“I don’t agree in the least,” said Mrs. Pratt. “It is our duty to stand as rocks behind our husbands” (I hoped this simile was not suggested by one of Kate’s stony buns) “and to present a united front. You know as well as I do that the trouble about a curate’s marriage is that he’s so often led astray by a pretty face in his youth, and makes a quite unsuitable match. I gather that this little Mrs. Strang is not what one would really call—”
How one’s snobberies get up and stare one in the face! I had been thinking on much the same lines, and yet I felt hot all over now. So I restrained myself from saying, “I expect if we’d lived in Nazareth we wouldn’t have called on Joseph’s wife,” as my grandmother remarked once in rebuke to such a criticism. Also I remembered Dick, as a schoolboy, after one of Mrs. Pratt’s visits, asking tolerantly, “And who is the great Lord Pratt?” and felt better.
“I’m quite sure she doesn’t influence his views, anyhow,” I said, politely. “I think he is very young and very earnest, and is trying to translate the Gospels into modern political life. So he does need our patience and tolerance. I wish,” I added, with sudden inspiration, “that you could see him and talk to him yourself, you know. Someone in your position—”
I have never fancied myself as a diplomat, but this remark was an undoubted success. Mrs. Pratt began doing up her fur collar at once, and if I hadn’t remembered in time that Mr. Strang was beginning influenza, she would have started on her campaign at once; and serve him right, thought my unregenerate self.
“I’ll make that suggestion to Adela myself, and tell her it comes through you, my dear,” said Mrs. Pratt. “I know the Archdeacon thought of visiting him, but he disliked anything that seemed like going behind your husband’s authority. But, of course, a woman can often do so much unofficially, and I often think that a woman’s, especially a mother’s, influence can do so much for a young man. Will you let me know when he is well enough for a little talk? I must be going on now, and I shall be very glad to tell Adela of our little chat. What news have you of Dick?” (Everyone asks this, and no-one ever waits for an answer, I notice. Soldiers aren’t news in this war.) “Do you know, I think I must leave you some flowers—I see you haven’t any! It was only that I promised to show Adela our new cyclamens, but I’ll just take one in my buttonhole.”
Do diplomats feel ashamed when they get Foreign Orders they don’t deserve? I don’t know, but I was more charmed than ashamed to be so well and truly forgiven and I accepted my nosegay shamelessly.
“Still running about as hard as ever?” asked Mrs. Pratt, now in high good humour, because she really loves to do a kindness, and had, I am sure, only meant to discipline me for my good. “Well, I shall see you on Friday, and we shall all have a nice restful day then.”
“Friday?” My face and brain registered a blank.
“My dear girl, you can’t have forgotten it’s the Quiet Day in the old Parish Rectory! You had! But my dear, surely, surely you keep an engagement book. Let’s see if you haven’t got it down.”
Not for worlds would I let Mrs. Pratt see my engagement book. I have never really kept a Diary, but I do put down in the big engagement book which “the Fish” sends every Christmas any date or notice I remember whenever I come across the volume—(it seems to travel by itself all over the house!)—and also, I regret to say, any odd remark which amuses me, or joke or quotation I come across in a book, or any stray event which seems of importance to me. I knew that I had had one of my unexpected re-unions with it on Sunday, and had copied out in it a poem from a review in the Observer, and notes like: “Call Mrs. Jones with beads for D.; Remind A. of Higgs; Try catch Lil Sime.” Now, too, for the first time I understood what had puzzled me over my entry for Friday: “Whoopee at R.” I must have written it under the momentary inspiration of some memory of Dick’s usual terminology for such clerical events, and as it had conveyed nothing to me since, and my memory offered no solution, I had been hoping for Friday as a real quiet day at home, with some mending and making up a parcel of cakes and socks for Dick, and an orgy of reading. But it would clearly be as much as my place is worth, clerically, to fail to appear at the Rectory now, so I only told Mrs. Pratt that of course I would be there, and that I remembered now that I had noticed it in my engagement book on Sunday.
