Читать книгу Lalage's Lovers - George A. Birmingham - Страница 4

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I had, I suppose, some reason for calling on Canon Beresford, but I have totally forgotten what it was. In all probability my mother sent me to discuss some matter connected with the management of the parish or the maintenance of the fabric of the church. I was then, and still am, a church warden. The office is hereditary in my family. My son—Miss Pettigrew recommended my having several sons—will hold it when I am gone. My mother has always kept me up to the mark in the performance of my duties. Without her at my elbow I should, I am afraid, be inclined to neglect them. I am bored, not interested as a churchwarden should be, when the wall of the graveyard crumbles unexpectedly. I fail to find either pleasure or excitement in appointing a new sexton. Canon Beresford, our rector, is no more enthusiastic about such things than I am. He and I are very good friends, but when he suspects me of paying him a business visit he goes out to fish. There are, I believe, trout in the stream which flows at the bottom of the glebe land, but I never heard of Canon Beresford catching any of them.

It must have been business of some sort which took me to the rectory that afternoon, for Canon Beresford had gone out with his rod. Miss Battersby told me this and added, as a justification of her own agreeable solitude, that Lalage was with her father. Miss Battersby is Lalage’s governess, and she would not consider it right to spend the afternoon over a novel unless she felt sure that her pupil was being properly looked after. In this case she was misinformed. Lalage was not with her father. She was perched on one of the highest branches of a horse-chestnut tree. I heard her before I saw her, for the chestnut tree was in full leaf and Lalage had to hail me three or four times before I discovered where she was. I always liked Lalage, and even in those days she had a friendly feeling for me. I doubt, however, whether a simple desire for my conversation would have brought her down from her nest. I might have passed without being hailed if it had not happened that I was riding a new bicycle. In those days bicycles were still rare in the west of Ireland. Mine was a new toy and Lalage had never seen it before. She climbed from her tree top with remarkable agility and swung herself from the lowest branch with such skill and activity that she alighted on her feet close beside the bicycle. She was at that time a little more than fourteen years of age. She asked at once to be allowed to ride the bicycle. I was a young man then, active and vigorous; but I was hot, breathless, and exhausted before Lalage had enough of learning to ride. I doubt whether she would have given in even after an hour’s hard work if we had not met with a serious accident. We charged into a strong laurel bush. Lalage’s frock was torn. The rent was a long one, extending diagonally from the waistband to the bottom hem. I knew, even while I offered one from the back of my tie, that a pin would be no use.

“Cattersby,” said Lalage, “will be mad—raging mad. She’s always at me because things will tear my clothes. Horrid nuisance clothes are, aren’t they? But Cattersby doesn’t think so of course. She likes them.”

The lady’s name is Battersby, not Cattersby. She held the position of governess to Lalage for more than a year and is therefore entitled to respect. Her predecessor, a Miss Thomas, resigned after six weeks. It was my mother who recommended Miss Battersby to Canon Beresford. I felt that I ought to protest against Lalage’s irreverent way of speaking. In mere loyalty to my mother, apart altogether from the respect which, as a landed proprietor, I naturally entertain for all forms of law and order, I was absolutely bound to say something.

“You should speak of her as Miss Battersby,” I said firmly.

“I call her Cattersby,” said Lalage, “because that is her nature.”

I said that I understood what this marker meant; but Lalage, who even then had a remarkable faculty for getting at the naked truth of things, did not even pretend to believe me.

“Come along,” she said, “and I’ll show you why.”

I followed her meekly, leading my bicycle, which, like Lalage’s frock, had suffered in its contest with the laurel. We passed through the stable yard and I stopped to put my bicycle into the coach house. An Irish terrier, Lalage’s property, barked at me furiously, thinking, I suppose, that I intended to steal Canon Beresford’s cart. Lalage chose to regard this as a ridiculous affectation on the part of the dog and shut him up in the stable as a punishment for folly. Then we climbed a stile, paddled round a large manure heap, crossed an ash pit, and came at last to a pigsty. There were no pigs in it, and it was, for a pigsty, very clean. Lalage opened the gate and we entered the small enclosure in which the pigs, if there had been pigs, would have taken food and exercise.

