John looked across from the mass of papers on his desk to his
father-in-law’s impassive face.
He was a young man with a generous share of self-control, but he could
not help revealing that he was very much moved.
“You can’t really mean, Sir,” he said with a momentary trembling of his
hand, as he turned over the mass of papers, “that _all_ your work is to
be left with me. The reconstruction work as well; that I am to have the
regulation of all this and take the proceeds? It’s a tremendous
future—and a tremendous fortune!”
Mr. Brett lit a cigar in a leisurely way and tilted back his chair to
his favourite angle.
“Yes,” he agreed indifferently, “there’s money in it, there’s most
usually money in what occurs to me, but it ain’t anything to make a fuss
about. Some people breed money, and some people breed dogs. I guess I’m
what you might call a money-fancier. As for those old notes, I took ’em
while I was prowling round this garden and the English Government has
decided it wants to take them up. I made it my condition that you were
to be managing director—that’s all there is to it.
“I sha’n’t be over here any more. I can’t be in two places at once, and
I’ve run that Channel passage during this war as faithfully as if I were
a German submarine, and I guess I’m just about as tired of it as German
submarines are going to be. I’ll get along all right in Paris. Brains
don’t go bankrupt. What I have left will come in mighty useful in
France. France wants new machinery a sight more than you do. She’s
commercially as flat as a plate, but she can be built up and she’s got
to be. There’ll be plenty on the plate before France is through, and I’d
like to be one of the men who put something there. Don’t you worry about
me.”
John drew a deep breath. He could not keep still in his excitement. He
walked up and down the long library at Mambles with his visions hot
before him.
Mr. Brett looked at him with satisfaction. He liked John, and he liked
pleasing him, but he knew that he wasn’t going on pleasing him. He
waited for his bad moment with the same unshaken placidity with which he
waited for his good ones. There was no homely truth of which Mr. Brett
was fonder, or more content to practise, than that of taking the rough
with the smooth.
“If I come to pieces over it,” John demanded, “or if I get cold feet,
can I come over and see you? There’s such a lot of things to plan and
think of—you’ve given me such powers, and the plans themselves are so
big—I almost hesitate to undertake them, and yet I’d rather do it than
anything else in the world!”
“You can come over and see me as long as I’m there,” said Mr. Brett
cautiously. “But you won’t need to. You go into your own brain and pick
at that. You’ve got a-plenty.
“I’ve studied the English mind some, since I’ve been over here, and I
guess I’ve spotted what’s wrong with it. It’s as lazy as a dog! You
don’t use what you’ve got: maybe you’re frightened it would look showy,
maybe you’re so stuck on behaving the way you weren’t made that you’re
afraid your wits will let you down into behaving the way you were made;
but you’ve got wits.
“Look at your navy! When I read your newspapers I could cry. When I talk
to your high-brows I could laugh—and when I hear the muddles your
Government is liable to slide into, I wonder any of you are alive. But
when I look at your navy I see the whole thing as clear as glass. Are
there any folk—even the showiest broker in Wall Street, or the latest
quick-thinking Jap—that acts more like a live wire than the lieutenant
of one of your destroyers? Are there any men who see cooler and clearer
than one of your young admirals? Or I might say, one of your infant
middies—for they’re all as clear-eyed and hard-headed as professional
burglars! No, Sir, you can’t find men in any country quicker or more
spry than your naval officers. And why is it? I figure it out this
way—they got to be. Sea fighting is like operatic singing, you haven’t
one thing to think of, you have half a dozen—pace, sight, signals, men,
guns, the sea. The sea does it. Men need all their sap to face the sea.
You can’t soss down and get into a habit with it. You can’t trust to a
prejudice, you got to change your mind and your behaviour as quick as a
north-east gale.
“Well, John—if a man _can_ do a thing when he’s got to—all you have to
do is to apply the emergency and take away his props.
“I guess that’s all you, or any other Englishman needs. This is a soft
country and there are a lot of props in it for the well-to-do, and there
ain’t many emergencies. So the English have got used to saying, ‘That’ll
do,’ and ‘Don’t bother,’ and ‘It’ll probably come out all right without
much trouble.’ But the war’s taken away some of the props, and it’s
applied a pretty heavy pressure. So I reckon you _can_ do jobs you never
thought of now—and follow trails you never heard of—and I’m banking on
you to do it satisfactorily.”
“Well, I can’t do more than try,” said John reflectively.
“Yes you can,” said Mr. Brett incisively. “You can succeed. I never had
any hankering for an ‘also ran’.”
John laughed and Mr. Brett gave a reluctant smile. Then he said, “And
now, John, there’s one more point we’ve got to go into, and then I think
we’re wound up. I want your help on a point of domestic policy. Before I
leave here I want to be sure of one thing—”
John turned round and faced him attentively.
“Yes, Sir,” he said, “is it about Elise?”
“It has to do with Elise,” said Mr. Brett slowly. “I want your word,
John, never to invite nor to accept the offer of a visit from Hermione.
She has given me already her word that she will not suggest it, nor
accept any such invitation from you or Elise, but Hermione’s words are
apt to be fluid. Facts don’t worry her, and people who ain’t worried by
facts come through their promises like damp through an outside wall.
“Before my mind can be perfectly free I must have a solid word from you,
John—and then I’ll feel all right.”
John flushed painfully.
“I really don’t know, Sir,” he said awkwardly, “that I can agree to give
it. Of course I remember that the first part of Hermione’s visit was not
a success, and it did seem as if Elise was a little overstrained by it.
But I am sure now that all those little difficulties were caused by
Hermione’s very serious ill health. Now that she is so much better, no
one could be a more delightful guest.”
John paused. Mr. Brett regarded him thoughtfully.
“Have you forgotten the lawn-mower, John?” he asked, with a slight lift
of his heavy brows. “Or Bodger? I don’t somehow feel as if they were the
ordinary symptoms of a disease.”
John moved restlessly to the window.
“Hermione is very sensitive,” he said, with his back turned. “She felt
at a great disadvantage when she first came down. She thought I was
prejudiced against her. It is extraordinary how people will
misunderstand each other under those circumstances.”
“Sure,” said Mr. Brett in a low voice. “Folks were made to misunderstand
each other—but as far as I know, they weren’t made to hit out at every
one who don’t take them at their own valuation.”
John let this pass. He did not understand what his father-in-law meant,
but he knew that he did not wish to understand it. He was thinking of
his last talk with Hermione, and their last talk had been an appeal from
Hermione, not to his understanding, but to his emotion, and John did not
find it easy to resist appeals to his emotion.
“It seems to me you are asking a great deal,” he said after a pause,
“and more than I ought to promise—at least without her free consent. If
Hermione wishes me to promise—I will consent to do it, but I couldn’t,
as it were, do it behind her back.”
