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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
'The merriest tale of human depravity you will ever read' HILARY MANTEL Ivy Compton-Burnett's mordantly funny, unsparing dissection of the patriarchal family, back in print with an introduction by Hilary Mantel It is Christmas Day, 1885, and the Edgeworths are at each other's throats again. Duncan holds his wife and children captive to his authoritarian whims; every day brings fresh struggles for power. Before breakfast is over, there will be presents in the fire. When illness strikes the family, volatile tensions are unleashed that result in scandal, adultery and murder, while a crowd of gossiping neighbours watches gleefully on. A brutally funny demolition of patriarchal authority, A House and Its Head confirms Ivy Compton-Burnett's status as one of the unique stylists of twentieth-century English fiction, and its greatest chronicler of the violent dysfunction of families.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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‘Ivy Compton-Burnett was that rare novelist who finds a form perfect for what she has to say and sticks to it… She is the cynic’s cynic, and remains deeply shocking’
Philip Hensher
‘Dark, hilarious, evil… I have all twenty of her novels and I’ve read nineteen. If I read the one that is left there will be no more Ivy Compton-Burnett for me and I will probably have to die myself’
John Waters
‘Hilarious, harrowing… [like] Jane Austen on bad drugs’
Francine Prose
‘Her scalpel-sharp pen performed startling surgery on the accepted concept of genteel family life’
Daily Telegraph
‘Absolutely sui generis… Her remorseless humor and savagery are a unique cocktail. There’s no middle ground with this novelist— you’re either bewildered by her or you become an addict’
BOMB
‘A remarkable and unusual novelist, who has, in her own well-tilled field, no rival and no parallel’
TLS
A HOUSE AND ITS HEAD
Ivy Compton-Burnett
With an introduction byhilary mantel
PUSHKIN PRESS
A HOUSE AND ITS HEAD
Contents
Introduction
This is the merriest tale of human depravity you will ever read. It begins on Christmas day, 1885: it is breakfast time, and having prepared presents for the children, the patriarch prepares his weapons. When his wife observes that the children are down late, Duncan Edgeworth makes no reply. To further harmless pleasantries, he makes no reply either. But instead, ‘put his finger down his collar, and settled his neck.’
Oh, Ellen, you want to say, throw a tea cup at him! She cannot, of course. As Thucydides puts it, the strong exact what they can and the weak yield what they must. By the end of breakfast, the nephew of the house, Grant, has lost his best present, a book; his uncle has thrown it into the fire.
We can guess the book is Darwin’s Origin of Species, or some allied work: not new, but perhaps new to Grant, and enlightening to him. Ivy Compton-Burnett likes to explore the slow workings of inheritance – the persistence of family traits in physiognomy and constitution, but also the transmission of quirks and quarrels from the old and dominant to the meek and young: who themselves, in their turn, become martyrs or tyrants. Appearances do not deceive. Grant’s ‘lively almond 8 eyes’ and ‘smooth black head’ mark him out as a charmer who commits follies with housemaids. Sybil, insipidly fair and pretty, is a drawing room machiavel. Her elder sister Nance, tall and thin with features ‘set awry,’ is the book’s moral centre – and this family badly needs one. Duncan himself is, as Grant notes, a weak man behind his bluster, spiteful rather than masterful. But there is no doubt about the essential relation between parents and children. Parents are, Duncan says simply, ‘over them,’ and in this cheese-paring establishment – ‘run on women servants,’ Ivy notes – it is father who has all the economic power. Having no direct heir, Duncan is prepared to hand his estates to Grant – but Grant is like a number of self-saboteurs in Ivy’s work, and bent on complicating his prospects.
Born in 1884, Ivy Compton-Burnett set her stories in the world of her early years. As she was dealing with passions hallowed by time – avarice, lust, craving for power – she saw no need to trouble her reader with shifting fashions in clothes or architecture. She did not share a background with her characters, but came from the professional middle classes, her father a doctor who married twice and had two families, twelve children in all. Her family was ‘smashed up,’ as she said, by the Great War. Two of her brothers died young, one killed on the Somme. Two of her sisters poisoned themselves in a bizarre suicide pact. Ivy herself was a victim of the flu pandemic and contracted pneumonia; without antibiotics, she said, ‘one just fought for breath for about a month.’ Afterwards she suffered lingering debility and depression. After an early novel, Dolores, which she later disowned, she produced nothing until 1925, when Pastors and Masters was pronounced by the New Statesman to be ‘like nothing else in the world.’
