Читать книгу The Little Vanities of Mrs. Whittaker - John Strange Winter - Страница 13

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Why is it that women are so fond of founding societies both for the improvement of themselves and of each other? Is it a confession of weakness, or is it one of the signs of the coming of the millenium?

Mrs. Whittaker was a woman who never did things by halves. She distinctly prided herself thereupon.

“If a thing, my dear, is worth doing,” I heard her say about the time of which I am writing, “it is worth doing well. I have great faith—although I have gone so far above the old-world thoughts of religion—in the verse which says: ‘Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might.’ It is a grand precept, one that I instil into my children—er—er—”

“For all you are worth,” remarked a flippant young woman who was listening.

“I—I shouldn’t have expressed it in that way,” stammered Regina, somewhat taken aback. “But—but—er—it’s what I mean.”

“And your children, are they the same?”

“Yes, I am proud to say that my children are very much like me in that respect. When they play, they play; when they work, they work; when they idle they idle; and I am sure if ever they were naughty, that they would be naughty with all their might.”

Poor Regina! Well, to make the story somewhat shorter, I must tell you that when Regina Whittaker went into public life, she did so in no half-hearted manner.

“I am convinced,” she remarked to the lord of her bosom, “I am convinced that I am taking a step in the right direction. What do you think, Alfie?”

“My dear,” said Alfred Whittaker, somewhat sleepily, for he had had a hard day in the city and had eaten an extremely good dinner, “if it pleases you, it pleases me. You have such a clear, sensible head,” he went on, feeling that perhaps he had been a little too unsympathetic, “you have such a clear, sensible head, that I am sure you will take up no question that is not a good one—an advantageous one.”

“I thought you would see it in that light, dear Alfie,” said Mrs. Whittaker in tones which betokened much pleasure. “You are so generous and so just. Some men would hate to feel that their wives had any interest outside their own homes.”

“Oh, my dear heart and soul!” exclaimed Alfred Whittaker, looking up in a very wide-awake sort of way, “surely this is a land of liberty. I don’t want to tie you down to being no better than my slave. God knows you fag enough and slave enough for all of us. It would be hard if you couldn’t have a few opinions and a few interests of your own.”

“Yes, dear; but it isn’t quite that. It is not only of opinions that I am speaking, it is the encouraging way in which you consent to my entering on this somewhat pronounced question.”

“I have absolute faith in your judgment,” said Alfred Whittaker; and again he composed himself for his after-dinner nap.

Regina sat looking at him as he slumbered. Her heart was very full, for she was an affectionate woman, and, in spite of her little airs and pretensions, she was really a good woman at bottom. Her heart swelled with pride to think that this was her husband, this handsome, portly, dignified man with a presence, an air of being somebody, this man who was so good, so easy to live with, such a good husband and such an affectionate father. And to think that he was hers! As I have said already, her heart thrilled within her.

It was true that others might not have agreed with Regina in her estimate of her husband. The outer world might have thought him anything but handsome, might have thought that he had anything rather than a presence. What Regina called portly, a less tender critic might have described in an extremely unpleasant manner; but, you see, Regina looked at him with eyes of possession, and the eyes of possession are ever somewhat biassed.

So her thoughts ran pleasantly on. Yes, it was indeed sweet to be so blessed as she was in her home life. She had once believed that her life was a wasted one. Well, that was in the foolish days, before she had tried her wings. Not that she ever regarded her flights into the world of higher thought with the very smallest regret; that could never be. Enlightenment is always enlightenment, whether it is actually paying in a monetary sense or not. She firmly believed that an elaborate and somewhat masculine education had enabled her to become a better wife and mother than she would have been had she been contented with the genteel education which her parents had thought good enough, further than which indeed their minds had never attempted to fly. Perhaps, her thoughts ran, her mission in life was to bring enlightenment to the minds of other women, in a somewhat different way to that which she had hitherto accepted as the most reasonable. Be that as it may, Regina entered upon her duties as President of the S.R.W., armed with the full sanction of her husband’s permission and approval.

To all her friends she was an amazing and, at the same time, an amusing study about this epoch.

“I am perfectly certain,” remarked Mrs. M’Quade to the mother of the little girl who at school was called Tuppenny, “I am perfectly certain that Mrs. Whittaker has at last found her metier. Are you going to join her scheme for the regeneration of women?”

“I don’t think so,” replied the lady who lived at Highthorn. “My husband is so very sneering when anything of the kind is mentioned. I shouldn’t mind for myself; I think it would be rather fun. They are going to have tea-parties and soirées, and all sorts of amusements. But George would be so full of his fun, that I don’t feel somehow it would be good enough for me to go into. Besides, it’s three guineas a year. As far as I can tell,” she continued, “from what Mrs. Whittaker has told me, there won’t be any real regeneration of women in our day. It may come in the day of our grandchildren, but I don’t feel inclined to work for that.”

“That shows a great want of public spirit,” remarked the doctor’s wife, laughingly.