“You show remarkably good feeling, John,” said Mr. Brett cordially, “and
remarkably poor sense. I’ve often noticed the way those two things hang
together. However, you can send for Hermione and ask her in my presence
what she does wish. I guess I’d rather see for myself how she tackles
the subject. Sometimes it regulates the way a cat jumps if you’re
watching the cat. If you’ll touch the bell we’ll ask Humphreys to let
the Princess know we’d like to see her here.”
John obeyed reluctantly. He felt very up in arms about Hermione: he
would stand by her whatever happened, even if it meant the loss of his
future, but the worst of it was that it would not mean any such
sacrifice and John knew it. Mr. Brett would never recall his
generosities. Somehow or other whether John opposed him or not he would
see that John didn’t lose. It made fighting against Mr. Brett much more
difficult when one realised that he attached no penalties to his
opponent in the hour of defeat. He was not even put out with John for
insisting on the presence of Hermione.
Hermione kept them waiting ten minutes. At the end of that time she
sailed into the library as if she were leading a procession. She looked
every inch a Princess.
She wore a dress of a soft black material wonderfully lightened by
Venetian point lace. Round her neck was a long string of pearls which
fell to her waist.
“I think you want me, Papa,” she said without reproach, but as if it
were strange that she had been sent for, and not sought.
“I can’t say that I do,” said Mr. Brett. “Accurately speaking John wants
you; but I’m an interested party.”
Hermione turned her beautiful lifted head towards John. She smiled at
him, as it is possible that martyrs, if they had time to think of it,
smiled at their rather cowardly fellow Christians who had not joined
them at the stake. John hesitated and stammered. He drew a chair forward
for her, and then stood beside her as if he was there to protect and not
to challenge her.
“Yes,” he confessed, “I do want to ask you something. Your father has
suggested that I should give him a promise from Elise and myself—and I
am not prepared to do so unless I have your consent. He has asked me not
to invite nor to accept a visit from you—I gather for the rest of our
lives.”
Hermione took it wonderfully. She did not lower her raised chin, or
change the benevolent light of her clear grey eyes. She merely looked
from one man to the other. John’s eyes were fixed anxiously upon her
face, but Mr. Brett regarded without concern, but without appreciation,
the points of his patent leather slippers. He did not consider that
English servants understood patent leather.
“For the rest of our lives?” repeated Hermione. Her voice did not break,
but it literally wrung John’s heart.
“You quite understand,” he urged, “that I have made no such promise; it
has only been put to me as a condition of your father’s going with you
to Paris, and what is more, I will not make it without your agreement.”
Hermione rose to her feet, she gave an exquisite gesture of mingled
surrender and protection in the direction of her father’s unresponsive
figure.
“Thank you, John,” she said with heroic fortitude, “for having consulted
me. I don’t think we need go into the painfulness of the question—you
will know, without my speaking of it, what it means to me. I must only
urge that as far as possible Elise is spared; to put such a decision
into her hands would torture her.
“As far as I am concerned the decision is already made. Since Papa makes
it the express condition of our being together, I—consent.”
She turned and without faltering walked towards the door.
John sprang to open it for her, and as she passed out of it, he took one
of her hands in his and kissed it. It seemed to him that he had been
present at the sacrifice of Iphigenia.
He was so moved that he could hardly force himself to return to Mr.
Brett. When he spoke to his father-in-law all the friendliness and
gratitude had gone out of his voice.
“I should like to know, Sir,” he asked coldly, “how I am to explain this
extraordinary arrangement to my wife?”
Mr. Brett raised his eyes and looked at John.
“Well,” he said slowly, “my way would be _not_ to explain it. Half the
trouble in life comes from explanations. When they’re honest they hurt,
and when they’re dishonest, and most explanations are dishonest, they’re
a waste of breath.
“If the question has to come up you can tell Elise that the arrangement
is mine, that you only agreed to it at Hermione’s wish, and that she
only agreed to it in order to succour the declining years of her
hard-hearted old parent. That lets you out, that lets Hermione out—I
guess that’s all that’s necessary.”
“The fact remains,” said John inexorably, “that by your action you
deprive Hermione of her sister’s companionship.”
“Sure, Hermione can’t have us both,” said Mr. Brett with a sudden
chuckle.
“And Elise can’t have you both either,” said John, ignoring his
father-in-law’s untimely mirth.
“It’s wonderful how you put two and two together, John,” said Mr. Brett
mildly. “But don’t you feel too bad about Elise; you can bring her over
to Paris whenever you feel inclined. I don’t want to put up any
unnecessary barriers, and Hermione and I will always be pleased to see
you.”
John was silent. He loved his father-in-law, and he wanted him to
justify himself. He waited expectantly for what Mr. Brett might have to
say. But Mr. Brett made no attempt at self-justification. He too paused
a little, but without expectation, and then he recalled John’s attention
to the question of the new chrysanthemums.
Two days were given over to packing and farewells, then the electric
brougham once more drew up at the door, followed by a luggage cart for
the Princess’s ten boxes, the French maid and Bichette. Bichette’s
increasing clamour almost outbarked the ghost of Bichon, if indeed she
was not privately reinforced by his spiritual tongue.
John and Elise stood at the gate and waved their handkerchiefs until the
electric brougham glided in ease and security out of sight. Mr. Brett
did not wave: he contented himself with a long grave look at Mambles as
if he were running over in his mind some secret inventory. The Princess
and the French maid bowed farewell and all the servants, handsomely
tipped and generously inclined, stood at the windows appreciatively
watching their departure.
“It’s just too wonderful,” said Elise, turning to her husband with
sparkling eyes. “I can hardly believe it—and it’s all due to you!
You’ve brought them together just as I always hoped and prayed you
would, and oh! John, isn’t it too perfectly lovely to think that dear
Papa has _got_ Hermione?”
THE WORM
CHAPTER I
Miss Onoria Strickland lived in a semi-detached villa, and had no
nonsense about her. Many women repose through life upon lesser
attributes, they may have a handsome profile, a gift for putting on
their clothes, a skilful tongue, or a kind heart. But Miss Strickland
found rest in none of these minor alleviations of the spirit; she took
her stand triumphantly upon her direct common sense.
No one could beat her there. “What,” she would ask herself as she came
to any crisis in her life or in the lives of her neighbours, “is the
most sensible thing to do?” And when she had answered this question, she
did it; or in cases where an action of her own was not indicated, she
ordered it to be done by others.
She had lived at Little Ticklington for forty-five years, and all this
time she had had her eyes open and said whatever came into her head,
under the impression that she was expressing a peculiarly pure form of
truth.
Her friends depended upon her and feared her. When they didn’t want to
depend upon her they got out of her way.
Miss Strickland was continually discovering the deceitfulness of human
nature but she never laid her finger upon its cause.
She did not realise that the only way to keep on good terms with an
aggressive personality is by the constant practice of evasion.
Miss Onoria Strickland was an exemplary citizen. She had earned her own
living with talent and success from the age of twenty-one, and she had
been a masterful but helpful daughter to her aged parents. They aged a
little prematurely under this assistance, and died within a year of each
other.
Opinion in Little Ticklington agreed that neither could support the full
weight of Onoria’s attentions without the other.
