OLIVER’S MISSION TO THE WOMEN OF HIS CLASS.
Oliver nourished the forlorn hope that he might do something with the
girls of his rank in raising their aspirations and refining their
habits. They at least belonged to the gentler sex, and ought to be by
constitution more tractable and altogether of finer clay. He took to
dropping in of an evening at the Polleys, where the male element in the
back parlour was but feebly represented by superseded Mr. Polley.
Oliver turned with disdain from Fan’s despairing warning: ‘Oliver,
if you don’t take care, Mrs. Polley will think you are proposing to
“keep company” with one of her girls, and if you don’t fulfil her
expectations, she will set you down unhesitatingly and proclaim you
openly to be “a flirty, shillyshallying fellow, who don’t know your own
mind.” Are you such a greenhorn that you require to be told you cannot
look twice at a girl of this stamp, or exchange three sentences with
her, without the girl, or her parents for her, concluding that you mean
something in the matrimonial line, and going on to class you as her
admirer and suitor, and to calculate what sort of match you will make
for her? As you are, undoubtedly, a great match in the Polleys’ eyes,
you ought to behave with common prudence.’
‘No, no!’ denied Oliver vehemently, blushing hotly with chivalrous
pain. ‘You are aspersing your whole sex, Fan, in the persons of
tradesmen’s daughters; and if there were any ground for the aspersion,
it would be high time that it should be done away with, by the
introduction of wider, simpler, more friendly intercourse between young
men and women.’
‘Perhaps you really mean to ally yourself with the family,’ said Fan in
her vexation, falling into the offence which was unusual with her, of
employing almost as tall language as ’Liza Polley might have adopted on
a similar occasion. ‘To be perfectly consistent, you ought. All I ask
is that you will tell me in time.’
‘That you may carry off your goods and chattels before they are
contaminated by coming in contact with Miss ’Liza’s or Miss ’Mily’s
bridal finery, and renounce me as a brother before you are forced to
own her as a sister,’ said Oliver, beginning to laugh. ‘All right. But
I don’t own to the soft impeachment yet, though, if ever my time should
come, why not a Miss Polley—I beg her pardon for the liberty taken
with her name, but I did not begin the impertinence—why not a Miss
Polley, I say, as well as another?’
Oliver spoke with light defiance but with some bitterness underlying
his challenge, for his thoughts had gone back to an encounter that
morning, when Catherine Hilliard, driving with her cousin, had passed
him and his baker’s shop, literally with unseeing eyes. She had looked
more delicate and tired out than ever. No wonder, when she was being
not merely morally starved, but slowly poisoned in her Palace of Art,
her fantastic ideal world.
Oliver was too manly, with a higher manliness than Jack Dadd’s or
than that of many persons of far greater pretensions than Jack,
to experience the particular dread of misconception which Fan had
sought to instil into her brother. He was shy enough in his way, and
he fought tough battles with his shyness every day he lived, but
his self-consciousness did not take this form. He had revolted at
it every time he met it, not only when young Dadd boasted of girls
making dead sets at him, and showing themselves, poor little souls,
spoony on his account, but when fellows, who might have known better,
expressed their alarm for the lasting consequences of the temporary
associations of Commemoration Week, or talked of running the gauntlet
of the dowagers and damsels of the London season. Oliver had felt
still more aggrieved when he found the same gratuitous insinuations in
books of ‘unexceptionable tone,’ where men—bachelors and widowers,
of mature years and sane minds, masters of the situation in every
other respect—were represented as timidly putting themselves under
the wings of female relations that the heads of the houses might be
protected from the wary advances or bold attacks of the single women
in their neighbourhood who cherished designs on their freedom. Well,
no doubt, there were women of all kinds, like men; but was it honest
women, modest women, women with souls, women like the men’s mothers,
sisters, future and past wives, whom brother-men thus insulted, while
sister-women handed on the insult?
