What a mother Gertrude would make to Joan, Jimmy’s rather spoilt girl of twelve, what a wife to Jimmy himself, what an excellent influence in the parish, what an energetic addition to our sleepy neighbourhood. We were told we were going to be stirred up. I never met the second Mrs. Cross till Jimmy brought her down as a bride to call on me in my cottage near his park gates. She at once inspired me with all the terror which very well-dressed people with exactly the right hair and earrings always arouse in me. She was good-looking, upright, had perfect health and teeth and circulation, did breathing exercises, had always just finished the book of the moment, and was ready with an opinion on it, not a considered opinion—but an opinion. During her first call I discovered that she had, for many years, held strong views about the necessity of school life for only children, and was already on the look-out for a seminary for Joan.
“It is in her horoscope,” she said to me, as we walked in my orchard garden, too much engrossed with Joan’s future to notice my wonderful yellow lupins. “Her Mercury and ruling planet are in Aquarius, and that means the companionship of her own age. I shall not delay a day in finding the best school that England can produce.”
I need hardly say that such an establishment protruded itself on to Mrs. Cross’s notice, with the greatest celerity, and thither the long-legged nail-biting, pimply, round-shouldered Joan repaired, and became a reformed character, with a clear complexion and a back almost as flat as her step-mother’s.
“Wonderful woman,” Jimmy used to say somewhat ruefully to me, sitting on the low stone wall which divides my little velvet lawn from my bit of woodland. “Gertrude has been the making of Joan.”
“And of you, too, my dear Jimmy,” I remarked.
He sighed.
It was perfectly true. She had been the making of him, just as she had been the making of the Manor garden, of the boot and shoe club, the boys’ carving class, the Confirmation candidates’ reading class, the mothers’ working parties, the coal club, the Church members’ lending library. The only misgiving that remained in one’s mind after she had been the making of all these things was that it seemed a pity that they were all so obviously machine-made, turned out to pattern.
Personally, I should have preferred that they should have been treated less conventionally, or let alone. My own course and Jimmy’s would, of course, have been to have left them alone. We left everything alone. But Gertrude always had a ready-made scheme for everything and everybody. She even had a scheme of salvation into which the Deity was believed to be compressed. I did not mind much the industrious efforts she expended on Jimmy, who was now an inattentive Magistrate and member of the County Council, and wobbly chairman of his own Parish Council, writing an entirely illegible hand, which perhaps did not matter much as he never answered letters. But I felt acutely distressed when she reconstructed the rambling old Manor garden entirely. All its former pleasant characteristics were wrenched out of it. It was drawn and quartered, and then put together anew in compartments. It contained everything; a Japanese garden, a rock garden, a herb garden, a sunk garden, a wilderness, a rose garden, a pergola, three pergolas, just as the village now contained, a boot club, a coal club, a—but I think I have said that before.
In the course of time she presented Jimmy with two most remarkable children, at least she said they were remarkable: and from their horoscopes I gathered the boy would probably become a prime minister, and the girl a musical genius. We don’t actually know yet what form their greatness will take, for as I write this they are still greedy, healthy children, who come out in plum-pudding rash regularly at Christmas.
I knew her well by the time the garden had been given its coup de grâce, and I told her after I had been dragged all over it that she had a constructive mind. (I have never been a particularly truthful person, but my career as a liar dates from Jimmy’s marriage with Gertrude.)