Читать книгу Our Little Life - Jessie Georgina Sime - Страница 17

Table of Contents

It was on the day of the first snow-fall of the year that Miss McGee was thoroughly upset. She had had one of her unpleasant days; and what made it more unpleasant, perhaps, was that it had been a day to which she had rather looked forward. The tunic was finished. It was an accomplished fact at last—after many days' wrestling in the wilderness. Whether Mrs. Barclay might not have spent less money if she had gone to a shop and bought a new dress is not the question; the three dresses that Mrs. Barclay had wished to have used up were used up: one was the tunic, the second was the underskirt, the third was belt and trimmings combined. The Athanasian Creed had at last resolved itself into one.

But what must Mrs. Barclay do just on this day which should have been such a cheerful one but resolve herself into theology; as if it were not enough that she had had economics, now she must go and catch another thing. She had spent the entire day in lambasting Miss McGee (as Miss McGee herself called it) with theological crooked questions—to which there could be nothing but cross answers. Mrs. Barclay was not only a "dissenter" in her religious views, she was a frantic and furious dissenter. The Roman Church was to her much what it would have been to a Roman centurion before he was brought over to Rome. To say that Mrs. Barclay couldn't abide it is to put the case insufficiently. She loathed it, she hated it; if she could have taken the whole Roman Church, neck and crop, and thrown it once more amongst the lions, she would have done it. And then she would have sat in the dissenting chapel turning down her thumbs and calling herself a christian.

Being of this turn of mind it was naturally impossible for Mrs. Barclay to keep silence long about the subject. In season and out of season, when Miss McGee was working at Wellston Road, Mrs. Barclay would begin her diatribes on the Roman Catholic Church—"Papistry" was what she called it. Miss McGee had borne a lot. She was not remarkable for patience at any time; and though on the whole she had borne it well she hadn't borne it as well as she thought she had. Even when she said nothing her silence was expressive; and when she did speak she answered Mrs. Barclay in a more devastating way than she was aware. It was the very devastation she wrought, indeed, that brought Mrs. Barclay back and back to the charge. She had no hope of "converting" Miss McGee. She knew well in her heart that that was impossible. But she simply couldn't—couldn't—help talking against the Catholic Church and calling it names and dragging it in the mud so far as she was able to do so; and Miss McGee couldn't—she equally couldn't—help picking up the Roman Catholic Church so far as she was able out of the mud and carrying it, held aloft, another bit of the way. When Mrs. Barclay and Miss McGee sat talking together on religious subjects they were exactly the Kilkenny cats who used to live in the reign of Mary Tudor. If they could have hanged, drawn, and quartered one another, they would have done so; and then, kind-hearted women as they were, both of them, once one had seen the other in separate portions, each would have run to try to cement together again the havoc she had wrought. Of so much common-sense were they made.

On this day of the first snow-fall of the season—and the completion of the Athanasian Creed—Mrs. Barclay had taken what Miss McGee was accustomed to call a "turn for the worse." She had been more maddening than usual. Instead of taking a right-minded interest in the accomplishment of her views, trying it on, and pirouetting in so far as years and flesh would allow her before the glass, she had refused to be interested in clothes at all. She had turned, quite unexpectedly, from "personal adornment" to the consideration of "more serious things." Miss Barclay had tried to prevent her. Mr. Barclay, at lunch, had vainly sought to wrap her mind in mutton chops. Mrs. Barclay had eaten the chops and the steamed ginger pudding to follow, and then she had returned to the work-room—and her subject. From bad things had gone to worse. Miss McGee, after a while, had permitted herself a certain flippancy in her observations; and, urged on, perhaps, by this, Mrs. Barclay had at length permitted herself a remark regarding the taking of the Sacrament (the swallowing of Our Lord was what Mrs. Barclay called it) which Miss McGee at least had never heard before. It had shocked her. It had wounded her. She had felt, on hearing her Lord's name taken thus in vain, a sort of rending wound made in her that a jagged spear might have caused had it been thrust in her side. The flippancy died out of her. She felt that Mrs. Barclay in desecrating her Lord had desecrated her. She felt outraged—debased—as if she had been made unclean in having been compelled to listen to such a thing. And, on her way home, she had run into St. Patrick's, and there, leaning against her pillar, she had tried to wash her soul in the sight of her God. "God, forgive me for hearin' ut," she had prayed. "Forgive her for the thought that come into her moind. Blot ut from my moind an' heart, O God. Take the filthy thought out of me—leave me clean again. Print Thy holy name where the thought has been—let me be clean. . . ."