9This slight, sharp, funny book was the beginning of an unbroken run of 19 novels, which gain in coherence and force but which, as one of her friends put it, ‘escaped the perils of popularity.’ Her British publisher did not seem to understand or value her work and did little to promote it. But it is possible that of her contemporaries, she will be read the longest – precisely because she applied the date stamp so firmly, pre-empting judgement on whether she is wearing well. She will always be seen as a curiosity, offering few of the conventional handholds a reader expects. But those who tune into her peculiar resonance find her bracing and necessary. Sometimes you blink at the page: does that mean what I think it means? Robert Liddell, in his 1955 book The Novels of I. Compton-Burnett, expresses the dismay of the new reader: ‘When I first met Miss Compton-Burnett’s work, in A House and Its Head, I wondered uneasily for some pages whether she could write at all before I discovered she wrote better than any living novelist.’
Ivy’s life is chronicled in two volumes of biography by Hilary Spurling: Ivy When Young is followed by Secrets of a Woman’s Heart, which takes the reader from 1920 to her death in 1969. Her early life was crowded by tragedy. Later events were mostly cerebral, though Ivy knew most of the famous authors of her day and read them with a cold eye. She lived in London in modest affluence, sharing a roof for many years with the antiquarian Margaret Jourdain. Writing by hand in penny exercise books, she created a unique body of work, consistent in manner, style and subject, unaffected by critical opinion, untouched by any external prompt: as if she were listening to inner music of her own. Enough had happened to her, perhaps, for her to make up her mind what human beings were, or could be. There was 10 no need to force artificial excitement into life. Her career was that of a witness.
The settings of her novels are enclosed communities – boarding schools, or the nurseries, dining and drawing rooms of shabby country houses, where multi-generation families stage and witness primal dramas, spied on by busy neighbours and attended by a complement of cooks, butlers, bootblacks and gardeners. In these genteel families, wickedness is seldom punished – it is seldom even named. The guilty thrive, and progress to more advanced sins. If someone locks a desk, the lock will be broken. A simple parlour game will reveal the unspeakable, scrawled on a scrap of paper. Meanness and financial stringency make for routine discomfort, so if the characters come home to a good fire it is because someone has been burning a will.
Summarized, the plot of A House and Its Head seems implausible and melodramatic. It is an accusation you could level at all Ivy’s novels. But Ivy thought otherwise. She told an interviewer, Kay Dick, ‘I think that there are a good many more deeds done than some people know.’ And elsewhere in the same interview: ‘People have a way of not coming out well in a temptation. They generally behave quite as ill as they can, don’t they?’ She added, ‘Well, not any worse than I should expect them to behave.’
By the fourth chapter of the story, it is Ellen who is missing from breakfast. It is a circumstance her husband will hardly condone, though it proves that she is dying. Though the neighbourhood doctor has mentioned a change in her, Duncan hates illness so took no notice. His mourning is complicated and corrosive. When bullies repent, they take care not to suffer alone. Within months, Duncan has outraged the parish by marrying again. 11 Alison is a troubled beauty scarcely older than her stepchildren. From the time the first teacup is rattled, a storm is brewing. The events that follow include an illicit affair, a divorce, and the murder of an infant in its nursery.
A plot, Ivy said, was only a ‘washing line’ on which she hung her stories. The dialogue carries the tale; it is taut, evasive and barbed, its surface politeness concealing shocking intent. It takes time to get used to the technique, which allows so much to lie between the lines. But once you do, you feel other novelists are trying too hard. In this novel as elsewhere, horrors are punctuated by comic set pieces, and an insidious, sly undermining of everyday piety. The tone and balance could only be sustained by an author in full command of her style and equipped with a chilly moral composure. The characters may struggle and protest, talk behind their hands and mutter about their intentions and resolve; but they can no more avoid disaster than, as James Michie once put it, ‘Oedipus could have dodged his meeting at the crossroads.’
And around the crossroads stand the neighbours, giggling. The elderly Gretchen Jekyll, keen and perceptive, doesn’t say any of the consoling things old ladies usually say. Her son Oscar, the parson, is an unbeliever. He is also unmarried, and the cause of rivalry between two cousins, Florence and Beatrice. Beatrice is effusively evangelical, while Florence ‘had retired from missionary work owing to the discomfort of the life, a reason which she did not disclose, though it was more than adequate.’ These ladies have a trainee in the shape of the atrocious Dulcia, with her hearty schoolboy slang and her habit of making a bad situation worse. Dulcia is perhaps the greatest fool Ivy ever created. It is her brother, the laconic, long-suffering Almeric, who is the 12 book’s closest approach to a romantic hero. Sometimes when a woman says, ‘Get me out of here,’ she needs a man who will do just that. Fleeing across the fields, cheered on by the reader, Almeric is lost to the plot. His life afterwards, it seems, is blameless. But most of Ivy’s characters, when they see the cage door open, go straight back in and latch it behind them.
