The Galaxy, June 1877 Part 1

The Galaxy, June 1877.

by Various.

A PROGRESSIVE BABY.

LETTER III.

18 STANFIELD GARDENS, } SOUTH KENSINGTON, } May 28, 1875. }

And there you have us down to date, my Susie. The sunshine and the crisp breezes, the innocent early teas with cresses and prawns, the grand long nights full of sleep, have put us all right with the world again; but after all Brighton's only a bit of West End moved off down by the sea, and if one must live in London at all, why, it's at its best for three or four weeks to come. And we're to get off early to Switzerland this year, for fear that it mayn't be so easy next summer.

For Ronayne's father is clearing away to make him stand for that dreary territory of hovels and bogs in which the paternal mansion is situate.

Fancy Ronayne an M.P.! And an Irish M.P.! I fight against it--under cover. The dream of my heart is an _appartement avec tena.s.se_ in Paris, and in summer to turn vagrants and tramps as now. It's so unlucky Ronayne should have been the eldest son: duty, respectability, and the proprieties have such a much stronger gripe upon him, and we're born vagabonds, both.

But, what must be, must. Meanwhile I console myself with my window-gardening. And you should see the house-front!--the balcony that will be a perfect bower presently. My window-boxes, the gayest mosaics of color, and the vestibule lined with callas, acacias, and heath--against a background of ferns and ivy. We were never so magnificent before, and it was Ronayne's surprise for me when we came back from the sea--he having given our florist _carte-blanche_; whereas I, bearing a conscience, have bargained with him always, and carefully counted my pots.

Mrs. Malise's disciplinary Johanna brought her charge for a little visit to my nursery yesterday. And my heart aches so for that baby!

He's a great child, well made, and with his mother's wonderful eyes--but so heavy, listless--"Meek as a work'us' child brought up on skilly," Ronayne renders it--and though he's perfectly clean now, and comfortably clad, n.o.body would dream he was a young mother's first baby, so ornamentless and sombre-hued are his little garments.

Nurse brings back indignant accounts of the way he's left to amuse himself, or cry his fill, when out for an airing in Kensington Gardens.

"Hours, ma'am, she keep that poor thing a-frettin' or a-sleepin' in his perambulator, the east wind a-cuttin' about him as draughty as draughty, while she sits on a bench a-makin' her foolish lace or talkin' to some of them German bandmen. He never gets taken out, nor played with, nor has any playthings. It's just cruelty to animals--that's what it is!" finishes my nursery dragon, who is as soft-hearted as she is grim of exterior and grammatically independent in speech.

Mrs. Malise has been absent at suffrage meetings in Scotland and Ireland for a month past, Miss Hedges told me when dining here just after our return. Mrs. Stainton, the porcelain widow, was invited also, and a curious and wonderfully interesting person we find her: the daintiest small creature--complexion like an ivory painting, deep-set, seeress eyes, and looking fairly spirit-like for fragility, in her long black dress and white lace shawl. Nothing could well be more piquant than to hear this filmy little thing, in a voice that would have fitted Queen Mab, recount her experiences in the most widely separated circles of life and thought, or quietly give utterance to quaint, audacious speculations, as to mysteries that perplex so many of us concerning this existence and the eternity it preludes. "If there be a hereafter!"

I heard some one answer to a remark of hers. "Ah, that was never a doubt to me save for a very brief s.p.a.ce," she replied. "I am like the Cure de Ars--'I know some one who would be finely taken in if there were no Paradise!'" Her exquisiteness of look, the fascinating talk, the soft, helpless manner are so appealing that one is disposed to treat her as some wandered denizen of the air and skies, though she hangs effortless, her whole weight upon one, and there is scarce a limit to her fine-lady and delicate-organization requirements.

The daughter of a Low Church dean, she became, in her husband's time, first broad church, then rationalist; after his death, because of extraordinary, extra natural occurrences that befell her, a spiritualist, and now she seems to be turning toward Catholicism, though Miss Hedges, who is a Catholic, shakes her head, and says she always feels very hopeless of people essentially given to all manner of vague interpretations, fanciful twistings of simple doctrine, and aesthetic sentimental mysticism.