“Yes, I daresay it does, but I don’t believe women are public-spirited, except here and there—generally when they have made a failure of their own lives, as my old man always says.”

“But Mrs. Whittaker hasn’t made a failure of her life.”

“Well, she has and she hasn’t. She has failed to become anything very much out of the ordinary. She is very fond of calling herself an unconventional woman who never does anything like anybody else, but I fail to see very much in it excepting that she makes horrible guys of her girls.”

“Well, I am going to join the society,” said Mrs. M’Quade, with the air of one who is prepared to receive ridicule. “No, I don’t pretend for a moment that I want regenerating myself—or even that other women do—but Mrs. Whittaker has been a very good patient to the doctor one way and another, and she’s stuck to us, and I think the least I can do is to join her pet scheme—and, mind you, it is a pet scheme.”

“I call that absolutely Machiavellian,” said her friend.

“Oh, a doctor’s wife has to be Machiavellian, my dear, and a thousand other things,” said Mrs. M’Quade, easily. “I have been fifteen years in the Park, and I have kept in with everybody—never had a wrong word with a single one of Jack’s patients. You may call it Machiavellian, and doubtless you are right, but I call it ripping good management myself.”

“So it is, my dear, so it is. And you shall have the full credit of it,” said Tuppenny’s mother, who was a genial soul and loved a joke as well as most people.

And Regina meantime was taking life with considerable seriousness. She fell into a habit of speaking of the S.R.W. as of her life’s work; indeed, she became a very important woman. No sooner was it known that she was an excellent and dominant President of the S.R.W. than she came into request for other societies of a kindred nature—no, I don’t mean societies solely for the regeneration of women, not a bit of it. There was one for the sensible education of children between three and seven years old, whose committee she was asked to join not many weeks after the birth of the S.R.W.; and there was another society which bore the name of “The Robin Redbreast,” and provided the poor children of a south London district with dinners for a halfpenny a head, and a number of others that they provided with dinners for nothing at all. Then there was a Shakespeare Society, which had long existed in the Park, and which until Regina became a full-blown president had never thought of asking her to come on to its committee.

Now all this took Regina a good deal away from her home, and the result of her absence and of these wider interests in life was that the two girls at Ye Dene were enabled to shape their lives very much more in their own way than ever they had done before. Regina had, it is true, always aimed at inculcating a spirit of independence in her children. She required them to do certain things during the course of the day, to be punctual at meals, especially at breakfast, to report themselves when they were going to school and when they returned; but otherwise, she left them fairly free to spend the rest of their time as their own inclinations led them. They had their own sitting-room and their own tea-table, at which they could invite any children belonging to their school, or indeed, for the matter of that, any of the children living in the Park; and up to the advent of the S.R.W. it must be owned that this system worked as well as any system could have worked with children of such pronounced characters as the young Whittakers. But after their mother became a public woman, Maudie and Julia may be said to have run absolutely wild. No longer did they report themselves in the old way, because they had a very complete contempt for servants, and there was usually no one else to whom they could report themselves.

“Does your mother never want to know where you are?” asked a schoolfellow when Maudie was just sixteen.

“Well, yes, we always tell her at night what we have done during the day.”

“Oh, do you?”

“Yes,” returned Maudie. “Mother is most deeply interested in all our doings. Did you think she wasn’t? How funny of you! Isn’t your mother interested in what you do?”

“Oh yes, of course mine is. But then mine is rather different to yours. Mine is not a public character.”

“Well, I don’t know that our mother is exactly a public character,” said Julia, who was keenly on the watch for a single word which would in any way pour ridicule or contempt upon her mother.

“Oh yes, she is. Father says she’s a philanthropist.”

“Oh, does he? Well, I don’t know I’m sure. Perhaps she is. I know she’s a jolly hard-worked woman, and if she wasn’t as clever as daylight she wouldn’t be able to keep going as she does. As for her being a philanthropist—well, after all, what is a philanthropist?”

“Well, I did ask father, and he explained it, but he didn’t make it very clear. It seems to be a sort of person who goes about doing good.”

“That’s mother all over,” said Maudie.

“Then who mends your stockings?” asked Evelyn Gage.

“Our stockings? Why, mother has never mended our stockings. Sewing is one of the things mother isn’t great on. You couldn’t expect it.”

“Why not? Mine does.”

“Oh, yes, but our mother is rather different. You see, she was educated like a man.”

“How funny!” giggled Evelyn.

“I think,” said Maudie to Julia, half an hour later, when Evelyn Gage had gone home and the two were getting out their lesson-books for their home work, “I think it would be rather funny to have a mother like an ordinary woman, don’t you, Ju?”

“Well, I don’t know,” returned Julia. “Evelyn’s mother makes jam and pickles and pastry and lovely little rock cakes, and things that our mother never seems to think of. She is always too much taken up with great questions to bother herself with little etceteras, as old nurse always called such things.”

“Perhaps, though, we should find it rather a bore to have a mother who worried about our stockings and things, just an ordinary, average kind of mother. But anyway, we haven’t got a mother like that, so we must make the best of what we have got.”