and explained the dials and the sockets for bomb-dropping till it
was time to mount and ride the wet clouds once more.
'Ah!' said Mary, as the stinking thing flared upward. 'Wait till our
Flying Corps gets to work! Wynn says it's much safer than in the
trenches.'
'I wonder,' said Miss Fowler. 'Tell Cheape to come and tow me home
again.'
'It's all downhill. I can do it,' said Mary, 'if you put the brake on.'
She laid her lean self against the pushing-bar and home they trundled.
'Now, be careful you aren't heated and catch a chill,' said overdressed
Miss Fowler.
'Nothing makes me perspire,' said Mary. As she bumped the chair under
the porch she straightened her long back. The exertion had given her a
colour, and the wind had loosened a wisp of hair across her forehead.
Miss Fowler glanced at her.
'What do you ever think of, Mary?' she demanded suddenly.
'Oh, Wynn says he wants another three pairs of stockings--as thick as we
can make them.'
'Yes. But I mean the things that women think about. Here you are, more
than forty--'
'Forty-four,' said truthful Mary.
'Well?'
'Well?' Mary offered Miss Fowler her shoulder as usual.
'And you've been with me ten years now.'
'Let's see,' said Mary. 'Wynn was eleven when he came. He's twenty now,
and I came two years before that. It must be eleven.'
'Eleven! And you've never told me anything that matters in all that
while. Looking back, it seems to me that _I_'ve done all the talking.'
'I'm afraid I'm not much of a conversationalist. As Wynn says, I haven't
the mind. Let me take your hat.'
Miss Fowler, moving stiffly from the hip, stamped her rubber-tipped
stick on the tiled hall floor. 'Mary, aren't you _anything_ except a
companion? Would you _ever_ have been anything except a companion?'
Mary hung up the garden hat on its proper peg. 'No,' she said after
consideration. 'I don't imagine I ever should. But I've no imagination,
I'm afraid.'
She fetched Miss Fowler her eleven-o'clock glass of Contrexéville.
That was the wet December when it rained six inches to the month, and
the women went abroad as little as might be. Wynn's flying chariot
visited them several times, and for two mornings (he had warned her by
postcard) Mary heard the thresh of his propellers at dawn. The second
time she ran to the window, and stared at the whitening sky. A little
blur passed overhead. She lifted her lean arms towards it.
That evening at six o'clock there came an announcement in an official
envelope that Second Lieutenant W. Fowler had been killed during a trial
flight. Death was instantaneous. She read it and carried it to
Miss Fowler.
'I never expected anything else,' said Miss Fowler; 'but I'm sorry it
happened before he had done anything.'
The room was whirling round Mary Postgate, but she found herself quite
steady in the midst of it.
'Yes,' she said. 'It's a great pity he didn't die in action after he had
killed somebody.'
'He was killed instantly. That's one comfort,' Miss Fowler went on.
'But Wynn says the shock of a fall kills a man at once--whatever happens
to the tanks,' quoted Mary.
The room was coming to rest now. She heard Miss Fowler say impatiently,
'But why can't we cry, Mary?' and herself replying, 'There's nothing to
cry for. He has done his duty as much as Mrs. Grant's son did.'
'And when he died, _she_ came and cried all the morning,' said Miss
Fowler. 'This only makes me feel tired--terribly tired. Will you help me
to bed, please, Mary?--And I think I'd like the hot-water bottle.'
So Mary helped her and sat beside, talking of Wynn in his riotous youth.
'I believe,' said Miss Fowler suddenly, 'that old people and young
people slip from under a stroke like this. The middle-aged feel
it most.'
'I expect that's true,' said Mary, rising. 'I'm going to put away the
things in his room now. Shall we wear mourning?'
'Certainly not,' said Miss Fowler. 'Except, of course, at the funeral. I
can't go. You will. I want you to arrange about his being buried here.
What a blessing it didn't happen at Salisbury!'
Every one, from the Authorities of the Flying Corps to the Rector, was
most kind and sympathetic. Mary found herself for the moment in a world
where bodies were in the habit of being despatched by all sorts of
conveyances to all sorts of places. And at the funeral two young men in
buttoned-up uniforms stood beside the grave and spoke to her afterwards.
'You're Miss Postgate, aren't you?' said one. 'Fowler told me about you.
He was a good chap--a first-class fellow--a great loss.'
'Great loss!' growled his companion. 'We're all awfully sorry.'
'How high did he fall from?' Mary whispered.
'Pretty nearly four thousand feet, I should think, didn't he? You were
up that day, Monkey?'
'All of that,' the other child replied. 'My bar made three thousand, and
I wasn't as high as him by a lot.'
'Then _that's_ all right,' said Mary. 'Thank you very much.'
They moved away as Mrs. Grant flung herself weeping on Mary's flat
chest, under the lych-gate, and cried, '_I_ know how it feels! _I_ know
how it feels!'
'But both his parents are dead,' Mary returned, as she fended her off.
'Perhaps they've all met by now,' she added vaguely as she escaped
towards the coach.
'I've thought of that too,' wailed Mrs. Grant; 'but then he'll be
practically a stranger to them. Quite embarrassing!'
Mary faithfully reported every detail of the ceremony to Miss Fowler,
who, when she described Mrs. Grant's outburst, laughed aloud.
'Oh, how Wynn would have enjoyed it! He was always utterly unreliable at
funerals. D'you remember--' And they talked of him again, each piecing
out the other's gaps. 'And now,' said Miss Fowler, 'we'll pull up the
blinds and we'll have a general tidy. That always does us good. Have you
seen to Wynn's things?'
'Everything--since he first came,' said Mary. 'He was never
destructive--even with his toys.'
They faced that neat room.
'It can't be natural not to cry,' Mary said at last. 'I'm _so_ afraid
you'll have a reaction.'
'As I told you, we old people slip from under the stroke. It's you I'm
afraid for. Have you cried yet?'
'I can't. It only makes me angry with the Germans.'
'That's sheer waste of vitality,' said Miss Fowler. 'We must live till
the war's finished.' She opened a full wardrobe. 'Now, I've been
thinking things over. This is my plan. All his civilian clothes can be
given away--Belgian refugees, and so on.'