"Oh everything"s the matter! You are all dull, indifferent, deadened to everything that is vital. You don"t care--you let things slide--and if any one tries to wake you up and tell you the truth you never, never listen."
"Who--me?" I asked, confused into this sad grammar by her outburst.
She threw the pamphlet down and jumped up, "Oh, I am sick of all your sins and stupidities!" she cried, pulling her hat straight and sticking violent pins into it.
"Whose--mine?" I asked in great perplexity.
"It would almost seem," said Charlotte, fixing me with angry eyes,--"it would really almost seem that there is no use whatever in devoting one"s life to one"s fellow-creatures."
"Well, one naturally likes to be left alone," I murmured.
"What I try to do is to pull them out of the mud when they are in it, to warn them when they are going in it, and to help them when they have been in it."
"Well, that sounds very n.o.ble. Being full of n.o.ble intentions, why on earth, my dear Charlotte, can"t you be placid? You are never placid.
Come and have some tea."
"Tea! What, with those wretched people? Those leathern souls? Those Harvey-Brownes?"
"Come along--it isn"t only tea--it"s strawberries and roses, and looks lovely."
"Oh, those people half kill me! They are so pleased with themselves, so satisfied with life, such prigs, such toadies. What have I in common with them?"
"Nonsense. Ambrose is not a toady at all--he"s nothing but a dear. And his mother has her points. Why not try to do them good? You"d be interested in them at once if you"d look upon them as patients."
I put my arm through hers and drew her out of the room. "This stuffy room is enough to depress anybody," I said. "And I know what"s worrying you--it"s that widow."
"I know what"s an irritating trick of yours," exclaimed Charlotte, turning on me, "it"s always explaining the reason why I say or feel what I do say or feel."
"What, and isn"t there any reason?"
"That widow has no power to worry me. Her hypocrisy will bear its own fruit, and she will have to eat it. Then, when the catastrophe comes, the sure consequence of folly and weakness, she"ll do what you all do in face of the inevitable--sit and lament and say it was somebody else"s fault. And of course every single thing that happens to you is never anybody"s fault but your own miserable self"s."
"I wish you would teach me to dodge what you call the inevitable," I said.
"As though it wanted any teaching," said Charlotte stopping short in the middle of the open s.p.a.ce before our table to look into my eyes. "You"ve only not got to be silly."
"But what am I to do if I am silly--naturally silly--born it?"
"The tea is getting very cold," called out Mrs. Harvey-Browne plaintively. She had been watching us with impatience, and seemed perturbed. The moment we got near enough she informed us that the tourists were such that no decent woman could stand it. "Ambrose has gone off with one of them," she said,--"a most terrible old man--to look at some view over there. Would you believe it, while we were quietly sitting here not harming anybody, this person came up the hill and immediately began to talk to us as if we knew each other? He actually had the audacity to ask if he might sit with us at this table, as there was no room elsewhere. He was _most_ objectionable. Of course I refused.
The most pushing person I have met at all."
"But there is ample room," said Charlotte, to whom everything the bishop"s wife said and did appeared bad.
"But, my dear Frau Nieberlein, a complete stranger! And such an unpleasantly jocular old man. And I think it so very ill-bred to be jocular in the wrong places."
"I always think it a pity to cold-shoulder people," said Charlotte sternly. She was not, it seemed, going to stand any nonsense from the bishop"s wife.
"You must be dying for some tea," I interposed, pouring it out as one who should pour oil on troubled waters.
"And you should consider," continued Charlotte, "that in fifty years we shall all be dead, and our opportunities for being kind will be over."
"My dear Frau Nieberlein!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed the astonished bishop"s wife.
"Why, it isn"t certain," I said. "You"ll only be eighty then, Charlotte, and what is eighty? When I am eighty I hope to be a gay granddame skilled in gestic lore, frisking beneath the burthen of fourscore."
But the bishop"s wife did not like being told she would be dead in fifty years, and no artless quotations of mine could make her like it; so she drank her tea with an offended face. "Perhaps, then," she remarked, "you will tell me I ought to have accepted the proposal one of the other tourists, a woman, made me a moment ago. She suggested that I should drive back to Sa.s.snitz with her and her party, and halve the expense of the fly."
"Well, and why should you not?" said Charlotte.
"Why should I not? There were two excellent reasons why I should not.
