The Life of Violet, page 2
“Love, charity, humility, Mary, are virtues above rubies, and if you possess these you may make a good match and be a happy woman. Now my dear, here is my little gift to you,” and she whipped a box from her underskirt, “and when you wear it think of IT and think of ME.”
Then she hung a heavy golden cross, in truth the bars were hollow, round her niece’s neck, kissed her on the forehead, and wished her a happy evening.
Mary or Violet, was by this time weeping solemn tears, like those that a dog might shed who has been beaten and does not question the justice of the whip. But the carriage was waiting and the ball was beginning, and Violet must go, if she went in the spirit of a Martyr to the Stake. Now it is recorded that her first partner was a clergyman, and her second was a Squire, and her third was a Peer (we shall move in good society, I promise you) and the Peer it was who said,
“May I ask, Violet, why you come to your first dance in a Cross?”
“Because I am so ugly John, and I must be a Beacon of Godliness if I am not a Maypole of Derision, and virtue is far above Rubies.”
The tail end of one eye did certainly droop over the last syllable of rubies, but that was no reason why a Christian nobleman should begin to laugh, continue to laugh, and end by laughing with such vigour that Violet lifted up her voice and laughed too, and the result was that the cross was “hauled down” (the peer said it) its value fixed, its weight judged, its purity gauged, and it was agreed that few ornaments are really more amusing than Crosses especially when been given you by maiden Aunts and worn at your first ball. The rest of the ball was what Violet called “Rattlin’ good fun” but we are writing no novel but the essence of truth. She could not tolerate for example, the final “g” of the present participle and though when made to pick it up she could hold it in her teeth for a second, directly you looked away she had dropped it in some dark corner. In the garden of the Corn Exchange, to continue the story, the nobleman proposed the Cross should be buried; but here Violet expressed some very decided opinions how Aunts were Aunts and Crosses were Crosses, and though you might drop your “G’s” in talking of them you could not bury them; and if my instinct is true the cross is still in its box, and the box is in its drawer; just as the Aunt is in her cottage, and twice a year Violet visits her.
“Violet, I wish you weren’t so plain - but poor Child - -”
Lately it has been “Do you know Violet, I think you are growing shorter? and better tempered?”
The day after the ball is always used by sentimental novelists endowed with words, for an effective contrast; not only does it change the scene and relieve the strain of prolonged attention—I give away these secrets the best in my possession—but it reveals quite naturally a different side of the hero’s character. And so it was with my heroine, if a living woman can be called by such a title; and the critics dispute it.
When she woke in the morning the first thing that caught her eye was that emblem of her Aunt and IT which had somehow proved so versatile the night before; but now the ugly thing was one and indivisible; and Violet felt constrained to recognise it. She took it with her to her bath, and set it in the soap dish while she sponged herself. She meditated whether she should kiss it, and laughed aloud; the breakfast bell rang and she forgot all symbols in the horrible substance—she would be late for breakfast, she had not practised, and it was the morning when Fraulein Müller came to “finish” her with a German polish. So the contrast verged almost on the melodramatic, for when Violet was depressed her face stretched, and she looked up from large drooping eyes which would spill tears if you wished it.
And this morning it was the History of England, the History of the Elizabethan age in particular, that wished it. Fraulein Müller talked of the Renaissance, the Italian influence
which was somehow German, the origin of the drama. Violet could only remember that Elizabeth was a “very naughty old thing”, had worn pearls on her petticoat, and someone had put down his cloak for her to step on.
“But, my dear Miss Violet, that is not history!” exclaimed Fraulein Müller. “Have you not read the course I made out for you? Have you not traced the development of the Miracle-Morality-Mystery Play into the Chronicle-History, and that into the Comedy-Tragedy, and that into the History-Comedy Tragedy-Romantico-Psychology of Shakespeare? You will never do yourself credit, Mademoiselle, in the society of Bath.”
It was at this point that the whole of life became intolerable.
“Nobody will ever care for me!” cried Violet.
“Nobody will ever wish to talk to you about the Elizabethan drama,” said Fraulein Müller, with an accuracy that did her credit.
