Mrs. Morgan, wife of a judge of the High Court of Bombay, and I sat
amidships on the cool side in the Suez Canal. She was outlining ‘Soiled
Linen’ in chain-stitch on a green canvas bag; I was admiring the
Egyptian sands. ‘How charming,’ said I, ‘is this solitary desert in the
endless oasis we are compelled to cross!’
‘Oasis in the desert, you mean,’ said Mrs. Morgan; ‘I haven’t noticed
any, but I happened to look up this morning as I was putting on my
stockings, and I saw through my port-hole the most lovely mirage.’
I had been at school with Mrs. Morgan more than twenty years agone, but
she had come to the special enjoyment of the dignities of life while I
still liked doing things. Mrs. Morgan was the kind of person to make
one realize how distressing a medium is middle age. Contemplating her
precipitous lap, to which conventional attitudes were certainly more
becoming, I crossed my own knees with energy, and once more resolved to
be young until I was old.
‘How perfectly delightful for you to be taking Cecily out!’ said Mrs.
Morgan placidly.
‘Isn’t it?’ I responded, watching the gliding sands.
‘But she was born in sixty-nine--that makes her twenty-one. Quite time,
I should say.’
‘Oh, we couldn’t put it off any longer. I mean--her father has such a
horror of early debuts. He simply would not hear of her coming before.’
‘Doesn’t want her to marry in India, I dare say--the only one,’ purred
Mrs. Morgan.
‘Oh, I don’t know. It isn’t such a bad place. I was brought out there to
marry, and I married. I’ve found it very satisfactory.’
‘You always did say exactly what you thought, Helena,’ said Mrs. Morgan
excusingly.
‘I haven’t much patience with people who bring their daughters out to
give them the chance they never would have in England, and then go about
devoutly hoping they won’t marry in India,’ I said. ‘I shall be very
pleased if Cecily does as well as your girls have done.’
‘Mary in the Indian Civil and Jessie in the Imperial Service Troops,’
sighed Mrs. Morgan complacently. ‘And both, my dear, within a year. It
WAS a blow.’
‘Oh, it must have been!’ I said civilly.
There was no use in bandying words with Emily Morgan.
‘There is nothing in the world like the satisfaction and pleasure one
takes in one’s daughters,’ Mrs. Morgan went on limpidly. ‘And one can be
in such CLOSE sympathy with one’s girls. I have never regretted having
no sons.’
‘Dear me, yes. To watch oneself growing up again--call back the lovely
April of one’s prime, etcetera--to read every thought and anticipate
every wish--there is no more golden privilege in life, dear Emily.
Such a direct and natural avenue for affection, such a wide field for
interest!’
I paused, lost in the volume of my admirable sentiments.
‘How beautifully you talk, Helena! I wish I had the gift.’
‘It doesn’t mean very much,’ I said truthfully.
‘Oh, I think it’s everything! And how companionable a girl is! I quite
envy you, this season, having Cecily constantly with you and taking her
about everywhere. Something quite new for you, isn’t it?’
‘Absolutely,’ said I; ‘I am looking forward to it immensely. But it
is likely she will make her own friends, don’t you think?’ I added
anxiously.
‘Hardly the first season. My girls didn’t. I was practically their only
intimate for months. Don’t be afraid; you won’t be obliged to go shares
in Cecily with anybody for a good long while,’ added Mrs. Morgan kindly.
‘I know just how you feel about THAT.’
The muddy water of the Ditch chafed up from under us against its banks
with a smell that enabled me to hide the emotions Mrs. Morgan evoked
behind my handkerchief. The pale desert was pictorial with the drifting,
deepening purple shadows of clouds, and in the midst a blue glimmer of
the Bitter Lakes, with a white sail on them. A little frantic Arab boy
ran alongside keeping pace with the ship. Except for the smell, it was
like a dream, we moved so quietly; on, gently on and on between the
ridgy clay banks and the rows of piles. Peace was on the ship; you could
hear what the Fourth in his white ducks said to the quartermaster in
his blue denims; you could count the strokes of the electric bell in the
wheel-house; peace was on the ship as she pushed on, an ever-venturing,
double-funneled impertinence, through the sands of the ages. My eyes
wandered along a plank-line in the deck till they were arrested by a
petticoat I knew, when they returned of their own accord. I seemed to be
always seeing that petticoat.
‘I think,’ resumed Mrs. Morgan, whose glance had wandered in the same
direction, ‘that Cecily is a very fine type of our English girls.
With those dark grey eyes, a LITTLE prominent possibly, and that good
colour--it’s rather high now perhaps, but she will lose quite enough
of it in India--and those regular features, she would make a splendid
Britannia. Do you know, I fancy she must have a great deal of character.
Has she?’
‘Any amount. And all of it good,’ I responded, with private dejection.
‘No faults at all?’ chaffed Mrs. Morgan.
I shook my head. ‘Nothing,’ I said sadly, ‘that I can put my finger on.
But I hope to discover a few later. The sun may bring them out.’
‘Like freckles. Well, you are a lucky woman. Mine had plenty, I assure
you. Untidiness was no name for Jessie, and Mary--I’m SORRY to say that
Mary sometimes fibbed.’
‘How lovable of her! Cecily’s neatness is a painful example to me, and I
don’t believe she would tell a fib to save my life.’
‘Tell me,’ said Mrs. Morgan, as the lunch-bell rang and she gathered her
occupation into her work-basket, ‘who is that talking to her?’
‘Oh, an old friend,’ I replied easily; ‘Dacres Tottenham, a dear fellow,
and most benevolent. He is trying on my behalf to reconcile her to the
life she’ll have to lead in India.’
