by F. M. Mayor
Dora’s goodbye was full of affection. Mary was established in her heart as a sister and a duty, beloved in both capacities. She decided to rearrange her Southsea work that she might be ready to go to that dear, solitary Mary whenever she was wanted. Mary gave her writings to Ella, and in due course received the following in a small, clear, pointed hand:
Dear Miss Jocelyn – Ella Redland sent me your MS. I thought the form so novel, and the rhythm of some of your phrases quite arresting. I like your pattern – it is very individual. I lent it to Dermott O’Donovan. I expect you know his verse. He’s quite new and rather young. He wrote to me about your writings: ‘I have never known any one on such intimate terms with toads, and this, coupled with a passion for Mother Julian of Norwich, indicates a mind I want to know more of. It must be arranged that I see her.’ Do come for the night to my flat next week. It would be jolly to have you. Dermott can’t be caught before eleven p.m. – Yours sincerely,
BRYNHILDA KENRICK.
This letter astonished Mary. She had written almost as a silkworm weaves a cocoon, with no thought of admiration. That it should come from a young man was exhilarating. She had the same idea of young men as a very young girl; they seemed above ordinary humanity. Middle-aged men she knew were like herself, subject to unpopularity and making mistakes. Not that she had ever been near falling in love with any young men. She had never desired to please any one as much as her father. He, by the way, would certainly not think more of her because she brought out a book. On the other hand, if a friend of his own age should read and like it, he might be disposed to talk more freely to her.
She remembered that Mr O’Donovan was a Roman Catholic. Canon Jocelyn disliked Roman Catholics and the Salvation Army on account of their wildness and extravagance. When Mary was thirteen she had said, ‘I simply detest Henry IV of France because he did not persecute any one.’
‘That is a foolish way of talking,’ Canon Jocelyn answered, ‘and I dislike your slang use of the word “simply”.’ She had only meant Henry IV was not in earnest, but there was a strangeness in the speech, which made Canon Jocelyn feel she might get into the hands of the Roman Catholics. Twenty-five years had elapsed: Mary was still a Protestant, but Canon Jocelyn would never say more than ‘Um’ if Mary told him she had met Father Murphy in the road. In his heart he regretted that ‘Papists’ had been put on the same level as Protestants at the Universities. He combined these views with admiration for the great Roman Catholic men of letters. In literature other matters troubled him – slang phrases and inadequate dictionaries.
It would be a bitter pill if any one of his family were beholden to a Roman Catholic. Nor was Mary sure if she wanted her inner thought exposed to the bored scrutiny of the public. But she wanted very much to go to London and hear Mr O’Donovan’s compliments from his own mouth.
She accepted the invitation. Then the news must be broken to her father.
It needed breaking, for she had never proposed to do such a thing before. She meant to tell him of her writings, but her heart failed her; she dreaded his sarcasm.
‘You wish to stay with a friend of Miss Redland, with whom you are not acquainted. That surely is a strange idea, and to go a journey of nearly two hours for one night only would not be at all worth while. I really think, Mary, you had better give it up; it seems a very wild scheme.’
‘Perhaps I could stay with Mrs Plumtree for another night, if you could spare me, Father. She has often said I could propose myself whenever I liked.’
‘I must say,’ replied Canon Jocelyn, ‘I am a little surprised that you should care to be running about in various directions at this time, when we are rather occupied with the Harvest Festival.’
She let pass the injustice of ‘various directions,’ and answered:
‘I should be back by Saturday, Father, and the Harvest Festival isn’t till Tuesday. It would only be two nights at the most.’
‘But there would be the decorations, which are always under your charge.’
‘Yes, but there would be plenty of time for them. I never do them till the morning before, you know.’
‘Well, you must of course judge for yourself in such a matter. I merely tell you what I think.’
Mary kept to her resolution, but the heart was taken out of it. Had she known her father’s real reason, she would have given up the visit in an instant, but Canon Jocelyn did not always like giving his real reasons.
