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‘Now Mercy was of a fair countenance

and therefore the more alluring.’

THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS

‘I described myself as a spinster without encumbrances. I don’t know quite what I meant by it, but I thought it sounded well.’

Kirsty Gilmour stood in the window in the spring sunshine, arranging daffodils in a wide bowl, and laughed.

Blanche Cunningham, lying back comfortably in a large armchair, looked at her friend appraisingly.

‘How old are you, Kirsty?’ she asked lazily, choosing with care a chocolate from an opulent-looking box that lay on her knee.

‘I’m thirty,’ said Kirsty, ‘but you shouldn’t make me say it out loud like that.’

‘How would you like to be forty, my dear?—that’s what I’ll be on my next birthday. But you don’t look thirty, child. You can stand in that glare of revealing sun and work with spring flowers and fear nothing. You’re rather like a daffodil yourself, now that I come to think of it, with that green frock and cloud of pale yellow hair—your eyes are green too. Did you know that?’

‘Of course,’ said Kirsty, attempting to make a weak-kneed daffodil stand upright, ‘that’s why I’m so fond of jade.... Now, isn’t that pretty? They look as if they were growing in the moss. I like best the small single daffodils that grow almost wild, they have such an eager look.’

‘Very pretty,’ Mrs. Cunningham said, glancing carelessly at the bowl of flowers. ‘But, Kirsty, it’s absurd that you should be a spinster. How have you managed it?’

‘I wonder! Blanche, you married so young that, as I’ve often told you, you’ve acquired the male attitude of mind. No man ever allows himself to believe that a woman is single from choice, and, in your heart, neither do you.’

‘Pouf!’ Mrs. Cunningham waved the imputation aside and searched diligently in the chocolate-box. ‘I’m afraid I’m making a dreadful mess of your chocolates. I’m looking for a hard one, and I’ve squashed all the soft ones pinching them.... You forget, my dear, when you accuse me of unbelief that I was on the spot and saw at least two aspirants to your hand—at Cannes, you remember? There was the hidalgo from the Tyne (I’ve forgotten his name), just baroneted, with all his blushing honours thick upon him. How red the back of his neck was! And there ...’

‘Blanche,’ Kirsty was smiling, but there was a note of appeal in her voice. ‘Need you talk about ugly things the first real day of spring? I’ve had no luck in suitors—let us leave it at that.... You really aren’t behaving very nicely. I’ve looked forward so to your visit, and, instead of giving me a week as you promised, you are only staying a miserable few hours—you arrived at luncheon-time and you say you must leave by the early train to-morrow morning. I’ve so much to tell you and to show you, and you don’t seem interested ... it’s very disappointing.’

Blanche Cunningham sprang up impulsively, upsetting the box of chocolates in her haste, and attempted to grab Kirsty, and the bowl of flowers she was carrying, in her arms. ‘But I am interested, Kirsty dear,’ she cried; ‘I’m dying to see every corner of this delectable place. How did you find it? Little Phantasy. I love the name.’

‘Just see what you’ve made me do!’ said Kirsty, carrying the flowers to a place of safety, and proceeding to mop up the water spilt on the floor with her handkerchief. Then she sat down on the arm of her friend’s chair and tried to dry her wet fingers with her wet handkerchief.

‘It was the name that fascinated me,’ she said. ‘As soon as I read the advertisement I knew I simply must live here. But I’ll tell you about that later.—To begin just where we are, do you approve of this room?’

She looked proudly round the gay white room with its wide windows of small-paned glass, and before her friend could reply, went on: ‘You don’t think the chintzes too bright, do you? I like a lot of colour in a country room, and I thought the white-panelled walls could stand the tulips and the parrots. Isn’t it luck that there should be such a good oak floor when we have so many rugs? I collected them for years all over the place, hoping that some day I might find a use for them. That Bokhara one is my special find. When I showed it to Mrs. Paynter—you remember the delightful American lady?—she took it in her arms and hugged it and said, “I don’t care how much you paid for this, it couldn’t be too much.” ’

Blanche laughed. ‘Yes, but I like best the big one in the middle. It makes me think of a meadow of bright flowers.... But it’s all charming: the dark old mahogany, and the white walls, and the bright chintzes, and the gentle colours of the rugs. Somehow I’m surprised. I never seem to have thought of you as a homemaker.’

