I
Mrs. Gereth had said she would go with the rest to church, but suddenly
it seemed to her that she should not be able to wait even till
church-time for relief: breakfast, at Waterbath, was a punctual meal,
and she had still nearly an hour on her hands. Knowing the church to be
near, she prepared in her room for the little rural walk, and on her way
down again, passing through corridors and observing imbecilities of
decoration, the aesthetic misery of the big commodious house, she felt a
return of the tide of last night's irritation, a renewal of everything
she could secretly suffer from ugliness and stupidity. Why did she
consent to such contacts, why did she so rashly expose herself? She had
had, heaven knew, her reasons, but the whole experience was to be
sharper than she had feared. To get away from it and out into the air,
into the presence of sky and trees, flowers and birds, was a necessity
of every nerve. The flowers at Waterbath would probably go wrong in
color and the nightingales sing out of tune; but she remembered to have
heard the place described as possessing those advantages that are
usually spoken of as natural. There were advantages enough it clearly
didn't possess. It was hard for her to believe that a woman could look
presentable who had been kept awake for hours by the wall-paper in her
room; yet none the less, as in her fresh widow's weeds she rustled
across the hall, she was sustained by the consciousness, which always
added to the unction of her social Sundays, that she was, as usual, the
only person in the house incapable of wearing in her preparation the
horrible stamp of the same exceptional smartness that would be
conspicuous in a grocer's wife. She would rather have perished than have
looked _endimanchee_.
She was fortunately not challenged, the hall being empty of the other
women, who were engaged precisely in arraying themselves to that dire
end. Once in the grounds, she recognized that, with a site, a view that
struck the note, set an example to its inmates, Waterbath ought to have
been charming. How she herself, with such elements to handle, would have
taken the fine hint of nature! Suddenly, at the turn of a walk, she came
on a member of the party, a young lady seated on a bench in deep and
lonely meditation. She had observed the girl at dinner and afterwards:
she was always looking at girls with an apprehensive or speculative
reference to her son. Deep in her heart was a conviction that Owen
would, in spite of all her spells, marry at last a frump; and this from
no evidence that she could have represented as adequate, but simply from
her deep uneasiness, her belief that such a special sensibility as her
own could have been inflicted on a woman only as a source of anguish. It
would be her fate, her discipline, her cross, to have a frump brought
hideously home to her. This girl, one of the two Vetches, had no beauty,
but Mrs. Gereth, scanning the dullness for a sign of life, had been
straightway able to classify such a figure as the least, for the moment,
of her afflictions. Fleda Vetch was dressed with an idea, though perhaps
with not much else; and that made a bond when there was none other,
especially as in this case the idea was real, not imitation. Mrs. Gereth
had long ago generalized the truth that the temperament of the frump is
amply consistent with a certain usual prettiness. There were five girls
in the party, and the prettiness of this one, slim, pale, and
black-haired, was less likely than that of the others ever to occasion
an exchange of platitudes. The two less developed Brigstocks, daughters
of the house, were in particular tiresomely "lovely." A second glance,
this morning, at the young lady before her conveyed to Mrs. Gereth the
soothing assurance that she also was guiltless of looking hot and fine.
They had had no talk as yet, but this was a note that would effectually
introduce them if the girl should show herself in the least conscious of
their community. She got up from her seat with a smile that but partly
dissipated the prostration Mrs. Gereth had recognized in her attitude.
The elder woman drew her down again, and for a minute, as they sat
together, their eyes met and sent out mutual soundings. "Are you safe?
Can I utter it?" each of them said to the other, quickly recognizing,
almost proclaiming, their common need to escape. The tremendous fancy,
as it came to be called, that Mrs. Gereth was destined to take to Fleda
Vetch virtually began with this discovery that the poor child had been
moved to flight even more promptly than herself. That the poor child no
less quickly perceived how far she could now go was proved by the
immense friendliness with which she instantly broke out: "Isn't it too
dreadful?"
"Horrible--horrible!" cried Mrs. Gereth, with a laugh, "and it's really
a comfort to be able to say it." She had an idea, for it was her
ambition, that she successfully made a secret of that awkward oddity,
her proneness to be rendered unhappy by the presence of the dreadful.
Her passion for the exquisite was the cause of this, but it was a
passion she considered that she never advertised nor gloried in,
contenting herself with letting it regulate her steps and show quietly
in her life, remembering at all times that there are few things more
soundless than a deep devotion. She was therefore struck with the
acuteness of the little girl who had already put a finger on her hidden
spring. What was dreadful now, what was horrible, was the intimate
ugliness of Waterbath, and it was of that phenomenon these ladies talked
while they sat in the shade and drew refreshment from the great tranquil
sky, from which no blue saucers were suspended. It was an ugliness
fundamental and systematic, the result of the abnormal nature of the
Brigstocks, from whose composition the principle of taste had been
extravagantly omitted. In the arrangement of their home some other
principle, remarkably active, but uncanny and obscure, had operated
instead, with consequences depressing to behold, consequences that took
the form of a universal futility. The house was bad in all conscience,
but it might have passed if they had only let it alone. This saving
mercy was beyond them; they had smothered it with trumpery ornament and
scrapbook art, with strange excrescences and bunchy draperies, with
gimcracks that might have been keepsakes for maid-servants and
nondescript conveniences that might have been prizes for the blind. They
had gone wildly astray over carpets and curtains; they had an infallible
instinct for disaster, and were so cruelly doom-ridden that it rendered
them almost tragic. Their drawing-room, Mrs. Gereth lowered her voice to
mention, caused her face to burn, and each of the new friends confided
to the other that in her own apartment she had given way to tears. There
was in the elder lady's a set of comic water-colors, a family joke by a
family genius, and in the younger's a souvenir from some centennial or
other Exhibition, that they shudderingly alluded to. The house was
perversely full of souvenirs of places even more ugly than itself and of
things it would have been a pious duty to forget. The worst horror was
the acres of varnish, something advertised and smelly, with which
everything was smeared; it was Fleda Vetch's conviction that the
application of it, by their own hands and hilariously shoving each
other, was the amusement of the Brigstocks on rainy days.