“Adela and I sometimes fear you are a little wanting in method, you know,” said Mrs. Pratt. “I don’t think you would look so tired and thin if you planned your days better. I have every hour accounted for in my book from ten in the morning to seven in the evening, so I have no rush or confusion.”
I didn’t like to make her feel uncomfortable by suggesting that my day usually starts at seven o’clock, but I did protest that engagements don’t always last as short a time as one hopes. Punctuality, said Mrs. Pratt, is the politeness of princes, and left me, after prolonged good-byes, on the doorstep, with just five minutes to race to our parish hall for the Quarterly Meeting of the Mothers’ Union.
Luckily Miss Boness had been entertaining Mrs. Leny, the speaker, an old school friend, at tea, and a hymn was still in progress, so I hoped my unprincely behaviour would go unnoticed; and when once Mrs. Leny was well under way, I could sit back and feel most of my responsibilities for the day over. My thoughts wandered, and, I fear, I had settled on the vases suitable for Mrs. Pratt’s flowers (if only Kate didn’t take them and wedge them into something unsuitable), and reflected that the onion soup was ready and that Kate fries fish passably when I have left it ready, before I jerked myself to attention. It would never do if Mrs. Leny were to preach heresies and again I was unable to give any account of them!
She did not preach heresies, but I found myself wishing, as I so often do, that I had provided our quarterly speaker with a more youthful audience. I am sure that it must be my fault that young married women here show so little interest in this admirable society, and I have sometimes a sneaking fear that it is because the grandmothers have dug themselves in so securely that the young naturally feel it a “has been”. I inherited from “the dear old days” a Sunday Class of elderly ladies, and they one and all retain their membership in the Mothers’ Union, though some of them boast of great-grandchildren. And though I call on the young married women and urge them to join, I am met usually with the reply that they prefer the W.R.I. When I point out that these two admirable societies are not in the least mutually exclusive, they say they’ll wait and think it over, but they don’t see themselves on a bench alongside of old Mrs. Debb. The few young people who have joined all herd themselves together at the back of the room, so that poor Mrs. Leny, a sweet, earnest, eloquent little woman, was left to urge the sanctity of home life on what seemed to my heated imagination, rows of elderly widows with Old Age Pensions. She omitted, I noticed, a page of notes which contained, probably, advice or prayers for what she had already, I was sorry to note, referred to as “toddlers”, and dealt faithfully with the urgency of keeping a note of purity and sanctity in our homes for the sake of our growing daughters. Tell them, she urged, that though men play with fast girls and flirt with giddy girls, yet they marry good girls. (“That’s an old maid’s story,” I heard from Mrs. Higgs in a stentorian whisper.)
Mrs. Leny, with supreme tact, passed on to the evensong of our lives, and the influence we may have on our grandchildren. My thoughts at this point reverted sadly, I fear, to the question of a possible nursery in Stampfield Vicarage for Dick’s and Ida’s babies, and I only returned when Mrs. Leny, on whom by now the age of the audience was beginning to tell, was picturing the happy moments when, our life’s work done, we sat back with our knitting to reflect on the blessings which motherhood had brought into our lives, and how best we could hand them on to the coming generations.
The happy picture of myself in an arm-chair, knitting, to the murmur of:
“By still waters they would rest
In the shadow of the tree;
After battle, sleep is best,
After noise, tranquillity,”
&nb
sp; was only disturbed by her sudden appeal to us all to be up and doing, which reminded me of the fish, and I looked anxiously at the clock. Arthur does like fish in batter, and our war-time fish is all the better for this disguise, but I feared this was an unworthy translation of the summons when I found Mrs. Leny had suddenly turned to the subject of Family Prayers. As I was the only person who could possibly hold them, and we don’t, because Kate announced that church now and again she could do with, but “set her on her knees in the dining-room and she’d think of nothing but the back door and the bacon”, I felt embarrassed and shame-faced. I was losing my feeling of unworthiness as Mrs. Leny made rather a beautiful little peroration about our prayers for our sons and all the sons of mothers all the world over, in war-time, when Mrs. Leaf exclaimed audibly, “S’more shame to Hitler!” and my helpless inclination to giggle overcame me again. Fortunately we soon stood up for a hymn, and though the choice which led Mrs. More to shout cheerily and vociferously that her “life’s brief day was sinking down to its appointed end”, did perhaps emphasize the advanced age of the gathering, it ended at least with a show of enthusiasm. And, to my infinite relief, Miss Boness and Mrs. Leny refused my wavering invitation to look in for a few moments, and I could hurry back to the kitchen.
