Читать книгу The Little Vanities of Mrs. Whittaker - John Strange Winter - Страница 4

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There are many who think that the unfamiliar is best.

To begin my story properly, I must go back to the time when the Empress Eugenie had not started the vogue of the crinoline, when the Indian Mutiny had not stained the pages of history, and the Crimean War was as yet but a cloud the size of a man’s hand on the horizon of the world—that is to say, to the very early fifties.

It was then that a little girl-child was born into the world, a little girl who was called by the name of Regina, and whose father and mother bore the homely appellation of Mr. and Mrs. Brown; yes, plain, simple and homely Brown, without even so much as an “e” placed at the tail thereof to give it a distinction from all the other Browns.

So far as I have ever heard, the young childhood of Regina Brown was passed in quite an ordinary and conventional atmosphere. Her parents were well-meaning, honest, kindly, well-disposed, middle-class persons. According to their lights they educated their daughter extremely well; that is to say, she was sent to a genteel seminary, she was always nicely dressed, and she wore her hair in ringlets.

This state of things continued, without any particular change, until Regina was nearly twenty years old. By that time the great Franco-Prussian War had beaten itself into peace, the horrors of the Commune of Paris had come and gone, and the sun of Regina Brown’s twentieth birthday rose upon a world in which nations had come once more, at least to outward seeming, to the conclusion that all men are brothers. It might have been some long-forgotten echo from the early days when France and England fought against Russia, or it might have been in a measure owing to the conflict, so long, so deadly and so bloody, between France and Germany, but certain is it that, when Regina Brown realized that she was twenty years old, she came to the conclusion that she was leading a wasted life.

If the period in which she lived had been that of to-day, I think Regina Brown would have entered herself at any hospital that would have accepted her and would have trained for a nurse; but, in the early seventies, nursing was not, as now, the almost regulation answer to the question, “What shall we do with our girls?”

“What shall I do with my life?” she said, looking in the modest little glass which swung above her toilet-table. “What shall I do with my life? Live here, pandering to my father and mother, listening to my father’s accounts of how some man at the club wagered a shilling on a matter which could make no difference to anyone; hearing mother’s elaborate account of the delinquencies of Charlotte Ann, who really is not such a bad girl, after all. I can’t go on like this—I can’t bear it any longer. It’s a waste of life; it’s a waste of a strong, capable, original brain. I must get out into the world and do something.”

In the course of life one comes across so many people who are always yearning to go out into the world and do something, but Regina Brown was not a young woman who could or would content herself with mere yearning. With her to think was to do. With her a resolve was a fact practically accomplished.

“I will go in for the higher education,” she said to herself. “What do I know now? I can dance a little, play a little, paint a little. I know no useful things. My mother sews my clothes and makes my under-linen; my mother orders the dinner, and never will entrust the making of the pastry to any hand but her own. What is there left for me? Nothing! I must go out into the world. There is only one line in which I am likely to make success, and I am not the class of woman who makes for failure. I will become a great teacher. To become a great teacher, I must qualify myself. I must work, and work hard. I must enter at some regular school of learning, or, failing that, I must find a first-class tutor to work with me.”

Eventually Regina Brown adopted the latter course. As a matter of fact, she was not sufficiently advanced in any branch of education to enter at any school of learning which admitted women to its curriculum. To Regina it mattered little or nothing. For the next ten years she lived in an atmosphere of hard learning. She proved herself a worker of no mean ability. She passed all manner of examinations, she took numberless degrees, and on the day on which she was thirty years old, she found herself once more gazing at her face in the glass and wondering what she was going to do with the knowledge that she had so laboriously acquired.

“Regina Brown,” she said to herself, “you are no nearer to becoming a great teacher than you were ten years ago this very day. Will anyone ever put you in charge of a high school? Will anyone give you a responsible post in any of the spheres where women can prove that they are the equals, and more than the equals, of men? It is very doubtful. You know much, but you have no influence. Ten years ago to-day, Regina Brown, you told yourself that your mode of existence was a waste of life. Well, you are wasting your life still. The best thing you can do, Regina Brown, is to get yourself married.”

So Regina Brown got herself married.

Now, to put such an action in those words is not a romantic way of describing the most—or what should be the most—romantic episode of a woman’s life; but I use Regina’s own words, and I say that she got herself married.

