[IV
BURNHAM BEECHES]
FOR Greta Morrison as for Mendel, London life had been opened up through Mitchell. He had been friendly and kind to her when everybody else had been harsh, fault-finding, and indifferent. Her first year and a half at the hostel had been a period of misery, for the girls and women there regarded her as odd, vague, and careless, and thought it their duty to impose on her the discipline she seemed to need, for they knew nothing of her suffering through her ambition and her work.
Like Mendel, she had been overwhelmed by her inability to adapt herself easily to the Detmold standard of drawing, for it was against her temperament and her habit of mind to be precise, and drawing had always been to her rather a trivial thing, though extremely pleasant for the purposes of the caricatures in which her teasing humour found an outlet. All her girlhood had been thrillingly happy in the execution of large allegorical designs, through which she sought to express her delight in the earth—the immense serene power of which she became profoundly aware as she lay in the bracken at home and gazed out over the rich valley or up into the marvellous, quivering blue sky, through which she felt that she was being borne without a sound, without a tremor, irresistibly. Nothing could shake that loving knowledge in her, and it hurt her that her mother’s cold, self-centred religion, which made her demand a fussy, sentimental attention from her children, forbade all expression of it in her daily life. Her brothers, revolting against the sentimentality exacted of them, treated all tenderness as ignoble rubbish, and in her rough-and-tumble with them Greta was hardened and forced into independence. She had to play their games with them and to suffer the same tortures of knuckle-drill, brush, dry-shave, and wrist-screw. But all their swagger seemed to her rather fraudulent; and because they laughed at her allegorical designs she decided that men were inferior beings. When they laughed at her designs it was to her as though they laughed at the beauty she had tried to express in them, and the sacrilege enraged her more than her mother’s petulance, for they were young and strong and full of life, and they should not have been blind. It was against them that she first found relief in caricature, and as they went through their Public Schools and were more and more compressed into type, she pilloried them, and, as a consequence, even when she was a young woman, big and fine, with the tender, delicate bloom of seventeen upon her, she had to submit to the indignity of knuckle-drill, brush, dry-shave, and wrist-screw.
She was filled with a horror of men, and especially Public School men, for they seemed to her entirely lacking in decency, humility, and honesty. They pretended to be so fine and ignored everything that was finer than themselves. Her brothers’ foolish love-affairs disgusted her and made her suppress in herself every emotion that tried to find its way to a good-looking boy or young man. She was not shy of them or afraid of them, but she would not encourage in them what she so detested in her brothers.
During her first year in London she devoted herself heart and soul to her work. There were two or three families who were kind to her as her mother’s daughter, but their ways were her mother’s, and she only visited them as a duty, and to break the monotony of the school and the hostel.
Her encounter with Mitchell took place at the time when Mendel’s influence on him had set him in revolt against his Public School training. On the other hand, the sight of the abyss of poverty into which Mendel descended so easily had set him reeling. He was shrewd enough to know that Hetty Finch was using him as a ladder to get out of it, and that there was a real danger of her kicking him down into it. In a state of horrible confusion he plunged at the most obvious outlet, the “pure girl” of the tradition of his upbringing.
He made no concealment of it, but turned to Morrison with a childlike confidence that touched her. She was feeling lonely, disappointed, and dissatisfied with herself and was glad of his company. It was a change from the woman-ridden atmosphere of the hostel.
By way of making their relationship seemly he introduced her to his family, where as the pure young girl who was to save their hope from wild courses she was a great success.
“First sensible thing you’ve done, my boy,” said Mr. Mitchell, that great man, a journalist who had been a correspondent in a dozen wars. “A pure friendship between a boy and a girl has a most ennobling influence—most ennobling.”
“She is truly spiritual,” sighed Mrs. Mitchell, “the type who justifies the independence of the modern girl, whatever the Prime Minister may say.”