Given all that passes to bruise and break the Edgeworth family, it is amazing that Duncan can get a third wife. Why does the admirable Cassie, once the family governess, agree to marry him? Ivy is as pitiless as Jane Austen; money makes marriages, and love comes a poor second. A woman needs shelter; it is better to live under a domestic tyrant than to have no home, and better to have a husband than depend on a brother’s charity. But men without resources will do as much or more: compromise where they must, suppress what they know, ignore even rank criminality. Grant is bought and paid for. Sybil ends a wealthy matron. Vice is rewarded. Virtue is derided. And yet, perversely, it is admired and commended. Courage and intelligence sustain spirits that would otherwise be stifled. Gallows humour keeps despair at bay, and sharp wits probe the weak spots in the armour of the conquerors.
Ivy seems to tell her reader, all this is no more than you know; it is what you have always known. She has a needling ability to activate the reader’s innate suspicion about human unworthiness; that ability goes to the root of her peculiar genius. This book, like her other novels, can be read again and again. Each time it discloses a little more, as if responding to the reader’s application, and each time it shows a different face, now comic and now tragic, as if reflecting the reader’s mood. The mode is old-fashioned, but the effect is strikingly modern, or 13 postmodern. We seem to be caught in a continuous present. There will always be parents and children, always some chill dawn in which, straight-backed before an insufficient fire, we sit waiting for the action to begin.
Hilary Mantel
Chapter 1
‘So the children are not down yet?’ said Ellen Edgeworth.
Her husband gave her a glance, and turned his eyes towards the window.
‘So the children are not down yet?’ she said on a note of question.
Mr Edgeworth put his finger down his collar, and settled his neck.
‘So you are down first, Duncan?’ said his wife, as though putting her observation in a more acceptable form.
Duncan returned his hand to his collar with a frown.
Duncan Edgeworth was a man of medium height and build, appearing both to others and himself to be tall. He had narrow, grey eyes, stiff, grey hair and beard, a solid, aquiline face, young for his sixty-six years, and a stiff, imperious bearing. His wife was a small, spare, sallow woman, a few years younger, with large, kind, prominent eyes, a long, thin, questioning nose, and a harried, innocent, somehow fulfilled expression.
The day was Christmas Day in the year eighteen eighty-five, and the room was the usual dining-room of an eighteenth-century country house. The later additions to the room had 16honourable place, and every opportunity to dominate its character, and used the last in the powerful manner of objects of the Victorian age, seeming in so doing to rank themselves with their possessor.
‘So you are down first of all, Duncan,’ said Ellen, employing a note of propitiation, as if it would serve its purpose.
Her husband implied by lifting his shoulders that he could hardly deny it.
‘The children are late, are they not?’ said Ellen, to whom speech clearly ranked above silence.
Duncan indicated by the same movement that his attitude was the same.
‘I think there are more presents than usual. Oh, I wish they would all come down.’
‘Why do you wish it?’
‘Well, it is not a day when we want them to be late, is it?’
‘Do we want them to be late on any day? Oh, of course, it is Christmas Day. I saw the things on the table.’
Ellen also saw them.
‘Oh, you have been down first, and put your presents at the places!’
Duncan moved his neck with an air of satisfaction in the ease he had attained.
‘I think they will all be down soon,’ said his wife, her manner seeming to carry comfort.
‘Will they?’ just uttered her husband, looking at the wall as if something on it struck him.
‘They won’t be very late on Christmas Day.’
‘Why should they be late on Christmas Day or any other? What reason would you suppose?’
17Ellen did not say.
‘Have you any idea what purpose is actuating them, the three at once? It must be something important.’
‘Well, the mornings are getting dark.’
‘The mornings are getting dark! The mornings are getting dark! Do you mean they are so sunk in lethargy and self-indulgence, that they need a strong light to force them to raise their heads from their pillows? Is that what you mean?’
Ellen, uncertain how much she had meant of this, was silent.
‘I don’t think they will be very late this morning.’
‘Only rather late, in concession to a standard of civilized decency.’
‘I know they are looking forward to their presents,’ Ellen advanced in the culprits’ favour.
‘We hardly expected to have to force them upon them.’
‘I am sure they do not think of it like that,’ Duncan was assured.
‘I expect they do not,’ he said, with a little burst of bitter mirth; ‘I suppose even they are not quite so sub-human.’
‘They could not be a better nephew and daughters than they are.’
