Unlike Arthur, I wanted to keep quiet about it; but Tony and my brothers had to be informed. Arthur had come to appreciate something of Tony’s character while he was staying in Cornwall, and I had told him of her love-story. He chanced to come across some lines that seemed to him an apt description of her, and wrote them out for me. These I sent her, along with my good news.
Through this dim, sorry world, where some men hold
We fight with shadows for a cause unknown,
You move serene and confident; as gay
As if Life were a festival; your ease
Deferred, and others’ pleasure all your care.
Yet they that know you best call you most dear
Not for your hundred charms, your mirth, your wit,
But for the hidden strength which these adorn,
And that unflinching temper of the soul
That in the hour of darkness has not failed.
For each of all your days, when read aright,
Is like some ancient missal’s flaming page,
Bordered with garlands, roses, fantasies,
Writ in the midst with precepts of the Law.
Her letter in reply made no reference to these lines, but ran thus: ‘Your news is no news to me, dear. I can see a church by daylight. There’s no mistaking a man in love. Arthur is one of the best men in the world, and there’s no hardship in having to wait.’
The reactions of my brothers were also characteristic. Dym had taken a liking to Arthur immediately, and was hearty in his congratulations. ‘He’s a good sort, dear—I found that out on our fishing talks at Bedford; and if he does play the fiddle, well, a man must have a fault or two.’ But Tom was too astonished to be decently polite. ‘Well, I’m blowed! Fancy our little Molly engaged to be married! It’s impossible. Nell and I can’t take it in. You say that this Arthur Hughes is a Cambridge honours man, and I have always said that if Molly ever should be married (in the remote future) it would be to a fool.’
Except for these few necessary lettres de faire part I hugged my happiness to myself. But mother and I had to celebrate somehow. Stationed at our corner opposite ‘The Cedars’ was a very old crossing-sweeper. Mother liked to watch him because he reminded her of the old man who used to sit at our corner at Canonbury and make friends with us children. As I turned out of North End Road each morning he would give an extra dash with his broom, and I would give him a smile and occasionally a penny. During the week following our great birthday Mother and I gathered together four half-crowns and wrapped them in a bit of paper. As I passed the old man on my way to the school as usual I thrust the packet into his hand with a muttered ‘special occasion’. I looked back after a yard or two and saw the old chap, with his hat raised to heaven, calling down blessings on my head. Sometimes it looks as if blessings really ‘took’. Mother had been watching from her window, and observed that the crossing was neglected for a while, and ‘The Cedars’ was one customer up, ‘but’, she added as she described it to me at dinner-time, ‘who shall blame him?’
It chanced that on the Saturday of that same week I went to spend the day in Camden Road with Mary Wood. As it was the first time we had met since our holiday at Sandsend, there was a great deal to tell that hadn’t been fully dealt with in our letters. I made her laugh about our meals in Darlington, about my cousins’ love-affairs in Cornwall, and about our rooms over the greengrocer’s shop, but Arthur I never even mentioned. She had much to tell me about our old friends at school and so on. There seemed no moment when I could break in with, ‘Oh, by the way, I’m engaged to be married’.
I blurted out my news in a letter immediately after my visit, and I don’t think she ever quite forgave me. It was some time before we had a chance to meet again, and by then her fury had blown over, and she listened to my explanation of how hard it was to talk about a thing one felt deeply.
‘Do tell me what it’s like to be in love!’ said she. ‘I have read a lot about it in novels, but you can tell me more exactly what it’s really like.’ I laughed a denial.
‘There’s one thing I can tell you at once that it is not like. There is no adoration in it. The idea that love is blind is all nonsense—it’s most clear-eyed—you know that the man is the one companion for you through life, no matter his follies or failings or crimes.’ (It is only recently that I have come across a description that would have suited my book had I known it then. Love, this modern author asserts, is a single experience in life; it is the supreme acceptance of one personality by another, without any condition or approval or other consideration whatever.) As it was, I ended lamely by telling Mary that she would know all about it when it happened to her; for how was I to express to her, or to anyone, that rush of experience that overcame me at Hell’s Mouth?
Mary went to her shelf and took down her Ovid. ‘How do you like these lines?
‘Te loquor absentem, te vox mea nominat unam,
Nulla venit sine te nox mihi, nulla dies.’
I fastened on to them at once, and printed them out (with unam changed to unum) and sent them to Arthur. Ever afterwards we used the non-committal words nulla venit as a secret pass-word at any time.
By some blessed Dispensation of the Law, as inscrutable as providence, Gray’s Inn required Arthur to dine there twice every fortnight. He used to get off on Saturday afternoon, eat one dinner, spend the night and Sunday morning at North End Road, and eat the second dinner before returning to Bedford. In order to have as long time with him as possible, I used to meet him at St. Pancras, and we would often do a picture gallery, or the like, before joining mother at tea.