She had prayed in the soft silent obscurity for a long time, and, as she knelt there, a sort of comfort had stolen into her mind. She had felt as if she were in the midst of strength, as if she were being wrapped round with consolation and kindness; and when she had risen from her knees she had felt as if the insult had been wiped out. But, as she came back into the street and into the every-day world where there are Mrs. Barclays and tempters—the thought pushed up into her mind with renewed violence. She felt as if she could not forgive her old friend for having thus insulted her faith. She felt as if she could never go back to Wellston Road, that quiet broad street fringed so calmly with maples—as if she must forgo for evermore all that solid comfort and kindliness, never even carry home baskets with cakes and home-baked bread and things for tea any more . . .

She turned into O'Neil Street from St. Patrick's and came along with the anger thrusting through the chastened comfort of the church, as a fire bursts out again after it seems quenched; and as she came round the corner of Penelope's Buildings that gives on Drayton Place (where the entrance door is) what should she see but Robert Fulton in the passage-way, talking to the Janitress. It needed only this.

If there was one woman on earth whom Miss McGee detested it was the Janitress. She not only detested her, she thought her a "bad woman." And she not only thought her that, she was sure she was. To live in a place with a "bad woman" set over her, as, in a sense, Mrs. Savourin was, was to Miss McGee a thing hardly to be borne. Above all things else, perhaps, Miss McGee was respectable. She had always held her head high. Mrs. McGee had been respectability itself. She had brought up her girls to hold themselves aloof and to look upon the sin of the world—especially the female sin—with a rigid eye. Miss McGee felt that by having Mrs. Savourin in the basement, the Penelopians were all inevitably dragged down a rung of the social ladder. She therefore made it a point to show Mrs. Savourin what she thought of her on every occasion: and Mrs. Savourin responded with spirit and fought the brave fight.

"Good evenin', Mr. Fulton," said Miss McGee, stopping transitorily as it were, on her way upstairs, and acknowledging Mrs. Savourin's presence with the minutest of nods. "Are ye comin' up?"

She knew she was imprudent to say this. She realized quite well that she was thus, in a way, setting her claim openly on Robert. She was saying in effect, "You are my property. What are you doing here? Come with me." And she knew that Mrs. Savourin would make use of her slip. But what woman ever yet was wise when she loved?—At the sight of Robert in close conversation with Mrs. Savourin, jealousy surged up in Miss McGee. Not the murderous sexual jealousy she would have felt years ago had she found Tully talking to the Janitress, but a quick motherly jealousy (that had its sex-element in it) that would have torn Robert Fulton from Mrs. Savourin and held him from her by force forevermore—because she was bad for him.

"Won't ye come up, Mr. Fulton," she said therefore. And she waited.

Robert was quite unconscious of doing wrong. He had wanted his double window (for with the first appearance of the snow he, with the rest of the poor, had wished to exclude all the air he could from his room and so economize the coal he would have to burn) and he had come down to the Janitress to ask for the key of the cellar where the double windows were.

"I'll come in a minute," he said cheerfully. "Just wait till I get my double window."

"Ye best go an' git ut," said Miss McGee: and she turned and went up the stairs.

This was the end to her day! As if it wasn't enough for Mrs. Barclay to insult her religion, now she must come home to find Robert being seduced by the Janitress. Such was the way Miss McGee put it to herself. She made no bones about it. "That—!" and here Miss McGee used the classic word made use of by Mrs. Morphy with regard to Maggie Chambers. "I could murdher her."

She went into her own flat and banged the door behind her, and with an unaccustomed noise she began to make preparations for supper.

As for Robert, he still stood talking with the Janitress. She was a fine free full young woman of thirty or so, conscious of her charms, and pleased to show them off to whoever cared to look at them. She was fair with goldined hair and large prominent blue eyes. She had a white skin that no hard work or rigor of climate seemed able to mar or roughen, full bosom, large hips, and a disposition to make the best of these things. She was said to sell the gentlemen of Penelope's Flats "privileges"—to bring home whatever they fancied at whatever hour they pleased—and to add the surplus, thus earned, to her monthly income. She "did herself good" or "got on," as the female members of the Buildings said, however she managed it; for to see her go out Sundays, as the same critics put it, was enough to make a tom-cat laugh. That might be, but she was a handsome woman.

She was not a careful person in her speech. She was—vivid. She said she had a husband at the War, and perhaps she had. But no Penelopian eye had beheld him; nor did he seem to write to her. "Husband!" said Miss McGee. "How many . . . !" She voiced the popular opinion.

