Still She Wished for Company

by Margaret Irwin

  “Surely one must try and get the most out of life and not miss any chances,” Barney replied, in the voice of one who states the first article of a religion.

  “Chances?” Jan teasingly considered a few of these. Tony, the emptiest man in London, with nothing to marry on but his money; the earnest young man from Bloomsbury who had preached on her moral obligation as an adult female to love for the sake of experience, his offer of an opening course being, no doubt, actuated by a sense of duty to his neighbour; or was there more solid business value again in the senior partner’s strictly honourable proposal across a luncheon table at the Pall Mall? True, he had neither looks nor charm, nor even youth, but then he could offer a house complete with servants, and surely that was enough to justify his asking for her with the dessert and with as complacent an air of security.

  Jan’s laughter did not conceal her disgust nor her obvious regret that she had never received “a really decent proposal,” whether honourable or otherwise. Barney was sure that Donald couldn’t have proposed like that.

  “Donald never proposed at all. He just assumed I was going to marry him.”

  She threw herself on to the bed, twisting her two plaits of hair tightly together under her chin so that it formed a close brown cap round her suddenly eager face.

  “Barney, I didn’t want to go with that man. I was afraid of disappointment and I know now I should have been disappointed. He was so nearly right—that walk, that unconscious air of authority, that—that touch of hardness. And ‘Your convenience is my pleasure’ —pretty, wasn’t it?

  “But he wasn’t right, Barney. He was stupid, really, and gross. He’d have had no more penetration than the senior partner. That crispness was only an echo, a chance likeness.”

  “Echo—likeness—what of?”

  “Barney, Barney, I wish I knew! Barney, I’m always just on the point of remembering something—something very interesting and delightful, but I never can quite. Do you ever feel like that?”

  “Never. You don’t know what you want, Rose Janet, that’s what it is.”

  “Yes I do. But I know now that I’ll never meet him because he can’t exist in an age that hurries and scrambles and pushes. It’s a kind that’s died out.”

  “The clothes have, that’s all. You’re so absurdly romantic. Human nature’s just the same at any time.”

  “Is it?” exclaimed Jan with sudden savagery. “Can’t you remember when mother was not’ just the same ’ as now?”

  There was silence for a minute. Both girls had known, in their early childhood, a mother whose air of repose and gentle distinction had long since been frittered away by the swarm of small cares that crowded, cramped and jostled her and her household.

  Jan, now in bed, pursued her advantage. “Would I behave like a ‘gamine,’ or you calculate our opportunities of ‘useful’ friends, if we’d been brought up as she and Granny were?”

  But Barney was here on safer ground. “What rot! You know you’d hate to have been ‘brought up.’ I’d like to see you, of all people, putting up with any real authority!”

  “But where there is authority,” said Jan, sleepily, “there is a chance of rebellion.”

  Barney meditated throwing a pillow at her, but reserved her energies instead for jumping out of bed and putting out the light, as Jan had apparently given up all intention of doing so. She looked round with her hand on the gas bracket and had a glimpse of Jan’s face on the pillow, a laugh at some unspoken thought flashing across her lips and eyes. Barney turned off the gas, then switched it on again so hastily that it re-lit of itself, and the familiar untidy room, the half-filled suit-case on the floor, the motionless figure on the other bed, all flashed again out of the darkness that had engulfed them.

  “I’m still here,” said Jan, drowsily. “Why did you turn it on again?”

  Barney did not know. She put out the light firmly and finally and got back into bed remarking that it was a pity Donald couldn’t get out of work to-morrow in time to see Jan off. There was no sound in the darkness. She wished Jan would answer her.

