VERENA IN THE MIDST
I
Rhoda Carlyon to Nesta Rossiter
[Telegram]
Miss Raby has had an accident and has asked for you. No immediate danger. Hope you can come quickly.
II
Rhoda Carlyon to Richard Haven
Dear Mr. Haven,—I am sorry to have rather bad news for you. My neighbour, Miss Raby, has had the misfortune to fall and hurt her spine, and Mr. Ferguson, our doctor, is afraid that she may have to lie up for some long time. She is not in much pain, but must be very quiet. She was anxious that you should be told. It was fortunate that I was at home when the accident happened, as her maids are not good in emergencies. Mr. Ferguson, who is exceptionally capable for a country place, will call in a specialist, but I fear there is no doubt about the seriousness of the injury and that her recovery will be a long business. Miss Raby is very brave and even smiling over it, but for anyone so active and so much interested in the life around her it will be a trial. She is hoping for one of her nieces, Mrs. Rossiter, to come directly.—I am, yours sincerely,
Rhoda Carlyon
III
Richard Haven to Verena Raby
Dearest Verena, your letter—or rather Mrs. Carlyon’s, containing your bad news—gave me a shock. Do you really mean to say you will have to lie up for months—flat and helpless? This is terrible for you—and for us. Of course I shall come and see you as soon as may be; but it can’t be yet. Why do you live so far away? And I will write, but if you cannot use your hands you must get either Mrs. Carlyon or Nesta (if she is there) to answer a number of questions at once. (I am glad Nesta is coming.)
(a) Can you use your hands?
(b) Does it tire you too much to read?
(c) Have you much or any pain?
(d) What can I do for you first?
(e) Have you a library subscription?
(f) Is there anyone in the neighbourhood who can read aloud, endurably?
(g) (Don’t worry: you are not to have the whole alphabet.) Do games of solitaire appeal to you?
I want you to think of me as your Universal Provider and to express your needs without any reserve. For what else am I useful? Consider me, in short, as a Callisthenes whose motto is “Deeds not Words.”—Yours,
R. H.
P.S.—(h) Have you a gramophone? And if not, does the idea of a gramophone repel or attract?
P.S. 2.—Dearest Verena, I hate it that you should be ill—you who live normally a hundred minutes to the hour. But if there is no heritage of weakness you will be all the better for the enforced rest. That I intend to think and believe.
P.S. 3.—Yours, again and always,
R. H.
IV
From the “Herefordshire Post”
We regret to state that Miss Verena Raby of Old Place, Kington, who is so well known as the Lady Bountiful of the neighbourhood, has met with a serious accident through falling on the ice and sustained spinal injuries which may confine her to her room for several months. Every one will wish her a speedy recovery.
V
Nesta Rossiter to Richard Haven
Dear “Uncle” Richard,—I got here this afternoon and found Aunt Verena very still and white and pathetic, but the doctor is cheerful and a London swell, a friend of his—Sir Smithfield Mark—is expected to-morrow. Mrs. Carlyon, who lives in that big house near the church, on the Llandrindod road, has been kindness itself. I have come prepared to stay for a considerable time. Fred has promised not to go away just yet and fortunately we have a very good nurse. A little later perhaps Lobbie, my second, will come to me here; it depends on how quiet Aunt Verena has to be kept.
Now for the answers to your questions, which Mrs. Carlyon has handed over to me:—
(a) She can use her hands but is not permitted to do anything tiring, such as writing.
(b) She has to lie too flat to be able to hold a book with any comfort for more than a very short while.
(c) She is not in serious pain.
(d) What she most wants is letters from her friends, and you, I imagine, in particular.
(e) She has a library subscription, but would like to know what books are cheerful. She does not want to lie awake thinking about other people’s frustrated lives. She is rather tired of novels with the Café Royal in them.
(f) I have done my best for years to learn to read aloud, for the sake of the children, but most of the sentences end in a yawn. I wonder why it makes one so sleepy.
