A Mixture of Frailties tst-3

by Robertson Davies

  They were standing in the lane which traversed Cwm Bau, and at this moment Ceinwen rounded the corner, leading an aged donkey, across whose back two large willow-work panniers were fixed.

  “We’ve been admiring the holly, as only North Americans can,” said Ripon.

  “Good,” said Ceinwen; “then you can come with me and gather a lot of it. I thought I might catch you, so I brought plenty of gloves and two broom-hooks. I know where we can get mistletoe, too.”

  It was idyllic to gather holly and mistletoe with Ceinwen, to take it back to Neuadd Goch and hang it in festoons on the staircase, to put sprigs of mistletoe in places where, Griffith Hopkin-Griffiths assured them, mistletoe had been hung for as long as anyone could remember.

  Neuadd Goch was not an uncommonly old house, though it stood where two very old houses had preceded it. The older, which had been built before the Welsh Tudors had sought their fortune in England, had been supplanted by a Jacobean house which, after a fire in the first decade of the nineteenth century, had been replaced by the present building. It was not the sort of house which attracts the attention of connoisseurs, for it had no special architectural distinction; but it was wonderfully pleasing and comfortable. Its park and its gardens were pretty, but not remarkable. It was not large enough to be a mansion, but it was quite large enough to hold its owners, their servants, and ten or twelve guests without crowding. It was fully and admirably what its name said—it was the Red Hall at Llanavon, modestly appropriate.

  Whether it took its character from its owners, or whether they became like it, nobody could say. Mr Hopkin-Griffiths certainly was as red as his own house. His face was brick red, round, and wore a look of surprise allied to firmness; his hair was of a red which had faded from its original foxy shade to a browner tone. His hands were red and covered at the joints with red hair. As with so many of his race, a few red hairs grew capriciously out of the tip of his nose. He gave an impression of bluntness in his speech and manner, but those who knew him were not deceived; he came of a family which had foreseen the time for getting out of goats and going into sheep, in the fifteenth century; had dropped sheep for cattle in the eighteenth; and had added timber to cattle in the nineteenth. His neighbours respected Mr Griffith Hopkin-Griffiths as a smooth man.

  Dolly, his wife, was a charming, walking monument to her own beauty as it had been thirty years ago; she had not changed her way of dressing her hair, and though she had yielded a little in matters of clothing she still looked more like the ‘twenties than the ‘fifties. She even made up according to the methods she had perfected in her youth, and it was a credit to the good qualities of her face that the effect was not grotesque. Seen at a distance, by a short-sighted man, she was a pretty, frivolous ghost from the period immediately following the First World War; seen closer, there was about her the pathos of the woman who has not quite grown as old as her years, either in body or mind.

  She came upon them as they were hanging the last of the Christmas greens.

  “Mistletoe!” she cried. “Oh, what fun! You’ll be absolutely worn out with gallantry, Mr Ripon. Oh, I do so hope Gilly can come. Don’t you, Ceinwen? Yes, I’m sure you do! It’ll be no sort of Christmas without at least two young men.”

  Monica and Ripon were by now very familiar with this hope that Gilly, her son, would be able to get away from his work in London to join them at Christmas. By many broad hints Mrs Hopkin-Griffiths implied that Ceinwen must be especially anxious for his presence; Monica and Ripon were happy enough to fall in with this notion on the part of their hostess. The young are usually, out of sheer good nature, ready to indulge the sometimes clumsy romantic ideas of their elders.

  If it was idyllic to hang the Christmas greens, it was Dickensian to drive the twelve miles to Trallwm and buy Christmas gifts. The rule at Neuadd Goch was that gifts exchanged among guests and family must not cost more than a shilling. It was on Christmas Eve that they made the journey, Monica, Ripon and Ceinwen in the Squire’s serviceable Humber.

