EMPHASIS ON MRS. COMBER I.
IT would be fitting at this moment, were it possible, to give Traill's
impressions, at the end of the first week, of the place and the people.
But here one is met by the outstanding and dominating difficulty that
Traill himself was not given to gathering impressions at all—he felt
things, but he never saw them; he recorded opinions in simple language
and an abbreviated vocabulary, but it was all entirely objective;
motives, the way that things hung and were interdependent one upon the
other, the sense of contrast and of the incessant jostling of comedy on
tragedy and of irony upon both, never hit him anywhere.
Nevertheless, he had, in a clear, clean-cut way, his opinions at the end
of the first week.
There is a letter of his to a college friend that is interesting,
and there are some other things in a letter to his mother; but he was
engaged, quite naturally, in endeavoring to keep up with the confusing
medley of “things to be done and things not to be done” that that first
week must necessarily entail.
His relations to Perrin and Perrin's relations to him are, it may be
said here now, once and for all, the entire motif of this episode—it
is from first to last an attempt to arrive at a decision as to the real
reasons of the catastrophe that ultimately occurred; and so, that being
the case, it may seem that the particulars as to the rest of the
people in the place, and, indeed, the place itself, are extraneous and
unnecessary; but they all helped, every one of them, in their own way
and their own time, to bring about the ultimate disaster, and so they
must have their place.
Traill had learnt during his three years at Cambridge that, above all
things, one must not worry. He had been inclined, a little at first, to
think, after the easy indolence of Clifton, that one ought to bother.
He had found that two thirds in his Historical Tripos and a “Blue” for
Rugby football were very easily; obtained; he found that the second of
these things led to a popularity that invited a pleasant indifference to
thought and discussion, and he was extremely happy.
His “Blue” would undoubtedly have secured him something better than a
post at Moffatt's had he taken more trouble; but He had left it, lazily,
until the last and had been forced to accept what he could get; in a
term or two he hoped to return to Clifton.
All this meant that his stay at Moffatt's was in the nature of an
interlude. He buoyantly regarded it as a month or two of “learning the
ropes,” and he could not therefore he expected to regard masters, boys,
or buildings with any very intense seriousness. It is, indeed, one of
the most curious aspects of the whole affair that he remained, for so
long a period, blind to all that was going on.
In his motives, in his actions, he was of a surprising simplicity. He
found the world an entirely delightful place—there was Rugby football in
the winter, and cricket in the summer; there were splendid walks; there
was a week in town every now and again; as to people, there was his
mother—a widow, and he was her only son—whom he entirely worshiped;
there were one or two excellent friends of his from Clifton and
Cambridge; there was no one whom he really disliked; and there were one
or two girls, hazily, not very seriously, in the distance, whom he had
liked very much indeed.
He read a little—liked it when he had time; had a passion for Napoleon,
whose campaigns he had followed confusedly at Cambridge; and was even
stirred—again when he had time—by certain sorts of poetry.
And it is this that leads me to one of the questions that are most
difficult of decision—as to how strongly, if indeed at all, he had any
feeling for beauty before he met Isabel Desart.
He certainly—if he had it at this time—could not put it into words; but
I believe that he had, in the back of his brain, a kind of consciousness
about it all, and his meeting with Isabel fired what had been lying
there waiting.
He never, certainly, talked about it, but it will be noticed that
he went to the wood a great many times, even before he felt Isabel's
influence, and that he realized quite vividly certain aspects of
Pendragon and the Flutes; and he would not have cared for Richard
Feverel quite so passionately had he not had something—some poetry and
feeling—already in him.
The reverse of the shield is, at any rate, given in that first letter
to his mother. He says of Moffatt's: “You never saw anything so hideous.
The red brick all looks so fresh, the stone corridors all smell so new,
the iron and brass of the place is all so strong and regular. It's
like the labs at Cambridge on an extensive scale; you'd think they were
inventing gases or something, not teaching boys the way they should
go.... All the same, coming up the hill the other night, with the
sun setting behind it, it looked quite black and grand—it 's the
fresh-lobster color of it that I can't stand...”