He called up a picture of Mary run over in a London crossing. He thought, too, of himself, seized with a heart attack; he had slight attacks at night occasionally. He liked Mary to come and sit with him on the pretext that he must drink something hot. He was hurt that Mary should not realize all this without explanation. He indulged himself in some petty and morose thoughts, but he checked himself, and recollected that the young are naturally selfish; allowance must be made for them. He wished her a comfortable journey; he even said, ‘I daresay Miss Gage can be your deputy at the decorations if you should be detained in London.’ He would not entirely give up his point about the Harvest Festival.
She had won her battle. Her battles with Canon Jocelyn were few and her victories fewer, but many times she regretted her victory, and most of all as she mounted the stairs to Miss Kenerick’s flat in Kensington.
11
In the flat a new world was opened to Mary, both of the eye and mind. The rooms were furnished with every new convenience. Nothing, even the books, dated back farther than four or five years. ‘Books are like sucked oranges when the vogue is over,’ said Miss Kenrick. Besides new books there were many magazines, pamphlets, and organs of small societies. There were, too, various thin volumes with thick pages. They contained poems, essays, short stories that the set was constantly publishing and presenting to itself.
The walls were orange; the paint royal blue. There were foreign posters still more emphatic than those at Basle Station; illustrations from comic papers of South-eastern Europe; Cubist studies by some Scandinavian artist. There were large cushions on the floor, which looked as if they had been sat on too much; they were covered in Cubist chintzes. These might have been harsh and crude, but were tempered by the dust, which everywhere lay thick; the windows were dull with London grime.
Miss Kenrick was a good-looking, imperturbable girl of twenty-five. She greeted Mary, who was trembling in shyness, with the cool, practised courtesy of one accustomed to seeing new people every day. She kept up easy talk.
‘Isn’t Ella Redland splendidly typical?’ she said. ‘We call her Great–aunt Ellen. The year before last we all had a season of causes, and she can’t quite realise the season’s over, and keeps sending us pamphlets. I’ve caught Dermott for tonight and one or two other people will be turning up, so would you like to rest for half an hour?’ She gave Mary a book of new poems to read.
While Mary turned the pages she was supposed to be enjoying, her mind ceaselessly repeated the phrase, ‘one or two people.’ It was an evening of ordinary routine to Miss Kenrick, only diversified by the new, uncertain element of Mary.
Brynhilda, Dermott, and the rest belonged to the same set. Its members were almost all between twenty and thirty. They came from Hammersmith, Hampstead, Chelsea, Bloomsbury, and St John’s Wood. Most of them had shaken off their families, and united in light elastic unions with friends. There were some husbands with not wives, and wives with not husbands. If one or two still lived with parents, it was understood that no one would take any notice of them. Most sprang from good provincial or suburban chapel homes. They were in the bloom of youth and lustiness with a remarkable proportion of good looks; they possessed youth’s special quality – vitality. Those who have it find it irresistible; so do those who lack it. The old, the middle-aged, the young themselves bow before it.
When the set did not meet at Brynhilda’s flat – it was a tribute to Brynhilda that it should come to such a wrong part of London as Kensington – it met at Hammersmith, Hampstead, etc. The flat was a house of call for the set, not a h
ome. It had no permanence, no roots of sentiment. When Brynhilda left it – she might at any moment – she would not think of it again. As she said, ‘You should never let the past get in your way.’
But how pleasant the atmosphere was, how sensible. There was no snapping, fussiness, or anxiety. Mary remembered many throes at the Rectory: if the cat took a day off in the woods, if a member of the household was late, or a visitor turned up unexpectedly for the night. And when they were agitated they all became cross, Mary included.
Neither was the set dull. Canon Jocelyn’s circle really enjoyed dullness: dull talks, walks, books, newspapers, sermons, visits, and parties. Mary, under the aegis of the old generation, had some of the attributes of her own, which, though it endured dullness, did not like it.
Now it was night, and the set came in. They hardly greeted one another, and Mary noticed that they made no distinction in their manner to the other sex. But were the sexes really so indifferent to one another? Did they not perhaps drawl, smoke languorously, loll and lounge among the cushions, lie in long heaps about the floor, appear too silly to finish their sentences, laugh and ejaculate ‘Isn’t it?’ at random more than they might have done if there had not been another sex present?
