This isn’t a story. It’s an attempt at reconstruction. Given my
knowledge of the principals--Mary Jarvis, and her mother, Mrs. St.
Luth--I think I can do it.
Mary Jarvis was my mother, and Mrs. St. Luth, of course, my
grandmother. Thank god, I’m a modern and can look at them
impersonally--judge each on her own merits, as it were.
My mother and my grandmother made scenes as other women make jumpers.
It was their form of self-expression. I imagine--although I never knew
for certain--that it was my father’s inability to maintain himself _à
la hauteur_, in the perennial melodrama that was my mother’s idea of
life, that led to my grandmother being invited to live with them.
She came when I, their only child, had barely reached the stage of
exchanging my baby frills for first knickerbockers. (I am certain,
although I don’t remember it, that my mother wept and said she felt
that she had lost her baby for ever.)
Already my parents were unhappy together. Mary--I call her so here for
convenience, but she would never have tolerated it in reality--Mary,
although really affectionate and impressionable, was fundamentally
insincere, with herself and with everybody else. She lived entirely on
the emotional plane, and when genuine emotions were not forthcoming
she faked them by instinct. Her mother, who belonged to the same
type, although with more strength of character, and far less capacity
for affection, had always played up to her. They had their violent
disputes and violent reconciliations--neither could have been happy
without--but they did respect one another’s poses.
But my father never played up.
He couldn’t. Worse still, if he could have done so, he wouldn’t--on
principle.
Again I can’t remember, but I can imagine, almost to the point of
certainty, short and searing passages between my parents.
“Robert, I want you not to ask me to play the piano to-night.”
(He so seldom gave her an opening, that she had to force them.)
“Off colour?”
“It isn’t that. I heard to-day that Mrs. Thorndyke’s child is dead.
It--it upset me.”
“But you didn’t know the child.”
“I know Katherine Thorndyke.”
“You’ve met her once or twice, I remember. And didn’t we hear that if
the poor child had lived, it must have been an idiot?”
Probably, at that stage, my mother burst into tears. She’d been heading
for that, of course, although she didn’t know it consciously. But my
father did, and had made her aware that he did, in a rather brutal
fashion.
That was the way they reacted on one another.
It was better, after grandmother came. Curiously enough, my
father liked her, although she and Mary had so many of the same
characteristics. But I think he regarded her as a sort of lightning
conductor.
For Mary herself, however, it was different. Like so many people who
manufacture continual unhappiness for themselves, she had a frantic
craving for happiness, and an irrational conviction that happiness was
her due.
She told me herself, long afterwards, that she never had any thought of
infidelity towards my father, nor did she ever meet any man who could
or would have caused her to break her marriage vows. But--and this she
didn’t tell me, it’s part of the reconstruction--she was constantly
obsessed by a vague and romantic expectation of some such encounter.
I imagine that she could not believe the world to have been created
without a special application to her yearnings.
And then undoubtedly the nervous wear and tear that she imposed
upon herself, and upon us all, told on her spirits. Her scenes with
grandmother, although they may have served as a safety-valve, were too
frequent. They may also have served to throw into painful contrast her
husband’s stolid opposition to any form of emotional stimulus.
However that may be, grandmother had formed part of our household for
rather less than a year, when Mary suddenly ran away.
It was, I suppose, the only dramatic thing that she could think of, in
a wet and dreary February, and I have no doubt at all that she did it
on impulse. That is to say, she gave herself time to write an immensely
long letter to my father--in which perhaps she set forth that view of
herself which he never gave her adequate opportunity for putting into
words--but she gave herself no time to pack up her things. She simply
took her dressing-case, and I am sure that that was mostly filled with
photographs in folding frames, and packets of letters tied up with
ribbon, and little manuals of devotion heavily underscored in several
places.
Then she walked out of the house, and to the station, and eventually
got to Assisi. And they traced her there almost at once, partly because
she took no pains to cover up her tracks, and partly because my
grandmother--who understood the processes of her mind--found a copy of
a Life of St. Francis on the drawing-room sofa, face downwards, with
one page all blistered, as though tears had fallen upon it.
