THE APPEAL
Thisisn’t a story. It’s an attempt at reconstruction. Given my knowledge of the principals—Mary Jarvis, and her mother, Mrs. St. Luth—I think I can do it.
Mary Jarvis was my mother, and Mrs. St. Luth, of course, my grandmother. Thank god, I’m a modern and can look at them impersonally—judge each on her own merits, as it were.
My mother and my grandmother made scenes as other women make jumpers. It was their form of self-expression. I imagine—although I never knew for certain—that it was my father’s inability to maintain himselfà la hauteur, in the perennial melodrama that was my mother’s idea of life, that led to my grandmother being invited to live with them.
She came when I, their only child, had barely reached the stage of exchanging my baby frills for first knickerbockers. (I am certain, although I don’t remember it, that my mother wept and said she felt that she had lost her baby for ever.)
Already my parents were unhappy together. Mary—I call her so here for convenience, but she would never have tolerated it in reality—Mary, although really affectionate and impressionable, was fundamentally insincere, with herself and with everybody else. She lived entirely on the emotional plane, and when genuine emotions were not forthcoming she faked them by instinct. Her mother, who belonged to the same type, although with more strength of character, and far less capacity for affection, had always played up to her. They had their violent disputes andviolent reconciliations—neither could have been happy without—but they did respect one another’s poses.
But my father never played up.
He couldn’t. Worse still, if he could have done so, he wouldn’t—on principle.
Again I can’t remember, but I can imagine, almost to the point of certainty, short and searing passages between my parents.
“Robert, I want you not to ask me to play the piano to-night.”
(He so seldom gave her an opening, that she had to force them.)
“Off colour?”
“It isn’t that. I heard to-day that Mrs. Thorndyke’s child is dead. It—it upset me.”
“But you didn’t know the child.”
“I know Katherine Thorndyke.”
“You’ve met her once or twice, I remember. And didn’t we hear that if the poor child had lived, it must have been an idiot?”
Probably, at that stage, my mother burst into tears. She’d been heading for that, of course, although she didn’t know it consciously. But my father did, and had made her aware that he did, in a rather brutal fashion.
That was the way they reacted on one another.
It was better, after grandmother came. Curiously enough, my father liked her, although she and Mary had so many of the same characteristics. But I think he regarded her as a sort of lightning conductor.
For Mary herself, however, it was different. Like so many people who manufacture continual unhappiness for themselves, she had a frantic craving for happiness, and an irrational conviction that happiness was her due.
She told me herself, long afterwards, that she never had any thought of infidelity towards my father, nor did she ever meet any man who could or would have caused her to break her marriage vows. But—and this she didn’t tell me, it’s part of the reconstruction—she was constantly obsessed by a vague and romantic expectation of some such encounter. I imagine that she could not believe the worldto have been created without a special application to her yearnings.
And then undoubtedly the nervous wear and tear that she imposed upon herself, and upon us all, told on her spirits. Her scenes with grandmother, although they may have served as a safety-valve, were too frequent. They may also have served to throw into painful contrast her husband’s stolid opposition to any form of emotional stimulus.
However that may be, grandmother had formed part of our household for rather less than a year, when Mary suddenly ran away.
It was, I suppose, the only dramatic thing that she could think of, in a wet and dreary February, and I have no doubt at all that she did it on impulse. That is to say, she gave herself time to write an immensely long letter to my father—in which perhaps she set forth that view of herself which he never gave her adequate opportunity for putting into words—but she gave herself no time to pack up her things. She simply took her dressing-case, and I am sure that that was mostly filled with photographs in folding frames, and packets of letters tied up with ribbon, and little manuals of devotion heavily underscored in several places.
Then she walked out of the house, and to the station, and eventually got to Assisi. And they traced her there almost at once, partly because she took no pains to cover up her tracks, and partly because my grandmother—who understood the processes of her mind—found a copy of a Life of St. Francis on the drawing-room sofa, face downwards, with one page all blistered, as though tears had fallen upon it.