When, as criticism deepened, Fleda dropped the suggestion that some
people would perhaps see something in Mona, Mrs. Gereth caught her up
with a groan of protest, a smothered familiar cry of "Oh, my dear!" Mona
was the eldest of the three, the one Mrs. Gereth most suspected. She
confided to her young friend that it was her suspicion that had brought
her to Waterbath; and this was going very far, for on the spot, as a
refuge, a remedy, she had clutched at the idea that something might be
done with the girl before her. It was her fancied exposure at any rate
that had sharpened the shock; made her ask herself with a terrible chill
if fate could really be plotting to saddle her with a daughter-in-law
brought up in such a place. She had seen Mona in her appropriate setting
and she had seen Owen, handsome and heavy, dangle beside her; but the
effect of these first hours had happily not been to darken the prospect.
It was clearer to her that she could never accept Mona, but it was after
all by no means certain that Owen would ask her to. He had sat by
somebody else at dinner, and afterwards he had talked to Mrs. Firmin,
who was as dreadful as all the rest, but redeemingly married. His
heaviness, which in her need of expansion she freely named, had two
aspects: one of them his monstrous lack of taste, the other his
exaggerated prudence. If it should come to a question of carrying Mona
with a high hand there would be no need to worry, for that was rarely
his manner of proceeding.
Invited by her companion, who had asked if it weren't wonderful, Mrs.
Gereth had begun to say a word about Poynton; but she heard a sound of
voices that made her stop short. The next moment she rose to her feet,
and Fleda could see that her alarm was by no means quenched. Behind the
place where they had been sitting the ground dropped with a certain
steepness, forming a long grassy bank, up which Owen Gereth and Mona
Brigstock, dressed for church but making a familiar joke of it, were in
the act of scrambling and helping each other. When they had reached the
even ground Fleda was able to read the meaning of the exclamation in
which Mrs. Gereth had expressed her reserves on the subject of Miss
Brigstock's personality. Miss Brigstock had been laughing and even
romping, but the circumstance hadn't contributed the ghost of an
expression to her countenance. Tall, straight and fair, long-limbed and
strangely festooned, she stood there without a look in her eye or any
perceptible intention of any sort in any other feature. She belonged to
the type in which speech is an unaided emission of sound and the secret
of being is impenetrably and incorruptibly kept. Her expression would
probably have been beautiful if she had had one, but whatever she
communicated she communicated, in a manner best known to herself,
without signs. This was not the case with Owen Gereth, who had plenty of
them, and all very simple and immediate. Robust and artless, eminently
natural, yet perfectly correct, he looked pointlessly active and
pleasantly dull. Like his mother and like Fleda Vetch, but not for the
same reason, this young pair had come out to take a turn before church.
The meeting of the two couples was sensibly awkward, and Fleda, who was
sagacious, took the measure of the shock inflicted on Mrs. Gereth. There
had been intimacy--oh yes, intimacy as well as puerility--in the
horse-play of which they had just had a glimpse. The party began to
stroll together to the house, and Fleda had again a sense of Mrs.
Gereth's quick management in the way the lovers, or whatever they were,
found themselves separated. She strolled behind with Mona, the mother
possessing herself of her son, her exchange of remarks with whom,
however, remained, as they went, suggestively inaudible. That member of
the party in whose intenser consciousness we shall most profitably seek
a reflection of the little drama with which we are concerned received an
even livelier impression of Mrs. Gereth's intervention from the fact
that ten minutes later, on the way to church, still another pairing had
been effected. Owen walked with Fleda, and it was an amusement to the
girl to feel sure that this was by his mother's direction. Fleda had
other amusements as well: such as noting that Mrs. Gereth was now with
Mona Brigstock; such as observing that she was all affability to that
young woman; such as reflecting that, masterful and clever, with a great
bright spirit, she was one of those who impose themselves as an
influence; such as feeling finally that Owen Gereth was absolutely
beautiful and delightfully dense. This young person had even from
herself wonderful secrets of delicacy and pride; but she came as near
distinctness as in the consideration of such matters she had ever come
at all in now surrendering herself to the idea that it was of a pleasant
effect and rather remarkable to be stupid without offense--of a
pleasanter effect and more remarkable indeed than to be clever and
horrid. Owen Gereth at any rate, with his inches, his features, and his
lapses, was neither of these latter things. She herself was prepared, if
she should ever marry, to contribute all the cleverness, and she liked
to think that her husband would be a force grateful for direction. She
was in her small way a spirit of the same family as Mrs. Gereth. On that
flushed and huddled Sunday a great matter occurred; her little life
became aware of a singular quickening. Her meagre past fell away from
her like a garment of the wrong fashion, and as she came up to town on
the Monday what she stared at in the suburban fields from the train was
a future full of the things she particularly loved.