disclosing the educational influence exerted by the essex coast, and other matters, including reasons for joy
sit down here by the fire—no, in the easy chair,” said ermyntrude, with a note of solicitude in her kindly voice. “mamma won’t be home for half an hour yet, and i want a nice, quiet, serious talk with you. oh, it’s going to be extremely serious, and you must begin by playing that you are at least one hundred and fifty years old.”
“that won’t be so difficult,” i replied, not without the implication of injury. “it will only be adding a few decades to the venerableness that i seem always to possess in your eyes.”
“oh!” said ermie, and looked at me inquiringly for a moment. then she seated herself, and gazed with much steadiness into the fire. i waited for the nice, serious talk to begin—and waited a long time.
“well, my dear child,” i broke in upon the silence at last, “i hoped to have been the very first to come and tell your mother how deeply glad i was to see you all back again in fernbank. but that wretched rheumatism of mine—at my age, you know———”
i was watching narrowly for even the faintest sign of deprecation. she did not stir an eyelash.
“yes,” she suddenly began, still intently gazing into the fire; “papa has got his money all back, and more. that is, it isn’t the same money, but somebody else’s—i’m sure i don’t know whose. sometimes i feel sorry for those other people, whoever they are, who have had to give it up to us. then, other times, i am so glad simply to be in again where it’s warm that i don’t care.”
“the firelight suits your face, ermie,” i said, noting with the pleasure appropriate to my position as the oldest friend of the family, how sweetly the soft radiance played upward upon the fair young rounded throat and chin, and tipped the little nostrils with rosy light.
“fortunately,” she went on, as if i had not spoken, “some americans took the house furnished in september for three months—i think, poor souls, that they believed it was the london season—and so we never had to break up, and we were able to get back again in time for uncle dudley to plant all his bulbs. they seem to have been very quiet people. mamma had a kind of notion that they would practise with bucking horses on the tennis-lawn, and shoot at bottles and clay pigeons here in the drawing-room. the only thing we could find that they did was to paste thick paper over the ventilator in the dining-room. and yet a policeman told our man that they slept with their bedroom windows open all night. curious, isn’t it?”
“i like to have one of these ‘nice, quiet, serious talks’ with you, ermie,” i said.
even at this she did not lift her eyes from the grate. “oh, don’t be impatient—it will be serious enough,” she warned me. “they say, you know, that drowning people see, in a single instant of time, whole years of events, whole books full of things. well, i’ve been under water for six months, and—and—i’ve noticed a good deal.”
“ah! is there a submarine observation station at clacton-on-sea? now you speak of it, i have heard of queer fish being studied there.”
“none queerer than we, my dear friend, you may be sure. mamma was right in choosing the place. we never once saw a soul we knew. of course, it is the dullest and commonest thing on earth—but it exactly fitted us during that awful period. we were going at first to cromer, but mamma learned that that was the chosen resort of dissolute theatrical people—it seems there has been a poem written in which it is called ‘poppy land,’ which mamma saw at once must be a cover for opium-eating and all sorts of dissipation. so we went to clacton instead. but what i was going to say is this—i did a great deal of thinking all through those six months. i don’t say that i am any wiser than i was, because, for that matter, i am very much less sure about things than i was before. but i was simply a blank contented fool then. now it’s different to the extent that i’ve stirred up all sorts of questions and problems buzzing and barking about me, and i don’t know the answers to them, and i can’t get clear of them, and they’re driving me out of my head—and there you are. that’s what i wanted to talk with you about.”
i shifted my feet on the fender, and nodded with as sensible an expression as i could muster.
“that’s why i said you must pretend to yourself that you are very old—quite a fatherly person, capable of giving a girl advice—sympathetic advice. in the first place—of course you know that the engagement with that hon. knobbeleigh jones has been off for ages. don’t interrupt me! it isn’t worth speaking of except for one point. his father, lord skillyduff, was the principal rogue in the combination which plundered papa of his money. having got the grundy money they had no use for the grundy girl. now, he justified his rascality by pleading that he had to make provision for his daughters, and everybody said he was a good father. papa goes in again through some other opening, and after a long fight brings out a fresh fortune, which he has taken away from somebody else—and i heard him tell mamma that he was doing it for the sake of his daughters. people will say he is a good father—i know i do.”
“none better in this world,” i assented cordially.