(g) This is really most important. Aunt Verena is devoted to Solitaire and thinks that a little later it might help her. But in her horizontal position it is, of course, impossible to use a table. What we have been wondering is whether it would be possible to get an arrangement by which it could be played on a more or less vertical board. Do you think this could be managed? I have been thinking about it and can suggest only long spikes and holes in the cards so that they could be hung on. Do you know anyone who could carry out such a scheme? She is going along very satisfactorily and is a perfect patient. She tells me to give you her love and thank you for all your suggestions.—Yours sincerely,
Nesta Rossiter
VI
Hazel Barrance to Verena Raby
Dearest Aunt Verena,—We are so sorry to hear about your accident, and so glad that some of the reports were exaggerated. Father says that nothing would give him such joy as to go to bed for a year, and then perhaps he might lose a few of his seventeen permanent colds; but he sends his love too. There is no news; the chief is that Roy has been demobbed and is wondering what his future is to be. His present is largely Jazz and avoiding father. The lucky boy is staying with some rich friends in Kensington. I am glad that Nesta is with you. Mother has given up Christian Science in favour of what father calls Unchristian Séance.
It’s an awful thing to say, but I often regret the loss of the War. Not because I was a profiteer, but because I then had something to do and some fun with it. But now?—Your loving
Hazel
VII
Richard Haven to Verena Raby
My Dear, of course I will write. If I were not tied to London just now by office work I should take rooms near you and do my best to spoil you. But that cannot be. Instead I will send you a letter as often as possible. In fact, I wouldn’t mind, if it would really give you any satisfaction, promising to write every day. Nulla dies sine epistola—however short. Shall I? I never made such an undertaking before in my life.
As to books—when I am ill I am like the man who when a new one came out read an old one—Dr. Johnson or Hazlitt or Mr. Birrell—and therefore I am a bad counsellor. Were I to have a nice luxurious little illness at this moment I should take with me to the nursing home Emma and Mansfield Park; but they are men’s books far more than women’s. I should also put into practice a project I have long had in mind—the attempted re-reading of certain favourites of my schooldays, to see if they will stand the test. Probably not. These include Midshipman Easy, Zanoni, Kenelm Chillingly and, above all, Moby Dick; but I doubt if any of these are in Miss Raby’s line. Nor is, I am afraid, my glorious new friend, O. Henry. In default of a better I send by parcel post the old 6-volume edition of Fanny Burney’s Diary.
Picture me hunting about for a Reader. Surely among all the demobilised young women who are said to be pining for a job I can find one! Don’t be frightened—she shall not be too startlingly from one of the great tea-drinking departments of the Government—but I can’t guarantee that her skirts will be below her knees. There are no long skirts left in London to-day, and no stockings that are not silk. I am not an observant person, but I have noticed that; I have noticed also that the silk does not always go the whole way. But perhaps among all your vast array of relations you know of a nice girl. If so, say so and I will not pursue the chase, but at the moment more than one agency is being busy about it. “Must have a pleasant voice and be able to keep it up for an hour without one gape”—that is what I tell them.
I must now stop or your poor arms will be tired with holding this up. Don’t forget that I want to know what Sir Smithfield Mark says. Apropos of doctors, I met old Beamish at the club to-day, very cock-a-hoop as he was just off to North Berwick, on his doctor’s advice, and without Mrs. B. He said with a wink that every man should have three doctors, carefully selected, to consult with discretion: one, when things were slackening domestically, to assure his wife that he must be fed up—better and more nourishing food, oysters and so forth; one when he was bored with town, to assure his wife that he is badly in need of a change and ought to go off on a little holiday at once, alone; and one to look after him when he is really ill.
R. H.
VIII
Richard Haven to Rhoda Carlyon
Dear Mrs. Carlyon, we are all very grateful to you for being such a good Samaritan to our dear Verena. The word neighbour henceforward will have a new meaning for me; but why we should naturally be amiably disposed to people because they cultivate the normally objectionable practice of living near or next door to us I never understood. You, however, have behaved so nobly that I shall now think of neighbours as being human too,—I am, yours sincerely,
Richard Haven
IX
Septimus Tribe to Verena Raby
Dear Sister,—We are gravely disturbed by the news of your accident and trust that recovery will be swift and sure, although injury to the spine is often slow in healing and not infrequently leaves permanent weakness. You are, however, normally strong, much stronger than my poor Letitia, who seems to me to become more fragile every day. Strange that two sisters should be so different.
