CHAPTER XVIII
TRIENNIAL
As if fortune had had no other object in view but the trial of Nancy’s character by adversity, she had no sooner handed over Letizia to the care of the Sisters than she secured an engagement with a bloodthirsty melodrama calledThe Lights of Paris, in which she toured what were called the “number two” towns for many, many weeks. Her part was very different from the one Mr. Plimmer had offered her. Instead of the unhappy young mother reconciled in the last act to a forgiving husband she was to be a dark-eyed adventuress, all ostrich plumes and swishing silk petticoats, whose diabolical support of the villain earned groans and hisses from every audience and whose death at last in the very sewer where she had plotted to drown the heroine was greeted with acclamation. However, what did the part matter? She was earning four pounds a week, out of which she was managing to save half. And what did these dreary manufacturing towns matter? There was less temptation to spend money in them. Or the dull company of second-rate actors and actresses? There was small encouragement to waste her money in buying clothes to impress them. Blackburn, Bury, Bolton, St. Helens, Oldham, Rochdale, Preston, Wigan, Warrington, Widnes, Halifax, Huddersfield, Hartlepool, Gateshead, Sunderland, South Shields. Rain and smoke and blight and the stench of chemicals. The clatter of clogs every morning and every afternoon when the women were going to and from their work in the factories. Soot and puddles. Murky canals slimed always with a foul iridescence. Sodden shawls and wet slates. Infinite ugliness, dawnsand days and dusks cinereous, eternal in festivity, and ceaseless monotone. No vivid colour anywhere except occasionally in the gutters a piece of orange-peel and on the sweating walls the posters of the tawdry melodrama in which she was playing. It was good to think of Letizia far from these drizzling and fumid airs.
In November theLights of Pariscompany visited Brigham where for several years now a theatre had stood actually on the site of the original tabernacle of the Peculiar Children of God. On making inquiries about the present state of Lebanon House, Nancy heard that old Mrs. Fuller had died about five months earlier. When Letizia went to school at the convent, Nancy had written and told the old lady; but she had never received an answer to her letter. She did not feel at all inclined to visit Caleb or the aunts, and although she found out where Emily Young was living she did not succeed in meeting her, Miss Young being away that week. Nancy was wondering if her news about Letizia had pleased the old lady, when the following week at Birkenhead she had a letter from Miss Young.
22 Rosebank Terrace,Brigham.November 20th, ’95.Dear Mrs. Fuller,I was so disappointed to miss you during your stay in this dreary place, but I was away on a visit to some cousins in Macclesfield. I wrote to you when Mrs. Fuller died, but I was afraid as I never heard from you that the letter failed to reach you. I sent it to the address from which you wrote last April about your little girl. Mrs. Fuller had just had a second stroke, and I’m not sure that she understood what I was reading to her. Still, I fancied that I noticed an expression in her eyes that looked as if she had understood and was glad. She was really unconscious though until she died in May just before Mr. Caleb Fuller was married. I miss her dreadfully, and Brigham seems duller every day. You are lucky to be on the stage and able to travel about from one place to another. Life here is simply beastly. I’m tryingto get a place as secretary to somebody and have been working hard at typewriting and shorthand. I hope I shall succeed. I hate Brigham more every moment of the day. I do hope that we shall meet somewhere again. Wishing you all good luck.With kind regards. I am,Yours sincerely,Emily Young.
22 Rosebank Terrace,Brigham.November 20th, ’95.
22 Rosebank Terrace,Brigham.November 20th, ’95.
22 Rosebank Terrace,
Brigham.
November 20th, ’95.
Dear Mrs. Fuller,
I was so disappointed to miss you during your stay in this dreary place, but I was away on a visit to some cousins in Macclesfield. I wrote to you when Mrs. Fuller died, but I was afraid as I never heard from you that the letter failed to reach you. I sent it to the address from which you wrote last April about your little girl. Mrs. Fuller had just had a second stroke, and I’m not sure that she understood what I was reading to her. Still, I fancied that I noticed an expression in her eyes that looked as if she had understood and was glad. She was really unconscious though until she died in May just before Mr. Caleb Fuller was married. I miss her dreadfully, and Brigham seems duller every day. You are lucky to be on the stage and able to travel about from one place to another. Life here is simply beastly. I’m tryingto get a place as secretary to somebody and have been working hard at typewriting and shorthand. I hope I shall succeed. I hate Brigham more every moment of the day. I do hope that we shall meet somewhere again. Wishing you all good luck.
