SKATING ON THIN ICE
Was it, I wonder, a mother who first evolved the proverb: "Where
ignorance is bliss 'twere folly to be wise"?
It cannot be said that as a family the inhabitants of Ye Dene were a
success at Northampton Park. I have already said that they made friends
slowly, and in saying so I was of course speaking of Mr. and Mrs.
Whittaker and not of the children. The children, on the contrary, made
friends very quickly and as quickly got through them. I doubt indeed if
two more unpopular children had ever attended the Northampton Park High
School. Fortunately for them, I mean for their peace of mind as the time
went by, Mrs. Whittaker was not aware of the real reason for this state
of affairs.
"I hear," she remarked one day to long-legged Maud, who had been for a
couple of years advanced to the dignity of a pigtail, "I hear that
Gwendoline Hammond had a party yesterday."
Maudie went very red and looked extremely uncomfortable. "I--I--did hear
something about it," she stammered.
"How was it that you were not asked?" inquired Regina, with an air very
much like that of a porcupine suddenly shooting its quills into
evidence.
"Oh, Gwendoline Hammond is a mean little sneak!" burst out Julia, who
was much the bolder of the sisters.
"A sneak? How a sneak? What had she to sneak about?" demanded Regina.
"Well, it was like this, mother. Gwendoline is an awful bully, you
know, and poor little Tuppenny was being frightfully bullied by her
one day, and she's a dear little thing, she can't take care of
herself--somebody's got to stand up for her--and Maudie punched her
head."
"Punched her head! And what was she doing?"
"Well, she was twisting poor little Tuppenny's arm around."
"What! That mere child? And Gwendoline head and shoulders taller than
she?"
"Yes."
"And you say Maudie--punched her head?"
"Yes, and she punched it hard, too. And then Gwendoline went blubbering
home, and Mrs. Hammond came to Miss Drummond, and--" Well, really, my
reader, I hesitate to say what happened next, but as this is a true
chronicle I had better make the plunge and get it over and done
with--"and then," said Julia, solemnly, "there was the devil to pay!"
"You had better not put it in that way," said Regina, hurriedly. I must
confess that she had the greatest difficulty to choke down a laugh. "You
had better not put it in that way. 'The devil to pay' is next door to
swearing itself, to say nothing of being what a great many people would
call excessively vulgar; and if you were heard to say such a thing at
school, you would get yourselves into dreadful trouble, and me too. I
shall be obliged, Julia, if you will not use that expression again."
"Very well, mother," said Julia, with an air of great meekness, which, I
may say in passing, she was far from feeling.
"With regard," went on Regina in her most magnificent manner, "with
regard to Gwendoline Hammond and her miserable party, I consider it
distinctly a feather in your cap, Maudie, that you were left uninvited.
If it were told to me, as I presume it was told to Mrs. Hammond, that
one of you had been brutally cruel to a child many sizes smaller than
yourself and incapable of self-defence, I should mete out the severest
punishment that it was possible for me to give you. You have never been
punished, because it has never been necessary. Some mothers," she
continued, "would punish you for using such a term as 'the devil to
pay.' I regard that as a venial offence which your own common-sense will
teach you is inexpedient as a phrase for everyday conversation. But
brutal cowardice is a matter which I should find it very difficult to
forgive, and I am extremely proud that you should have taken the part of
a poor little child who was not able to do it for herself. I shall tell
your father when he comes home, and I shall ask him to reward you in a
suitable manner; and meantime, when I see Miss Drummond--"
"If you please, mother," broke in Julia, who was, as I have said, the
dominant one of the two sisters, "if you please, mother, just drop it
about Miss Drummond. We are quite able to fight our own battles at
school--we don't want Miss Drummond, or anybody else, to think that we
come peaching to you telling you everything. We tell you because we are
fond of you and you ask, and--and--we don't like to lie to you." She
stammered a little, because on occasion no one could tell a prettier lie
than Julia Whittaker. "In fact," ended Julia, "our lives wouldn't be
worth living if it was known that we came peaching home."
