Читать книгу Ann and Her Mother (Autobiographical Novel) - O. Douglas - Страница 6

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"No honeymoon!"

Ann's pen was held aloft in amaze, as she looked across at her mother seated at the other side of the fire in her very own chair that had stood by the nursery fireside in long past days. Well did Ann remember the comfortable squat legs of it from the time when she had lived in that world of chair-legs and the underside of sofas which we all inhabit at the beginning of things.

Ann's mother was knitting as usual, a stocking for a long-legged grandson; but she knitted mechanically, not looking at her work, her eyes on the dancing flames, a little reminiscent smile turning up the corners of her mouth.

"No honeymoon!" Ann again ejaculated. "What was Father thinking of? Didn't you mind?"

"Mind? No. Where would we go in December but to our own little house? You must remember that I had hardly ever left Etterick except to go to school, and the journey north seemed a wonderful adventure to me; and your father was in such a hurry to show me the little Manse and all the new furniture that the train journey seemed all too long. We got to Inchkeld very late, and it was snowing hard. We looked about for the cab that had been ordered to meet us, but your father said, 'There's only a carriage and pair; that can't be for us—let's walk.' So off we set, I in my sealskin coat and prune-coloured bonnet! And the sad thing was that the carriage and pair was meant for us. It turned out that the carriage-hirer came from Priorsford, and when he got the order he said, 'It's for Mr. Mark and his bride; I'll send a pair.' And the pair came, and we walked!"

Ann laughed. "Too much humility doesn't pay. There's a parable there if I had time to think it out. Well, and did the house come up to your expectations?"

"It was one of a row of houses," said Mrs. Douglas. "There was a gate and a strip of garden, and a gravel-path leading to the front door. On your right as you went in at the door was the dining-room—but before we got to that your father had to show me everything in the little entrance hall and tell me the price. Very ugly things you would call them—you who like crumbling Jacobean chests and gate tables; but I was very well pleased with the brand new hall table (on which stood a large brass bell), the hat-stand, and the thing for umbrellas. I really liked them much better than the beautiful old things at Etterick; they were new and they were mine. The dining-room had a bow window which held a green wire stand full of growing ferns. (Isn't it odd that after forty years I remember every detail?) The room was hardly big enough to hold the huge mahogany sideboard with the mirrored back, and all the other furniture."

"I remember the pictures," Ann said, "at least I expect they were the same as at Kirkcaple and Glasgow—big steel engravings; one of a slave market which I liked very much, and another that the boys liked better, of fat priests looking at the provisions brought by the country people for the Monastery—ducks and fowls, and a large salmon and a slain deer. We made up stories about those pictures."

"The drawing-room was the crowning glory of the house," Mrs. Douglas went on. She was not listening to her daughter; she was living over again that first enchanting peep at her own house. "My father furnished it for us, and everything he did was well done. It was midnight before we had finished supper, but I couldn't have slept without seeing it. The wall-paper was pure white with bunches of gilt flowers; it was your father's choice and I thought I had seldom seen anything so beautiful. How dull it must be for women who marry men who take no interest in the house! I'm thankful that I had a man who was interested in every thing. It made doing things so much more worth while. He was so innocent the way he showed his belongings to people, taking their interest for granted, like a child. I can see him now watching my face as the full glory of the room burst on me. It was lit by a glittering glass gasalier hung from the ceiling; I had known only lamps and candles. The rosewood suite was covered with bright crimson rep, there were crimson rep curtains at the bow window, a chiffonier with a marble top stood against one wall, our shining new piano against another, a round rosewood table in the middle of the room, and an ottoman covered with bead work in the window. Really, Ann, I can hardly forgive you when I think that when you grew up you made me part with the chiffonier and the rosewood table, and the ottoman, and that comfortable couch."

"What a vindictive mother!" said Ann. "But why did you do it? Surely my eighteen-year-old yearnings after a high-art drawing-room could have been quelled."

"Oh, I suppose they could, but I didn't want to 'daunton' you, and you didn't see how you could live unless you got at least one room in the house made what you called artistic. You said our drawing-room walls were just a network, and perhaps I had too many things hanging from the picture-rail (it used to be a puzzle to get them all up again at spring-cleaning times), but they had all a reason for being there—the plaques framed in plush that Mark painted, your water-colours, and all the enlarged photographs of people I was fond of. You put them all ruthlessly away, and had the walls done with brown paper and hung up a few dreary-looking pictures in dark frames. And you chose a dull blue carpet, and orange cushions, and all my cheerful red rep chairs were covered with sad-coloured stuffs, and you got green blinds and kept them pulled down so that the room was almost quite dark, and people who came to call just stotted over obstacles on their way to shake hands. And you banished photographs——"

Ann's face wore a guilty look as her mother told of her sins and faults of youth, and she broke in:

"But own, Mother, that the phase didn't last long. I know it was dreadful while it lasted. I had met some artists and they had fussed me and my head was turned. I must have been a sore trial to my family at that time. Father, losing patience with me one night, said, 'Oh, go to bed, girl, and don't sit attitudinising there!' You should have beaten me instead of giving in to me when I suggested putting away the things you were fond of. Young people are heartless because they don't think. I would know better now."

