“In what way?”
“Auto-apotheosis.”
“Come off it, Monkey,” said Arthur laughing.
“Well, if I must pander to your ignorance, she’s in a mental condition in which she recognizes no authority but her own—everything she does is right because she does it. She imagines that, owing to her having been born a Chevis, she is justified in behaving exactly as she pleases at whatever cost to other people—is that clear?”
“There are a good many people suffering from that disease,” Arthur opined.
“That’s not the only thing, though,” continued Monkey. “Of course I oughtn’t to tell you, but it’s a relief to gas to somebody even if they are as abysmally ignorant as you. I won’t confound you with medical terms this time.”
“Decent of you!” commented Arthur.
“I shall talk down to you, and call her condition an antimarriage complex,” said Monkey Wrench.
“But she married, didn’t she?”
“She never would have married if it hadn’t been for the Chevis name. She wanted a Chevis at Chevis Place. Cobbe was quite the wrong sort of man to deal with anything not normal. The marriage was a fiasco, and, of course, there’s no heir after all.”
“Bad luck!”
“Yes. A child would have made all the difference, but there you are—that’s life,” said Monkey, lighting his pipe and puffing hard to get it going well. “That’s life, Badger—and then other people have too many.”
“Yes,” agreed Arthur.
“So she’s a lonely woman, you see. The people who want to be friends with her she suspects of being after her money. Sir Lucian Agnew is her only real friend, and he’s a queer sort of creature, too. Rather a tame cat, if you know what I mean, but I believe if she had married him they might have made a success of it. All these things combined have made Lady Chevis Cobbe an extraordinarily difficult person to deal with. She really is a little mad—not certifiable, of course, but definitely abnormal. She hates marriage and everything connected with it, won’t have a married butler in the house—sacked a chauffeur she had had for years because he got engaged—won’t even have a married lodge-keeper at the gates.”
“I suppose that’s why she likes you,” said Arthur, smiling. “No encumbrances, eh?”
“Yes, of course it is,” replied Monkey. “It’s no joke, Badger—you needn’t grin. I tell you that woman causes me more trouble than all my other patients put together.”
“I can well believe it,” Arthur told him. “There are some people who seem born to give other people trouble. It’s the same in my business.”
“Temperamental authors,” suggested Monkey smiling.
“Temperamental authors,” Arthur agreed.
There was a little silence after that, a friendly, sympathetic silence; the two pipes puffed away in harmony.
“I’m glad you’re here, Monkey,” said Arthur Abbott at last. “I’m getting old, I suppose. Anyhow, I’ve come to the time of life when one old friend seems better than all the new friends in the world.”
“Same here,” said Monkey, gruffly.
The pipes puffed on.
Chapter Fourteen
New Friends
Barbara and Arthur settled down very comfortably in their new abode. Barbara’s days were full of small happenings. There was still a good deal to do in the house and garden; people called, and their calls had to be returned. The neighbors were nice, Barbara thought. She liked them all—some of them more than others, of course. Every morning Barbara shopped in Wandlebury, and there she met her neighbors engaged in the same mysterious occupation. She met them and chatted with them in the butcher’s or the grocer’s, or in the ice-bound fastness of the fishmonger’s. In the afternoon she walked, or paid calls, or hobnobbed with Jerry who had quickly become her friend, and once or twice she had Miss Foddy to tea. Sometimes Arthur came down early from town, and, if it were fine, they took the small car and explored the country, discovering new beauties in the bare trees and fields and rolling pastures.
These were small pleasures, perhaps, but Barbara was very content, and some of the small incidents of everyday life gave her a great deal of amusement and satisfaction. There was the morning when she met Mr. Marvell in the town, for instance. Barbara happened to be in the tiny slit of a shop which was the Wandlebury Library. She was busy choosing a book, and had looked through several without finding anything adventurous enough to please her taste, when suddenly the doorway was darkened by a massive figure (with a flapping black cloak, flung carelessly round its shoulders) and a tragic voice proclaimed: “Oh dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon!”
