The Gods and Mr. Perrin. Hugh Walpole
alight—seemed, as she looked at the handsome and ardent Freddie, an easy enough thing to do. She did not know that Fate very often, having given a tempting glimpse and even a positive handling of its burnished brass and intricate tracing, removes it altogether—merely, as it may seem to some cynical observers of life, for the fun of the thing. In any case, from the moment of her marriage, Mrs. Comber’s eager hands found nothing to hold on to at all, and she passed, in the ensuing years from a plucky determination to make the “second best” do, to the final blind acquiescence in anything at all that might have the faintest resemblance to that earlier glorious radiance.
Freddie Comber’s transition from the handsome, enthusiastic young lover into the stout, lethargic and querulous Mr. Comber, master of the Middle Fourth and anticipatory author of a work on the athletes of Greece, would need an exhaustive treatise on “Public School Education as applied to our Masters” for its reasonable analysis. Perhaps this faithful account of the relations of Perrin and Traill may offer some solution to that and other more complex riddles.
It says, however, everything for Mrs. Comber’s pluck and determined stupidity that she lived, even now, after fifteen years’ married life, at the threshold of expectation. Things that were apparent to the complete stranger in his first five minutes’ interview with Comber were hidden, wilfully and proudly hidden, from her.
She yielded to facts, however, in this one particular, that she extended her attempts at Romance to wider fields. It always might return as far as Freddie was concerned—she was continually hoping and expecting that it would; but meanwhile she dug diligently in other grounds. Her three boys—fat, stolid, stupid, pugnacious—cared, they showed her quite plainly, nothing for her at all; but she put that down to their age, to their school, even to their appetites, their clothes, anything that pointed to a probable change in the future. In their holidays she spent her days in eagerly loving them and being repulsed, and then in hiding her love under a troubled indifference and being entirely disregarded.... They were unpleasant boys.
Another place for digging was the ground of “things,” of property. Having had nothing at all when she was a girl, and having almost nothing—they were very poor, and she “managed” badly—now, she had always had an intense feeling for possession. She was generous to an amazing degree, and would give anything, in her tangled, impetuous kind of way, to anybody without a moment’s thought. But she loved her valuables. They were very few. Potatoes and cabbages, clothing and school-bills for the boys, consumed any money that there might happen to be, and consumed it in a muddled, helpless kind of way that she was never able to prevent or correct. But things had come to her—been given, left, or eagerly seized in a wild moment’s extravagance,—and these she cherished with all her eyes and hands. The peacock-blue Liberty screen, the ormolu clock, some few pieces of dainty Dresden china, some brass Indian pots, a small but musically charming piano, some sketches and two good prints, and edition de luxe of Walter Pater (a wedding-present, and she had never opened one of these beautiful volumes), some silver, a teapot, a tray, some cups that Freddie had won in an earlier, more glorious period, some small pieces of jewelry—over these things she passed every morning with a delicate, lingering touch.
Clumsy and awkward as she generally was, when she approached her valuables she became another person: she would lie awake thinking about them.... They seemed—dumb things as they were—to give her something of the affection for which, from more eloquent persons, she was always so continually searching.
She was as clumsy in her relations to all her neighbors and acquaintances as she was in her movements and her finances. She was famous for her want of tact; famous, too, for a certain coarseness and bluntness of speech; famous for a childlike and transparent attempt to make people like her—an attempt that, from its transparency, always with wiser and more cynical persons failed.
She generally thought of three things at once and tried to talk about them all; she was quite aware that most of the ladies connected with the town and the neighborhood disliked her, and she never, although she wondered in a kind of muddled dismay why it was, could discover a satisfactory reason. She spent her years in cheerfully rushing into people’s lives and being hurriedly bundled out again—which “bundling,” at every reiteration of it, left her as confused and dismayed as before.
But against all this rejection and muddled confusion there was, of course, to be set Isabel Desart. What Miss Desart was to Mrs. Comber no simple succession of printed words can possibly say. She was, in her free, spontaneous fashion, a great many things to a great many people; but to none of them was she quite the special and wonderful gift that she was to Mrs. Comber.
Perhaps it was some feeling of this kind that brought her so often, and for so long a period, down to Moffatt’s—a proceeding that her London friends could never even vaguely understand. That she—having, as she might, such a glorious “time” in London behind her—should care to go and stay for so long a period at that dullest of places, a school, with those dullest and most arid of people, scholastic authorities (this term to include wives as well as husbands), was indeed to them all a total mystery.
Mrs. Comber, with all her faults and insufficiencies, would have seemed a poor enough answer to the riddle as an answer; it was, in fact, only partial.
In addition to Mrs. Comber, there was Cornwall; and Cornwall, as it was at Moffatt’s, was quite enough to draw Isabel unerringly, irresistibly.
Of the place—the surroundings, the look of it all, the “sense” of it—there is more to be said in a moment—being seen, more completely perhaps, with Traill’s new and unaccustomed eyes; it is enough here that, on every separate occasion of her coming, it meant to Isabel deeper and more vital experiences. She was beginning even to be afraid that it was not going to let her go again: its sea, its hard, black rocks, its golden gorge, its deep green lanes, its gray-roofed cottages that nestled in bowls and cups of color as no cottages nestle anywhere else in the world—these were all things that she dreamed of afterwards, when she had left them, to the extent, it began to seem to her, of danger and confusion.
She herself “fitted in” as only a few people out of the many that go there could ever do.
With her rather short brown hair that curled about her head, her straight eyes, her firm mouth, her vigorous, unerring movements, the swing of her arms as she walked, she seemed as though her strength and honesty might forbid her softer graces. To most people she was a delightful boy—splendidly healthy, direct, uncompromising, sometimes startling in her hatred of things and people, sometimes arrogant in her assured enthusiasms; Mrs. Comber, who, in her muddled eager way, had told her so much, knew of the other side of her, of her tenderness, her understanding.
The boys loved her, and she had been their envoy on many occasions of peril and disaster; they always trusted her to carry things through, and she generally did.
It was only, perhaps, with the other ladies of the establishment that she did not altogether find favor. The other ladies consisted of Mrs. Moy-Thompson, Mrs. Dormer, and the lady matrons—Miss Bonhurst, the two Misses Madder, and Miss Tremans.
Mrs. Moy-Thompson, a thin, faded lady in perpetual black, had long ago been crushed into a miserable negligibility by her masterful husband. She very seldom spoke at all and, when she did, hurriedly corrected what she had just said in a sudden fear lest she should be misunderstood. She allowed her husband to bully her to his heart’s content.
Mrs. Dormer, stern, with the manner of one who never says what she means, had never got over the disappointment of her husband having, fifteen years before, missed the head-mastership. She was continually finding new reasons for this omission and venting her dislike on people who had had nothing whatever to do with it. She was neat and puritanical, and hated Mrs. Comber because she was neither of these things.
Of the matrons, it may be enough to say that they all disliked each other, but were perfectly ready to combine in their mutual dislike of the other ladies; they felt that their position demanded that they should assert their birth and breeding; they also felt that Mrs. Comber and Mrs. Dormer looked down on them.
The best of them was the matron of the Lower School, the elder Miss Madder—stout and kind-hearted and extremely capable. She made up for the undeniable fact that no one had ever asked her to change her name for a pleasanter one by