The Confessions of a Well-Meaning Woman. Stephen McKenna
you’d licked him a bit more when he was younger …”
This from Spenworth!
“Who,” I asked, “who made thee a ruler and a judge?”
And then, truly honestly, I had to beg him to leave me in order that I might compose myself …
Compose myself!
To shew you how unnerved I had become, I wrote down something which I had never breathed to Arthur or Will. We have always been so poor that I had dreaded an emergency, a sudden illness, for which I should be unable to provide. In Mount Street we are positive Spartans! Well, from the day of Will’s birth I have pinched and scraped, scraped and pinched, trying to put something by … A little nest-egg … Thirty years—nearly. I have never dared invest it, in case something happened. It lies at the bank—in a separate account—ready at a moment’s notice. When I was so ill four years ago, did I touch it? But before my operation—in case anything happened—I told Will the amount and how I had arranged for him to be able to draw on it. What I tell you is told to the grave; I have torn up the letter; they still do not know; but, when I saw the amount, I was truly tempted to say “Well done, thou good and faithful servant” … I have lost the thread …
Ah, yes! I was saying that my nerve had entirely gone … I was so much exhausted that I fell into some kind of trance. Goodness knows the thousand and one things that go to make up a dream … Opposites … All that sort of thing … I dreamt most wonderfully about Will and—I wonder if you can guess? Phyllida! They have been brought up together—cousins! She is young, high-spirited, very, very attractive; and, thanks to Brackenbury’s marriage, she is well-dowered … I said to myself in the dream “If she could marry happily some one in her own station …” And then I seemed to see her with Will … It was but a phantasy. I should do nothing to encourage it, I am not at all sure that I even approve …
Alas for reality! Phyllida came and bullied me for my “interference.” . . But I told you about that. And, the day before the operation, Arthur asked whether I really thought it was necessary. Like that! At the eleventh hour!
“I don’t trust these surgeons,” he said. “They make operations.”
At first I was touched …
“Dear Arthur,” I said, “I am not doing this for my amusement.”
“Oh, of course not!,” he answered. “All the same, I wish it could be avoided. And, if it can’t be avoided, I wish you’d kept more quiet about it. I don’t know what you said to Spenworth and Brackenbury, but they’re making the deuce’s own tale of it.”
I begged him to enlighten me.
“Well,” said Arthur, “Spenworth says that you pretended to be at death’s door in order to force him to make a settlement on Will and that he might have consented if he hadn’t happened to know that you’d said the same thing to Brackenbury five minutes before. About being the head of the family and all that sort of thing. You know, Ann, it does make us look just a little bit ridiculous.”
You assure me you have seen neither Brackenbury nor Ruth? I just wondered who was privileged to hear this “deuce’s own tale” … I can hardly ask you to believe it; but I do assure you that this is the solemn truth; those two men were seeking to convince themselves that I was pretending to be ill in order to work on their susceptible emotions! They seem to have had the good taste to keep their little joke for home consumption, but you may be sure they made merry with Ruth and Kathleen about me … Too merry, perhaps; I can only think it was conscience that made Ruth offer to pay for the operation. Or perhaps it was curiosity … I wonder what their feelings would have been if anything had gone amiss …
No, I am thankful to say there was no hitch of any kind. The anæsthetic was administered, I heard that hammer, hammer, hammer—and then voices very far away. It was all over! That was the preliminary examination. Then I was subjected to that too wonderful X-ray light and saw myself as a black skeleton with a misty-grey covering of flesh, one’s wedding-ring standing out like a black bar round one’s finger. Too marvellous. I do believe in this science …
But not so marvellous as what followed. Dr. Richardson congratulated me, and I had to beg for enlightenment.
“It will not be necessary,” he said, “to operate after all. The symptoms are exactly as you described them, but a little treatment, principally massage …”
And that is why I am still here, though I hope to be allowed up on Friday. But lying in bed makes one so absurdly weak! What I have told you is for your ears alone. It would be altogether too much of a triumph for Spenworth. Instead of feeling any thankfulness that I had been spared the knife, he would only say … Well, you can imagine it even from the very imperfect sketch that I have given you. No, I am assured that massage makes the operation wholly unnecessary; and I am already feeling much, much better. If I have not taken the whole world into my confidence, it is partly because I detest this modern practice of discussing one’s inside (“wearing one’s stomach on one’s sleeve,” as Will rather naughtily describes it) and partly because I am altogether too humble-minded to fancy that the entire world is interested in my private affairs. When the princess asked “How did the operation go off?,” I said “Excellently, thank you, ma’am.” And that was what all the papers published. It was not worth while telling her that the operation was found to be unnecessary. I am not of those who feel obliged to trumpet forth that Mrs. Tom Noddy has left Gloucester Place for Eastbourne or Eastbourne for Gloucester Place. As Tennyson says, “Again—who wonders and who cares?”
At the same time—I loathe Americanisms and I do conscientiously try to express myself in what I may call the English of educated society; we do not seem to have any literary equivalent for “mentality,” so I must ask you to pardon the neologism—will you, to oblige me, try to imagine the “mentality” of Spenworth and Brackenbury? The sister-in-law of one, the sister of the other; casting about in her resourceful mind to discover any means of softening their hard hearts; clapping hand to forehead; exclaiming “I have it!”; retiring to bed; summoning the relations; making frantic appeal; exacting death-bed promises …
Truly honestly, I don’t think we have come to that yet …
And those two men have an hereditary right … Thank goodness, neither of them knows where the House of Lords is! There are moments when I feel very nearly a radical …
But you agree that they are hardly the people I should wish to discuss my operation with. And whatever I have said to you has of course been said in confidence.
2.
II
LADY ANN SPENWORTH REPUDIATES ALL RESPONSIBILITY
LADY ANN (to a friend of proved discretion): But this is as delightful as it is unexpected! If we only have the carriage to ourselves … I often say that a first-class ticket is the merest snare and delusion; during the war it has exposed one to a new order—I’ve no doubt they are very brave and so forth and so on, but that sort of thing ought to be kept for the trenches. One doesn’t want to travel with it, one certainly doesn’t want to live with it …
At least I don’t. There’s no accounting for tastes, as my poor niece Phyllida has been shewing. You are going to Brackenbury, of course? Every one does by this train. In the old days my father enjoyed the privilege of being able to stop every train that ran through Brackenbury station; he held property on both sides of the line and was a director for very many years. One said a word to the guard—they were a very civil lot of men—, and that was literally all. My brother has allowed that to lapse, like everything else;