Bewildering Cares

by Peck,Winifred

  This admirable change of front enabled me to settle down to prepare the meals of the day, and I turned my attention to soup for the evening and one of those dainty war-time supper dishes which begin with onions and end with lentils, however original they pretend to be. I often wonder if other women who are taking to their own work in war-time are filled with the same stupefied admiration for domestic servants which I feel now. Unruffled, they seem to be able to leave milk on the boil while they answer the Laundry and oblige with 3s. 6¾d., wipe the flour off their hands while they respond to the Rubbish, break off in whipping up an egg to polish and take up the shoes, and keep a kindly eye on the soup even while, at the basement gate, a gentleman is imploring them to view the writing-paper in his attaché-case.

  “It’s all a question of Method,” Mrs. Weekes says to me, impressively, but what method is there about these amiable visitors? And if Kate were downstairs (instead of upstairs at the back at that moment) she would have a lingering conversation with every one of them, scrub the kitchen as well and turn out a passable meal. But she is so wasteful and extravagant, and careless about her utensils, that I feel it better to keep her as only second-in-command in the kitchen, now that it is a national duty to be careful. “You don’t tell me Hitler’ll get what he’s asking for if you fiddle about with those scraps of cold mutton,” is her attitude on this question.

  “Miss Croft at the gate,” called Kate, in a stentorian whisper down the stairs. “I thought she’d be popping in when I saw Mr. Elgin coming along. Shall I say you’ll see her or that you’ve not cleaned yourself yet?”

  “Oh, yes, I’ll come,” I said, horrified at the alternative suggestion. “I’ve finished but for grating the cheese—if you could do that and add it as this recipe tells you, Kate.”

  “That I will. It fair makes me smile to see you working on at that grater by the hour when I gets it done in five minutes. And as for recipes, a stew’s a stew whether you fill it with odds and ends and call it Raggout Victory or not, I say!” And I must admit that after many experiments with New War-time Suggestions I couldn’t help feeling that Kate had right on her side.

  One of the depressing parts of provincial life is a remark like my omniscient Kate’s on poor Miss Croft’s visit. Sometimes I had vaguely imagined that there might be a faint lavender-scented whisper of a romance (musical, in D sharp) between Mr. Elgin and my visitor, but it had seemed to me to have such a vague, touching, twilight atmosphere that I had never even mentioned it to Arthur. I had no idea that anyone but myself might have wondered if Miss Croft’s regular attendance in the voluntary choir, and Mr. Elgin’s regular appearances for a cup of coffee in her “Olde Teapot” café (his chief meal in the day, I sadly fear) pointed in that direction, but I had no idea that Kate’s all-seeing eye had perceived the drama, and I sincerely hoped that Miss Croft didn’t guess it as I hurried upstairs, trying to get flour off my dress and out of my nails, and hoping the best for my hair.

  I am fond of little Miss Croft, partly because I first discovered her when I was a little lonely and alien on my arrival, and learnt much really from her rather highly-coloured picture of what life in the provinces meant to her. When she first came here, as a girl of twenty in 1910, in a cretonne overall, bead chains and a volume (I feel sure) of Henry James in her suit-case, she rented a low two-fronted little old shop off the Market Square, and started a library for semi-highbrow books, an “Olde Teapot Room” with home-made cakes and jams, hand-made pottery and little beaten brass objects with special reference to the Lincoln Imp. Girls and young men flocked to her, she says, and before the War she and the one apostle of culture she found in Stampfield, named, not very appropriately, Sarah Stump, started a Browning Society, a “musical gathering”, and a small amateur theatrical society. “Where”, asks Miss Croft, dramatically, “are they now?”

  It was not the Great War which broke up this Society—though Sarah’s elopement with a Private was a terrible blow—as much as the wireless, the films, motors and the cocktail habit. These agents have standardized, she says with some truth, the lowest type of Main Street civilization in the provinces. “Where”, she asks, “are the earnest girls with long skirts who found interest and culture in their homes, and only left them to plod on foot, or cycle anxiously, to ‘Ye Olde Teapot Room’ in search of books and guidance?” Their place is taken by gay young things who slip, in huge fur coats and infinitesimal guinea frocks, out of their boy friends’ cars into the picture houses, or to the bar of the Midland in Manchester for drinks. If they have to endure an evening at home, do they read or play the piano? No, they turn on the wireless dance bands.