That shows that he was, to some degree at any rate, sensitive to the
way that the place looked, and he, in all probability, felt a great deal
more about it than he ever said to anyone.
Cambridge may have done something for him—few people can spend three
years with these gray palaces and blue waters without some kind of
development, although probably—because we are English—it is unconscious.
II.
He had, during that first week, too much to do to get any very concrete
idea of the staff. On the first morning of term there was a masters'
meeting, and he could see them all sitting, heavily, despondently, in
conclave. There was a gradation of seats, and Traill, of course, took
the lowest—a little, hard, sharp one near the window with a shelf just
above his head, and it knocked him if he moved.
The Rev. Moy-Thompson, the head master—a venerable-looking clergyman,
with a long grizzled heard and bony fingers—sat at the end of the table
in an impatient way, as though he were longing for an excuse to fly
into a temper. For the others, Traill only noticed one or two; Perrin,
Dormer, and Clifton were there, of course. There was a large stout
man with a heavy mustache and a sharp voice like a creaking door; a
clergyman, thin and rather haggard, with a white wall of a collar much
too big for him; an agitated little Frenchman, who seemed to expect that
at any moment he might be the victim of a practical joke; a thin, bony
little man with a wiry mustache and a biting, cynical speech that seemed
to goad Moy-Thompson to fury; a nervous and bald-headed man, whose
hand continually brushed his mustache and whose manner was exceedingly
deprecating. There were others, but these struck Traill's eyes as they
roved about.
During the discussion that followed concerning the moving of boys up
and the moving of boys down, the time of lock-up, the possibilities and
disadvantages of the new boys, it seemed to be everybody's intention
to be as unpleasant as possible under cover of an agreeable manner. On
several occasions it seemed that the storm was certain to break, and
Traill bent eagerly forward in his seat; but the danger was averted.
As the week passed, he found that these men grew more distinct and
individual. The stout man with the heavy mustache was called Comber; he
had once been a famous football player, and was now engaged on a book
concerning the athletes of Greece. The clergyman, the Rev. Stuart, was
very quiet except on questions of ritual and ceremony, and these things
stirred him into a passion. The little Frenchman, Monsieur Pons, spent
his time in hating England and preparing to leave it—an escape that he
never achieved.
The little man with the mustache, Birkland by name, seemed to Traill the
most “interesting” of them. He was fierce and caustic in his manner to
everybody and was feared by the whole staff.
White, the nervous man, never, so far as Traill could see, opened his
mouth; and if he did say anything, no one paid the slightest attention.
None of these men, Traill discovered, concerned him very closely, as his
work was for the most part at the Lower School. He was pleasant to all
of them, and, if he had thought about it at all, would have said that
they liked him; but he did not think about it.
His relations with Dormer, Perrin, and Clinton were quite agreeable.
Dormer was kind and helpful in a fatherly way; Clinton admired his
football and liked to compare Oxford (at which he had, several years
before, been a shining light) with Traill's own university; Perrin asked
him into his sitting-room for coffee and talked School Education to him
at infinite length.
Everyone, during this first week, was quite pleasant and agreeable. III.
The ladies of the establishment came to Traill's notice more slowly;
and they came to him, of course, considering his temperament, quite
indefinitely and without his own immediate realization of anything. He
could point, of course, to the moment of his meeting Isabel, because,
from that moment, his life was changed; but it was the meeting rather
than any keen and tangible idea of her that he realized.
It is essential, however, that Mrs. Comber should appear on the scene a
good deal more clearly than he would ever probably see her. She had so
much to do with everything that occurred—quite unconsciously, poor lady,
as indeed she was always unconscious of anything until it was over—that
she demands a close attempt at accurate presentation.
The immediate impressions that she left on any observer, however
casual, were of size and color, and of all the things that go with those
qualities. She was large, immense, and seemed, from her movements and
her air of rather tentatively and timidly embracing the world, to be
even larger.
