THE FIRST ATTEMPT.
After all, if Oliver had always been ushered into the drawing-room
which these closed books were supposed to embellish, he would not have
found many traces of higher aspirations in its gaudy carpet, and chairs
and tables of one ponderous monotonous style, since Mrs. Polley’s
influence had at least saved them from being slim and gimcrack, with
its samples of meretricious fancy-work, in which there was as little
fancy as there was use, than he could discover in the back parlour.
The family room was furnished with the darkest drugget and coarsest
mahogany and hair cloth. It did not, according to the Polleys’ ideas,
admit of any attempt at ornament. It was reserved to fulfil their
notions of ease and comfort, the table being often covered and littered
with the materials employed in the girls’ home dressmaking, and the
chimney-piece given over to Mr. Polley’s tobacco-pouch and pipes, and
Mrs. Polley’s thimble and reels of cotton.
’Mily Polley was not a bad mimic in that lowest development of art
which is contented to grasp and caricature such salient details and
absurdities of human nature as come within the artist’s limited
observation. And though there was a horrible absence of reverence
and tenderness in the girl’s rendering of some old woman’s palsied
utterance, or some half-imbecile boy’s stutter, in her cool giving
of her own father’s stock phrases, even in her close copies of Mr.
Holland—the Polleys’ clergyman’s—stiff or strained gestures in the
most solemn part of his services, the representation was the only
version of the drama which ever reached the Polleys, while it was as
good as a play in forcing Mrs. Polley to relax into a grim smile and
to forget for a moment her rare achievements, and in stimulating Mr.
Polley to clap his hands magnanimously at the mocking echo of himself.
There was no theatre in Friarton, and if there had been, the Polleys
belonged to a branch of the Christian Church which condemns theatres
without reservation, nay, sometimes, as in the case of Mrs. Polley,
extends the condemnation to play-books as well as players.
Yet it struck Oliver Constable that the Polleys were at the level of
civilisation when the theatre, if not abused and tabooed, would have
naturally come in as an effective instrument in their training. He
arrived at the conclusion as he formed one of the audience to the
mimicry which ’Mily Polley, who was proud of her gift, was sometimes
tempted to practise before her friends and acquaintances, in addition
to her family; as he took notice of the nicknames which abounded in her
vocabulary in about an equal degree to that in which they flourished
in Jack Dadd’s speech; and as Oliver observed the glee with which the
girl utilised any exceptionally silly or stupid person who had the
misfortune to enter her circle, making him or her serve for a temporary
butt. The last was grievously disloyal, and the worst thing was that
nobody—neither the mistress nor the master of the house, not even
’Liza, who was certainly gentler than the others, who sometimes read a
little from choice, and who was therefore under the impression that she
had culture—recognised the disloyalty.
But the mimicry was an intellectual effort a shade in advance of
the bald individual experiences, the tittle-tattle purely peddling,
or more or less mischievous, which constituted the staple of the
Polleys’ conversation, and was just such an effort as the theatre
might have spurred on and supplemented. Oliver imagined the Polleys
might have liked to go to a respectable theatre which was not under an
ecclesiastical ban, might have enjoyed a broad farce, and relished and
profited so far by one of the homelier order of tragedies.
What he could not imagine was, that till they had gone a little farther
in elementary knowledge, and without the theatre, which comes in to
meet the intellectual law that perception and imitation are among the
first acts of the mental powers of a child, or an undeveloped man or
woman, any of the Polleys, with the exception of ’Liza, could derive
the smallest benefit or satisfaction from the mass of books, which, to
be sure, they left untouched. He ceased also to be surprised that the
Polley family should be in the section of Mr. Holland’s congregation,
the members of which composed themselves, after the prayers and hymns,
to look round on their neighbours and manifestly take stock of their
presence, looks and clothes, or who openly nodded and audibly snored
throughout their clergyman’s finest peroration, with which, however,
they would not have consented to dispense, since they took a reflected
pride in his fervid eloquence as contrasted with the vicar’s well-bred
conversation in the pulpit. Oliver had ceased to get impatient with
what he had been accustomed to consider Holland’s violent transitions
in a variety of bad styles—from the strongly sensational to the
familiarly anecdotal—bordering on the facetious, when the critic
was better able to estimate the order of intelligence with which, to
a large extent, the preacher had to deal. Oliver began to pity the
poor teacher, who was bound alike by his calling and his conscience
to impart the highest truths which could be addressed to humanity, to
these dense minds and stolid hearts.
