An Act in a Backwater. E. F. Benson
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One evening, about a fortnight after the attack of congestion in Bolton Street, Canon and Mrs. Collingwood were sitting in their dining-room lingering over their dessert. The butler had filled their claret-glasses to the brim with water, and had left the room. It was a warm night in mid-July, and the French window opening on to the garden was flung wide, admitting breaths of soft and flower-scented air. The dusk was not yet passed the bounding line between day and night, and the eye was led over a cool, spacious square of grass, framed in flower-beds in which colour still lingered, to a red brick wall at the end of the garden over which rose the gray pinnacle of the Cathedral. It was still near enough to midsummer to dine without candles if your dinner-hour was 7.45, and the absence of them and decanters gave to the table a certain virginal and ascetic air. Both the Canon and his wife were teetotalers, she of the kind which we may call intemperate—that is to say, she regarded alcohol not only as poison, but as an essentially immoral thing. Mrs. Collingwood was a woman of strong will, and ruled her husband; and though his own inclination would have been to set wine before his guests when they were entertaining, her detestation of fermented liquids overruled hospitality, and, unless one particular person was dining with them, you would no more see a decanter on the table than you would see a roulette board. But the exception was made in favour of their Bishop, who was under doctor’s orders to drink the abominable thing, and on these occasions a half bottle of Burgundy blushed before Mrs. Collingwood’s eyes. How exactly it is possible to conceive of a natural and lifeless product as being in itself wicked is a problem at which the ordinary mind stumbles. But Mrs. Collingwood had solved it, and we should show a more becoming modesty if we lamented our mediocrity of grasp and silently envied Mrs. Collingwood’s extraordinary powers of conception, than if we called her point of view unreasonable. It is possible also that if a guest had produced a doctor’s certificate that he must drink wine, he would have been accorded some of the Bishop’s Burgundy, but his wine would be understood to be of the nature of medicine, which custom has ordained that we shall not indulge in at the dinner-table.
Now it was not the habit of Canon Collingwood or his wife to linger over the pleasures of the table, but they were discussing a subject which had probably been discussed at thirty or forty other tables that evening, namely, the advent of Jeannie and Arthur to Wroxton.
“I don’t feel certain that she will be helpful,” said Mrs. Collingwood; “to me she seemed not in earnest. There was no depth about her.”
And she put a hard piece of gingerbread into her rather wide mouth.
Canon Collingwood stroked his beard for a moment in silence.
“She is young,” he said, doubtfully.
“One can never be too young to be in earnest,” said his wife. “And I did not like the look of the drawing-room. There were several books on the table which I should never allow in my house, and there was an organ in the hall.”
Canon Collingwood had been married many years, but even now his wife occasionally puzzled him.
“Why not, my dear?” he said.
“Because an organ should only be used for sacred music,” said Mrs. Collingwood, “and I have no doubt that they use it for other pieces. Indeed, I saw some opera of Wagner’s standing open on it.”
“Did you call there to-day?” he asked.
“Yes, I paid a long call there. I tried to interest Miss Avesham in various things, but I had to begin at the beginning. She did not even know what G. F. S. meant. It is very strange how unreal life must be to some people.”
“Is not their aunt staying with them?”
Mrs. Collingwood could not reply for a moment, for the gingerbread was very hard.
“Yes, she is living with them for the present,” she said. “I am bound to say that Miss Fortescue baffled me. I could make nothing whatever out of her. She seemed to me at first most keenly interested in the prevention of cruelty to animals, but when I spoke of the prevention of cruelty to children—much more important, of course—she did not seem to pay the slightest attention. And later, when we were speaking of household matters, she urged Miss Avesham to see that the mulberries from their tree in the garden were picked for making mulberry gin. She asked me if I did not think it was delicious.”
“She could not know how you felt about such matters,” said the Canon, apologetically.
“I should have thought that gin was not a subject usually mentioned,” said Mrs. Collingwood. “No one can be ignorant of how terrible a curse it is to so many households.”
Canon Collingwood sighed.
“I met Miss Avesham a day or two ago at the Lindsays’,” he said. “She seemed to me a nice, pleasant girl, and very full of life.”
Mrs. Collingwood folded her napkin up in silence. Her husband’s remark seemed to her fatuous. Either a person was earnest and helpful or not. Any other quality, particularly that very dangerous quality known as “life,” was only trimming, and a possible temptation. Earnestness and helpfulness were to be rated by the desire to aid in good works. But as she rose she made a great concession.
“If you mean energy by life, William,” she said, “I agree with you that it is admirable as an instrument if properly used. You have not said grace.”
To do her justice, Mrs. Collingwood’s time was spent in good works, and her thoughts (when not thus occupied) in passing judgments on other people. Her favourite text, the text by which her life was conducted, was, “Ye cannot serve God and mammon.” In her youth she must have been remarkably handsome, but she had got over that, which was lucky, since she now tended to consider that good looks, if not actually the invention of the evil one, were an open door by which he entered, bringing with him pride, vanity, and self-esteem. Like alcohol and tobacco, she regarded them as almost more than dangerous, as something in themselves not right. But with what might be hastily considered as inconsistent, she thought it her duty to admire the beauties of nature when not exhibited in human beings. The green of forest trees, the level lines of the sunset, the Gothic architecture, particularly when seen from a Cathedral close, and thus, as it were, chastely framed, she thought were meant to lead one’s aspirations heavenward. These things (the trees and light, at any rate) had been at the Creation pronounced good, and that was enough for Mrs. Collingwood, who, if she could pin a text on to any conclusion, put it away in a drawer as proved. Her drawers were full of such. Similarly, man had fallen, and his face was the face of a fallen thing.
Thus this evening, when she and her husband left the dining-room, and he retired to his study to finish his sermon for the next day, she stood a full minute at the open window of the drawing-room looking at the view. Then she sat down at her davenport to finish writing a paper on the Downward Tendency of Modern Fiction, which she was to read at a meeting of the Wroxton Ladies’ Literary Union next week. She proposed to deal more particularly with novels which discuss theological problems, and were so upsetting to the faith of the weaker, for what is known as the Higher Criticism seemed to Mrs. Collingwood to be synonymous with the temptation of the devil. But she was a just woman, and one of her sentences began, “What a very clever book we all feel this to be, but how immoral!” Mrs. Collingwood found literary composition presented no difficulties, and she looked upon it, provided the motive of it was earnest and helpful, as an agreeable relaxation. Her style was conversational, and there was a good deal of “dear friends” in it.
The view on which she so resolutely turned her back in order to give this timely warning to the literary ladies of Wroxton against theological, or rather infidel, novels, justified her minute’s contemplation. The lawn, a cool, restful space of sober green, sloped down to a prattling tributary of the chalk stream which ran through the town, and in the dusk the flower-beds (the Canon’s hobby was gardening) glowed with subdued and darkening colour. The scent of the tobacco-plant (like Adam and Eve, still in its garden innocence) came floating in through the window, dominating all other perfumes. Thrushes still called to each other from the bushes, or crossed the lawn with quick, scudding steps, and an owl floated by with a