She nursed them to the last with a rigid application of common sense,
which took the wind out of the local doctor’s sails. There was nothing
left for him to suggest but medicines, and these were ineffectual.
Onoria had never felt lonely during the lifetime of her parents.
She left home at nine o’clock every morning and returned at five o’clock
in the afternoon, except on Saturday, when she came back to lunch.
No one could have had a fuller life; she managed her parents, did the
household accounts, worked in the garden, or took Prendergast for a
walk. Prendergast was a pug dog of a self-centred and exacting nature.
He had been given to Mr. and Mrs. Strickland by an old friend of that
name, and though Onoria had protested against the use of a surname for a
pet dog, as unsuitable and even ridiculous, her father and mother had
insisted querulously and unitedly that they wanted to call the pug
“Prendergast” as a last tribute to their deceased friend; and as they
were at this time feeble, and it was bad for them to insist, Onoria had
wisely let her protest drop.
After her parents’ death, Prendergast became the pivot upon which the
household turned. Onoria was not sensible about Prendergast: she adored
him. He was the one licensed folly of her ordered life.
It must not be supposed that Romance had passed Onoria by.
It had fallen at her feet early in life, and when she discovered how
much nonsense it had about it, she had kicked it ruthlessly away.
No one will ever know why Peter Gubbins worshipped Miss Strickland. He
was a gentle, inoffensive youth, with a weak chin and bottle-neck
shoulders; his strongest tastes were for magazines and barley sugar, and
though he was easily convinced that he was unsuitable, he continued to
worship Onoria in a melancholy but resigned manner for twenty years.
Peter Gubbins was her next-door neighbour, and as the years went on a
certain element of relief mingled with his melancholy.
Miss Strickland had a piercing voice which swept across the garden, over
the wall which divided their retreats; but there was a wall.
Mr. Gubbins, who was extremely fond of poetry, often thought of those
lines in “Maud” which assure her that if she were to pass near the final
resting place of her lover: his “heart would hear her and beat,” had he
“lain for a century dead.” Mr. Gubbins was under the impression that his
own heart would act in a precisely similar manner should Onoria visit
his grave. Mr. Gubbins had a large Tabby cat called Samson, of which he
was inordinately proud.
Samson did not so much return, as passively accept, his master’s nervous
devotion.
He was inconsiderate about sleeping in a basket. Inflexible
arrangements, when they were not his own, galled him; and though he knew
his name perfectly, he had never been known to answer to it, unless he
had reason to believe that fish was at the other end.
Peter Gubbins was very fond of all small and reasonably gentle animals,
and often took Prendergast for a walk if Miss Strickland hadn’t time.
Prendergast accompanied Mr. Gubbins for the sake of the walk, but he
made it perfectly plain from the first (just as Miss Strickland herself
had done) that he thought nothing of Peter Gubbins as a companion.
Mr. Gubbins made himself useful in other ways. He really knew a great
deal more about gardens than Onoria did, and he loved them—under his
breath as it were—because Onoria was always pointing out to him how
much rubbish was talked and written upon the subject of gardens. The
Garden of Eden had started the topic, and no one had been able to let it
alone since.
Peter Gubbins had a private income and wrote occasional articles and
poems for magazines. The articles dealt with sweet peas, on which he was
an expert, and Roman Catholicism, on which he was not, but by dint of
studying the works of ex-nuns and monks, he had arrived at some very
startling theories upon the Roman Catholic religion suitable for very
low church magazines. The poems were on certain aspects of nature which
have unfortunately occurred to other persons in search of poetic
subjects; still they were occasionally published and Mr. Gubbins signed
them “Sirius.” (As he often wrote about stars, and always referred to
them as “bright,” his signature could not have been more appropriate.)
Obviously “Peter Gubbins” applauding the universe would not do.
He never showed the poems to Onoria, but they shared the articles on
Rome, and sometimes Onoria liked them, though she felt them to be too
milk and watery to do real justice to the subject. It was inconsistent
of Onoria to have such a decided bias against Rome, for she was very
fond of law and order, and considered authority final. She said “This
settles it” about a dozen times a day, and no Pope has ever made more
ex-cathedra proclamations in the twenty-four hours.
Mr. Gubbins was by no means Onoria’s greatest man friend; she merely saw
him the most.
Men liked Onoria, and Onoria liked men.
Whether she had a secret passion for any of the more virile types of
Little Ticklington will never be known.
Onoria did not shriek her emotional history upon house-tops, and as far
as the relations of the sexes were concerned, she was not modern—that
is to say she thought there should be no relation except marriage; and
even that should be concealed as far as possible.
Women she despised.
Men sought Onoria to tell her what they felt for other women, they
talked politics with her, and they took a monstrous and secret pleasure
in hearing her abuse her own sex; but with the exception of Mr. Gubbins
they did not propose to share their lives with Onoria; they preferred
the weaker sisters whom Onoria had relentlessly dissected for their
special delectation.
They enjoyed watching this merciless analysis of a suspected sex, but in
spite of their suspicions they married the subjects of the analysis.
Onoria hated women. It may have been because she had been an only girl
in a family of five, and that certain limitations and inhibitions
brought home to her early in life the disabilities of her sex without
the compensating spiritual advantages which occur later; or it may have
been that something in herself warned her that her most marked qualities
were not those that succeed in attracting, where qualities less marked
and perhaps less worthy of attention prevail. Each of her brothers in
turn gave themselves over without reprieve to an incarnate devil.
This is not their own account of the transaction; they were under the
impression that they had married singularly delightful types of
womanhood, but Onoria found these women out, tried them in the furnace
of her fraternal love and told them roundly what she thought of them.
The result of freedom of speech is often the separation of families.
Onoria quarrelled bitterly and irretrievably with each of her
sisters-in-law in turn, and never went near any of them again.
She referred to her brothers as “poor dear So-and-So”—in the manner of
the pious whose dead are in the hands of the Lord. She sometimes saw
them in neutral places, and she sent her nephews and nieces handsome
presents at Christmas, especially her nephews.
When Onoria asserted that her family had been ruined by women, she
firmly believed this to be the fact. People who invariably speak the
truth are sometimes misled as to the nature of fact; it is so difficult
for truthful natures to realise that they are not in possession of the
whole of that evasive quality.
At the High School Onoria taught nothing but girls. She taught them
music and singing with bitterness and with boredom for over twenty
years, and she taught them exceedingly well.
There is an excellent poem which asserts that “He who only rules by
terror does a grievous wrong,” and there is no doubt a good deal to be
said for this theory.
All Onoria’s pupils would have agreed to it with rapture; still you do
not go down the path of least resistance often if you find lions in the
way.
Even girls have the sense to make unusual efforts to avoid unusual
inconveniences, and Miss Strickland’s temper when roused was an unusual
inconvenience. She said everything that came into her head against the
girl who had failed her, and then, with the sting of a life-long
prejudice behind her, everything against the sex which had evolved her.