Oliver found the girls by fits and starts furiously busy, or, in spite
of their mother, absolutely idle. It was clear that notwithstanding,
or because of, their mental vacuity, they luxuriated in idleness a
little after the fashion of the dwellers in Eastern zenanas. The
Polleys still regarded idleness much as their poor young drudge of a
maid-of-all-work, taken from the workhouse school, looked upon it, with
more reason, as one of the great gains of having risen and prospered
in business and the world. To do nothing save gabble idle gossip was
next best to wearing fine clothes every day of the week and every hour
of the day, and eating at every meal early lamb and salmon, pastry,
plum-cake, and strawberry ices, which the Polleys’ class are now in
circumstances to add to their more primitive dainties of pork-pies,
muffins, and shrimps. Idleness was one of the established privileges
of ladies to which the girls gave full credit, and of which they were
not slow to avail themselves when they had the opportunity. It might
pall in time, and so might the fine clothes and fine food in unlimited
quantities, but such satiety the Polley girls were not likely to attain
so long as they lived under their mother’s rule. And they prized their
advantages the more because they were still reduced to snatch at and
make the most of them when these only came in their way occasionally,
by the arbitrary will of Mrs. Polley.
Oliver observed that the girls had none of the sustained industry of
Fan, and that they were constantly seeking to shirk the share of work
in the shop and house which their mother laid upon them. ’Mily was
particularly adroit in slipping off her burdens, and her active mother
made more allowance for ’Mily’s adroitness than for ’Liza’s laziness
or Ann’s slowness, showing that she considered rebellion incidental
to youth, and admired in this case the cleverness with which it was
carried out. Mrs. Polley said her youngest was ‘a sad pickle,’ but
she admitted she had been thoughtless and fond of her pleasure beyond
everything in her own girlhood. She daresayed a house and family on
’Mily’s refractory shoulders would steady her in time. She would rather
have a girl smart for her own ends than a silly or a dawdle, any day;
so far from regarding the smartness thus exercised as dishonourable to
the culprit, Mrs. Polley saw in it a proof that ’Mily would be worth
something in the end.
The household needlework, which is still done at home in houses like
the Polleys’, was another task which the girls evaded, or discharged,
with a grudge, in the most slovenly fashion. Such disgraceful
needlework, to be worn in private, as the Polleys passed through their
clumsy, careless fingers, Fan Constable would not have accepted from
the least scholar in the vicar’s wife’s school.
It puzzled Oliver that Mrs. Polley, who insisted so strongly on the
merits of energy and enterprise in her own case, could, as a matter
of principle, permit the comparatively useless, frivolous lives her
daughters led. But when he sounded her one day on whether she did
not approve of training girls to self-help, as fit successors to
their fathers and mothers in such a shop as she herself conducted
successfully, he found, strange as it seemed to him, that she too, was
tinged with the girls’ views of gentility. Oliver, who had thought to
have pleased his father’s old friend by the suggestion, had never gone
so near to sending her off in a huff—and Mrs. Polley in a huff was a
formidable person to have to do with.
‘Well, to tell you the truth, Mr. Oliver,’ said Mrs. Polley, with a dry
cough, ‘my gals don’t ought to look forward to going into the shop. I
haven’t toiled my shoulders and my ’ead, and stood there till I was fit
to drop on market-days, for my gals to have to follow in my shoes.
