Joking apart

Unity Square, Millport.

My dear Louise,—I am sorry that you are getting out of breath with my experiences; but just think what it must be for me to have to go through them! If I had not a better-balanced mind and a more stable temperament than yours, I should probably have been returned dead on your hands a week ago, and you would have found that far more disturbing than reading my letters.

I am writing from the University, because the Merchants’ eldest child has got measles. The higher powers are so ingenious in devising these little bits of action to brighten up the plot of one’s life! Measles is not the sort of thing I should ever have thought of for myself, but it has varied my days here to an extent that I should have supposed to be quite out of the range of a few spots.

I have had measles myself, and was therefore quite prepared to go on with my work. I was even looking forward to brightening the monotonous pallor of the children’s complexions by painting in a pink rash, but I was not allowed to. Mrs. Merchant has a warm heart, and said that it would not be safe to trifle with illness. This means that instead of everything going on as usual, as it might quite well do, every one in the house has to run up and down stairs all day—except the hospital nurse, who stands just inside the child’s door and heads the runners downstairs again.

It was suggested at first that I should go home for three weeks and then come back here, but instead of that I am staying with Mrs. Cambridge. I have forgotten why she asked me to come to her, or why I accepted. The last week has been like a dream, where one begins by salmon-fishing, and then suddenly finds oneself in a motor accident on the top of the Alps. The connecting links have faded.

Most of the Dons, or whatever their local equivalent is, live in a square round the University, which is a big building like a cross between an office and a church. I have told you that the Merchants’ house is a mixed-looking erection; the whole town is like that. The offices are half hotels, the churches suggest schools or offices, the private houses have borrowed a feature or two from dovecots, mausoleums, and even castles on the Rhine. The Town Hall has a compromising resemblance to the Stock Exchange, which, in its turn, is tricked out in what looks like pink gingham trimmings from the seaside lodging-houses. The Cambridges’ house is designed for the greatest comfort of the few, and the greatest inconvenience of the many, the many being a large staff of maid-servants. All the rooms are beautifully large and airy, the stairs narrow and steep, the bedrooms infinitely removed from the apparatus by which they are kept clean. The kitchens are so remotely buried in the bowels of the earth that, even if the smell of boiled cabbage travelled as quickly as a ray of light, it would take, probably, some weeks to reach the noses of those fortunates engaged at meals in the dining-room.

I have already described the Cambridges to you. I should like to add that I am beginning to be very fond of the beetle-like Mr. Cambridge. As for her, it is a delight to see her handle the town. I never in my life saw such skill. Her “at-home” day makes me think of one of the days of creation—about the middle of the week—when huge lizards, giant toads, and queer-faced monstrosities of all sorts were being delivered by the million at the front door of Eden, and there was no one to show them what to do next. Mr. Cambridge would have made a bad Adam. He would have looked at them through his spectacles and said: “No, really, I can’t think of a name for that fellow. Let’s try this fat old girl. Let me see—h’m, ha!”—(he gives his little old—maidish cough)—“er—Pobblyomniba Jessica perhaps——”

“May I introduce Mrs. Blot?” Mrs. Cambridge would then have said in her quiet voice, and the matter would have been settled for all time, or until the Blots died out or were replaced by a more agile species, the Trots.

On her last Thursday I pinned myself into a corner behind the heaviest mammoth of the lot—a massive woman with a hairy face, and arms like a prize-fighter’s legs. I have never recovered from my first alarm sufficiently to ask her name, but I have since gathered that she lives alone with a widowed nephew, and is at once the terror and delight of the junior staff of the University. People of strong character are not afraid of her, but the younger and less definite individuals cower before her, although her mighty hands shower sugar-plums, excellent dinner-parties, and the kindest advice upon them.

I was resting for a moment on an ottoman near the window when she sat down upon me, and looked about her through a pair of lorgnettes. Then she began to fan herself, and the motion which this gave to her body caused me such acute agony in my knees that I gave a faint scream, and, I think, moved a little. She looked round. I can’t think how she did it—but, in fact, her face came quite close to the top of my head. I could feel her breath distinctly.

“God bless me!” she exclaimed. “It’s a child! A young person! I beg your pardon most heartily, my dear child. I hope I have not injured you.”

“No, indeed, I don’t think so,” I answered when I could speak. “I shall be quite all right in a minute.”

