A Woman's War - Warwick Deeping (best black authors .TXT) 📗

gossip that haunts

a healer’s name. Parker Steel was essentially a selfish

mortal, and selfish men are often the happiest, provided

they succeed.

 

Yet no man, however selfish, can wholly stifle his own

thoughts. That the silence he kept was an immoral

silence, no man knew better than did Parker Steel. People would have shrunk from him had they known the

truth, as a refined woman shrinks from the offensive

carcass of a drunken tramp. His own niceness of taste

revolted from the consciousness of chance and undeserved

pollution. Ambition was strong in him, however, and

the cold tenacity to hold what he had gained. More

isolated than Selkirk on his island, he had to bear the bitterness of it alone, knowing that sympathy was locked

out by silence.

 

The supreme trying of his powers of hypocrisy came for

him in his attitude towards his wife. Parker Steel was

in no sense an uxorious fellow, and neither he nor Betty

were ever demonstrative towards each other. An occasional half-perfunctory meeting of the lips had satisfied both after the first year of marriage. For this reason

Parker Steel’s ordeal was less complex and severe than

if he had had to repulse an emotional and warm-blooded

woman.

 

The first diplomatic development had been insomnia;

at least that was the excuse he made to Betty when he

chose to sleep alone in his dressing-room at the back of

the house. The faintest sound disturbed him, so he protested, and the rattle of wheels over the cobbles of the

Square kept him irritably sleepless in the early hours of

the morning. To Betty Steel there was no inconsistency

in the excuse he gave. She thought him worried and

overworked, and there was abundant justification for the

latter evil. Winter and early spring are the briskest

seasons of a doctor’s life. Dr. Steel had had seven severe

cases of pneumonia on his list one week.

 

“You are too much in demand, Parker,” she had said.

“There is always the possibility of a partner to be considered.”

 

“Thanks, no; I am not a believer in a co-operative

business.”

 

“You must take a jaunt somewhere as soon as the work

slackens.”

 

“All in good time, dear.”

 

“Sicily is fashionable.”

 

Parker Steel had indulged in optimistic reflections to

distract her vigilance. She had sought to prove that he

was in stale health by remarking that the wound on his

forefinger had not completely healed. He was still wearing the finger-stall that covered the fons et origo malt.

 

“There is absolutely no need for you to fuss about me,”

he had answered; “I am not made of iron, and the work

tells. Three thousand a year is not earned without

worry.”

 

“As much as that, Parker?”

 

He had touched a susceptible passion in her.

 

“Perhaps more. We shall be able to call our own tune

before we are five-and-forty.”

 

“Heaven defend us, Parker, you hint at terrible things.

Respectable obesity, and morning prayers.”

 

Her husband had laughed, and given her plausible

comfort.

 

“You will be more dangerous then than you are now,”

he had said.

 

In truth, their fortunes were very much in the ascendant, and the social side of professional life had prospered

in Mrs. Betty’s hands. The brunette was supreme in

Roxton so far as beauty was concerned, supreme also in

the yet more magic elements of graceful savoir-faire and

tact. She was one of those women who had learned to

charm by flattery without seeming to be a sycophant;

moreover, she had tested the wisdom of propitiating her

own sex by appearing even more amiable to women than

to men. Since the passing of the Murchisons she had

had nothing in the way of rivalry to fear. True, two

“miserable squatters” had put up brass plates in the

town, and scrambled for some of the poorer of James Murchison’s patients. Mrs. Betty had been able to call upon

the wives with patronizing magnanimity. They were both

rather dusty, round-backed ladies, with no pretensions to

style, either in their own persons or in the persons of their

husbands. One of these professional gentlemen, a huge

and flat-faced Paddy, resembled a police constable in

plain clothes. The other was rather a meek young man

in glasses, destitute of any sense of humor, and very useful in the Sunday-school.

 

Roxton had weathered Lent and Easter, and Lady

Sophia Gillingham, Dame President of the local habitation of the Primrose League; patroness of all Roxton

charities, Dissenting enterprises excepted; and late lady-inwaiting to the Queen; had called her many dear friends

together to discuss the coming Midsummer Bazaar that

was held annually for the benefit of the Roxton Cottage

Hospital. Roxton, like the majority of small country

towns, was a veritable complexity of cliques, and by

“Roxton” should be understood the superior people who

were Unionists in politics, and Church Christians in religion. There were also Chapel Christians in Roxton,

chiefly of Radical persuasion, and therefore hardly decent

in the sight of the genteel. People of ” peculiar views—”

were rare, and not generally encouraged. Some of the

orthodox even refused to buy a local tradesman’s boots,

because that particular tradesman was not a believer in

the Trinity. The inference is obvious that the “Roxton” concerned in Lady Sophia’s charitable bazaar, was

superior and highly cultured Roxton, the Roxton of dinner-jackets and distinction, equipages, and Debrett.