She was not wholly unattractive. She had a pinky skin and frank grey eyes, but her figure was of the pincushion order, and much study had done away with that lissomness which is one of the most attractive attributes of womenkind. Her hands were white, strong, determined; white because they were mostly occupied about books and papers, strong because she herself was strong, and determined because it was her nature to be so. Her feet, frankly speaking, were large. She was a young woman who sat solidly on a solid chair, and looked thoroughly in place. Her features otherwise were neither bad nor good, and I think she was probably one of the worst dressers that the world has ever seen. It was no uncommon thing for Regina Brown to wear a salmon-pink ribbon twisted about her ample waist and to crown her toilet with a covering of turquoise blue.

It was about this time that Regina received a valentine—the first in her life. She held it sacred from any eye but her own, in fact she put it into the fire before any of the family had time to see it. The words ran thus:—

“Regina Brown, Regina Brown,

You think yourself a beauty;

In pink and green

And yellow sheen

You go to do your duty.

Regina Brown, Regina Brown,

Whenever will you learn

That pink and green

And golden sheen

Are colors you should spurn?

Regina Brown, Regina Brown,

Take lesson from the lily,

A lesson meek,

Not far to seek,

’Twill keep you from being silly!”

I cannot truthfully say that the valentine did Regina the smallest amount of good. You know, my gentle reader, if we only look at things the right way, we can find good in everything. As some poet has beautifully put it in a couplet about sermons in stones and running brooks—“And good in everything,” Regina might even have found good out of that malicious and spiteful valentine with its excellent likeness, done in water colors, of herself clad in weird and wonderful garments, the like of which even she had never attempted. But Regina consigned it to the flames, and went on her way precisely as she had done before, for Regina was a woman of strong nature and settled convictions. I give you this piece of information because you will find by the story which I shall tell and you will read, that this curious dominance of nature proved to be one of the mainsprings of this remarkable character.

So Regina went on her way and she got married. I don’t say that it was a brilliant alliance—by no means. The man was young, younger than Regina. He was weak-looking and pretty, of a pink-and-white, wax-doll type, with shining fair hair and rather watery blue eyes. To his weakness Regina’s dominant nature strongly appealed; perhaps, also, in some measure the fact that she was the sole child of her father’s house, and that her father lived upon his means, and described himself as “gentleman” in the various papers connected with the politics of his country which from time to time reached him. Be that as it may, an engagement came about between Regina Brown and this young man, who was “something in the city” and who rejoiced in the name of Alfred Whittaker.

I must confess that it was somewhat of a shock to Regina when she found that among his fellows—young, vapid, rather raffish young men—he was known by the abbreviative of “Alf.”

“Dearest,” she said to him one day, after this unpalatable information had come to her, “I noticed that your friend, Mr. Fitzsimmons, called you ‘Alf’ last night.”

“Yes, the fellows mostly do,” he replied.

“But you were not called Alf at home, dearest,” said Regina.

She laid her substantial hand upon his arm and looked at him yearningly.

“My mother and my sisters always called me Alfie,” said he, returning the gaze with interest, for he admired Regina with an admiration which was wholly genuine.

“I really couldn’t call you Alfie,” she said.

“I don’t see why you couldn’t, Regina,” he replied. “It seems to me such an awful thing for people who love one another to be saying ‘Regina’ and ‘Alfred.’ There is something so chilly about it. Did your people never call you by a pet name?”

“Never,” said Regina.

“I should like to,” said Alfred, still more yearningly.

“If you can think of a pet name that will not be derogatory to my dignity—” Regina began, when the weak and weedy Alfred insinuated an arm about her ample waist and drew her nearer to him.

Without some effort on the part of Regina Brown, I doubt if his intention could have been carried into effect, but Regina yielded herself to his tenderness with a shy coyness which was sufficiently marked to have merited even the pet name of Tiny.

“What would you like me to call you—Alfred?” she asked, with the faintest possible pause before the last word.

“Call me Alfie,” said he in manly and imperative tones.

“Dear Alfie!” said Regina.

“Darling!” said Alfie.

“You couldn’t call me darling as a name,” said Regina, coyly.

“I shall always call you darling,” he gurgled. “But I should like, as a name, to call you Queenie.”

“You shall call me Anna Maria Stubbs if you like,” said Regina, with a sudden surrender of her dignity.

And forthwith, from that moment, between themselves she was known no longer by her real name, but sank into a state of hopeless adoration, and was called Queenie.