Onoria firmly believed that all girls were deceitful, lazy and vain, and
that the only way to deal with them was by repeated castigations of the
spirit.
Some of her pupils would have done better without these reprisals; most
people are supposed to work best under appreciation and do not begin to
find themselves until they have the confidence and sympathy of their
teachers. Such girls did not do their best work for Onoria; but they
worked. All of them worked, feverishly or steadily, to avoid the deluge
of her merciless tongue.
The level of Onoria’s pupils was high, and as she did not believe in
hidden depths, she never had to regret that she had failed to plumb
them.
“I know exactly what each of my girls can do,” she was fond of saying.
What she did not know was what the girls could have done if they hadn’t
been hers.
“I have never made a friend out of a pupil yet, thank the Lord,” she
would end up by saying to her men friends, who spent Sunday afternoons
in hearing Onoria undermine the position of women, “and what is more I
never will!” The men shook their heads in delighted admiration; they
knew they could not say as much for themselves; but they admired Onoria
for her security.
CHAPTER II
Elsie Andrews was exactly the kind of girl Miss Strickland disliked
most. Nobody really liked Elsie very much because it is difficult to
like a child who constantly squirms. She went, at school, by the name of
“The Worm.” The young have an unconscious preference for success or the
materials of success, and no one could have imagined a success being
made of Elsie.
She had long, greasy, dark hair which fell perfectly straight down her
back, and was the colour of a wet haystack. Her eyes were small and
rather weak, her chin receded, and her complexion was a pale fawn
colour.
She came into a room as if she were holding herself together with
difficulty, and was unpleasantly conscious of having broken the Ten
Commandments. If she had really broken them there would have been some
sense in it; but she never broke anything except the points of her
pencils.
Miss Strickland did not notice her, except to tell her to sit up, or to
get out of the way.
It came as a shock to the whole school when it learned that Elsie had
petitioned to be allowed to take music lessons from Miss Strickland,
instead of from the less accomplished but much milder teacher provided
for the younger girls.
It was like asking to be led into a lion’s den without having evinced
the slightest aptitude for being a Daniel.
It was supposed that Miss Strickland would make short work of her, and
that after the first or second music lesson Elsie’s whitened bones would
be left outside the music room door.
Miss Strickland herself, staring at the small bowed figure on the music
stool, felt as a rose fancier might feel if asked to entertain the most
noxious of the caterpillars.
Here was a true type of feminine nature—a prevaricating, vacillating,
cowardly little girl; and Elsie was vain too, or how would she have
dared to claim the best teacher in the school for presumably the worst
pupil?
She so exemplified everything that Miss Strickland felt women in general
were, without any of the attractions which, in the eyes of the
undiscriminating, outweigh these disadvantages, that Miss Strickland
felt a certain kindliness rise in her—the kindliness of a prophet who
sees his worst prognostications blossom into disastrous facts.
“May I ask what you think you know about music?” she shot out at the
child with a twist of her determined chin.
This was Miss Strickland’s usual preliminary to a campaign of slaughter,
and all new pupils, even if she had a kindly feeling towards them, had
to be slaughtered first.
Elsie choked, looked helplessly at her limp little fingers, and
stammered, “Nothing, please!”
Miss Strickland did not appear in the least mollified by this collapse
of confidence.
“Under the circumstances,” she replied with the easy smartness of a
licensed bully, “can you tell me why the teacher for the younger girls
was not considered sufficiently good for you?”
There was a breathless silence before Elsie, with an astonishing spasm
of courage, answered,
“I shouldn’t have learned anything from her, please.”
“‘Couldn’t’ is no doubt what you mean,” said Miss Strickland with genial
irony. “And ‘couldn’t’ will be no doubt the result of trying to learn
from me. Not even the cleverest teacher can mate a good job with a bad
tool. You are a very inefficient little girl. You don’t know how to sit
on a music stool, or how to hold your hands. Your back is a disgrace,
and your fingers are all thumbs. Let’s hear you play something. What
have you got here—rubbish? Oh, I see—worse than rubbish—the usual
Sonata by that poor Mozart—mercifully he is dead!
“Play it, and as I am not dead, pray do not make it any louder than is
strictly necessary. Keep your feet off the pedals. Pupils who don’t know
how to play their notes have an idea that they can fall back on the loud
pedal to drown their incompetence. That is not the proper use of pedals.
They were never put into a piano to reinforce blunders.”
Elsie dropped the Sonata on the floor, and in picking it up overturned
the music stool.
Miss Strickland longed to slap her. Like all highly strung musical
organisations, she loathed a sudden noise.
“Clumsy little animal!” she said under her breath.
Elsie heard her and turned a dull crimson. She arranged the Sonata with
trembling fingers and started off solemnly upon its well-known track.
Every note she played was a mistake. She altered pace, she ignored
rhythm. She tried for expression when the notes escaped her. She
wallowed desperately on through the thickening disapproval of Miss
Strickland’s portentous silence.
Miss Strickland considered that she was giving Elsie a chance.
Elsie knew exactly what the Sonata sounded like to Miss Strickland—she
had the vision of the disciple into the mind of the master.
She knew she was inflicting torture upon her ideal human being—but
still she inflicted it, having grasped that obedience is better than
sacrifice, even the sacrifice of the feelings of the one you are bound
to obey.
Blandina before the maddened cow in the Coliseum could not have shown a
more desperate courage.
At the end Miss Strickland said with deceptive calm, “You cannot like
music, it is impossible! What on earth persuaded you to suggest that I
should teach you?”
For a long while Elsie said nothing; she seemed engrossed in folding up
the Sonata. Then she lifted her rather weak eyes to Miss Strickland’s
face; she had no colour at all, her very lips were white—“Because I
liked you—” she stammered. “I wanted you to speak to me—even if you
were angry——”
Miss Strickland was not an expert in Biblical language—but there was a
quotation which attacked her mind at that moment, and which stuck in her
memory for years afterwards: “Though He slay me, yet will I trust in
Him.”
She was the first to look away.
If there was one thing Miss Strickland had always set her face against,
it was school-girl devotions. If she had any reason for supposing that
any particular girl was guilty of such a sentiment towards herself, she
crushed it ruthlessly within the hour of its conception.
But there was something in Elsie’s eyes which was different from
anything she had seen in the eyes of other girls.
It would not be an easy act for a strong swimmer to deprive a drowning
man of his straw. As far as life was concerned Miss Strickland was a
strong swimmer, and Elsie was a drowning man, her hopeless, helpless
eyes said it.
She had this one desire, this one strange, pitiful claim upon the
Universe, and having made it, she was prepared to drown. She said no
more.
She did not cry, she sat and trembled on her music stool, looking dumbly
at Miss Strickland’s face.
Miss Strickland hesitated. She had always worked on principle
before—girls below a certain standard were Miss Saunders’ pupils, girls
above it were hers. It is not easy to break a principle at one’s own
expense.
