Читать книгу The Little Vanities of Mrs. Whittaker - John Strange Winter - Страница 6

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It is curious how the possession of humble things satisfies the souls of naturally ambitious people.

In due course Regina Brown merged her identity into that of Mrs. Alfred Whittaker.

They were not married in a hurry. Regina had come of old-fashioned people, who held firmly to the belief that courting time is the sweetest of a woman’s life; that it is good for man to look and long for the woman of his heart, and for woman to be coy and to hold him who will eventually become her liege lord at arm’s length for a suitable period. To people of the Brown, and indeed of the Whittaker class, there is something in a short engagement and a hurried-on marriage which borders almost upon immodesty.

“We won’t be engaged very long,” said Alfred, when he had been made the happiest man in the world for nearly six weeks.

“No, not long,” returned Regina. “My father and mother were engaged for seven years.”

“Good God!” exclaimed Alfred, who was somewhat given to strong language, as many weak men are. “Good God, Regina, you have taken my breath away!”

“I wasn’t proposing to be engaged to you for seven years, Alfie dear,” she said to him, with an indulgent air. “Oh no. I always thought that father and mother made such a mistake, although you couldn’t get mother to own it.”

“I should think so, indeed. Seven years! Seven months is nearer my idea of the proper time for being engaged.”

“Seven months? Oh, that would be too soon. I couldn’t possibly get my things ready.”

“Oh, things,” said he, with a manly disregard of chiffons which appealed to Regina as nothing else would have done.

“I must have things, Alfie.”

“Yes, darling, I know you must. And I don’t say that a good start-out wouldn’t be very useful to us; but you won’t spin it out too long, will you?”

“I never was brought up to sew,” said Regina, “I am learning now.”

“Can’t you buy ’em ready-made?”

“They don’t last,” said Regina. “And mother’s idea of the trousseau is to give me three dozen of everything. And they’ve all got to be made. I’m sewing white seams now, although I can’t cut out and plan. Look at my finger.”

He possessed himself of the firm, strong, first finger of his fiancée’s left hand and kissed it rapturously. “Poor little finger,” said he, “poor dear little finger! Can’t you have people in to do the things?”

“I am afraid that would go against mother’s ideas,” Regina returned, “but I’ll sound her on the point.”

Eventually Regina Brown’s three dozen of everything were got together, neatly folded, and tied up in half-dozens with delicate shades of ribbon, and the wedding day was fixed to take place just fourteen months after the engagement had come about.

The bride’s parents came down handsomely on the occasion. It was a great event, that wedding. Eight bridesmaids, four in pink and four in blue, followed Regina to the altar. Regina herself was dressed as a bride in a shiny white silk, with a voluminous veil. There was a large company, and much flying to and fro of hired carriages—mostly with white horses—distributing of favors, and a popping of champagne corks, when all was over and the two had been made man and wife. And then there was a heart-broken parting, when Regina was torn away from the ample bosom of her adoring mother, and a wild shower of rice and satin slippers, such as strewed the road before the Brown domicile for many days after the wedding was over.

So Regina Brown became Mrs. Alfred Whittaker, and her place in her father’s house knew her no more.

All things considered, she made an admirable wife. If Alfred adored Regina, Regina worshipped Alfred, and under her care, and in the sunshine of her lavish and outspoken admiration of his personal beauty, he grew sleek and prosperous.

If only a son had been born to them, a little son who would have carried on the traditions of both families, who could have been called Brown-Whittaker, and gladdened the hearts of three separate households. But no son came—never a sign of a son. On the contrary, about a year after their marriage a little daughter arrived on the scene, who was welcomed as a precursor of the unborn Brown-Whittaker, and was named Maud. And little Maud Whittaker grew and throve apace, went through the usual early infantile troubles, and, about two years later, the process which is known among domestic people as having her nose put out of joint.

And again it was a girl.

For some reason not explained to the whole world, the second baby was christened Julia, and forthwith became a very important item in the world.

“The next one must be a boy,” said Mrs. Alfred Whittaker, as she cuddled the new arrival to her side.

But there never was a next one, and slowly, as the second baby got through her troubles and began to toddle about and to play games with her sister, the truth was borne in upon her parents that what Maud had begun Julia had finished—that no boy would come to gladden the hearts of the Whittaker and Brown households, that no little Brown-Whittaker would ever make history.

Well, it was when Julia Whittaker was about six years old that her mother’s mind underwent a curious change. She was then just forty years old, a fine, buxom, healthy woman, a good deal given to looking upon the rest of the world with a superior eye, to feeling that whereas the other married ladies of her set had been content with the genteel education of a private seminary, she had gone further and had received the wide-minded and broad education of a professional man.

