AT SCHOOL--THE LILAC-BUSH--BRIDGET'S POSIES--SUMMER--HEALTH.
We knew when it was summer at Bush House, because there was a lilac-tree
by the gate, which had one large bunch of flowers on it in the summer
when Eleanor and I and Matilda were at school there. As we left the
house in double file to take our daily exercise on the high-road, the
girls would bob their heads to catch a whiff of the scent as they
passed, or to let the cool fragrant flowers brush their foreheads. On
this point Madame, our French governess, remonstrated in vain. We took
turns for the side next to the lilac, and sniffed away as long as there
was anything to smell. Even when the delicate colour began to turn
brown, and the fragrance vanished, we were loth to believe that the
blossoms were fading.
"I think I have got a cold in my head," said Matilda, who had plunged
her nose into the cluster one day in vain.
"You have a cough, ma foi! Mademoiselle Buller," replied Madame, who
seemed to labour under the idea that Matilda rather enjoyed this
privilege. But I had tried the lilac-bush myself with no better
success.
"I think," I whispered to Eleanor, in English, "that we have smelt it
all up."
"Parlez-vous francais, mesdemoiselles!" cried Madame, and we filed out
into the dusty street, at the corner of which sat another of our visible
tokens of the coming of the season of flowers; a dirty, shrivelled old
Irishwoman, full of benedictions and beggary, who, all through the
summer, sold "posies" to the passers-by. We school-girls were good
customers to her. We were all more or less sentimental, more or less
homesick, and had more or less of that susceptibility to the influence
of scents which may, some day, be the basis of a new school of medicine.
One girl had cultivated pinks and _Roses de Meaux_ in her own garden "at
home," and Bridget was soon wise enough to discover that a nosegay
composed of these materials was an irresistible temptation to that
particular customer. Another had a craving for the sight and smell of
southernwood (or "old man," as Eleanor called it), and preferred it in
combination with bachelor's buttons.
"There was an old woman 'at home' whom we used to go to tea with when we
were children--my brother and I," she said; "there were such big bunches
of southernwood by her cottage. And bachelor's buttons all round the
garden."
The brother was dead, I knew, and there were two flattened "buttons" and
a bit of withered "old man" gummed into her Bible. "Picked the last day
we were out together. Before he was taken ill with scarlet fever," she
told me. She had the boy's portrait in a standing frame, and, little
space as we had in our bedrooms, the other girls piled their brushes and
ribbon-boxes on one side of the looking-glass as best they could, and
left the rest of the dressing-table sacred to his picture, and to the
Bible, and the jar of Bridget's flowers, which stood before the likeness
as if it had been that of a patron saint.
For my own part I was very ignorant of the names and properties of
English flowers. I knew some by sight, from Adelaide St. Quentin's
bouquets, and from my great-grandfather's sketches; and I knew the names
of others of which Adolphe had given me plants, and of which I was glad
to see the flower. As I had plenty of pocket-money I was a liberal
customer, and I made old Bridget tell me the names of the flowers in her
bunches. I have since found out that whenever she was at fault she
composed a name upon the spot, with the ready wit and desire to please
characteristic of her nation. These names were chiefly connected with
the Blessed Virgin and the saints.
"The Lord blesh ye, my dear," she would say; "that's 'Mary's flower';"
or, "Sure it's the 'Blessed Virgin's spinning-wheel,' and a pretty name
too!"
A bitter-smelling herb which she commended to me as "Saints' Savory," I
afterwards learned to be tansy.
The youngest of us, a small, silent little orphan, had bought no posy
till one day she quietly observed, "If you could get me a peony, I would
buy it."
The peony was procured; so large, so round, and so red, that some one
unfeelingly suggested that it should be cut up for pickled cabbage. The
little miss walked home with it in her hand, looking at it as
sentimentally as if it had been a forget-me-not. As we had been
hard-hearted enough to laugh at it, we never learned the history which
made it dear.
Madame would certainly never have allowed us to break our ranks, and
chaffer with Bridget, but that some one had been lucky enough to think
of giving her bouquets.
Madame liked flowers--as ornaments--and was sentimental herself, after a
fashion, a sentimentality of appearances. She liked a bright spot of
colour on her sombre dresses too, and she was economical; for every day
that she had a bright bouquet a day's wear and tear was saved to her
neck-ribbons. She pinned the bright flowers by her very clean collar,
and not very clean throat, and permitted us to supply ourselves also
from Bridget's basket.