Then she said with conscious dryness, “Well—we must see what we can do
with you.” She had not taken away the straw. The small figure beside her
gave a long sigh of relief.
“You quite understand,” continued Miss Strickland with her usual
firmness, “that I make no promises. If you work very hard and improve, I
will try to keep you, but it will require all the work you have in you.
Now I am going to tell you, not _all_ the things that were wrong in your
playing—that would be impossible in the short time that is left to
us—but I shall point out a few of them which I shall expect you to
overcome before the next lesson.
“As you play the Sonata all wrong, I should suggest your never touching
it again and starting to learn properly something you have never seen
before. Are you listening to me attentively?”
Elsie nodded, she tried to listen attentively, but she was hearing
instead of Miss Strickland’s words the music of the spheres. The sons of
God were shouting together in a newly created world.
Her heart’s desire had been granted to Elsie. She was not going to be
abandoned by the one being on earth whom she truly loved.
It is unfortunate to have to confess at this point that both Elsie’s
parents were living.
Her father was a genial tradesman of the higher class of tradesmen; he
did not serve in his own shop, and liked to romp with his children when
he came home from business.
Mrs. Andrews was a flighty, pretentious little woman, who had overlaid
the maternal instinct by a desire to get on in the world. She would have
liked a pretty little girl to show off to her neighbours, but she
preferred boys.
She had two of them, and she had brought them up to tease and tyrannise
over their small sister. They did this without imagination or cruelty of
intention, until they were old enough for school, when they ignored her.
There were little things she could do for them in the holidays, and if
she did them all right she could live in peace.
It was a great relief to Elsie Andrews when nobody at home paid any
attention to her, but it could not quite fill the whole horizon of
youth. Miss Strickland filled the rest of it. Elsie believed in her as
the wisest, most beautiful, and grandest of earthly beings. She
sometimes wondered if Queen Victoria had ever been like her. Not in some
ways; for Elsie hugged it to her heart as a golden but guilty secret
that her goddess was “advanced.” Elsie would not have revealed it under
torture, but she had seen Miss Strickland smoke a cigarette behind the
shrubbery in the school garden. Probably Queen Victoria had never done
this; she had lacked that final Napoleonic touch of audacity.
Miss Strickland’s cigarette was the nearest thing to an adventure that
Elsie had ever known.
It took the place in her imagination of “perilous seas in faery lands
forlorn.” She never passed a tobacco shop without a thrill of memory,
and she saw, far down the vista of the years, a kindred moment for
herself. It was with the aspect of Miss Strickland’s light blue eyes and
trim, erect figure (the rest of her appearance was not very impressive)
that Elsie supposed Venus had arisen from the sea. (The blue serge coat
and skirt which invariably accompanied Miss Strickland, no doubt adhered
to her later.)
Miss Strickland was as beautiful as Venus, as grand as Queen Victoria,
as wise as Minerva. As far as Elsie was concerned, wisdom would die with
Miss Strickland. When Onoria said “That’s settled,” Elsie would rather
have disputed the last trump.
It had taken two years of dumb and invisible worship before Elsie had
dared to make this final bid for the notice of her goddess.
She knew it was final: if Miss Strickland had turned her away, she would
have sunk like a stone to the bottom of her despair. She would never
have attempted to move again. Life would have gone on all round her, but
she would not have lived. She was living now; every breathless moment of
her terrible lesson she had lived—ardour and agony combined in her. She
felt that she was moving as swiftly as the Scotch express—sparks were
flying out from the tension of her silence.
“Well,” said Miss Strickland, “you’ve had over your hour—and I think
I’ve told you enough to go on with. You haven’t talent, but don’t let
that discourage you, I never believe in little girls with talent; work
produces ability up to a certain point. There is no such thing as a
woman genius and never will be.”
Elsie looked at her in surprise.
“But you—” she murmured. “Surely you are a genius?”
“Nonsense,” said Miss Strickland, flushing half with annoyance and half
with a feeling that was not annoyance.
“I am nothing of the kind. I am merely a very hard-working person with
the natural advantages of a good ear and light fingers.”
Elsie could not believe this and she looked as if she could not believe
it; but she said nothing.
“Now run along,” said Miss Strickland briskly but not unkindly. You
cannot be unkind to a person who will not believe that you are not a
genius.
Elsie went out of the music room with her head held up and her eyes
sparkling.
Miss Strickland did not immediately ring the bell to summon her next
pupil. She felt unaccountably stirred.
“A very ordinary little girl,” she said to herself reassuringly. “A
_most_ ordinary little girl. Still I will see if something can’t be done
with her. The poor child has been shamefully neglected by some woman no
doubt. Women are the most destructive force in existence, or I should
rather say weakness. Force is creative and appertains to man. Women are
destructive because they have no force; they destroy by the conscious
exercise of their weakness.”
Then Miss Strickland rang the bell. She felt more natural after this
little fling at her old enemy, and she had succeeded in hiding from
herself why she had given way to Elsie, who should most certainly have
been returned to Miss Saunders.
CHAPTER III
Even a very dull person may achieve his aim if he has only one aim, and
devotes his entire attention to it.
Elsie’s aim in life was to please Miss Strickland. She thought of
nothing else by day, and she dreamed of nothing else by night.
All the other teachers, and the objects of their efforts, slipped past
her. She saw them vaguely as trees walking, and bumped into them from
time to time with some severity. She was considered the dunce of the
school.
The cream of her concentration was her work for the piano. She practised
as the devotee prays. She did not think any more of the actual process
than the devotee thinks of his prayers. It is the Deity which is the
object of the devotee, and it was Miss Strickland who stood for Elsie
beyond the five-finger exercises and chromatic scales; even as the
vision of Beatrice leaned towards Dante out of Paradise.
Miss Strickland was amazed at the child’s progress; she was the more
amazed because she had seen from the first with an instinct practically
unerring, that she was not dealing with talent. She still believed that
it was not talent. It was something that baffled Miss Strickland—an
ardour of obedience, a stake-like adherence to her least words, which
produced odd blunders, and sudden advances, and finally a higher level
of achievement than that of any pupil in the school.
For two years the intercourse between Miss Strickland and Elsie was
limited to forty minutes a week in the music room.
Elsie accepted Miss Strickland’s temper as the earth accepts the
ministrations of climate. Sun and shower, heat and cold were part, no
doubt, of a divine plan, and so were the sharpness and the comparative
mildness of Miss Strickland’s nerves.
Of course Elsie liked them to be mild, but when they were sharp they
seemed to her like the magnetic lightnings of the Universe.
Miss Strickland had never had a pupil whom she could hurt more. She was
often unscrupulous in the use of her power, but the absoluteness of it
in Elsie’s case stayed her hand.
Elsie had no defence against her, and she would have used none if she
had had it.
One day Miss Strickland announced,
“There is to be a concert at the end of the term, Elsie. You have
improved so much lately that I have told Miss Bretherton that you will
play at it.”
Elsie squirmed. “Oh, if you please, Miss Strickland, I can’t!” she
stammered. “I couldn’t—not before people—I’m too—I’m too afraid!”