“But.….…” — Human nature is weak, or strong, which ever you choose to call it, and when the lunch bell rang Fraulein Müller was wiping her eyes and saying,
“Ah, my dear Miss Violet, I have never told any one what I have told you.”
Such in short was the way in which Violet acquired her knowledge of history, literature, arithmetic, modern languages, music and humanity; and that is why each governess when she left felt that she had imparted a great deal, and that it would be necessary to go on instructing her at intervals all through her life. A time comes however, parents and guardians can tell the precise second, when book learning has yielded exactly the number of drops which, taken internally, benefit the system of a maiden; a teaspoonful in excess has been known to ruin the constitution for life; some maintain that a little external polish is no bad thing.
Violet at any rate felt considerable affection for her books when she locked them in their cases before going to London for her first season; Shakespeares pages were stamped with the affairs of the heart of Mademoiselle Bourget; Keats sang of German life in a flat on the third story; Wordsworth taught her how a plain Somersetshire girl, the daughter of an Attorney can earn her living, hem her underclothing, and keep her father’s drunkenness from the knowledge of the neighbours. If you ask her to quote the Ode to Duty, at this day, which she thinks the finest modern poem, and she keeps it by her bedside, she will at once tell you the story of Miss Janet Sitwell. So her regret was quite genuine when she stood on the threshold of the schoolroom, one April day, and thought of the sunny mornings, the birds and bees among the flowers, while literature sent straight avenues branching out from all sides of the lawn till it swam as a little island on an immense ocean and she could scarcely sit on her chair for a desire to voyage there.
“How I love reading!” she exclaimed, and shut the door and jumped into the carriage which stood waiting.
Now there should be here some more tremendous division than a blank space of white paper, and I suspect that my artistic skill would have been more consummate had I thrown these first pages into the waste paper basket or enclosed them within the arms of a parenthesis. For when you are writing the life of a woman you should surely begin with her first season and leave such details as birth, parentage, education, and the first seventeen years of her life to be taken for granted. For it is the merit of the first season that, like some curiously furled flower, it folds many events and qualities and experiences into one mature blossom. Clearly no one could have a season who had not been born and who had not spent seventeen years in practising for it, but as these acquirements are completely exhibited in the ball room it is mere waste of time to say how she came by them or in what proportions they are mixed. But then this Biography is no novel but a sober chronicle; and if life will begin seventeen years before it is needed it is our task to say so valiantly and make the best of it.
Violet’s first season has, no doubt, some less picturesque name in the catalogue of the century; it was the year when trade was worse or better than it has ever been, when there was a blight among the mayfly; when sashes were worn, and Mr. Gladstone’s ministry came in or went out or stayed where it was; but for us and for her and for many now beginning to grizzle on the top, it was Violet’s first season.
“Who is that very tall young woman with the pleasant expression?” asked Lady.….…
(I forgot to say that names can seldom be used in this narrative, for many are yet alive, in high places, and so on—I must beg my reader to believe that a blank means rather more than a full name, for it is capable of feeling if you guess it aright.)
Her ladyship waved her fan as an elephant its trunk, and indeed her position in a drawing room was so gigantic that she was allowed the liberties that monkeys, sheep and asses grant to the King of Beasts.
“That? Oh, Miss Violet Dickinson.”
“Dickinson - with a “y” No? Well there have been Dickinsons with an “i” - Yes, present her.”
“And so Miss Dickinson, you have an ‘i’,” went on the august lady.
“Two eyes I think Ma’am,” said Violet fixing them both on the lady’s face. Such was the comicality and at the same time the wistfulness of their expression that her Ladyship’s sense of humour was tickled, and she was grateful to any one who made her laugh; “I like sneezing and I like laughing,” she used to say, “but it must be natural.”
“I like you, Miss Whats-your-name,” she said.
“Dickinson Ma’am; and a very good name too,” said Violet. “And may I tuck in your Ladyship’s chemise? One pin will do it, I have one myself. Thank’ee.”
“Am I straight behind,” asked Lady.….….… … in some agitation. “Most annoying you know. One can’t trust one’s maid. Now who does your hair?”