‘We see they could be on this occasion,’ said Duncan, biting his thumb-nail and speaking absently.
‘I believe I can hear one of them,’ said Ellen with simple relief; ‘I am sure there was a sound on the stairs.’
‘A sound on the stairs! A remarkable thing to hear at this time in the morning!’
‘It is Nance; I know her step. I am glad that one of them is down.’
‘Glad? Why?’
Ellen gave no reason.
18‘It is a natural thing for a young woman to come downstairs in the morning to have her breakfast,’ said Duncan, seeming to disclaim any less tangible purpose in his daughter. ‘Well, Nance, you have condescended to join us?’
‘If that is the word you would use, Father. I felt simply that I was joining you.’ Nance embraced her mother and went to her seat, obeying the unrecognized family law, that the father should not receive a morning salute. ‘I have never taken my place before such a pile of gifts. Do I fall upon them, or wait for those who delay longer than I?’
‘Have we waited for you?’
‘I observed you had, Father, was indeed struck by it. But was the process congenial enough to be emulated?’
Nance Edgeworth was a tall, thin girl of twenty-four, with her father’s head placed rather squarely on her shoulders, her mother’s features set a little awry on her face, and an expression that was her own.
‘Have you seen anything of Grant and Sibyl this morning?’
‘No, Father. It is not a time of day when family intercourse flourishes.’
‘I asked you, Nance, if you had seen anything of them.’
‘No. My life to-day has hitherto been solitary. Ah, the things that I needed, that I was without! I hope to find cause to sustain these cries of joy. Do I hear the laggard footfalls on the stairs?’
‘This listening for footfalls seems a foolish thing in adult human beings,’ said Duncan with a little laugh. ‘Why should not people come down in the morning?’
‘I can think of no reasons, Father. And apparently they could think of none that held weight for long. Happy Christmas, sister and cousin!’
19‘Happy Christmas, Father dear,’ said the younger daughter, caressing Duncan’s shoulder, as she went to her seat, a nearly grown girl of eighteen, with a fair, pure oval face, a curved, red mouth, a childish nose and chin, and blue eyes set unusually close, and thereby gaining charm. ‘So it is the day of days at last.’
‘It is, indeed, the Day of Days,’ said Duncan, altering the weight on the words. ‘I was beginning to think it had escaped your memory. You might have been eager to begin a Day, which can hardly be long enough for the thoughts it must bring. Grant, have you not anything to say to us this morning?’
‘The very thing,’ said his nephew, bowing round the table. ‘A happy Christmas to you all.’
‘Thank you, Grant,’ said Duncan, not failing himself in courteous response.
‘Pray don’t thank me, Uncle. You are welcome to my words.’
Grant Edgeworth was a spare, dark youth of twenty-five, with a delicate, olive face, lively, almond eyes, keen but emotional lips, that twisted on the verge of a smile, and an odd feature that ran in his mother’s family, a lock of pure white hair in the front of his smooth, black head. He was the orphan son of Duncan’s brother, and heir to the entailed estate. He had had his home with his uncle since his parents’ death, loved by Ellen next to her own, and at once accepted and resented by Duncan in the stead of a son. He was reading for the Bar, but in an easy spirit, as his future was secure.
‘Yes, it is the Day at last. Can anyone tell me the meaning underneath it?’ resumed Duncan, hardly showing the natural confidence in his own training. 20
There was silence.
‘Can no one tell me? Will no one? We are not ashamed, I hope, of acknowledging the Truth, which we are all celebrating with gifts.’
It almost seemed that Duncan had made a suggestion, and there was still silence.
‘Nance, will you tell me what Day it is?’
‘The day of the Birth of Christ, Father,’ said Nance, forcing a natural voice.
‘Yes,’ said Duncan. ‘Yes. Sibyl, can you tell me what Day it is?’
‘The Day of the Birth of Christ, Father,’ said Sibyl, in a fuller tone, perhaps feeling confidence in the answer, after his confirmation of it.
‘Grant?’ said Duncan.
‘Oh, I agree,’ said Grant, making a gesture towards his cousins, and causing his aunt to laugh before she knew it.
Duncan simply turned from him.
‘Nance, I should like to hear you say it as Sibyl did.’
‘No, you must pass my individual performance. You asked for it.’
There was a pause.
‘I hope that my allowing you to treat the occasion as a festival, has not blinded you to its significance?’
‘It is the usual way of treating it.’
‘And does it blind people to the underlying meaning, do you think, Nance?’
‘I think up to a point it does.’
‘Can you tell me why you were late this morning? I suppose you had a reason?’
