An Autumn Sowing

by E. F. Benson

Here Mrs Keeling’s disintegration of mind showed itself. She had but a moment before been critical of Alice’s silence.

‘Yes, dear, that is what I always tried to teach you,’ she said, ‘when you were children; just as my mother taught me. I’m sure I told you all every day not to talk with your mouths full or when anybody else is talking. If we all talked together there would be a fine noise, to be sure, and nobody a bit the wiser. I took a great deal of trouble about your manners, and I’m sure it was not thrown away, for I consider you’ve all got very good manners, even John, when he chooses. Talking of that’ (This phrase meant nothing in Mrs Keeling’s mouth), ‘I noticed Mr Silverdale in church. He seemed to me to have a hungry kind of look. I dare say his housekeeper is very careless about his meals, not having a wife. I hope he will make a good meal this evening. Perhaps it would be safer, dear, if you refused the salmon mayonnaise, as you are not so very fond of it. Mrs Bellaway would have it that there was plenty, but she has such a small appetite herself.’

‘I saw nothing hungry about his face,’ said Alice, with decision. ‘He looked so rapt and far-away as if anything like food was the last subject he would think about.’

‘Very likely, my dear; you are wonderful at reading character. All the same the people who don’t give a thought to food are just those who do go hungry, so we may both of us be right. Is that a spot of rain or a fly? I felt something on the back of my glove.’

Alice put her clasped hands between her knees and squeezed them. She was perfectly willing to go without her mayonnaise, but she could not bear her mother should think Mr Silverdale looked hungry.

‘I thought his face was so like Jonah preaching at Nineveh in the stained glass window,’ she said.

Mrs Keeling suddenly became coherently humorous. An idea (not much of one, but still an idea) floated down the debris from her mind.

‘Well, he had had nothing to eat for three days,’ she remarked. ‘That seems to show that I’m right.’

The street down which they drove from church very soon ceased to be a street in the sense of its being lined on each side by contiguous houses, and became Alfred Road, and was bounded on each side by brick and stucco villas. At first stood arm-in-arm, semi-detached, but presently they took on an air of greater spaciousness and stood square and singly, while the gardens that sandwiched them before and behind were large enough to contain a grass-plot and six or seven laurels in front, and a full-sized tennis-lawn and a small kitchen garden at the back. But perhaps they scarcely warranted such names as ‘Chatsworth,’ ‘Blenheim,’ ‘Balmoral,’ or ‘The Engadine,’ which appeared so prominently on their painted gates. ‘Blenheim’ had once been Mrs Keeling’s home, and her mother, a tiny, venomous old lady in a Bath-chair, lived and was likely long to live there still, for she had admirable health, and the keen, spiteful temper which gives its possessor so indignant and absorbing an interest in life.

It was to a far narrower home than Blenheim that Emmeline had gone on her marriage with Mr Keeling, and though the greater part of Alfred Road had shaken their heads over her mating herself with a man so much below her socially, her mother, wife, and now widow of a retired P. & O. captain, had formed a juster estimate of her future son-in-law’s chin. A silly, pretty girl like Emmeline, she thought, was very lucky to capture a man who was going to make his way upwards so obviously as that strapping young fellow with the square jaw. He was then but the proprietor of the fishmonger’s shop at the end of the High Street, but Mrs Goodford knew very well, without being told so by young Keeling himself, that he was not of the sort which remain a small fishmonger. Events had justified her insight, and it was to a much bigger house than Mrs Goodford’s that her daughter was being driven on this Sunday morning.