  “The sheer bliss of this robs me of speech,” said Ripon. “Here we go, on Christmas Eve—get that, Christmas Eve—to buy Christmas presents. If I were at home, I would have finished my Christmas shopping a full two weeks ago; I would have wrapped everything in elaborate paper, and tied it with expensive plastic twine. I would approach the great festal day prepared for everything but a good time. But here I go, prepared to squander ten shillings at the utmost on the very eve of the day of giving; for the first time in my life I have got Christmas into focus. Tomorrow I shall worship, I shall feast and, quite incidentally, I shall give and receive. And that’s how it ought to be. It’s Dickensian. It’s Washington Irving-like. It’s the way Christmas ought to be.”

  They spent all day making their purchases, for the shilling rule had been made in a time when a shilling bought a bigger variety of possible gifts than it does now. But Ripon persuaded a bookseller and stationer to let him rummage among some old stock, and produced a wonderful variety of paper transfers, Victorian post-cards, and works of edification which had once been sold as Sabbath School prizes. And in an outfitter’s he got a dicky for ninepence, and an almost forgotten oddity—a washable “leather” collar—which he said would be just the thing for Mr Hopkin-Griffiths. Monica, who did not want to be outdone, turned up some cards of pretty old-fashioned buttons in a woolshop and, after much pondering, bought another copy of Welsh in a Week to give to Ripon, who had been mercilessly teased by their hosts and Ceinwen about his earlier adventures with that work. At mid-day Ripon took the two girls to lunch at The Bear, where they ate fat mutton with two veg. following it with prunes doused with a custard of chemical composition, and some surly cheese. But even this did not crush their spirits.

  Driving back to Llanavon, Monica and Ripon agreed that it had been one of the happiest days they had ever known. Their protestations of pleasure made Ceinwen shy at first, then effusive, and the drive ended in an atmosphere which a cruel observer might have described as maudlin, but which was in truth full of genuine, warm, though possibly facile feeling.

  They rushed into the house in time for tea, hungry from the asperities of The Bear, and hungry too as only emotion can make one. Mrs Hopkin-Griffiths scampered out of the drawing-room to meet them.

  “Oh darlings, it’s too, too wonderful. He’s been able to come! I never quite dared to hope but he’s here. Gilly’s come! It’s going to be a perfect Christmas!”

  Swept forward by her excitement they burst into the room. There, before the fire, stood Giles Revelstoke.

  11

  That night, having made herself ready for bed; Monica went to the bathroom to clean her teeth, a maiden; in slightly less than fifteen minutes she returned to her room, her teeth clean, and a maiden no more.

  There was only one bathroom at Neuadd Goch. It had formerly been a bedroom, and was a chamber of considerable size, in a corner of which was a very large and deep bath, encased in mahogany and standing on a dais; there was also a large and ornate marble basin, a full-length cheval-glass with candle-brackets, an armchair and a side chair, and a set of scales upon which it was possible to weigh oneself by sitting on a large, padded seat. There was a couch of the type familiar in the best-known picture of Madame Recamier, with one arm and a partial back. The two large windows were richly curtained to the floor. This splendid chamber was for ablutions only; the water closet was housed in mahogany splendour in a smaller room nearby: it had a bowl in the agreeable Willow pattern.

  If Monica had not been a North American her fate might have been very different; in each bedroom was a washstand, with ewer and basin, and night and morning a copper pitcher of boiling water. But she had been accustomed all her life to clean her teeth in running water, and so she went to the bathroom in her dressing-gown, her toothbrush and a tube of paste in her hand. She would only be a minute, thought she, so she pushed the door around, but did not bolt it. It was not quite closed, and less than a minute later Giles Revelstoke, towel in hand and in his dressin
g-gown, pushed it open.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” said he.

  And then, because Monica looked so attractive with her hair brushed out, and her mouth foaming slightly with pink dentifrice, and because the lamplight in the bathroom was so charming, and because the couch was so conveniently at hand, and probably also because it was Christmas—because of so many elements so subtly combined, Monica returned to her bedroom in just under a quarter of an hour, much astonished and even more delighted.

  As always when something important had happened, she wanted a time of quiet in which to think about it. But that was not to be hers just yet. As she was opening her door, a figure hastened to her side out of the darkness of the stairs. It was Ripon.

