CHAPTER IV

Onoria Strickland had an imagination that centralised its own experiences.

She believed that for pure drama Little Ticklington outshone Paris. Its crimes were more lurid, its adventures more romantic, its types of character more truly representative of human nature. Her own career often seemed to Onoria Napoleonic, and her friends and her enemies were always larger than life.

At first she undertook Elsie Andrews as a conscientious educator undertakes bad material, but as the years passed and Elsie’s affection stood solidly across Onoria’s pathway as immovable as granite, she began to find in Elsie strange and exotic virtues.

“That girl,” she would announce, “has the mind of the Fourteenth Century—mature and adventurous!

“She will do something one day. She is not like modern girls; she has character. Not that silly thing they call temperament, thank goodness!—temperament wobbles and stings like a jellyfish, and arrives nowhere—but good solid English character! Elsie won’t set the Thames on fire perhaps, but she hasn’t set out with any such theory. Mercifully she knows her limitations as a woman. What she has set out to do she will accomplish in spite of all obstacles—I call that dignified.”

Elsie knew just what Onoria thought of her, because Onoria always told her friends exactly what she thought of them, even when it was nice.

(After her twenty-first birthday Miss Strickland became “Onoria” to Elsie.)

It was difficult for Elsie to believe that she was dignified, but she knew that she had a kind of strength.

She found in herself a fund of resistance enabling her to guard her friendship with Onoria. Neither Mr. nor Mrs. Andrews liked it; Mrs. Andrews because, like many mothers, it seemed to her unnecessary that her children should form any ties outside their home; Mr. Andrews because he foresaw that this concentration of his daughter’s heart might damage her future prospects.

“If she gets into tagging round for ever after an old maid,” he explained to his wife, “she won’t marry. Why don’t you smarten her up a bit and take her out with you?”

But Elsie wouldn’t be smartened up. She did not refuse new clothes, but she did not respond to them; and you cannot make a dead weight look chic. Mrs. Andrews tried. She would have liked a daughter she could take with her to tea parties, not one who practised Beethoven and read Shakespeare.

Elsie loathed tea parties. She followed her mother on those rare occasions when she had failed to elude her as one who follows a corpse to the grave. People soon stopped asking Mrs. Andrews to bring her daughter.

Then Mr. Andrews bought Elsie a tennis racket to play with the young people.

She went out after the house was locked up at night and broke it against an oak tree in the garden. It was this act that convinced Onoria that Elsie had in her the spirit of the Fourteenth Century.

If there was one thing Elsie disliked more than tea parties with her mother’s friends, it was tennis with young people.

She could not play tennis and she disliked young people. They believed all the things Onoria said were not so—and they carried on conversations that were not solely for the sake of conversation. They seemed to wish to attract each other.

Elsie knew that the fault lay in the women and she would have talked to the young men if they had looked at her, but they did not seem to see that she was there; and you cannot carry on a conversation with young men who do not look at you—however great your respect may be for the masculine sex.

Onoria explained Elsie’s position to her kindly but firmly.

“You are not a man’s woman,” she said to her, “and you had better make up your mind to it once and for all. I know men. They are hoodwinked and misled by appearances, owing no doubt to the false upbringing they receive from their mothers, but there it is—they rarely understand true merit until they have provided themselves with the contrary. You are not a marrying woman. Realise this and don’t hanker. There are many other things in life.”

Elsie sighed and said she supposed there were. She did not sigh very heavily because she was still quite young and there was Onoria. Besides, the only husband she knew anything about was Mr. Andrews. He was by no means a bad husband as husbands go, he sometimes called his wife “Pussy,” and if no one did what he disliked, he was seldom cross; but he was not as interesting to Elsie as Onoria.

What Elsie liked best in the world was sitting in Onoria’s garden, and being told what to think.

Onoria was a well-informed woman with violent prejudices, and all her information was at the disposal of her prejudices.

Her opinions were pitched battles, and her views (she intensely disliked what she called ‘viewy’ people, but she had her own views) were like the approaches of a distant thunderstorm. It might pass over if nothing happened to bring it down.

To enjoy Onoria’s conversation was to confess to a taste for Punch and Judy Shows; and, as time hardened Onoria’s method of attack, Little Ticklington grew tired of her bludgeoning.

The men who had delighted in Onoria’s prowess had married, and with years of domesticity their delight in prowess had gradually faded out, or been transferred to the actions of their offspring.

Onoria disliked other people’s children and very wisely told them so. It relieved her of many tiresome obligations, but among them it relieved her of the presence of the parents. She had had to throw away the apple with the core.

Onoria had fewer and fewer objects for her affection. Prendergast had changed from being an elderly and morose Pug, into being very old and resentful of all claims upon his attention except in the shape of well chopped-up food. He liked the results of tenderness without its expression.

Peter Gubbins was just as faithful, but if you have been faddy and aggravating as a young man, you will infallibly become eccentric and exasperating when youth has left you.

