The wisest aunt telling the saddest tale.
Midsummer Night’s Dream.
The earlier proofs of the Mouse-trap were brought by Lance, who had spent more time in getting them into shape than his wife approved, and they were hailed with rapture by the young ladies on seeing themselves for the first time in print. As to Gerald, he had so long been bred—as it were—to journalism that, young as he was, he had caught the trick, and ‘The Inspector’s Tour’ had not only been welcomed by the ‘Censor’, but portions had been copied into other papers, and there was a proposal of publishing it in a separate brochure. It would have made the fortune of the Mouse-trap, if it had not been so contrary to its principles, and it had really been sent to them in mischief, together with The ‘Girton Girl’, of which some were proud, though when she saw it in print, with a lyre and wreath on the page, sober Mysie looked grave.
“Do you think it profane to parody Jane Taylor?” said Gerald.
“No, but I thought it might hurt some people’s feelings, and discourage them, if we laugh at the High School.”
“Why, Dolores goes to give lectures there,” exclaimed Valetta.
“Nobody is discouraged by a little good-humoured banter,” said Gillian. “Nobody with any stuff in them.”
“There must be some training in chaff though,” said Gerald, “or they don’t know how to take it.”
“And in point of fact,” said Dolores, “the upper tradesmen’s daughters come off with greater honours in the High School than do the young gentlewomen.”
“Very wholesome for the young Philistines,” said Gerald. “The daughters of self-made men may well surpass in energy those settled on their lees.”
Gerald and Dolores were standing with their backs to the wall of Anscombe Church, which Jasper Merrifield and Mysie were zealously photographing, the others helping—or hindering.
“I thought upper tradesfolk were the essence of Philistines,” returned Dolores.
“The elder generation—especially if he is the son of the energetic man. The younger are more open to ideas.”
“The stolid Conservative is the one who has grown up while his father was making his fortune, the third generation used to be the gentleman, now he is the man who is tired of it.”
“Tired of it, aye!” with a sigh.
“Why you are a man with a pedigree!” she returned.
“Pedigrees don’t hinder—what shall I call it?—the sense of being fettered.”
“One lives in fetters,” she exclaimed. “And the better one likes one’s home, the harder it is to shake them off.”
He turned and looked full at her, then exclaimed, “Exactly,” and paused, adding, “I wonder what you want. Has it a form?”
“Oh yes, I mean to give lectures. I should like to see the world, and study physical science in every place, then tell the next about it. I read all I can, and I think I shall get consent to give some elementary lectures at the High School, though Uncle Jasper does not half like it, but I must get some more training to do the thing rightly. I thought of University College. Could you get me any information about it?”
“Easily; but you’ll have to conquer the horror of the elders.”
“I know. They think one must learn atheism and all sorts of things there.”
“You might go in for physical science at Oxford or Cambridge.”
“I expect that is all my father would allow. In spite of the colonies, he has all the old notions about women, and would do nothing Aunt Lily really protested against.”
“You are lucky to have a definite plan and notion to work for. Now fate was so unkind as to make me a country squire, and not only that, but one bound down, like Gulliver among the Liliputians, with all manner of cords by all the dear good excellent folks, who look on that old mediaeval den with a kind of fetish-worship, sprung of their having been kept out of it so long, and it would be an utter smash of all their hearts if I uttered a profane word against it. I would as soon be an ancient Egyptian drowning a cat as move a stone of it. It is a lovely sort of ancient Pompeii, good to look at now and then, but not to be bound down to.”
“Like Beechcroft Court, a fossil. It is very well there are such places.”
“Yes, but not to be the hope of them. It is my luck. If my eldest uncle, who had toiled in a bookseller’s shop all his youth and reigned like a little king, had not gone and got killed in a boating accident, there he would be the ruling Sir Roger de Coverley of the county, a pillar of Church and State, and I should be a free man.”
“Won’t they let you go about, and see everything?”
“Oh yes, I am welcome to do a little globe-trotting. They are no fools; if they were I should not care half so much; but wherever I went, there would be a series of jerks from my string, and not having an integument of rhinoceros hide, I could not disregard them without a sore more raw than I care to carry about. After all, it is only a globe, and one gets back to the same place again.”
“Men have so many openings.”
“I’m not rich enough for Parliament, and if I were, maybe it would be worse for their hearts,” he said, with a sigh.