 

To be a very dear friend of Lady Sophia Gillingham’s

was to be one of the chosen and elect of God, and Betty

Steel had come by that supreme and angelic exaltation.

Perhaps Mignon’s kitten had purred and gambolled Mrs.

Betty into favor; more probably the physician’s wife had

nothing to learn from any cat. Betty Steel and her husband dined frequently at Roxton Priory. The brunette

had even reached the unique felicity of being encouraged

in informal and unexpected calls. Lady Sophia possessed

a just and proper estimate of her own social position.

She was fat, commonplace, and amiable, poorly educated,

a woman of few ideas. But she was Lady Sophia Gillingham, and would have expected St. Peter to give her proper

precedence over mere commoners in the anteroom of

heaven.

 

The third Thursday after Easter Mrs. Betty Steel

drove homeward in a radiant mood, with the spirit of

spring stolen from the dull glint of a fat old lady’s eyes.

There had been an opening committee meeting, and

Lady Sophia had expressed it to be her wish that Mrs.

Steel should be elected secretary. Moreover, the production of a play had been discussed, a pink muslin drama

suited to the susceptibilities of the Anglican public. The

part of heroine had been offered, not unanimously, to Mrs.

Betty. And with a becoming spirit of diffidence she had

accepted the honor, when pressed most graciously by the

Lady Sophia’s own prosings.

 

Mrs. Betty might have impersonated April as she

swept homeward under the high beneficence of St.

Antonia’s elms. The warmth of worldly well - being

plumps out a woman’s comeliness. She expands and

ripens in the sun of prosperity and praise, in contrast to

the thousands of the ever-contriving poor, whose sordid

faces are but the reflection of sordid facts.

 

Betty Steel’s face had an April alluringness that day;

its outlines were soft and beautiful, suggestive of the

delicacy of apple bloom seen through morning mist. She

was exceeding well content with life, was Mrs. Betty,

for her husband was in a position to write generous

checks, and the people of Roxton seemed ready to pay

her homage.

 

Parker Steel was reading in the diningroom when this

triumphant and happy lady came in like a white flower

rising from a sheath of green. It was only when selfishly

elated that the wife showed any flow of affection for her

husband. For the once she had the air of an enthusiastic girl whom marriage had not robbed of her

ideals.

 

“Dear old Parker”

 

She went towards him with an out-stretching of the

hands, as he dropped the Morning Post, and half rose

from the lounge chair.

 

“Had a good time?”

 

“Quite splendid.”

 

She swooped towards him, not noticing the furtive yet

watchful expression in her husband’s face.

 

“Give me a kiss, old Morning Post.”

 

“How is Madam Sophia?”

 

“Most affable.”

 

Parker Steel had caught her out-stretched hands. It

was as though he were afraid of touching his wife’s lips.

 

“Making conquests, eh?”

 

“Waal I guess that” and she spoke through her

nose.

 

“Dollars?”

 

“Enticing them into the family pocket.”

 

Something in her husband’s eyes touched Betty Steel

beneath her vivacity and easy persiflage. Her husband

had risen from his chair, released her hands, and moved

away towards the fire. She had a sudden instinct telling

her that he was not glad of her return.

 

The wife’s airiness was damped instantly. Parker

Steel had repelled her with the semi-playful air of a man

not wishing to be bothered. She had noticed this suggestion of aloofness much in him of late, and had ascribed

it to irritability, the result of overwork.

 

“Anything the matter, dear?”

 

“Matter?”

 

He looked at her frankly, with arched brows and open

eyes.

 

“Yes, you seem tired—”

 

“There is some excuse for me. This is the first ten

minutes I have had to myself all day. It is an effort to

talk when one’s tongue has been going for hours.”

 

His wife’s face appeared a little triste and peevish.

She glanced at herself in the mirror over the mantel-piece,

and found herself wondering why life seemed composed

of actions and reactions.

 

“Have you had tea?”

 

“No, I waited,” and he turned and rang the bell with

a feeling of relief. It was trying to his watchfulness for

Parker Steel to be left alone with his own wife. Even the

white cap of the parlor-maid was welcome to him, or the

flimsiest barrier that could aid him in his ordeal of silent

self-isolation. The art of hypocrisy grows more complex with each new statement of relationships. And

hypocrisy in the home is the reguilding of a substance

that tarnishes with every day. The wear and tear of

life erase the lying surface, and the daily daubing becomes

a habit by necessity, even as a single dying of the hair

pledges the vain mortal to perpetual self-decoration.