"For 'tis a chronicle of day by day."
_The Tempest_.
About this time Jean wrote a letter to David at Oxford. It is wonderful
how much news there is when people write every other day; if they wait
for a month there is nothing that seems worth telling.
Jean wrote:
" ... You have been away now for four days, and we still miss you badly.
Nobody sits in your place at the table, and it gives us such a horrid
bereaved feeling when we look at it. Mhor was waiting at the gate for
the post yesterday and brought your letter in in triumph. He was
particularly interested in hearing about your scout, and has added his
name to the list he prays for. You will be glad to hear that he has got
over his prejudice against going to heaven. It seems it was because
someone told him that dogs couldn't go there, and he wouldn't desert
Micawber--Peter, in other words. Jock has put it right by telling him
that the translators of the Bible probably made a slip, and Mhor now
prays earnestly every night: 'Let everyone in The Rigs go to heaven,'
hoping thus to smuggle in his dear companion.
"It is an extraordinary thing, but almost the very minute you left
Priorsford things began to happen.
"I told you in the note I wrote the day you left that Bella Bathgate's
lodger had arrived and that I had seen her, but I didn't realise then
what a difference her coming would make to us. I never knew such a
friendly person; she comes in at any sort of time--after breakfast, a
few minutes before luncheon, for tea, between nine and ten at night. Did
I tell you her name is Pamela Reston, and her brother, who seems to be
ranging about India somewhere, is Lord Bidborough ('A lord-no-less,' as
Mrs. M'Cosh would say). She calls him Biddy, and seems devoted to him.
"Although she is horribly rich and an 'honourable,' and all that sort of
thing, she isn't in the least grand. She never impresses one with her
opulence as, for instance, Mrs. Duff-Whalley does. Her clothes are
beautiful, but so much a part of her personality that you never think of
them. Her pearls don't hit you in the face as most other people's do.
Because she is so unconscious of them, I suppose. I think she is lovely.
Jock says she is like a greyhound, and I know what he means--it is the
long, swift, graceful way she has of moving. She says she is forty. I
always thought forty was quite old, but now it seems to me the very
prettiest age. Age doesn't really matter at all to people who have got
faces and figures and manners like Pamela Reston. They will always make
whatever age they are seem the perfect age.
"I do wonder what brings her to Priorsford! I rather think that having
been all her life so very 'twopence coloured' she wants the 'penny
plain' for a change. Perhaps that is why she likes The Rigs and us.
There is no mistake about our 'penny-plainness'--it jumps to the eye!
"I am just afraid she won't stay very long. There are so many pretty
little houses in Priorsford, and so many kind and forthcoming
landladies, it was bad luck that she should choose Hillview and Bella
Bathgate. Bella is almost like a stage-caricature of a Scotswoman, so
dour she is and uncompromising and she positively glories in the drab
ugliness of her rooms. Ugliness means to Bella respectability; any
attempt at adornment is 'daft-like.'
"Pamela (she has asked me to call her that) trembles before her, and
that makes Bella worse. She wants someone to stand up to her, to laugh
at her grimness; she simply thinks when Pamela is charming to her that
she is a poor creature.
"She is charming to everyone, this lodger of Bella's. Jock and Mhor and
Mrs. M'Cosh are all at her feet. She brings us books and papers and
chocolates and fruit, and makes us feel we are conferring the favour by
accepting them. She is a real charmer, for when she speaks to you she
makes you feel that no one matters to her but just you yourself.
And she is simple (or at least appears to be); she hasn't that
Now-I-am-going-to-be-charming manner that is so difficult to bear. It is
such fun talking to her, for she is very--pliable I think is the word I
want. Accustomed to converse with people who constantly pull one up
short with an 'Ah, now I don't agree,' or 'There, I think you are quite
wrong,' it is wonderfully soothing to discuss things with someone who
has the air of being convinced by one's arguments. It is weak, I know,
but I'm afraid I agree with Mrs. M'Cosh, who described a friend as 'a
rale nice buddy. She clinks wi' every word ye say.'
"I am thinking to myself how Great-aunt Alison would have dreaded
Pamela's influence. She would have seen in her the personification of
the World, the Flesh, and the Devil--albeit she would have been much
impressed by her long descent: dear Aunt Alison.
"All the same, Davie, it is odd what an effect one's early training has.
D'you remember how discouraged G.-A. Alison was about our
levity--especially mine? She once said bitterly that I was like the
ell-woman--hollow--because I laughed in the middle of the Bible lesson.
And how antiquated and stuffy we thought her views, and took pleasure in
assuring ourselves that we had got far beyond them, and you spent an
evening tea-less in your room because you said you would rather be a
Buddhist than a Disruption Worthy--do you remember that?
"Yes, but Great-aunt Alison had builded better than she knew. When
Pamela laughs 'How Biblical!' or says in her pretty, soft voice that
our great-aunt's religion must have been a hard and ugly thing, I get
hot with anger and feel I must stick unswervingly to the antiquated
views. Is it because poor Great-aunt isn't here to make me? I don't
know.
"Mhor is really surprisingly naughty. Yesterday I heard angry shouts
from the road, and then I met Mhor sauntering in, on his face the
seraphic expression he wears when some nefarious scheme has prospered,
and in his hand the brass breakfast kettle. He had been pouring water on
the passers-by from the top of the wall. 'Only,' he explained to me, 'on
the men who wore hard black hats, who could swear.'
"I told him the police would probably visit us in the course of the
afternoon, and pointed out to him how ungentleman-like was his
behaviour, and he said he was sorry; but I'm afraid he will soon think
of some other wickedness.
"He thinks he can do anything he hasn't been told not to do, but how
could I foresee that he would want to pour water on men with hard black
hats, capable of swearing?
"I had almost forgotten to tell you, an old man came yesterday and
wanted to see over the house. You can imagine what a scare I got--I made
sure he wanted to buy it; but it turned out that he had lived at The
Rigs as a boy, and had come back for old sake's sake. He looked ill and
rather shabby, and I don't believe life had been very good to him. I did
want to try and make up a little, but he was difficult. He was staying
at the Temperance, and it seemed so forlorn that he should have no one
of his own to come home to. He didn't look as if anybody had ever made a
fuss of him. I asked him to stay with us for a week, but he wouldn't. I
think he thought I was rather mad to ask him, and Pamela laughed at me
about it.... She laughs at me a good deal and calls me a
'sentimentalist.' ...
"There is the luncheon bell.
"We are longing for your letter to-morrow to hear how you are settling
down. Mrs. M'Cosh has baked some shortbread for you, which I shall post
this afternoon.
"Love from each of us, and Peter.--Your
"JEAN."