“There’s journalism, a great power.”
“Yes, but to put my name to all I could—and long to say—would be an equal horror to the dear folks.”
“Yet you are helping on this concern.”
“True, but partly pour passer le temps, partly because I really want to hear ‘The Outlaws Isle’ performed, and all under protest that the windmill will soon be swept away by the stream.”
“Indeed, yes,” cried Dolores. “They hope to regulate the stream. They might as well hope to regulate Mississippi.”
“Well-chosen simile! The current is slow and sluggish, but irresistible.”
“Better than stagnating or sticking fast in the mud.”
“Though the mud may be full of fair blossoms and sweet survivals,” said Gerald sadly.
“Oh yes, people in the old grooves are delightful,” said Dolores, “but one can’t live, like them, with a heart in G. F. S., like my Aunt Jane, really the cleverest of any of us! Or like Mysie, not stupid, but wrapped up in her classes, just scratching the surface. Now, if I went in for good works I would go to the bottom—down to the slums.”
“Slums are one’s chief interest,” said Gerald; “but no doubt it will soon be the same story over and over, and only make one wish—”
“What?”
“That there could be a revolution before I am of age.”
“What’s that?” cried Primrose, coming up as he spoke. “A revolution?”
“Yes, guillotines and all, to cut off your head in Rotherwood Park,” said Gerald lightly.
“Oh! you don’t really mean it.”
“Not that sort,” said Dolores. “Only the coming of the coquecigrues.”
“They are in ‘The Water Babies’,” said Primrose, mystified.
Each of those two liked to talk to the other as a sort of fellow-captive, solacing themselves with discussions over the ‘Censor’ and its fellows. Love is not often the first thought, even where it lurks in modern intellectual intercourse between man and maid; and though Kitty Varley might giggle, the others thought the idea only worthy of her. Aunt Jane, however, smelt out the notion, and could not but communicate it to her sister, though adding—
“I don’t believe in it: Dolores is in love with Physiology, and the boy with what Jasper calls Socialist maggots, but not with each other, unless they work round in some queer fashion.”
However, Lady Merrifield, feeling herself accountable for Dolores, was anxious to gather ideas about Gerald from his aunt, with whom she was becoming more and more intimate. She was more than twenty years the senior, and the thread of connection was very slender, but they suited one another so well that they had become Lilias and Geraldine to one another. Lady Merrifield had preserved her youthfulness chiefly from having had a happy home, unbroken by family sorrows or carking cares, and with a husband who had always taken his full share of responsibility.
“Your nephew’s production has made a stir,” said she, when they found themselves alone together.
“Yes, poor boy.” Then answering the tone rather than the words, “I suppose it is the lot of one generation to be startled by the next. There is a good deal of change in the outlook.”
“Yes,” said Lady Merrifield. “The young ones, especially the youngest, seem to have a set of notions of their own that I cannot always follow.”
“Exactly,” said Geraldine eagerly.
“You feel the same? To begin with, the laws of young ladyhood—maidenliness—are a good deal relaxed—”
“There I am not much of a judge. I never had any young ladyhood, but I own that the few times I went out with Anna I have been surprised, and more surprised at what I heard from her sister Emily.”
“What we should have thought simply shocking being tolerated now.”
“Just so; and we are viewed as old duennas for not liking it. I should say, however, that it is not, or has not, been a personal trouble with me. Anna’s passion is for her Uncle Clement, and she has given up the season on his account, though Lady Travis Underwood was most anxious to have her; and as to Emily, though she is obliged to go out sometimes, she hates it, and has a soul set on slums and nursing.”
“You mean that the style of gaieties revolts a nice-minded girl?”
“Partly. Perhaps such as the Travis Underwoods used to take part in, rather against their own likings, poor things, are much less restrained for the young people than what would come in your daughters’ way.”
“Perhaps; though Lady Rotherwood has once or twice in country-houses had to protect her daughter, to the great disgust of the other young people. That is one development that it is hard to meet, for it is difficult to know where old-fashioned distaste is the motive, and where the real principle of modesty. Though to me the question is made easy, for Sir Jasper would never hear of cricket for his daughters, scarcely of hunting, and we have taken away Valetta and Primrose from the dancing-classes since skirt-dancing has come in; but I fear Val thinks it hard.”