  Time Was

  Chapter I

  On warm days when the air was still, Juliana Clare would walk down through the terraced gardens of Chidleigh House, through the wrought-iron gates three times her height, and into the drive of beech trees that stretched for two miles in a straight line across the park. This drive, together with most of the house and gardens, dated from the time when Henry VIII had rebuilt Chidleigh as a holiday residence for his delicate son. Juliana always walked more slowly when she entered the drive, for she liked to linger in it and think how it had looked when the young prince and his gorgeous retinue came riding down to Chidleigh between those rigidly straight lines of trees. But that was in the days of the Tudor kings. In this dull year of grace, 1779, nothing pretty and romantic ever happened.

  Presently the drive went over a bridge with low stone parapets, and Juliana always paused there to look down at the fishes in the small, clear stream below. Sometimes, especially on very hot days, she would sit for a time at the side of the drive, near to the bridge, and look up at the cool green arches overhead, for the upper branches met and formed a vaulted aisle that stretched away till nothing could be seen but greenery.

  Sometimes she would turn aside by the stream and follow it through the park till she came to the lake, and there she would lie on the stone seat that her father had had made on its shore; lie looking downwards at the dragon-flies that darted here and there above the smooth and shining water, or lie looking upwards at the many chimneys and turrets of her home. They rose from the summit of a wooded slope, and looked from the lake like the towers of a fairy city rising above the trees.

  Often Juliana carried a book or a piece of embroidery or some drawing paper or, lately, the fat manuscript book, bound in calf and fastened with brass clasps, which her mother had just given her on her seventeenth birthday.

  “If you write in it the events and industries of each day,” said Lady Chidleigh, “it will, I hope, encourage application. You are sadly idle, my love, but I think that when you are accustomed to see for yourself how you have ordered your time, you will be more careful to employ it well. It would surely shame you to write down ‘This was an empty day.’”

  Mamma always spoke so beautifully. Juliana was fired by her eloquence into a burning desire to employ profitably every moment of her time. She wrote carefully on the first page, in a delicate, pointed hand—

  Juliana Clare—Her Journal,

  February I5th, 1779,

  Chidleigh.

  Then she drew up a time-table, composed, as nearly as might be, on the rules laid down for herself by Clarissa Harlowe, the peerless heroine of Mr. Richardson’s great novel, rules that should serve as a pattern of perfection to young ladies through all the centuries.

  “February 15th : I will allot my first three morning Hours to Study in my Closet,” wrote Juliana, “and five Hours every day to my Needle, Drawings, Music, etc.”

  She debated with herself the next item of “One Hour to Visits to the Neighbouring Poor,” to give them “brief instructions and good books.” There were no neighbouring poor at Chidleigh, owing to the extent of the park, the nearest village being nearly four miles off. Nor, were they more accessible, could Juliana imagine what instructions, however brief, she could give them.

  It was true she visited Nurse’s cottage in the drive nearly every day. It stood half-way to the park gates, the only break in the drive, except for the bridge over the stream, and its bright patch of garden glowed like a many-coloured mosaic set in that endless straight expanse of green trees.

  It made a convenient reason for a walk, and Nurse was always so happy to see her, and never too busy for a chat. She was so fresh and round and rosy that she looked almost as young as her eldest daughter, Molly (now maid to Juliana), although she had been Nurse to all the present generation at Chidleigh and now had a great family of her own. Little William, the youngest, was an angel, and Jul
iana generally contrived to find some treasure to bring him in her bag, while Nurse on her side never let “little miss” depart without some flowers or their first pear or plum or strawberry, or a taste of the new jam or elderberry wine or cowslip tea that she had been making.

  But in trying to consider Nurse as a substitute for the “poor,” Juliana could not but feel guilty of a mean evasion.

  As compensation she decided she would account for moments that the peerless Clarissa had not mentioned.

  “In employing the time while Molly does my hair, by learning my Geography or History Cards—one Hour each day.”

  And to crown all and leave no possible room for subterfuge in the matter, she wrote at the end in very firm characters,

  “And I will not allow a single Hour to pass in Dreaming and Idling.”