‘She won’t need much reconciling, if she’s like most girls,’ observed
Mrs. Morgan, ‘but he seems to be trying very hard.’
That was quite the way I took it--on my behalf--for several days. When
people have understood you very adequately for ten years you do not
expect them to boggle at any problem you may present at the end of the
decade. I thought Dacres was moved by a fine sense of compassion. I
thought that with his admirable perception he had put a finger on the
little comedy of fruitfulness in my life that laughed so bitterly at
the tragedy of the barren woman, and was attempting, by delicate
manipulation, to make it easier. I really thought so. Then I observed
that myself had preposterously deceived me, that it wasn’t like that at
all. When Mr. Tottenham joined us, Cecily and me, I saw that he listened
more than he talked, with an ear specially cocked to register any small
irony which might appear in my remarks to my daughter. Naturally he
registered more than there were, to make up perhaps for dear Cecily’s
obviously not registering any. I could see, too, that he was suspicious
of any flavour of kindness; finally, to avoid the strictures of his
upper lip, which really, dear fellow, began to bore me, I talked
exclusively about the distant sails and the Red Sea littoral. When he
no longer joined us as we sat or walked together, I perceived that his
hostility was fixed and his parti pris. He was brimful of compassion,
but it was all for Cecily, none for the situation or for me. (She would
have marvelled, placidly, why he pitied her. I am glad I can say that.)
The primitive man in him rose up as Pope of nature and excommunicated
me as a creature recusant to her functions. Then deliberately Dacres
undertook an office of consolation; and I fell to wondering, while
Mrs. Morgan spoke her convictions plainly out, how far an impulse of
reparation for a misfortune with which he had nothing to do might carry
a man.
I began to watch the affair with an interest which even to me seemed
queer. It was not detached, but it was semi-detached, and, of course,
on the side for which I seem, in this history, to be perpetually
apologizing. With certain limitations it didn’t matter an atom whom
Cecily married. So that he was sound and decent, with reasonable
prospects, her simple requirements and ours for her would be quite met.
There was the ghost of a consolation in that; one needn’t be anxious or
exacting.
I could predict with a certain amount of confidence that in her first
season she would probably receive three or four proposals, any one of
which she might accept with as much propriety and satisfaction as any
other one. For Cecily it was so simple; prearranged by nature like her
digestion, one could not see any logical basis for difficulties. A nice
upstanding sapper, a dashing Bengal Lancer--oh, I could think of half
a dozen types that would answer excellently. She was the kind of young
person, and that was the summing up of it, to marry a type and be
typically happy. I hoped and expected that she would. But Dacres!
Dacres should exercise the greatest possible discretion. He was not
a person who could throw the dice indifferently with fate. He could
respond to so much, and he would inevitably, sooner or later, demand so
much response! He was governed by a preposterously exacting temperament,
and he wore his nerves outside. And what vision he had! How he explored
the world he lived in and drew out of it all there was, all there was!
I could see him in the years to come ranging alone the fields that were
sweet and the horizons that lifted for him, and ever returning to pace
the common dusty mortal road by the side of a purblind wife. On general
principles, as a case to point at, it would be a conspicuous pity. Nor
would it lack the aspect of a particular, a personal misfortune. Dacres
was occupied in quite the natural normal degree with his charming self;
he would pass his misery on, and who would deserve to escape it less
than his mother-in-law?
I listened to Emily Morgan, who gleaned in the ship more information
about Dacres Tottenham’s people, pay, and prospects than I had ever
acquired, and I kept an eye upon the pair which was, I flattered myself,
quite maternal. I watched them without acute anxiety, deploring the
threatening destiny, but hardly nearer to it than one is in the stalls
to the stage. My moments of real concern for Dacres were mingled more
with anger than with sorrow--it seemed inexcusable that he, with his
infallible divining-rod for temperament, should be on the point of
making such an ass of himself. Though I talk of the stage there was
nothing at all dramatic to reward my attention, mine and Emily Morgan’s.
To my imagination, excited by its idea of what Dacres Tottenham’s
courtship ought to be, the attentions he paid to Cecily were most
humdrum. He threw rings into buckets with her--she was good at that--and
quoits upon the ‘bull’ board; he found her chair after the decks were
swabbed in the morning and established her in it; he paced the deck with
her at convenient times and seasons. They were humdrum, but they were
constant and cumulative. Cecily took them with an even breath that
perfectly matched. There was hardly anything, on her part, to note--a
little discreet observation of his comings and goings, eyes scarcely
lifted from her book, and later just a hint of proprietorship, as the
evening she came up to me on deck, our first night in the Indian
Ocean. I was lying in my long chair looking at the thick, low stars and
thinking it was a long time since I had seen John.
‘Dearest mamma, out here and nothing over your shoulders! You ARE
imprudent. Where is your wrap? Mr. Tottenham, will you please fetch
mamma’s wrap for her?’
‘If mamma so instructs me,’ he said audaciously.
‘Do as Cecily tells you,’ I laughed, and he went and did it, while I by
the light of a quartermaster’s lantern distinctly saw my daughter blush.
Another time, when Cecily came down to undress, she bent over me as I
lay in the lower berth with unusual solicitude. I had been dozing, and I
jumped.
‘What is it, child?’ I said. ‘Is the ship on fire?’
‘No, mamma, the ship is not on fire. There is nothing wrong. I’m so
sorry I startled you. But Mr. Tottenham has been telling me all about
what you did for the soldiers the time plague broke out in the lines at
Mian-Mir. I think it was splendid, mamma, and so does he.’
‘Oh, Lord!’ I groaned. ‘Good night.’