  “Want to talk to you for a minute,” said he, and hurried into the room after her.

  Monica’s bedroom was large, and as the electricity at Neuadd Goch—a private system—operated only on the ground floor, it was lit with a large oil lamp by the bed. She and Ripon were in a rich gloom, but it was plain that he was excited.

  “You get into bed and keep warm,” he said. “I’ll sit here. Listen; Ripon the sleuth has done it again! I just got the lowdown on this whole situation from Ceinwen; she’s a bit put out that this chap Revelstoke has turned up—she was hoping against hope that he wouldn’t, and Mrs H.-G. was aching that he should. We’ve been misled by Mrs H.-G.; Ceinwen does not look on this Giles as Prince Charming. And do you know why? It’s a fantastic deal among the older generation. Ceinwen is to marry Revelstoke: Mrs H.-G. wants it because she is keen for him to settle down, live a quiet life in the country, and be a good boy. It appears that he isn’t a very good boy in London. She’s got quite a bit of money, you see, left her by her first husband, who was a stock-broker, of all things. And the Squire wants the marriage because he will then leave this house and estate to Ceinwen, on condition that they change their name from Revelstoke to Hopkin-Griffiths, thus continuing the name at Neuadd Goch. And Ceinwen’s father, Professor Griffiths, wants it because he wants her to have Neuadd Goch, which he thinks ought to be in his part of the family anyhow, and the marriage will make him retroactively county gentry, instead of just a well-known scholar. Did you ever hear anything like it?”

  “No,” said Monica. “But surely it all depends on what Ceinwen and Giles want?” It was fortunate that it was dark in the room for it was the first time she had ever called him Giles, and she blushed deeply.

  “Ah, that’s what you’d think, and what I’d think, but it’s not what these people think. And that’s what makes it fascinating. It’s like finding oneself in a Victorian novel. I’ve got to re-adjust all my thinking about the set-up here. You see, I had it all worked out on the Hamlet-theme; I asked myself why Mrs H.-G. was so wild to have her son come home, when there seemed to be so much doubt about it. I mean, nobody ever said he couldn’t come; they just said he mightn’t. Well—it was plain as a pike-staff. Revelstoke was a Hamlet-figure, unconsciously jealous of the Squire, identifying himself strongly with the late Revelstoke, and bitter against his Ma. It sees itself, doesn’t it? I was crazy for him to come home, because I’ve never had a chance to observe a man in the Hamlet-situation at close quarters. But how wrong I was!”

  “You certainly do see life in terms of literature, Johnny.”

  “Well—just look at the fun I have! But now, you see, I’m bang in the middle of one of those terrific novels about Who Gets the Dibs; the next thing to be decided is—are we in a Jane Austen situation, or a Trollope situation?”

  “Does it have to be one or the other?”

  “But you can’t call it a modern situation?”

  “Well, it’s happening now, isn’t it?”

  “Only in a very limited sense. There are whole climates of thought and feeling which aren’t really modern; I can’t see a situation where two people are being pushed toward marriage in order to save family name, and family pride, as modern.”

  “Go on; I bet it happens all the time.”

  “You’re just being feminine and perverse. Anyhow, you said you felt in terms of music; I feel in terms of literature.”

  “All right, then; where do we fit into the plot?”

  “Frankly, I don’t see that you come into it at all, except as a fringe figure—Nice Girl for Christmas Purposes. But for myself—well, I don’t mind telling you that I go for Ceinwen in quite a big way.”

  “So soon?”

  “Don’t be naive. I have the feelings of a poet. There’s a remarkable quality about her, don’t you think? Sort of figure in a poem by Yeats? Or really more like one of those wonderful women in the poems of Dafydd ap Gwylim. You know that Welsh verse she recited to us the first day, when we were in Cwm Bau? That was Dafydd ap Gwylim. I asked her, and then I read up on him in the encyclopaedia. Wonderful, warm, infinitely fascinating women, full of passion yet teasingly chaste.”

  “Johnny, you’ve got a really bad case.”