“well, don’t you see,” ermyntrude went on, “that puts daughters in the light of a doubtful blessing. papa’s whole worry and struggle was for us—for me. i was the load on his back. i don’t like to be a load. while we were prosperous, there was only one way for me to get down—that is by marriage. when we became poor, there was another way—that i should earn my own living. but this papa wouldn’t listen to. he quite swore about it—vowed he would rather work his fingers to the bone; rather do anything, no matter what it was, or what people thought of him for doing it, than that a daughter of his should take care of herself. he would look upon himself as disgraced, he said. those lodgings of ours at clacton weren’t specially conducive to good temper, i’m afraid; for i told him that the real disgrace would be to keep me in idleness to sell to some other knobbeleigh jones, or to palm me off on some better sort of young man who would bind himself to work for me all his life, and then find that i would have been dear at the price of a fortnight’s labour—and then mamma cried.—and papa, he swore more—and—and—”
i stirred the fire here, and then blushed to rediscover that it was asbestos i was knocking about. “how stupid of me!” i exclaimed, and murmured something about having been a stranger to fernbank so long.
ermyntrude took no notice. “i made a pretence of going up to london on a visit,” she continued, “and i spent five days looking about, making inquiries, trying to get some notion of how girls who supported themselves made a beginning. i talked a little with such few girls that i knew as were in town, and i cared to see—guardedly, of course. they had no idea—save in the way of the governess or music teacher. i’d cut my throat before i’d be either of those—forced to dress like ladies on the wages of a seamstress, and to smile under the insults of tradesmen’s wives and their louts of children. an actress i might be, after i had starved a long time in learning my business—but before that mamma would have died of shame. then there are typewriters, and lady journalists and telegraph clerks—i am surly enough sometimes to do that last to perfection—but they all have to have special talents or knowledge. as for saleswomen in the shops—there are a dozen poor genteel wretches standing outside ready to claw each other’s eyes out for every vacancy. i went over euston road way at noon, and i watched the work-girls come out of the factories and workshops, and they had such sharp, knowing, bullying faces that i knew i should be a helpless fool among them. and watching them—and watching the other girls on the street... in the strand and piccadilly—i told you i was going to talk seriously, my dear friend—it all came to seem to me like a nightmare. it frightened me. these were the girls whose fathers had failed to provide for them—that was absolutely all the difference between them and me. i had looked lazily down at marriage as a chance of escaping being bored here at fernbank. they were all looking fiercely up at marriage as the one only chance of rescue from weary toil, starvation wages, general poverty and misery. in both cases the idea was the same—to find some man, no matter what kind of a man, if only he will take it upon himself to provide something different. you see what poor, dependent things we really are! why should it be so? that’s what i want to know.”
“oh, that’s all you want to know, is it?” i remarked, after a little pause. “well, i think—i think you had better give me notice of the question.”
“i have tried to read what thinkers say about it,” she added; “but they only confuse one the more. there is a dr wallace whom the papers speak of as an authority, and he has been writing a long article this very week—or else it is an interview—and he says that everything will be all right, that all the nice women will marry all the good men, and that the other kinds will die off immediately, and everybody will be oh, so happy—in a ‘regenerated society.’ that is another thing i wanted to ask you about. he speaks—they all speak—so confidently about this ‘regenerated society.’ do you happen to know when it is to be?”
“the date has not been fixed, i believe,” i replied.
the early winter twilight had darkened the room, and the light from the grate glowed ruddily upon the girl’s face as she bent forward, her chin upon her clasped hands, looking into the fire.
“there is another date which remains undetermined,”’ i added, faltering not a little at heart, but keeping my tongue under fair control. “i should like to speak to you about it, if i may take off my lamb’s-wool wig and santa claus beard, and appear before you once more as a contemporary citizen. it is this, ermie. i am not so very old, after all. there is only a shade over a dozen years between us—say a baker’s dozen. my habits—my personal qualities, tolerable and otherwise, are more or less known to you. i am prosperous enough, so far as this world’s goods go. but i am tired of living——”
i stopped short, and stared in turn blankly at the mock coals. a freezing thought had just thrust itself into the marrow of my brain. she would think that i was saying all this because her father had regained and augmented his fortune. i strove in a numb, puzzled way to retrace what i had just uttered—to see if the words offered any chance of getting away upon other ground—and could not remember at all.
“tired of living,” i heard ermyntrude echo. i saw her nod her head comprehendingly in the firelight. she sighed.
“yes, except upon conditions,” i burst forth. “i weary of living alone. there hasn’t been a time for years when i didn’t long to tell you this—and most of all at clacton, if i had known you were at clacton. you have admitted yourself that nobody knew you were there.” the words came more easily now. “but always before i shrank from speaking. there was something about you too childlike, too innocent, too—too——”
“too silly,” suggested ermie, with an affable effect of helping me out.
then she unlocked her fingers, and, still looking into the fire, stretched out a hand backward to me. “all the same,” she murmured, after a little, “it isn’t an answer to my question, you know.”
“but it is to mine!” i made glad response, “and in my question all the others are enwrapped—always have been, always will be. and, oh, darling one——”
“that is mamma in the hall,” said ermyntrude.