  There is not, she declares, ‘one person in Stampfield who has heard of Virginia Woolf or Gertrude Stein or T. S. Eliot, and she thinks these authors ought to know about it. “And their mothers are no better,” she says, drawing the worn, faded cretonne curtains across her windows, with wizened hands on which her silver and amethyst rings hang so loosely. They laugh at her and say they took up Culture when they were young because they’d nothing better to do, and now they drift off to the pictures to wallow in stories of women of forty and fifty who still Find Love in the most unexpected places.

  It was at this moment of cultural depression that I persuaded Miss Croft, after joining her library (2s. 6d. deposit, and 2d. a week for such a new volume as the last but one Aldous Huxley) to come to Saint Simon’s and join the voluntary choir. In a month or so she had joined the Parochial Guild, and was busy getting up a Mystery Play.

  “And never again, if I can help it,” she told me after three months of internecine warfare in the parish. “What with persuading the Archangel Gabriel that she was not meant to look like the Principal Boy in the Pantomime, and all that cattiness about the part of the Madonna, and the way the Angels’ haloes would slip to one side, and their wings get broken through sheer carelessness, I think we’ll keep to Shakespeare’s readings in the future, Mrs. Lacely.”

  But, alas, Shakespeare’s readings and Browning societies and Old English Madrigals are all lying under the blight of the War now, and Miss Croft gives all her energy to the choir, the church, and various committees, and is not proposing, as Dick naughtily suggests, to go off as a Vivandière with “Ye Olde Teapot” slung on her back. She was looking tired and dispirited this morning, I thought, and indeed I don’t suppose the twopenny books and threepenny cups of coffee really manage to cover the rent of the little rooms off the Market Square.

  “I am so sorry to bother you,” she said, “but I just looked in about the work-party this afternoon.”

  The working-party is another of the minor disturbances created in Stampfield by the War. It was devoted to garments for our Mission in India, and held every Monday afternoon; but with the outbreak of hostilities a strong, patriotic party, led by Miss Boness and Miss Grieve, demanded that we should leave the Indian hospital patients to clothe themselves (which I cannot help feeling they might prefer to do) while we gave all our energies to Warmth for Warriors. Weight was lent to the Opposition by Mrs. Weekes (thirteen stone of it) with no better motive, I sometimes fear, than an ever-simmering rivalry with Miss Boness, and Miss Croft cast in her lot with our churchwarden’s wife, partly because she is always on the side of church officials, and partly, I fear, because one of the major pleasures of her life are the Royal Commands for afternoon tea which she receives only too infrequently from our leading parochial lady. An earth-shaking schism seemed imminent, and was only prevented by the decision to adopt my casual suggestion of holding two parties weekly, Comforts for Converts on Monday, and Warmth for Warriors on Thursday. There are not really enough members to make this worth while, especially as since our unhappy division no Monday worker will knit on Thursday, and no Thursday knitter will button-hole pyjamas on Monday. My hope had been that I could evade both ceremonies, as each side had such competent, not to say militant leaders; but I am recognized as deputy-leader by either party, and only too often I have to attend both meetings in a week.

&nbs
p; “Oh, dear, can’t we get the flannelette?” I asked. Here again, how odd it seems that the War is interfering with the supply of lurid magenta fabric for a faraway Hindu hospital!

  “No, no, Dykes have been most clever and obliging, and we have got two good bales in now. No, it was only to say that I can’t be there this afternoon, as I’ve got to go to Leeds. I must go to visit an old cousin of mine there who’s very ill. I’ve let Mrs. Weekes know, and I do hope she’ll turn up all right, but she has so many engagements, of course—her life is one long Whirl, she always tells me! If she can’t manage it, could you be so very kind this week?”

  Monday afternoon is, in theory, a parson’s holiday, but I knew Arthur would never find time for a walk or a rest this afternoon, and as I refuse to admit that my eight-stone figure indulges in a perpetual whirl like Mrs. Weekes’s thirteen, I had to consent.