"Well," Mrs. Douglas gave a long sigh, "it's only now I miss my things. I parted from them light-heartedly—rather proud, I dare say, of being so modern. I didn't know that I would live to cherish every relic of my first married days, because I had lost the one who shared them. … Not that I behaved well that first year in Inchkeld. Of course, I was only seventeen, but I might have had more sense. I cried half the time. What a damp and disconsolate companion for any poor man! No, I had nothing to cry about! Au contraire, as the seasick Frenchman said when asked if he had dined (to use Robbie's favourite jest); but I had never been away from home before, and I missed Agatha, and I missed the boys, and I missed all the stir of a big family and the cheery bustle that goes on in a country house. I loved my little doll's house, so new and fresh, but the streets, and the houses full of strangers oppressed me, and I was woefully homesick. Your grandmother, my mother-in-law—she died before you were born, and you missed knowing one of the kindest women that ever lived—sent her cook, Maggie Ann, a capable girl from the Borders, to be my servant, and she was as homesick as I was. One day we saw an old tinker body who visited Etterick regularly on her rounds walking down the road with her box of small wares slung on her back. The sight to us was like cold water to a thirsty man. Maggie Ann rushed out and brought her in, and we feasted the astonished old woman and bought up nearly all her wares. The thought that she would be seeing Etterick soon, that she would sleep in our barn, would hear the soft Lowland tongue and see all my own people made that old beggar-wife a being to be envied by me. … Poor Maggie Ann was very patient with her inefficient mistress, and was young enough rather to enjoy my effort to housekeep. She said it reminded her of when she was a bairn and played at a wee house. We tried all sorts of experiments with food, but I don't remember that anything turned out very well. I'm afraid we wasted a good deal. It was a very long, cold winter, that winter in Inchkeld. The snow lay on the ground, and the frost held late into March, and even my sealskin coat could not keep out the cold. We grew tired of skating, and I took to moping in the house——"

"Really, Mother," said Ann, "it sounds frightfully unlike you as I have always known you—a little bustling hurricane of a woman, waking up all the dreaming ones, spurring the idle to work, a reproach to the listless, an example to all—and you tell me you sat in the house and moped and cried."

Mrs. Douglas shook her head. "I wasn't always a bustling hurricane. I think I became that because I married such a placid man; just as I became a Radical because he was such a Tory; just as I had to become sternly practical because he was such a dreamer. If we had both been alike we would have wandered hand-in-hand into the workhouse. Not that Mark spent money on himself—bless him—but nobody ever asked him for help and was refused; and he did like to buy things for me. I found I just had to take control of the money. Not at first, of course; it came to it by degrees. And your father was only too glad; money was never anything but a nuisance to him. I don't think I'm inordinately fond of money either, but I had to hain so that for years it had an undue prominence in my mind. Well, I sighed for the South Country, and one day, when I was miserably moping over the fire, your father said to me: 'Come on, Nell, I'm going to visit a sick girl about your own age. She's always asking me questions about you, and I said you would go and see her.'

"I didn't want to go, for I was shy of sick people—the being ill in bed seemed to put them such a distance away—but I put on my best clothes to make a good impression, and went. … We were taken into a clean, bright room, with a dressing-table dressed crisply in white muslin over pink. A girl was lying high up on the pillows, and I thought at first she couldn't be ill, she had such shining blue eyes and rose-flushed cheeks; her yellow hair hung in two plaits over her shoulders. Then I saw that her hands were almost transparent, and that her breath came in quick gasps between her red, parted lips, and I knew that this pretty child was dying quickly of consumption. I couldn't speak as I took her hand, but I tried hard to keep the tears from my eyes as she looked at me—two girls about an age, the one beginning life at its fullest, the other about to leave the world and youth behind. I stood there in my wedding braws, hating myself almost for my health and happiness. Your father talked to her until I got hold of myself, and then she seemed to like to hear me tell about the little house and my attempts to cook. As we were leaving she held your father's hand, and said, in her weak, husky voice, 'Mr. Douglas, tell the folk on Sabbath that Christ is a Rock. … ' I think I realised then, for the first time, what religion meant. A sentence in that book we were reading, Green Apple Harvest, reminded me of that girl. … You know when Robert is dying and his brother Clem says to him:

"'Oh, Bob, it seems unaccountable hard as you should die in the middle of May!'

"And Robert replies: '. … I've a feeling as if I go to the Lord God I'll only be going into the middle of all that's alive. … If I'm with Him I can't never lose the month of May. … '

"I went home crying bitterly for the girl who was dying in the May morning of her days. I don't think I moped any more."