Chapter XIII

OLIVER’S MISSION TO THE WOMEN OF HIS CLASS.

Oliver nourished the forlorn hope that he might do something with the girls of his rank in raising their aspirations and refining their habits. They at least belonged to the gentler sex, and ought to be by constitution more tractable and altogether of finer clay. He took to dropping in of an evening at the Polleys, where the male element in the back parlour was but feebly represented by superseded Mr. Polley.

Oliver turned with disdain from Fan’s despairing warning: ‘Oliver, if you don’t take care, Mrs. Polley will think you are proposing to “keep company” with one of her girls, and if you don’t fulfil her expectations, she will set you down unhesitatingly and proclaim you openly to be “a flirty, shillyshallying fellow, who don’t know your own mind.” Are you such a greenhorn that you require to be told you cannot look twice at a girl of this stamp, or exchange three sentences with her, without the girl, or her parents for her, concluding that you mean something in the matrimonial line, and going on to class you as her admirer and suitor, and to calculate what sort of match you will make for her? As you are, undoubtedly, a great match in the Polleys’ eyes, you ought to behave with common prudence.’

‘No, no!’ denied Oliver vehemently, blushing hotly with chivalrous pain. ‘You are aspersing your whole sex, Fan, in the persons of tradesmen’s daughters; and if there were any ground for the aspersion, it would be high time that it should be done away with, by the introduction of wider, simpler, more friendly intercourse between young men and women.’

‘Perhaps you really mean to ally yourself with the family,’ said Fan in her vexation, falling into the offence which was unusual with her, of employing almost as tall language as ’Liza Polley might have adopted on a similar occasion. ‘To be perfectly consistent, you ought. All I ask is that you will tell me in time.’

‘That you may carry off your goods and chattels before they are contaminated by coming in contact with Miss ’Liza’s or Miss ’Mily’s bridal finery, and renounce me as a brother before you are forced to own her as a sister,’ said Oliver, beginning to laugh. ‘All right. But I don’t own to the soft impeachment yet, though, if ever my time should come, why not a Miss Polley—I beg her pardon for the liberty taken with her name, but I did not begin the impertinence—why not a Miss Polley, I say, as well as another?’

Oliver spoke with light defiance but with some bitterness underlying his challenge, for his thoughts had gone back to an encounter that morning, when Catherine Hilliard, driving with her cousin, had passed him and his baker’s shop, literally with unseeing eyes. She had looked more delicate and tired out than ever. No wonder, when she was being not merely morally starved, but slowly poisoned in her Palace of Art, her fantastic ideal world.

Oliver was too manly, with a higher manliness than Jack Dadd’s or than that of many persons of far greater pretensions than Jack, to experience the particular dread of misconception which Fan had sought to instil into her brother. He was shy enough in his way, and he fought tough battles with his shyness every day he lived, but his self-consciousness did not take this form. He had revolted at it every time he met it, not only when young Dadd boasted of girls making dead sets at him, and showing themselves, poor little souls, spoony on his account, but when fellows, who might have known better, expressed their alarm for the lasting consequences of the temporary associations of Commemoration Week, or talked of running the gauntlet of the dowagers and damsels of the London season. Oliver had felt still more aggrieved when he found the same gratuitous insinuations in books of ‘unexceptionable tone,’ where men—bachelors and widowers, of mature years and sane minds, masters of the situation in every other respect—were represented as timidly putting themselves under the wings of female relations that the heads of the houses might be protected from the wary advances or bold attacks of the single women in their neighbourhood who cherished designs on their freedom. Well, no doubt, there were women of all kinds, like men; but was it honest women, modest women, women with souls, women like the men’s mothers, sisters, future and past wives, whom brother-men thus insulted, while sister-women handed on the insult?

Oliver’s company certainly induced the Polley girls to forego, for the evenings on which he called, their wanderings abroad in search of gossip and amusement, which their mother tolerated because young folks must have their day, and the girls had their markets (matrimonial) to make, being bound, in a measure, to keep on the outlook for settlements in life.

But the young Polleys’ gaddings were restrained within certain well-defined and not to be subverted bounds of time and circumstance. The Miss Polleys, collectively or singly, might frequent their neighbours’ houses or such promenades as Friarton afforded, till three quarters past nine, but they must be safe at home, if not at supper, at the latest by ten o’clock, when the house-door was formally locked by Mrs. Polley in person. No Miss Polley was at liberty to stray into companionship not approved of by her mother, not even ’Mily—‘the most owdacious of the set,’ as Mrs. Polley was sometimes moved to term her favourite daughter, in referring to ’Mily’s flights of wild spirits and self-will—dared to transgress in these respects.

Oliver took it as no particular compliment to him that the Miss Polleys should be induced to stay at home when he was a visitor. Common hospitality—of which their class was by no means deficient, required it of all or some of them. And it seemed to the young man that any variety must be welcome in the atmosphere—the intellectual stagnation of which was equal to its literal oppressiveness—laden as it was with the odours, from the shop, of cheese, sugar, and coffee.