With kind regards. I am,Yours sincerely,Emily Young.
Nancy smiled when she read of the envy her career inspired, smiled when she thought of Blackburn, Bury, Bolton, St. Helens, Oldham, Rochdale, Preston, Wigan, Warrington, Widnes, Halifax, Huddersfield, Hartlepool, Gateshead, Sunderland, and South Shields.
The following Sunday theLights of Pariscompany found themselves in Warrington, and after Benediction at a little tin mission-church Nancy saw the priest and arranged for Masses to be said for Letizia’s great-grandmother. It was not so much the spiritual satisfaction she derived from the fulfilment of this pious duty as the feeling that somehow or other Masses said in this tin church for the repose of that strange old woman’s soul would express her personality in the immense void of eternity as effectively as on earth she had expressed herself with those vermilion cushions and Venetian mirrors. She had defied in her own creative world the overwhelming nonentity of Lebanon House, just as on the walls of her room Giorgione’s “Pastorale” had defied the meanness of contemporary existence, prevailing with colour against time itself. Now let beauty and compassion rise from the smoke of Warrington to sustain her soul.
There was no opportunity that December to go South and spend Christmas with Letizia; but Nancy was gratefully surprised by an invitation from Mother Mary Ethelreda to visit the convent at Beaumanoir on the moors of northern Lancashire, whence she could easily return in time for the matinée at Burnley on Boxing Day. The drive through the cold upland air, the quiet and seemliness of the conventual life, the dignity of the agedMother Superior, the whiteness and candlelight within, the snow and starshine without, all united to compose Nancy’s mind so that when she returned to the theatre she moved in a dream, like one who has voyaged from afar and whose body has arrived while the spirit still lingers on the way. Looking out of her window that night, she fancied that the stars high above the smoke of Burnley were jingling like silver bells, so much nearer seemed they since her visit to the Convent of the Holy Infancy at Beaumanoir on the wintry moors. And she knelt down to thank Almighty God that Letizia’s youth was clear and bright, remote and crystalline as one of those stars ringing down notes of harmonious light upon the discordant gloom in which her mother wandered.
It was June before Nancy saw Letizia. They spent a month together in the cottage where she was born among the Kentish cherry orchards. The pinks smelt just as sweet along the garden paths as then. There were not fewer roses nor less honeysuckle in the high hedges of the lanes. The haycocks threw shadows quite as far across the shaven leas, across the green-glowing gold-bloomed leas. And when Letizia was tucked away in her old cot and Nancy sat by the lattice, poring upon the perfumes of the evening, there were just as many ghost moths dancing upon the dusky air of the garden, fluttering with the old fantasmal passion above the spiced and sombrous flowers. But in no lane and in no lea, behind no hedge, across no brook, at the end of no garden path was Bram, who in this same month six years ago was everywhere. Yet, in spite of the poignancy of remembered joys that she could never know again, Nancy was very happy during her holiday. Letizia was as diverting as ever, with her long tales of school, as definite in her likes and dislikes and as quick to express them.
At the end of the month the long-promised stay with Mrs. Pottage at Margate was accomplished, and Nancy noted with a little pang for the way Letizia was gettingolder that she no longer called her old friend Mrs. Porridge, just as now she always said “mother” instead of “muvver.”
“Well, they haven’t starved her at this convent,” the old landlady declared after she had embraced Letizia and presented her cousin, Mrs. Williams, the pleasant and hospitable woman in whose house they were to stay. “I was very doubtful about the idea when you settled to put her in this convent, because I’ve always had a horror of nuns, and which is why I’ve never been to see her. I know I read a story once about a pore girl they bricked up, and it gave me the horrors to that extent it was weeks before I could go down into the cellar and fetch up a scuttle of coal. But the child’s looking a regular nosegay. What do they give you to eat, duckie?”