A less pleasant sign of summer than the lilac-blossom or Bridget's
flower-basket was the heat. It was hot in the dusty, draughty streets of
the little town. The empty bedrooms at Bush House were like ovens, and
the well-filled school-room was much worse. Madame would never hear any
complaints of the heat from me or from Matilda. Summer at Bush House, in
the nature of things, could be nothing to summer in India, to which we
were accustomed. It was useless to point out that in India the rooms in
which we lived were large, well shaded, and ventilated by constant
currents of fresh air. Also that there, our heaviest meal, our longest
walk, and our hardest work were not all crowded into the hottest hours
of the day.
"England is at no time so warm as India," said Madame.
"I suppose we are not as hot as the cook," suggested little "Peony" as
we now called her, one very hot day, when we sat languidly struggling
through our work in the stifling atmosphere of the school-room. "I
thought of her to-day when I looked at that great fat leg of roast
mutton. We're better off than she is."
"And she's better off than if she were in the Black Hole of Calcutta;
but that doesn't make either her or us cool," said Emma Lascelles, an
elder girl. "Don't preach, Peony; lessons are bad enough in this heat."
"I shan't eat any dinner to-morrow, I think," said Eleanor; "I cannot
keep awake after it this weather, so it's no use."
"I wish I were back at Miss Martin's for the summer," said another girl.
We knew to what this referred, and Madame being by a rare chance absent,
we pressed for an account, in English, of Miss Martin's arrangements in
the hot weather. "Miss Martin's" was a school at which this girl had
been before she came to Bush House.
"I can't think why on earth you left her," said Eleanor.
"Well, this is nearer home for one thing, and the masters are better
here, certainly. But she did take such care of us. It wasn't everlasting
backaches, and headaches, and coughs, and pains in your side all along.
And when the weather got hot (and it was a very warm summer when I was
there), and she found we got sleepy at work after dinner, and had
headaches in the afternoon, she said she thought we had better have a
scrap meal in the middle of the day, and dine in the cool of the
evening; and so we used to have cold rice-pudding or thick
bread-and-butter, such as we should have had for tea, or anything there
was, and tumblers of water, at one, and at half-past five we used to
wash and dress; and then at six, just when we were getting done up with
the heat and work, and yet cool enough to eat, we had dinner. I can tell
you a good fat roast leg of mutton looked all right then! It cured all
our headaches, and we worked twice as well, both at midday work and at
getting lessons ready for next day after dinner. I know----"
"Tais-toi, Lucy!" hissed Peony through her teeth. "Madame!"
"Donnez-moi cette grammaire, Marguerite, s'il vous plait," said Lucy, as
Madame entered.
And I gave her the grammar, and we set to work again, full of envy for
the domestic arrangements of Miss Martin's establishment during the dog
days.
If there is a point on which Eleanor and I are quite agreed, among the
many points we discuss and do not always agree upon, it is that of the
need for a higher education for women. But ill as I think our sex
provided for in this respect, and highly as I value good teaching, I
would rather send a growing girl to a Miss Martin, even for fewer
"educational advantages," and let her start in life with a sound,
healthy constitution and a reasonable set of nerves, than have her head
crammed and her health neglected under "the first masters," and so good
an overseer as "Madame" to boot. For Madame certainly made us work, and
was herself indefatigable.
The reckless imprudence of most girls in matters of health is
proverbial, the wisdom of young matrons in this respect is not beyond
reproach, and the lore which long and painful experience has given to
older women is apt, like other lessons from that stern teacher, to come
too late. It should at least avail to benefit their daughters, were it
not that custom prescribes that they also should be kept in the dark
till instructed in turn by the lamentable results of their ignorance,
too often only when these are past repair.
Whether, though there are many things that women have no knowledge of,
and many more of which their knowledge is superficial, their lack of
learning on these points being erudition compared with their crass
ignorance of the laws of health, the matter is again one of education;
or whether it is an unfortunate development of a confusion between
ignorance and innocence, and of mistaken notions of delicacy, who shall
say? Unhappily, a studied ignorance of the ills that flesh is heir to is
apt to bring them in double force about one's ears, and this kind of
delicate-mindedness to bring delicacy of body in its train. Where it
guides the counsels of those in charge of numbers of young people (as in
Miss Mulberry's case), it is apt to result in the delicacy (more or
less permanent) of several bodies.
But I am forgetting that I am not "preaching" to Eleanor by the kitchen
fire, but writing my autobiography. I am forgetting, also, that I have
not yet said who Miss Mulberry was.