‘None worth stating, Father.’
21‘Sibyl?’ said Duncan, turning from his elder daughter.
‘Oh, I am a growing girl, Father,’ said Sibyl, with her head to one side.
Duncan just shook his head, and turned to his nephew.
‘Grant, why were you late this morning?’
‘I felt a disinclination to rise, Uncle, so strong that it overcame me.’
‘You came down for your breakfast and your presents.’
‘Oh, yes, for those.’
Duncan dropped his eyes with something like a smile on his lips. He was a man who liked the companionship of men, and in spite of his bitterness at having no personal heir, had come to find something utterly satisfying in the company of his brother’s son. The same words on the lips of Nance would have struck him as essentially different.
‘Ellen,’ he said in an easier tone, ‘would you say these young people feel as they should on fundamental things?’
‘Oh, yes, I think they do; they are all very good.’
‘Well, that is the right proof of it. If that is so, I can have no more to say. Now, I have not thanked my wife for her gifts, my children not the last or least.’
Duncan rose and embraced his wife, who met him with a change of expression that told its tale. Sibyl stopped him on his return, and drew his face down to her own.
‘Well, Nance, haven’t you a kiss for your father on Christmas Day?’
Nance raised her face, and Duncan, turning from her to Grant, in vague consideration of a substitute for the caress, caught sight of a volume at his place.
‘What is that book, Grant?’
22Grant uttered the title of a scientific work, inimical to the faith of the day.
‘Did you remember that I refused to give it to you?’
‘Yes, Uncle. That is why I asked somebody else.’
‘Did you say I had forbidden it in the house?’
‘No, or I should not have been given it.’
Duncan took the book, and walking to the fire, placed it upon the flames.
‘Oh, Father, really!’ said Nance.
‘Really? Yes, really, Nance. I shall really do my best to guide you – to force you, if it must be, into the way you must go. I would not face the consequences of doing otherwise.’
‘Would not the consequences be more widely distributed?’
‘I shall really do what I can to achieve it,’ went on Duncan, as if he had not heard, ‘and I trust it will not be impossible. I do not do it in my own strength.’
‘How untrue!’ murmured Grant. ‘As if more strength than he has, is possible!’
‘I regret my choice of word,’ said Nance.
‘What did you say, Nance?’ said Duncan, whose slight deafness was more intermittent than was realized.
‘I said I regretted my choice of word, Father.’
‘Yes,’ said Duncan, easily; ‘you are getting into a missish turn of phrase.’
‘I did not know you objected to the book, Duncan,’ said Ellen. ‘I have not read it myself.’
‘So, Grant, it was my wife, whom you chose to lead against me!’
‘I wanted to read the book, Uncle.’
Duncan set his foot on the volume, and thrust it further into the flames. 23
‘What are you laughing at, Nance?’
‘The scene makes me hysterical, Father. I shall gather up my presents, and bear them to safety.’
‘You will sit down, Nance, and remain in your seat,’ said Duncan, accurately forecasting what would take place.
‘Have you read the book, Father?’
‘From cover to cover. And on every page there is poison. My volume met the fate of this one.’
‘You are qualified to understand its influence. And you thought burning was the only thing?’
‘Grant might have known its nature from the title?’
‘That was just it,’ said Grant.
‘He is a better judge of titles than you are, is he, Father?’
‘I don’t know, Nance, if you think I find it congenial, to have this hour of peace and pleasure turned into a bout of family strife? I don’t know if you think it is what I incline to?’
‘I believe I was feeling it was rather natural to you, Father.’
‘Father, you like my books, don’t you?’ said Sibyl.
‘We are sitting a long time over breakfast,’ observed Ellen, inattentive to what passed.
‘We are not merely having breakfast this morning,’ said Duncan, with extreme sharpness. ‘There must be certain things that cannot be done up to time.’
‘Are you going to give the servants their presents afterwards?’ said Sibyl. ‘I always think you do it so perfectly, Father. It is a thing some people would make so awkward.’
‘There are no presents for the servants this year,’ said Ellen, stumbling over the words, and withdrawing her eyes from her husband. ‘I mean, I have not got them; I have not been able. I 24was just going to ask Father for some money for them.’ Her eyes came to rest on her daughters.
‘I do not like this giving of money to people who have served us personally through the year. We should choose their present for them as individuals. I believe I have spoken of that before.’
‘Yes, but I could not get them out of the money for the Christmas expenses. I had thought about it, and planned what they would like; but the other things came to more than you thought, than we thought when we went over them together.’
‘All that money gone on a few domestic expenses! It marks the difference between people. It would take me a longer time to spend it on better things.’