“Oh, we have breakfast and dinner and tea and supper, and a glass of milk at eleven,” Letizia said.
“You do?” Mrs. Pottage exclaimed. “Oh, dear, oh, dear, they regular gormingdise you! I’ve got it all wrong about nuns. I suppose it’s the name that sounds so empty. But certainly I fancied if you had two slices of dry bread and a glass of water you thought you’d done well for one day.”
“Mrs. Pottage, when shall we go paddling?” Letizia asked persuasively.
“Paddling?” said Mrs. Pottage. “You surely don’t expect me to go paddling?”
“Well, of course you must paddle,” Letizia exclaimed. “Don’t you know we’re at the seaside?”
“But if I take off my shoes and stockings and pull up my skirts they’ll think the British Museum’s broken loose,” said Mrs. Pottage. “You haven’t seen my legs, duckie. Talk about marble columns. Well, my legs would make a marble column look like a knitting-needle. Besides, supposing I got my toe bit off by a kipper?”
The next morning, armed with several baskets of strawberries and a large green-lined gingham umbrella,Mrs. Pottage set out with Nancy and Letizia to savour the delights of Margate beach.
“Fine weather for a sail, mum,” said one of the longshoremen.
“Yes, but you’d be the one that was sold,” Mrs. Pottage retorted.
“Nice day for a row, mum,” suggested another longshoreman. “A shilling the first hour, and sixpence every hour afterwards.”
“Who do you think I am?” Mrs. Pottage demanded. “Grace Darling? No, thanks, young man, I’d sooner spend the money on winkles.”
It was such a jolly week at Margate. Although Mrs. Pottage was never lured into a boat, she was persuaded by Letizia into paddling; and when she found herself with the water round her knees she was so much amused by the ridiculous sight she must be making of herself that she became as helpless with laughter as her friend Mrs. Bugbird did and sat down with such a tremendous splash that every child on the beach came running in her direction at the rumour that an elderly woman had been seized by a ferocious shark. Letizia was so much amused by the spectacle of Mrs. Pottage sitting down in the sea and remaining there helpless with laughter that she sat down herself, whereupon several other little girls and boys followed her example, to the consternation of their nurses who had to fling down their novelettes and hurry to the rescue. Yes, it was a jolly week at Margate, a week of sitting on the sun-baked sands and eating strawberries, of paddling and visiting the camera obscura, of listening to Negroes and Pierrots, of digging castles and buying shrimps for tea, of exploring the mysterious marine underworld of the pier, of wild rides on donkeys and sedate drives in goat-carriages, of sweets and paper-bags and asphalt promenades. But it came to an end very quickly. Mrs. Pottage went back to Greenwich. Letizia went back to the convent. Nancy went on tour again to play the adventuress in another melodrama.
And for another two years she played adventuresses, rustling her silk petticoats, hissing defiance through her clenched teeth, and smoking with amazing effrontery the cigarettes that in those days indicated on the stage a woman dead to shame. Nor did she catch more than an occasional glimpse of Letizia during that time, because she managed to fill up the summers of both 1897 and 1898 by acting in stock seasons at northern theatres, where for one week during the illness of the leading lady she had an opportunity of showing what she could do with parts like Rosalind, Viola, and Lady Teazle. But the next week she was playing the colourless Celia, the tiresome Olivia, and the prototype of the modern adventuress, Lady Sneerwell. Yet even these parts only lasted for the two reputed fine months of the year. By the middle of July she was once more immersed in monotonous villainy, measuring her success not by the applause but by the groans and hisses of the unsophisticated audiences for whose entertainment she kept the hero and the heroine apart until the very end of the fifth act. Her salary was still four pounds a week; but every week she was still able to save half. There was over £200 for Letizia in the bank when in the autumn of 1898 Nancy secured an engagement in the provincial tour of a popular musical comedy to sing a contralto part with a good song in each of the two acts and, what interested her much more, a salary of five pounds a week. It was while she was with this company that she met John Kenrick.