"Obedience is in the order of existence," says the little lady. "I long for authority; I long for a voice I shall not question, to whose decision I can submit all the questions that torture me."

"I tried to stay my soul with ritualism," she said, talking to Miss H.

and myself when we were alone after dinner, "and at first I thought I was going to get some comfort out of it. I made my father furious by entering one of Miss ----'s famous sisterhoods. But it wouldn't do.

Ritualism of course was not more illogical then than now, but the actors weren't as well up in their parts, and how queer some of our performances at ---- were! I remember a retreat I made there, in which I was put into a cell bare of everything save a table and chair, and a Testament upon the table, and there I was left alone the whole day, seeing no creature save a Sister who, speechless, thrust my dinner and tea in at me! You may imagine the imbecile condition in which night found me.

"And as a punishment for some fault I was ordered to go to communion for four months without going to confession! Miss ----, our Reverend Mother, behaved exactly as if she had taken her notions of the external character and dignities of her office from some swelling, stern, ridiculous Lady Abbess in a no-popery novel! We undertook everything--teaching, the care of hospitals, training of servants, district work, Magdalen houses, and to these active employments we joined the contemplative, strictly cloistered life! We had no special training for either one of our labors; we had no completed const.i.tutions or rule, and one was liable, at any moment, to be whisked from one's quiet cell and sent alone at night, across the kingdom, to some duty for which one was no more fitted than a baby or a savage.

"I was set, in the beginning, to clean lamps, and black-lead the grates, but failed in this business so completely that I was given a district in East London to afflict with visitations and instructions.

Trying one day to convey some idea of the Real Presence to a voluble old woman who was one of the sisterhood's most devoted _protegees_, I said, 'Then, Sally, since you know _who_ is in the church, I hope you never go in or out without showing proper respect.' 'Oh, yessum, yessum!' she a.s.sured me. 'Indeed, 'm, I allays bobs to the eagle!' (the bra.s.s eagle of the lectern!). With all Sally's bobbings to the eagle and to us sisters, she was a dreadful old harpy, and made me think always of two old women my father overheard talking one day at Cirencester. There is a fund there which was long ago bequeathed by some pious person for the furnishing small stipends to such aged poor people as should daily devoutly hear ma.s.s. Of course since the revenues have lapsed into Anglican hands this sum is used now for those who attend the early service. And this was what my father heard:

"First old crone, _loquitur_: 'These be hard times, Betty. How d'ye think of getting a livelihood this winter?'

"Second old crone: 'They _be_ hard, for sh.o.r.e, Anne, and I'm a-thinking of taking to yorly priors (early prayers) for a quarter!'

"One of my droll, dreadful district visitor experiences I shall never forget. In the process of my visitations I stumbled, one day, into the room of a woman very haggard and very yellow, but as the woman was dressed and moving actively about, I had no idea of her having any special ailment, save dirt. But as soon as she knew who I was, a visiting Sister, she began to tell me how ill she was--ill of a disease that not another person in the whole kingdom had--the doctor said so--spotted leprosy. And how physicians came constantly to see her, and brought, each one, other physicians--how, in short of a horrible long, she was a sort of gruesome doctor's pet!

"The woman's husband--for she was married, had eleven children, and another baby coming soon--was working away at a cobbler's bench in the room's only window, and she constantly appealed to him: 'Dr. So-and-So said there wasn't another case like mine in this country, didn't he, Jim? And he didn't see how it was it hadn't killed me off long ago--you remember, Jim? And that young Scotch doctor that was so astonished to see what a family I had--you haven't forgotten him, have you, Jim?' And the man corroborated all her statements with a pride in having a wife so uniquely afflicted impossible to describe! Then she insisted I must see and dress the awful sores that made her shoulders and one breast a great wound, telling me, as I half fainted over the task, that I didn't do it half so well as any of the doctors, and begging me, when I had finished, to stop long enough for her to give me a cup of tea in that place, insufferable at best with the dirty cobbler and five or six of the wretched babies, but become, after my _mauvais quart d'heure_ with the terrible woman, a chamber of horrors in which to delay one further instant would, I felt, make me daft, or shudderingly sea-sick, for life!