  For the rest of February and March the journal was so closely written, and accounted for each hour of the day so minutely, that it seemed Juliana must be the most persistently occupied person on earth. She embroidered an apron, she painted flowers, she drew fanciful figures to illustrate some classic fable, she practised the harpsichord and some new songs, she studied the European rivers from Guthrie’s maps, she read French memoirs and plays with mamma, and English history to herself, and, on Sundays, Blair’s Sermons on the Government of the Heart and the Necessity of Order in Conduct. Moreover, when the dressing bell rang at three o’clock, the hour appointed for all to be put into “full dress,” she ran at once and first fetched a book of poems or the history or geography cards, and sat with them on her lap during the elaborate process of having her hair brushed, dressed and powdered. If she did not always succeed in learning much, that was because Molly was such a chatterbox, not she.

  Quite a large proportion of time had to be allotted “to the writing of my journal,” and she found also that the frugal heroine on whom she modelled herself, appointed no hours to carriage exercise, riding abroad, or excursions to friends. But there had not been so many of these since Fanny, her eldest sister, had married Mr. Daunt nearly a year ago, and gone to live in his London house in Hill Street.

  Juliana was the youngest of the family, and Fanny, who was seven years older, had always petted her and treated her with a mixture of patronage, protection and adoration, as though she were a favourite doll or her own baby. Juliana, for her part, had a deep veneration for her sister, as well as a clinging affection.

  And when at the end of March dear Fanny came to pay a visit of some weeks at Chidleigh, Juliana’s delight was too ecstatic to record her doings with the same length and precision in the new journal. Often the single entry under some date was “A happy, happy day.”

  Nor would the doings have made such an edifying record of industry as before. The sisters made up parties with their cousins Charlotte and Sophia Clare, and the numerous Miss Hilburys from the Grange and their schoolboy brothers, and rode and drove, played, sang and danced, laughed and chattered together, all day and often half the night. There was no end to the joys and surprises that Fanny provided—Fanny’s dresses, Fanny’s little presents, Fanny’s new modish maid, Fanny’s gossip of balls and the opera and witty gentlemen and pretty ladies, and a shocking affair of a duel fought by one of her acquaintance on account of a well-known beauty, a notable toast, whom Fanny had met and declared to be as lovely as an angel but with surprising bold eyes. Fanny was not herself a beauty, except in as far as a charming, unconscious air of dignity and sweetness could make her so.

  Once when Charlotte and Sophia had stayed the night, the four girls sat on the great bed in Fanny’s room and talked so late and made so much noise that in the middle of the night, well after midnight in fact, mamma herself had come along the passage and tapped on the door to bid them go to sleep. How startled they had all been—startled into complete stillness, their open mouths suddenly silent, their eyes very round and large, much like a nest of young birds gaping and staring!

  But even those delightful weeks, so long because so full of incident and variety, came to an end, and towards the end of April, Fanny went back to the town, taking Sophia with her for a visit. She wished to take Juliana, but Lady Chidleigh considered her daughter too young to make her first experience of the town without the watchful care and guidance of a mother as well as a sister, and she could not arrange to leave Chidleigh herself at present. In reality, she feared lest anyone so young and impressionable might form some “unfortunate attachment,” and had, therefore, decided that she should not go to London until she was safely married.

  On the day that Fanny and Sophia had left, Juliana pulled out her journal again from the drawer in her black japanned writing table, and sat bolt upright in a chair at the table with the great green china inkstand close in front of her, and wrote—

  “May 1st. This Morning they all drove off in the Phaeton, Coch, and Vis-a-Vis, back to the Town. My brothers ackom-pani’d them on horseback as far as Windsor.”

  Here she came to a long pause and tapped her ebony pen against her small white even teeth. She could think of no more to write, and considered that though there would now be plenty of time to write in her journal, yet there would be nothing to write about for many weeks. It would be so dull to fill up the book again with her occupations—those occupations that she now had no wish to resume. So she continued to tap her teeth and look out of the new French windows of her “closet,” a pleasant, low room, as big as many drawing-rooms of a later date. Her father, Robert Clare, the late Lord Chidleigh, had had these door windows put in in all the rooms downstairs.