Peter Gubbins was unaware that youth had left him; he sometimes had misgivings about Time and Onoria’s figure. Her complexion had always been a little hard and weather beaten, but her hair retained its colour and her voice its piercing quality; besides Onoria was three years older than Peter.

He knew Onoria was no longer young, but she was still very, very powerful.

Neither of them had had a severe illness, a great sorrow, or an unexpected good fortune; and it is very easy to believe that you have remained the same if everything else has.

Peter wrote less poetry and rather more articles, and he grew the finest sweet peas in the neighbourhood.

There was one event which might have awakened Peter to the lapse of years if it had not come on almost as gradually as his success with the sweet peas. This was the introduction of Elsie; but she had been introduced before he could connect change with her, or receive the challenge to his personality which a young girl’s friendship will cause the least self-conscious of men.

Elsie had not made friends with Peter at first, but after two or three years of speechless, tepid watchfulness upon both sides, a bond had been secretly and invisibly formed between them.

They could not have told why it was secret and they hardly knew that it was a bond; they only knew that in each other’s society there was an absence of insistent racket, a blissful sense of not being at their best and liveliest, and not needing to be, which took the place of active pleasure.

There were very few of these harmonious moments. Usually Onoria was there, and they met under her eyes and with the volleyings of her wit, and the tremendous onslaught of her theories, thick upon them.

But there had been June evenings when Onoria had letters to write, or was playing over new sets of pieces with a view to her profession, when Elsie slipped out of the long French window on to the lawn to water the flowers, and found that Peter was watering his.

Peter joined her on these occasions and they hunted for slugs together with an effortless ardour rarely obtained upon their separate quests.

Sometimes they combined with desperate loyalty to try to save Onoria an exertion that they could not persuade her to give up, or planned to appease her with a suitable birthday present.

Their talk was full of Onoria. They quoted her most strident sayings with bursts of nervous laughter; they bulwarked their own opinions with the justice of her utterances; and sometimes with bated breath they confessed to each other the little difficulties which arose on their domestic hearths, when these hearths were confronted with Onoria.

Mr. Gubbins had a housekeeper who hated Onoria and was herself a redoubtable woman. Elsie’s family sometimes stood up and raged against her intimacy with Onoria; they even curtailed it to music lesson days and Sundays. They couldn’t quite destroy it because the most authoritative of families would shrink from forbidding one of its daughters from visiting a very respectable, middle-aged lady, who had been her music teacher since she was a child.

“I said,” Elsie explained breathlessly behind the rhododendron bushes, “if you stop me going to see Miss Strickland, I’ll tell the Vicar and Miss Bretherton. You know Father thinks the world of the Vicar since we’ve stopped going to Chapel; he’s Onoria’s second cousin too; and no one would like to have Miss Bretherton down on them, not even Mother—so they just glared. Glaring’s awful, of course, still it can’t do you any real harm.”

“No,” Mr. Gubbins murmured with a long sigh of regret. “It’s not as if your parents _cooked_ for you! If Mrs. Binns has been crossed, and whenever she sees Onoria she seems to get crossed, she pours pepper into everything I eat! And as I’ve often told you, I have a very delicate throat!”

Elsie looked uneasily over the tobacco plant they were spraying.

Onoria had laughed so hard and so long upon the subject of Mr. Gubbins’ throat that it seemed to Elsie a disloyalty to let him talk about it.

What he was afraid of was cancer. He had an enlarged tonsil.

Mr. Gubbins could (as Onoria pointed out to him several times during the course of the winter when he was always catching colds) have it taken out. But Mr. Gubbins did not think it was bad enough for this heroic remedy; it was only bad enough to give rise occasionally to the question of whether the doctor really knew what he was talking about in assigning to a pain so severe a cause so insufficiently lurid.

“What I say is,” explained Mr. Gubbins to Elsie (he never gave this explanation to Onoria), “if he _does_ happen to be wrong and the trouble is, as I sometimes think, malignant, I shall have to pay in the end; he’ll get out of it all right. Doctors always do.”

“Hadn’t you perhaps better consult another doctor?” asked Elsie timidly. She was always timid even with Mr. Gubbins, and even when she saw, as she frequently did, the plainest way out of his troubles; and Mr. Gubbins thought that timidity and sense were a delightful combination in a woman.

“It’s not much use my doing that,” said Mr. Gubbins moodily. “They all stand in together you know. Medical etiquette, as they call it, is neither more nor less than a conspiracy against the public.

“Besides, when you come to think of it, I’ve been to Jenkins on and off for thirty years, and I shouldn’t like to hurt his feelings, especially as it may not be cancer after all.”

“What are you two talking about, over there in the shrubbery?” shouted Onoria from the window.

Mr. Gubbins looked appealingly at Elsie.

They both trembled, but Mr. Gubbins trembled most.

“Slugs,” said Elsie in a wavering voice.

Her eyes fell before the accusatory ones of Mr. Gubbins. He was thinking how true, how painfully true, Onoria’s theory was, as to the prevarication of women.

Whatever the consequences might have been, he could not have told a lie to Onoria. He would not have dared.