Chapter 7: A Girl Who Couldn’t

I am almost perfectly happy; but an unfaltering regard for the strict truth compels me to state that I am not quite. I wish I could--conscientiously--say that I was. But I cannot. I am aware that when a girl is engaged--especially when she is just engaged--her happiness ought to be flawless. And mine was, until--

However, perhaps I had better come to the point.

It is not my fault if I cannot do everything. I can do some things. When I turn the matter over in my mind, systematically, I feel justified in asserting that I can do a good many things. It is a well-known scientific fact that a Jack-of-all-trades is master of none. Therefore it seems to me to follow as a matter of course that because I can do the things which I can do, I cannot do the things which I cannot do. Nothing could be simpler. Or more obvious. We cannot all of us be Admirable Crichtons. And it is just as well that we cannot. And yet, merely on that account, I have lately suffered--well, I have suffered a good deal.

Nothing could have given me greater pleasure than the knowledge that Philip had a mother and two sisters. When Mrs Sandford--that is his mother--wrote and said that Philip had told her about the understanding he and I had come to; that she would very much like to know her dear son’s future wife; so would I spend a few days with her in her cottage on the Thames, I was delighted. There was a note from each of the sisters--Bertha and Margaret--echoing their mother’s words, and that also was very nice. I sat down then and there, and replied to them all three, arranging to go to them on the Tuesday following.

As soon as I had despatched my letters I became conscious of feeling--I hardly know how to put it--of feeling just the slightest atom unsettled; as if I had the shadow of a shade of a suspicion that I had let myself in for something which might turn out to be, I didn’t quite know what. Directly I got there--or very nearly directly--certainly within half an hour of my arrival, I realised that my premonitions had not been airy fictions of my imagination; but sound and solid forebodings, which might--and probably would--turn out to be only too well justified by events.

In the first place I had to go without Philip. He was to have gone with me. And, of course, I had looked forward to our journey together in the train. But, at the last moment, he telegraphed to say that business detained him in town; would I go down without him, and he would join us on the morrow. I went without him. And, on the whole, I think I bore up very well. Especially considering that, just as the train was starting from Paddington, a woman got into my carriage with two dogs, a parrot in a huge cage, bundles of golf clubs, hockey clubs, tennis rackets, fishing rods, and goodness only knows what besides; her belongings filled the whole of her own side of the compartment, and most of mine. The last of them was being hustled in as the train was actually moving. As she was depositing them anywhere, and anyhow--I never saw anyone treat her belongings with scantier ceremony--she observed, --

“I cut that rather fine. Don’t believe in getting to the station before the train is ready to start--but that was a bit of a shave.”

It was a “bit of a shave”; the marvel was that she succeeded in catching the train at all. I--disliking to be bustled--had been there a good twenty minutes before it started, so--although she might not have been aware of it--there was a flavour of something about her remark which was very nearly personal.

It was only after we had gone some distance that the dogs appeared--not a little to my amazement. One of them--which came out of a brown leather hand-bag--was one of those long-bodied, short-legged creatures, which always look as if they were deformed. The other, a small black animal with curly hair, she took out of the pocket of the capacious coat which she was wearing. Directly she placed it on the floor of the carriage it flew at me, as if filled with a frenzied desire to tear me to pieces. While it was doing its best to bark itself hoarse, its owner removed a green cover from the parrot’s cage; whereupon the bird inside commenced to make a noise upon its own account, as if with the express intention of urging that sooty fragment to wilder exertions. That compartment was like a miniature pandemonium.

“Don’t let them worry you,” remarked the mistress of the travelling menagerie.

But as she made not the slightest attempt to stop their worrying me, I did not quite understand what she expected I was going to do. When the black dog got the hem of my skirt into its mouth, and began to pull at it with its tiny teeth, I did remonstrate.

“I am afraid your dog will tear my dress.”

“Not she! It’s only her fun; she won’t hurt you.”

I was not afraid of the creature hurting me; but my skirt. The mistress’s calmness was sublime. Suffering her minute quadruped to follow--without the smallest effort to control it!--its own quaint devices, she was serenely attaching a new tip to a billiard cue which she had taken out of a metal case. As if she felt that her proceedings might impress me with a sense of strangeness, she proffered what she perhaps meant to be an explanation.

“Always tip my own cue. I’ve got a cement which sticks; and I like my tip to be just so. If you want to be sure of your cue, tip it yourself.”

Presently my liliputian assailant passed from unreasonable antagonism to a warmth of friendship which was almost equally disconcerting. Springing--after one or two failures, on to the carriage seat, it deposited itself in the centre of my lap--nearly knocking my book out of my hands; and, without a with-your-leave, or by-your-leave, but with the most take-it-for-granted air imaginable, prepared for slumber. Perceiving which, the short-legged dog descending, in its turn, to the floor of the carriage, began to prowl round and round me, sniffing at my skirts in a manner which almost suggested that there was something about me which was not altogether nice. All of a sudden the parrot, which had been taking an unconcealed interest in the proceedings, discovered a surprising, and, hitherto, wholly unsuspected capacity for speech.

