XXVIII MOTHER AND DAUGHTER

          Life . . . is like love. All reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it.         
          EREWHON REVISITED.

ON hearing of the capture of Streeten, celebrated in the most jubilant strain by Mrs. Folyat, with a magnificently unjust comparison of her new son-in-law with Bennett Lawrie, Minna wrote this letter to Mary:

    “Mother Bub loves cutting her lamb up into chops. Did she fix him with an eye? You know how she can bore into the back of a man’s neck. I’m almost sorry I missed the fun. I suppose she’ll be better off than any of us. We’re beastly poor, the studio’s always in a mess and we can’t get it straight. London is amusing but awfully big and callous. It makes you feel that it never cares whether you’re there or not, and the river is almost the most human thing in it. Nobody seems to want Basil’s work. I suppose there are thousands of Basils all wanting to do the same thing, and I suppose each Basil has a me wanting a great deal to eat and more pleasure and fun than is good for her, and not caring particularly how much of his soul he has to sell to give it her. The Folyats have a certain charm, but we’re all selfish—except, of course, dear old Ma, who always would have it that we got our wickedness from Pa. Mother Bub has the charm of a basilisk, or a fly-paper. I hope she will come to London, as it will be nice to borrow money from her.

    Dearest love, Mottle dear,

    M.

    [Pg 281]

    P.S.—Basil has just sold a drawing. Sausages and mashed for supper! Also beer!

    P.P.S.—Did Bennett go to the wedding? How grateful he must have been to Streeten for stepping into his shoes.

    P.P.P.S.—I wouldn’t get married if I were you. And to think I might have been a Countess! Willie Folyat lives in London—the Hearl of Leedham, if you please. I hear he’s turned out a horrid little prig. I knew he would, I felt it in my bones. I have such clever bones.

    M. H.”

Mary was magnanimous and kept the letter to herself. She was essentially good-natured and bore no malice. She was amused by Minna’s spite and did not believe a word she said. To her Gertrude was happy; she was married, therefore she loved her husband and her husband loved her. It was impossible for Mary to take a detached view, to tell black from white, good from bad. She was mentally short-sighted and her pleasures lay entirely in sentiment. She loved music as she loved nothing else in the world, but her pleasure in it was the pleasure of rhythm. Harmony touched her not at all. She had a sort of nervous sensitiveness which made her extremely shy and unresponsive. A kind of island existence was hers, and the island on which she dwelt was in a perpetual fog. Every sound that reached her from without—and little else but sound did reach her—was blurred. Voices more easily moved her than actions or the expressions of a person’s face. She had always loved her father because of his soft, gentle voice, and when Serge was in the house she was animated and more quickly interested in what was going on around her.

She accepted her defeat by Gertrude docilely enough, gave up the majority of her pupils and much of her chamber-music and took up the reins of the household. With only her father and mother to provide for, it was fairly easy, and the expenses were so much reduced that she was able to pay more wages and to procure a better class of maid. Mrs. Folyat took a dislike to the [Pg 282]maid, and all her service had to be performed by Mary herself.

Serge had fallen into the habit of taking supper with his family—his father and mother and Mary—nearly every Sunday evening, and he was exasperated by the petty attentions which his mother was continually demanding. He had tried many a time to find a way to the heart of this curious, stupid, yet gentle and kindly sister of his, but he had always found it impossible to set her thoughts moving. She seemed to have almost lost the capacity of thinking, and she had so little sense of humour that any blunt statement of fact hurt her as a direct attack. She showed in many ways that she was fond of him, but it was as a dog is fond, with a mute uncomprehending sympathy.

Serge fell back on action. Whenever his mother, in the metallic tones of her querulous mood, asked Mary to fetch her book from the other end of the house, or to unravel her knitting when she had dropped a stitch, or to read to her because her eyes ached, Serge bustlingly and rather ostentatiously forestalled his sister. There was never any sign that he had produced any effect on mother or daughter.

