The crow's-nest

by Sara Jeannette Duncan

I would not dwell upon her, I would pass to other themes, but one has a feeling that Tryphena has been too much omitted from accounts of our little town. Such chronicles have been somehow too playful; one would think we did nothing but discover affinities and listen to the band and eat expensive things in tins. One would think life was all joy and pleasure whereas there are Associations of every kind. Whatever may have been the case in the golden age, or the time of Lord Lytton, I believe that the great over-fed conscience of Great Britain now sends out more Tryphenas every year, and their good works have to be seriously reckoned with in considering the possibility of remaining here. We have our traditions, of course, but we are practically compelled to live upon them, and it seems to me that a distant world should hear not only of our declining past but of what we have increasingly to put up with. I would not have invited Tryphena to occupy a chapter, but as she has walked in without this formality she might as well stay.

Indeed I would not have invited her. She is the kind of Tryphena that never comes to see you unless you are ill. I am not so agreeable when I am ill—I imagine few people are—and I prefer visits, at such a time, only from people who are fond of seeing me when I am well. Why in heaven’s name, when you are feverish or aguish or panting for breath, you should be expected to accept as a “kindness” a visit from a person who never thinks of you until you become a helpless object to whet her righteousness on, who comes and inflicts a personality upon you to which the most robust health only enables you to be barely polite, is to me an irritating conundrum. I had taken particular pains to be reported to Tryphena as entirely convalescent, “quite out of the doctor’s hands;” I did not want to be on her parish books. Why should I suffer to enable her to do her duty? Why should she have things put down to her credit at my expense? This does not seem to me reasonable or proper and I am averse to it. Yet I have told her, such is my hypocrisy, how good it was of her to come, and she has gone away better pleased with herself than ever.

Tryphena’s attitude toward the social body by which she is good enough to allow herself to be surrounded is a mingling of compassion and censure. She is la justicière. She will judge with equity, even with mercy, but she must always judge. She is perpetually weighing, measuring, criticising, tolerating, exercising her keen sense of the shortcomings of man in general and woman in particular. She will bring her standards and set them up by your bedside. Your scanty stock of force cannot be better used than in contemplating and admiring them, and you must recognize how completely she herself attains them; you have no alternative. If one will for ever strike human balances one should have a broad fair page to do it on, and Tryphena’s is already over-written with cramped prejudices. It is a triviality, but Tryphena’s gloves always wrinkle at the thumbs.

If she had been a man she would have been a certain kind of clergyman, and if she had been a clergyman his legs would have gone in gaiters. Indeed, sooner or later she would probably have added to the name of Tryphenus the glories of an episcopal see. She is past mistress of the art of kindly rebuke. But I do not wish to be kindly rebuked. In that respect I am like the Roy-Regent, and all other persons whom Providence has enabled to do without this attention. She has more principles than any one person is entitled to, and she is always putting them into action before you. I think it is a mistake to imagine that people care about the noble reasons that direct one’s doings; if one’s doings themselves provoke interest it is exceptional luck. I wish somebody would tell Tryphena that principles ought to be hidden as deep as a conviction of superiority; and see what would happen. I am sure we were not born to edify one another.

The deplorable part of it is that Tryphena leaves one inclined to follow her in the steep and narrow path that leads to self-esteem. I find myself at this moment not only in a bad temper, but in a vein of criticism which I am inclined to visit upon persons whom I am usually entirely occupied in admiring. My friend the Bengal Lancer has just ridden by, with his hand on his hip. It has never struck me before that to ride with a hand on the hip is a sign of irredeemable vanity. The Gunner was here to tea yesterday—he of the Mountain Battery—and told us stories of his mules. I think disparagingly of his mules. That a mule will “chum up to” a pony and kick a donkey, seems this morning an imbecile statement of an improbable fact, though I admit I laughed at the time, it was so British. The unpaid Attaché came too. The unpaid Attaché gives one the impression of never allowing himself to be as charming as he might be. What foolish fear can justify this reticence? Enthusiasm, we all know, is permitted to the gods and to foreigners only, but even an unpaid Attaché can afford a whole smile.

The worst that can be said of Delia is that numbers of people whom she doesn’t care a button about call her a dear. At least that is the worst I can think of. As to Thalia, I had a note from her yesterday in which she spelled my name wrong. This after two years of notes. It may have been an accident; but much as I love Thalia I am disposed—this morning—to think that there is somewhere in her a defect obscure, elementary, which matches this. What is the worst they know of me? I have not the least idea, but I am prepared—this morning—to hope it is something rather bad.

The fact is that here in our remote and arbitrary and limited conditions we are rather like a colony in a lighthouse; we have nothing but ourselves and each other, and we grow overwrought, over-sensitive to the personal impression. I suppose that is what has produced, has at least aggravated, cases like Tryphena’s. It is a thing to be on one’s guard against. I quite see that if my own symptoms increase I shall shortly arrive at the point of being unable to endure the sight of many persons superior to myself; which is illogical and ridiculous.

Chapter XIX

I  WAS congratulating the hydrangea this morning on its delightful attitude toward life. This is no virtue of the hydrangea’s; it is a thing conferred, a mere capacity, but how enviable! All through its youth and proper blossoming time, which is the rains, it has the pink-and-white prettiness that belongs to that period. When it is over, instead of acknowledging middle age by any form of frumpishness the hydrangea grows delicately green again; it retires agreeably, indistinguishably into leaves, a most artistic pose. That, too, passes in these sharp days when the sun is only gold that glitters, and the hydrangea, taking its unerring tone from the season, turns a kind of purplish rose, and still never drops a petal, never turns a hair. In the end the hydrangea will be able to say with truth that it has not died without having lived.

Sooner or later I might perhaps have seen that for myself, but it was Cousin Christina who pointed it out to me. It is one of the subtler and more gratifying forms of selfishness to ask persons of taste to help you to enjoy your garden; and at no one’s expense do I indulge in this oftener than at Cousin Christina’s. She spends more time with me here under the pencil-cedar than any one else does, partly because I think she likes me a little and the garden a great deal, and partly because she has fallen, recently, upon very idle circumstances.