I gave her my seat, and was beginning to feel my legs again, when she said suddenly: “Do you live here? I see you are not wearing your hat.” I explained all that I have told you, and she became very much interested. She said one especially amusing thing.

“I hope, my dear, that you don’t paint still-life?”

I said that I didn’t, because I dislike anything that sits still and looks heavy while I am working. “That’s right, that’s right,” she said, patting my hand. “Now do you see that woman over there? Dirty creature! I believe she has come out again without washing her neck. She gave an exhibition of her work the other day; it seemed to me most deplorable. There was one picture in particular which really vexed me. A glass of water (a very ugly glass too—a common bedroom tumbler), a book (shamefully dog-eared), half a melon, and a boot that a scavenger might have been ashamed to wear, unlaced, and with a great bulging hole in the toe. I more than half suspect that she got it out of her husband’s dressing-room, because that is the sort of woman she is. I was quite frank about it. ‘No, my dear,’ I said, ‘I don’t like it, and I’m not going to flatter you. Art is meant to ennoble us, and there is nothing ennobling about untidiness and sloth. If ever you see things of that sort about in your house, don’t immortalize them—burn them. We don’t want to recall such things. Don’t even give them to the poor!’”

I longed for her to go on, but a disagreeable, boasting woman came up and laid a bold hand upon my mammoth. Such a woman has no excuse for braving danger, because, whichever place she goes to, she is bound to be unpleasantly situated when she dies. But to my great surprise, nothing happened; she was not trampled upon as I expected. In fact, any fool may tamper with these immense creatures, who very rarely exercise their strength. Their real anxiety is not to break anything, and the desire of their hearts is to inspire confidence.

I have seen the other woman—a brazen serpent in my opinion—at every house to which I have been lately. She seems to be an object of superstitious veneration in the town. Whether she ever did any good or cured people who had been bitten by adversity I do not know, but now she is nothing more than a fetish. Sometimes she shows a more active vulgarity, and mixes among us as an ordinary moral bounder, a sort of “’Arry” of the Christian religion. I have seen religious “Algernons,” too, more effete and less noisy, but this woman, when she is at her worst, clothes herself in virtue as though it were a loud check suit, and wears her blameless life like a buttonhole of dahlias.

Unfortunately she happened to catch sight of my mammoth, who was swaying in a leisurely manner above the heads of the crowd, and, thrusting aside her worshippers, she plunged across the room. She was full of some pompous, trivial rubbish about a churchwarden and a stained-glass window. “Of course, the dear Bishop would never find anything objectionable in it. They were all Protestant saints that we chose. John has been most particular on that point.”

The wretched woman contrived to make a mess of the whole tea-party in about five minutes. Her brawling attracted other loiterers to the spot by the well-known dodge of the Park preacher. If you get on a chair in the Park, and in a high-pitched voice address the baby and perambulator that are nearest to you, and if you then rope in an errand boy, and two maiden ladies, and a tramp, you will soon have an audience that a prophet might be proud of. I don’t think that she stood on a chair, but I know that she began with one harmless, deaf old lady whom she caught on the hearth-rug. When she was removed by an indulgent and busy husband, she left behind her the absurd impression that we had all been edified and improved. I meet her constantly, wherever we go, and her behaviour always reminds me of a temperance lecturer explaining limelight views of a drunkard’s liver to an assembly of school children. She assumes that every one in the audience is either drunk or likely to become drunk very soon if she is not there to interfere.

The mammoth stayed to dinner that evening, and I felt that for the moment chaos was over and the earth resting. She swept us all into our places with a gentle overpoweringness, and we knew at once just where we were. The large animals nibbled their food, the small ones frisked about unharmed. If any of us wandered for a moment from the broad path of reason, the mammoth drove the offender back again into his place with irresistible common sense and kindness. Mr. Cambridge teased her because she goes to lectures.

“My dear professor,” she said, “I like to improve my mind. I was never educated as a girl, and I like to know what is going on. You young people know so much that I have never heard of. I should be sorry to go into another world having missed so much of what is to be seen in this one. The clergy are all very well: they mean excellently—I am a Churchwoman myself—but it seems to me that they spend too much time in laying plans for what can only be a visionary future, before they have mastered the wonders of our actual past and present. How can they fit their immortal souls for what is to come when they know so little of what has gone before? Their ignorance is lamentable, if you consider that their object in life is to adapt us for association with beings of the highest intelligence.”