“Don’t be a fool!” he said.

Whether the advice was addressed to me, or to the short-legged dog, I could not say. But it was so unexpected, and was uttered with so much clearness--and was such an extremely uncivil thing to utter--that I quite jumped in my seat. The lady with the billiard cue made a comment of her own.

“That bird’s a magnificent talker; and that’s his favourite remark.”

It proved to be. I do not know how many times that parrot advised somebody not to be a fool before we reached our journey’s end; but the advice was repeated at intervals of certainly less than two minutes. And as the creature kept its eyes fixed intently on me, there was a suggestiveness in its bearing as to the direction for which its “favourite remark” was intended, which was in the highest degree unflattering.

When we stopped at my station a girl coming up to the carriage door began showering welcomes on my companion and her creatures with a degree of fluency which pointed to an intimate acquaintance with all of them.

“Hollo, Pat, so you’ve come!--Hollo, Tar!”--this was to the small black animal. “Hollo, Stumps!”--this was to the short-legged dog. “Hollo, Lord Chesterfield!”--this was to that excessively rude parrot, who promptly acknowledged the greeting by rejoining, --

“Don’t be a fool!”

Then, seeing that I was only waiting for the removal of some of the impedimenta to enable me to get out, the girl exclaimed, --

“Are you Molly Boyes?” I admitted that I was. “I’m Bertha Sanford--awfully glad to see you. This is Miss Patricia Reeves-- commonly known as Pat. Great luck your coming down together in the same compartment; you’ll be as intimate as if you’d known each other for years.”

I was not so sure of that. More--I doubted if Miss Patricia Reeves and I ever should be intimate, as I understood intimacy. Still worse, I was disposed to be dubious if Miss Reeves’s bosom friend could ever be mine.

A pony phaeton was waiting outside the station, with another girl in it. This proved to be Margaret Sanford. She welcomed “Pat” and “Pat’s” etceteras with as much effusion as her sister had done. There was a discussion as to what was to happen. Since the phaeton would hold at most three, somebody would have to walk. Miss Reeves insisted on being the someone; she and Bertha immediately set off at what struck me as being a good five miles an hour. Until then I had supposed myself to be no bad pedestrian for a mere girl; but when I saw the style in which those two were covering the ground I was glad that I had been permitted to ride.

Not that the ride was one of unalloyed bliss. The journey down from town had not been all that I had hoped that it would be; how different it would have been if Philip had been my companion instead of Miss Reeves. And, somehow, the discovery that she was bound for the same destination as I was; and was--plainly--an old and intimate friend, jarred. I do not believe that I am hard to get on with; no one has ever given me any reason to suppose it. And yet, all at once, the fact that the Sanford atmosphere was one in which Miss Reeves was thoroughly at home seemed to hint, with distressing significance, that it was one in which I distinctly should not shine.

The impression heightened as Margaret drove me along. She conversed on matters of which I, for the most part, knew little, and, up to that moment, had cared less. She talked of golf, inquiring, in an offhand sort of way, what my “handicap” was; evidently taking it for granted that, in common with the rest of the world, I had a “handicap.” I do not know what I answered; because, as it happened, not only was I without that plainly desirable appurtenance, but I did not even know what she meant. Hitherto golf had not come into my life at all. But fortunately, she chattered on at such a rate that she was able to pay no attention to what I said; so that it did not matter what I answered. It appeared that she had recently been playing a “tie” or a “match” or a “game” or a “round” or a “skittle,” or something--I do not know which it was, but I am almost certain it was one or the other--with a Mrs Chuckit--I am sure of the name, because it was such an odd one--in which, it seemed, she had met with an unparalleled series of disasters. From what I could gather she had been “stymied” and “bunkered” and “up” and “down” and “holed” and “foozled” and “skied” and “approached” and “driven,” and all sorts of dreadful things. At least, I believe they were dreadful things; and, indeed, from the emphatic way in which she spoke of them, I am convinced they were. One thing of which she told me I am sure must have been painful. She said that she got into a hedge--a “beast of a hedge” she called it; though how, or why, she got into it she did not explain; and that no sooner did she get out of it--”which took some doing”--so it shows it must have been painful--than back she went--”bang into the middle” of it again--which seemed such a singular thing for anyone to do that, had she not been speaking with such earnestness, and such vigour, I should almost have suspected her of a desire to take advantage of my innocence. Then, she admitted, she had lost her temper--which was not to be wondered at. If anyone had thrown me, or “got” me into a hedge, anyhow, I should have lost mine right straight off. The moral of it seemed to be that “the last hole cost her seventeen,” though seventeen what--whether pounds or shillings--she did not mention; nor what manner of hole it could have been that she should have been so set on getting it at apparently any price. It was all double Dutch to me. But she rattled on at such a rate that I hoped to be able to conceal my ignorance; for I felt that if she discovered it, I should drop in her estimation like the mercury in the thermometer which is transferred from hot water into cold.