‘The money has gone on many domestic expenses,’ said Nance. ‘You forget the sacredness of the home, Father. You and I will stay away from church, and consider the quarter’s bills, and arrange an allowance for Mother on the basis of them.’
‘And how long has it been your business to talk of an allowance for your mother, or any other affairs of people above you? You need give no thought to any allowance but your own. As long as you need that, you are in no position to.’
‘It has been my business since I saw it was imperative. For some time now.’
‘And are you the head of the house, or am I?’
‘Oh, you are, Father; and I want Mother to be.’ Nance put her hand on Duncan’s. ‘Do stop trying to be a man and a woman as well.’
‘Oh, you come bamboozling me,’ said Duncan, accepting the pressure, but giving no further sign. ‘So I make it a business of mine to try to be a woman? As it is one of yours, see you attend to it.’
25‘Well, what are we to do about the presents?’ said Ellen, with the open sigh which was her common sign of weariness.
‘Why, call up the servants, and say that we were not able to choose their gifts this year; but that we hope they will spend what we give them on something they wish, and regard it as a present from us. It is easy enough to do it. It offers no difficulty. A gentlewoman should be able to do anything.’
‘It seems as good a method as the other,’ said Nance. ‘But a gentlewoman is not able to spin gold out of straw; it required a full princess to do that.’
Duncan took his purse from his pocket, and handed it to his wife.
‘Grant,’ he said, as though the matter had scarcely engaged him, ‘there is something to be said between us, little though I like it for the day. Am I to believe it was you, who chose to make an exhibition of yourself with a maid-servant behind the house? I find it hard to think it.’
‘I am glad of that, Uncle.’
‘Surely you have enough decency and dignity, enough respect for your aunt and your cousins, for womanhood in general, to hold you from such a depth? I am unable to think my training has brought you to it.’
‘I am glad, Uncle.’
‘It will go hard with me, if I have to believe it. But do not stoop to deceit. If that is of any good, you have stooped far enough.’
‘Well, what am I to do?’ said Grant.
‘I should have been able to repudiate such a rumour. But in face of what I have known of you, I could not. I found myself in that humbling place. I cannot discuss such a matter before my daughters.’
26‘I am very glad,’ said Grant. ‘I feel great respect for womanhood. More than you do, perhaps. I was beginning to think you could discuss the matter before them.’
‘Now in a week we shall enter the New Year,’ said Duncan, his attention for the company. ‘Have you your resolves ready for it? Nance, can you tell me one of yours?’
‘Your hopes seem to centre on me, Father, your first-born. I have been resolving to be more independent in the coming months.’
‘Sibyl?’ said Duncan, passing easily from Nance.
‘I have not been resolving anything like it, Father. I have been seeing I shall always be dependent.’
‘Well, you will both be dependent, whether or no you want it, and whether or no I do, as far as I can see. Grant, what resolve have you to tell us?’
‘Aunt Ellen and I have not made any, Uncle. We are not the slaves of convention.’
‘And what have your aunt’s resolves to do with you? If she is well enough without them, who would say the same of you? So make a resolve, when I order you, and tell us of it.’
‘What are your resolves, Father?’ said Nance.
‘Good enough, good enough. Who are you, not to be sure of it? And if you are to be independent, what is it to you? Grant, I require you to oblige me.’
‘I will oblige you, Uncle. I have no false shame. I resolve to give more time to the place.’
‘You think that stage has come? So the place has so much to do with you? You are putting me in my grave. What else am I to expect? Now what is the matter with the girl, Sibyl?’
‘I don’t like you to talk like that, Father. I can’t get used to it.’
27‘You are a good girl,’ said Duncan, in a mechanical manner, as though accustomed to such moments. ‘I will cease from any talk that troubles you. Now let none of us be behindhand in leaving the house. Grant, I hope you are giving me your mind?’
‘I am not thinking of going to church, Uncle.’
‘I said I hoped you were giving me your mind: I did not ask what you were thinking of. Why should I be concerned with it?’
‘I was not meaning to go to church, Uncle,’ said Grant, already using the past tense.
‘I said I hoped you were giving me your mind,’ said Duncan, as he rose and left the room.
‘I am in a simple position,’ said Grant: ‘I do not dare to remain at home.’
‘I find myself without the traditional courage of womanhood,’ said Nance.
‘I enjoy church on Christmas Day,’ said Ellen, putting her hands over her eyes. ‘Most of our friends will be there, and it passes the morning.’
‘Grant,’ said Sibyl, swinging her chair towards him, ‘I believe I could get you that book from the rectory library.’