Kirsty shook her head rather mournfully.

‘You see,’ she said, ‘it’s the very first home I’ve ever had, though I am thirty.’

Blanche was silent, remembering the Kirsty she had first known, a rather listless girl, dragged from one smart hotel to another by a valetudinarian but sprightly stepmother. Change had been the breath of life to Lady Gilmour. Plaintively seeking health, she had moved from one to another Pool of Bethesda, where in very truth she ‘troubled the waters.’

Thinking of Lady Gilmour, Blanche was conscious again of the hot wave of dislike that had so often engulfed her when she had come in contact with that lady in life. She remembered the baby-blue eyes, the appealing ways, the smooth sweet voice that could say such cruel things, the too red lips, the faint scent of violets that had clung to all her possessions, the carefully thought-out details of all she wore, her endless insistent care for herself and her own comfort, her absolute carelessness as to the feelings of others. Blanche told herself that she had done more than dislike Lady Gilmour, she had almost hated the woman—chiefly on Kirsty’s account.

She had first met Kirsty and her stepmother ten years before at an hotel in Mentone where she was recruiting after an illness in India. She had been interested at once in both of them, the pretty fragile mother and the young daughter with the cloud of pale gold hair and grave green eyes. They made a charming picture, she thought, but they were so constantly surrounded by a crowd of admirers, both male and female, that it was some time before an opportunity came to speak to the girl. When it came she found her shy and, for such an attractive creature, oddly grateful for attention and responsive to kindness. When she heard that Mrs. Cunningham was Scots she cried, ‘But so am I, through and through. Kirsty Gilmour—that sounds Scots enough, doesn’t it?’

‘And you live in Scotland?’ she had asked.

‘No. You see my stepmother hates Scotland. It makes her ill, she says: so draughty and cold. We seem to go everywhere but to Scotland. D’you know, I haven’t been home—to Scotland, I mean—since I was eight. Not since my father died.’

Blanche had laughed at the woeful droop of the girl’s soft mouth and said, ‘What part of Scotland do you belong to? The Borders? Ah well, you must see that you marry a Scotsman and make your home there.’

Later on she had been introduced to Lady Gilmour, and had found her sweet and friendly and quite intolerable. For the sake of seeing something of Kirsty she had tried to dissemble her dislike and make one of the admiring crowd that murmured at intervals, ‘Dear Lady Gilmour, so frail, so touching’; but at all times Blanche dissembled with difficulty, and Lady Gilmour had herself seemed to feel the antagonism and return it with interest. She had done her best to wean Kirsty from her new friend, but Kirsty was staunch, and she and Blanche had corresponded regularly and met at intervals all through the ten years.

Lady Gilmour had been dead about six months, and Kirsty had come, like a homing bird, to the Borders.

‘Kirsty,’ Blanche laid her hand on her friend’s arm. ‘However did you stand it all those years? What an intolerable woman she was!’

Kirsty sat looking in front of her.

‘She’s dead,’ was all she said.

‘Well,’ Mrs. Cunningham retorted briskly, ‘being dead doesn’t make people any nicer, does it?’

‘No—but it makes them so harmless and unresentful.’

‘As to that, Lady Gilmour wouldn’t be harmless if she could help it, you may be sure of that. I never met a woman with such a genius for mischief-making.... You were a model of discretion, my dear, the most dutiful of stepdaughters, but you aren’t naturally stupid—you must have seen.’

Kirsty looked out to the wild garden where the daffodils danced in the April sun. All the light had gone out of her face, the very gold of her hair seemed dulled. She was again the listless girl who had followed apathetically in the train of her egotistical stepmother.

