Penelope's Postscripts

Himself and I have gone through the inevitable changes that life and love, marriage and parenthood, bring to all human creatures; but no one of the dear old group of friends has so developed as Francesca.  Her last letter, posted in Scotland and delivered here seven days later, is like a breath of the purple heather and brings her vividly to mind.

In the old days when we first met she was gay, irresponsible, vivacious, and a decided flirt,—with symptoms of becoming a coquette.  She was capricious and exacting; she had far too large an income for a young girl accountable to nobody; she was lovely to look upon, a product of cities and a trifle spoiled.

She danced through Europe with Salemina and me, taking in no more information than she could help, but charming everybody that she met.  She was only fairly well educated, and such knowledge as she possessed was vague, uncertain, and never ready for instant use.  In literature she knew Shakespeare, Balzac, Thackeray, Hawthorne, and Longfellow, but if you had asked her to place Homer, Schiller, Dante, Victor Hugo, James Fenimore Cooper, or Thoreau she couldn’t have done it within a hundred years.

In history she had a bowing acquaintance with Napoleon, Washington, Wellington, Prince Charlie, Henry of Navarre, Paul Revere, and Stonewall Jackson, but as these gallant gentlemen stand on the printed page, so they stood shoulder to shoulder, elbowing one another in her pretty head, made prettier by a wealth of hair, Marcel-waved twice a week.

These facts were brought out once in examination, by one of Francesca’s earliest lovers, who, at Salemina’s request and my own, acted as her tutor during the spring before our first trip abroad, the general idea being to prepare her mind for foreign travel.

I suppose we were older and should have known better than to allow any man under sixty to tutor Francesca in the spring.  Anyhow, the season worked its maddest pranks on the pedagogue.  He fell in love with his pupil within a few days,—they were warm, delicious, budding days, for it was a very early, verdant, intoxicating spring that produced an unusual crop of romances in our vicinity.  Unfortunately the tutor was a scholar at heart, as well as a potential lover, and he interested himself in making psychological investigations of Francesca’s mind.  She was perfectly willing, for she always regarded her ignorance as a huge joke, instead of viewing it with shame and embarrassment.  What was more natural, when she drove, rode, walked, sailed, danced, and “sat out” to her heart’s content, while more learned young ladies stayed within doors and went to bed at nine o’clock with no vanity-provoking memories to lull them to sleep?  The fact that she might not be positive as to whether Dante or Milton wrote “Paradise Lost,” or Palestrina antedated Berlioz, or the Mississippi River ran north and south or east and west,—these trifling uncertainties had never cost her an offer of marriage or the love of a girl friend; so she was perfectly frank and offered no opposition to the investigations of the unhappy but conscientious tutor, meeting his questions with the frankness of a child.  Her attitude of mind was the more candid because she suspected the passion of the teacher and knew of no surer way to cure him than to let him know her mind for what it was.

When the staggering record of her ignorance on seven subjects was set down in a green-covered blank book, she awaited the result not only with resignation, but with positive hope; a hope that proved to be ill-founded, for curiously enough the tutor was still in love with her.  Salemina was surprised, but I was not.  Of course I had to know anatomy in order to paint, but there is more in it than that.  In painting the outsides of people I assure you that I learned to guess more of what was inside them than their bony structures!  I sketched the tutor while he was examining Francesca and I knew that there were no abysmal depths of ignorance that could appall him where she was concerned.  He couldn’t explain the situation at all, himself.  If there was anything that he admired and respected in woman, it was a well-stored, logical mind, and three months’ tutoring of Francesca had shown him that her mental machinery was of an obsolete pattern and that it was not even in good working order.  He could not believe himself influenced (so he confessed to me) by such trivial things as curling lashes, pink ears, waving hair (he had never heard of Marcel), or mere beauties of colour and line and form.  He said he was not so sure about Francesca’s eyes.  Eyes like hers, he remarked in confidence, were not beneath the notice of any man, be he President of Harvard University or Master of Balliol College, for they seemed to promise something never once revealed in the green examination book.