  “Oh, yes, of course. I’d hoped to get my magazines done to-day as I have a busy morning of committees to-morrow, but I can manage.”

  “You don’t mind reading aloud, do you? I call it so much better than the mere gossip Miss Boness allows on Thursdays,” said Miss Croft, sniffing.

  “I thought she asked people to give talks to her party?”

  “Only once a month, and they often fail her. Mind you, I don’t say that Mrs. Weekes and I see eye to eye over books always, but I have persuaded her to try George Eliot now, and we all sit entranced over The Mill on the Floss, absolutely entranced!”

  “How bad for the pyjamas!” I said, laughing, and realized that again I had made the dreadful mistake against which all parsons’ wives should be warned at their Ordinations—of jesting on serious subjects. It is such a stupid trick to make an obvious fight comment of that sort, only to find oneself involved in the heavy weather of explanations. I must have told Miss Croft quite ten times that I had not meant what I said in the least, before it emerged, surprisingly, but as a great relief, that what she had really come for was to borrow our time-table if we had one, as the one she keeps in the shop is ten years old and has lost the pages from G. to Q. inclusive, and she hadn’t time to get to the station.

  I fear that Kate’s most excited suspicions must have been aroused by the fact that on this we repaired to the study, just as Arthur was seeing Mr. Elgin to the door. The organist gallantly offered to inquire at the station about the train, and let her know later when he dropped in for a cup of coffee; and as they went off together, he in a very threadbare overcoat and dejected trilby hat, and she in the great red and purple cape which couldn’t be warm enough over a home-made art silk jumper, their thin earnest faces turned in excited talk to each other, I indulged in my usual foolish pastime of imagining the death of the Leeds cousin, the discovery of a missing will in favour of Miss Croft, wedding bells, and a presentation by the congregation of a plated teapot and the bound works of John Sebastian Bach to the happy pair.

  Unluckily, while indulging in these visions I was caught at the door by Mrs. Jay. However dull and ordinary and wanting in paint a vicarage door may be, it is a door of a thousand histories. For people may abuse and despise the Church as they will and yet those in need or trouble continue to besiege our portals rather than those of the highbrows who assure us so frequently that the Church has had its day. We have indeed had our day, for the most part, as a benevolent institution. We can no longer afford to keep open house in our kitchens for the hungry, hand out chicken-broth and port wine, and temper any moral advice with a half-crown at the close. That was the style of the rectory in the early days of Arthur’s mother, but a cup of tea is all that Kate will provide nowadays, and that for the respectable only. Most people imagine that all such private charity is unnecessary, now that the State cares for the worker from the cradle to the grave. So it does, in theory, but there are bad gaps in what Mrs. Weekes growls at as grandmotherly legislation. One of them is the trouble which brought Mrs. Jay here to-day. Jay has been lucky and got taken on at Hall’s Works again as a porter, and Mrs. Jay for three months has managed to keep her family of six adequately fed on the dole. But I defy anyone so to manage the unemployment benefit, as to have any margin left for clothes or boots. Jay was out in the bad weather shovelling snow off the streets, and his shoes are worn right to the uppers, and could I oblige with an old pair of the Vicar’s or Mr. Dick’s to start him fresh? Luckily I could, and disguised my feelings as I handed over a pair which Dick had outgrown (and how are mothers to brace themselves against this terrible sentiment over inanimate things nowadays?) with a suggestion that she might find a pair of mine of some use to herself. Unluckily on investigation it appears that Mrs. Jay takes a whole size smaller than mine, and she deplored so tragically the fact that “the gentry always have such big feet”, that I laughed and felt better.