Robert Fulton was ignorant of all this. Completely ignorant. He was not a stupid man. He knew, naturally, the things we all know as we grow to years of discretion. He knew that women are not all virtuous; and he knew the whys and wherefores of the loss of virtue, and what such mean in this world of ours. He was man born of woman. He had the usual ardors of such a descent. He was perfectly human. He was just one of us; and besides all this, he was well-read in more than one of the literatures of the world: and such topics as the loss of virtue together with such personalities as Mrs. Savourin's have always formed, and always will form probably, a part of these literatures. Robert Fulton was no fool; but he had an incurable naïveté, a sort of lack of suspiciousness, a powerlessness (if one may put it so) to put two and two together so that they made four: and, therefore, it was quite possible for him to stand and talk with a woman like Mrs. Savourin and never realize, in his upper consciousness at least, what sort of woman she was and what sort of thing she was after in talking to a man. He knew—and he didn't know. And to give the finishing touch to his unsuspiciousness, Mrs. Savourin and her like recognized Robert Fulton's position towards themselves with much greater precision than they could have given tongue to. They knew that he thought better of them than they deserved and they more or less unconsciously acted up to the character he gave them, and appeared at their best while talking to him.

Had you explained this to Miss McGee for a year, at the end of the year she would have been just as inflexible as ever. Yet it was true. Mrs. Savourin, as she stood talking to Robert at the entrance-door, was showing at her best. She had a certain fund of kindness in her; the look in the young man's eyes brought the kindness surging up from where it often lay perdu for months at a time. She was merely talking to him as Miss McGee came into the entrance-hall—saying no harm of anyone—not even embroidering her language with the choice morsels of blasphemy and obscenity with which she usually decorated her speech. As she stood there she was keeping a watch upon her tongue. And if, in the recesses of her heart, there was something of the feeling of Potiphar's wife for Joseph . . . does it matter? Robert Fulton was unconscious of it. It did Mrs. Savourin no more harm than usual. And assuredly there was human kindliness mixed with the feeling. She wouldn't willingly have done him any harm.

Robert went down to the cellar and got the window, and Mrs. Savourin went with him. Possibly she tried the experiment of edging her shoulder up against his as she helped him to hoist the window up on his shoulder; and perhaps, as they came up the steep cellar stairs, she may have managed a collision . . .

Nothing happened. Robert Fulton came up-stairs as he had gone down, except that he carried his shutter up on his shoulder: and by the time he had got into his room and had (with some trouble) adjusted the double window on the outside of his single one, the thought of Mrs. Savourin had slipped right out of his mind. She didn't interest him. Her beauty, such as it was, was not for him. He asked something a little less obvious . . . and anyway, it so happened that the thought of woman was out of his mind for the moment. It does slip out of a man's mind at times!

After Robert had adjusted the window and after he had eaten his very simple meal he said to himself, "I think I'll go down to Miss McGee's and read her that new piece I wrote last night." And with a smile on his face and the joy of anticipation in his heart, he descended the stairs again, and knocked at Miss McGee's door.

His knock was a gentle one, as always. But this time, after he had knocked, instead of the door being thrown open instantly—hospitably—as was the way, it remained obstinately shut; and from inside there came no sound. "She can't have heard me," thought Robert—and he knocked again. Still nothing. And then he said to himself with a certain disappointment and the smile fading out of his face, "She must be out." And he was just turning away when the door opened a little way—an inch or two—and Miss McGee's face became apparent in the opening.

She said nothing. She simply stood there, looking out. And this was so daunting to Robert that he said nothing either. For a long minute they stood like that gazing at one another, Miss McGee's face set, and Robert's wondering.

"Miss McGee," he stammered out at last, "I just brought down something to—to read." He glanced involuntarily down at the little roll of papers in his hand. "I—I thought . . ."

His voice died away.

"I can't hear ut to-night, Mr. Fulton," Miss McGee said—and he had never heard her voice like that: so stern. "I—" and she stammered in her turn, "I'm tired. I—I'm going to bed."

Robert felt that something had happened.

"There isn't anything—wrong, is there?" he said.

"No," Miss McGee answered: and then she stopped. There was something so disarming about Robert's evident puzzlement, his discomfiture, his disappointment at being repulsed—and a certain timidity that had come into his bearing—that Miss McGee felt . . . different. As she stood there in the crack, looking out at Robert Fulton, some of her anger against him, against Mrs. Savourin, against Mrs. Barclay, against the world in general melted away. She suddenly felt repentant . . . but not loving.

"I'd ask ye in," she said, and her voice was more as it usually was, "but I'm"—she glanced down—"I'm in my wrapper."

She paused, and the thought flitted through her mind, "Will I ask him to go upstairs for a minnut till I slip in me gown again?"

She hesitated. And then the thought of everything that had gone cross in the day surged up into her mind again.

"No," she said. "No. I can't see ye to-night. I've the headache. I'm tired. I—I got to git to bed."

She gazed out through the crack of the doorway, and it seemed to Robert that her eyes grew misty as he looked at them.

"Good night," she said.

"Good night, Miss McGee," said Robert—and he ascended the stairs again. That night Miss McGee cried herself to sleep.