Mrs. Carpenter was to be seen through the doorway, pushing slowly towards them, elbowing one, patronising another with a smile, making expressive gestures to friends here and there indicating that her task was nearly impossible—but—hold on, little sheep! The shepherdess is coming. You shall have tea if she has to commandeer some one else’s table.
“I wonder if you would mind——” she will probably say reproachfully. “This lady ought to sit down and it is impossible to find a table. I think we can get six chairs in here if it won’t be pressing you too near the wall.” It was by some manœuvre of this sort that she did in the end plant the girls, whom she had volunteered to find, and Mrs. Vachell, whom she could not very well get rid of, at a table where Mrs. Fulton and Mrs. Manley were already seated. The two elderly ladies who were there first drained their cups and withdrew, commenting on the bad management of the tea rooms and the “manners of some people.”
Mrs. Eric Manley, Mrs. Carpenter and Mrs. Vachell occupied positions in Millport not unlike those of the kings of England before Alfred. Their territories were less defined, their wars were not so bitter, but, as the history books say, “the country languished under their rule and longed for a just and wise leader to unite their petty factions under his sway.” Mrs. Manley ruled over the Fashionable-who-are-charitable, Mrs. Carpenter over the Charitable-who-are-fashionable-and-educated, and Mrs. Vachell over the Educated-and-incidentally-fashionable-and-charitable. They were ripe for the arrival of a visionary like Susie who should unite their people in the peaceful practices of Love—love of architecture-and-so-on, love of children, of all weathers, of the poor, “even those poor terrible drunken creatures who have been taught to be wicked,” of “your own beautiful homes.” We have anticipated this last object of her love. It became one of the stock phrases of those speeches which made her the idol of public meetings in days to come.
But although Destiny was hovering over the tea-table, they knew it not. Perhaps Teresa felt something of the fate in store for her. Their chairs were near a window, below which the trams stopped to load and discharge their passengers. The faces were there by the hundred, the drab clothing, the mud were as usual. Did the scene never alter she wondered? Did the stream of people pour on like that under lowering skies perpetually—all day—Sundays—holidays, even through the night? She had come from the crowded streets of London, but that was utterly different. There was variety, sunshine, even leisureliness in the squares and quiet places off the main traffic; and besides that, the significance of any individual was so small that no one could feel responsible for his neighbour unless he were invited to interest himself. In Millport every weary pedestrian seemed to carry a personal grudge against those who had the means to escape from the mud.
Mrs. Manley was comparing notes with Susie on the eternal subject of prices. Even cakes made at home were almost too expensive to eat every day, she complained. Her husband had had to give up keeping a tin of biscuits at his office, and he often came home to tea to save expense, unless he had to stay and carry on work that the clerks used to do. It was impossible to have the sort of entrées one used to, made with just a little sweetbread or cream or something; even the eggs mounted up now——
“Yes, yes, I know, my dear women,” Mrs. Carpenter interrupted, “but do you realise what it means to Charity? You are only on the visiting committee of my beloved Institute, you know,” she smiled at Mrs. Manley, “and you can have no idea. The very soap the women wash with costs us £20 a year more than it did; there now! What do you think of that? That is just soap alone.”
Mrs. Manley looked a little contemptuous. “Everyone uses soap,” she said. “I have to deal it out at our orphanage when it is my week for the store cupboard. But anyhow I believe there is only one thing that hasn’t gone up and that is bi-carbonate of soda. That is why everybody’s cakes taste of it. (She glanced at Mrs. Carpenter). How do you find things, Mrs. Fulton?”
“I try not to worry about it,” Susie replied. Love seemed to envelope the table as she spoke, and even Mrs. Carpenter felt that she had not got the nail plumb on the head with her last blow. Mrs. Vachell pricked up her ears. “I do so want those two,” Susie continued with a fond look at her daughters, “not to have all their young time clouded by perpetual half-pennies. Of course we are not extravagant, but we have none of us very large appetites and, as I say, I just try not to worry. I have no doubt that what we are going through now is somehow for the good of the world.”
Mrs. Carpenter drew a long breath and turned back a piece of fur at her wrist. “Of course we all believe that,” she said, “or we shouldn’t be here; at least I hope not. But what do you propose, Mrs. Fulton, to do about the terrible suffering as it is?” Even the best accredited lamb in its first year at Millport must not have things all its own way in the fold.
Susie’s eyes brimmed. “I think and think,” she said earnestly, “but I can’t see how it is to be avoided. It seems somehow as if it was meant, and we can only learn the meaning by helping everywhere we can when we get the chance. I think some of the saddest cases are often the least known, don’t you?” Mrs. Vachell was taking an Olympic pleasure in the new forces which Susie was evidently going to bring in on the side of good against evil. She looked on from the high ground of quicker wits than her two sister rulers. She now wanted to see what Susie did with her two daughters. “It is the younger generation that will have to find out these things,” she said, looking at the girls.