“Oh, Mr. Marvell, what a fright you gave me!” exclaimed Barbara. “It’s only dark in here because of you in the doorway,” she added, with her usual common sense. But she said it kindly because she liked big men, and never made any secret of her predilection.
“Mrs. Abbott!” he returned, sweeping off his soft black hat in a low bow, “I presume you are there! I hear your voice, but you are invisible: ‘Blind with the sun, his eagle eyes are dim. The darkness shields her loveliness from him.’”
“It’s because the pupils don’t expand quickly enough,” Barbara said, in a friendly tone, “or is it contract—I never remember. But I thought eagles’ did,” she added, a trifle incoherently. “Eagles’ and lions’.”
“Eagles and lions—The Kings of the Air and the Kings of the Beasts,” said Mr. Marvell. “They can look at the sun unblinded by its glare. Have you anything I would like, Miss Carruthers?” he continued, turning to the bird-like librarian, and precipitating a pyramid of cheap editions onto the floor with the edge of his cloak.
“Never mind it, Mr. Marvell,” said Miss Carruthers, referring, of course, to the accident. “Never mind about it. What kind of book would you like, do you think?”
“A good bedside book—you know my taste.”
“A bedside book,” agreed Miss Carruthers, licking her fingers and turning over the leaves of her catalogue with rapid flicks. “Let me see now—Bedfordshire Streams, no, Bedlington Terriers, Bedding out Plants, no, no, Bedlam Memories, no—”
“Yes,” said Mr. Marvell.
“It’ll give you nightmares, Mr. Marvell!”
“Never mind, it might be worth it,” said Mr. Marvell. “I’ll take it—yes—Bedlam Memories—hah!”
He took the book from Miss Carruthers, and he and Barbara left the shop, and walked down the street together.
“And how are you liking our little town?” he inquired.
Barbara assured him that she liked it immensely.
“Good,” said Mr. Marvell. “Good. You and your husband must dine with us. I will get Feodore to arrange a day—neighbors, you know—neighbors,” said Mr. Marvell in a jovial voice.
“Yes,” said Barbara. “Yes, thank you, we should like to come.”
“Good,” said Mr. Marvell. He was in splendid fettle that morning; various things had conspired together to please him. His agent had written suggesting a private show, and he had just finished a picture, and was convinced that it was the best thing he had done. Mr. Marvell was in the mood for dalliance with a personable woman, and Barbara intrigued him. Before he left her he had discharged several enigmatical quotations at her head, and had complimented her on the elasticity of her walk. The quotations were too literary to be comprehensible, but the compliment to her gait was easily understood. Barbara walked home that morning with tremendous elasticity and told Arthur all about it.
Another day she encountered Mrs. Fitch and Miss Wotton. This was quite a different sort of meeting, of course, but, somehow or other, Barbara “got a kick out of it,” as Sam would have said. She saw them coming toward her down the road: the short, stodgy, pudding-like figure of Mrs. Fitch and the trim, angular, anemic Miss Wotton with her red-rimmed eyes and her blue n
ose. It was, of course, not their fault that their exteriors were unlovable. God had, presumably, made them what they were. The thought was incredible to Barbara; it was almost blasphemy. Could God have made them? Could He really have intended them to look like that? And, even more incredible, could He have intended them to be like that, for their natures were almost as revolting as their appearance (as everybody in Wandlebury could testify). It wasn’t their fault that they were like that. Probably, if they had been asked, Mrs. Fitch and Miss Wotton would have chosen to be young and handsome rather than old and hideous and hairy; to be helpful and capable, rather than a nuisance and a burden to their relations and friends. They were the sort of elderly ladies who were always dropping their bags, mislaying their handkerchiefs, losing their umbrellas, and complaining bitterly to all who would hearken to them of the frightful incompetence of their servants. Miss Wotton was stone deaf, and Mrs. Fitch had a beard—that was not their fault, either, thought Barbara magnanimously, they had not chosen deafness or a beard—but on the other hand, there were such things as ear-trumpets and depilatories.