My father, for his part, found the long letter that no doubt told him how little he had understood a sensitive nature, and possibly to what point their life together had become intolerable.
And this had the strange effect of making him resolve, and declare aloud, that nothing would induce him to try and get her back again. There must have been a stormy scene between him and my grandmother, who had all theconventionally moral instincts of her day, and was genuinely shocked and disturbed at her daughter’s abrupt and violent casting off of her obvious responsibilities.
“For the child’s sake, at least, Robert ...” she must have repeated many times.
(Neither she nor my mother ever understood the futility of repeating, again and again, words which had already failed of their appeal.)
“A child whose mother can leave him, at four years old, is better without her.”
“It was madness, Robert, but you know she’s not a wicked woman—my poor Mary. If you go and bring her back now, no one will ever know what has happened, and you can start a new life together, and try again.”
“It would be useless.”
“Don’t, don’t say that.” The tears must have been pouring down her old face by that time. “Oh, Robert, give her another chance. This will have been a lesson to her—won’t you forgive her and take her back?”
Well, in the end she prevailed to a certain extent—that is to say, my father would not seek out the culprit himself, but he would allow grandmother to do so, and if she brought Mary home again properly repentant he would not refuse to receive her and give her the “chance” of starting their married life afresh. “For the boy’s sake.”
My grandmother must have repeated that phrase a hundred times at least, and it was certainly herpièce de resistancein the scene at Assisi with Mary.
I’ve had a version of that scene from each one of them, and on the whole the accounts tally, although of course each viewed it—as they viewed everything—exclusively from the personal angle.
My mother saw only a young, beautiful, misunderstood woman, goaded to frenzy in the grip of an uncongenial marriage, taking a desperate step in search of freedom. And then, even stronger and more touching in her relinquishment, finding the courage, for love of her child, to return to the house of bondage.
And my grandmother, with equal inevitability, saw only a sorrow-worn woman, no longer young (but infinitelyinteresting), courageously undertaking a solitary journey, on a mission that should restore sanctity to a shattered home. And even as her urgent plea had shaken Robert’s defences, so her eloquence, her boundless influence and unfaltering understanding, must prevail with the slighter, more trivial personality of her daughter. The achievement of persuading Mary to return to her husband and child was, my grandmother told me, the ultimate justification of her existence, in her own eyes.
As a matter of fact, I doubt if she, any more than the rest of us, felt her existence to be in any need of justification whatsoever—but she was addicted to phrases, and this one at least served as an indication to the magnitude of her effort.
For Mary did not capitulate without a struggle. And it is in the details of that struggle that my reconstruction work comes in, for although each of the protagonists has quoted to me whole sentences, and even speeches, of brilliant oratory from herself and inadequate rejoinder from the other, I do not believe either of them. Accuracy, with that type, can never co-exist with emotion—and emotion, real or imaginary, is never absent.
But this, I imagine, is more or less what took place in the sitting-room of the tinyalbergoat Assisi:
“I’ve come to fetch you home, my child. You shall never hear one word of reproach—Robert only wants to begin again—a new life.”
“Never, mother. It’s impossible. I’ve borne too much. I can’t ever go back to it. I must live my own life.”
(Probably Mary had been readingThe Doll’s House. People were discovering Ibsen in those days.)
“Mary, it’s not five years since you and Robert were married, in the little country church at home, by our dear old vicar, who held you at the font when I took you, a tiny baby, to be christened.”
It may have been at this stage that Mary began to cry. Anyway, I’m certain that my grandmother did. Any allusions, however irrelevant, to little country churches at home, and Mary as a tiny baby, were always apt to bring the tears to her eyes—and I’m sure that neither of themhad thought for an instant of steadying their nerves by sitting down to a solid meal. So that tears must have been easier, even, than usual.
“Robert doesn’t understand me—he never will.”
“Darling, don’t you remember your early days together? The little things—little jokes, and allusions, and happinesses shared together? Does one ever forget?”
“No.”
Mary sobbed. “But I can’t go back to him.”
