The idea that perhaps after all she had made a Great Mistake, the
Mistake of her Life it might be, was quite firmly established in its
place among all the other ideas in Marjorie's mind by the time she had
dressed next morning. Subsequent events greatly intensified this
persuasion. A pair of new stockings she had trusted sprang a bad hole as
she put them on. She found two unmistakable bills from Oxbridge beside
her plate, and her father was "horrid" at breakfast.
Her father, it appeared, had bought the ordinary shares of a Cuban
railway very extensively, on the distinct understanding that they would
improve. In a decent universe, with a proper respect for meritorious
gentlemen, these shares would have improved accordingly, but the weather
had seen fit to shatter the wisdom of Mr. Pope altogether. The sugar
crop had collapsed, the bears were at work, and every morning now saw
his nominal capital diminished by a dozen pounds or so. I do not know
what Mr. Pope would have done if he had not had his family to help him
bear his trouble. As it was he relieved his tension by sending Theodore
from the table for dropping a knife, telling Rom when she turned the
plate round to pick the largest banana that she hadn't the self-respect
of a child of five, and remarking sharply from behind the _Times_ when
Daffy asked Marjorie if she was going to sketch: "Oh, for God's sake
don't _whisper!_" Then when Mrs. Pope came round the table and tried to
take his coffee cup softly to refill it without troubling him, he
snatched at it, wrenched it roughly out of her hand, and said with his
mouth full, and strangely in the manner of a snarling beast: "No' ready
yet. Half foo'."
Marjorie wanted to know why every one didn't get up and leave the room.
She glanced at her mother and came near to speaking.
And very soon she would have to come home and live in the midst of this
again--indefinitely!
After breakfast she went to the tumbledown summer-house by the duckpond,
and contemplated the bills she had not dared to open at table. One was
boots, nearly three pounds, the other books, over seven. "I _know_
that's wrong," said Marjorie, and rested her chin on her hand, knitted
her brows and tried to remember the details of orders and deliveries....
Marjorie had fallen into the net prepared for our sons and daughters by
the delicate modesty of the Oxbridge authorities in money matters, and
she was, for her circumstances, rather heavily in debt. But I must admit
that in Marjorie's nature the Oxbridge conditions had found an eager and
adventurous streak that rendered her particularly apt to these
temptations.
I doubt if reticence is really a virtue in a teacher. But this is a
fearful world, and the majority of those who instruct our youth have the
painful sensitiveness of the cloistered soul to this spirit of terror in
things. The young need particularly to be told truthfully and fully all
we know of three fundamental things: the first of which is God, the
next their duty towards their neighbours in the matter of work and
money, and the third Sex. These things, and the adequate why of them,
and some sort of adequate how, make all that matters in education. But
all three are obscure and deeply moving topics, topics for which the
donnish mind has a kind of special ineptitude, and which it evades with
the utmost skill and delicacy. The middle part of this evaded triad was
now being taken up in Marjorie's case by the Oxbridge tradespeople.
The Oxbridge shopkeeper is peculiar among shopkeepers in the fact that
he has to do very largely with shy and immature customers with an
extreme and distinctive ignorance of most commercial things. They are
for the most part short of cash, but with vague and often large
probabilities of credit behind them, for most people, even quite
straitened people, will pull their sons and daughters out of altogether
unreasonable debts at the end of their university career; and so the
Oxbridge shopkeeper becomes a sort of propagandist of the charms and
advantages of insolvency. Alone among retailers he dislikes the sight of
cash, declines it, affects to regard it as a coarse ignorant truncation
of a budding relationship, begs to be permitted to wait. So the
youngster just up from home discovers that money may stay in the pocket,
be used for cab and train fares and light refreshments; all the rest may
be had for the asking. Marjorie, with her innate hunger for good fine
things, with her quite insufficient pocket-money, and the irregular
habits of expenditure a spasmodically financed, hard-up home is apt to
engender, fell very readily into this new, delightful custom of having
it put down (whatever it happened to be). She had all sorts of things
put down. She and the elder Carmel girl used to go shopping together,
having things put down. She brightened her rooms with colour-prints and
engravings, got herself pretty and becoming clothes, acquired a fitted
dressing-bag already noted in this story, and one or two other trifles
of the sort, revised her foot-wear, created a very nice little
bookshelf, and although at times she felt a little astonished and scared
at herself, resolutely refused to estimate the total of accumulated debt
she had attained. Indeed until the bills came in it was impossible to do
that, because, following the splendid example of the Carmel girl, she
hadn't even inquired the price of quite a number of things....
She didn't dare think now of the total. She lied even to herself about
that. She had fixed on fifty pounds as the unendurable maximum. "It is
less than fifty pounds," she said, and added: "_must_ be." But something
in her below the threshold of consciousness knew that it was more.
And now she was in her third year, and the Oxbridge tradesman, generally
satisfied with the dimensions of her account, and no longer anxious to
see it grow, was displaying the less obsequious side of his character.
He wrote remarks at the bottom of his account, remarks about settlement,
about having a bill to meet, about having something to go on with. He
asked her to give the matter her "early attention." She had a
disagreeable persuasion that if she wanted many more things anywhere she
would have to pay ready money for them. She was particularly short of
stockings. She had overlooked stockings recently.
Daffy, unfortunately, was also short of stockings.
And now, back with her family again, everything conspired to remind
Marjorie of the old stringent habits from which she had had so
delightful an interlude. She saw Daffy eye her possessions, reflect.
This morning something of the awfulness of her position came to her....
At Oxbridge she had made rather a joke of her debts.
"I'd _swear_ I haven't had three pairs of house shoes," said Marjorie.
"But what can one do?"