CHAPTER XXVIII
Wherein Dawning Womanhood whispers that Dolls are Dolls
Betty,listless and lonely, and in hiding, had not been long in her new-found attic when she won the wan smile of a little old faded lady who lived in the room below.
They met on the stairs; and a smile bred a smile. A formal invitation to tea from the little old faded lady followed. The little scented note bore the signature of Flora Jennyns....
When Betty entered the room, and shut the door, she shut out half a century.
Miss Flora Jennyns, rustling in full-skirted silks, had the atmosphere of crinolines round and about her; the room was fresh and sweet, and fragrantly quaint and stilted, and of the early Victorian years.
Into the armchair before the fire where she was used to sit, Betty made the little lady now go; and the girl went and sat on a footstool by her knees and talked to her, and entered into the dainty faded mind.
She saw, with a little smile, that Miss Flora Jennyns at once fell into a little pose—it was the faded reflection of a portrait that hung on the wall—the picture of a graceful simple young woman who leaned her chin on a pretty slender hand, as she sat wrapt in dreams of sweet sentiment; and slowly, from out the faded lines of the old face and head and pose, there came to her the features and pose, modest and virginal, of the portrait.
Whilst Betty made tea for her, she learnt that the little old Catholic lady had been a literary success in her youth—a one-time vogue, who was now fading away in the heroic pride of a gentlewoman’s penury—uncomplaining—amidst a sordid world and harsh needs dreaming of romance that had walked in crinolines—living in a withered garden where were but fragrant fallen leaves....
From that day, the little Miss Flora’s smile became more frequent; and from Betty’s attic the bleak loneliness lifted and went out; for, though the vasty gulf of age divided them (youth and old age can only love each other as in a dream, vaguely), the girl did not find so much time for brooding—she had found a something to mother....
Betty, looking out of her attic window, began to notice that, as twilight fell, a little old gentleman would slowly pace the street opposite; and the little faded old lady, dressed for the road, would go out and meet him, and, after old-world courtesies exchanged between them, she would take his proffered arm and so together they would take their little walk abroad.
Betty came to know him, with a smile, as the Man of Pallid Ideals.
He would bring Miss Flora to the door always; ring the bell for her; and with elaborate bow and hat in hand, there take leave of her. Nearer to the lady’s room he never ventured, neither being provided with a chaperon....
Betty one day taxed Miss Flora with the charge that she was in love—and loved a poet. And the little withered waxen cheeks blushed.
“You shall read his poems, my dear,” she said; and, rising, she went to a little sandal-wood box, opened the lock with an ornate little key, and, raising the lid, let out the scent of the lavender in which was laid a little book of verse amidst other treasures.
Miss Flora handed the little volume to Betty; and she, begging her to leave the box open, said she would only read the precious book in that room.
Miss Flora kissed her, and went back to her chair.
Betty, sitting in the window in the waning light, learnt from the precious volume that the poet’s name was Cartel de Maungy; and opening the book she found written upon every leaf in tuneful verse the self-revelation of the man, the poet of faded ideals, as his race had been before him—his grandsire had gone to the guillotine for a well-turned sonnet about something that did not matter. On every page was the tale of his placid devotion; his adoration of his Flora—always from a seemly distance; his vows that they should ever move in the ideal; that the touch of his lips upon her fingers is sweet marriage enough for him; in his measured singing of jewelled queens and sapphire nights and pearly dusk he holds her finger-tips reverently and but for the moment, and that only in the distant and proper measure of the gavotte or the like stately trippings to the whispered music of viol and lute and harpsichord—throughout was no coarse bucolic love-embrace. Thus the slender verse sounded its tender music until there was almost shame in the kiss that is kissed upon the mouth.
The little old faded lady was possessed of an academic and dainty old-world Papist faith that æsthetically touched Betty’s sense of beauty.
The child had grown up without any kind of formal religious instruction—had picked up from the air, and from straying truths in the air, her sweet concept of life. The pure metal of her quick, alert and vigorous understanding required but little hammering. Only with the lad Noll had come unrest and questioning.
Major Modeyne had drifted from his Church—indeed, Bettyremembered well a very severe fit of coughing that had overcome him in answer to an early childish demand of hers during a thunderstorm as to what God could find to do all day in heaven—coughing which became almost an apoplectic fit when, being unanswered, she concluded airily that the drab intercourse with pious people and the lack of good wholesome entertainment excused these outbursts of anger and violence, and no doubt led to the making of these noises and other suchlike unpleasantnesses.
