An Act in a Backwater

by E. F. Benson

The two sisters lived a regular and most harmonious life. Since they never sat idle, they were right in considering that they were busy, and when Miss Phœbe had spent two or three hours every morning in washing the china they had used for breakfast, ordering dinner, and marching through every room in the house, examining towels to see if they required darning, soap to see if it wanted renewing, and smelling the water in the bed-room bottles, she was glad to seek refreshment about half past twelve by throwing herself into a chair in her corner and playing a Neapolitan air on her mandolin, or, with the soft pedal down for fear of disturbing Clara, trying over a song by Tosti or Pinsuti about “Life of my life, and soul of my soul.”

The tragedy of growing old, in fact, consists, if we look at it more closely, not in growing old, but in remaining young, and their irredeemable youthfulness was the pathetic fact in the lives of the Misses Clifford. The banjo-playing and the writing of youthful lyrics was a true symptom of the age they felt themselves to be, and the streaks of gray in their hair and the wrinkles in their faces were a travesty of their spirits. Since childhood they had led a perfectly serene and untroubled existence, and it was their bodies, the sheaths, and not the sword, which was rusting. They had floated slowly round and round in a backwater of life, and the adventure and romance of living swept by them, making them feel as if they and not the great stream was moving, and if they had been told that it was the stream that hurried by them in turmoil and charmed bewilderment, while they were standing still, they would scarcely have credited it. This is a malady most incident to country towns.

But it would be giving a totally erroneous picture of them if the impression was left that they were unhappy or unsatisfied. Herein lay the tragedy of it to the onlooker, but to them the tragedy would begin when they became aware of it. They had aged and narrowed without knowing it. They lived the life they had lived twenty years ago, among those whose days had been distinguished by a similar uniformity, without knowing that twenty years had made a difference in them. Clara always thought that Phœbe was a girl yet, and Phœbe constantly considered that Clara was still a little flighty. Meantime they scored their little successes. Clara was congratulated on her last poem in the Wroxton Chronicle, and Phœbe sang Pinsuti in a quavering voice to the cottage piano. Then when the afternoon party was over (they gave teas at Villa Montrose), Clara would start for a reckless ride on her bicycle, and Phœbe hungered for her return.

Their father had been the rector of a country village near Wroxton, and their great-uncle—a grocer—the mayor of the town. Thus Villa Montrose had a double halo round it; the grocery was sunk in the civil dignitary, and the poverty of the clergyman in the honour of his office. “My father, the rector,” “My great-uncle, the Mayor,” were notable subjects of conversation.

But this evening Miss Phœbe felt more disturbed than she had felt for many years. For many years no fresh friend and no fresh interest had touched the lives of herself and her sister, and the call they had paid on Jeannie, though they talked only on trivial subjects, and looked out on to the familiar spires of the Cathedral, had been strangely exhilarating. The impression had been conveyed to her in some subtle manner that Jeannie’s whole attitude toward life was utterly different to any she had known before. How it had been conveyed to her she could not have told you, but Jeannie’s every word and gesture she saw to be the product of a wholly new idea of life. Her hair had been untidy, yet Miss Clifford knew how different would have been the effect if it had been her own hair which wanted brushing; she lounged in a chair, with one leg crossed over the other, an attitude which Miss Clifford knew from her earliest childhood to be most unladylike, and though her manner had been utterly unstudied, and she did not, as Miss Clifford always did, press her guests to stay when they said they must be going, she gave you the impression that you were welcome.

These thoughts hovered round Miss Clifford’s head as she lay awake that night. Jeannie was so much fresher and vivacious even than Clara, who often talked and laughed more than her elder sister quite liked. How was it that Clara looked rather old and tired beside Jeannie? Could it be because she was so? And Miss Clifford, for her own peace of mind, fell asleep without solving the question.

CHAPTER VI

Jack Collingwood came to pay his expected visit to Wroxton early in September, as soon as his father and mother were back from their annual trip to the English Lakes. Canon Collingwood had much enjoyed their time there, and had brought back several tin boxes full of roots of wild marsh-growing plants which he intended to cultivate on the edge of the chalk-stream which ran at the bottom of the garden. He did this every year, and the plants never grew, which did not in the least stand in the way of his doing it again. He had also, as usual, preached an old sermon in Grasmere church, and had written three new ones. His life, indeed, at the Lakes was not less regular than his life at Wroxton; he had been out of doors more and had spent only two hours a day over the study of patristic literature, but he had been out at the same hours, and in at the same hours, and was quite unaltered. He had worn the same straw-hat at the Lakes that he always wore, and on returning home put it on the top shelf of his mahogany wardrobe, where it reposed for eleven months out of the twelve.

It would be giving a false impression to say that Mrs. Collingwood had enjoyed herself. She took a holiday like medicine, with a view to its after-effects, in order to enable her to return with renewed vigour to the battle with immoral books and people who were not helpful and did not live in closes. In order to attain this end as fully as possible she had spent all her time out of doors, taking long strolls from breakfast till lunch, and a walk with her husband from lunch till tea, on the recognised plan that the best rest for a tired mind is to strenuously overtire the body also. She had continually looked at the beauties of nature also as part of the prescription, and had read a little Wordsworth as she would read a guide-book in a foreign town. In the evening, and sometimes if it was exceedingly wet, she would work, and had produced three G. F. S. leaflets, one of which embodied her lecture on the Downward Tendencies of Modern Fiction. Another was called No Parleyings with the Enemy. In fact, when she and her husband returned, she might be said to be a match for anything.

Jack arrived on a brilliant September afternoon, and, sending his luggage on, walked himself. The old, quaint town seemed to his brisker London eye to be dozing on as peacefully as ever, in a sort of tranquil mediæval drowsiness. From the station, which was on a hill, he could see across the cup-shaped hollow in which lay the red-tiled town. There were no new houses on the way down, and the names above all the old ones were the same. The man who had cut his hair when he was a child stood, as he had always stood, at his door, looking on to the street, with a pair of scissors stuck into the pocket of his white apron, neither balder nor stouter than he used to be. It had always been a matter of wonder to Jack how a man with so bald a head dare have his windows filled full of infallible hair-preservers, but perhaps he was a cynic, and traded with amusement on the fathomless credulity of man. The very slope of the high street seemed designed for a leisurely folk; it was too steep for a horse to trot either up or down, and the foot-passengers ascended softly like bubbles arising through water, and descended with the same equable motion like pebbles sinking in the sea. Half-way down he branched off through a covered passage leading under a house into the close, and there, too, time seemed to have stood still. A few nursery-maids wheeled contented babies up and down its paths, and children were playing among the grave-stones; the gray pinnacled west front seemed the incarnation of stability. As always, the place asserted its instant charm over him; for the moment as he passed through the grave-yard into the close he would have asked nothing better than to say an eternal good-bye to the froth and bubble of the world and turn the key on his ambitions. It would be necessary, he reflected, to be rid of them, else in a week or two he would be tingling for wider things again and chafing at the slow passage of ungrudged hours. Like all healthily minded young men, he knew he was going to overtop the world, and the air here was opiate. But for the moment he was in love with tranquility.