Time never hung heavy between these visits. Mother was continually discovering fresh interests in the neighbourhood, and new walks into ‘almost country’. Friends and relations, mostly Cornish, were pretty frequent, and we could always have a spare room to put anyone up. The mere fact of our living ‘over a shop’ was an attraction in itself, and Mary Wood was not the only one to be disappointed at not having to ‘wade through onions to a throne’, as she expressed it. One fairly constant visitor was the oddest man I have ever met. John Lloyd, the brother-in-law of my young aunt Fanny, and therefore a quasi-uncle, was small and insignificant in every way, even in dress; and yet he was very rich. His position was that of secretary to the Pacific Steam Navigation Company, and his office was somewhere in the City. He was a bachelor, and the word must have cried out for the epithet ‘confirmed’ from his youthful days. His life was engrossed in his three hobbies. The first was his secretarial work, and I call it a hobby because he would go to his office on every Bank holiday, Good Friday, and Christmas Day. On mother’s expressing astonishment at this he said, ‘You see, I can get on so much better in the quiet, with all the young clerks out of the way.’ Another hobby was his knowledge of London. It was like throwing a bone to a dog to ask him how to get from one point to another. Out would come pencil and paper and there was a map of the best route before you knew where you were. This amused mother and me so much that I was guilty of thinking up fancy spots for him to connect. I had him gravelled once for a minute or two, dealing with the route for a poor old lady, who couldn’t afford a cab, with an invalid brother she wished to visit; she lived in Penge, and her brother in Hornsey Rise. John Lloyd’s own home, for as long as I ever heard of him, was the Euston Hotel—of course a good central position for studying the vagaries of the old town. It may well be wondered why he came out to see us in West Kensington; he always took a kindly interest in Barnholt, for whom he had found a place in his Company, and liked to have any news of him from us; but I think it was his third hobby that really drew him. He solved the acrostics in Vanity Fair (if I remember the paper aright). As soon as he had had a cup of tea, discussed the weather, and asked after Barnholt, he would begin, ‘By the way’ and draw from his pocket a cutting from a newspaper with the acrostic. I was of peculiar use to him in this direction, for my education had been superficial and I knew through my brothers a little bit of everything. Moreover, as he
pointed out, ladies’ minds aren’t rational and logical, and that’s just what one wants for an acrostic. I think he wished after he had spoken that he had refrained from stating this undeniable truth, for our mirth over it was a little too hearty.
On one of his visits we had news for him. Barnholt was coming home for a short holiday. Good luck seemed to rain on us, for a glimpse of Barnholt was quite literally a rare treat. His letters were laughably laconic. Here is one that I happen to have kept:
Dear mother, I hope you are all right. We are just making
Iquique. Give my love to little Molly. Your loving son Barnholt.
But his presence was another matter, for he was the prime favourite with each of us, and we all rallied round. Of course he was to stay at North End Road, but Dym met him at Plymouth to bring him on. Tom came from Middlesbrough for a few days, and Arthur put in a short visit before going to Wales for Christmas. Those whom we couldn’t accommodate put up at ‘The Cedars’. Barnholt was hugely tickled at the greengrocer’s shop, and greatly appreciated the variety of vegetables which our landlady served up every day as ‘surprises’ for us. One evening was specially gay, when Mr. Bourne joined us and contributed his subacid wit to the conversation. The feast itself was simple, ‘on a bottled beer footing’, but at the close mother unveiled a bottle of special sloe-gin that had come from Tony. Barnholt had been pouring forth the most exciting yarns, with the straightest face, and extreme economy of words. The sloe-gin reminded him of a man he met in an hotel in Valparaiso, who was talking very big about taste in wines. ‘I’m glad to meet you,’ said Barnholt, ‘for I happen to have in my possession three bottles of a rare liqueur, of extremely delicate flavour, too good for ordinary people, really crying out for a man like you to taste it. I obtained it (don’t ask me how) from the cellars of the King of Spain. If you like I’ll go up to my room and bring you a specimen to try.’ The man was interested, and proclaimed the pure water that Barnholt brought to him in a liqueur glass to be of the most delicate bouquet he had ever come across. He offered large money for the three bottles, or even for one, but nothing would induce Barnholt to part with them.
‘That’s right, Barney,’ was Tom’s comment, ‘a true humorist never spoils his joke by telling a man how he has been fooled.’
Barnholt was as pleased with Arthur as the others were, but told me that he thought it was all nonsense for me to go on working for a degree.
‘You see, Barney,’ said I, ‘we can’t be married for some time, and to go on working at something hard is just the best thing for me, and really it’s rather fun.’
‘Right. But don’t work too hard. Learn to knock off properly when you do knock off. Some people don’t know how to be lazy. It’s an art.’