I think that here, if my grandmother gave her a chance, she probably did make one—or part of one—of the speeches that she long afterwards quoted to me.
She was intensely unhappy. Robert did not understand her, and she could not live in an unsympathetic atmosphere. She should go mad. All that she had ever asked of life was peace, beautiful surroundings, and the ideal companion.... If she went back to Robert now, after having found courage to make the break, it would be a repetition of the misery that had broken her heart during the past three years.
(The hearts of my mother and grandmother both suffered innumerable breakages throughout their lives, neither of them ever seeming aware of the physiological absurdity of the expression.)
“It’s braver to stay away than to go back and try and patch up something that can never be anything but a failure,” quavered Mary, with a momentary flash of insight.
But of course grandmother couldn’t leave it at that. She had the justification of her own existence to think of, for one thing. I am quite sure that a fortuitous street-musician, rendering “Santa Lucia” or “Silver Threads Amongst the Gold” in the distance, would have broken down Mary’s frail barrier of honest thought, and have materially assisted my grandmother to her victory. Accessories were so absolutely essentials, to them both.
But so far as I know, grandmother had to win on points, as it were, and received no extraneous help in the shape of sentimental appeals from without.
She made her supreme effort.
“For the boy’s sake, Mary ... your little, little boy. Is he to be motherless?”
“Wouldn’t Robert let me have him?”
“No, my dear. How could he? I myself—the mother that bore you, Mary—I couldn’t think it right that a woman who had deliberately deserted her husband and home should have the care of a little, innocent child.”
“Oh, my baby!”
She sobbed and cried, but she had not yet capitulated. Grandmother, however, had gauged pretty accurately the force of the baby-motif.
“Before I came away, on my long, lonely journey,” she said slowly, “I went up to the nursery, to say good-bye to Bobbie. He had on his blue overall—the one you embroidered for him last summer, Mary—was it only last summer?—and he was playing with his engine, on the nursery floor, his dear, round face was so solemn....”
“Oh, don’t—don’t——”
But grandmother, the tears streaming from her eyes, relentlessly continued: “Darling, his big blue eyes looked up at me, and his little voice asked: ‘Where’s Mummie?’”
Did grandmother’s—even grandmother’s—conscience misgive her, at the quotation? That it was verbally correct, I have no doubt—but what of the intonation?
My grandmother’s poignant rendering of “Where’s Mummie?” no doubt contained all the pathetic appeal of bewildered and deserted childhood throughout the ages....
But mine—the original “Where’s Mummie?...” I have no recollection of it, of course, but I do remember myself at four years old—a stolid, rather cynical child, utterly independent by temperament, and reacting strongly even then against a perpetually emotional atmosphere. And one knows the way in which small children utter those conventional enquiries which they unconsciously know to be expected of them ... the soft, impersonal indifference of the tone, the immediate re-absorption, without waiting for a reply, in the engrossing occupation of the moment....
Mary held out for a little while longer, but the heart went out of her resistance after the pitiful sound of that “Where’s Mummie?” as my grandmother rendered it.
She gave in “for the boy’s sake.”
And my grandmother had justified her existence.
They travelled home together, and Mary averted anti-climax by quite a real nervous breakdown, that overtook her after she got home, before my father had had time to forgive her in so many words.
So they began again—literally.
It wasn’t, in fact, possible for them to be happy together, and they never were so. I grew up in the midst of scenes, tears, and intermittent periods of reconciliation. There was no stability about my childhood; and no reality. Undoubtedly I was the victim—far more so than my father, who presently sought and found consolation elsewhere, or than Mary, whom he thus provided with a perfectly legitimate grievance that lasted her until he died, fifteen years later. After that, she was able gradually to forget that there had ever been unhappiness between them, and to assume the identity of a heart-broken widow.
Mrs. St. Luth, my grandmother, lived to be very old.
“But useless old woman though I am, God gave me the opportunity of justifying my existence, when He let me bring a mother home to her little child....”
I wonder.
Thank god, I’m a modern.