"I stopped a year and a half in the sisterhood, trying, as I said, to make it do; but either I'm too logical, or have too keen a sense of the ridiculous, for the farce of our active-uncloistered-severely-contemplative-enclosed life, a religious order without a const.i.tution, frowned on by all the bishops, carrying on its dearest devotional practices in hiding from all proper ecclesiastical authority, became intolerable to me; and when, one fine day, there came from 'Reverend Mother' an order to go and nurse a man ill with typhus--an agricultural laborer living alone in his cottage--and to my remonstrances that I knew nothing of the disease, my plea for a companion less ignorant or at least clear instructions for my own guidance, no answer was vouchsafed save an oracular a.s.surance that if I did my part of obedience, light would be given me, I revolted, sent a contumacious message that though I believed the age of miracles by no means past, I had never seen any wrought in our order, and could not risk the poor man's life upon so vague a prospect, and presently bid farewell to my Anglican convent and to ritualism. Several Sisters have returned to the world since, and four of these have gone over to Rome. Two of these have married. One, whom I loved most dearly, is a Poor Clare in Ireland, and the other has used her fortune to open a creche, where she works harder than any of her nurses, and carries, I should say, the lightest heart in London.

"I have no doubt there is more system, more decorum--I use the word in its literal sense--in the Anglican sisterhoods now. I'm quite amazed sometimes at the closeness of the imitation of the real thing when I go to Margaret street, or to St. Alban's--the altars, the lights, the confessionals, the stations, the black-ca.s.socked figures gliding about, removing their berettas and dropping on one knee as they pa.s.s the altar--all the furniture; but a dreadful feeling of emptiness--as if the house's owner had moved away! Do you ever look at the pictures and the t.i.tles of books in the windows of the High Church bookshops? What would have been thought of them five years ago even? And at ----'s in Oxford street, a High Church friend tells me, they have a room into which you may be ushered by inquiring for the 'Penitential Department,' if the card bearing the name of a clerical voucher, which you must present, be satisfactory, and where you may purchase disciplines--nail-studded armlets, waist-belts--perhaps hair shirts, though I don't remember that they figured in my friend's list.

"And, two years ago, I think it was, I witnessed a little scene that was as extraordinary as it was absurd. I was coming up from Cromer, and our train had halted for the usual time in the station at Norwich. It's a large station, trains constantly rolling in and out, and crowds of pa.s.sengers, guards, porters flying about. While we waited, above the din suddenly was heard a singular and regular thud! thud! coming down the platform. Thud! thud! on it came, and the noise, and the queer, sudden hush of most of the other racket made us all look eagerly out to see what it could be. _It_ was a progression--a procession--a man in soutane, barefooted, I believe, preceded by some sort of a servitor carrying a monstrous book--breviary, 'Livre des Heures'--I know not what, and a tall wooden crosier, whose foot it was that made the thud!

thud! At a little distance behind the man in the soutane, whom I recognized directly as Mr. Lyne--the famous Father Ignatius, a self const.i.tuted Benedictine Abbot--followed two Anglican Sisters. The servitor and Father Ignatius betook themselves into a first-cla.s.s carriage, the Sisters remaining outside, and presently the crosier head was thrust out of the window, and Father Ignatius appeared behind it with hand outstretched to bless the Sisters, who knelt devoutly on the platform to receive the benediction. Up to this point everybody had behaved with wonderful restraint; but the last stroke was too much, and it was amid a perfect scream of laughter from pa.s.sengers, officials, cabmen, and _gamins_, that the train steamed out of the station, bearing the Benedictine Abbot away, but surely not leaving the lambs of the flock comfortless."

And so she goes on for as long as you like. She has been everywhere.