Mrs. Polley—the presiding genius—when she was to be seen in private life, for she was sometimes detained at the close of a busy day in the shop, suffered from the fatigue consequent on the day’s labours, and although she was always equal to an exertion, and roused herself to brandish and snap her fingers figuratively and in a friendly—well-nigh a playful fashion in Oliver’s face, he felt convinced when he or any other stranger was not there, must give herself up to cross-tiredness, to nagging her daughters, and snubbing her husband between fits of the gapes over her knitting, or coarse hemming, and rough and ready darning of household linen.

Mr. Polley, who was not regarded as company worth counting, by his own children any more than by the rest of the world, did no more than contribute the dreariest platitudes and the stalest incidents from his second day’s newspaper, to the feast of reason and the flow of soul. There grew to be a merit in the girls’ persistent giggles and in the light-hearted empty chatter and idle gossip, pointed by personalities and spiced by scandal, with which they stirred the heaviness, and the absence of all dignity and beauty, from which Oliver was not astonished that they made their escape, when they had the opportunity.

The Polleys had another sitting-room besides that behind the shop, a best parlour or drawing-room as the girls liked to call it, in which they sometimes sat with their hands crossed in their laps, or engaged in fancy-work, entertaining company. But as Oliver chose to come to them in the character of a family friend, a distinction which they appreciated, Mrs. Polley overruled her daughters’ objections and elected that he should be received in the ordinary family room.

‘He shall see us as we are,’ said the matron when the Polleys were all together in the back parlour one evening before supper. ‘He sha’n’t have to say we were honey to his face and molasses behind his back. Besides, we don’t do nothing we are ashamed of. I tell you what, gals, if he has got any one of you in his eye already, he’s that kind of chap, if I’m not mistaken, he’ll think a deal more of you, and be more likely to grow sweet on you, if he finds you with me and father, in your house-gowns, working at your needles in the parlour here, than if he were supposed to catch you sitting like dressed-up dolls, at your fine-lady nonsense of crochet and bead-work, in the other room, as, I dare say—for I have not been out at the mill-house for years now—I’m a stay-at-home, even if Fan Constable were readier with her invitations—his sister sits from morning till night.’

‘It’s all you know, mother,’ said ’Mily, a well-grown buxom girl of eighteen; ‘but at least it shows you have not made yourself cheap at Friarton Mill. Fan sees callers in her bare cold hole of a drawing-room certainly; but when I go there, which is precious seldom as I know she would rather have my room than my company, she is always pretending to be notable over a heap of such common hemming and back-stitching as even you can do. Fancy! she was making bed curtains, and not keeping them out of the way either, the last time I was there. She is as busy as any sewing girl over the vicarage old women’s flannel petticoats and children’s cotton frocks. Rather she than I slave for such cattle. We give a good subscription to Mr. Holland’s poor-box, and that’s enough, I should think. But Fan curries favour with the vicarage people, who have taken her up, though Peter Constable was an old chapel-goer like we are, and Oliver goes to chapel still. I am at a loss to tell what gentility she has more than us, except that she’s that proud and stuck-up,’ and ’Mily sat up in her chair with Fan’s most frigid air, amidst the loud applause of her sisters.

‘Now mind what you’re about, ’Mily,’ her mother reproved the actress; ‘you may not be far wrong, and you’re smart at taking people off—there’s no denying it, but you may do it once too often. What would Oliver Constable think if he saw you? He may not have any nonsense about him, but he won’t care to have his sister turned into a laughing-stock.’

‘I’m sure I don’t mind a fiddle-stick what he cares,’ protested ’Mily, taking high ground.

‘Hold your tongue, and don’t speak again to me, Miss,’ insisted Mrs. Polley. ‘You get too much of your head as it is; but you sha’n’t spoil your chances by your folly before my very eyes.’

‘It ain’t likely to be me, mother,’ cried ’Mily, rather enjoying the implication. ‘It will be ’Liza if it’s to be any of us. She is fitter to tackle him with her rubbish of poetry, which ought to suit a college man.’

‘Me!’ ejaculated ’Liza, a delicate, rather indolent girl, in injured innocence. ‘I never spoke about poetry to Oliver Constable.’

‘And I should just like to hear you try it,’ Mrs. Polley gave her literary daughter fair warning; ‘though a song is all very well at a proper time and place, at a party or after supper. I was a good singer myself in my day—you need not make faces, ’Mily—and I can raise the tune yet in chapel a deal truer than a pack of set-up madams with money wasted on them in an instrument and in piany-forty lessons.’ The last cut bore reference to the superannuated piano in the Polleys’ drawing-room, and the two quarters’ fees for instruction in playing on it, vouchsafed by Mrs. Polley to her daughters, being what they might claim as their due in education according to the growing requirements of their station. ‘But to sing my Maker’s praises is one thing,’ went on Mrs. Polley severely, ‘or even to be able to manage a song or two in addition to a hymn, and to have any traffic with play or poetry books is another. To my mind, they’re worse than novels and romances, and you all know what your deacons think of them. You gals may read them on the sly sometimes, but it had need to be on the sly, for if I get my hands on such devil’s books, into the fire or out of the window they go. Them’s my opinions, and if you think to defy them you know the consequences.’