“Nonsense,” said Miss Strickland firmly. “I am the best judge of whether
you can play or not, and I have decided that you can. It is absurd to be
afraid of people who know very little about music and have come prepared
to be easily pleased. You are not afraid to play before me, and I don’t
come prepared to be pleased, and do know a good deal about music.”
Elsie, if she could have explained, would have said, “That’s what I’m
afraid of—not pleasing you. It’s you that will care about the people.”
But it was out of the question to make a statement of this kind to Miss
Strickland, even if it had occurred to Elsie that it was the truth, and
things seldom occurred to Elsie as the truth until after what she had
been afraid of had happened.
She merely repeated in an agony, “Oh, please don’t make me play! I shall
break down! I know I shall break down! It would terrify me to disappoint
you!”
To which Miss Strickland replied, “Don’t be idiotic. I have decided upon
Mendelssohn.”
The school at Little Ticklington gave particularly good concerts.
Besides the parents, the Mayor sometimes appeared with several Town
Councillors, the Vicar, who was an Archdeacon, and various people in the
neighbourhood who thought Education ought to be encouraged and that
their presence at School Concerts encouraged it.
Miss Strickland sat at the back of the hall, so that she could hear if
the songs carried.
She had prepared all the girls carefully, and Miss Saunders, who lived
in the School, would supervise them on the platform.
Miss Strickland had not seen Elsie for three days. At her last lesson
she had played the Mendelssohn uncommonly well, but she had annoyed Miss
Strickland by opening and shutting her mouth like a fish. Miss
Strickland had told her so, and Elsie had then shut her mouth and kept
it shut, but Miss Strickland had still been annoyed. She was conscious
of something in the child that was not consenting to her will, and this
was very unusual.
Children must play at Concerts. Elsie was now fourteen, she was a great
big girl, and the Mendelssohn was very easy.
Miss Strickland told herself these reassuring facts several times before
the curtain swung vacillatingly back for the first girl to perform.
“Besides,” Miss Strickland hastily informed herself, “I take no special
interest in Elsie.”
The first girl performed as first girls generally do. She was chosen for
her hardihood and she had a little over-estimated it. Still she banged
pleasantly away, and while she was too nervous to remember any of the
finer shades of Miss Strickland’s careful teaching, she played no wrong
notes, and covered up the weakness of her execution with that merciful
solvent of pianoforte puzzles, the loud pedal.
Miss Strickland mentally provided for this young criminal a castigation
of the direst kind, short of direct profanity. Only men (who deserve it)
may have the relief of an entire language to devote to wrath. Miss
Strickland had to rely upon the fervency of her emotion. Then she
listened, with the grim patience of a teacher who is not involved in the
subject, to a bad recitation.
After this there were several excellent and charming songs with
choruses. Miss Strickland had taught them to the school, and in one case
written the song herself.
They went with a vim, and gave her a certain amount of very slight
pleasure. And then Elsie appeared.
She was dressed in a heavy white muslin dress which revealed her thick
ankles and pitilessly broad-toed shoes.
It was the wrong kind of muslin, trimmed with tawdry embroidery and girt
about the untamed breadth of her waist by a harsh blue sash. Her hair
lay lankly down her back, evading where it could the ministrations of a
similarly harsh blue ribbon.
Elsie moved heavily and stared at the audience with the eyes of a sleep
walker.
Miss Strickland had particularly told Elsie to keep her mouth shut, her
head up and her chin in. The results of these attempts upon the figure
are usually beneficial to young performers, but nothing could do much
for Elsie’s figure; it remained thick and uncertain, with a tendency to
bulge in the wrong places.
Miss Strickland felt an unusual pang of depression when she saw Elsie,
followed by a much more usual one of rage.
Why had not Elsie’s mother chosen more suitable clothes for her? “Women
again! They only think of clothes, and they show the value of their
thought by a stupid result like this!” thought Miss Strickland sternly.
Elsie sat down clumsily on the music stool. It was lower than she had
expected it to be. Miss Saunders, the young music teacher, adjusted the
Mendelssohn.
It was “The Venetian Boat Song,” the easiest and lightest of concert
pieces.
Elsie played the first two bars quite faultlessly. Miss Strickland was
about to breathe a sigh of relief, when, to her horror, the girl stopped
abruptly and took her hands off the piano. Then she played the first two
bars over again, and stopped once more.
There was a long silence in the hall, a breathless, inconvenient
silence, and then Elsie turned slowly on her music stool away from the
piano and faced the audience. She looked like some one delivering
themselves into the hands of Red Indians for torture. She faced them
with her hands in her lap and her eyes fixed, not so much appealingly as
hopelessly, upon the audience.
She did not cry; it was the expression of an immovable despair. She
neither stirred nor spoke, she only looked straight in front of her as
if she saw the end of Hope.
Miss Strickland felt as if the child’s gaze fixed itself upon her heart.
Before she had time to move, Miss Saunders had stepped forward at a sign
from Miss Bretherton, and led Elsie away.
It was obviously impossible for any one who looked like that to play
“The Venetian Boat Song.”
Miss Saunders (who wanted Elsie to enjoy the tea afterwards) led her to
the back row of little girls.
Elsie went with her passively and sank into her seat like a thing
frozen.
Miss Strickland had once watched a baby rabbit holding itself together
to look like a leaf—its fear had fixed it into the landscape.
Elsie looked like that. She did not move for half an hour; she was as
anxious as the baby rabbit to escape all observation.
A group of charmingly dressed girls came on to the stage and danced.
There were no more hitches. Everything else was beautifully done; and
when it was over Elsie asked if she might go and rest. She said she had
a headache.
Miss Saunders, who was sympathetic and didn’t know what else to
say—agreed readily. The other girls stared at Elsie, but no one was
cruel enough, or kind enough, to say anything to her. They all felt that
she was interesting to talk about, but uncomfortable to talk to, and
they left her alone.
Miss Strickland decided to do the same. She took her tea on the lawn and
ate some particularly good strawberries without enjoying them.
Then she went to look for Elsie. There were very few places where Elsie
had any right to be. She wasn’t in the empty school room, or in the
small ante-room used by the teachers before they went into their
classes. She was in the dressing room behind a curtain, lying on the
boots and shoes.
It was only by the faintest of creaks that her presence was disclosed to
Miss Strickland. She lay there in a crumpled heap of muslin and anguish,
sobbing as if her heart would break.
It was very pitiful to see her. Miss Strickland knelt down by Elsie’s
side and tried to speak, but to her surprise she found it difficult. She
said “My dear child,” twice over, the first time her voice actually
shook. Then she recovered herself.
“Stop grovelling among those boots!” she exclaimed sharply. This was
better. Elsie sat up, and made an enormous effort to control herself,
but the sobs had got possession of her: they shook her down among the
boots again.
Miss Strickland frowned. “It’s all my fault,” she found herself saying.
