Good-bye,
Yours ever,
Georgina.
CHAPTER XX
“Longmoor,” Millport.
My dear Louise,—This day week will see me back. The portraits are finished. I huddled them all on to one canvas at last—all, at least, except papa. The children would not sit still without mamma, and mamma had a sort of unemployed, forcible idleness look about her without the children, so there they are. I won’t bore you by telling you any more about the pictures. I have told you about the people themselves, and if you don’t see their portraits in your mind’s eye it is owing to your slowness in the uptake.
My last experience in Millport has amused me as much as any. I had a whole day with Mrs. County, and I have not yet quite got back my power of moving naturally. Mrs. Merchant had to go last week to the other end of Cheddar to do some good work or other—sit on a Board or in a Chair, or something—and suggested that I should go with her for the run. Mrs. County, who, by the way, lives farther away than I thought, would give me luncheon, and had asked me to stay until the car picked me up again on its way home.
We motored miles and miles through something that certainly is not country, though neither is it town, sea, desert, or icefloe. Perhaps it is just arable land; I had not thought of that before. It looks like acres of brown paper, slightly wrinkled, and marked into irregular shapes by lines of the mixed rubbish that a bird makes its nest of. The dusty road runs alongside of these lines of dusty twigs and straw and rags, and every few minutes we passed a house built either of red brick or of that white mud that has had gravel thrown at it. Exasperating houses, planned often in imitation of a farmhouse with some cut about it, only, unfortunately, the builders have copied all the details and left out all the point. Any details they liked have been exaggerated, such as sloping roofs, odd levels, inconvenient entrances. These houses are the nurseries of Millport. Here the married sons and daughters live after they have left papa’s luxurious nest on the outskirts of his business, and before they have developed into full-blown county specimens, with a hunting stable and the supreme terror of all forms of discomfort, mental and physical.
In the eye of God I believe the last state of that man to be worse than the first, and that the middle state partakes of the vices and virtues of both. Papa is often self-made, but whether he has made himself bad or good, still he has done it in the way he likes, and often in fighting other people he develops a flair for sincerity like that of a pig for truffles. The young people in the nurseries, having papa’s enthusiasm for progress without his gouty rigidity, are sometimes a little priggish, but more often they are generous and amusing. They have a great many babies, and work hard and keep young a long time. Apollyon waits for them farther afield. If they escape his clutches they may come out top among the angels, but he manages to catch quite enough of them to keep him strong and active. When he catches them he imbues them with an almighty terror of the word “it.” They become “it’s” slave. Any trifle may involve them in the shame of not being quite “it” (in my mother’s time people called it “the thing”), and yet no one can tell them where “it” lurks; every one has to find out for himself. “In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou find ‘it,’” says Apollyon, and they never know a moment’s peace after that.
I was left for a few minutes alone in the drawing-room before Mrs. County came down. Her drawing-room is pretty, and smells delicious. No human being could work, or, I should think, live, in a room like that, but it is as pretty as a skilful conjuring trick. If one looked carefully at any detail of it, its charm was gone. I could imagine any number of cats feeling at home in it, because all its chairs are luxurious, and, apart from bodily luxury, a cat’s whole creed is negation and denial.