Oliver’s company certainly induced the Polley girls to forego, for
the evenings on which he called, their wanderings abroad in search of
gossip and amusement, which their mother tolerated because young folks
must have their day, and the girls had their markets (matrimonial) to
make, being bound, in a measure, to keep on the outlook for settlements
in life.
But the young Polleys’ gaddings were restrained within certain
well-defined and not to be subverted bounds of time and circumstance.
The Miss Polleys, collectively or singly, might frequent their
neighbours’ houses or such promenades as Friarton afforded, till three
quarters past nine, but they must be safe at home, if not at supper,
at the latest by ten o’clock, when the house-door was formally locked
by Mrs. Polley in person. No Miss Polley was at liberty to stray into
companionship not approved of by her mother, not even ’Mily—‘the most
owdacious of the set,’ as Mrs. Polley was sometimes moved to term her
favourite daughter, in referring to ’Mily’s flights of wild spirits and
self-will—dared to transgress in these respects.
Oliver took it as no particular compliment to him that the Miss Polleys
should be induced to stay at home when he was a visitor. Common
hospitality—of which their class was by no means deficient, required
it of all or some of them. And it seemed to the young man that any
variety must be welcome in the atmosphere—the intellectual stagnation
of which was equal to its literal oppressiveness—laden as it was with
the odours, from the shop, of cheese, sugar, and coffee.
Mrs. Polley—the presiding genius—when she was to be seen in private
life, for she was sometimes detained at the close of a busy day in the
shop, suffered from the fatigue consequent on the day’s labours, and
although she was always equal to an exertion, and roused herself to
brandish and snap her fingers figuratively and in a friendly—well-nigh
a playful fashion in Oliver’s face, he felt convinced when he or any
other stranger was not there, must give herself up to cross-tiredness,
to nagging her daughters, and snubbing her husband between fits of the
gapes over her knitting, or coarse hemming, and rough and ready darning
of household linen.
Mr. Polley, who was not regarded as company worth counting, by his
own children any more than by the rest of the world, did no more than
contribute the dreariest platitudes and the stalest incidents from his
second day’s newspaper, to the feast of reason and the flow of soul.
There grew to be a merit in the girls’ persistent giggles and in the
light-hearted empty chatter and idle gossip, pointed by personalities
and spiced by scandal, with which they stirred the heaviness, and the
absence of all dignity and beauty, from which Oliver was not astonished
that they made their escape, when they had the opportunity.
The Polleys had another sitting-room besides that behind the shop, a
best parlour or drawing-room as the girls liked to call it, in which
they sometimes sat with their hands crossed in their laps, or engaged
in fancy-work, entertaining company. But as Oliver chose to come to
them in the character of a family friend, a distinction which they
appreciated, Mrs. Polley overruled her daughters’ objections and
elected that he should be received in the ordinary family room.
‘He shall see us as we are,’ said the matron when the Polleys were all
together in the back parlour one evening before supper. ‘He sha’n’t
have to say we were honey to his face and molasses behind his back.
Besides, we don’t do nothing we are ashamed of. I tell you what,
gals, if he has got any one of you in his eye already, he’s that kind
of chap, if I’m not mistaken, he’ll think a deal more of you, and be
more likely to grow sweet on you, if he finds you with me and father,
in your house-gowns, working at your needles in the parlour here, than
if he were supposed to catch you sitting like dressed-up dolls, at
your fine-lady nonsense of crochet and bead-work, in the other room,
as, I dare say—for I have not been out at the mill-house for years
now—I’m a stay-at-home, even if Fan Constable were readier with her
invitations—his sister sits from morning till night.’