  “Could I speak to you or the Vicar a minute, Mrs. Lacely?” Mrs. Bearden caught me before I could go upstairs again. She represented another of a large class of applicants just now. Bearden has joined up, leaving a good job at four pounds a week, and his army pay does little more than cover the rent of their nice superior little Council house. She has been managing with two lodgers but has now by our advice got what we all know as “the pink form” (which has, Dick tells me, a far less polite adjective in the Army) and wants my help to fill it up. These forms are a perpetual worry to anxious lonely wives and mothers, “and not the last of the worry either I expect”, said Mrs. Bearden gloomily. The War Office has not a good name for promptness in payment to dependents here. However Mr. Weekes as Secretary of the Benevolent Fund is the stand-by of soldiers’ wives in our town, and I sent her on to him for help in arrears in light and gas at once. That must really be enough for “the Door” this morning I decided as I raced upstairs for galoshes and waterproof, without even looking out of the window, because it always rains on Mondays in Stampfield. It had to be quick work for I was sure I saw Mrs. Sime talking to Kate at the basement door and I really could not become involved in her familiar domestic problem about “our Lil”. I picked up my bag and shopping-basket and hurried down into the street, leaving the door to Kate’s very practical guardianship, and almost fell into the arms of Miss Boness.

  “The top of the morning to you!” she cried, for she is always terribly cheery in Lent. (“There’s a one for fasting and anointing the face, if you like,” said Dick once.) “Coming to Matins, and then on to the Mothers’ Guild Committee? Good! Then we can go together.”

  Miss Boness’s age is unknown, but the angle at which her hat perches on the back of her fluffed-up hair suggests a conservative attachment to the beginning of this century. Her face is thin, with a nose and eyebrows and lines round her mouth which suggest a perpetual question mark. She lives with her brother, our nice cheerful and skilful doctor, and devotes herself with unsparing energy to parochial work. She was very fond of our predecessors here, and their time at the vicarage is often referred to regretfully as “the dear old days”, and I suspect Arthur feels about her much as I do about Kate. She spoke a good deal in August about being called up, but I expect myself that she found, like me, that our age disqualified us for anything but the membership of some minor order of Saint John of Jerusalem, and had to content herself with tracking down light as an Air Raid Warden, and with more indefatigable zeal in parochial committees than ever. In spite of my polite protests she insisted, on this occasion, on accompanying me to the butcher, grocer and greengrocer on the way to church, in the obvious fear that I meant to shirk my duties.

  “Now about this sermon!” she began, as, after Matins, read in a very bellicose and abrupt manner by pallid Mr. Strang, in our chilly church, we paddled across to the parish hall for our committee. “You were at church last night, Mrs. Lacely. I saw you in your prophet’s chamber, ah ha! What did you make of it?”

  “Mr. Strang is so well meaning,” I began, feebly, when we turned to see Mrs. Weekes coming into the room. Mrs. Weekes in the character of our wealthy churchwarden’s wife treats me, officially, rather as one of the barbarian emperors must have tr
eated the Papacy, with a show of forbearance to my office, but a come-let-us-have-no-nonsense tone at the slightest sign of resistance. She dresses habitually in elephant grey, a wise choice for her redundant figure, and to-day, shaking off the rain-drops from her skirt and umbrella she looked more like a formidable but kind-hearted cod-fish emerging from the elements than ever.

  “Good morning, good morning! What a day! It is the worst of this war that we’re so short of petrol. Is anyone else expected, Miss Boness? No, I thought not. Miss Grieve rang up that she daren’t venture out. Mrs. Gregg and Miss Henly should really resign. They never attend and they’d be no loss. Are we a quorum?”

  Unluckily we were, and we sat down to some perfunctory business, for the Mothers’ Guild, which consists principally of grandmothers, is rapidly expiring of old age, and we passed on rapidly to the subject of the Sermon. Here, luckily, inspiration seized me, and I sprang up.

  “Will you forgive me? I promised my husband not to say one word about this until he has talked the whole subject out with Mr. Strang. It would be very wrong of me to discuss it. I’m sure you’ll agree with me.”

  “In the dear old days”, began Miss Boness, “dear old Mr. Brownlee always gave us a lead in any difficulty.”

  “There’s no difficulty here,” puffed Mrs. Weekes, who always seems to swell visibly when she disapproves of anything. “The church was all forced last night to listen to a sermon which was unpatriotic, irreligious and un-English, and my husband says steps must be taken at once or he won’t answer for the consequences. I cannot see why you should go off like this, Mrs. Lacely. There are no two words to be said about it.”