When she spoke her voice too had changed: it dragged tonelessly. ‘Oh, don’t you see? If I had ever even to myself put it into words, I couldn’t have stood it another day. I never let myself say to myself how I hated it, I just went on—dreary day after dreary day. And after all, Marmee was all I had, she needed me, and perhaps she did care for me a little in her own way, though she couldn’t help always stinging me like a gadfly. I’ve been thinking since that my misery was greatly my own fault. If I had been a different kind of girl I might have enjoyed the life very well. To many it would have been rapture to go from one gay place to another, to have their fill of pretty dresses and dancing and tennis, and no domestic cares or duties. But to me it was anathema. The fact is, I was born out of due season. I should have lived in mid-Victorian days.’

Kirsty stopped to laugh at herself, and Blanche said:

‘Yes, I know what you mean. You would have enjoyed what somebody calls “the comfortable commonplaces, the small crises, the recurrent sentimentalities of domestic life.” ...’

Kirsty nodded. ‘I would indeed. I would have rejoiced in nurseries of bashful babies, brothers and sisters, warm family affection. But I was set solitary in the world with no mother and a very busy father. I suppose, poor innocent, he thought he was doing his best for me when he married again; and when I was eight he died.... My stepmother didn’t care for children, and I stayed at school until I was seventeen. Then she sent for me, and took me about with her everywhere, made me call her “Marmee,” and liked people to say that we looked like sisters. She loved hotel life, and I loathed it from the first—the publicity, the abiding smell of rich food and cigars, the rooms with their expensive furniture and utter lack of homelikeness or individuality; the people who sat about fatly in fat armchairs, the way they gloated over their food, their endless efforts to keep themselves entertained.’

Blanche nodded comprehendingly, and Kirsty went on:

‘It wasn’t only the hotels I loathed—indeed I might have enjoyed them if they had only been an interlude in a life filled with other things. But it was the way we behaved in hotels. I don’t know what my father did to be given a knighthood, but whatever it was, I wish he hadn’t. It complicated matters so. A title—even a very little one—has a wonderful attraction for certain people, and those people swarmed round Marmee like wasps round a honey-pot. I remember one idiot saying to me, “How gracious dear Lady Gilmour is”—and poor Marmee lapped it all up like a hungry cat.’

Blanche cracked a hard chocolate with her strong white teeth, and ‘I can see her,’ she said.

‘And we were such snobs ourselves,’ Kirsty went on. ‘We always pursued the worth-while people—Marmee had a wonderful keen eye for “the best people”—and very often we were snubbed for our pains. It served us right, of course, but it was pretty ghastly. Happily we never stayed long in one place. Nearly always we quarrelled with some one, and Marmee lost taste for her new friends and left.’

‘Yes,’ Blanche said, ‘she was like the lady in one of “Elizabeth’s” books whose new friends liked her, and who had no old friends.’

‘Poor Marmee,’ said Kirsty.

‘No, don’t pity her. She was the most accomplished egoist I ever came across.... But you were greatly to blame, Kirsty. Why were you so weak? Surely you had the right to live your own life. Why didn’t you break away?’

‘Well, you see’—Kirsty looked at her friend deprecatingly—‘after I was twenty-one most of the money was mine, and I couldn’t very well—I mean to say it would have crippled her a lot, and she liked to do things well, and——Oh, I know I sound frightfully feeble, but I can’t help it. I simply hate to hurt people’s feelings or make them feel uncomfortable. It’s the way I’m made.... I did try once to break away as you call it. It was the second year of the War, and I suddenly felt that I simply could not go on doing nothing but knit socks and make shirts and give subscriptions. I went off, after a wild scene, to work in a hospital. I hadn’t well begun when I was sent for. Marmee had had a heart attack, and the doctor—a new one—blamed me severely for having left her. Oh, it was no good, Blanche. I was bound. She wove a web round me.’

Blanche moved impatiently. ‘Heart attacks wouldn’t have bound me,’ she said.