“I ought not to have made you play, and you really mustn’t be so
distressed about it. People often make mistakes. One can retrieve them.
I daresay,” said Miss Strickland mercifully, but without accuracy, “I
daresay I’ve broken down myself before now, but I shouldn’t give way
about it. I know that it was not carelessness on your part. On the
contrary, you were trying too hard!”
“Oh!” gasped Elsie, “don’t you hate me? You must—I know you must! You
see I can’t—I’m no good. I never was any good! And I never will be! I’m
like that!”
Miss Strickland was shocked. She disliked over-confidence
(over-confident people always do) but this child’s formidable
hopelessness was worse than any over-confidence. She was behaving as if
there were a flaw in the Universe; and in Miss Strickland’s Universe
there had never been a flaw. She had disliked many occurrences but she
had felt equal to them, whether she disliked them or not. She did not
feel equal to what was happening now. She said, “My dear, you mustn’t be
silly. If you weren’t some good you wouldn’t be here!”
Elsie replied, “But I know I’m not, and I don’t want to be here, I’d
rather be dead.”
“That’s sillier still,” Miss Strickland answered doubtfully, “and it’s
also very wrong.”
“What does it matter if it’s wrong or not—if you hate me—” sobbed
Elsie. “Nothing matters to me except that!”
Miss Strickland stared at her uncomfortably. She still did not know what
action was the most sensible to take.
An instinct told her what to do, but she was not used to instincts, and
felt flurried by having one. Her instinct told her to take the child in
her arms.
She compromised with it, and kissed Elsie, a little reluctantly, on the
cheek.
“I don’t hate you at all, child,” she said kindly. “You’re a very good,
painstaking little girl, and I am very fond of you.”
Then Miss Strickland arrived at the nearest she was ever likely to get
to a miracle.
She saw a plain little girl, made plainer by a convulsive fit of crying,
turn perfectly beautiful. It was like watching a black and windswept
country yielding to the sun. Across Elsie’s face light spread: the light
of an infinite gratitude, a preposterous faith, an overwhelming love.
Her eyes met Miss Strickland’s and held hers almost against her will.
“Then,” the child said slowly, “I’m glad I broke down.”
It was the truth, and Miss Strickland with her love of truth should have
recognised it; but she had already recognised a great deal more than it
was at all comfortable to recognise. She really couldn’t go on
recognising things which were so far from sensible, whether they were
true or not.
“Well, don’t let us have any more nonsense,” she said briskly. “Wipe
your eyes, and brush, as far as you can, the dust off your frock. You
really should not have lain down on boots and shoes, it was most
unsuitable. You’d better come and see Miss Bretherton; she has been
asking about you on the lawn, and she’s no more angry with you than I
am.”
“Please may I go home?” Elsie pleaded. “I’m quite happy now, only I
don’t want to see any one else. You see nobody else matters.”
Miss Strickland hesitated. Head mistresses always matter. Still she had
pressed the point about Elsie’s playing and it had proved a mistake.
Onoria made a point of learning from her mistakes, when she saw them.
Perhaps it was better to waive the point. The child looked dreadful, she
could make excuses for her to Miss Bretherton, and excuses are tidier
and more malleable than tear-stained little girls.
“Very well,” Miss Strickland said at last, “you may go home if you want
to—” But there was something in Elsie’s eyes which still held hers.
“If I might,” whispered Elsie bravely, “play you ‘The Venetian Boat
Song’—before I go?”
Miss Strickland nodded. She led the way into a small practice room, out
of reach of the festivities on the lawn. Then she sat down on a hard
cane chair and listened to “The Venetian Boat Song” for perhaps the
500th time.
It did not sound at all familiar to her.
Elsie played it as Miss Strickland had never heard it played before. For
the only time in her life music was captured by Elsie’s faithful,
clumsy, little fingers. She played it dreamily, tenderly, with ardour
and with grace, as Mendelssohn himself might have played it—who had the
heart of a child.
There was a little silence after the last notes sounded.
“That,” Elsie explained as she turned round slowly on her music stool,
“was the way I had meant to play it.”
CHAPTER IV
Onoria Strickland had an imagination that centralised its own
experiences.
She believed that for pure drama Little Ticklington outshone Paris. Its
crimes were more lurid, its adventures more romantic, its types of
character more truly representative of human nature. Her own career
often seemed to Onoria Napoleonic, and her friends and her enemies were
always larger than life.
At first she undertook Elsie Andrews as a conscientious educator
undertakes bad material, but as the years passed and Elsie’s affection
stood solidly across Onoria’s pathway as immovable as granite, she began
to find in Elsie strange and exotic virtues.
“That girl,” she would announce, “has the mind of the Fourteenth
Century—mature and adventurous!
“She will do something one day. She is not like modern girls; she has
character. Not that silly thing they call temperament, thank
goodness!—temperament wobbles and stings like a jellyfish, and arrives
nowhere—but good solid English character! Elsie won’t set the Thames on
fire perhaps, but she hasn’t set out with any such theory. Mercifully
she knows her limitations as a woman. What she has set out to do she
will accomplish in spite of all obstacles—I call that dignified.”
Elsie knew just what Onoria thought of her, because Onoria always told
her friends exactly what she thought of them, even when it was nice.
(After her twenty-first birthday Miss Strickland became “Onoria” to
Elsie.)
It was difficult for Elsie to believe that she was dignified, but she
knew that she had a kind of strength.
She found in herself a fund of resistance enabling her to guard her
friendship with Onoria. Neither Mr. nor Mrs. Andrews liked it; Mrs.
Andrews because, like many mothers, it seemed to her unnecessary that
her children should form any ties outside their home; Mr. Andrews
because he foresaw that this concentration of his daughter’s heart might
damage her future prospects.
“If she gets into tagging round for ever after an old maid,” he
explained to his wife, “she won’t marry. Why don’t you smarten her up a
bit and take her out with you?”
But Elsie wouldn’t be smartened up. She did not refuse new clothes, but
she did not respond to them; and you cannot make a dead weight look
chic. Mrs. Andrews tried. She would have liked a daughter she could take
with her to tea parties, not one who practised Beethoven and read
Shakespeare.
Elsie loathed tea parties. She followed her mother on those rare
occasions when she had failed to elude her as one who follows a corpse
to the grave. People soon stopped asking Mrs. Andrews to bring her
daughter.
Then Mr. Andrews bought Elsie a tennis racket to play with the young
people.
She went out after the house was locked up at night and broke it against
an oak tree in the garden. It was this act that convinced Onoria that
Elsie had in her the spirit of the Fourteenth Century.
If there was one thing Elsie disliked more than tea parties with her
mother’s friends, it was tennis with young people.
She could not play tennis and she disliked young people. They believed
all the things Onoria said were not so—and they carried on
conversations that were not solely for the sake of conversation. They
seemed to wish to attract each other.
Elsie knew that the fault lay in the women and she would have talked to
the young men if they had looked at her, but they did not seem to see
that she was there; and you cannot carry on a conversation with young
men who do not look at you—however great your respect may be for the
masculine sex.