Betty, with the strange reserve that covered all her deepest thinking, whispered no hint of her own birth in the same faith to the old lady; she tried instead to win from the beautiful and pure and faded mind of Miss Flora some conception of God and the mysteries—only to find the little old lady’s concept, for all the disguises of her delicate mind, exceedingly crude and vague—that, in fact, she had absolutely no concept at all. She saw that it was the wide compassion of the mystic Man of Sorrows that gave, as to most Papists, the exquisite faith in their mysteries. Yet, like the most orthodox, she spoke of the old and the new dispensation—God then had not known His own mind. Puzzled with the great fact that God and Son were absolutely destructive of each other—one the God of War, the other the God of Peace—one the God of Vengeance, demanding Punishment, the other the God of Mercy, offering Forgiveness; the one choosing an indifferent race as a chosen people, the other rejecting that race; the book of the laws of the one obliterating the book of the laws of the other—the girl had awakened from her childhood and realized that she had eaten of the fruit of knowledge, and that before the judgment-seat of that knowledge the God of her childhood stood convicted of the very sins, from killing downwards, for which that same God had condemned man to eternal punishments; and, with the true instinct for justice and for the humanities, she forthwith rejected the God and gave all her affection to the Christ, who had thwarted, and by thwarting had confessed the injustice of God.
And now, having so decided, and being in sight of a calm harbour of refuge, she found herself baffled with the fury of the factions that professed the Christ. The symbolism and the beauty of the Papist section beckoned her to Rome; but the genius of the child saw all things in the large, and was not to be led aside by details—she was repelled by the contradictions of its belief that at one turn appealed to reason, at the next rejected reason; repelled by its un-Christliness, repelled by the submission of the conscience to its priesthood, repelled by its condemnation of all outside its gates, repelled by its preposterous claims—by its belief in the real presence of the Christ in the wine and wafer of its sacraments.
She had only that day come upon a copy of the Cautels, and as she read the cautions to priests, after partaking of the sacraments, that they should not wash their mouths or spit before breaking their fast in case of ejecting the body of Christ in their spittle or vomit, she was stung with shame that such puerile things should be expected of her intelligence—it were as though she had been struck across the face with a whip. The strong blood of themaster race leaped in her veins, and she found herself unable to believe that the toys which had amused her infancy were really alive.
To all the pettiness of the little petty quarrels that were galling the dignity of the age, her clear intellect was too contemptuous to give more than a passing thought. The symbols and the forms, the chief source of the wrangles and squabblings, were no trouble to her, had the things on which they were founded been deep and large with truth. With the greyness of mind, that made of these things a sin, she had no more sympathy than with the narrowness of head that made of them an important part of life....
She had wandered one day into a Quakers’ meeting-house—had been struck with the deep religious atmosphere, the far deeper mysticism than that of her own Church, for all its splendid forms and ceremonial and great beauty of service. She had not felt her reason sullied by the interposition of any gross human body between the Christ and her nobility. She had felt the wondrous dignity of the simple service, in spite of the greyness.
She had read of late a novel, a vulgar stupid book, in which a child brought up by an agnostic is made to commit suicide because it cannot believe in a hereafter—in hell. Her reason revolted at the shabby trick, for she saw that no child would commit suicide because there was not a hell; but rather because there was—indeed, she herself remembered that she had suffered torments at night and had wept until her nerves were shaken for fear of hell, and out of compassion for the poor lost souls—nay, had reeled before the brutality that had created these poor souls only to fling them to such hellish predestined doom for all eternity. This literary trash roused her to the feeble foundations of sand on which much so-called religious life is built—especially the religious side of women. For the book had a wide sale.
Creeds are an affair of race. They that are of a master race will hold a master creed—they that are of a sloven race will bow to sloven gods. It is the attribute of a slave people to pay homage from fear. This girl was of the master peoples. It was impossible for her to enslave her mind or her body or her soul with the blind credulities. She was of the mighty race that has bred the Protestors. With the passing of her childhood she put away the toys of the childhood of the world. In no bitter or harsh temper, but with affection and sadness she put them away—and took a deeper breath of life.
In monastic cells and blind gropings in dark corners where life is a denial, and in the shirking of contradictions, very God is not to be found; but out in the free fresh air of the great world. The truth cannot lie.
The girl roused in the dusk of the dying day and took the beautiful image of the Mary, and went down with it to the little old faded lady’s room, and set it upon the mantel there, that it might bring happiness to one whose sweet mind had not passed beyond these things.
And she, little and old and faded, seated before the fire, smiledwhen the girl had set above her hearth the emblem of her outworn creed. When the tall slender girl went and sat down beside the flounced and emaciated old knees a pathetically weary old hand was stretched out and rested on the brown hair.
“Mother of God,” sighed the withered lips, “I am so glad not to be alone.”
As the girl parted from her image of the Mary, she left the childhood of her intellect behind her.
And from that day, Betty raised her frank honest eyes to the facts and verities of the live world about her, and, as she nearest might, fearlessly and cheerfully lived her own sweet life foot to foot and eye to eye with the mystic realities of her appointed destiny, mistaking guesses for truth never.
For it is through the humanities alone, be ye sure of this, that we may touch the hem of the garment of God.