X. My Second Post
IN spite of Barnholt’s good advice about taking things easy I found it difficult to get any time at all for relaxation during the term. Our care-free life over the greengrocer’s came to an end. Pupils poured into the school, and one or two wanted to be boarders. So a house was taken in one of the many respectable roads of West Kensington, someone was found to run it, and the two first boarders were accommodated. To make the venture pay its way mother and I were asked to live there too. Of course mother heartily consented; but how we did regret our move! The road of houses all alike, with pillared decorations of a standard pattern, was a poor exchange for our bustling corner by ‘The Cedars’. The lady superintendent was all too ladylike and refined, and from her we had to endure emotional prayers every morning. The presence of herself and the boarders deprived every mealtime of its salutary merriment, so that mother and I had to confine our folly to our walks together. And these were none too many, for in addition to the increased work at school I was making fierce attempts to get through my reading for a degree. In this matter mother was my great stand-by. She read the French and English books, and discussed them. Her pleasure in the character of Falconbridge went beyond the bounds of propriety; for she liked to quote some of the more robust bits at table, shock our presiding lady, and then add very gently that it was Shakespeare. She took a lot of trouble to ‘hear’ me the lists of names and facts and dates from Roman History that I hung over the washing-stand, but she had a hearty contempt for my troubling to learn them. ‘Why bother to know anything’ she would say, ‘when your neighbour is always able and even desirous to tell you?’ But, as I pointed out to her, they don’t encourage this method in examination-rooms.
On looking back I can’t imagine how I contrived to do all the work, without proper time for it, without any tutoring, and often without even an annotated text. I was completely beaten once by a passage in a speech of Cicero’s. Remembering the remark of some tough old teacher of Classics that one can construe through a brick wall, I steadily pinned down all the visible verbs, fitted cases and genders, and yet no sense would emerge. For over an hour one evening I set my teeth into it with a dogged obstinacy, but had to put it away in despair. At the next available hour of freedom I took a bus to the South Kensington Museum, where I knew there was a reference library. I asked the young man for an annotated text of the oration, retired to a desk, and hunted up the passage, saying to myself that the editor would probably have followed the example of most of his tribe by blandly shutting his eyes to a real difficulty while calling attention to some harmless little subjunctive in its neighbourhood. No, he had had the honesty to say, ‘This passage is so obscure that the text is obviously incomplete’. Although I couldn’t afford to buy that thrice-blessed edition, it was worth the twopenny bus-ride to be able to stake down at least one chapter that no examiner would have the heart to set.
Another thing we missed badly in our refined home was the casual dropping-in of visitors—Mr. Bourne, John Lloyd, Mary Wood, and our numerous Cornish cousins. However, I always had the fortnightly joy of seeing Arthur. Once I met him at St. Pancras in pouring rain, and wrote a description to Tony of our afternoon struggling through the streets to the National Gallery, our favourite resort. Her reply was, ‘How delightful to go to meet the man you love, especially when it’s raining and you’ve no money to spend.’
I needed these bright spots, for the work at school was robbed of its natural pleasure by the fidgets of the headmistress. The pupils were for the most part of the best type one could desire, but Miss Bennett’s standard was too high. Her ideal was ladylike efficiency combined with the rigid discipline of the North London. But she had none of the awe-inspiring attributes of Miss Buss, nor the slightest sense of humour to balance the deficiency. Her working scheme was that I should be the martinet, and she the popular dispenser of smiles. Hence if anything went wrong she blamed me. Now things are bound to go wrong sometimes, however ladylike girls may be, and however elevated their home circle. If healthy, they must be noisy sometimes in their playtime, and some of them will be sure to do an unladylike thing. A bland and solemn girl of fifteen, of Spanish blood, appeared so often with a note from her mother asking leave of absence that Miss Bennett felt she ought to call and remonstrate. To her shocked surprise it turned out that the mother knew nothing of these letters, and was hardly distressed at having to admit that they must have been all written by the girl herself. Miss Bennett comforted herself with the reflection that the people were more or less ‘foreign’.
Her religious principles and ideals of conduct were really exalted; and I think when this is the case the ideals themselves have the effect of works of supererogation, so that the holders of them can afford to do little acts of deception of which less exalted natures would be ashamed. For instance, Miss Bennett herself told me that in taking a French translation lesson she had spied a word coming that she didn’t know. So she glanced at the clock and suddenly exclaimed to the class, ‘Oh, I forgot, I have to send off a message; just go on with your work; I’ll be back in a minute.’ Whereupon she slipped into her study, looked up the word, and returned. This was retailed by her to me as a slick way of getting out of a hole.
Again, one day my classroom door was op
ened and I was requested to come outside. ‘Down in the drawing-room,’ began Miss Bennett hurriedly, ‘there’s a girl of fifteen with her mother who wants her to be prepared for matriculation. She appears to have done some Latin and Mechanics. I’ve tested her Latin, and it’s fairly good; and now I’ve said that my assistant will test her Mechanics, since it’s not my subject. So please go down at once and examine her in it.’
‘But I’m a blank on it. I haven’t touched it since I went in for matriculation myself…. I simply can’t.’
‘I am afraid I must request you to do as I say. The girl is waiting for you. I will take your class.’
I have seldom thought so hard as I did on those stairs. ‘Thought’ is not the right word, though, for all I could do was to try to recall something of my old school text-book—a small green one, by someone named Magnus. All I could visualize were some sentences in italics—Newton’s Laws of Motion. I believed there were three, but the only one that had stuck was the first. This had remained for the simple reason that I had always doubted it—for how could Newton be sure that a thing would go on for ever if you let it alone? Then a blessed reflection came upon me, that I need only ask questions, there was no need to answer them, and sauntering into the study, I said, ‘Good morning’, sat down, and began benignly:
A London Girl of the Eighties Page 18