‘It’s all you know, mother,’ said ’Mily, a well-grown buxom girl of
eighteen; ‘but at least it shows you have not made yourself cheap at
Friarton Mill. Fan sees callers in her bare cold hole of a drawing-room
certainly; but when I go there, which is precious seldom as I know she
would rather have my room than my company, she is always pretending to
be notable over a heap of such common hemming and back-stitching as
even you can do. Fancy! she was making bed curtains, and not keeping
them out of the way either, the last time I was there. She is as busy
as any sewing girl over the vicarage old women’s flannel petticoats and
children’s cotton frocks. Rather she than I slave for such cattle. We
give a good subscription to Mr. Holland’s poor-box, and that’s enough,
I should think. But Fan curries favour with the vicarage people, who
have taken her up, though Peter Constable was an old chapel-goer like
we are, and Oliver goes to chapel still. I am at a loss to tell what
gentility she has more than us, except that she’s that proud and
stuck-up,’ and ’Mily sat up in her chair with Fan’s most frigid air,
amidst the loud applause of her sisters.
‘Now mind what you’re about, ’Mily,’ her mother reproved the actress;
‘you may not be far wrong, and you’re smart at taking people
off—there’s no denying it, but you may do it once too often. What
would Oliver Constable think if he saw you? He may not have any
nonsense about him, but he won’t care to have his sister turned into a
laughing-stock.’
‘I’m sure I don’t mind a fiddle-stick what he cares,’ protested ’Mily,
taking high ground.
‘Hold your tongue, and don’t speak again to me, Miss,’ insisted Mrs.
Polley. ‘You get too much of your head as it is; but you sha’n’t spoil
your chances by your folly before my very eyes.’
‘It ain’t likely to be me, mother,’ cried ’Mily, rather enjoying the
implication. ‘It will be ’Liza if it’s to be any of us. She is fitter
to tackle him with her rubbish of poetry, which ought to suit a college
man.’
‘Me!’ ejaculated ’Liza, a delicate, rather indolent girl, in injured
innocence. ‘I never spoke about poetry to Oliver Constable.’
‘And I should just like to hear you try it,’ Mrs. Polley gave her
literary daughter fair warning; ‘though a song is all very well at a
proper time and place, at a party or after supper. I was a good singer
myself in my day—you need not make faces, ’Mily—and I can raise the
tune yet in chapel a deal truer than a pack of set-up madams with
money wasted on them in an instrument and in piany-forty lessons.’ The
last cut bore reference to the superannuated piano in the Polleys’
drawing-room, and the two quarters’ fees for instruction in playing on
it, vouchsafed by Mrs. Polley to her daughters, being what they might
claim as their due in education according to the growing requirements
of their station. ‘But to sing my Maker’s praises is one thing,’ went
on Mrs. Polley severely, ‘or even to be able to manage a song or two
in addition to a hymn, and to have any traffic with play or poetry
books is another. To my mind, they’re worse than novels and romances,
and you all know what your deacons think of them. You gals may read
them on the sly sometimes, but it had need to be on the sly, for if I
get my hands on such devil’s books, into the fire or out of the window
they go. Them’s my opinions, and if you think to defy them you know the
consequences.’
‘Compose yourself, my dear,’ ventured Mr. Polley, looking up from his
newspaper. ‘I apprehend you’re going just a little too far. I remember
the old minister gave in to recommend Uncle Tom’s——’
‘Uncle Tom’s cat!’ interrupted Mrs. Polley, disrespectfully. ‘A good
turn of honest work is a far better employment than snivelling over
any made up story—though it were Mr. Holland or the old minister
himself as made it up. You can tell him I said so, if you like. I
wonder anybody can be so silly—not to say so unprincipled, for I
call it downright want of principle, to be taken in by printed lies.