Arthur was very late and very tired, with a tendency again to feel our food unduly luxurious, and a strong reluctance to come up afterwards to the drawing-room. But his study fire was out and his books awaited him, I told him, and by the time I had finished helping Kate to clear up, he was comfortably asleep over a vast new volume of Saint John. I was just following his example when the telephone bell went.
Again, to my relief, it was not the War Office. Still, the dining-room was so cold that my teeth were literally chattering, and I felt very angry when I had to wait, after answering the call, to be put through by some maid to a mistress. I peeped through the edge of the black-out blind, and saw the soft mazy drift of snowflakes in the pitch darkness; snow in these unlighted nights is curiously uncanny, and I was sighing at the winter which would never pass away, in the world or in our hearts, when a little rustle told me that someone was at the other end of the instrument at last.
“Good evening,” said Mrs. Weekes. “What a cold evening, is it not—it almost seems like snow.” She paused, and I said good evening and left it at that. “I’ve been seeing Mrs. Pratt this evening,” she began again, and again I refused to help her out. “You are there, Mrs. Lacely? Hullo, are you there? … Oh, I quite thought we had been cut off. … Well, as I was saying, I have been seeing Mrs. Pratt, and she told me that the Archdeacon was hoping to see your husband at two o’clock. Well, of course, as I said to Mrs. Pratt, that would quite break up our little lunch party, so I have been thinking …”
“Think away,” was my unregenerate comment to myself, and I regret to say I made a face at the telephone.
“I have been thinking that perhaps, after all, it would be more satisfactory if you were both to give us the pleasure of your company at luncheon,” said Mrs. Weekes, and as I heard the poor old dear literally swallowing her pride at the other end, my heart melted.
“It’s so good of you,” I said, “but don’t bother, because I expect Arthur really does want an interview alone with the Archdeacon.”
“Yes, yes, I know, but they can have my husband’s den to themselves, or the lounge if they prefer it; we shall be in the drawing-room, we ladies, you see! Mrs. Pratt is so sure that you are ready to help us all in this difficulty, and if I was too hasty at first in thinking you didn’t understand our point of view … well, of course. …”
“I think I’d better go and ask Arthur about his appointments to-morrow,” I said, because I simply had to retreat upstairs for a minute to laugh, and ask Arthur what on earth we shall do.
“Do? Why go, of course,” said Arthur.
“Christian forgiveness or sheer greed?”
“Both, but principally the latter,” replied Arthur, serenely. He would live on air if I neglected him; he calls onion soup and fried haddock undue luxury at home, and yet, like every normal man he enjoys a really good meal out of his own home with quite simple hearty pleasure now and again. If he felt like that, it was silly for me to rage inwardly at Mrs. Weekes’ insufferable impertinence, and better to remember that at all costs we must be friends for Dick’s sake. And if I was sacrificing my proper pride, poor old Adela had been obliged to sacrifice a lot more! I longed to know whether the invitation was due to anything but the intransigeance of the Archdeacon, but I had no desire to stay and chatter—as my teeth did at once.
“Good,” said Mrs. Weekes, “good, very good. At one o’clock then. It is most unlucky that Mrs. Pratt herself cannot come, but there it is. I have got another guest, a surprise for you. Tell me, is it true that Mr. Strang is so very ill?”
“He’s a bad go of ’flu,” I said, knowing that to Mrs. Weekes, who adores illness, his political views would seem less obnoxious at once.
“Dear me, I hope his silly little wife knows how to look after him! One has to guard against chills so carefully at this time of year.”
“Yes,” I said, doing an audible shiver down the telephone, “And it’s so cold in here I must now run away. Good night, and thank you.”