  Outside, the brilliant green of the wide lawn lay bathed in sunshine, and the shadow of the great cedar made a deep purple pool in the middle of it. It was unusually warm for the beginning of May, enervatingly so.

  Juliana sighed, then yawned, then sighed again. She had a slender shape, unformed but graceful, though the proper carriage of her “back-bone” was the despair of Lady Chidleigh. Her small oval face was of the exquisite complexion that has never faced wind and weather. Her mouth drooped a little; it gave her an expression that was pensive and languid; not discontented. She had no particular features except for her eyes, which were large and lustrous, and in the language of her day would no doubt have been described as swimming. They were certainly swimming now, for they were full of tears that did not fall but remained caught on her long lashes.

  “Nothing to write about,” repeated Juliana to herself, and her mouth drooped almost piteously by now. On a sudden impulse she dipped the pen into the inkstand again and wrote, “I have felt very low ever since my dear, dear Fanny left.”

  One of the tears, as though it had been encouraged by this admission to a greater boldness, fell with a large round plop into the middle of the page.

  “Oh!” cried Juliana. It had made the ink run just at the top of the first “dear,” and though she at once unscrewed her minute sand-castor and sprinkled the page, yet even when it was dried it left a crinkled round. She consoled herself by remembering her resolve that not a soul should ever see her journal but herself.

  It was extremely warm, even in this cool room. She would take her journal out-of-doors and fill up some of the blank pages she had left for the past weeks, writing in pencil. It did not matter, since no one would ever see her journal but herself.

  She put on a wide straw hat to shield her complexion, and tied the ribbons in a bow under her chin. They were lilac, to match her lilac “nightgown,” a loose dress without any stays or hoops, for she was not yet “dressed,” and her hair was still unpowdered.

  She went out through the windows, across the lawn to the terrace, and down the steps between stone Cupids bearing bowls of growing tulips and narcissus. The scent of these latter was almost too sweet in the hot air. It was like midsummer, not spring.

  Juliana did not pause in the drive but went straight to her seat by the lake. There she lay sideways, her elbow on a cushion from the summer-house, and her journal lay closed beside her. There were already dragon-flies on the lake; they darted over
the white and gold buds of the water-lilies that had just begun to show.

  She watched the heat dance over the lake in transparent, shimmering waves. Last summer after Fanny’s wedding she had lain here hour after hour, looking at the water through half-closed eyes, in a melancholy that was sometimes quisite as pleasure, and sometimes so painful that she would weep and wish to die, since death could not be more dull and empty than life.

  When she was a child, Nurse had told her two stories over and over again. One was about Jack the Giant Killer, and the other, which she liked best because it always came in the same words, was about a woman who “sat by the fire one night, and still she sat and still she span, and still she wished for company.” And “in came a pair of big, big feet,” and then shanks and then knees and so on until there was a whole man there on the hearth beside her, and after each portion of anatomy had entered, came the refrain, “And still she sat and still she span, and still she wished for company.”

  The climax came when the woman asked the strange visitor what he had come for, and Nurse, catching Juliana up in her arms, would shout merrily, “For You!”

  The words of the foolish old tale would often drift into her idle mind as she lay by the lake, and sometimes her eyes would close altogether, not because she was asleep, but because she liked to imagine what company she might find when she opened them. A page in scarlet kneeling at her feet? A king, standing on the opposite shore of the lake, looking across the water to her? Or a cavalcade of horses and gallant gentlemen riding down the drive, emerging for one moment from the concealing trees as they crossed the bridge in the sunlight, and then enclosed by the green shade once more—and in their midst a little boy in the dress of a Tudor prince?

  Or (and this, of course, was only when she was sleepy and forgetful that she was no longer a child) might she not see water-nymphs rising from the lake, beckoning her to come with them, down, down under the water, to explore the marvels of an unknown world?