I shall be glad to be informed if there is anything that I can do to alleviate your mind at this season. Since we have had no details of your illness nor are acquainted with your medical man, it is possible that I may be suggesting a gravity which the case does not possess; but from what I know of spinal troubles, I think that if you have not yet considered the drawing-up of your will you ought to do so. Most probably you have, for you have always been thoughtful, but even the most complete will is liable to second and third thoughts, which necessitate codicils. It occurs to me that the presence of a man of affairs, such as myself, might be of use to you while you perform this delicate task, and it is, of course, more suitable for one who is allied to you through kin to stand beside your bed than for a stranger. I have stood beside too many for you to feel any embarrassment. I have also acted as Executor and Trustee on several occasions; in fact, few men can have had more experience than I in giving counsel as to wise benefactions.
With loving thoughts, in which Letitia would, I am sure, join me, were she not out purchasing our necessarily frugal dinner,—I am, your affectionate brother-in-law,
Septimus Tribe
X
Richard Haven to Nesta Rossiter
Dear Nesta, how odd things are! Here have you been my honorary niece for years and years, and we have hardly exchanged a word, and now, all owing to a piece of slippery ice, I am reeling out correspondence. But how wrong that it should have needed such a lamentable form of provocation!
You must think of me now as in constant consultation with card-sharpers and carpenters, with a view to solving the great Solitaire-board problem. If it comes out, thousands of invalids, and a few lazy folk into the bargain, will bless the names of Raby and Rossiter, not altogether, I hope, forgetting that of Haven; for all of us at times have wished for the possibility of playing card games while reclining in comfort on a sofa. There is a thing called a card index, the maintaining of which seems to have been the principal task of the female war-winners in the various Government Departments, and it is upon the same principle (as you have already suggested) that our vertical or sloping Solitaire table must be made. Meanwhile tell me if you have one of those invalid tables that come from Bond Street and can be insinuated into the patient’s zone with such ease. If not I shall send you one.
I ran into one of your kith and kin, Horace Mun-Brown, to-day and told him the news, so Verena may expect trouble. I had told him before I realized what a bloomer I was committing. But that is life! The always wise communicate no news.—Yours,
R. H.
P.S.—You, as a parent, will like the small schoolboy’s letter home which one of the evening papers quotes to-day:—
My Dear Father and Mother,—Do you know that salt is made of two deadly poisons?—Your loving son,
John
XI
Antoinette Rossiter To Her Mother
Dearest Mummie,—I hope you are quite well. I have a cold. Daddy tells me to tell you that if you don’t come home soon he will take another lady in wholly wedlock. So please come soon because we have decided we couldn’t endure her. I send you a thousand kisses.—Your loving
Tony
x x x x x x x x
XII
Nesta Rossiter to Richard Haven
Dear “Uncle” Richard,—Aunt Verena asks me to tell you that the specialist is very hopeful that she may be quite as strong and active as ever, but it will be a long business. Injuries to the spine are, however, very dangerous things, and there can be no certainty yet. Directly she can, she is going to write to you with her own hand. You are to be the first. Meanwhile she says that your daily letters are a great joy, but you must not hesitate to break the custom if it is ever at all troublesome.—Yours sincerely,
Nesta
XIII
Richard Haven to Verena Raby
[Telegram]
Three and thirty cheers for the specialist.
R. H.
XIV
Hazel Barrance to Verena Raby
Dearest Aunt Verena,—I hope you are really better, or—if that is too much to hope yet—that you are going on all right. As soon as the Doctor says so, I am coming to peep at you.
We are living in a state of great excitement because Mother’s old friend Mrs. Blundry is here for a few days and she talks of nothing but spiritualism. You know she lost her son Savile in the War—or, to use her own word, she “gave” him—and every night she gets out the paraphernalia of communication and has conversations with him. I used to think of death with terror—and indeed I do now, of my own—but the late Savile Blundry is transforming us all into frivolous heartless creatures! From his mother’s report of what he says, the grave has taught him nothing, and most of his remarks are only to the effect that it’s “jolly decent over there.”
Father is furious about it all and says that the duty of the dead is to be dead: but of course he can’t be brutal like that to Mrs. Blundry. The fact, however, remains that she sees far more of her Savile now than she ever did when he was alive. Of course, if talking to the boy, or thinking she does so, brings any comfort, one should be glad of it—and there seem to be lots of people getting such comfort, or groping after such comfort, all over the world—but really, dead people do seem to have so little to say. When it comes to that, so do live people.