“You are quite right,” I answered him; “the green book is not all there is of Miss Monroe, but whatever there is is plainly not for you”; and he humbly agreed with my dictum.

Is it not strange that a man will talk to one woman about the charms of another for days upon days without ever realizing that she may possibly be born for some other purpose than listening to him?  For an hour or two, of course, any sympathetic or generous-minded person can be interested in the confidences of a lover; but at the end of weeks or months, during which time he has never once regarded his listener as a human being of the feminine gender, with eyes, nose, and hair in no way inferior to those of his beloved,—at the end of that time he should be shaken, smitten, waked from his dreams, and told in ringing tones that in a tolerably large universe there are probably two women worth looking at, the one about whom he is talking, and the one to whom he is talking!

    May 12, 19–.

To go on about Francesca, she always had a quick intelligence, a sense of humour, a heart, and a conscience; four things not to be despised in the equipment of a woman.  The wit she used lavishly for the delight of the world at large; the heart had not (in the tutor’s time) found anything or anybody on which to spend itself; the conscience certainly was not working overtime at the same period, but I always knew that it was there and would be an excellent reliable organ when once aroused.

Of course there is no reason why the Reverend Ronald MacDonald, of the Established Church of Scotland, should have been the instrument chosen to set all the wheels of Francesca’s being in motion, but so it was; and a great clatter and confusion they made in our Edinburgh household when the machinery started!  If Ronald was handsome he was also a splendid fellow; if he was a preacher he was also a man; and no member of the laity could have been more ardently and satisfactorily in love than he.  It was the ardour that worked the miracle; and when Francesca was once warmed through to the core, she began to grow.  Her modest fortune helped things a little at the beginning of their married life, for it not only made existence easier, but enabled them to be of more service in the straggling, struggling country parishes where they found themselves at first.

Francesca’s beautiful American clothes shocked Ronald’s congregations now and then, and it was felt that, though possible, it was not very probable, that the grace of God could live with such hats and shoes, such gloves and jewels as hers.  But by the time Ronald was called from his Argyllshire church to St. Giles’s Cathedral in Edinburgh there was a better understanding of young Mrs. MacDonald’s raiment and its relation to natural and revealed religion.  It appeared now that a clergyman’s wife, by strict attention to parochial duties; by being the mother of three children all perfectly well behaved in church; by subscribing generously to all worthy charities; by never conducting herself as light-mindedly as her eyes and conversation seemed to portend,—it appeared that a woman could live down her clothes!  It was a Bishop, I think, who argued in Francesca’s behalf that godliness did not necessarily dwell in frieze and stout leather and that it might flourish in lace and chiffon.  Salemina and I used to call Ronald and Francesca the antinomic pair.  Antinomics, one finds by consulting the authorities, are apparently contradictory poles, which, however, do not really contradict, but are only correlatives, the existence of one making the existence of the other necessary, explaining each other and giving each other a real standing and equilibrium.

    May 7, 19–.

What immeasurable leagues of distance lie between Salemina, Francesca, and me!  Not only leagues of space divide us, but the difference in environment, circumstances, and responsibilities that give reality to space; yet we have bridged the gulf successfully by a particular sort of three-sided correspondence, almost impersonal enough to be published, yet revealing all the little details of daily life one to the other.

When we three found that we should be inevitably separated for some years, we adopted the habit of a “loose-leaf diary.”  The pages are perforated with large circular holes and put together in such a way that one can remove any leaf without injuring the book.  We write down, as the spirit moves us, the more interesting happenings of the day, and once in a fortnight, perhaps, we slip a half-dozen selected pages into an envelope and the packet starts on its round between America, Scotland, and Ireland.  In this way we have kept up with each other without any apparent severing of intimate friendship, and a farmhouse in New England, a manse in Scotland, and the Irish home of a Trinity College professor and his lady are brought into frequent contact.

Inspired by Francesca’s last budget, full of all sorts of revealing details of her daily life, I said to Himself at breakfast: “I am not going to paint this morning, nor am I going to ‘keep house’; I propose to write in my loose-leaf diary, and what is more I propose to write about marriage!”