If business goes with us as it has done, I’m ’appy to say, ever since
I took it in hand, I expect I shall put enough by to enable the gals,
if they ain’t provided with husbands in the meantime, to live on their
means, and do nothing, like the best in the place.’
Oliver was silenced.
The one employment which entirely overcame the Polleys’ taste for
idleness, and on which they entered with a will and the utmost
zest, was what Oliver reckoned their unfortunate blunder in making
objects of themselves in the line of dress. They could always be
eagerly interested in frilling themselves from top to toe, in pulling
down their old flounces, and furbelows, and bunches of skirts, and
reconstructing them, if possible, in an uglier shape than before. They
were never wearied of manufacturing the most grotesque apologies for
hats and bonnets. Oliver thought, in contrast, of Fan and Catherine
Hilliard’s simple gowns and quiet hats, which, if he had known it,
’Mily Polley classed as the dowdiest things out, and farther stated
that it was her deliberate opinion, only a learned young lady with
her head in the clouds, like Miss Hilliard, or a girl with the cool
assurance of Fan Constable, would take it upon her to be so plain in
her dress, and would not at least try to be wearing what was stylish.
Oliver, poor benighted man, only marvelled, on the contrary, how even
girls in their vagaries could accomplish such tremendous mistakes in
what one might have imagined would have been the congenial art of
adorning their own bodies.
Nobody could call the Polleys’ lives gloomy or austere, yet to Oliver
their enjoyments appeared grievously ignoble, even when they were not
of an animal character. He was very sorry for those girls, whom no man
had hired to worthy work and wages. He thought of the innumerable
missions to the poor, and of the ladies who, to their unending credit,
devoted much time and attention to raising the women of the lower
ranks. He recalled the superior advantages which may be held at least
to balance the increased temptations of the upper classes. And he
reflected, with deep regret and shame, how Fan withdrew, and Catherine
Hilliard recoiled, from all association with girls like the Polleys.
What chance had they of escaping from irredeemable materialism and
innate vulgarity—those deadly foes to all that is spiritual and
really noble? What help was extended to them beyond the Sunday sermon
which flew over their heads, and the verses in the Bible—which they
read as a lesson, that had little or nothing to do with their past or
present, but belonged, as Mrs. Polley would have said, to their ‘latter
hends’—to rise above gross self-indulgence—so long as it was not what
the world called vicious? For the Polleys were not merely respectable,
but even inclined to be Pharisees in their loud boasting of their
respectability. Yet self-indulgence, which was not absolutely vicious,
was in their eyes perfectly admissible and actually laudable. A man or
a woman who would not gratify himself or herself by well-nigh wallowing
in the outward fruits of success, was either a screw or a minx. Heroes
and saints had very little that was heroic and saintly in them to the
Polleys’ mind. All were dragged down to the same low level.
The Polleys’ standard was very little above that of the most
rudimentary Christians, whether in high places, in courts and alleys,
or in the bush and the jungle. The Polleys would do no murder, would
not pick or steal—unless in those adaptations and adulterations of
groceries, which had become part of a wide-spread system, with which
all trades complied, and which nobody, save a fanatic, dreamt of
defining as stealing, would prove chaste maids and matrons, would
not literally fall down and worship golden images, and for anything
farther would regularly attend chapel—of which the heads of the house
were members, and would contribute liberally and with great _esprit de
corps_ to the minister’s salary.
It did not strike Oliver that the Polleys were much exposed to the
temptation to break those commandments which they respected, and for
the rest, with regard to the grand spiritual lives beyond, these were
simply ignored and uncomprehended. Oliver feared there was a more
impassable miserable chasm between the Polleys’ mode of existence and
all that belongs to a higher life, than even the ghastly gulf which
cuts off the outcast in his crimes and wretchedness from purity and
peace, just as it was said of old that the publicans and harlots
were nearer the kingdom of heaven than their extremely respectable,
outwardly moral, nay, ostentatiously religious brethren. To do the
Polleys justice, they made no great barren profession of religion; they
contented themselves with being by inheritance and social politics
chapel people, and despising the members of a state and priest-ridden
church.
