A Woman's War - Warwick Deeping (best black authors .TXT) 📗
- Author: Warwick Deeping
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to initiate the movement, followed the fat lady’s inspiriting example. Mrs. Stensly was in the garden. The
breweress and her flock of sheep filed through the open
window to shake hands and go.
“Madge.”
“Hallo, dear, am I sitting on you? Whither away?”
“To pay my most dutiful respects!”
Catherine Murchison and the Canon had left the window, and were pacing the grass under the benisons of the
great cedar. By the expression of their faces, and the
serious yet sympathetic inflection of their voices, they had
broken the mere social surface, and were speaking of
deeper things. It is the fashion to abuse the priesthood
in the abstract, yet any critic who took the clean-girt manliness of Canon Stensly ‘s character might find his rhetoric
chilled in its free flow.
“You have done the right thing, and your true friends
will be glad of it.”
“It was my husband’s wish.”
“The wish of a brave man.”
“What a wonderful thing is sympathy! You have
helped me so much this afternoon. It was an ordeal.
You know, we dread the unknown uncertainty.”
The big, gray-headed man looked down at her with
much of the affection of a father. His hands had given
her confirmation and joined her hand in marriage.
“Doubt is a great distorting glass,” he said, simply;
“the difficulties of life decrease the moment they are
faced.”
“I am glad you are on our side.”
“I should be a poor Christian if I were not.”
A figure in a pink dress, sumptuous and perfect as to
the milliner’s craft, glided across the grass, and cast a
shadow at Catherine’s feet.
“How d’you do, Kate? You have surprised us all
assuredly.”
The two women touched hands. Betty Steel’s drawl
ascended towards patronage. She assumed the air of a
mistress of a salon whose salutation decided destinies
and dispensed fame.
“How is Dr. Murchison? This long rest must have
done him good.”
“Thanks. My husband is very well.”
“I am afraid we all misunderstood your plans. We
thought you had left Roxton for good. I suppose Dr.
Murchison will not expose himself again to the strain of
general practice. Surgical cases are such a responsibility.”
It is the ability of women to be politely insolent and
to cover a taunt with ironical courtesy. There were at
least a dozen people within range of Mrs. Betty’s aggressive drawl, and Betty Steel had no intention of letting
Roxton forget James Murchison ‘s past.
“And how are the children?”
Her eyes were studying the details of Catherine’s dress
with the critical acuteness so trying to a woman.
“The boy is very well, thanks.”
“And the other a girl, was it not?”
“You need not trouble to remember her.”
“That sounds as though you were disappointed. I
remember how you used to read me texts on the divinity
of motherhood.”
“The child is dead, Betty, that is all.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. I always thought the girl was
delicate.”
Canon Stensly’s massive shadow interposed itself between the slighter silhouettes upon the grass,
“Your husband has kept his promise, Mrs. Murchison.”
“Is he here?”
“Yes, yonder, with my wife.”
Betty Steel’s face was tinged with a malignity that
leaked from her eyes and from the sneering angles of
her mouth. She felt glad that Catherine’s favorite child
was dead. The incomprehensible malice in the thought
justified itself in the reflection that Catherine had lost
something that she, Betty, had always lacked.
She passed James Murchison as she returned towards
the house, a man with a certain dignity of past suffering
writ heavily upon his face. He was talking to two old
friends. Betty swept by him without troubling to notice
whether he bowed to her or not. The man was a mere
pawn in the game so far as she was concerned. Any
humiliation that he might suffer was only valuable so
far as it humiliated his wife.
The carriage was waiting for them under the limes of
Canon’s Court. Madge Ellison flounced down in her
corner with a relieved sigh.
“What a function! Well, how is she, charming as
ever?”
“Who?”
“You know whom I mean, Betty?”
“That beast?”
“I heard you call her that once when we were at school,”
and Miss Ellison tittered; “I believe she’ll make the whole
town swallow the past.”
“Will she indeed!”
“You don’t relish the idea?”
“Wait, my dear girl; we have not seen the end of the
game yet.”
ROXTON, like a certain lady of literary fame, was
ever ready with its free opinions on any subject
that it did not understand. The return of the Murchisons had exercised the town’s capacity for criticism, and
inaugurated a debate that was to be heard at publichouse bars, as well as in the parlors of the pious. The
facts of the case were generally agreed upon; but facts
are things that the ingenious mind of man can juggle
with. The complexion of the affair varied with the convictions of the debater, and the sacred incidents of home
life profaned or honored according to the temper of the
tongue that dealt with them.
In Mill Lane the case had a most energetic exponent
in the person of Mr. William Bains, the sweep, A certain brewer’s drayman, who had won some crude celebrity as an atheist, had taken upon himself to argue on
the adverse side. The two gentlemen squared to each
other one evening at the bottom of the lane, and thrashed
it out strenuously before a meagre but attentive crowd.
“What about the inquest? Didn’t we read the ‘ole of
it in the Mail and Times? Yer can’t get away from
facts, can yer?”
“And supposin’ he did make a mistake for once, does
that mean callin’ a man a fool and a danger to the public?
Who drove his cart last week into a pillar-box by Wilson’s
grocery shop?”