"It is your duty to tell me everything," said Regina.
"Well, you might say the same about Gwendoline Hammond," remarked Julia,
with a matter-of-fact air.
"You are within your right," said Mrs. Whittaker; "you are within your
right. I apologize."
"Oh, please don't do that," said Julia, magnanimously; "it isn't at all
necessary. But you please won't say anything to Miss Drummond about
it--not unless she should speak to you, which she won't. She was very
indignant with Gwendoline when she found the whole truth out, and I
believe she--at least I did hear that she paid a special visit to Mrs.
Hammond and made things extremely unpleasant for Gwendoline. I don't
wonder she didn't ask Maudie to her party, because her father happened
to be there, and he was very angry about it. He almost stopped her
having her party altogether, only Mrs. Hammond had asked some people and
she did not like to go back upon her word and disgrace Gwendoline before
everybody. So you understand, mother, not a word, please, to Miss
Drummond."
"My dear child," said Regina, "my dear original, splendid child!"
Julia coughed. She would have liked to have taken the praise to herself,
but with Maudie standing open-mouthed at her side it was not altogether
feasible. She coughed again. "You--you forget Maudie," she remarked
mildly.
"My dear, noble, generous child! I forget nothing--and I will forget
nothing for either of you. Here," she went on, in ringing accents which
would have brought down the house if Regina had been speaking at any
public meeting, "is a small recognition from your mother, and at
dinner-time to-night your father shall speak to you."
"I think," remarked Julia, ten minutes later, when she and her sister
were on the safe ground of that part of the garden which belonged
exclusively to them, "I think we got out of that uncommonly well,
Maudie, don't you?"
"Yes, but it was skating on thin ice," said Maudie. "I don't know how
you dared, Ju. You told mother you didn't like telling lies!"
"Well," said Julia, "it is to be hoped it will never come out, for if it
does there will be the devil to pay and no mistake about it."
It was as well for Regina's peace of mind that the thin ice never broke,
and that the actual truth never came to light. You know what the poet
says--"A lie that is half a lie is ever the hardest to fight." Well, the
same idea holds good for a truth that is half a truth. I don't say that
Julia's account of the difference between themselves and Gwendoline
Hammond was wholly a lie, but it was certainly not wholly the truth;
indeed, it was such a garbled account that nobody concerned therein but
would have found it difficult to recognize it.
"Wasn't mother's little sermon about the devil to pay lovely?" said
Julia, swinging idly to and fro while Maudie stood contemplating her
gravely.
"Yes," said Maudie, "but she was quite right. That's the best of
mother--she's always so full of sound common-sense."
"Except when she calls you her brave, noble child!" rejoined the sharp
wit.
"I don't know," said Maudie, reflectively, "that that was altogether
mother's fault."
"Perhaps it wasn't. It will be just as well for you and for both of us
as far as that goes, if mother doesn't happen to just mention the matter
to Tuppenny's mother. I think I was a fool not to have safeguarded that
point."
"There's time enough," said Maudie. "You can lead up to it when you go
in, because, you know, Ju, if they ever do find out--"
"Yes, there _will_ be the devil to pay," put in Julia. "You are quite
right."
It was astonishing how sweet a morsel the phrase seemed to be to the
child.
"You'll get saying it to Miss Drummond," said Maudie, warningly.
"Well, if I do," retorted Julia, "I shall have had the pleasure of
saying it--that will be something."
Now this was but one of many similar instances which occurred during the
childhood of Regina's two girls. They were so sharp--at least Julia
was--and as she was devoted to Maudie, she always put her wits at the
service of her sister, and the other children whom they knew not
unnaturally resented the fact that they were invariably to be found in
the wrong box in any discussion in which the Whittaker children had a
share. So they became more and more isolated as the years went by.
