Life . . . is like love. All reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it.         
          EREWHON REVISITED.

ON hearing of the capture of Streeten, celebrated in the most jubilant strain by Mrs. Folyat, with a magnificently unjust comparison of her new son-in-law with Bennett Lawrie, Minna wrote this letter to Mary:

    “Mother Bub loves cutting her lamb up into chops. Did she fix him with an eye? You know how she can bore into the back of a man’s neck. I’m almost sorry I missed the fun. I suppose she’ll be better off than any of us. We’re beastly poor, the studio’s always in a mess and we can’t get it straight. London is amusing but awfully big and callous. It makes you feel that it never cares whether you’re there or not, and the river is almost the most human thing in it. Nobody seems to want Basil’s work. I suppose there are thousands of Basils all wanting to do the same thing, and I suppose each Basil has a me wanting a great deal to eat and more pleasure and fun than is good for her, and not caring particularly how much of his soul he has to sell to give it her. The Folyats have a certain charm, but we’re all selfish—except, of course, dear old Ma, who always would have it that we got our wickedness from Pa. Mother Bub has the charm of a basilisk, or a fly-paper. I hope she will come to London, as it will be nice to borrow money from her.

    Dearest love, Mottle dear,

    M.

    [Pg 281]

    P.S.—Basil has just sold a drawing. Sausages and mashed for supper! Also beer!

    P.P.S.—Did Bennett go to the wedding? How grateful he must have been to Streeten for stepping into his shoes.

    P.P.P.S.—I wouldn’t get married if I were you. And to think I might have been a Countess! Willie Folyat lives in London—the Hearl of Leedham, if you please. I hear he’s turned out a horrid little prig. I knew he would, I felt it in my bones. I have such clever bones.

    M. H.”

Mary was magnanimous and kept the letter to herself. She was essentially good-natured and bore no malice. She was amused by Minna’s spite and did not believe a word she said. To her Gertrude was happy; she was married, therefore she loved her husband and her husband loved her. It was impossible for Mary to take a detached view, to tell black from white, good from bad. She was mentally short-sighted and her pleasures lay entirely in sentiment. She loved music as she loved nothing else in the world, but her pleasure in it was the pleasure of rhythm. Harmony touched her not at all. She had a sort of nervous sensitiveness which made her extremely shy and unresponsive. A kind of island existence was hers, and the island on which she dwelt was in a perpetual fog. Every sound that reached her from without—and little else but sound did reach her—was blurred. Voices more easily moved her than actions or the expressions of a person’s face. She had always loved her father because of his soft, gentle voice, and when Serge was in the house she was animated and more quickly interested in what was going on around her.

She accepted her defeat by Gertrude docilely enough, gave up the majority of her pupils and much of her chamber-music and took up the reins of the household. With only her father and mother to provide for, it was fairly easy, and the expenses were so much reduced that she was able to pay more wages and to procure a better class of maid. Mrs. Folyat took a dislike to the [Pg 282]maid, and all her service had to be performed by Mary herself.

Serge had fallen into the habit of taking supper with his family—his father and mother and Mary—nearly every Sunday evening, and he was exasperated by the petty attentions which his mother was continually demanding. He had tried many a time to find a way to the heart of this curious, stupid, yet gentle and kindly sister of his, but he had always found it impossible to set her thoughts moving. She seemed to have almost lost the capacity of thinking, and she had so little sense of humour that any blunt statement of fact hurt her as a direct attack. She showed in many ways that she was fond of him, but it was as a dog is fond, with a mute uncomprehending sympathy.

Serge fell back on action. Whenever his mother, in the metallic tones of her querulous mood, asked Mary to fetch her book from the other end of the house, or to unravel her knitting when she had dropped a stitch, or to read to her because her eyes ached, Serge bustlingly and rather ostentatiously forestalled his sister. There was never any sign that he had produced any effect on mother or daughter.

This went on for months. Existence in the house in Burdley Park passed smoothly and placidly, and Francis seemed to be happy, as he had never been, busy with his parish and greenhouse. He was silent for days together, except that every now and then he would hum tunelessly to himself, booming like a bumble-bee. He had every small joy that he asked of the world and was content. He liked the new generation of his parishioners better than the old, they were not so dour, and everything seemed to him to be going well and happily. He saw Frederic very seldom, and Annette very frequently, and Minna and Gertrude were regular correspondents. Serge had not for a very long time asked him for money, and for the first time for many, many years his expenses and income were on good terms with each other. Best of all, Mrs. Folyat had begun to see herself and her husband as a sort of Darby and Joan, and sweetened her conduct to fit the character. Everybody said you might go far before [Pg 283]you could find a more delightful old couple. They achieved a sort of celebrity.

Mary too came in for her share of the general admiration, and her devotion to her mother was by more than one tyrannous old woman brandished over the head of a peevish and fading daughter. Mary recked nothing of it, and it would have made no impression on her if she had.

One Sunday, when her mother had rather explosively demanded her spectacles, and Serge without a word had gone down to the dining-room for them, and without a word had given them to her, a new idea came to Mary. She sat stupidly gazing at her mother and very slowly she began to think what would become of her if her father and mother were to die. There was a loud-ticking clock in the room, and it said with remorseless insistency:

“I-shall-be-alone.”

This was a very dreadful idea to her. She strangled it.

There is no getting rid of thoughts. If they are strangled their corpses remain and rot in the mind, to its lasting detriment. This idea remained in Mary’s mind, cold and dead, and gradually poisoned the sweetness of her nature.

A fixed idea is a dead idea.

 

Mary’s temper suffered, and she vented her spleen on her pupils to such a degree that there came a time when she had only one left—the youngest daughter of the sausage-machine manufacturing widower, all of whose daughters she had instructed in turn in a polite mastery of the violin. Her bi-weekly visits to his house had become part of the routine of his house............