It’s an infliction, Barbara thought, to look like that. Poor old things! People ought to be specially kind to them to make up. So she greeted them with her best smile and pointed out the beauty of the morning; and the very bleakness and drabness and misery of Mrs. Fitch and Miss Wotton made Barbara more aware of her own happiness and content.
All this time Barbara was seeing a good deal of the Marvell children. They had made a very liberal interpretation of her permission to play in The Archway House garden. They played in it constantly; whenever they could escape from Miss Foddy they made a beeline for the tree which leaned over the wall and was their means of ingress and egress. Barbara didn’t mind. She felt that what Trivvie had said was true; the garden liked them to play in it, and Barbara wanted now (as she had wanted from the beginning) that The Archway House garden should have exactly what it wanted and deserved. She felt, vaguely, that the garden really belonged to the young Marvells rather than to Arthur and herself. They had bought the place, it was true, but what was money, after all (it still seemed strange to Barbara that money had been able to buy The Archway House and all its amenities). Trivvie and Ambrose knew the place—they knew every stone. It was theirs by right of conquest. They knew the place as she would never know it if she lived there until she was a hundred years old, for—alas—she had come to it too late. It is only the very young who can make a place their own by an intimate knowledge of its geography.
They can play in the garden, Barbara thought, and I shall get to know them and understand their natures. It will be nice, Barbara thought, soliloquizing in her usual colloquial manner, it will be nice for me to get to know some children. I’ve never known any children at all (there were none at Silverstream, except, of course, Sarah’s twins, and they were only babies). Barbara was conscious that it was a Big Want in her that she knew, and had known, no children, since every newspaper and magazine, and almost every book that she opened impressed upon her the importance and the beauty of the very young, and waxed lyrical over the sincerity, the innocence and the freshness of the opening mind, and pointed out in no uncertain language how much one could learn from the unspoiled simplicity of its Outlook upon Life.
Naturally Barbara was interested; she was an adventurous person and she wanted to experience life to the full. Naturally she looked forward to her friendship with the Marvell children with eager anticipation. Barbara had read and heard so much about this strange subject race of human beings, that she imagined she knew “quite a lot about children,” but she soon discovered that nothing she had hitherto heard, or read, or thought about the very young was applicable to her next-door neighbors.
The Marvell children were not children, they were savages. The only “childlike” things about them were their greed, their covetousness, their love of freedom. They had none of the virtues that Barbara had been led to expect, not one. But they were most certainly an Experience and an Adventure—Barbara granted them that. Sometimes they amused her, and sometimes they annoyed her, and, if she had not had a very keen sense of humor in good working condition, the annoyance would very soon have swamped the amusement she got out of them, and she might have been led to the extreme step of banishing them from their Paradise.
The Marvell children were savages; they were red in tooth and claw. They had an Elizabethan sense of humor, and a truly Elizabethan freedom and ribaldry of speech. Barbara tried hard to get “on terms” with the children, but she never knew where she was with them. Sometimes they flitted from one subject to another like butterflies among flowers, so that Barbara was literally breathless in her efforts to follow their thoughts; sometimes they stuck to one subject for days, and could think and talk of nothing else, so that Barbara was bored to death. Sometimes they would converse with Barbara in a reasonable manner, so that she began to feel she was really getting to know them at last, and then, in the middle of the conversation, and for no reason at all, Trivvie would suddenly shake with soundless laughter; she would fling herself on the ground, and roll about convulsed with mysterious mirth, while Ambrose watched her in stolid silence, or remarked, with his usual bland indifference, that she would get hiccups in a minute, or wet her knickers.
On Sundays when Barbara saw them in church, sitting, one on either side of Miss Foddy, washed and brushed, and dressed in their best clothes, and heard them singing in their shrill sweet childish treble:
We are but little children weak nor born in any high estate, she could only shake like an aspen leaf with helpless laughter; Trivvie weak, and meek! She was as meek, and almost as helpless, as a full-grown Bengal tiger.