"Why don't we like the Whittakers?" said a girl to her mother, who had
met Mrs. Whittaker and thought her a very remarkable woman. "Well,
because we don't."
"Yes, but why?"
"Oh, well, we don't exactly know why--but we don't. They're queer."
Have you noticed, dear reader, how frequent it is to set down those who
are too sharp for you as "queer?" Well, it was just so at Northampton
Park, and what the girl didn't choose to put into plain words, she
stigmatized as queer.
"And what do you mean by queer?" the mother asked.
"Well, they _are_ queer. I think their mother must be queer, too,
because their dress is so funny."
"Is it?"
"Oh, awfully. They always wear brown."
"What are they like?"
"Well, Maudie is fairish and Julia is darkish. Maudie has quite a
straight nose and Julia's turns up--oh, it isn't an ugly turn-up nose, I
didn't mean that. But they are such guys, and what is worse, they don't
care a bit."
"Really? What sort of guys?" asked the mother, who was immensely amused.
"Well, they never have anything like anybody else. They've got long,
pokey frocks made of tough brown stuff, like--er--like--er--pictures of
Dutch children. And over them they wear long holland pinafores."
"It sounds very sensible," remarked the mother. "And when they come out
of school?"
"In the winter they've got long brown coats, with little bits here--you
know."
"You mean a yoke?"
"I don't know what you call it, mother--little bits, and skirts from it,
and poke bonnets, and brown wool gloves; brown stockings and brown
shoes, and little brown muffs. Oh, they really are awfully queer!"
"And in the summer?"
"In the summer? Well, in the summer they wear brown holland things.
They're queer, mother, I can't tell you any more--they're queer."
"I see," said the mother. "But in themselves," she persisted, "what are
they like in themselves?"
"Oh, I don't know. Nobody likes them much."
"Poor children! I wish you would be a little kind to them."
"Do you?" said the girl, rather wistfully. "Well, I will if you like,
but it would be an awful bore, and they wouldn't thank us."
"I see," said the mother. But she was wrong; she only thought she saw.
So time sped on, and these two children grew more and more long-legged,
more and more definite in character, and as they progressed towards what
Mrs. Whittaker fondly believed to be originality and unconventionalism,
so did her mother's heart bound and yearn within her.
"I am amply satisfied with the result of our scheme of education," she
was wont to say. "No, it is not easy--it is much easier to bring up
children in the conventional way. But the result--oh, my dear lady, the
result, when you feel a thrill of pride that your children are different
to others, is worth the sacrifice."
"Now I wonder what," said the lady in question in the bosom of her
family, "did that foolish woman particularly have to sacrifice? The
general feeling in the Park seems to be that the Whittakers are
horrid children--disagreeable, ill-bred, sententious, and altogether
ridiculous; too sharp in one way, too stupid for words in another. And
yet she talks about sacrifice!"
"Oh, Maudie isn't sharp--at least, not particularly so," said her own
girl, who, being a couple of years older than Maudie Whittaker, knew
fairly well the lie of the land. "Julia's sharp--a needle isn't in it.
It's Julia who backs Maudie up in everything, and Julia is a horrid
little beast whom everybody hates and loathes. She tried it on with me
once when I was at school, but I soon put the young lady in her right
place with a good setting down, and she never tried it on any more.
They'd have been all right if they had been properly brought up, which
they weren't."
"You think not?"
"Oh no, mother. You have no idea how intensely silly Mrs. Whittaker is."
"Is she? I thought she was such a brilliant woman."
"I believe she calls herself so; nobody else agrees with her."
"Do you know what I heard about Mrs. Whittaker only yesterday?" said the
mother, with a sudden gleam of remembrance. "She has gone in for public
speaking. They say it's too killing for words."
"Speaking on what?" asked the girl.
"On the improvement of the condition of women."
"What! a political affair?"
"No, no; not political at all; a something quite disconnected with
politics--quite above them. She has been chosen President of a new
society which is to be called 'The Society for the Regeneration of
Women.'"