CHAPTER I

Miss Onoria Strickland lived in a semi-detached villa, and had no nonsense about her. Many women repose through life upon lesser attributes, they may have a handsome profile, a gift for putting on their clothes, a skilful tongue, or a kind heart. But Miss Strickland found rest in none of these minor alleviations of the spirit; she took her stand triumphantly upon her direct common sense.

No one could beat her there. “What,” she would ask herself as she came to any crisis in her life or in the lives of her neighbours, “is the most sensible thing to do?” And when she had answered this question, she did it; or in cases where an action of her own was not indicated, she ordered it to be done by others.

She had lived at Little Ticklington for forty-five years, and all this time she had had her eyes open and said whatever came into her head, under the impression that she was expressing a peculiarly pure form of truth.

Her friends depended upon her and feared her. When they didn’t want to depend upon her they got out of her way.

Miss Strickland was continually discovering the deceitfulness of human nature but she never laid her finger upon its cause.

She did not realise that the only way to keep on good terms with an aggressive personality is by the constant practice of evasion.

Miss Onoria Strickland was an exemplary citizen. She had earned her own living with talent and success from the age of twenty-one, and she had been a masterful but helpful daughter to her aged parents. They aged a little prematurely under this assistance, and died within a year of each other.

Opinion in Little Ticklington agreed that neither could support the full weight of Onoria’s attentions without the other.

She nursed them to the last with a rigid application of common sense, which took the wind out of the local doctor’s sails. There was nothing left for him to suggest but medicines, and these were ineffectual.

Onoria had never felt lonely during the lifetime of her parents.

She left home at nine o’clock every morning and returned at five o’clock in the afternoon, except on Saturday, when she came back to lunch.

No one could have had a fuller life; she managed her parents, did the household accounts, worked in the garden, or took Prendergast for a walk. Prendergast was a pug dog of a self-centred and exacting nature. He had been given to Mr. and Mrs. Strickland by an old friend of that name, and though Onoria had protested against the use of a surname for a pet dog, as unsuitable and even ridiculous, her father and mother had insisted querulously and unitedly that they wanted to call the pug “Prendergast” as a last tribute to their deceased friend; and as they were at this time feeble, and it was bad for them to insist, Onoria had wisely let her protest drop.

After her parents’ death, Prendergast became the pivot upon which the household turned. Onoria was not sensible about Prendergast: she adored him. He was the one licensed folly of her ordered life.

It must not be supposed that Romance had passed Onoria by.

It had fallen at her feet early in life, and when she discovered how much nonsense it had about it, she had kicked it ruthlessly away.

No one will ever know why Peter Gubbins worshipped Miss Strickland. He was a gentle, inoffensive youth, with a weak chin and bottle-neck shoulders; his strongest tastes were for magazines and barley sugar, and though he was easily convinced that he was unsuitable, he continued to worship Onoria in a melancholy but resigned manner for twenty years.

Peter Gubbins was her next-door neighbour, and as the years went on a certain element of relief mingled with his melancholy.

Miss Strickland had a piercing voice which swept across the garden, over the wall which divided their retreats; but there was a wall.

Mr. Gubbins, who was extremely fond of poetry, often thought of those lines in “Maud” which assure her that if she were to pass near the final resting place of her lover: his “heart would hear her and beat,” had he “lain for a century dead.” Mr. Gubbins was under the impression that his own heart would act in a precisely similar manner should Onoria visit his grave. Mr. Gubbins had a large Tabby cat called Samson, of which he was inordinately proud.

Samson did not so much return, as passively accept, his master’s nervous devotion.

He was inconsiderate about sleeping in a basket. Inflexible arrangements, when they were not his own, galled him; and though he knew his name perfectly, he had never been known to answer to it, unless he had reason to believe that fish was at the other end.

Peter Gubbins was very fond of all small and reasonably gentle animals, and often took Prendergast for a walk if Miss Strickland hadn’t time.

Prendergast accompanied Mr. Gubbins for the sake of the walk, but he made it perfectly plain from the first (just as Miss Strickland herself had done) that he thought nothing of Peter Gubbins as a companion.

Mr. Gubbins made himself useful in other ways. He really knew a great deal more about gardens than Onoria did, and he loved them—under his breath as it were—because Onoria was always pointing out to him how much rubbish was talked and written upon the subject of gardens. The Garden of Eden had started the topic, and no one had been able to let it alone since.