“You’ll have to stoop down now and crawl,” said Lalage. “You needn’t be afraid. The pigs were sold last week.”

I realized that I was being invited to enter the actual home, the private sleeping room, of the departed swine. The door of it had been newly painted. While I knelt in front of it I read a notice which stretched across it in large white letters, done, apparently, with chalk:

The Office of the Anti-cat

Editor: Miss Lalage Beresford, B. A.

Sub-Editor: Ditto. Ditto.

Underneath this inscription was a carefully executed drawing of a spear with a large, a disproportionately large, and vicious looking barb. A sort of banner depended from its shaft, with these words on it: “For Use on Cattersby. Revenge is sweet!” I looked round at Lalage, who was on her hands and knees behind me.

I intended asking for some explanation of the extraordinarily vindictive spirit displayed by the spear and the banner. Lalage forestalled my question and explained something else.

“I have the office here,” she said, “because it’s the only place where I can be quite sure she won’t follow me.”

This time I understood thoroughly what was said to me. Cattersby—that is to say, Miss Battersby—if she were the sort of person who mourned over torn frocks, and if, as Lalage suggested, she liked clothes, would be very unwilling to follow any one into the recesses of the pigsty. Even a bower in the upper branches of a tree would be less secure from her intrusion. We crawled in. Against the far wall of the chamber stood the trough from which the pigs, now no doubt deceased, used to eat.

“It was put there,” said Lalage, who seemed to know that I was thinking of the trough, “after they had done cleaning out the sty, so that it wouldn’t go rotten in the wet before we got some more young pigs.”

“Was that Miss Battersby’s idea?”

“No, it wasn’t. Cattersby wouldn’t think of anything half so useful. All she cares about is sums and history and lessony things. It was Tom Kitterick who put it there, and I helped him. Tom Kitterick is the boy who cleans the boots and pumps the water. It was that time,” she added, “that I got paint all over my blue dress. She said it was Tom Kitterick’s fault.”

“It may have been,” I said, “partly. Anyhow Tom Kitterick is a red-haired, freckly youth. It wouldn’t do him any harm to be slanged a bit for something.”

“It’s a jolly sight better to have freckles, even if you come out all over like a turkey egg, than to go rubbing stinking stuff on your face at night. That’s what Cattersby does. I caught her at it.”

Miss Battersby has a nice, smooth complexion and is, no doubt, quite justified in doing her best to preserve it. But I did not argue the point with Lalage. A discussion might have led to further revelations of intimate details of the lady’s toilet. I was young in those days and I rather prided myself on being a gentleman. I changed the subject.

“Perhaps,” I said, “you will now tell me why you have brought me here. Are we to have a picnic tea in the pigs’ trough?”

Lalage crawled past me. She had to crawl, for there was not room in the sty for even a child to stand upright. She took out of the trough a bundle of papers, pierced at the top left-hand corner and tied with a slightly soiled blue ribbon. She handed it to me and I looked it over. It was, apparently, a manuscript magazine modelled on those sold at railway bookstalls for sixpence. It was called, as I might have guessed, the Anti-Cat. The table of contents promised the following reading matter:

1. Editor’s Chat.

2. Poetry—A Farewell. To be recited in her presence.

3. The Ignominy of Having a Governess.

4. Prize Competition for the Best Insult Story.

“You can enter for that if you like,” said Lalage, who had been following my eyes down the page.

“I shall,” I said, “if she insults me; but she never has yet.”

“Nor she won’t,” said Lalage. “She’ll be honey to you. That’s one of the worst things about her. She’s a hypocrite. I loathe hypocrites, don’t you?”

I returned to the table of contents:

5. On Sneaking—First Example.

6. Our Tactics, by the Editor.

“She won’t insult you,” said Lalage. “She simply crawls to any grown-up. You should hear her talking to father and pretending that she thinks fishing nice.”