When I mentioned to Himself the subject I intended to treat, he looked up in alarm.

“Don’t, I beg of you, Penelope,” he said.  “If you do it the other two will follow suit.  Women cannot discuss marriage without dragging in husbands, and MacDonald, La Touche, and I won’t have a leg to stand upon.  The trouble with these ‘loose leaves’ that you three keep for ever in circulation is, that the cleverer they are the more publicity they get.  Francesca probably reads your screeds at her Christian Endeavour meetings just as you cull extracts from Salemina’s for your Current Events Club.  In a word, the loosened leaf leads to the loosened tongue, and that’s rather epigrammatic for a farmer at breakfast time.”

“I am not going to write about husbands,” I said, “least of all my own, but about marriage as an institution; the part it plays in the evolution of human beings.”

“Nevertheless, everything you say about it will reflect upon me,” argued Himself.  “The only husband a woman knows is her own husband, and everything she thinks about marriage is gathered from her own experience.”

“Your attitude is not only timid, it is positively cowardly!” I exclaimed.  “You are an excellent husband as husbands go, and I don’t consider that I have retrograded mentally or spiritually during our ten years of life together.  It is true nothing has been said in private or public about any improvement in me due to your influence, but perhaps that is because the idea has got about that your head is easily turned by flattery.—Anyway, I shall be entirely impersonal in what I write.  I shall say I believe in marriage because I cannot think of any better arrangement; also that I believe in marrying men because there is nothing else to marry.  I shall also quote that feminist lecturer who said that the bitter business of every woman in the world is to convert a trap into a home.  Of course I laughed inwardly, but my shoulders didn’t shake for two minutes as yours did.  They were far more eloquent than any loose leaf from a diary; for they showed every other man in the audience that you didn’t consider that you had to set any ‘traps’ for me!”

Himself leaned back in his chair and gave way to unbridled mirth.  When he could control his speech, he wiped the tears from his eyes and said offensively:—

“Well, I didn’t; did I?”

“No,” I replied, flinging the tea-cosy at his head, missing it, and breaking the oleander on the plant-shelf ten feet distant.

“You wouldn’t be unmarried for the world!” said Himself.  “You couldn’t paint every day, you know you couldn’t; and where could you find anything so beautiful to paint as your own children unless you painted me; and it just occurs to me that you never paid me the compliment of asking me to sit for you.”

“I can’t paint men,” I objected.  “They are too massive and rugged and ugly.  Their noses are big and hard and their bones show through everywhere excepting when they are fat and then they are disgusting.  Their eyes don’t shine, their hair is never beautiful, they have no dimples in their hands and elbows; you can’t see their mouths because of their moustaches, and generally it’s no loss; and their clothes are stiff and conventional with no colour, nor any flowing lines to paint.”

“I know where you keep your ‘properties,’ and I’ll make myself a mass of colour and flowing lines if you’ll try me,” Himself said meekly.

“No, dear,” I responded amiably.  “You are very nice, but you are not a costume man, and I shudder to think what you would make of yourself if I allowed you to visit my property-room.  If I ever have to paint you (not for pleasure, but as a punishment), you shall wear your everyday corduroys and I’ll surround you with the children; then you know perfectly well that the public will never notice you at all.”  Whereupon I went to my studio built on the top of the long rambling New England shed and loved what I painted yesterday so much that I went on with it, finding that I had said to Himself almost all that I had in mind to say, about marriage as an institution.

    June 15, 19–.

We were finishing luncheon on the veranda with all out of doors to give us appetite.  It was Buttercup Sunday, a yellow June one that had been preceded by Pussy Willow Sunday, Dandelion Sunday, Apple Blossom, Wild Iris, and Lilac Sunday, to be followed by Daisy and Black-Eyed Susan and White Clematis and Goldenrod and Wild Aster and Autumn Leaf Sundays.

