Maradick at Forty: A Transition

by Hugh Walpole

Meanwhile there is Janet Morelli.

Miss Minns was the very last person in the world fitted to give anyone a settled education; in her early days she had given young ladies lessons in French and music, but now the passing of years had reduced the one to three or four conversational terms and the other to some elementary tunes about which there was a mechanical precision that was anything but musical. Her lessons in deportment had, at one time, been considered quite the thing, but now they had grown a little out of date, and, like her music, lost freshness through much repetition.

Her ideas of life were confined to the three or four families with whom she had passed her days, and Janet had never discovered anything of interest in any of her predecessors; Alice Crate (her father was Canon Crate of Winchester Cathedral), Mary Devonshire (her father was a merchant in Liverpool), and Eleanor Simpson (her father was a stockbroker and lived in London). Besides, all these things had happened a long while ago; Miss Minns had been with Janet for the last twelve years, and fact had become reminiscence and reminiscence tradition within that time. Miss Minns of the moment with which we have to do was not a very lively person for a very young creature to be attached to; she was always on the quiver, from the peak of her little black bonnet to the tip of her tiny black shoes. When she did talk, her conversation suffered from much repetition and was thickly strewn with familiar proverbs, such as “All’s well that ends well” and “Make hay while the sun shines.” She served no purpose at all as far as Janet was concerned, save as an occasional audience of a very negative kind.

The only other person with whom Janet had been brought into contact, her father, was far more perplexing.

She had accepted him in her early years as somebody about whom there was no question. When he was amusing and played with her there was no one in the world so completely delightful. He had carried her sometimes into the woods and they had spent the whole day there. She remembered when he had whistled and sung and the animals had come creeping from all over the wood. The birds had climbed on to his shoulders and hands, rabbits and hares had let him take them in his hands and had shown no fear at all. She remembered once that a snake had crawled about his arm. He had played with her as though he had been a child like herself, and she had done what she pleased with him and he had told her wonderful stories. And then suddenly, for no reason that she could understand, that mood had left him and he had been suddenly angry, terribly, furiously angry. She had seen him once take a kitten that they had had in his hands and, whilst it purred in his face, he had twisted its neck and killed it. That had happened when she was very small, but she would never forget it. Then she had grown gradually accustomed to this rage and had fled away and hidden. But on two occasions he had beaten her, and then, afterwards, in a moment it had passed, and he had cried and kissed her and given her presents.

She had known no other man, and so she could not tell that they were not all like that. But, as the years had passed, she had begun to wonder. She had asked Miss Minns whether everybody could make animals come when they whistled, and Miss Minns had admitted that the gift was unusual, that, in fact, she didn’t know anyone else who could do it. But Janet was growing old enough now to realise that Miss Minns’ experience was limited and that she did not know everything. She herself had tried to attract the birds, but they had never come to her.

Her father’s fury had seemed to her like the wind or rain; something that came to him suddenly, blowing from no certain place, and something, too, for which he was not responsible. She learnt to know that they only lasted a short time, and she used to hide herself until they were over.

With all this she did not love him. He gave her very little opportunity of doing so. His affection was as strangely fierce as his temper and frightened her almost as badly. She felt that that too was outside himself, that he had no love for her personally, but felt as he did about the animals, about anything young and wild. It was this last characteristic that was strangest of all to her. It was very difficult to put it into words, but she had seen that nothing made him so furious as the conventional people of the town. She was too young to recognise what it was about them that made him so angry, but she had seen him grow pale with rage at some insignificant thing that some one had said or done. On the other hand, he liked the wildest people of the place, the fishermen and tramps that haunted the lower quarters of the town. All this she grasped very vaguely, because she had no standard of comparison; she knew no one else. But fear had made love impossible; she was frightened when he was fond of her, she was frightened when he was angry with her. Miss Minns, too, was a difficult person to bestow love upon. She did not want it, and indeed resolutely flung it back with the remark that emotion was bad for growing girls and interfered with their education. When she lived at all she lived in the past, and Janet was only a very dim shadowy reflexion of the Misses Crate, Devonshire, and Simpson, who had glorified her earlier years.

Janet, therefore, had spent a very lonely and isolated childhood, and, as she had grown, the affection that was in her had grown too, and she had had no one to whom she might give it. At first it had been dolls, and ugly and misshapen though they were they had satisfied her. But the time came when their silence and immobility maddened her, she wanted something that would reply to her caresses and would share with her all her thoughts and ideas. Then Miss Minns came, and Janet devoted herself to her with an ardour that was quite new to the good lady; but Miss Minns distrusted enthusiasm and had learnt, whilst educating Miss Simpson, to repress all emotion, so she gave it all back to Janet again, carefully wrapped up in tissue paper. When Janet found that Miss Minns didn’t want her, and that she was only using her as a means of livelihood, she devoted herself to animals, and in a puppy, a canary and a black kitten she found what she wanted. But then came the terrible day when her father killed the kitten, and she determined never to have another pet of any kind.

By this time she was about fifteen and she had read scarcely anything. Her father never talked to her about books, and Miss Minns considered most novels improper and confined herself to Mrs. Hemans and the “Fairchild Family.” Janet’s ideas of the world were, at this time, peculiar. Her father had talked to her sometimes strangely about places that he had seen, but they had never attracted her: mountain heights, vast unending seas, tangled forests, sun-scorched deserts; always things without people, silent, cold, relentless. She had asked him about cities and he had spoken sometimes about London, and this had thrilled her through and through. What she longed for was people; people all round her, friends who would love her, people whom she herself could help. And then suddenly, on an old bookshelf that had remained untouched for many years past, she had found “Kenilworth.” There was a picture that attracted her and she had begun to read, and then a new world opened before her. There were several on the shelf: Lytton’s “Rienzi” and “The Last of the Barons,” George Eliot’s “Middlemarch,” Trollope’s “Barchester Towers,” and Miss Braddon’s “Lady Audley’s Secret.” There were some other things; somebody’s “History of England,” a Geography of Europe, a torn volume of Shakespeare, and the “Pickwick Papers.” Living, hitherto a drab and unsatisfactory affair, became a romantic thrilling business in which anything might happen, a tremendous bran pie into which one was continually plunging for plums. She had no doubt at all that there would be adventures for her in the future. Everyone, even the people in “Middlemarch,” had adventures, and it was absurd to suppose that she wouldn’t have them as well. She noticed, too, that all the adventures that these people had rose from the same source, namely love. She did not realise very thoroughly what this love was, except that it meant finding somebody for whom you cared more than anyone else in the world and staying with them for the rest of your life, and perhaps after. She did not admire all the people of whom the heroines were enamoured, but she realised that everyone thought differently about such things, and that there was apt to be trouble when two ladies cared for the same gentleman or vice versa.