“A little creature I picked up off the streets, gave her a bath, it’s astonishin’ what the water was like afterwards - and converted her. We go to church, hand in hand, and she tells me I shall be damned, but she prays for me.”
“Miss Dickinson,” pronounced the great lady as she rose, “you must lunch with me to-morrow.”
“Very sorry, but I can’t” said Violet.
“Then Tuesday? - Wednesday? to meet the Prime Minister?”
“I think I could come Thursday if that suits. Thank’ee.”
Any one who knows the manners of the inner circle of English society will agree that this slight but faithful conversation (there was more of it than I have quoted) is as remarkable in one way as The Ode to a Nightingale in another. In both you see the same amazing precocity, the same instant penetration to the secret heart, the same perception that truth is beauty, the same mastery over material. But Violet must be allowed the credit due to one who makes fact out of barren paradox; who proves that Duchesses are as true as nightingales.
When six months later, Lady.… ….…. (the blanks yawn like awful caverns, as though the shield once withdrawn you might see all splendours and glittering lights within) had to confess that somewhere behind her name and her tremendous front door she kept a mortal body, Violet was the first to see her after the operation. She did not like to confess to others that she was so solid a fact. Then (this should come in a footnote) Violet was present at the birth of the first grandchild, now Lord.…. … she went to Italy with Lady.… ….… … and by feeding her with steamed breadcrumbs for twelve hours incessantly saved her from death from the puncture of a pin, which her Ladyship had swallowed by mistake; she was in the house when the cook fell through the floor, thereby revealing the presence of an unsuspected cesspool. “Enough to give you all enteric two whiffs,” said Dr. Walker, had not Violet instantly soaked the woman in salad oil and soapsuds—“the one thing that could have saved her life”—while she directed the household to fill the chasm with vinegar and burning feather beds till the doctor came. The butcher’s horse falling down the area on the same afternoon, made it necessary for her to take the man to the London hospital. He recovered, and called his first child Violus (it was a boy) after her; while Lady.…..…. put up a window in the parish church, in which the good Samaritan helps a Leper on to his Ass, while the beast crops Violets. The horse, unfortunately, died.
From this bald and hasty paragraph a person of discrimination will construct whole chapters which I have no time to write out. But when you think what a casual bow in a drawing room did in this instance, and there are many others, you will figure to yourself a head charged with thunders and lightnings, bent beneath the winds of heaven, so piercing in the shafts of its eyes that fires will kindle and flames long blunt among ashes shoot up beneath its compulsion. Further, you will imagine a mouth, which like flame again for my figure declares its need of ashes, curls and flickers and bursts here and there into a true rose of heat, deep with quivering shades of red and opal colour as the petals overlap each other and melt swiftly to the heart of the naked fire within. Ashes, even, glow like the clouds of dusk when it flushes them. “I too have a fire within me.” “I too sing a delightful song.” And “My God, I can write!” such were the sparks that spurted from Duchess and kitchen maid when Violet struck them.
Among Violet’s friends there was a Costermonger and a woman who sold apples; a number of people whose names would produce no kind of effect were I to write them down, and at least half a dozen who were so profoundly investigated that the surface shell was of no more importance than that “thin jacket which grasshoppers shed in spring.”
Now here again it would be possible to enter into one of those intricate labyrinths of analysis which, as modern novelists expound them, turn human hearts and brains into so many honey-combs of coral. How did Violet love her friends, how did she know them? Tell me, for example, how she thought? Why did she drop her “g’s” and put in her “h’s”? Was she a Christian? Describe the flight of her mind, rising like a cloud of bees, when a question was dropped into it. Did she reason or only instincticise? Where does care for others become care for oneself, and at what precise point in her relationship with.…. did she cross the boundary of unselfishness and become the most selfish of living creatures?
