An Act in a Backwater

by E. F. Benson

Jeannie threw herself into the life of the place with amazing energy, and she had her hands very full. In the first place, the house in Bolton Street had a new inhabitant—none other than the baby of Frank Bennett. It had occurred to Arthur when Jack was telling him about it that here was a possible situation, at any rate for the present, and before a week had elapsed he had written to Jack to say that if he wished they would give the child a home as long as the present régime of Bolton Street continued. Jack had accepted the offer with the most thankful alacrity: to live there was much better for the child; also (this he hardly admitted to himself) he could run down with reasonable frequency to see how it throve.

Jeannie had wanted no persuading, and Miss Fortescue hardly more. She had opposed the scheme at first on the same grounds as she opposed everything, in order to see how the thing looked from the other side. That such a plan was somewhat out of the way, and that it would give Wroxton a good deal to talk about, she did not consider at all a disadvantage to them, and a distinct benefit to Wroxton.

“We shall hear less of the S. P. C. K.,” she remarked.

The baby was to Jeannie of absorbing interest. The same instinct which had led her when a child to make dramatic the lives of her dolls, and to watch over them with an anxious benignity of which saw-dust and wax were really not worthy, had here a sort of fruition. A doll had come to life, the inventions of her childhood were being played over again in the theatre of living, her play was become true. Arthur, who was the youngest of them, was only a year younger than herself; she had thus never known a baby in the house, and she found an ineffable charm in it.

But the baby, in being at least, was only a relaxation to be enjoyed in odds and ends of time, for the solid hours were full. She seemed to have taken on her shoulders the responsibility for the whole of Wroxton. She had already written a paper for the Literary Ladies, which had caused a kind of revolution in that gentle society, and Mrs. Collingwood had left the room in a marked manner in the middle. It is true that she came back again, and spoke venomously about it, but that was an after-thought, for by going away she expressed her silent disapproval, which she repeated not at all silently in the discussion that followed. Indeed, she might well be horror-struck, for Jeannie, taking as her text that notorious and scandalous novel, The Sheltered Life, had made remarks about “realism” and artistic treatment which made Mrs. Collingwood not exactly blush, but bristle. In the first place, the hero of the work was a professed unbeliever, and though, if we are to believe the author, he sought for light, and lived a sober and innocent life, there was no doubt about his religious opinions. It is unnecessary to go into details of the rest of the story; that one fact was enough for Mrs. Collingwood. But Jeannie seemed hardly to have noticed it. Instead, she spoke of the admirable development of his characters, of the sobriety and reticence of the narrative; of the skilled surgical dissection of the man’s actions, and the exhibition of the real forces that swayed them, partly the result of heredity, partly of early training and circumstance, and the one thing that, according to Mrs. Collingwood, condemned the book, even had it been written by Shakespeare and corrected by Milton, she passed over with the remark that the description of the struggle of the reason against a faith his reason could not accept was wonderfully rendered.

Dead silence followed her reading; and the Literary Ladies, who for the most part had followed her with great interest, saw Mrs. Collingwood enter again (she came in so punctually as Jeannie sat down that it seemed almost as if she had been listening at the door) and cowered. Most of them looked guilty, but it was noticed that Miss Clara, in her place as president, sat bolt upright, and looked as brave as a lion. Indeed, several times during the lecture she had applauded with her silver pencil-case on the table. Miss Fortescue, who sat next Jeannie, also appeared unterrified, but, as her niece sat down, she said in a whisper to her:

“You’ve done it now, dear. There’s war in that woman’s eye. But I’ll see you through.”

Miss Fortescue was right. There was war in Mrs. Collingwood’s eye; there was crusade in her eye, and she marched out to attack the hosts of the infidel like Cœur de Lion. She made no parleying with the enemy, and though she alluded to Jeannie’s speech as “most suggestive and clever,” it was only to point out to her hearers how dangerous cleverness was. She hurled texts at their heads: the house built on sand, the kings who did evil, the captivity, the fall of Babylon, the mark of the beast, the seven foolish virgins, the man who put his hand to the plough and looked back, the seed on the dry ground, the pitcher broken at the well, the woman of Samaria—all these, if rightly understood, proclaimed how abhorrent was The Sheltered Life! Jeannie as she listened was first angry, and ended by being amused. There had been a seven days’ storm; Mrs. Collingwood had sent in her resignation, and Jeannie, hearing of it, sent in hers, provided that Mrs. Collingwood would remain. It ended in Jeannie’s calling on Mrs. Collingwood, in answer to the almost tearful request of Miss Clifford, and talking it out with her. She explained that she had not been criticising the data of the book, but the treatment of certain data, and made her points with such sweetness of temper and apparent inability to take offence that Mrs. Collingwood was charmed in spite of herself.

“But these things are the most serious in the world, Miss Avesham,” she had said at parting. “You do not, I now believe, take them lightly, but that was the impression your very clever speech made on me. I was wrong, I am willing to confess that.”

Then Jeannie started a musical society, at the meetings of which the Miss Cliffords quavered an uncertain alto, and Colonel Raymond thundered an approximate bass. They met originally once a week at Bolton Street, to sing glees for an hour, under the severe guidance of Miss Fortescue, who taught them by degrees not so much what good part singing was, as what it was not. Then they won their way to the passable. Her teaching seemed almost hair-splitting at first, especially when she insisted on the middle of a note being sung, and allowed nothing which to the ordinary mind was allowable enough, and insisted on the existence of notes intermediate between semitones.