Reading trash of stories and verses never paid a debt, or filled a
hungry stomach, that I ever heard tell of. But I’ll tell you what
they’ve done,’ speaking triumphantly in vindication of her theory,
‘they’ve brought an idiot like Poet Dymott,’ alluding to a local poet
of humble vocation, ‘as low as the union. Luckily his silly of a wife
who encouraged him died early, and they had no children to suffer
from his not sticking to his last and shoe-leather. Fools’ tales sent
a light-headed gipsy like Mrs. Dadd’s last servant into the county
asylum, after she was pulled out of Buller’s Brook, where she might
have stopped still for all the washing her character had got. We should
be a deal better off for maids-of-all-work, when we’ve the misfortune
to need ’em, if it were not for the trumpery “Family Heralds” and
“People’s Journals” as the girls have the impudence to take out,
throwing away their pence, and sitting up at nights by the help of
prigged candle-hends, at the risk of setting houses on fire, and
creeping and dawdling about their work next day. I don’t hold against
a book as is an improving book, and deals with our latter hends,’ Mrs.
Polley granted, showing herself a little more liberal and capable of
making a concession, ‘at a proper time, on a Sunday evening, when it
rains cats and dogs, so as to make chapel out of the question, and
there’s nothing else to do at home. But I’d like to see any of you gals
settle to a volume of sermons, if there was a glistening chimneypot
hat or a draggled tail of a skirt to watch passing the door. I don’t
make any stand against Polley muddling for ever amongst his newspapers,
since he’s no good at any better job.’
‘Missus Polley!’ objected the gentleman, looking up again from his
newspaper, with his hat still on his head. Though he rarely stirred
beyond the parlour, he wore his hat, except when he was at meals or in
bed, as if to give him the help of a few inches added to his masculine
height. He spoke half under his breath in subdued displeasure.
‘I don’t deny I like myself to know what’s a-going on, when I’ve time
to listen, which ain’t often, and Polley’s reading out saves me the
trouble of looking over the news,’ confessed the matron candidly,
taking not the smallest notice of her husband’s appeal unless by
speaking, if anything, in a louder key. ‘Besides, it helps to keep him
out of harm’s way.’
‘Missus Polley!’ groaned the defaulter more clamorously.
‘What are you Missus Polleying me for?’ his helpmeet turned on him
briskly. ‘You ain’t going to deny the tricks you played me when first
we went together, Polley? It is as well to keep you out of temptation,
though I should just like to see you trying on that trade again, now
that I’ve got the upper hand, and you’ve got some notion of the value
of a good wife, as has kept a roof over your and the gals’ heads, and
a full table, and the shop flourishing more than it ever did in your
day. You ought to bless your stars, Polley, that you ever set eyes on
my face, or that I consented to have a bad bargain in you.’
’Mily Polley was a little tired of hearing the chronicle of her
father’s delinquencies and her mother’s virtues; she broke in upon the
monologue, reminding her mother of an instance of inconsistency in her
conduct. ‘I wonder, mother, you ever let poetry books lie in the house
or suffer ’Liza to look into them.’
‘You know as well as I do, ’Mily,’ Mrs. Polley explained, shortly,
‘that ’Liza has not been so strong as the rest of you gals, and when
she has not been able to sit up with her colds and influenzas, there
was no great wrong done in her diverting herself with a book, though I
could have wished it had been of a more sensible and serious kind. I
did try to set Mr. Holland upon her about that.’
‘I was dumpish enough, I can tell you, without reading mouldy sermons,’
grumbled ’Liza. ‘I wonder how any of you would have liked to be
condemned either to do that or count your fingers, for my strength was
that gone I was not able so much as to hold a crochet-hook, and Mr.
Holland said there was no harm in my pieces, some of them were most
elegant.’
‘Then ’Liza’s books,’ said Ann Polley, who was commonplace and
practical to excess, ‘are not ’Liza’s any more than ours, only that she
looks into them sometimes. They are school prizes and Christmas gifts,
and keepsakes from friends, though I think they might hit on better
presents. It would be a great pity if you were so far left to yourself
as to burn them, mother, since some of them are quite handsome “table
books,” which I should be sorry to handle except to dust, for fear of
spoiling their red and green and gold backs. They are a great ornament
laid round the drawing-room table.’
‘Yes,’ said Mrs. Polley, decidedly, ‘that is the right place for them.
They will turn nobody’s feather head, and waste nobody’s time save in
the dusting, lying there.’