My father, for his part, found the long letter that no doubt told him
how little he had understood a sensitive nature, and possibly to what
point their life together had become intolerable.
And this had the strange effect of making him resolve, and declare
aloud, that nothing would induce him to try and get her back again.
There must have been a stormy scene between him and my grandmother,
who had all the conventionally moral instincts of her day, and was
genuinely shocked and disturbed at her daughter’s abrupt and violent
casting off of her obvious responsibilities.
“For the child’s sake, at least, Robert ...” she must have repeated
many times.
(Neither she nor my mother ever understood the futility of repeating,
again and again, words which had already failed of their appeal.)
“A child whose mother can leave him, at four years old, is better
without her.”
“It was madness, Robert, but you know she’s not a wicked woman--my poor
Mary. If you go and bring her back now, no one will ever know what has
happened, and you can start a new life together, and try again.”
“It would be useless.”
“Don’t, don’t say that.” The tears must have been pouring down her old
face by that time. “Oh, Robert, give her another chance. This will have
been a lesson to her--won’t you forgive her and take her back?”
Well, in the end she prevailed to a certain extent--that is to say,
my father would not seek out the culprit himself, but he would allow
grandmother to do so, and if she brought Mary home again properly
repentant he would not refuse to receive her and give her the “chance”
of starting their married life afresh. “For the boy’s sake.”
My grandmother must have repeated that phrase a hundred times at least,
and it was certainly her _pièce de resistance_ in the scene at Assisi
with Mary.
I’ve had a version of that scene from each one of them, and on the
whole the accounts tally, although of course each viewed it--as they
viewed everything--exclusively from the personal angle.
My mother saw only a young, beautiful, misunderstood woman, goaded to
frenzy in the grip of an uncongenial marriage, taking a desperate step
in search of freedom. And then, even stronger and more touching in her
relinquishment, finding the courage, for love of her child, to return
to the house of bondage.
And my grandmother, with equal inevitability, saw only a sorrow-worn
woman, no longer young (but infinitely interesting), courageously
undertaking a solitary journey, on a mission that should restore
sanctity to a shattered home. And even as her urgent plea had shaken
Robert’s defences, so her eloquence, her boundless influence and
unfaltering understanding, must prevail with the slighter, more trivial
personality of her daughter. The achievement of persuading Mary to
return to her husband and child was, my grandmother told me, the
ultimate justification of her existence, in her own eyes.
As a matter of fact, I doubt if she, any more than the rest of us, felt
her existence to be in any need of justification whatsoever--but she
was addicted to phrases, and this one at least served as an indication
to the magnitude of her effort.
For Mary did not capitulate without a struggle. And it is in the
details of that struggle that my reconstruction work comes in, for
although each of the protagonists has quoted to me whole sentences,
and even speeches, of brilliant oratory from herself and inadequate
rejoinder from the other, I do not believe either of them. Accuracy,
with that type, can never co-exist with emotion--and emotion, real or
imaginary, is never absent.
But this, I imagine, is more or less what took place in the
sitting-room of the tiny _albergo_ at Assisi:
“I’ve come to fetch you home, my child. You shall never hear one word
of reproach--Robert only wants to begin again--a new life.”
“Never, mother. It’s impossible. I’ve borne too much. I can’t ever go
back to it. I must live my own life.”
(Probably Mary had been reading _The Doll’s House_. People were
discovering Ibsen in those days.)
“Mary, it’s not five years since you and Robert were married, in the
little country church at home, by our dear old vicar, who held you at
the font when I took you, a tiny baby, to be christened.”
It may have been at this stage that Mary began to cry. Anyway, I’m
certain that my grandmother did. Any allusions, however irrelevant, to
little country churches at home, and Mary as a tiny baby, were always
apt to bring the tears to her eyes--and I’m sure that neither of them
had thought for an instant of steadying their nerves by sitting down to
a solid meal. So that tears must have been easier, even, than usual.
“Robert doesn’t understand me--he never will.”
“Darling, don’t you remember your early days together? The little
things--little jokes, and allusions, and happinesses shared together?
Does one ever forget?”
“_No._”
Mary sobbed. “But I can’t go back to him.”