This went on for months. Existence in the house in Burdley Park passed smoothly and placidly, and Francis seemed to be happy, as he had never been, busy with his parish and greenhouse. He was silent for days together, except that every now and then he would hum tunelessly to himself, booming like a bumble-bee. He had every small joy that he asked of the world and was content. He liked the new generation of his parishioners better than the old, they were not so dour, and everything seemed to him to be going well and happily. He saw Frederic very seldom, and Annette very frequently, and Minna and Gertrude were regular correspondents. Serge had not for a very long time asked him for money, and for the first time for many, many years his expenses and income were on good terms with each other. Best of all, Mrs. Folyat had begun to see herself and her husband as a sort of Darby and Joan, and sweetened her conduct to fit the character. Everybody said you might go far before [Pg 283]you could find a more delightful old couple. They achieved a sort of celebrity.

Mary too came in for her share of the general admiration, and her devotion to her mother was by more than one tyrannous old woman brandished over the head of a peevish and fading daughter. Mary recked nothing of it, and it would have made no impression on her if she had.

One Sunday, when her mother had rather explosively demanded her spectacles, and Serge without a word had gone down to the dining-room for them, and without a word had given them to her, a new idea came to Mary. She sat stupidly gazing at her mother and very slowly she began to think what would become of her if her father and mother were to die. There was a loud-ticking clock in the room, and it said with remorseless insistency:

“I-shall-be-alone.”

This was a very dreadful idea to her. She strangled it.

There is no getting rid of thoughts. If they are strangled their corpses remain and rot in the mind, to its lasting detriment. This idea remained in Mary’s mind, cold and dead, and gradually poisoned the sweetness of her nature.

A fixed idea is a dead idea.

 

Mary’s temper suffered, and she vented her spleen on her pupils to such a degree that there came a time when she had only one left—the youngest daughter of the sausage-machine manufacturing widower, all of whose daughters she had instructed in turn in a polite mastery of the violin. Her bi-weekly visits to his house had become part of the routine of his household, and she was part and parcel of its furniture, being fitted into the heavy dinner-parties when there was a gap. At other entertainments she was never omitted and was as much part of their colour as the faded best chair-covers that were taken out for the occasion or the Japanese lanterns which illuminated them. She was useful, for she was always willing to play the piano for hours on end when the young people wanted to dance. To the widower, who never saw her on other occasions, she was always associated with gaiety.

[Pg 284]

One day he proposed marriage to her, and she refused him.

“Be sure,” he said, “that I shall always be your friend. And I shall continue to hope.”

He was really relieved at being rejected, and retired to cogitate the extraordinary impulse which had driven him to do such a thing. He felt very uncomfortable, for the fictions with which he had surrounded his dead wife had been shaken.

Mary left his house in a flutter. The man had always been kind to her, he was an admirable father, and she had always respected him as a solid man, though he was a little too Northernly solid to be taken altogether seriously. His house was very comfortable, though ugly and too reekingly prosperous, but the habit of years had made it a corner of the equilateral triangle of her life. Its atmosphere was altogether different from that of her home and delivered her from monotony.

Her only feeling about his proposal of marriage was one of surprise. She thought of it only materially and was not signally disturbed by it until he sent her an extraordinary letter in which he sought to explain away his behaviour. In the course of it he cut deeper in his contemplation of the marriage—having been married—and had, unwittingly, set his emotions stirring. Mary’s emotions responded, but her modesty plucked them back. She did not, she told herself, “love” Mr. Hargreave, because, after all, he was only a common man who had begun life as a boy in a smithy. It had been easy enough when she thought of marriage as a mere translation from one house to another, but, quite clearly, he was asking for a personal relation, and from that she shrank, chiefly because it was a change from the custom of years. When she desired a concrete objection she fished out from the confusion in her mind the prejudiced idea that she would be a stepmother; worse than that, a stepmother to children to whom she had been a paid instructress, children moreover who had, upon occasion, been so cruel to her that she had been unable to retort upon them or to maintain discipline. . . . She read Mr. Hargreave’s letter once [Pg 285]more and saw that she could not easily enter his house again, except it were to leave her home.

