Her former friends and acquaintances—county folk who had motored in for a day’s shopping, the stout be-jewelled wives of the rich magnates and manufacturers of Millsborough. Poor ladies! how worried they would be, not knowing what to do, meeting her by chance in the street. She with her umbrella and her parcels. And their red-faced husbands who would squeeze her hand and try to say the right thing. There would be plenty of comedy—at first, anyhow. That was the trouble. Tragedy she could have faced. This was going to be farce.
The dulness—the appalling dulness of it. The long evenings in the one small living room. She would have to learn sewing—make her own dresses, while Anthony read aloud to her. He read rather well. Perhaps, by help of great economy in the housekeeping, they might be able to purchase a piano, on the hire system—or would it have to be a harmonium?
She had risen. From the window, she could see the cloud of smoke beneath which the people of Millsborough moved and had their being.
Why should it seem so impossible. Her present ordered existence, mapped out from year to year, calling for neither thought nor effort, admitting of neither hope nor fear, the sheltered life of a pampered child—had not that also its dulness, its monotony? Why did rich people rent saeters in Norway, live there for months at a time on hunter’s fare, doing their own cooking and cleaning—welcome the perils and hardships of mountain climbing; of big game shooting; of travels into unknown lands; choose danger, privation and toil, and call it a “holiday”? Had not she herself found the simple living and hard work of the hospital a welcome change from everlasting luxuriousness? Would the Garden of Eden have been the ideal home for men and women with brains and hands? Might not earning one’s living by the sweat of one’s brow be better sport?
Need those evenings after the day’s work was done be of necessity so deadly? Her great dinners at The Abbey, with all their lights and lackeys, had they always been such feasts of intellectuality? Surely she had had social experience enough to teach her that brains were a thing apart from birth and breeding, that wit and wisdom were not the monopoly of the well-to-do. It came back to her, the memory of her girlhood’s days when they had lived in third-rate boarding-houses in Rome and Florence; rented small furnished appartements in French provincial towns; cheap lodgings in Dresden and Hanover. There had been no lack of fun and laughter in those days. Those musical evenings to which each student brought his own beer, and was mightily careful to take back with him the empty bottles, for which otherwise ten pfennigs would be charged. How busy she and her mother had been beforehand, cutting the sandwiches, and how sparing of the butter! Some of the players had made world-famous names; and others had died or maybe still lived—unknown. One of them she had heard just recently, paying ten guineas for her box; but his music had sounded no sweeter than when she had listened to it sitting beside Jim on the uncarpeted floor, there not being chairs enough to go round. Where had she heard better talk than from the men with shiny coat sleeves and frayed trousers who had come to sup with her father off maccaroni and chianti at two lire the flask. There might be clever brilliant men and women even in Millsborough. So far as she could judge she had never succeeded in securing any of them for her great receptions at The Abbey. They might be less shy of dropping in at Bruton Square.
It was what one felt, not what one had, that was the source of our pleasure. It was the school boy’s appetite, not a Rockefeller’s wealth that purchased the good dinner. The nursery filled with expensive toys: the healthy child had no need of them. It was the old rag doll, clutched tight to our bosom that made the attic into heaven. It was astride on the wooden horse without a head that we shouted our loudest. We over-burdened life with empty show, turned man into a mannikin. We sacrificed the play to the scenery and dresses. Four walls and a passion were all that the poet demanded.
Whence had come this idea that wealth brought happiness? Not from the rich. Surely they must have learnt better, by this time.
It was not the enjoyable things of life that cost money. These acres of gardens where one never got away from one’s own gardeners! What better were they than a public park? It was in the hidden corner we had planted and tended ourselves—where we knew and loved each flower, where each whispering tree was a comrade that we met God in the evening. It was the pleasant living room, where each familiar piece of furniture smiled a welcome to us when we entered, that was home. Through half-a-dozen “reception rooms,” we wandered, a stranger. The millionaire, who, reckoning interest at five per cent., paid ten thousand a year to possess an old master—how often really did he look at it? What greater artistic enjoyment did he get out of it than from looking at it in a public gallery? The joy of possession, it was the joy of the miser, of the dog in the manger. Were the silver birches in the moonlight more beautiful because we owned the freehold of the hill?
She remembered her walking tours with Jim. Their packs upon their backs, and the open road before them. The evening meal at the wayside Inn, and the sweet sleep between coarse sheets. She had never cared for travel since then. It had always been such a business: the luggage and the crowd, and the general hullaballoo.
What would the children say? Well, they could not preach, either of them: there was that consolation. The boy, at the beginning of the war, and without saying a word to either of them, had thrown up everything, had gone out as a common soldier—he had been so fearful they might try to stop him—facing death for an ideal. She certainly was not going to be afraid of anything he could say, after that.