“She’s perfectly right to do that. After all, Lalage, your father is a canon and a certain measure of respect is due to his recreations as well as to his serious work. Besides——”

“It’s never right to crawl to any one.”

“Besides,” I said, “what you call crawling may in reality be sympathy. I’m sure Miss Battersby has a sympathetic disposition. It is very difficult to draw the line between proper respect, flavoured with appreciative sympathy, and what you object to as sycophancy.”

“If you’re going to try and show off,” said Lalage, “by using ghastly long words which nobody could possibly understand you’d better go and do it to the Cat. She’ll like it. I’m not going to sit here all day listening to you. Either read the magazine or don’t, whichever you like. I don’t care whether you do or not, but I won’t be jawed.”

This subdued me at once. I began with the poem:

“Fair Cattersby I weep to see

You haste away by train,

As yet that Latin exercise

Has not been done again.

Stay, stay,

Until amo, I say.

(To be continued in our next)”

“There was a difficulty about the last three lines, I suppose,” I said.

“Yes,” said Lalage. “I couldn’t remember how they went, and Cattersby had the book. She pretends she likes reading poetry, though she doesn’t really, and she makes me learn off whole chunks of it.”

“You can’t deny that it comes in useful occasionally. I don’t see how you could have composed that parody if she hadn’t made you learn——”

“She didn’t. That’s not the sort of poetry she makes me learn. If it was I might do it. She finds out rotten things about ‘Little Lamb, who made you?’ ‘We are Seven,’ and stuff of that sort. Not what I call poetry at all.”

I had the good sense while at Oxford to attend some lectures given by the professor of poetry. I also belonged for a time to an association modestly called “The Brotherhood of Rhyme.” We used to meet in my rooms and read original compositions to each other until none of us could stand it any longer. I am therefore thoroughly well qualified to discuss poetry with any one.

I should, under ordinary circumstances, have taken a pleasure in defending the reputations of Blake and Wordsworth, but I shrank from attempting to do so in a pigsty with Lalage Beresford as an opponent, I turned to the last page of the Anti-Cat and read the article entitled “Our Tactics.” It was exceedingly short, but it struck me as able. I began to have a great deal of pity for Miss Battersby.

“Calm” (or Balm. There was an uncertainty about the first letter) “and haughty in her presence. Let yourself out behind her back.”

“What about your going in for the competition?” said Lalage. “Even if she doesn’t insult you you could easily invent something. You’ve seen her and you know quite well the sort she is. You might get the prize.”

“May I read the story you’ve got?” I asked. “If it’s not very good I might perhaps try; but it is probably quite superior to anything I could possibly produce, and in that case there would be no use my attempting to compete.”

“It is good,” said Lalage, “but yours might be good too, and then I should divide the prize, or you could give a second prize; a box of Turkish Delight would do.”

This encouraged me and I read the “Insult Story.”

“I did my lessons studiously, as good as I could.”, Lalage was a remarkably good speller for her age. Many much older people would have staggered over “studiously.” She took it, so to speak, in her stride.

“I wrote out a lot of questions on the history and answered them all without looking at the book. I knew it perfectly. The morning came and with it history. I answered all the questions except one—the character of Mary. The insulter repeated it, commanding me to ‘Say it now.’ I said it with a bland smile upon my face, as I thought how well I knew my history.”

“Lalage,” I said, pausing in the narrative, “did you make that smile bland simply because you knew your history or was its blandness part of the tactics, ‘Balm and haughty in her presence?’ ”

“Calm,” said Lalage, “calm, not balm. Never mind about that. Go on.”

“The insulter,” I read, “turned crimson with rage and shrieked demnation and stamped about the floor. Cooling down a bit, she said, ‘You shall write it out ten times this afternoon.’ Naturally I was astonished, for I had said it perfectly correctly when she told me. I had, however, a better control over my temper than she had, and managed, despite my passionate thoughts, to smile blandly all through, though it made her ten times worse.”