We have already had one real séance here, when father was out, and wonderful results were said to be obtained, but to my naughty sceptical mind they weren’t of any interest whatever. After a number of false starts and accusations of undue control, and so forth, we got a name spelt out which with a little lenience could be translated into Cyrus Bowditch-Kemp by one of the women present, who, when she was a girl, had known a man of that name who died in Rangoon twenty years ago. This was, of course, frightfully thrilling. Then he was asked if he had a message for any member of the company and he said “Yes” and this was the message: “Wind in the daffodils”; and the woman nearly fainted when she remembered that one spring afternoon when Bowditch-Kemp was calling, there was a gale which swayed the daffodils at the edge of the lawn. That was all, but it was considered to be marvellous and to prove that Mr. Bowditch-Kemp was now the woman’s “watcher,” as they are called.
I hope you are not shocked: but you said you wanted to know all that we were doing. People take this new spiritualism so differently; and of course, as I said, if it is a comfort one is only too glad, but it can be a kind of drug too, and there is no doubt that it has made things very easy for too many charlatans.—Your loving
Hazel
XV
Evangeline Barrance to Verena Raby
Dear Aunt Verena,—I was awfully sorry to hear about your accident. The French mistress has had one too, she went to London and was knocked down by a taxi and has been in bed ever since. We were glad about her, but I am sorry about you. It will be horrid not to see you at Christmas. I am going to prepare a great surprise to cheer you while you are ill but I mustn’t tell you any more about it now as it is a terrific secret. Miss Arnott is reading Nicholas Nickleby to us, it is very nice. I like John Browdie, don’t you? But I think the actors are the best, Mr. Folair and Mr. Lenville and the Infant Phenomenon. We acted The Tempest the other day, I was Ariel. It isn’t fair in a charade, is it, to divide a word like “Shadow” into “shay” and “dough.” It ought to be “shad” and “owe” or “Oh!” oughtn’t it? Do answer this, because I want to confound some of the other girls. I will get the surprise ready as soon as possible, but there are others in it too and we must have time.—I am, your affectionate niece,
Evangeline
P.S.—Of course if you are not well enough to write, you mustn’t bother about shadow. I can ask some one else.
XVI
Horace Mun-Brown to Verena Raby
Dear Aunt Verena,—I met Haven by chance the other morning and heard of your accident. I am more than sorry, but I think I have a means both of helping you to pass some of the weary time and also, if you are so disposed, of making good use of some of your superfluous income, of which I have so often written to you. It is monstrous, especially now, when the world is trying to recover from the paralysis of the War, that there should be any dormant bank balances, and, except for medical attendance and nursing, you will, I imagine, be spending less than usual.
To be brief, I have now perfected a piece of household furniture which cannot fail to make its way if it is set properly on the market. This is a combination clothes-horse, screen, step-ladder and holder for what the French, who can be so clever with names, call a serviette sans fin; surely a more picturesque phrase than “circular towel.” My invention is intended primarily for the kitchen, but, being on casters, it can easily be moved elsewhere. I feel sure that never before can one and the same article have been used for drying clothes, keeping out a draught, and in hanging pictures: and small houses must find it invaluable. The carpenter has carried out my idea with great skill and the model is here for anyone to see. I am enclosing a photograph, with dimensions.
All that is needed is a small sum sufficient to manufacture a thousand or so and to pay the patent-fee. We can then see how it goes and arrange for further supplies. I expect it to be a little gold-mine both for the inventor and for the fortunate capitalist. I am giving you, dear Aunt Verena, the first chance. A sum of £500 should be sufficient to start with.
So much for the business side.
Now for the amusement. A good catchy name is needed for it, but I have not yet thought of one that wholly pleases me. The name should cover all its many functions and yet be short and snappy. I thought of “Steppo,” but that disregards the clothes-horse and screen; or “Klowscrene,” but that takes no note of the ladder. It occurred to me that you might find entertainment on your bed of sickness (which I trust you are soon to leave) in puzzling out something suitable.