Peter Gubbins had a private income and wrote occasional articles and poems for magazines. The articles dealt with sweet peas, on which he was an expert, and Roman Catholicism, on which he was not, but by dint of studying the works of ex-nuns and monks, he had arrived at some very startling theories upon the Roman Catholic religion suitable for very low church magazines. The poems were on certain aspects of nature which have unfortunately occurred to other persons in search of poetic subjects; still they were occasionally published and Mr. Gubbins signed them “Sirius.” (As he often wrote about stars, and always referred to them as “bright,” his signature could not have been more appropriate.) Obviously “Peter Gubbins” applauding the universe would not do.

He never showed the poems to Onoria, but they shared the articles on Rome, and sometimes Onoria liked them, though she felt them to be too milk and watery to do real justice to the subject. It was inconsistent of Onoria to have such a decided bias against Rome, for she was very fond of law and order, and considered authority final. She said “This settles it” about a dozen times a day, and no Pope has ever made more ex-cathedra proclamations in the twenty-four hours.

Mr. Gubbins was by no means Onoria’s greatest man friend; she merely saw him the most.

Men liked Onoria, and Onoria liked men.

Whether she had a secret passion for any of the more virile types of Little Ticklington will never be known.

Onoria did not shriek her emotional history upon house-tops, and as far as the relations of the sexes were concerned, she was not modern—that is to say she thought there should be no relation except marriage; and even that should be concealed as far as possible.

Women she despised.

Men sought Onoria to tell her what they felt for other women, they talked politics with her, and they took a monstrous and secret pleasure in hearing her abuse her own sex; but with the exception of Mr. Gubbins they did not propose to share their lives with Onoria; they preferred the weaker sisters whom Onoria had relentlessly dissected for their special delectation.

They enjoyed watching this merciless analysis of a suspected sex, but in spite of their suspicions they married the subjects of the analysis.

Onoria hated women. It may have been because she had been an only girl in a family of five, and that certain limitations and inhibitions brought home to her early in life the disabilities of her sex without the compensating spiritual advantages which occur later; or it may have been that something in herself warned her that her most marked qualities were not those that succeed in attracting, where qualities less marked and perhaps less worthy of attention prevail. Each of her brothers in turn gave themselves over without reprieve to an incarnate devil.

This is not their own account of the transaction; they were under the impression that they had married singularly delightful types of womanhood, but Onoria found these women out, tried them in the furnace of her fraternal love and told them roundly what she thought of them.

The result of freedom of speech is often the separation of families. Onoria quarrelled bitterly and irretrievably with each of her sisters-in-law in turn, and never went near any of them again.

She referred to her brothers as “poor dear So-and-So”—in the manner of the pious whose dead are in the hands of the Lord. She sometimes saw them in neutral places, and she sent her nephews and nieces handsome presents at Christmas, especially her nephews.

When Onoria asserted that her family had been ruined by women, she firmly believed this to be the fact. People who invariably speak the truth are sometimes misled as to the nature of fact; it is so difficult for truthful natures to realise that they are not in possession of the whole of that evasive quality.

At the High School Onoria taught nothing but girls. She taught them music and singing with bitterness and with boredom for over twenty years, and she taught them exceedingly well.

There is an excellent poem which asserts that “He who only rules by terror does a grievous wrong,” and there is no doubt a good deal to be said for this theory.

All Onoria’s pupils would have agreed to it with rapture; still you do not go down the path of least resistance often if you find lions in the way.

Even girls have the sense to make unusual efforts to avoid unusual inconveniences, and Miss Strickland’s temper when roused was an unusual inconvenience. She said everything that came into her head against the girl who had failed her, and then, with the sting of a life-long prejudice behind her, everything against the sex which had evolved her.

Onoria firmly believed that all girls were deceitful, lazy and vain, and that the only way to deal with them was by repeated castigations of the spirit.

Some of her pupils would have done better without these reprisals; most people are supposed to work best under appreciation and do not begin to find themselves until they have the confidence and sympathy of their teachers. Such girls did not do their best work for Onoria; but they worked. All of them worked, feverishly or steadily, to avoid the deluge of her merciless tongue.

The level of Onoria’s pupils was high, and as she did not believe in hidden depths, she never had to regret that she had failed to plumb them.

“I know exactly what each of my girls can do,” she was fond of saying. What she did not know was what the girls could have done if they hadn’t been hers.

“I have never made a friend out of a pupil yet, thank the Lord,” she would end up by saying to her men friends, who spent Sunday afternoons in hearing Onoria undermine the position of women, “and what is more I never will!” The men shook their heads in delighted admiration; they knew they could not say as much for themselves; but they admired Onoria for her security.