It was true enough. There was no subject on which Mrs. Alfred Whittaker was not able to demonstrate an exceedingly pronounced and autocratic opinion. She seldom wasted her time, even after her marriage, in reading what she called trash, and other people spoke of as a “circulating library.” Deep thoughts filled her mind, great questions entranced her interest, and high views dominated her life. She was keen on politics of the most Radical order. She had sifted religion, and found it wanting. She was an advanced Socialist—in her views, that is to say—and deep down in her heart, although as yet it had never found expression, was an innate admiration of men and an equal contempt for women. She felt, and often she said, that she had a man’s mind in an extremely feminine body.

“I cannot,” she declared one day, when discussing a great social question with a clever friend of Alfred’s, “shut my eyes to the fact that I do not look on a question of this kind as an ordinary woman would. An ordinary woman jumps to conclusions without knowing why or wherefore. I, on the contrary, have a clear and logical mind, which gets me perhaps to the same goal by a clear and definite process of reasoning. We may come from the same, and we may arrive at the same, and yet we are so different that neither has any sympathy with the other.”

And out of this conversation there arose in Regina Whittaker’s mind an idea that, after all, another decade had gone by, and she was still wasting her life.

“I asked myself a question at twenty,” her thoughts ran. “I asked it again at thirty, and now I have touched my fortieth birthday, here I am asking it yet once more. I have fulfilled the functions of wife and mother, and nothing else. Yet I am an extraordinary woman, far out of the common in intelligence, brain power, logic, and in all mental attributes. It only shows me that the time is not yet ripe for woman to become the equal of man. It is not the fault of the woman. Through many generations—nay, hundreds of years—she has been kept ignorant, inefficient, downtrodden by her lord and master. She has been used as a toy, and her one mission in life has been a mere function of nature—the reproduction of the race. It makes me savage,” she went on, talking to herself, “when I hear it cited as an immense work that a woman has produced so many babies. How many, I wonder, have produced those babies with any love of duty, poor feeble souls? After all, there is so little duty about it, and no choice midway. Well, here am I, who should be in a big position in the world, I who should have made myself a name, I who could have put George Eliot and all her set in the shade. I have absolutely wasted my life. I suppose I began too late. I am out of the common, but I do not rank as a woman out of the common. Still, I have daughters. From this moment I dedicate my life to my little Maud and Julia. They shall not begin their mission in the world too late. I would rather have been the mother of boys, but as I have proved to be only the mother of girls, I will try to make those girls what I have missed being myself. They shall be out of the common; they shall belong to the New Womanhood; they shall be brought up at least to be the equals of men.”

Now by this time the “something in the city” on which Regina and Alfred had started housekeeping had resolved itself into a very solid and prosperous position, though Alfred Whittaker—make no mistake about it—was not, and was never likely to be, a millionaire, or even a very wealthy man. But he was prosperous in a comfortable, assured, middle-class way. He was ambitious too—I mean socially ambitious—and he liked to feel that his wife was in a good set in the suburb in which they lived. He liked to go to church occasionally, and to have his own seat when he did so. He liked his rector to come to him as an open-handed, clean-living man on whom he could depend for contributions suitable to his style of living. He liked to be able to take his wife to a theatre, and to dine her beforehand, and to give her a bit of supper afterwards. He liked to go to the seaside for August, and to take a trip to Paris at Easter if he was so inclined. And, above all things, Alfred Whittaker liked a good dinner, a pretty, tasteful table, and a neat handmaiden to wait upon him. To do him justice, he never lost his early admiration for Regina. It was wonderful that he had not done so, for with her improved circumstances and her improved position, Regina’s taste in dress had not advanced. Sometimes, on a birthday, or some anniversary kept religiously by them, such as their day of engagement, their wedding day, the day on which they first met, the day on which they moved into the house they occupied—such domestic altars as most of us erect during the course of our lives—he would bring her home a present of a bonnet. He called it a bonnet, but it was generally a hat. Alfred always called it a bonnet nevertheless, and Regina invariably accepted it with blushes of admiration, and wore it with what, in another woman, would have been the courage of a martyr. It was no martyrdom to Regina. I have seen her with all her fair hair turned back from her large face, crowned with a modiste’s edifice which would have proved trying to a lovely girl of eighteen.

“You like my hat?” said Regina, one day to a friend. “Isn’t it lovely? Dear Alfie brought it for me from town. I believe he sent to Paris for it. It has a French name in the crown. Much more extravagant than I should have got for myself—these white feathers won’t wear, and all this lovely sky-blue velvet and these delicate pearl ornaments are far beyond what I should have chosen on my own responsibility. But I can’t help seeing how it becomes me.”

“Why don’t you have a waistcoat of the same color—a front, you know—this part?” asked her friend, making a line from her throat to her belt buckle.

“There is a sameness about the idea,” said Regina, superbly. “I have always flattered myself, Mrs. Marston, that I am one of the few women who can bear to mix her colors. You remember the old story of the young man who asked Sir Joshua Reynolds what he mixed his colors with, and his reply—‘Brains, sir, brains.’ ”