An Act in a Backwater

by E. F. Benson

But the smoking was the root of offence, and Mrs. Collingwood stumbled heavily over it. She and her husband were dining at the Aveshams one Saturday evening, and Jeannie, who had dressed before the class in order not to break it up sooner than usual, came in, and, Mrs. Collingwood said, “reeking of the pot-house.” But even Mrs. Collingwood, who had been accustomed all her life to express things strongly, felt that her expression fully met the enormities of the case.

The ramifications of the boys’ class and the girls’ class were innumerable. There was the case of the girl who played the violin, and the boy who professed to do the same. It was natural that they should be taken together. But when it appeared that the boy in question was a follower of the girl in question, Jeannie’s indignation knew no bounds. “I would not play gooseberry to the Czar of Russia,” she exclaimed.

Then it happened that between the Literary Ladies and the glee club, the boys’ class and the girls’ class, the violins, botany, and singing lessons, Jeannie had not any hour of her own. There were also, as Miss Fortescue said, several hours a week to be devoted to the suppression of scandal. An instance of this occurred when Mrs. Vernon overheard an animated conversation between Jeannie and a draper’s assistant in the High Street. Jeannie’s voice carried, and the tones were audible to passers-by.

“Do come round this evening about nine,” she said, “because the others are dining out, and I shall be alone. Mind you come.”

He came.

One evening, about the end of October, Jeannie had had an unexpected respite. The policeman who was learning botany had to go on unexpected duty, owing to the illness of one of the staff, and she had an evening free. It would be false to say that she was relieved, for the patient was another of her boys, and she was anxious about him; but she certainly ran up the stairs, two at a time, to the nursery, where the evening toilet of the baby was going on. The baby was in his bath, worshipping his toes. He crowed with delight when he saw Jeannie, and when the bath was over the warm, wet body was blanketed and hoisted into her lap. Jeannie was long ago initiated into the mysteries of the evening meal, and the nurse, having mixed the patent food, went by Jeannie’s request to her own supper, without any sense of shifting responsibility on to untrustworthy shoulders.

It was a brisk, frosty evening, and the fire prospered in the grate. Jeannie drew the nurse’s rocking-chair close to the fender and adjusted the bottle. The baby was warm and hungry, and her thoughts turned inward, soothed and driven there by the dear, helpless presence, and she meditated nonsensically, so she told herself, as if she had been talking alone to the baby.

“What do you know,” she thought, “of to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow? Boys’ class to-morrow, and girls’ class the day after. Somebody will play the violin a little less villainously, and some one will perhaps not cut his finger at all. Oh, baby, it is a world where things go slow. First the seed, and then the stalk, and who knows about the corn? Supposing a storm comes in June? Ah, when will June come? How I long for June!

“Poor little fatherless mite, are we so much better off than you? Oh, baby, Heaven prevent us from getting morbid! Yes, those toes are quite beautiful, and all your own. Nobody has any more toes than you, and what a consolation that ought to be. But nobody has any less. There is always that. We are all very average, and we have no right to expect extraordinary happiness. Yet I do, and so do you; you think that you will always have some one to hold you like this, and have a fire to look at. But what if the fire goes out, and somebody drops you?”

Jeannie’s face had got quite grave over these unconsidered possibilities. But her brow unclouded quickly.