She has known quant.i.ties of out-of-the-way people. She is ready at every turn with a fresh story, an apposite bit of experience, and darts in an instant from the perfect mimicry of a popular vicar we know, who preaches in lavender kids, and leaving his cure of souls for a month's holiday, pathetically from the pulpit entreats our Lord to look after his charge until its proper shepherd returns, to some speculation concerning personal accountability, an annunciation of the reasonableness of purgatory, and wondering as to its various forms of discipline for individual souls, or to dwell on minute phases of the preservation of ident.i.ty, distinctive and original character after death, etc., and manifests altogether such an at-homeness with the unseen world that, listening to her, I half expect phantom eyes will look into mine if I glance back over either shoulder, bodiless somethings start forward from dusky corners, the very sweep of my own drawing-room curtains gets eerie, a what-not or a tabouret becomes a tripod, my unsubstantial small guest is a priestess--and I'm glad when Ronayne's voice breaks in, "All in the dark, the fire at its last coal, no tea or coffee. Mrs. Stainton, you're a syren!"

Her own little sitting-room in the a.s.sociate house is as heterogeneous as herself--the room lined with soft comforts, the air heavy with the fragrance of a profusion of flowers, the room's mistress nearly lost in the capaciousness of a most luxurious lounging chair, her table piled with ascetic literature; and in this chamber I encountered the other day the very oddest of all the peculiar people to whom my friendship for "little Malaise" has introduced me--a Miss Beauclerc, a short, stout, dark, coa.r.s.e-skinned woman of fifty odd, hair cropped close, and an obstinate, honest, horse face.

She was exhibiting her own "spirit drawings"--mad scaramouches, things like designs for eastern embroidery, accurate representations of various portions of the kingdom of heaven, she a.s.sured me, and a quant.i.ty of utterly purposeless collections of strokes and dots, to which she gave names that would have been blasphemous in any but a lunatic's mouth. How she explained them! How fondly she looked at them!

and what anguish she told me she endured lest they should be injured, or perish in some unworthy way. This woman believes herself to be the spirit bride of ----! Can you fancy it? one of the most fervent, poetic, spiritual, gifted of all Anglican divines. She says that since his death he has been constantly near her. She sees him often, leads the life he prescribes, making and shunning acquaintances at his direction, going from place to place, crossing the ocean twice even at his pleasure. Finally she showed a photograph--the faithfulest possible presentment of her own unideal face and person, with, floating above, arms extended in protecting angel guise, a mistily outlined, veiled figure surmounted by the refined, beautiful face known to everybody in the later editions of his poems, and in the windows of church bookshops--the poor clergyman who is allowed to rest neither in his grave nor in any unknown country beyond. It is hard for him, hard for Mrs. ----, were she to hear of this post-mortem masquerading and "affinity," hard for the deluded woman who wanders about the world alone with her crazy fancies, repudiated by her kindred, and plundered by the brigandish among her co-believers.

Here, too, I met again the tall, thin young lady, heroine of the device for frightening small bores--the Plymouth Sister's daughter. We talked of a good many things, but chiefly of marriage, and the position of unmarried women in England. The girl was as simply frank as a child.

Matrimony, and matrimony alone, offered any career to women in England.

And upon Mrs. Stainton's saying that despite her own perfect marriage--a marriage for love, and the union so entire that there lurked no shadowy region in her soul of which she could not make her husband as free as herself to enter--yet all that she had seen of life made her feel sure that, beyond a few rare exceptions, it mattered not, ten years after marriage, whether the match had been for love solely, or arranged, or a _mariage de convenance_, the girl a.s.sented; somewhat bitterly remarked that ideals were very well for a heroic life, but terrible drawbacks in the world of to-day, and that any woman would do better for herself to accept any reasonably suitable offer than to cling to an impossible dream, or insist upon a great amount of sentiment. "It ought to be enough," said this girl of the period, "for a woman to be able to decently respect a man who has the means of placing her in such conditions as she thinks will suit her. And men do very well without sentiment. They have their professions, their business, their friends, their clubs. It is quite enough for them if their wives are fairly good housekeepers and mothers, presentable at head of their tables, pleasant hostesses in their drawing-rooms. It sounds very mean, but what is a girl to do? We may be most of us clever enough and tolerably well educated, but there are not among us many brilliant geniuses who can find all comfort and happiness in a life devoted, wholly to art or literature. What is one of the mediocre ma.s.s to do? It's not genteel to do this, it's unfeminine to do that; one can't stir in any direction that would have in it some spirit, some earnest, something worth while.