Oliver, in his arguments with Fan, had given all honour to the
essential virtues of his class; now it pained him intensely to be
forced to recognise wherein it fell short, even in precedent and
tradition, not to say in word and deed, of the standards and practices
of the more highly cultured and better educated classes.
Certainly truth was not confined to any rank, and flagrant deception
was confessedly committed by ladies and gentlemen. But these ladies and
gentlemen were not respectable members of their class and, unless in
outrageous instances, counted falsehood brought home to them worldly
dishonour, and concealed their lapses from truth with all their might.
But a certain amount of lying did not involve the same disgrace when
it came to light in Oliver’s class. Jack Dadd was singularly obtuse in
perceiving that the twists and turns which he gave to his words and
actions, in order to serve himself, and of which he actually boasted to
Oliver, in the sense of what some Americans would call ‘smart practice’
or as capital jokes, were neither more nor less than cunningly veiled
lies. As for the Polley girls, they indulged with the utmost freedom
in wild exaggerations, horribly prejudiced statements, and barefaced
fibbing when it suited their purpose, until Oliver hung his head and
almost groaned aloud.
Of course, as Oliver was thankful to think, there were many much better
representatives of the small shopkeeping class than any he encountered
in Friarton—young men whose public spirit and intelligence, if not
their culture, far exceeded his own; girls as dutiful as Fan had been
to her father, and with a still higher and truer idea of what made
perfect womanliness, and of a necessity perfect ladyhood, in any rank.
But he feared these formed the exceptions, more or less rare, to the
ordinary rule. They were the salt of the earth, no doubt, but bore no
greater proportion to the social body they preserved from corruption,
than salt to the physical world with which it is incorporated. Oliver
was compelled to suspect that the Dadds and Polleys presented an
average specimen of their class.
Oliver sought to prove a friend and brother to the young Polleys and
their girl companions as well as to Jack Dadd and his associates. In
order to be so he struggled to show himself patient and judicious with
the girls. He answered all their questions about his former college
experience and present volunteer movement, as fully as he knew how.
And then he tried to carry the inquisitors to something in earth or
heaven beyond their small personalities and their life in Friarton,
with so poor a result that he fell back in despair to asking ’Liza
Polley about the poetry—of which she was said to be fond. She did not
impress him as the most intelligent of the sisters, but he fancied if
she had the shadow of a taste for poetry, he had a hold upon her.
Oliver was in blissful ignorance of Mrs. Polley’s objection to such a
subject of conversation, as not merely trifling in the extreme, but
verging on impropriety.
For that matter, Mrs. Polley was not quite so good as her word where
a well-to-do young fellow, who might be looking after one or other of
her daughters, was concerned. She gave Oliver considerable license
in his attempts to entertain the girls, leaving him to ‘get thick’
with them in his own way, refraining, to a remarkable extent and
with some disinterestedness, from her usual custom of engrossing the
conversation. She only dropped one little hint which, notwithstanding
Fan’s warning, Oliver failed to appropriate. ‘If you encourage ’Liza
in her liking for such nonsense, you must be prepared to take the
responsibility upon yourself, Mr. Oliver,’ said Mrs. Polley, with
something like a simper which might have been alarming in so downright,
plain-spoken a woman, had it been addressed to a less single-hearted,
self-forgetful man.
But Oliver undertook the responsibility with a frankness and
fearlessness which were their own defence. He assured Mrs. Polley that
Miss ’Liza need take no harm from the perusal of good poetry, and
pledged himself that, so far from causing her to neglect any duty, it
ought rather to spur her on and brace her to its better performance. He
smiled to himself after the utterance of so great a platitude, while
the hint evaporated in empty air.