Once long ago when I was taking Dick for a walk, someone who met us annoyed me by just such a display of bad manners, and ignorance of what you can and can’t do, as Mrs. Weekes had shown just now. I was younger and even more indiscreet then, and burst out suddenly with—“Oh, the insufferable manners of these provincial big-wigs,” and Dick, who was always Arthur’s son, insisted painstakingly on an exact definition of the meaning of each word. By the time we’d finished with it, the sentence was rubbed into my mind as a typical fall from grace, and I repeat it to myself at moments when I am very cross inside as a suitable reminder and penance. At the top of the first flight of seven stairs I felt better, and by the time I had reached the place at the next corner which has worn so thin that it soon won’t be carpet any more, I was quite composed, and able to rejoice that to-morrow I needn’t cook lunch or know what I’ll have, and that as it was Kate’s afternoon out I should have to come straight home to answer the door and the telephone, and have time to arrange a nice dinner. This prospect gave me strength to refrain from awaking Arthur to hear the latest news of the great Strang controversy. “Men dislike talking things over as much as women like it”, was one of my mother-in-law’s dicta, and I do remember to let a sleeping husband lie.
I was just going upstairs to bed when the front doorbell rang. As Kate is officially in bed by eleven o’clock, though actually I could hear a manly laugh in the kitchen, I went down to answer our door, hoping that it was not an urgent sick call for Arthur. Obviously, I decided, it was not, as I found myself face to face with a very stout woman in a draggled fur coat, who faced me with the glassy stare of the happily fuddled.
“Ser sorry I’m ser late,” said my visitor in a conspiratorial whisper, “Fac’ is I come to see the Vicar here about some banns! I want some.”
“To-morrow morning,” I replied firmly. “It’s too late for banns to-night.”
“Coo—she says it’s too late,” reported my visitor to some invisible companion in the darkness. “And me coming out in the snow for them too. Must report this! I wonder—” she paused on the steps and turned to me with an entire change of manner, “now there is one thing I wonder if you could oblige me with and that’s a fried egg!”
“I’m sorry, I haven’t one in the house,” I replied stoutly. “Have you anyone to see you home?”
“Not a soul, no Christian charity!” wailed my visitor, showing a distinct inclination to camp out on the door-step. I had a dreadful fear that Arthur would appear, refusing to turn the poor away, but luckily the unseen friend pulled her up and out of the gate remorselessly, and I could lock our door—our ubiquitous door—and go to bed at last.
VI
Thursday
The hat problem became really acute this
morning.
As I returned from Early Service, I most unfortunately caught sight of myself in the side glass of the little shop at the corner of our street which sells “haberdash”, baby linen and ladies’ corsets. It is not a prosperous business, and the glass is far from clean, so that, in pausing, I did gather a general impression that at our next jumble sale my present head-gear would hardly go off, even at the “All on this counter—1d. Stall,” and that no woman could be expected to show tact on the subject of pacifism, the charm of a prospective relation-in-law, and the dignity of the Church of England to the Weekes’s under a battered relic of black felt. Kate, who was washing the step as I came in, strengthened this impression by remarking that now the spring seemed coming along at last, and Dykes was having a throw-out sale, it did seem as if we’d all have to think about a bit of shopping.
My thoughts, however, were diverted from Dykes when the telephone bell went, just as we were sitting down to breakfast. Miss Boness, at the other end, told me in tones of such despair that she was up the spout and down the drain, that I really thought for a moment that she was mistaking me for the plumber. “Only you can help me, dear Mrs. Lacely,” she went on, however, “and I know we never appeal to you in vain! Miss Jedd has scratched! Simply scratched!”
“Miss Jedd?” (Where, as Mrs. Pratt would say, was my method or engagement book?)
“Yes, Miss Jedd! She was to speak to my Comforts Club this afternoon—surely you remember. Surely you meant to attend the meeting at three!”
“No, no!” I could reply with infinite relief. “You know it’s my maid’s afternoon out, so I have to be in the Vicarage from three o’clock onwards. We can’t leave the house empty because of telephone calls.”
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