You must not think of me as for one moment wanting something for nothing. I should never do that. All I propose is an alliance between my restless brains and your dormant bank balance which might be profitable to both of us.
Again wishing you a speedy recovery, I am, yours sincerely,
Horace
P.S.—I suppose it would hardly do to call it “The Angel in the House”? Not enough people know the phrase, and admirers of Coventry Patmore might be shocked.
XVII
Roy Barrance to Verena Raby
Dear Aunt Verena,—I am most awfully sorry to hear from Hazel about your accident. I hope it’s only a blighty and that you will soon be fit again. As I am a great believer in good news as a buck-me-up, I hasten to tell you before anyone else that I am engaged to be married. Every one has always said that I should be all the better for settling down, and really with such a pet as Trixie I am sure they are right. I have not known her very long—we met at a dance at Prince’s—but there are some people that you feel in a minute or so you have known all your life, and she is one of them. If you were not so ill I should bring her to see you at once.
She has fair hair, bobbed, and her father is a swell in the India Office. I have not met either him or her mother yet, but Trixie is to let me know directly a favourable opportunity occurs and then I shall butt in. I rather dread the interview, as Mr. Parkinson—that’s her father’s name—is said to be dashed peppery and to have set his heart on her marrying coin; but I daresay I shall pull myself together and play the game. Meanwhile Trixie wants to keep the engagement a secret; and except for two or three pals you are the only person I have told. I haven’t even told Hazel.
I ought to tell you that she can drive a car and knows all about them, so she ought to be really a helpmate, as all wives should be, don’t you think? She is nearly eighteen and as I am nearly twenty it is splendid. I have always believed that husbands ought to be older than their wives. It gives them authority. We are thinking of taking our honeymoon in a two-seater on which I have had my eye for some time; but it is rather costly. Everything costs such a lot nowadays. Trixie says she finds me such a relief after so many soldiers. You see, having been in the Army such a short time, I am almost, she says, a civilian; really her first civilian friend; but of course if the War hadn’t stopped I should still be a soldier too.—Your sincere nephew,
Roy
P.S.—I’m awfully sorry about your being seedy. There’s nothing like keeping fit and I was never so full of beans myself. Get well soon. Cheerio!
XVIII
Evangeline Barrance to Richard Haven
Dear Mr. Haven,—Will you please be very kind and write something for a little paper which I am editing at school for Aunt Verena to read while she is so ill. You are so clever. Something funny if you can, but, if not, something readable. The paper is to be called The Beguiler; or, The Invalid’s Friend.—Yours affectionately,
Evangeline Barrance
XIX
Horace Mun-Brown to Verena Raby
Dear Aunt,—Just a line to say that I have hit on what I think is a perfect name for my invention, so do not trouble your brains any more. “The Housewife’s Ally.”—Yours sincerely,
Horace Mun-Brown
XX
Richard Haven to Evangeline Barrance
Dear Evangeline (what a long name!), I am so busy in trying to be a beguiler to your Aunt Verena, on my own account, that I don’t think I shall be able to contribute to your magazine; but I wish it very well and I shall try to collect something for you from a literary friend here and there. Being funny is too difficult for me anyway.—Yours sincerely,
Richard Haven
XXI
Septimus Tribe to Verena Raby
Dear Sister,—Letitia and I were distressed by the tone of Nesta’s reply to my offer of a friendly advisory visit. It was never in my mind to supplant your lawyer, but merely to assist you in preparing for him. Friendly as family lawyers can become, one must always remember that they are a race apart, members of a secret society, largely inimical in their attitude to amateur counsellors outside their mystery. But on this subject I shall say no more.