  “It’s not anything that can be described as a case. Here she is, being sacrificed to ideas which don’t really come into her climate of thought and feeling at all; she’s in the wrong book. The thing is, can I get her into the right book?”

  “Johnny, I want to go to sleep. And if anybody hears you talking at the top of your voice in my room, you won’t get Ceinwen into any book at all. You go to bed now.”

  Monica leapt out of bed and fetched a small parcel from her chest of drawers.

  “Just so you won’t think I’m unsympathetic, here’s your Christmas present now. Don’t open it until morning. It’s something that will be useful to you in getting Ceinwen back into the right book.”

  She pushed him out of the door, bearing her gift, which was, of course, another copy of Welsh in a Week.

  Rid of Ripon, she was able to attend to her own affairs, and her first act was to fetch the lamp, and set it on the floor beside the full-length mirror which formed part of the front of the large wardrobe. Then, chilly as it was, she took off her nightdress and studied herself in the mirror with satisfaction.

  By the laws of literature which meant so much to Ripon, her first experience of sex should have been painful, dispiriting and frightening. But it had been none of these things. She had been too confused and surprised to take great heed of the physical side of the encounter; it had all been so strange—the nearness, the intimacy of the posture, the inevitable and natural quality of the act itself; though new to her, it did not seem utterly unaccustomed, but rather like something dimly but pleasurably remembered from the past—and this in itself was strange. What had moved her more than these things were the endearments which Revelstoke had whispered, and the kindness and gentleness with which he had carried out his purpose. Nobody had ever spoken to her in such a fashion before. She had been kissed once or twice in a very tentative way, but that was nothing; this had touched the tender places of her spirit, caressed and stirred them, bringing her a fresh consciousness of life. And again this was not utterly strange, but like the resumption of something once cherished, and lost for a time.

  She should feel evil, depraved—she knew it. But, miraculously, at this moment when she should have stood in awe of her mother, and Pastor Beamis and the whole moral code of the Thirteeners, she felt, on the contrary, free of them, above and beyond them as though reunited with something which they sought to deny her. She knew something which they could never have known, or they would not have talked as they did. If Ripon had known about it, he would have said that she had moved into a new climate of feeling.

  Gazing at her naked body in the mirror she stretched, and preened, and looked at herself with an intent and burning gaze. She was, by the standards of her upbringing, a ruined girl, and she had never looked better or felt happier in her life.

  She slipped again into the nightdress, blew out the lamp and jumped into bed. Almost at once she was asleep. But not before a new and warming Christmas satisfaction rose from the deeps of her mind: What a smack in the eye for Persis Kinwellmarshe!

  12


  Did the morrow bring remorse? It did not. When Monica ran into the dining-room the squire told her that she looked fit as a fiddle, and gave her a smacking Christmas kiss. Ripon followed his example; he was a literary kisser and presumably his salute had some inner significance which was not to be apprehended by the unlettered. When Ceinwen entered a moment later, and was kissed by her uncle, Ripon did not have quite the courage to go on, and shook her warmly by the hand. But Monica had still to be kissed by Revelstoke, and he saluted her in a friendly fashion which could not have aroused suspicion in the most observant mother; it was precisely the sort of kiss, which, a moment later, he gave Ceinwen. Monica was inwardly amused; nobody knew what she knew!

  “Gilly, there’s the most awful thing happened,” said Mrs Hopkin-Griffiths to her son. “Mr Mathias has sent up a message that Mr Gwatkin is too ill to play at the service this morning. Rheumatism, poor old thing—real arthritis; he hasn’t really been able to do anything with the pedals for years, and now it’s in his hands so badly he simply can’t manage. Will you be a dear and play for Morning Prayer?”

  “But mother, I’m not an organist.”

  “But dear, you’ll be quite good enough. Everybody knows you can play anything. Why, when you were just a lad, I remember how you did wonders with a coach-horn after only an hour or two. It’s a very small organ.”

  “I know, and it’s a very out-of-tune organ too, I’m sure. I’d rather not.”