"You can always do good, they tell us. I dare say; so can men; but how many among them would like to be recommended, as life occupation, to go making impertinent raids into poor people's houses to tell them they're untidy, when a family has but one room to live in, and there's but one water tap in the court, and two or three flights of stairs over which to carry every drop; or that they're ill-smelling, and will have fever, when an open drain and the dust bin are lodged just under the window, and somebody's great high wall cuts off every ray of sunshine; or that they don't know how to manage because they fare ill, when a half dozen people must keep life in them and some covering on them on fifteen shillings a week? Oh, I'm sick of it all! Look at mamma! She _lives_ in jails, up alleys, in soup kitchens and dispensaries, and we girls cut out and make up flannels, and knew about relief tickets before we could speak, and it's all just pouring water into a sieve! Mamma's always in agonies about some _protegee_ she's placed somewhere, who has absconded with the family plate and wardrobe. Her people are always getting drunk, fighting, or cheating her in some monstrous way. Her nicest girls run off with a strolling theatre company, or to dance in the ballet. There's no end to her miseries, and the people she spends her whole time, strength, and all the money she can spare and beg upon are not really much better off in the end. But even if they were? Mamma is mamma, and I am myself, and we're differing stars. No, I stick to my text. To be only a commonly contented married woman, with the shelter and freedom of a wife's position, with a house to keep, children and servants to look after, and with a certain amount of social influence, is better than to subside into a grim or fidgetty old maid in lodgings, with a dog and three-volume novels to get through the days and years with; to be snubbed and sneered at by men; to have, when one's hair is white as time can make it, the privilege of walking meekly out to dinner behind one's grand niece, a silly chit of eighteen, married a twelvemonth--and n.o.body to care whether one lives or dies, unless perhaps a Bath chair man.

"Matrimony's the only career for women in England, but we ought to be trained for it on Gradgrind principles. As it is, we're far too aesthetic and sentimental for the mates we must have--if any. Poetry and the stories of fine, gracious, self-sacrificing lives ought to be suppressed; they're ruinous reading for this nineteenth century." And so on and on.

"There's reason for that poor girl's bitterness," said Mrs. Stainton when we were again alone. "A dozen years ago, in her first and second seasons out, a more charming creature it would have been hard to find--ingenuous, sunny tempered, a dashing, sparkling blonde beauty, full of Irish quickness and fun, and a favorite wherever she went.

Unluckily she met Ward Cotterell--now one of the editors of 'The Phare'--then a radiant, double first, handsome, chivalric, but as poor and debt-laden as he was clever, and the pair fell desperately in love.

Mrs. Dixon wouldn't let them call themselves engaged. She had crippled her own fortune, and Kate had sacrificed a great part of her own portion, to clear a spendthrift eldest son and brother of his difficulties, and start him afresh in Ceylon, so that aid on their part was impossible, and Cotterell, after a year or so's trying vainly in this and that direction, for an income, gave up the struggle, married an heiress, who paid his debts, brought him 40,000 then, and has inherited since 60,000, and within six months after his marriage had his place on the 'Phare' offered him, with a salary of 1,200 a year.

'What would I not have given a year ago for any sort of hard work that would have made me sure of 500 a year?' he said to some friend who knew the little story.

"Poor Kate kept up pretty well. 'What else _could_ he do?' she always says. 'He had no income, and mine would have barely given us shelter.'

But she refused offer after offer for years. Now, when she finds admiration less freely forthcoming, and is utterly weary of everything she has tried, or believes is in store for her, I dare say she fancies she regrets the lost chances, but she's too genuine to make a _mariage de convenance_, let her talk as cynically as she will.

"As for Cotterell, he hasn't a money anxiety in the world, and is reckoned one of the most brilliant leader writers in London; but his wife is the most commonplace woman alive--no more a companion to him than a housemaid would be; and Cotterell's not one of the clever men who like women to be pillows, and pillows only. He has given up society, save that of men, almost entirely; lives in his study and his room in the 'Phare' building, and his talk, when one meets him, is a mixture of fatalism and wormwood, depressing to the last degree. No hero he, and yet his fate has plenty of compensations that Kate's lacks--power, work, and two or three children that have inherited his wit as well as his handsome looks.