‘It has a place there, and Father devoured its every word, and Grant took risks to get it,’ said Nance. ‘I am glad of my approaching independence.’
‘It was wrong of you not to tell me, Grant,’ said Ellen, almost with indifference. ‘Of course I should not have given it to you. Now there is that expensive book wasted.’
‘It keeps the home fires burning,’ said Grant, ‘if Uncle is speaking the truth about his copy.’
‘Well, that had been put to its intended purpose,’ said Nance. 28
‘Poor Father! He is rather one by himself in the house,’ said Sibyl. ‘I hope he knows what we all feel for him.’
Ellen raised her eyes with a faintly grieved expression.
‘If he does not know what you feel, it is not for want of being told,’ said her cousin.
‘He and I have always been friends. I have known his look for me all my life.’
‘He cares much the most for Aunt Ellen.’
Ellen’s eyes filled with tears, and she spoke at once.
‘Here is all this money for the servants! They will be so pleased.’
‘Can you take what you like from the purse?’ said Sibyl, addressing her mother for the first time that day.
‘Father never speaks of what I have taken, when he leaves me his purse.’
‘A disregard of material things happily works both ways,’ said Nance.
‘We ought to be ready to start in half an hour,’ said her sister. ‘I think we owe it to Father not to be late.’
‘There is no reason why we should be late.’
‘I suppose there is not,’ said Grant, walking round the room with the successive demeanours of his acquaintance entering church. ‘It seems there must be. There is always a laggard.’
This was true, and on this occasion it was Ellen.
Duncan stood in the hall, with hat and book, in an attitude of being on the point of leaving the house. The young people stood about, still and silent, until Grant and Nance met each other’s eyes, and broke into laughter.
Duncan breathed more audibly and maintained his position, but as the laughter increased, he dropped his book, and signed 29sharply to Grant to retrieve it. Grant took a moment to follow, and Sibyl was before him; and Duncan idly dropped it again, and motioned his nephew to obedience.
Ellen came hurrying down the stairs, her avoidable haste acting in its normal way upon her husband. He remained as he was, until she came up, and then without turning his eyes upon her, walked from the house.
Chapter 2
Duncan and Ellen proceeded to church, unconscious that it was the only occasion in the week when they were seen abroad together. Grant followed with his cousins, adopting the bearing of his uncle, and somehow contriving that the sisters appeared to reproduce his aunt’s.
Ellen went first into the family pew, and was followed by her husband. Sibyl sat by Duncan, Nance by Sibyl, and Grant took his place at the end of the line, in readiness to emerge and hand the plate, a duty imposed by his uncle.
The parson conducted the service in a cold, impersonal manner, making it as brief as he could. He was a strong, solid man about thirty-eight, with face and hair and eyes of much the same pale colour, high, marked features, and a set, enigmatic expression. His discourse took the line of a lecture rather than a sermon, and was to earn a parishioner’s comment, that faith as deep as his would hardly appear on the surface. In fact, his concern with his faith was limited to this level, as it was years since it had existed on any other. His scepticism had not led him to relinquish his living, as he had a slender income, and a widowed mother to support, and no other means of reconciling 31 the conditions. He hoped his duties would be less well done by a stupider man, as a believer would probably be; and his views, though of some inconvenience to himself, were of none to his congregation, as they were beyond the range of its suspicions. Even his mother, who lived in his house, assigned his unguarded words to modern breadth of mind, and either gave them no ear, or gave it with enjoyment, as although herself a believer, she had a dislike for her beliefs.
Old Gretchen Jekyll sat in the rectory pew, a ponderous woman in the seventies, in conventional widow’s dress, with round, black eyes, like the eyes of no one else, features resembling her son’s, and a benevolent, dominant expression. Half a dozen young boys sat under her eye, the pupils of her son, who added to his income by conducting their education. Her daughter, Cassandra, was with her, a tall, handsome woman of thirty-nine, with a finer form of the family face, her brother’s clear, pale eyes, and hair prematurely grey. She was governess to Duncan’s daughters, and still had her home in his house.
Gretchen marshalled her flock out of church directly the service concluded, her expression indicating that decorum might no longer be hoped. She paused at a customary spot in the churchyard, with an odd, fierce look that came of self-consciousness, frankness, and penetration, and accorded with her talk.
‘Well, Mrs Jekyll,’ said Duncan, in a tone unheard in his family, though often by them, ‘I shall not wish you a happy Christmas, when you possess yourself of a member of my house.’
‘We must have some family life on Christmas Day,’ said Gretchen, staring into his face.
‘It seems we must,’ murmured Grant.
Gretchen smiled with grim understanding.