Letitia is, I regret to state, in a poorer condition of health than usual, due not a little to the need for certain luxuries with which, to my constant regret, I am unable to provide her, not the least of which is some sound invigorating wine such as our medical man recommends. In default of champagne, which is light and easily digested, she has to take stout, which, poor girl, lies heavily on her stomach. But these are not matters on which to discourse to one in affliction, and I apologise. Let me repeat that if in any way I can be of service to you in your helplessness I shall be only too ready.—I remain, your affectionate brother-in-law,
Septimus Tribe
XXII
Horace Mun-Brown to Verena Raby
Dear Aunt,—I am afraid I was over-sanguine about the name for my invention. I showed it to a friend, a very capable man at the Bar, and to my astonishment he pronounced “Ally” not as if it were the word signifying helper (as I had intended) but as though it were a diminutive of Alexander or Alfred, bringing to mind, most unsuitably, the vulgar paper Ally Sloper. Such a misconception, in a man of his ability, would mean that far too many people would make a similar mistake, so we must start again.—I am, yours sincerely,
Horace Mun-Brown
XXIII
Nesta Rossiter to Richard Haven
Dear “Uncle” Richard.—The news here is good, I think, were it not that Aunt Verena has great difficulty in sleeping. She worries a good deal over her inactivity, and her burdensomeness (as she calls it) to others. She does not want to take drugs, nor do the doctors recommend them if they can be avoided. Our nurse is very good and attentive, but not much of a companion in the small hours. Have you any suggestions?—I am, yours sincerely,
Nesta Rossiter
XXIV
Richard Haven to Verena Raby
My Dear, I’m sorry about your sleeping so badly. All I can do is to pass on to you my own remedy, which is to repeat poetry to myself. It is better than counting sheep and all that kind of thing.
“But suppose I don’t know any poetry?”
Well, of course, you do; but there is no harm in learning more, and especially so if, in order not to tire you in the wrong way, it is all very short, never more than eight lines. The epigrammatic things that are like miniatures in painting. What do you think of that? Here is a quatrain that touches immediately on your case:—
Invoking life, I feel the surging tide
Of countless wants ordained to be denied;
Invoking sleep, I feel the hastening stream
Of minor wants merged in a want supreme.
You see, I have already begun to collect these little jewels, and, difficult as it is to find perfection (even Landor is often disappointing), I am in great hopes of getting together a really beautiful necklace of them, and then perhaps we will print them privately in a little book for the weary, and the wakeful and the elect. You might even learn Omar: say, two quatrains a day. It’s the loveliest melancholy stuff and can’t do you any harm, because you have your belief in the goodness of things all fixed and unshakeable, and you couldn’t get at the red wine if you wanted to. If you haven’t an Omar I shall send you one.
Ah, Love! could’st thou and I with Fate conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,
Would we not shatter it to bits—and then
Re-mould it nearer to the Heart’s desire!
Wouldn’t we just? But then you don’t think the scheme as sorry as I often am forced to.
R. H.
XXV
Hazel Barrance to Verena Raby
Dearest Aunt Verena,—I do hope you are getting stronger. We are all excited about the vertical Solitaire table and I long to see it. One odd and unexpected effect of your illness is to keep Evangeline quiet and busy. She comes home from school now full of importance and spends hours with her pen. The result, as I think she has told you, is to be a surprise for you. I wish I could do something to help you, but can suggest nothing. Knitting was my only accomplishment and I’m sure you are not short of woollies. Having ordered the day’s food, I have now nothing to do but periodically to eat it, and to go out of my way to be more than amiable to the maids for fear of offending and losing them. You have no notion—you with your divine permanent staff—of the volcanoes we live on here and our constant terror of receiving notice. And this family in particular, because father makes no effort to control his language (but then no one does any more, and if “damn” were a word that infants could lisp they would lisp it—but servants don’t like it), and mother will give us the results of séances, which again servants don’t like or quite understand. Their idea of the dead is something to be put tidily away in a cemetery and visited on Sunday afternoons; not talkative spirits full of messages.
The more I go on in this aimless way the more I want to break loose and live alone without meals and really do something. I was useful during the War and now I’m a machine. My only excitement—and a very doubtful on—is the refusal of dear cousin Horace, who proposes to me every other week.—Your loving
Hazel
P.S.—Poor Fritz has had to be gently brought to his end. We have buried him next to Tiger and father has had the stone engraved with the words:—
HERE LIES
FRITZ THE DACHSHUND
WHO
(ALTHOUGH A GERMAN)
WAS
THE TRUEST FRIEND
AN ENGLISH FAMILY
EVER HAD
1919
XXVI
Louisa Parrish to Verena Raby
My Dear Verena,—I have only just heard of your accident and cannot understand why you did not let me know sooner. But perhaps, poor thing, you can’t write. I heard it through the Hothams, who had been told by Pauline Bankes. Still even if you can’t write yourself you must have some one there who can. Dictating is not an easy thing, I know, but even a postcard would have been better than nothing, and then I would have written at once to cheer you up. But if you do send a postcard, you will be careful, won’t you, not to put anything very private on it, as they are all read here. It was how the village heard of poor Colonel Onslow’s daughter’s elopement. No doubt you were too ill to think of all your friends, and yet in the night, when one thinks of so much, I wonder my name didn’t occur to you.