I said at dinner how much I disliked the woman whom I had met that afternoon, and when they understood from my description who she was, they all had so much to say that I disentangled the facts with great difficulty. I now understand that she has declared herself a sort of Queen of Morality in the town, and that her following consists of those who will believe anything that any one says so long as it is said loud enough and often enough.

This is a queer, self-conscious place. The people who inhabit it are neither living in a state of natural warfare, nor is there any domestic harmony between the species. They walk in the glaring publicity of a small community, and each says to the other, “I am I. Who are you? Well, that won’t do at all; you must be somebody quite different, or I shan’t like you.” Mrs. Cambridge has something of the contemptuous nonchalance of a Persian cat, which is always sufficient unto itself, and would rather, almost, that the common herd were not cats, because their inclusion in her tribe would lower its exclusiveness. But my dear mammoth can never look on while a bird flies, or a mole burrows, or a squirrel leaps from bough to bough, but she must exclaim, “Bless my soul! What a splendid idea! I must learn to step more lightly, and to know more of the wonders of the underworld.”

The city wives and the wives of the University may not see eye to eye, but they both have their value, and people like the mammoth (for there are others like her) provide a medium of common sense in which these two very different elements may combine for the benefit of what my chemist calls the “pill-swallowing public.”

“Then, my dear, you ought to,” says the mammoth (so Mrs. Cambridge tells me), when some satin-coated Ichthyosaurus, spangled with diamonds, boasts that she has not made the acquaintance of a certain little spoon-backed mouse with spectacles and a family. “She would do you a world of good. If you had to educate your own dear children as she has, you would have no idea how to set about it. And as for myself, I should be quite helpless without my chef. I could never learn to prepare a dinner equal to the one that she and her little maid cooked for me last week. Quite admirable, I assure you, and I am a greedy woman.”

But last night she spoke with equal frankness on the other side. “You mustn’t misunderstand dear Sarah Plummins,” I heard her say to Mrs. Cambridge; “her kindness is beyond all description. She would give the clothes off her back—yes, I know what you are going to say, and it is very witty, and you shall not say it—she would give the clothes off her back to help a friend or an enemy, and say nothing about it. Her abrupt manner is just shyness. You see, I am shy myself, and I know how awkward it is to be thrown among people with ideas to which we are not used. But I don’t mind your chaff, and I tell Sarah that she is to come and see your lovely collections, and take Mr. Cambridge out in her motor. It will do them both good.”

I went to tea with Mrs. Merchant yesterday, just to see how the child was, and I asked her whether she knew the mammoth. She said that she had always been a little afraid of her. “Tom likes her,” she said, speaking of her husband, “but she overpowers me sometimes.” I said that she was like an oak among shrubs, and the literal creature reminded me that a moment ago I had called her a mammoth. Which did I mean? Mammoths were not a bit like oaks. I was cross, and replied, “Yes, they were, because they both had trunks,” and she went shrieking off to “Tom” in his smoking-room, and said that I had made such a good joke, fit for Punch. I came back here before they had reached the inevitable sequel of a mammoth in a tight boot being like an oak because it is sure to have a-corn. By the way, I also mentioned the brazen serpent to Mrs. Merchant, who rose at once to my bait.

“Oh, I am so glad you have come across her,” she exclaimed, “she is such a delightful woman!”

“Whom does she delight?” I asked, determined to get at the bottom of this legend. “Not the police, I’ll be bound, for she takes the bread out of their mouths.”

“Oh, what nonsense,” said Mrs. Merchant. “Has she been scolding you? I expect you deserved it.”

“Who first started the idea that she was anything in particular?” I asked. “Did she tell you she was in the confidence of the angels?—and, if so, can she produce any evidence of such favouritism?”

I could get nothing more definite than the same vague rumours of her merit repeated again and again. It is evidently just as I thought. The idea has got about that she does a lot of good. I am inclined to put an advertisement in the local papers:

I believe that the mammoth would provide funds for a commission to investigate the whole matter, if she were persuaded that it were for the good of the town. Most probably, though, she would do nothing of the sort. She would say that we all stand in need of improvement, and that a borrowed twopenny dip strapped to the back of a blind weasel may be tiresome and even dangerous in society, but it all helps to keep up the idea that there is a good fire burning somewhere. I can imagine her saying it with perfect conviction.

Yours ever,

Georgina.