She left the matter for a day or two, did not reply, and failed to attend for Violet Hargreave’s violin lesson. A day or two more and she received another letter from Mr. Hargreave in which he completely abased himself, and, in his desire to be kind and to palliate the affront he conceived himself to have put upon her, waxed tender and was almost lyrical in her praises.

She tried to write to him but could find nothing to say. Tears rolled down and plopped on to the paper, and she grew hot and impatient with herself. Clearly she must go to his house and reassure him. No sooner had she resolved on that, than she felt that she could not explain herself, that he would renew his proposal, and she would have to say either “Yes” or “No.” If “Yes,” then a thousand and one objections would rise in her mind. If “No,” then it would become impossible for her ever to enter his house again.

She dried her eyes and resolved that she would go there and then and get it over. It was evening. She could ask for one of the Hargreave girls, leave a piece of music; she was familiar enough at the house; no one would suspect the undercurrent.

As she went downstairs her mother called to her. She could not find “Johnny Ludlow” anywhere, and what had Mary done with it, and why was she so careless?

“I am not careless,” replied Mary. “You were reading it yourself. You must have left it in your room.”

“Johnny Ludlow” was found behind the cushions of Mrs. Folyat’s chair. Mary felt a gust of impatience as she gave the book to her mother. She sat down suddenly, and with a desperate gulp she said very quickly:

“Mr. Hargreave has asked me to marry him!”

“You, my dear . . . Mr. Hargreave! He must be nearly sixty!”

The word “sixty” chilled Mary.

“Fifty-one,” she murmured.

“An old man like that . . . Really he ought to be ashamed of himself. He ought to be preparing himself [Pg 286]for his eternal life instead of thinking of a wife. . . . And with all those children too.”

Mary’s sense of justice was offended.

“A great many widowers marry again for the sake of their children, don’t they?”

“But Mr. Hargreave has two grown-up daughters.”

Again there was a chilly catch at Mary’s heart, and she had a lump in her throat. She said:

“No one else has ever asked me to marry.”

It needed melodrama to move Mrs. Folyat; tragedy or tragi-comedy left her blank. She was in no mood for general consideration, for she was thinking with cold practicability of the need of the moment. When she thought of the house without Mary it was as a place of absolute silence. There were many evenings when Francis said never a word; many again when he sat alone in his study or working in his greenhouse, and only came up just before it was time to go to bed. Mrs. Folyat had a horror of silence. . . . Mary must not go, she thought, Mary must not go. She came swiftly to the point and asked:

“Have you accepted him?”

Unreasonably, in the face of experience, Mary had been expecting sympathy; she so craved it. For a flickering moment she desired almost viciously to lie, but she was hurt into truth.

“No,” she said.

Mrs. Folyat sighed with relief and triumph.

“Of course you couldn’t,” she said. “He is such a common man. . . . Let us play Bézique.”

Mary fetched the cards and they played until Francis came up at ten o’clock. She let him take her hand and went downstairs to the kitchen to brew her mother’s chocolate. She had lost all interest in Mr. Hargreave, and she felt nothing at all.

In her bedroom that night she found it quite easy to write to him. She said that she trusted him to understand that she could not marry him, and that it would be best in the circumstances if he found another teacher for Violet. He had (she continued) always been very kind to her. She was very grateful to him, and would think well [Pg 287]of him, but her duty lay towards her father and mother.

So, without any ill-feeling she slipped into the part designed for her by her mother.

As she was writing to Mr. Hargreave, her mother said to Francis:

“My dear, what do you think? That horrid old Hargreave has actually proposed to Mary. Of course she refused him.”

“Poor Mary,” said Francis.