Mary found herself seated by a Mr Worsley of forty-five, the oldest person present. Feeling this disgrace, he was the most rebellious of the rebels, the youngest of the young. He took care to pay no attention to Mary, who was his nearest contemporary. He and his wife had discarded one another some years before. After different experiences he had now set up house with a girl of eighteen, and was trying to think and be just what she was. She was already beginning to find him ‘mossy.’
On the other side of Mary was the fireplace, where once had been the grate and now was the radiator, not in full working order. If it was the place of honour, it had its dangers too, for all the ends of cigarettes were hurled at it. One missed, and hit Mary; another fell into a kitchen jug. There were four of them, filled with coffee, which was cooling on the hearth. Brynhilda introduced her to one or two people. They treated her as if she had not been there. On the whole she was grateful, though it was missing the only chance she was likely to get of coming into touch with the intellectual, young generation.
Mary had noticed a thin girl, Priscilla Leach. She was stretched at full length on a couch, half-opening and then shutting her narrow, brown eyes, which looked like some not brightly polished stones. She was talking about adventures.
‘One ought to have as many as one can, and go on and on and on. You get such jolly things from them.’
‘Does one leave all the old shells of the victims lying about?’ said an undergraduate called Tommy. ‘Isn’t that rather untidy?’
‘Oh, if little me gets the kernel anybody else can have the shells,’ said Priscilla.
‘Excuse my seeming rude,’ said the undergraduate, ‘but I rather doubt whether little me will get my kernel.’
‘The point, I feel sure, is,’ said Mr Worsley, crushing levity, ‘that whether one loves or hates, or is faithful or unfaithful, life is always a comedy and always a pageant.’
This topic continued for some time. Brynhilda placidly handed round coffee and cakes; she had heard it too often to be much interested. None of the men helped her. It pleased the girls that the men were rude to them; it pleased the men almost more to be rude. Mary listened in bewilderment, hardly believing what she heard. The coffee was cold, and there was not enough to go round, but such discomfort the set bore with an attractive lightness of heart.
At last Dermott came in. Brynhilda introduced him to Mary, and he took Mr Worsley’s place. He was very handsome, and greeted her with a bewitching smile; he could not smile quite impersonally. Light friendliness lay behind it, and careless desire to please. Mary would have meant much by such a smile. She could not help thinking he must be a little attracted to her. It excited her; she longed to impress him. Looking back afterwards, she saw she had been ripe with encouragement for something warmer than friendship.
No chance came for her to shine. The talk fell on London. Dermott decried it. ‘What is there to say for this corner of London at any rate? You have the large vulgar stores here just matching the large vulgar flats, and the vulgar motors spueing forth obscene and abominable cries, and portentous women with fat bosoms surging against the stores, submerging the men, who are absolutely as detestable in their own beady-eyed Hebrew line. Now just tell me, is this a spot any breathing being could respect?’
‘But why should any old thing ever respect another old thing?’ said Brynhilda. ‘London’s ugly, and wicked, and screaming, and silly, and crude, and smelly, and democratic, and jolly, and tremendous, and it’s today, never last week.’
‘Who says London is ugly?’ said Salome, a lovely serious girl, who wrote bad poetry, ‘with its taxis scarlet and emerald, and its buses like dressed-up revellers at a ball, and its great racing cars like darting silver beetles. And the posters are like nursery picture-books for the giants’ children, and the sky-signs are spelling lessons for the stars.’
‘Say that all over again,’ said Tommy, ‘that I may take it down in shorthand, and send it to the Publicity Department of Metroland. You’ll see it all up at Walham Green Station* in a neat frame.’
‘There is an incongruity about London,’ said Mr Worsley, ‘which makes it so splendid. I mean, always London goes on her way indifferent, whatever happens. Now Paris tries consciously to be beautiful, doesn’t she? That produces in her an atrocious anaemia, which sickens one like the odour of garbage. I always feel Paris is longing to be crimson as blood, but I see her maroon like my grandmothers pelisse.’