I think that here, if my grandmother gave her a chance, she probably
did make one--or part of one--of the speeches that she long afterwards
quoted to me.
She was intensely unhappy. Robert did not understand her, and she could
not live in an unsympathetic atmosphere. She should go mad. All that
she had ever asked of life was peace, beautiful surroundings, and the
ideal companion.... If she went back to Robert now, after having found
courage to make the break, it would be a repetition of the misery that
had broken her heart during the past three years.
(The hearts of my mother and grandmother both suffered innumerable
breakages throughout their lives, neither of them ever seeming aware of
the physiological absurdity of the expression.)
“It’s braver to stay away than to go back and try and patch up
something that can never be anything but a failure,” quavered Mary,
with a momentary flash of insight.
But of course grandmother couldn’t leave it at that. She had the
justification of her own existence to think of, for one thing. I am
quite sure that a fortuitous street-musician, rendering “Santa Lucia”
or “Silver Threads Amongst the Gold” in the distance, would have broken
down Mary’s frail barrier of honest thought, and have materially
assisted my grandmother to her victory. Accessories were so absolutely
essentials, to them both.
But so far as I know, grandmother had to win on points, as it were, and
received no extraneous help in the shape of sentimental appeals from
without.
She made her supreme effort.
“For the boy’s sake, Mary ... your little, little boy. Is he to be
motherless?”
“Wouldn’t Robert let me have him?”
“No, my dear. How could he? I myself--the mother that bore you, Mary--I
couldn’t think it right that a woman who had deliberately deserted her
husband and home should have the care of a little, innocent child.”
“Oh, my baby!”
She sobbed and cried, but she had not yet capitulated. Grandmother,
however, had gauged pretty accurately the force of the baby-_motif_.
“Before I came away, on my long, lonely journey,” she said slowly, “I
went up to the nursery, to say good-bye to Bobbie. He had on his blue
overall--the one you embroidered for him last summer, Mary--was it only
last summer?--and he was playing with his engine, on the nursery floor,
his dear, round face was so solemn....”
“Oh, don’t--don’t----”
But grandmother, the tears streaming from her eyes, relentlessly
continued: “Darling, his big blue eyes looked up at me, and his little
voice asked: ‘_Where’s Mummie?_’”
Did grandmother’s--even grandmother’s--conscience misgive her, at the
quotation? That it was verbally correct, I have no doubt--but what of
the intonation?
My grandmother’s poignant rendering of “_Where’s Mummie?_” no doubt
contained all the pathetic appeal of bewildered and deserted childhood
throughout the ages....
But mine--the original “_Where’s Mummie?_...” I have no recollection of
it, of course, but I do remember myself at four years old--a stolid,
rather cynical child, utterly independent by temperament, and reacting
strongly even then against a perpetually emotional atmosphere. And
one knows the way in which small children utter those conventional
enquiries which they unconsciously know to be expected of them ... the
soft, impersonal indifference of the tone, the immediate re-absorption,
without waiting for a reply, in the engrossing occupation of the
moment....
Mary held out for a little while longer, but the heart went out of her
resistance after the pitiful sound of that “_Where’s Mummie?_” as my
grandmother rendered it.
She gave in “for the boy’s sake.”
And my grandmother had justified her existence.
They travelled home together, and Mary averted anti-climax by quite a
real nervous breakdown, that overtook her after she got home, before my
father had had time to forgive her in so many words.
So they began again--literally.
It wasn’t, in fact, possible for them to be happy together, and
they never were so. I grew up in the midst of scenes, tears, and
intermittent periods of reconciliation. There was no stability about my
childhood; and no reality. Undoubtedly I was the victim--far more so
than my father, who presently sought and found consolation elsewhere,
or than Mary, whom he thus provided with a perfectly legitimate
grievance that lasted her until he died, fifteen years later. After
that, she was able gradually to forget that there had ever been
unhappiness between them, and to assume the identity of a heart-broken
widow.
Mrs. St. Luth, my grandmother, lived to be very old.
“But useless old woman though I am, God gave me the opportunity of
justifying my existence, when He let me bring a mother home to her
little child....”