Her hair was of a blackness and her cheeks of a redness that hinted at
foreign blood, but was derived in reality from nothing more than Cornish
descent—and that indeed may, if you please, be taken as foreign enough.
There was a great deal of hair piled on her head, and in her continual
smiles and anxiety to be pleasant there seemed, too, to be a great deal
of her red cheeks.
In those earlier days, the daughter of a country clergyman, and the
youngest of six sisters, she had been, when so permitted, jolly, noisy,
with a tremendous sense of life. The key that was going, she believed,
to unlock life for her was Romance, and she looked eagerly and
enthusiastically down the dusty road to watch for the coming of some
knight. When he came in the person of Freddie Comber, young, handsome,
athletic, and the most devout of lovers, she felt that, now that her
lamp was lighted, she had only got to keep the flame burning and she
would be happy for ever. That—the keeping of it alight—seemed, as she
looked at the handsome and ardent Freddie, an easy enough thing to do.
She did not know that Fate very often, having given a tempting glimpse
and even a positive handling of its burnished brass and intricate
tracing, removes it altogether—merely, as it may seem to some cynical
observers of life, for the fun of the thing. In any case, from the
moment of her marriage, Mrs. Comber's eager hands found nothing to
hold on to at all, and she passed, in the ensuing years from a
plucky determination to make the “second best” do, to the final blind
acquiescence in anything at all that might have the faintest resemblance
to that earlier glorious radiance.
Freddie Comber's transition from the handsome, enthusiastic young lover
into the stout, lethargic and querulous Mr. Comber, master of the Middle
Fourth and anticipatory author of a work on the athletes of Greece,
would need an exhaustive treatise on “Public School Education as applied
to our Masters” for its reasonable analysis. Perhaps this faithful
account of the relations of Perrin and Traill may offer some solution to
that and other more complex riddles.
It says, however, everything for Mrs. Comber's pluck and determined
stupidity that she lived, even now, after fifteen years' married life,
at the threshold of expectation. Things that were apparent to the
complete stranger in his first five minutes' interview with Comber were
hidden, wilfully and proudly hidden, from her.
She yielded to facts, however, in this one particular, that she extended
her attempts at Romance to wider fields. It always might return as far
as Freddie was concerned—she was continually hoping and expecting that
it would; but meanwhile she dug diligently in other grounds. Her three
boys—fat, stolid, stupid, pugnacious—cared, they showed her quite
plainly, nothing for her at all; but she put that down to their age,
to their school, even to their appetites, their clothes, anything that
pointed to a probable change in the future. In their holidays she spent
her days in eagerly loving them and being repulsed, and then in
hiding her love under a troubled indifference and being entirely
disregarded.... They were unpleasant boys.
Another place for digging was the ground of “things,” of property.
Having had nothing at all when she was a girl, and having almost
nothing—they were very poor, and she “managed” badly—now, she had always
had an intense feeling for possession. She was generous to an amazing
degree, and would give anything, in her tangled, impetuous kind of way,
to anybody without a moment's thought. But she loved her valuables. They
were very few. Potatoes and cabbages, clothing and school-bills for the
boys, consumed any money that there might happen to be, and consumed it
in a muddled, helpless kind of way that she was never able to prevent or
correct. But things had come to her—been given, left, or eagerly seized
in a wild moment's extravagance,—and these she cherished with all her
eyes and hands. The peacock-blue Liberty screen, the ormolu clock, some
few pieces of dainty Dresden china, some brass Indian pots, a small but
musically charming piano, some sketches and two good prints, and edition
de luxe of Walter Pater (a wedding-present, and she had never opened one
of these beautiful volumes), some silver, a teapot, a tray, some cups
that Freddie had won in an earlier, more glorious period, some small
pieces of jewelry—over these things she passed every morning with a
delicate, lingering touch.