Francie was walking over the green-sward with a bowl and spoon, just as our Scottish men friends used to do with oat-meal at breakfast time.  The Sally-baby was blowing bubbles in her milk, and Himself and I were discussing a book lately received from London.

Suddenly I saw Billy, who had wandered from the table, sitting on the steps bending over a tiny bird’s egg in his open hand.  I knew that he must have taken it from some low-hung nest, but taken it in innocence, for he looked at it with solicitude as an object of tender and fragile beauty.  He had never given a thought to the mother’s days of patient brooding, nor that he was robbing the summer world of one bird’s flight and one bird’s song.

“Did you hear the whippoorwills singing last night, Daddy?” I asked.

“I did, indeed, and long before sunrise this morning.  There must be a new family in our orchard, I think; but then we have coaxed hundreds of birds our way this spring by our little houses, our crumbs, and our drinking dishes.”

“Yes, we have never had so many since we came here to live.  Look at that little brown bird flying about in the tall apple-tree, Francie; she seems to be in trouble.”

“P’r’haps it’s Mrs. Smiff’s wenomous cat,” exclaimed Francie, running to look for a particularly voracious animal that lived across the fields, but had been known to enter our bird-Eden.

“Hear this, Daddy; isn’t it pretty?” I said, taking up the “Life of Dorothy Grey.”

Billy pricked up his ears, for he can never see a book opened without running to join the circle, so eager he is not to lose a precious word.

“The wren sang early this morning” (I read slowly).  “We talked about it at breakfast and how many people there were who would not be aware of it; and E. said, ‘Fancy, if God came in and said: “Did you notice my wren?” and they were obliged to say they had not known it was there!’”

Billy rose quietly and stole away behind the trees, returning in a few moments, empty-handed, to stand by my side.

“Does God know how many eggs there are in a bird’s nest, mother?” he asked.

“People have so many different ideas about what God sees and takes note of, that it’s hard to say, sonny.  Of course you remember that the Bible says not one sparrow falls to the ground but He knows it.”

“The mother bird can’t count her eggs, can she, mother?”

“Oh! Billy, you do ask the hardest questions; ones that I can never answer by Yes and No!  She broods her eggs all day and all night and never lets them get cold, so she must know, at any rate, that they are going to be birds, don’t you think?  And of course she wouldn’t want to lose one; that’s the reason she’s so faithful!”

“Well!” said Billy, after a long pause, “I don’t care quite so much about the mother, because sometimes there are five eggs in a weeny, weeny nest that never could hold five little ones without their scrunching each other and being uncomfortable.  But if God should come in and say: ‘Did you take my egg, that was going to be a bird?’ I just couldn’t bear it!”

    June 15, 19–.

Another foreign mail is in and the village postmistress has sent an impassioned request that I steam off the stamps for her boy’s album, enriched during my residence here by specimens from eleven different countries. (“Mis’ Beresford beats the Wanderin’ Jew all holler if so be she’s be’n to all them places, an’ come back alive!”—so she says to Himself.)  Among the letters there is a budget of loose leaves from Salemina’s diary, Salemina, who is now Mrs. Gerald La Touche, wife of Professor La Touche, of Trinity College, Dublin, and stepmother to Jackeen and Broona La Touche.

It is midsummer, College is not in session, and they are at Rosnaree House, their place in County Meath.

Salemina is the one of our trio who continues to move in grand society.  She it is who dines at the Viceregal Lodge and Dublin Castle.  She it is who goes with her distinguished husband for week-ends with the Master of the Horse, the Lord Chancellor, and the Dean of the Chapel Royal.  Francesca, it is true, makes her annual bow to the Lord High Commissioner at Holyrood Palace and dines there frequently during Assembly Week; and as Ronald numbers one Duke, two Earls, and several Countesses and Dowager Countesses in his parish, there are awe-inspiring visiting cards to be found in the silver salver on her hall table,—but Salemina in Ireland literally lives with the great, of all classes and conditions!  She is in the heart of the Irish Theatre and the Modern Poetry movements,—and when she is not hobnobbing with playwrights and poets she is consorting with the Irish nobility and gentry.