But all this was later, of course, when Barbara had had dealings with the Marvell children, when she had tried to get to know them and failed; when she had invited them to tea, and they had eaten everything provided for them, and asked for more; when they had prepared an elephant pit on the path through the wood, and Barbara had fallen into it and grazed her knees; when they had dammed the stream to make a harbor for their boats, and the stream (naturally annoyed at the restriction) had overflowed its banks and flooded the lower part of the garden; when she had listened, with horror and sympathy, to a circumstantial account of their meeting with a wolf escaped from Bertram Bostock’s menagerie (which was in Gostown at the time) and had afterward discovered, quite by accident, that the whole story was a baseless fabrication.
After the last-mentioned incident Barbara took all they told her with an ample helping of salt, and she found to her horror that more than half they told her required this seasoning. Even when they seemed to be telling the truth, the truth was colored by them, and distorted out of all recognition, and, whether it was so colored and distorted by vanity—as in the case of the wolf—or by fear—as when they had disclaimed all knowledge of the damming of the stream—or even by a misplaced kindness and consideration for others—as when they had assured Miss Foddy that her petticoat was not hanging down below her skirt—the truth was never (when the Marvells had had a hand in it) anything like the clear unvarnished truth as seen by others, so that Barbara began to wonder whether the Marvells knew when they were telling the truth and when they were not.
Like sand they ran through Barbara’s fingers—ribald, independent, unreliable. They had no sense of responsibility to God nor man. Had they a sense of responsibility to each other, Barbara wondered. It would seem that they had. Even in their most severe quarrels it only required the appearance of one of their common enemies—a “grown-up” connected with their own household—for all their differences to be forgotten, and for them to be banded together in an impregnable alliance. That, thought Barbara, is one of the few things you can really be sure of about them—their loyalty to each other—and, after all, it is a good deal. Another thing that mitigated the barbarity of the Marvell children in Barbara’s eyes was their love of beauty. In Ambrose the love of beauty was a placid sort of admiration, but in
Trivvie it was a fierce passion. She loved beauty and she hated ugliness with all the intensity of her young and vital nature. She loved the dog roses in the hedge at the bottom of the garden and the little swamp which bordered the stream with its brave show of flags; she loved the horse chestnuts that she and Ambrose garnered so assiduously—they were so smooth and brown and shining when you took them out of their close-fitting shells. (“They’re like little jewel cases,” Trivvie explained, and, for that delightful smile, Barbara forgave her a good deal.) Her hatreds were equally acute. She hated ugliness in people—Mrs. Fitch and Miss Wotton, for instance, were anathema to Trivvie—and she hated ugly things—old, worn-down bedroom slippers, and hairbrushes that had lost their bristles, and the stain in the bottom of the bath where the enamel had peeled off—it was bluish red, like a bruise—these things made her shudder with horror.
Barbara gradually learned these things about the Marvells. She learned, too, that the Marvells, like all savages, had superstitions and taboos. Trivvie would rather have died than walk under a ladder, and she was miserable for days if a mirror were broken, or a black cat crossed her path, or if she saw a solitary magpie in the wood. There were certain words that must never be said, and certain trees which Trivvie never passed without touching lightly with her hand. Barbara never learned more than a tenth of all these strange rites and never knew the meaning nor the origin of those she saw; she doubted whether the Marvells themselves knew the meaning or the origin of them.
The Marvells continued to play in the garden and Barbara continued to find excuses for their misdemeanors; she excused them to herself, and to Miss Foddy, and also to Arthur, who was legitimately annoyed at the damming of the stream (Arthur would have been even more annoyed if he had heard about the elephant pit, but Barbara kept that piece of wickedness to herself), but sometimes it was difficult to find excuses, and, sometimes, quite impossible, and at last Barbara decided that she must just take the Marvells as she found them and make the best of it.
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