Clumsy and awkward as she generally was, when she approached her
valuables she became another person: she would lie awake thinking about
them.... They seemed—dumb things as they were—to give her something of
the affection for which, from more eloquent persons, she was always so
continually searching.
She was as clumsy in her relations to all her neighbors and
acquaintances as she was in her movements and her finances. She was
famous for her want of tact; famous, too, for a certain coarseness and
bluntness of speech; famous for a childlike and transparent attempt to
make people like her—an attempt that, from its transparency, always with
wiser and more cynical persons failed.
She generally thought of three things at once and tried to talk about
them all; she was quite aware that most of the ladies connected with
the town and the neighborhood disliked her, and she never, although
she wondered in a kind of muddled dismay why it was, could discover
a satisfactory reason. She spent her years in cheerfully rushing into
people's lives and being hurriedly bundled out again—which “bundling,”
at every reiteration of it, left her as confused and dismayed as before.
But against all this rejection and muddled confusion there was, of
course, to be set Isabel Desart. What Miss Desart was to Mrs. Comber
no simple succession of printed words can possibly say. She was, in her
free, spontaneous fashion, a great many things to a great many people;
but to none of them was she quite the special and wonderful gift that
she was to Mrs. Comber.
Perhaps it was some feeling of this kind that brought her so often, and
for so long a period, down to Moffatt's—a proceeding that her London
friends could never even vaguely understand. That she—having, as she
might, such a glorious “time” in London behind her—should care to go
and stay for so long a period at that dullest of places, a school, with
those dullest and most arid of people, scholastic authorities (this term
to include wives as well as husbands), was indeed to them all a total
mystery.
Mrs. Comber, with all her faults and insufficiencies, would have seemed
a poor enough answer to the riddle as an answer; it was, in fact, only
partial.
In addition to Mrs. Comber, there was Cornwall; and Cornwall, as it was
at Moffatt's, was quite enough to draw Isabel unerringly, irresistibly.
Of the place—the surroundings, the look of it all, the “sense” of
it—there is more to be said in a moment—being seen, more completely
perhaps, with Traill's new and unaccustomed eyes; it is enough here
that, on every separate occasion of her coming, it meant to Isabel
deeper and more vital experiences. She was beginning even to be afraid
that it was not going to let her go again: its sea, its hard, black
rocks, its golden gorge, its deep green lanes, its gray-roofed cottages
that nestled in bowls and cups of color as no cottages nestle anywhere
else in the world—these were all things that she dreamed of afterwards,
when she had left them, to the extent, it began to seem to her, of
danger and confusion.
She herself “fitted in” as only a few people out of the many that go
there could ever do.
With her rather short brown hair that curled about her head, her
straight eyes, her firm mouth, her vigorous, unerring movements, the
swing of her arms as she walked, she seemed as though her strength
and honesty might forbid her softer graces. To most people she was a
delightful boy—splendidly healthy, direct, uncompromising, sometimes
startling in her hatred of things and people, sometimes arrogant in her
assured enthusiasms; Mrs. Comber, who, in her muddled eager way, had
told her so much, knew of the other side of her, of her tenderness, her
understanding.
The boys loved her, and she had been their envoy on many occasions of
peril and disaster; they always trusted her to carry things through, and
she generally did.
It was only, perhaps, with the other ladies of the establishment that
she did not altogether find favor. The other ladies consisted of Mrs.
Moy-Thompson, Mrs. Dormer, and the lady matrons—Miss Bonhurst, the two
Misses Madder, and Miss Tremans.
Mrs. Moy-Thompson, a thin, faded lady in perpetual black, had long ago
been crushed into a miserable negligibility by her masterful husband.
She very seldom spoke at all and, when she did, hurriedly corrected what
she had just said in a sudden fear lest she should be misunderstood. She
allowed her husband to bully her to his heart's content.
Mrs. Dormer, stern, with the manner of one who never says what she
means, had never got over the disappointment of her husband having,
fifteen years before, missed the head-mastership. She was continually
finding new reasons for this omission and venting her dislike on
people who had had nothing whatever to do with it. She was neat and
puritanical, and hated Mrs. Comber because she was neither of these
things.