“Such things puzzle my sisters at Vale Leston. They are part of the same spirit of independence that sends girls to hospitals or medical schools.”
“Or colleges, or lecturing. Dolores is wild to lecture, and I see no harm in her trying her wings at the High School on some safe subject, if her father in New Zealand does not object, though I am glad it has not occurred to any of my own girls.”
“Sir Jasper would not like it?”
“Certainly not; but if my brother consents he will not mind it for Dolores. She is a good girl in the main, but even mine have very different ideals from what we had.”
“Please tell me. I see it a little, and I have been thinking about it.”
“Well, perhaps you will laugh, but my ideal work was Sunday-schools.”
“Are not they Miss Mohun’s ideal still?”
“Oh yes, infinitely developed, and so they are my cousin Florence’s—Lady Florence Devereux; but the young ones think them behind the times. I remember when every girl believed her children the prettiest and cleverest in nature, showed off her Sunday-school as her pride and treasure, and composed small pink books about them, where the catastrophe was either being killed by accident, or going to live in the clergyman’s nursery. Now, those that teach do so simply as a duty and not a romance.”
“And the difficulty is to find those who will teach,” said Geraldine. “One thing is, that the children really require better teaching.”
“That is quite true. My girls show me their preparation work, and I see much that I should not have thought of teaching the Beechcroft children. But all the excitement of the matter has gone off.”
“I know. The Vale Leston girls do it as their needful work, not with their hearts and enthusiasm. I expect an enthusiasm cannot be expected to last above a generation and perhaps a half.”
“Very likely. A more indifferent thing; you will laugh, but my enthusiasm was for chivalry, Christian chivalry, half symbolic. History was delightful to me for the search for true knights. I had lists of them, drawings if possible, but I never could indoctrinate anybody with my affection. Either history is only a lesson, or they know a great deal too much, and will prove to you that the Cid was a ruffian, and the Black Prince not much better.”
“And are you allowed the ‘Idylls of the King’?”
“Under protest, now that the Mouse-trap has adopted Browning for weekly reading and discussion. Tennyson is almost put on the same shelf with Scott, whom I love better than ever. Is it progress?”
“Well, I suppose it is, in a way.”
“But is it the right way?”
“That’s what I want to see.”
“Now listen. When our young men, my brothers—especially my very dear brother Claude and his contemporaries, Rotherwood is the only one left—were at Oxford, they got raised into a higher atmosphere, and came home with beautiful plans and hopes for the Church, and drew us up with them; but now the University seems just an ordeal for faith to go through.”
“I should think there was less of outward temptation, but more of subtle trial. And then the whole system has altered since the times you are speaking of, when the old rules prevailed, and the great giants of Church renewal were there!” said Geraldine.
“You belong to the generation whom they trained, and who are now passing away. My father was one who grew up then.”
“We live on their spirit still.”
“I hope so. I never knew much about Cambridge till Clement went there, but it had the same influence on him. Indeed, all our home had that one thought ever since I can remember. Clement and Lance grew up in it.”
“But you will forgive me. These younger men either go very, very much further than we older ones dreamt of, or they have flaws in their faith, and sometimes—which is the strangest difficulty—the vehement observance and ritual with flaws beneath in their faith perhaps, or their loyalty—Socialist fancies.”
“There is impatience,” said Geraldine. “The Church progress has not conquered all the guilt and misery in the world.”
“Who said it would?”
“None of us; but these younger ones fancy it is the Church’s fault, instead of that of her members’ failures, and so they try to walk in the light of the sparks that they have kindled.”
“Altruism as they call it—love of the neighbour without love of God.”
“It may lead that way.”
“Does it?”
“Perhaps we are the impatient ones now,” said Geraldine, “in disliking the young ones’ experiments, and wanting to bind them to our own views.”
“Then you look on with toleration but with distrust.”
“Distrust of myself as well as of the young ones, and trying not to forget that ‘one good custom may corrupt the world,’ so it may be as well that the pendulum should swing.”
“The pendulum, but not its axis—faith!”
“No; and of my boy’s mainspring of faith I do feel sure, and of his real upright steadiness.”
Lady Merrifield asked no more, but could wait.
But is not each generation a terra incognita to the last? A question which those feel most decidedly who stand on the border-land of both, with love and sympathy divided between the old and the new, clinging to the one, and fearing to alienate the other.
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