32‘I seemed to grasp the essence of it this morning,’ said Nance. ‘Unless the vision comes with every absence of Cassie’s, and Time, the healer, does its work in between.’
‘No one puts in a claim for the rest of us,’ said Grant. ‘We are left to the reality of our own homes.’
‘The rest of you can afford to remain in them,’ said Gretchen.
‘The deceitfulness of riches,’ said the doctor of the neighbourhood, rubbing his hands, a short, plump man of fifty-five, with dark, bright, close-set eyes, over-shadowed by a heavy, hooked nose, a sculptured mouth and chin, and a bland, amused expression.
‘Other things can be deceitful,’ said Gretchen. ‘I find they are.’
‘Riches as I have seen them, are straightforward enough,’ said Dr Fabian Smollett’s cousin and wife, a woman of the same type and height and age, who with her spaced, blue eyes, serious mouth, and straightforward expression, appeared to be normally different.
‘Why is Christmas a family festival?’ said Grant. ‘It should surely be of general application?’
‘Or what was the good of the message to all mankind?’ said Fabian.
‘Things tend to become rooted in families,’ said Florence his wife.
‘People think they keep them to themselves in that way,’ said Gretchen.
‘And so they do,’ said Grant.
‘Oh, I have caught my hair in a bush!’ said Sibyl, in a voice that attracted attention.
‘Ah, we must not be hanging you up like Absalom, Miss Sibyl,’ said Fabian, disengaging the hair. 33
‘Thank you so much, Dr Smollett,’ said Sibyl, with a full voice and smile.
‘Stand farther away from the bushes, Sibyl,’ said her father.
‘Reginald,’ said Gretchen, in rolling tones, ‘will you remember you are near a place of worship?’
Reginald, qualified to interpret these words as a request to cease to whisper, complied with the request.
A lady bustled forward and put a coloured tract into his hands, as a legitimate object for his attention. Miss Rosamund Burtenshaw was regarded as having as much connexion with the church as the rector, and really had more. She was a short, buxom woman of forty-four, with a high, set colour, unvarying, hazel eyes, strong, stiff clothes, and a manner suggesting that what she said would occasion mirth. Her father came behind her – his custom in every sense – an older, easier, masculine edition of her, with a dragging step and an idle but interested gaze; whose likeness to his daughter, rather than hers to him, caused surprise that two such indefinite sets of features bore such a definite resemblance. The fact that Alexander had followed no calling, was a ground for speculation, and the reason was seldom guessed, that he had been driven by no actual need.
His niece, Miss Beatrice Fellowes, more generally seen as cousin to his daughter, was a big, angular woman of thirty-eight, with awkward hands and limbs, a good-tempered, trivially moulded face, obstinate, red-brown eyes, and hair and dress conforming to some unknown standard of unworldliness, which her cousin showed herself able to ignore.
Miss Burtenshaw had retired from missionary work owing to the discomfort of the life, a reason which she did not disclose, though it was more than adequate; and was accustomed to say 34 she found plenty of furrows to plough in the home field; and Beatrice made her home in her house, almost unaware that it was her father’s, and at once served, admired, and emulated her.
‘Cassie, are you coming to luncheon?’ said Nance. ‘You have no conception of the festival, as celebrated by ourselves, with Father as director.’
‘Poor Father!’ said Sibyl; ‘I am afraid he is disappointed in us.’
‘I can hardly believe that possible,’ said her sister; ‘I don’t pretend to follow his line of thought, if he is.’
‘Why, do you think you are perfect?’
‘As a daughter I do, absolutely. I can’t take any other view.’
‘Think how much better we are than he is,’ said Grant.
‘If there is room for improvement in you, improve, Sibyl,’ said Nance: ‘I can see none in myself.’
Fabian stood by, laughing to himself.
‘Did you observe with what boyish dignity I handed the plate?’ said Grant. ‘And I put in my own contribution last, when most men put it in first. Because who am I, but a youth who is not all bad? Cassie, if you do not come to luncheon, you will offend one of these little ones.’
‘I will come; I will leave my home for another on Christmas Day.’
‘That is good news,’ said Ellen, her tone drawing Duncan’s eyes.
‘What have you to say to that, Mrs Jekyll?’ said Beatrice.
‘Luncheon makes no odds,’ said Gretchen, her eyes roving over her flock. ‘Our family life has to wait until the boys are in bed.’
‘So the boys have no family life at all,’ said her son, joining the group. ‘And we maintain they have every advantage.’ 35
‘The rector is himself this morning,’ said Miss Burtenshaw, looking at Oscar, and moving her feet.