Onoria explained Elsie’s position to her kindly but firmly.
“You are not a man’s woman,” she said to her, “and you had better make
up your mind to it once and for all. I know men. They are hoodwinked and
misled by appearances, owing no doubt to the false upbringing they
receive from their mothers, but there it is—they rarely understand true
merit until they have provided themselves with the contrary. You are not
a marrying woman. Realise this and don’t hanker. There are many other
things in life.”
Elsie sighed and said she supposed there were. She did not sigh very
heavily because she was still quite young and there was Onoria. Besides,
the only husband she knew anything about was Mr. Andrews. He was by no
means a bad husband as husbands go, he sometimes called his wife
“Pussy,” and if no one did what he disliked, he was seldom cross; but he
was not as interesting to Elsie as Onoria.
What Elsie liked best in the world was sitting in Onoria’s garden, and
being told what to think.
Onoria was a well-informed woman with violent prejudices, and all her
information was at the disposal of her prejudices.
Her opinions were pitched battles, and her views (she intensely disliked
what she called ‘viewy’ people, but she had her own views) were like the
approaches of a distant thunderstorm. It might pass over if nothing
happened to bring it down.
To enjoy Onoria’s conversation was to confess to a taste for Punch and
Judy Shows; and, as time hardened Onoria’s method of attack, Little
Ticklington grew tired of her bludgeoning.
The men who had delighted in Onoria’s prowess had married, and with
years of domesticity their delight in prowess had gradually faded out,
or been transferred to the actions of their offspring.
Onoria disliked other people’s children and very wisely told them so. It
relieved her of many tiresome obligations, but among them it relieved
her of the presence of the parents. She had had to throw away the apple
with the core.
Onoria had fewer and fewer objects for her affection. Prendergast had
changed from being an elderly and morose Pug, into being very old and
resentful of all claims upon his attention except in the shape of well
chopped-up food. He liked the results of tenderness without its
expression.
Peter Gubbins was just as faithful, but if you have been faddy and
aggravating as a young man, you will infallibly become eccentric and
exasperating when youth has left you.
Peter Gubbins was unaware that youth had left him; he sometimes had
misgivings about Time and Onoria’s figure. Her complexion had always
been a little hard and weather beaten, but her hair retained its colour
and her voice its piercing quality; besides Onoria was three years older
than Peter.
He knew Onoria was no longer young, but she was still very, very
powerful.
Neither of them had had a severe illness, a great sorrow, or an
unexpected good fortune; and it is very easy to believe that you have
remained the same if everything else has.
Peter wrote less poetry and rather more articles, and he grew the finest
sweet peas in the neighbourhood.
There was one event which might have awakened Peter to the lapse of
years if it had not come on almost as gradually as his success with the
sweet peas. This was the introduction of Elsie; but she had been
introduced before he could connect change with her, or receive the
challenge to his personality which a young girl’s friendship will cause
the least self-conscious of men.
Elsie had not made friends with Peter at first, but after two or three
years of speechless, tepid watchfulness upon both sides, a bond had been
secretly and invisibly formed between them.
They could not have told why it was secret and they hardly knew that it
was a bond; they only knew that in each other’s society there was an
absence of insistent racket, a blissful sense of not being at their best
and liveliest, and not needing to be, which took the place of active
pleasure.
There were very few of these harmonious moments. Usually Onoria was
there, and they met under her eyes and with the volleyings of her wit,
and the tremendous onslaught of her theories, thick upon them.
But there had been June evenings when Onoria had letters to write, or
was playing over new sets of pieces with a view to her profession, when
Elsie slipped out of the long French window on to the lawn to water the
flowers, and found that Peter was watering his.
Peter joined her on these occasions and they hunted for slugs together
with an effortless ardour rarely obtained upon their separate quests.
Sometimes they combined with desperate loyalty to try to save Onoria an
exertion that they could not persuade her to give up, or planned to
appease her with a suitable birthday present.
Their talk was full of Onoria. They quoted her most strident sayings
with bursts of nervous laughter; they bulwarked their own opinions with
the justice of her utterances; and sometimes with bated breath they
confessed to each other the little difficulties which arose on their
domestic hearths, when these hearths were confronted with Onoria.
Mr. Gubbins had a housekeeper who hated Onoria and was herself a
redoubtable woman. Elsie’s family sometimes stood up and raged against
her intimacy with Onoria; they even curtailed it to music lesson days
and Sundays. They couldn’t quite destroy it because the most
authoritative of families would shrink from forbidding one of its
daughters from visiting a very respectable, middle-aged lady, who had
been her music teacher since she was a child.
“I said,” Elsie explained breathlessly behind the rhododendron bushes,
“if you stop me going to see Miss Strickland, I’ll tell the Vicar and
Miss Bretherton. You know Father thinks the world of the Vicar since
we’ve stopped going to Chapel; he’s Onoria’s second cousin too; and no
one would like to have Miss Bretherton down on them, not even Mother—so
they just glared. Glaring’s awful, of course, still it can’t do you any
real harm.”
“No,” Mr. Gubbins murmured with a long sigh of regret. “It’s not as if
your parents _cooked_ for you! If Mrs. Binns has been crossed, and
whenever she sees Onoria she seems to get crossed, she pours pepper into
everything I eat! And as I’ve often told you, I have a very delicate
throat!”
Elsie looked uneasily over the tobacco plant they were spraying.
Onoria had laughed so hard and so long upon the subject of Mr. Gubbins’
throat that it seemed to Elsie a disloyalty to let him talk about it.
What he was afraid of was cancer. He had an enlarged tonsil.
Mr. Gubbins could (as Onoria pointed out to him several times during the
course of the winter when he was always catching colds) have it taken
out. But Mr. Gubbins did not think it was bad enough for this heroic
remedy; it was only bad enough to give rise occasionally to the question
of whether the doctor really knew what he was talking about in assigning
to a pain so severe a cause so insufficiently lurid.
“What I say is,” explained Mr. Gubbins to Elsie (he never gave this
explanation to Onoria), “if he _does_ happen to be wrong and the trouble
is, as I sometimes think, malignant, I shall have to pay in the end;
he’ll get out of it all right. Doctors always do.”
“Hadn’t you perhaps better consult another doctor?” asked Elsie timidly.
She was always timid even with Mr. Gubbins, and even when she saw, as
she frequently did, the plainest way out of his troubles; and Mr.
Gubbins thought that timidity and sense were a delightful combination in
a woman.
“It’s not much use my doing that,” said Mr. Gubbins moodily. “They all
stand in together you know. Medical etiquette, as they call it, is
neither more nor less than a conspiracy against the public.
“Besides, when you come to think of it, I’ve been to Jenkins on and off
for thirty years, and I shouldn’t like to hurt his feelings, especially
as it may not be cancer after all.”
“What are you two talking about, over there in the shrubbery?” shouted
Onoria from the window.
Mr. Gubbins looked appealingly at Elsie.