It was poor Miss ’Liza who felt embarrassed. She had been accustomed to
hear herself accused of literary tastes with an admixture of very mild
vanity and rather more energetic deprecation. She was by no means sure
that the tastes were sufficiently pronounced to stand the investigation
of a university man. She fidgeted and hesitated, and caused ’Mily to
mock her more than ever, when Oliver broached the word poetry to her.
In addition, by common consent, in the light of compatibility of taste,
’Liza found Oliver Constable likely to be set aside by her family and
friends as her ‘beau.’ He was in all probability coming after one of
the sisters in his regular visits to the back parlour, and ’Liza was
the one who struck her own set, at the first glance, as cut out for him.
’Liza was quite the girl to believe what everybody told her. And she
was not without a sense of obligation to the world in general and to
her sisters in particular, for handing over Oliver to her. She was
struck by the disinterestedness of Ann and ’Mily, and she was flattered
with the notion of a distinguished conquest on her own part.
On the other hand, ’Liza Polley was not so simple as to suppose that
her sisters were actuated entirely by generosity in their early
withdrawal from any rivalry in her pretensions to Oliver Constable.
Indeed, in spite of her literary bent, ’Liza was ready to agree with
’Mily in her sweeping assertion that Oliver was ‘a handsome gorilla
of a duffer,’ who was always talking sense, or nonsense which was no
better than sense, since it was past their comprehension, and who was
constantly on the verge of lecturing them. ’Liza did not relish the
imminent prospect of a lecture, however delicately administered, any
more than ’Mily or Ann relished it. She had an uneasy consciousness
that Oliver would consider her a humbug, since she had really hardly
any more topics to talk over with him than her sisters could find.
Above all, ’Liza knew in her inmost heart there were persons—young
men—a young man whom, whoever the world might regard as well matched
with her, she liked infinitely better than she could ever like Oliver
Constable.
Oliver was a great scholar, and she was not nearly scholarly enough
to be at home with him as she was with that other person, who chaffed
her unmercifully about being a blue-stocking, but who, she was sure,
nevertheless, looked up to her a little for her slender bookish
attainments.
’Liza dreaded that ‘the word of’ Oliver would separate her from this
more favoured aspirant to her regard.
On all these counts ’Liza was so reluctant and retiring when Oliver
tried to ‘tackle’ her, as he called the process, on her reading, that
he felt—even in being foiled anew—at least he could triumphantly
refute Fan’s unwomanly assertion that the Polley girls would be eager
and unmaidenly in receiving and misinterpreting his advances.
Oliver never got beyond the discovery that ’Liza’s theory of poetry
was decidedly that of rhyme; and she inclined strongly to what was
meretriciously sentimental, especially when the sentiment was that of
pairs of lovers meeting by sunset or moonlight, under oak trees, or in
bowers of roses, or amidst ruins in churchyards. These persons swore
eternal fidelity and incontinently died by violent deaths, or one of
them proved false, as it were for the purpose of breaking the heart
of the other, who continued, to Oliver’s mind, wrongheadedly faithful
to a creature who was not worth a moment’s regret. When ’Liza strayed
slightly from these stock scenes, it was into the superficial splendour
of palaces, or at least into the height of hackneyed picturesqueness
as displayed in the castles and fortified towns, the crusades, sieges
and battlefields of mediæval times. Followers at a humble distance of
Moore, L.E.L., and Mrs. Hemans, constituted her antiquated school of
poets.
It saddened Oliver to see that ’Liza’s faint poetic fancy could find
no resting-place nearer home, and remained on that account utterly
divorced from her daily life. It was like a wistful groping for better
things far a field. It reminded him of the manlier sort of songs with
which Jack Dadd and his comrades diversified their ‘If ever I cease to
love’ and ‘Not for Joe.’ How the shop lads, who had not the remotest
chance of being active participators in the open-air stir and joy of
a hunting field, or who were in no danger of knowing any voyage more
exciting than a holiday trip in a river steamer, would give the full
force of their young lungs and hearts to the vigorous refrain of ‘John
Peel’ or ‘The Bay of Biscay—O.’