Mr. Bains scored a palpable hit. The audience laughed.
“Got ‘im there, William,” said a neighbor.
The drayman sniffed, and threw out his stomach.
“Facts is facts. Doctorin’ ain’t drivin’ ‘osses.”
“Thank the Lord, Mr. Sweetyer, it ain’t, for our
sakes.”
“I say the man blundered.”
“And who ‘asn’t run ‘is nose into a lamp-post on occasions? Why, look ‘ere,” and Mr. Bains stretched out a
didactic forefinger, “when my little girl ‘ad the diphtheria,
who pulled ‘er through? And who saved old Jenny
Lowther’s leg? And there was young Ben Thompson,
who some London joker swore was a dyin’ man!”
“That’s true,” said a bony woman in an old red blouse.
The drayman, finding the neighbors inclined to take the
sweep’s view of the matter, began to look hot, and a little
nettled.
“Well, what ‘ave yer got to say about the booze?” he
asked.
“I reckon that’s more your business than mine.”
Again the audience caught the gibe and laughed.
“Three gallons a day, that’s ‘is measure,” interjected
a morose gentleman, who was hanging over his garden
gate and smoking the stump of a clay pipe.
“Wasn’t ‘e carried ‘ome from the club?”
“P’raps ‘e was, p’r’aps ‘e wasn’t. Any fool could ‘ave
seen that the man ‘ad been workin’ hisself to death. Why,
he fainted bang off one mornin’, round at our ‘ouse. Ask
my missus. A thimbleful o’ brandy would ‘ave made a
man in ‘is state ‘ug the railin’s.”
“Anyhow, he hugged ‘em,” said the obdurate opponent.
“We ain’t always responsible for what we do when we’ve
‘ad a bad smack over the side of the jaw.”
“Doct’rs oughtn’t ter touch it.”
“You’re a nice one to preach, now, ain’t yer?”
“He is that,” quoth the laconic worthy at the gate.
“Look ‘ere, don’t you go shovin’ it into me sideways.”
“Let me argue ‘im, Mr. Catt.”
“Argue, you ‘ain’t got a leg to stand on!”
“Haven’t I, my boy!” and the two disputants began to
glare.
The drayman wiped his hands on the back of his
breeches.
“Some fool ‘11 be callin’ me a liar soon,” he remarked.
“It’s on the cards.”
“Look ‘ere, Bill Bains, I’ve ‘ad enough of your sarce.
Stow it.”
“You go and bully your kids. Can’t I speak my mind
when I bloomin’ well like?”
“Course ‘e can,” said the lady in the red blouse; “and
‘e speaks it well, ‘e does. Murchison was always a right
down gentleman; better than that there little nipper,
Steel.”
“Right for you, Mrs. Penny. We don’t go blackguardin’ other people’s characters, do we?”
“I ain’t blackguardin’ the man, I’m statin’ facts.”
“Facts, facts why, the man’s clean daft on facts. Facts
must be another name for a pint of bitter.”
“I’ll smash your jaw, Bill Bains, if you don’t stow it.”
“Smash away, my buck. Who’s afraid of a bloomin’
cask?”
Whereon the dwellers in Mill Lane were treated to an
exhibition of two minutes straight hitting, an exhibition
that ended in the intervention of friends. But since the
drayman departed with a red nose and a swollen eye, it
may be inferred that the sweep had the best of the argument.
To have one’s past, present, and future dragged through
the back streets of a country town is not an experience
that a man of selfrespect would welcome. A sensitive
spirit cannot fail to feel the atmosphere about it. It may
see the sun shining, the clouds white against the blue,
the natural phenomena of health and of well-being; or
the faces of a man’s fellows may be as sour puddles to
him, their sympathy a wet December.
Trite as the saying is, that in trouble we make trial of
our friends, only those who have faced defeat know the
depth and meaning of that time-worn saying. A week
in Roxton betrayed to Catherine and her husband the
number and the sincerity of their friends. The instinct
of pride is wondrous quick in detecting truth from shams,
even as an expert’s fingers can tell old china by the feel.
The population of the place was soon mapped out into
the priggishly polite, the piously distant, the vulgarly inquisitive, the unaffected honest, and the honestly indifferent. Catherine met many a face that brightened to
hers in the Roxton streets. The past seemed to have
banked more good-will for them then they had imagined.
It was among the poor that they found the least forgetfulness, less of the cultured and polite hauteur, less affectation, less hypocrisy. As for the practice, they found
it non-existent that first humiliating yet half-happy week.
But perhaps the sincerest person in Roxton at that
moment was the wife of Dr. Parker Steel. Betty was not
a passionate woman in the matter of her affections, but in
her capabilities for hatred she concentrated the energy
of ten. She had come quite naturally to regard herself
as the most gifted and interesting feminine personality
that Roxton could boast. Every woman has an instinctive conviction that her own home, and her own children,
are immeasurably superior to all others. With Betty
Steel, this spirit of womanly egotism had been largely
centred on herself. She had no children to make her
jealous and critical towards other women’s children. It
was the symmetry of her own success in life that had
developed into an enthralling art, an art that absorbed
her whole soul.
It might have been imagined that she had climbed too
high to trouble about an old hate; that she was too
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