‘Now, Miss Jocelyn,’ said Dermott, turning to Mary, ‘I know you’re concurring in my sentiment. Don’t you feel that village of yours can despise London?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Mary. He paused attentively, and, after ransacking her brains for something, she went on. ‘I think trees and fields are more companionable.’
‘To be sure they are, rather too much so, particularly on a night in November, when the wind is sighing among them.’
‘I don’t mind saying I think any company’s better than the most communicative tree,’ said Brynhilda. ‘And you do too, Dermott. When do you ever cross to Ireland unless one of us goes and holds you by the hand?’
Next the set turned to the anthology Mary had looked at in the afternoon.
‘What did you think of it, Miss Jocelyn?’ said Brynhilda.
Mary had not understood the poems; their style and matter were unfamiliar. She disliked them for this – the reason why the set admired them. She said more than she intended. Perhaps solitary people fall into the shyness of talking too much, more than others.
‘Well, Miss Jocelyn,’ said Dermott at length, ‘you have demolished me pretty thoroughly. That unhappy little rhyme which especially offends you is my poor offspring.’
‘I did not know,’ cried Mary. ‘I had no idea. Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘We none of us knew. How were we to know that Jonas Mudge was you?’ said Brynhilda.
‘Yes, that was my little private jest. I wanted to see if you’d know an O’Donovan when you met it.’
‘I should have thought it was particularly individual; any one might have recognized it as Dermott’s work,’ said Mr Worsley.
‘But why Jonas Mudge? Why particularly Jonas and why particularly Mudge?’ asked somebody.
‘Surely that’s obvious. My own name is so excruciatingly pretty that it isn’t to be endured more than it must be. It was to be mine for plain everyday life, but in the land of romance I call myself Jonas Mudge and enfranchise my soul – and he really is a very charming fellow.’
‘I should fancy he is an earnest agnostic of the Herbert Spencer school,’ said Tommy.
Mary’s cheeks burnt. She was reminded of herself at fifteen, when she had either turned dumb and been reproved, or talked too much and been further reproved. She made more of it than necessary. All turned to
something else and forgot her. They stayed very late. Dermott was the last to go.
‘Wait,’ said Brynhilda, posing herself on the floor beside him and Mary. ‘I want to ask you what about Miss Jocelyn’s writings?’
‘About Miss Jocelyn’s writings?’ said he. ‘I don’t know that I have anything of special importance to say on the subject.’
‘What do you advise Miss Jocelyn to do?’
‘Is there any reason why I should advise anything? I am quite impotent, and quite incompetent. Did I tell you, by the way, Father Lecky has just been showing me the most amazing hymns of a girl of fifteen in Galway. She has had visions of Our Lady that are of superlative wonder and beauty. But I say, I must depart. I see even old Worsley has gone to roost. That is a sign the night is far spent. Goodnight, Miss Jocelyn,’ he hardly glanced at her. ‘Goodnight, Brynhilda. Think that I’m off to Oxford at ten, and I haven’t packed up.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Brynhilda later. ‘He was in a mood. He really did like your work; he could talk of nothing else one night. You ought to have liked his poem; that was the misfortune.’
‘I’m very sorry I was so rude to him,’ said Mary, flushing almost to tears. ‘It was shyness. You have no idea how terrified I felt of you all.’
‘Oh,’ said Miss Kenrick. ‘On the contrary, it was so jolly getting a fresh point of view. Let’s have some more coffee before we go to bed; there’s nothing like coffee for making one sleep. Tell me what you think of all the people.’
‘I couldn’t possibly say.’
‘Oh, do. Say quite frankly. I want to know what strikes you.’
‘I don’t understand any of them. Who was the beautiful fair girl?’
‘Oh, Salome Barnett. She’s religious, and she writes. She wanted to take vows somewhere, and she wouldn’t cross herself, and they sent her away in a week. She isn’t quite normal. What did you think of Priscilla?’