First, because it was an impertinence; and secondly, because I am going back in the boat."
"The second reason is good, but you must pardon my seeing no excellence whatever in the first."
"Your son"s tea will be undrinkable," I said, feebly interrupting. I can never see two people contradicting each other without feeling wretched.
Why contradict? Why argue at all? Only one"s Best-Beloved, one"s Closest and Most Understanding should be contradicted and argued with. How simple to keep quiet with all the rest and agree to everything they say.
Charlotte up to this had kept very quiet in the presence of Mrs.
Harvey-Browne, had said yes in the right places, and had only been listless and bored. Now, after reading her own explosive pamphlet for an hour, stirred besides by the widow"s base behaviour and by the failure of her effort to induce penitence in Hedwig by means of punishment, she was in the strenuous mood again, and inclined to see all manner of horrid truths and fates hovering round the harmless tea-table, where denser eyes like mine, and no doubt Mrs. Harvey-Browne"s, only saw a pleasant flicker of beech leaves over cups and saucers, and bland strawberries in a nest of green.
"If women did not regard each other"s advances with so much suspicion,"
Charlotte proceeded emphatically, "if they did not look upon every one of a slightly different cla.s.s as an impossible person to be avoided, they would make a much better show in the fight for independent existence. The value of co-operation is so gigantic----"
"Ah yes, I fancy I remember your saying something like this at that lecture in Oxford last winter," interrupted Mrs. Harvey-Browne with an immense plaintiveness.
"It cannot be said too often."
"Oh yes dear Frau Nieberlein, believe me it can. What, for instance, has it to do with my being asked to drive back to Sa.s.snitz with a strange family in a fly?"
"Why, with that it has very much to do," I interposed, smiling pleasantly on them both. "You would have paid half. And what is co-operation if it is not paying half? Indeed, I"ve been told by people who have done it that it sometimes even means paying all. In which case you don"t see its point."
"What I mean, of course," said Charlotte, "is moral co-operation. A ceaseless working together of its members for the welfare of the s.e.x. No opportunity should ever be lost. One should always be ready to talk to, to get to know, to encourage. One must cultivate a large love for humanity to whatever cla.s.s it belongs, and however individually objectionable it is. You, no doubt," she continued, waving her teaspoon at the staring bishop"s wife, "curtly refused the very innocent invitation of your fellow-creature because she was badly dressed and had manners of a type with which you are not acquainted. You considered it an impertinence--nay, more than an impertinence, an insult, to be approached in such a manner. Now, how can you tell"--(here she leaned across the table, and in her earnestness pointed the teaspoon straight at Mrs. Harvey-Browne, who stared harder than ever)--"how will you ever know that the woman did not happen to be full, full to the brim, of that good soil in which the seed of a few encouraging words dropped during your drive would have produced a splendid harvest of energy and freedom?"
"But my dear Frau Nieberlein," said the bishop"s wife, much taken aback by this striking image, "I do not think she was full of anything of the kind. She did not look so, anyhow. And I myself, to pursue your metaphor, am hardly fitted for the office of an agricultural implement.
I believe all these things are done nowadays by machinery, are they not?" she asked, turning to me in a well-meant effort to get away from the subject. "The old-fashioned and picturesque sower has been quite superseded, has he not?"
"Why are you talking about farming?" asked Ambrose, who came up at this moment.
"We are talking of the farming of souls," replied Charlotte.
"Oh," said Ambrose, in his turn taken aback. He pretended to be so busy sitting down that he couldn"t say more than just Oh. We watched him in silence fussing into his chair. "How pleasant it is here," he went on when he was settled. "No, I don"t mind cold tea a bit, really. Mother, why wouldn"t you let the old man sit with us? He"s a frightfully good sort."
"Because there are certain limits beyond which I decline to go," replied his mother, visibly annoyed that he should thus unconsciously side with Charlotte.
"Oh but it was rough on him--don"t you think so, Frau Nieberlein? We have the biggest table and only half-fill it, and there isn"t another place to be had. It is so characteristically British for us to sit here and keep other people out. He"ll have to wait heaven knows how long for his coffee, and he has walked miles."
"I think," said Charlotte slowly, loudly, and weightily, "that he might very well have joined us."
"But you did not see him," protested Mrs. Harvey-Browne. "I a.s.sure you he really was impossible. _Much_ worse than the woman we were talking about."