Of the matrons, it may be enough to say that they all disliked each
other, but were perfectly ready to combine in their mutual dislike
of the other ladies; they felt that their position demanded that they
should assert their birth and breeding; they also felt that Mrs. Comber
and Mrs. Dormer looked down on them.
The best of them was the matron of the Lower School, the elder Miss
Madder—stout and kind-hearted and extremely capable. She made up for the
undeniable fact that no one had ever asked her to change her name for
a pleasanter one by loving the small boys of the Lower School with a
warmth and good-humor that they none of them, in after life, forgot.
And so there they all were—most of them—a background, and simply, as
individuals, witnesses to the whole case and, perhaps, by reason of
their very existence, factors in assisting the result.
They were, most of them, never in young Traill's consciousness at
all—Miss Madder, perhaps because she was at the Lower School; Mrs.
Comber, because Isabel was staying with her... and Isabel. IV.
A word, finally, about the surrounding country.
It becomes, perhaps, at once most definitely presented if you take the
Brown Hill as the center, and Pendragon to the right along the coast,
and Truro inland to the left—both at an equal distance—as the farthest
boundaries.
Between Truro and Moffatt's there is a ridge of hill—undulating, gently,
vaguely shaped, with its cool brown colors melting into the blue or gray
of the sky as dim clouds melt into one another.
The Brown Hill itself rises sharply, steeply, straight from the sea,
with the little village—Chattock—at its feet, curling with its steep,
cobbled street up the incline. Halfway down the hill there is a wood—the
Brown Wood—and it hangs with all its feathery trees in friendly, eager
fashion over the little white-stoned and yellow-sanded cove (so tiny and
so perfect in its shape and color that it almost audibly cries out not
to be touched). There is a little part of the wood where the trees part
and you may sit, in a kind of magical wonder, right over the gray carpet
of the sea, hearing what the wood, with its creaking and bending and
rustling, is saying to the water and what the water, with its slipping
and hissing and singing, is saying to the wood. Of the two towns
Pendragon has become, from the invasion of the Vandals, modern and
monotonous. It had, not so long ago, a cove on its outskirts—that was
the whole of Cornwall in a tiny space; now there is a row of modern
villas, red-roofed and wooden-paled. Traill, in his visits there, was
concerned with the chief house there—The Flutes, owned by a certain
Sir Henry Trojan, whose son, Robin Trojan, had been, although senior, a
friend at Cambridge. The house was beautiful both in its position and
in the spirit of its owner, and Traill snatched what moments he could to
visit it and to snatch a respite there.
Had he known, it became in the back of his mind a contrast with the
“lobster red” and the stone corridors of Moffatt's, so that he took its
wide, high rooms and its shining, ordered garden with an added sense of
richness. Had he realized how soon its dignity and peace stood to him
for an “escape,” he would have realized also his growing protest
against his voluntary imprisonment. He went over also on occasions to
Truro—because he liked the walk over the hill, because he liked certain
quaintnesses in the market, in the sharp cobbles of Lemon Street, in the
higher breezes of Kenwyn, because, above all, he liked the dark quiet
and solemnity of the Cathedral.
The point about both Pendragon and Truro is that it was the kind of life
that he was leading at Moffatt's—the sides of it that are soon to be
given you in detail—that led him to notice these places. Contrast drove
him to a sudden opening of his eyes—contrast and Isabel Desart. He was
growing so very quickly.
In letters to his mother he spoke of a splendid little wood where one
could sit and watch the sea for hours if there was only time; of the
funny old hill, all brown, with the white road curling up it; of calling
at The Flutes, and “Sir Henry Trojan and Lady Trojan being most awfully
kind,” and the house being quite beautiful, but very little about the
people of the school, and during those first few weeks nothing at all
about Isabel Desart.
It was not until Mrs. Comber gave her dinner-party that the
preliminaries could be said to be over.