Writing letters is no hardship to me, as it is to so many people. My brother John, for instance, can’t bring himself to put pen to paper at all, and his study is always littered up with unanswered things. It is very odd, I always think, that the son of so methodical a man as father was should be so careless, but I expect it is a throwback or comes from mother’s side. I am much more like father in so many ways, as well as having the Parrish nose and the ears set so far forward, while John and the others favour the Pegrams.
You must let me know if there is anything I can do for you besides writing now and then. Of course, if you were able to knit it would be better, although there is no one to knit for now. All the girls that I see knitting are working only for themselves—those jumpers they wear without corsets, so very indelicate, I think, especially when the bust is at all full. It is all so different from the War, when people were really unselfish. As long as I can remember, I, personally, have knitted for others; not that I want to take credit for it, but it is nice to be able to be of service. When I was a child it was mittens for the gardener and the coachman or else those poor Deep Sea Fishermen.
I suppose you have all the books you want. You have always been so well provided for, but there’s a little comforting bedside volume by Frances Ridley Havergal which I am sending in case you should want anything of that sort. It has always helped me, and the other day, after so many years, I read Queechy again and found it quite exciting, so I am putting that in too. Many of the modern books are so outré.
My rheumatism has been rather worse lately, but I mustn’t tell you things like that when you are so ill yourself. I should like to know what your doctor says about you. There was a poor lady here who slipped and fell and hurt her back, very much in the same way, I should imagine, and she lived only a few hours. And dear old Sir Benjamin Pike, my father’s friend and fellow magistrate, came to his end in the same way, through a banana skin. I am sure the regulations about throwing banana and orange skins away in the streets should be more strict. In my childhood we never saw bananas at all, and now they are everywhere. How odd it is that fashions in fruit should change as well as fashions in bodies and in dress, although I for one am against so much change in dress and think the advertisements in the weekly papers are dreadful in their incitement to women to spend money, especially now when the Prime Minister tells us we should all save, and I am sure he is right. And the money people gave for pearls too, at the Red Cross sale! Perfectly marvellous where it all comes from, and how different we all are! Those millionaires buying pearls for their wives, and me here quite happy with the mosaic brooch my father brought me from Venice and the agate clasp which belonged to dear mother.
I must stop now or I shall miss the post.—Always your loving friend,
Louisa
XXVII
Richard Haven to Verena Raby
My Dear, how odd it is that even the sweetest-natured men, when asked for a fairy tale for the young, tend to satire. Pure fancy—comic invention with no arrière pensée—seems to be the most evasive medium. That mathematical genius, W. K. Clifford, could do the genuine thing without one drop of the gall of sophistication, and so, of course, could Lewis Carroll, and Burne-Jones in his letters. But when I asked my old friend, George Demain, for something amusing and suitable for a children’s amateur magazine, look at what he sent! I enclose the original, which please return. As it is no part of my scheme of life to teach cynicism, I am withholding it from the fledgling editors. I don’t mind meeting cynics (although it is always best that there should be but one in any company) but I don’t intend consciously to make any.
One of the extraordinary things of the moment is how little some men who went through the War were changed by it all. In fact, it comes to this, that the War could deal only with what a man had: it could not create brains or feelings. The people who talk about it as a purge, an educator, as discipline and so forth, are saying what they thought it ought to have been, rather than what it was. There are clerks in my office who enlisted and fought and even killed men, and have now returned to be clerks again, with perfect resignation, and with no outward sign of development, except that they do their work with less care.
I asked one of them what he thought of France and the French. He had been right through the War and had come, for the first time in his life, into relations with the French under every kind of emotional stress. He ought to have had numbers of stories to tell and national distinctions to draw. All he said was—“Funny how far up from the railway platform their trains are!”
I hope all goes as well with you as it can.
R. H.