“Well?” said Lalage when I had finished.

“I am a little confused,” I said. “I thought the story was to be about an insult offered by Miss Battersby to some one else, you, or perhaps me.” “It is,” said Lalage. “That’s what the prize is for, the best insult.”

“But this seems to me to be about an insult applied by the author to Miss Battersby. I couldn’t conscientiously go in for a competition in which I should represent myself as doing a thing of that sort.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Lalage. “I didn’t insult her. She insulted me.”

“Come now, Lalage, honour bright! That smile of yours! How would you like any one to make you ten times worse by smiling blandly at you when you happened to be stamping about the floor crimson in the face and shrieking——”

“I wouldn’t. I don’t use words of that sort even when I’m angry.”

“It might be better if you did. A frank outburst of that kind is at times less culpable than a balmy smile. I have a much greater respect and liking for the person who says plainly what she means than——”

“She didn’t. She wouldn’t think it ladylike.” “Didn’t what?”

“Didn’t say straight out what she meant.”

“She can’t have meant more,” I said. “After all, we must be reasonable. There isn’t any more that any one could mean.”

“You’re very stupid,” said Lalage. “I keep on telling you she didn’t say it. She’s far too great a hypocrite.”

“Do you mean to say that she didn’t stamp about the floor and say——”

I hesitated. I have been very carefully brought up and I am a churchwarden. Besides, there is a Latin tag which Canon Beresford, who has a taste for tags, quotes occasionally, about the great reverence due to boys. Obviously a much greater reverence must be due to girls. I did not want my conscience to have an opportunity for reproaching me. Therefore I hesitated when it came to the point of saying out loud a word which Lelage ought certainly not to hear.

She came to my rescue and finished my sentence for me in a way which got me out of my difficulty. Very likely she felt that she ought not to corrupt me.

“That word,” she said.

“Thanks! We’ll put it that way. Am I to understand that she didn’t say that word?”

“Certainly not,” said Lalage. “She couldn’t if she tried. I should—I really think I should quite like her if she did.”

I felt that this was as far as I was at all likely to get in bringing Lalage to a better frame of mind. Her attitude toward her governess was very far indeed from that enjoined in the Church Catechism, but I lacked the courage to tell her so. Nor do I think I should have effected much even if I had been as brave in rebuke as an archdeacon or a bishop. Besides, I felt that I had accomplished something. Lalage had committed herself to an approval of a hypothetical Miss Battersby. If a governess could be found in the world who would stamp about the floor and shriek that word, or if Miss Battersby would learn the habit of violent profanity, Lalage would quite like her. It was a definite concession. I had a mental vision of the changed Miss Battersby, a lady freckled from head to foot, magnificently contemptuous of glycerine and cucumber, who hated clothes and tore them when she could, who rejoiced to see blue dresses with blobs of bright red paint on them, who scoffed openly at Blake’s poetry, who had been to sea or companied with private soldiers on the battlefield, and so garnered a store of scorching blasphemies. I imagined Lalage taking this paragon to her heart, clinging to her with warm affection, leading her into pigstys for confidential chats, and, if she published a magazine at all, calling it Our Feline Friend. But the dream faded, as such dreams do. Miss Battersby was plainly incapable of rising to the heights required.

It is to my credit that in the end I did make an effort to soften Lalage.

“I wish,” I said, “that you’d try and call her Pussy instead of Cat.”

“Why? What’s the difference?”

“The meaning is the same,” I said. “But it’s a much kinder way of putting it. You ought to try and be kind, Lalage.”

She pondered this advice for a while and then said:

“I would, if only she’d stop kissing me.”

“Does she do it often?”

“Every morning and every evening and sometimes during the day.”

That settled it. I could not press my point. Once, years afterward, Miss Battersby very nearly kissed me, but even before there was any chance of such a thing I was able to sympathize with Lalage. I crept out of the pigsty and went home again, leading my injured bicycle.