"Oh, what a world it is!--a world of infinite pettinesses. I'm dreadfully poor and cowardly myself, but I've always had the greatest reverence for the gift of immortality, and I used to think if I could have chosen, I would have been born and then have died directly. But now that I believe unbaptized babies and people whose goodness, however perfect, is only natural, will have, in another existence, but natural beat.i.tude, and as such a state wouldn't at all satisfy me for an eternity, I should have to tarry long enough to be baptized, and after that one can't wish to run away directly from the foes one has just promised to war against. A soul _not_ such a responsibility, and is always thrusting in to complicate and confuse matters!

"But, do you know, I think so often what an admirable, harmonious, earthly preface to eternal bliss in the natural order would Anglicanism be--Anglicanism of the moderate type, a little quickened with the evangelical element, but neither high nor low. The life, as I remember it in the close at ----, was so pleasant, so decorous, so amiable, so full of good, comfortable, luxurious things, so ladylike and gentlemanly, so reputable. One kept the commandments mainly; one was never anything but high-bred and high-toned; one did one's duty too--taught a little in the schools; looked after the rheumatic old bodies in cottages delightfully picturesque to sketch, but dark and damp as graves to live in; handed buns and tea at the school treats; one wasn't always thinking about delicate matters of conscience, about renunciation, self-abnegation, and what it must mean to be a soldier under a captain who neither lived delicately, nor slept softly, nor was used to stately shelter--a crucified head whose arms are the instruments of the Pa.s.sion--and how well off one's body was!"

And I've been--no, I've been bidden to the Dialectical Society. You don't know what that is, my barbaric New Zealander? And I didn't know either when Mr. Malise sent me tickets for one evening, specially urging my attendance, as there would be something well worth hearing--a paper on "Celibacy" read by its author, a gifted young girl of only twenty-two!

I took my tickets to my liege. "Ronayne, fount of wisdom and light, whatever may the Dialectical Society be?"

"The Dialectical Society, madam, is a body of men and women who meet to rake up, turn over, and discuss to all their verges subjects which the weaker ma.s.s of mortals think upon only on compulsion, with fear and trembling, and in mental sackcloth and ashes. And pray, what have you to do with Dialecticals, Eve? We are _not_ going there, if that's what those tickets mean!"

"Oh, Adam! And why not? Because I'm, unluckily, married, am I to stop trying to improve myself, and not care to know what grand heights happier, unhampered women are scaling? And, Adam, only see, here's to be a paper read by a young lady only twenty-two, Mr. Malise says, and there couldn't be anything so very dreadful to hear in the little composition of an innocent young creature like that!"

"'Subject, Celibacy, by Eliza Stella Greatheart, M.D.,'" read Ronayne.

"Humph! charming young creature! Well, madam Lil, you'll have to imagine what the medical young lady will say on the state she's proved to such ripeness of years, for you're not likely to hear, and Mr.

Malise has wasted his tickets. And as if you cared what anybody could say about single blessedness--a woman with an angel in the nursery crib, and a husband who breathes but to serve her! Go away this minute!" And I left monseigneur to his _moutons_, a little huffed, no doubt, at being interrupted in the fine middle of a working morning--always "The Growth of Language"; and you should see the pile of MSS. I used to copy for him, but lately it has taken so much time to sketch my baby! Every new att.i.tude is prettier than the last, and every day adds a charm. You need not laugh; I never had a baby before. Just wait until you know for yourself! I've painted the darling twice, once for Ronayne's father, though a little against the grain, for the old gentleman thinks it dreadfully _infra dig._ that I, a lady born, and I most especially a lady wed, should ever have been publicly catalogued as an artist in exhibition lists and newspaper notices, and have sold the labor of my hands, eyes, and brain in the marketplace. What would happen if he caught sudden sight of a memento that always goes with me in one of my boxes--a little tin sign, my first one; and how proud I was of it!