第54章 THE FIRST(8)
"Oh, Dick!" said Gertrude a little impatiently, "Dick's Pi."And I never disillusioned her by any subsequent levity from this theory of my innate and virginal piety.
6
It was against this harsh and crude Staffordshire background that Ithink I must have seen Margaret for the first time.I say I think because it is quite possible that we had passed each other in the streets of Cambridge, no doubt with that affectation of mutual disregard which was once customary between undergraduates and Newnham girls.But if that was so I had noted nothing of the slender graciousness that shone out so pleasingly against the bleaker midland surroundings.
She was a younger schoolfellow of my cousins', and the step-daughter of Seddon, a prominent solicitor of Burslem.She was not only not in my cousins' generation but not in their set, she was one of a small hardworking group who kept immaculate note-books, and did as much as is humanly possible of that insensate pile of written work that the Girls' Public School movement has inflicted upon school-girls.She really learnt French and German admirably and thoroughly, she got as far in mathematics as an unflinching industry can carry any one with no great natural aptitude, and she went up to Bennett Hall, Newnham, after the usual conflict with her family, to work for the History Tripos.
There in her third year she made herself thoroughly ill through overwork, so ill that she had to give up Newnham altogether and go abroad with her stepmother.She made herself ill, as so many girls do in those university colleges, through the badness of her home and school training.She thought study must needs be a hard straining of the mind.She worried her work, she gave herself no leisure to see it as a whole, she felt herself not making headway and she cut her games and exercise in order to increase her hours of toil, and worked into the night.She carried a knack of laborious thoroughness into the blind alleys and inessentials of her subject.
It didn't need the badness of the food for which Bennett Hall is celebrated and the remarkable dietary of nocturnal cocoa, cakes and soft biscuits with which the girls have supplemented it, to ensure her collapse.Her mother brought her home, fretting and distressed, and then finding her hopelessly unhappy at home, took her and her half-brother, a rather ailing youngster of ten who died three years later, for a journey to Italy.
Italy did much to assuage Margaret's chagrin.I think all three of them had a very good time there.At home Mr.Seddon, her step-father, played the part of a well-meaning blight by reason of the moods that arose from nervous dyspepsia.They went to Florence, equipped with various introductions and much sound advice from sympathetic Cambridge friends, and having acquired an ease in Italy there, went on to Siena, Orvieto, and at last Rome.They returned, if I remember rightly, by Pisa, Genoa, Milan and Paris.Six months or more they had had abroad, and now Margaret was back in Burslem, in health again and consciously a very civilised person.
New ideas were abroad, it was Maytime and a spring of abundant flowers--daffodils were particularly good that year--and Mrs.Seddon celebrated her return by giving an afternoon reception at short notice, with the clear intention of letting every one out into the garden if the weather held.
The Seddons had a big old farmhouse modified to modern ideas of comfort on the road out towards Misterton, with an orchard that had been rather pleasantly subdued from use to ornament.It had rich blossoming cherry and apple trees.Large patches of grass full of nodding yellow trumpets had been left amidst the not too precisely mown grass, which was as it were grass path with an occasional lapse into lawn or glade.And Margaret, hatless, with the fair hair above her thin, delicately pink face very simply done, came to meet our rather too consciously dressed party,--we had come in the motor four strong, with my aunt in grey silk.Margaret wore a soft flowing flowered blue dress of diaphanous material, all unconnected with the fashion and tied with pretty ribbons, like a slenderer, unbountiful Primavera.
It was one of those May days that ape the light and heat of summer, and I remember disconnectedly quite a number of brightly lit figures and groups walking about, and a white gate between orchard and garden and a large lawn with an oak tree and a red Georgian house with a verandah and open French windows, through which the tea drinking had come out upon the moss-edged flagstones even as Mrs.
Seddon had planned.
The party was almost entirely feminine except for a little curate with a large head, a good voice and a radiant manner, who was obviously attracted by Margaret, and two or three young husbands still sufficiently addicted to their wives to accompany them.One of them I recall as a quite romantic figure with abundant blond curly hair on which was poised a grey felt hat encircled by a refined black band.He wore, moreover, a loose rich shot silk tie of red and purple, a long frock coat, grey trousers and brown shoes, and presently he removed his hat and carried it in one hand.There were two tennis-playing youths besides myself.There was also one father with three daughters in anxious control, a father of the old school scarcely half broken in, reluctant, rebellious and consciously and conscientiously "reet Staffordshire." The daughters were all alert to suppress the possible plungings, the undesirable humorous impulses of this almost feral guest.They nipped his very gestures in the bud.The rest of the people were mainly mothers with daughters--daughters of all ages, and a scattering of aunts, and there was a tendency to clotting, parties kept together and regarded parties suspiciously.Mr.Seddon was in hiding, I think, all the time, though not formally absent.