‘The War years,’ Kirsty went on, ‘were the worst. We had no one even to be anxious about. I envied—yes, I did—the haggard-eyed women devouring the newspapers. It is awful to be left out of everything.... And having borne no part in the War, we had the impertinence to be among the first who went to look at the battlefields. Marmee liked to say she had done things before the herd rushed in, so we motored from Paris by Amiens, through the Somme country to Arras. She was soon bored—there was so pitifully little to see. “Shocking,” she said, as we saw shattered towns and villages, blasted trees, miles of mud. You see, it was nothing to us. We weren’t reconstructing it all in our minds—we weren’t saying to ourselves, “So it must have looked when he saw it.” “Here perhaps he stood.” ... On the road from Albert to Arras our chauffeur stopped at a hillock near the roadside. This, he told us, was the famous Butte de Warlencourt which men had died by thousands to take and hold. I got out and walked across to the hillock. It was an April day, with blinks of sun between wild beating showers of rain. My feet sank in the mud—Somme mud, how often I had read of it! There were tin hats and long trench boots lying about, and here and there stood a frail wooden cross. Every inch of the ground had been black with the blood of our men—I could hardly put one foot before another as I thought of what each step must have meant to them as they struggled up against pitiless fire. On the summit there were three tall crosses—like Calvary.... A party of four, two women and two men, had got out of a car and were walking over the ground near me. The men evidently knew the place of old, and one said to the other in tones almost of awe, “D’you see? There are cowslips growing in the shell-holes.” The women were in mourning—a mother and daughter I thought, very pale and quiet. One of the men turned to them and said softly, “It was about here,” and they stood still, their hands clasped as if praying. I crept back to the car and Marmee.... Oh, it’s wretched of me sitting here, talking like this, making myself out a creature of fine feelings, and blaming a woman who can’t answer back. I daresay I must often have irritated her when I felt superior and showed it. If I had known she was going to die I would have been so much nicer.’

‘You were amazingly patient.’

‘Perhaps I seemed so, but I often wasn’t. There is one thing that comforts me, though, when I think of her. In her last illness she was surrounded by admiration and affection, and she knew it. She was only ill for a few days—really ill, I mean, for she was always delicate—and I think she knew it was the end, and the odd thing was she didn’t think about herself—she thought of others, she thought of me. I was so touched. And the nurse told me with tears in her eyes that she had never nursed a more delightful patient, and that evening when she slept peacefully away the doctor said, and his voice sounded really moved: “A very sweet woman.” I was so thankful to hear them speak so.’

‘And thankful that the illness was a short one,’ said Blanche dryly, ‘so that they could speak so. Ah, forgive me, Kirsty; I sound a brute, I know, but you are such an incurable sentimentalist. You find everything and everybody “touching.” You spend your time wrapping up ugly facts in pink chiffon: you see life like a picture on a chocolate-box. Yes, I know I’m being horribly rude, but who is to tell you home-truths if not an old friend?’

Kirsty walked to the fireplace and bent over the log basket to replenish the fire.

Presently she said, lifting a flushed face to her friend:

‘I don’t mind home-truths, and I daresay I am sentimental, but please try to forget what I said about Marmee. All that part is finished with. Now I can make what I will of my life. And I mean to make just as many people happy as I possibly can.’ She stopped, glanced at Blanche, and added, ‘Now I mean to live for others.’

At this announcement Blanche sat bolt upright.

‘My dear,’ she said in a shocked voice, ‘I’m afraid Lady Gilmour has done more than spoil your youth. I’m afraid she has destroyed your sense of humour. Live for others. You say it in cold blood, just like that.’

Kirsty laughed. ‘I admit it sounds pretty bad—priggish in the extreme; especially when you say it in that frozen clear voice of yours. But why should you be so shocked? Surely it is a most laudable intention?—Now stop eating chocolates (you don’t deserve to have a sound tooth in your head), and come and see the house. I shan’t spare you a cupboard, and it will be much better for me than talking about myself. I’m sick of the subject, anyway.’

Blanche rose lazily and looked at herself in the narrow gilt mirror above the mantel-shelf.

Then she turned and took Kirsty’s face between her two hands, smiled at her, and said obscurely:

‘Froggy’s Little Brother.’