All these questions are legitimate, and I can only answer—she had an Irish grandmother, and the Irish grandmother was one day triumphing in the mist above Loch Ness, and clasping to her breast cloud-shapes of spiritual bridegrooms, when she fell into a pit, “a pit of rocks and sulphur and the howlin’ of the damned” as she described it afterwards. “And there was a man like Elijah in his burnin’ mantle” who gave her “fire to drink and the flesh of wild goats and spake to me with the voice of the wind and the rain. And it was like the voice of none other, for he did the things he spake of, and lifted me in his arms and drave me behind wild beasts, like a God, to the little house in the valley and there he married me. Och Och Ochone!”
Mr. Dickinson, a North country cotton spinner who had made a fortune by inventing a new form of spinning frame, called the Throstle, would have told the story in sober prose, and there would have been bans and wedding rings and marriage settlements above all, but no prose, as I begin to discover, can tell you how Irish mists break over Lancashire rods of steel in the brain of their descendant.
2
The Magic Garden
ON A SUMMER afternoon you might have seen, had you taken the ’bus to the Jumping Elephant, turned to the left and walked on a tender green pavement beneath the trees in the gardens of Royal Academicians, and rung the bell at No. 25 - you might have seen as beautiful a sight as any in England. There were gigantic women, lying like Greek marbles in easy chairs, draped, so that the wind bared little gleaming spaces on their shoulders, who laughed as they helped themselves to strawberries and cream as though they looked upon the vision of a jocund world; who rubbed one hand deep in the rich fur of a Chow dog, where he most liked to be rubbed; who fluted up and down the scale of human speech with a round note always, who rose and strode across the lawn, their laces foaming in the grass behind them, and shook cherry blossoms from a benignant tree upon the face of a child, who crowed thereupon and clapped his hands, as at some familiar rain of crimson butterflies. And there were other ladies like flowers strayed from the beds, anemones and strange fritillaries freaked with jet, and certain straight tulips, tawny as sunset clasped by stiff green spikes—all kinds of flowers indeed, whose voices chimed like petals floating and kissing in the air, or creaked, as fresh tulip leaves creak when rubbed together, so that you long to crush the juice out of them. This is a picture of noble English ladies at tea, as true as I can make it, and if it is not spoiling the harmony, I would further suggest that these ladies think, eat and breathe—live in short—besides existing or whatever the polite word for it is, within the pages of Burke.
I will not say how they do these things, for that would require a surgical knowledge of anatomy, neither polite nor possible; for, living as I do, in a garret with one dirty charwoman who brings me Lloyds Weekly and a bunch of kippered herrings tied by the tails like candles on Friday nights, how can I imagine the taste of the cutlets which Lady B-----th eats off silver, beneath the eyes of six flunkeys in livery? Cutlets may change their shape beneath such a radiance, and Heaven knows what exquisite nerves are stimulated and begotten by mutton eaten off silver. And as it is with mutton, so it must be with other things, with books, with pictures, with love, with life. This is a very good reason why I should not attempt to describe what I do not know - why I should continue to adore it.
But two things I do know about English aristocratic ladies, and one is that they have health, and another that they have country houses; and by health I do not mean, as we plebeians mean, a power of earning our bread and eating it, but a far subtler state than that, which only a temperature tube can rightly appreciate. A temperature I have heard one lady (Mrs. M----x----e) explain, is just as good as a sea voyage. She ran to her room and fetched what she called ‘a chart,’ and with her forefinger she traced her weeks journey. “Here I was down below normal, oh! it was wretched - I fancied myself lying in a muddy creek, with a gray sky, forgotten by my friends, useless - a free trader; then I took just four drops of essence of a cheese, and here you see I’m over 99. The flags flying - we’re out at sea - the Cornish sea you know, with rocks and emerald water and blue sky, and there’s been a Protectionist gain and all my friends love me - O do take your temperature too! The great thing in life, I’m sure, and so is Leo,” she went on as one sharing a secret of importance, “is never lose your interest in things; now when you wake in the morning and see this chart before you, (I keep it over the wash stand) you think “Gracious Heavens, I’m alive!” and then you think, “now am I more alive or less alive?” And then you take your temperature. And if you think a thing, you are that thing. Now I’m certain that all life’s a matter of temperature. If Darwin had always been above normal and Chamberlain was always below - - ”