‘Compose yourself, my dear,’ ventured Mr. Polley, looking up from his newspaper. ‘I apprehend you’re going just a little too far. I remember the old minister gave in to recommend Uncle Tom’s——’

‘Uncle Tom’s cat!’ interrupted Mrs. Polley, disrespectfully. ‘A good turn of honest work is a far better employment than snivelling over any made up story—though it were Mr. Holland or the old minister himself as made it up. You can tell him I said so, if you like. I wonder anybody can be so silly—not to say so unprincipled, for I call it downright want of principle, to be taken in by printed lies. Reading trash of stories and verses never paid a debt, or filled a hungry stomach, that I ever heard tell of. But I’ll tell you what they’ve done,’ speaking triumphantly in vindication of her theory, ‘they’ve brought an idiot like Poet Dymott,’ alluding to a local poet of humble vocation, ‘as low as the union. Luckily his silly of a wife who encouraged him died early, and they had no children to suffer from his not sticking to his last and shoe-leather. Fools’ tales sent a light-headed gipsy like Mrs. Dadd’s last servant into the county asylum, after she was pulled out of Buller’s Brook, where she might have stopped still for all the washing her character had got. We should be a deal better off for maids-of-all-work, when we’ve the misfortune to need ’em, if it were not for the trumpery “Family Heralds” and “People’s Journals” as the girls have the impudence to take out, throwing away their pence, and sitting up at nights by the help of prigged candle-hends, at the risk of setting houses on fire, and creeping and dawdling about their work next day. I don’t hold against a book as is an improving book, and deals with our latter hends,’ Mrs. Polley granted, showing herself a little more liberal and capable of making a concession, ‘at a proper time, on a Sunday evening, when it rains cats and dogs, so as to make chapel out of the question, and there’s nothing else to do at home. But I’d like to see any of you gals settle to a volume of sermons, if there was a glistening chimneypot hat or a draggled tail of a skirt to watch passing the door. I don’t make any stand against Polley muddling for ever amongst his newspapers, since he’s no good at any better job.’

‘Missus Polley!’ objected the gentleman, looking up again from his newspaper, with his hat still on his head. Though he rarely stirred beyond the parlour, he wore his hat, except when he was at meals or in bed, as if to give him the help of a few inches added to his masculine height. He spoke half under his breath in subdued displeasure.

‘I don’t deny I like myself to know what’s a-going on, when I’ve time to listen, which ain’t often, and Polley’s reading out saves me the trouble of looking over the news,’ confessed the matron candidly, taking not the smallest notice of her husband’s appeal unless by speaking, if anything, in a louder key. ‘Besides, it helps to keep him out of harm’s way.’

‘Missus Polley!’ groaned the defaulter more clamorously.

‘What are you Missus Polleying me for?’ his helpmeet turned on him briskly. ‘You ain’t going to deny the tricks you played me when first we went together, Polley? It is as well to keep you out of temptation, though I should just like to see you trying on that trade again, now that I’ve got the upper hand, and you’ve got some notion of the value of a good wife, as has kept a roof over your and the gals’ heads, and a full table, and the shop flourishing more than it ever did in your day. You ought to bless your stars, Polley, that you ever set eyes on my face, or that I consented to have a bad bargain in you.’

’Mily Polley was a little tired of hearing the chronicle of her father’s delinquencies and her mother’s virtues; she broke in upon the monologue, reminding her mother of an instance of inconsistency in her conduct. ‘I wonder, mother, you ever let poetry books lie in the house or suffer ’Liza to look into them.’

‘You know as well as I do, ’Mily,’ Mrs. Polley explained, shortly, ‘that ’Liza has not been so strong as the rest of you gals, and when she has not been able to sit up with her colds and influenzas, there was no great wrong done in her diverting herself with a book, though I could have wished it had been of a more sensible and serious kind. I did try to set Mr. Holland upon her about that.’

‘I was dumpish enough, I can tell you, without reading mouldy sermons,’ grumbled ’Liza. ‘I wonder how any of you would have liked to be condemned either to do that or count your fingers, for my strength was that gone I was not able so much as to hold a crochet-hook, and Mr. Holland said there was no harm in my pieces, some of them were most elegant.’

‘Then ’Liza’s books,’ said Ann Polley, who was commonplace and practical to excess, ‘are not ’Liza’s any more than ours, only that she looks into them sometimes. They are school prizes and Christmas gifts, and keepsakes from friends, though I think they might hit on better presents. It would be a great pity if you were so far left to yourself as to burn them, mother, since some of them are quite handsome “table books,” which I should be sorry to handle except to dust, for fear of spoiling their red and green and gold backs. They are a great ornament laid round the drawing-room table.’

‘Yes,’ said Mrs. Polley, decidedly, ‘that is the right place for them. They will turn nobody’s feather head, and waste nobody’s time save in the dusting, lying there.’