Part 35 (2/2)
”Wouldn't the dear old pater have enjoyed G? She's just the kind of oddity he doted on. Fancy her teaching music of all things. It must be only scales and exercises. I think she's splendid to see the incongruity herself, and refuse to call it music when she dare be honest. What a grotesque figurehead she looks, chum, doesn't she? I thoroughly enjoyed talking to her.”
But Ethel could not answer to his cheeriness just yet.
”Basil, why are so many humans just mere letters of the alphabet in the general scheme?”
She had slid into a sitting posture now, and leaned her head against his arm.
”It doesn't matter so much about the men; they can go out into the world and make friends by the way, and become something more if they wish; but what of the single women, who have to work for their living, and have nothing much to look forward to but a sort of terror as to what will become of them when they can work no more? If you could see some of them at the office, with that drawn, dried-up, joyless look, sc.r.a.ping and saving and starving for dread of the years ahead: it's so unfair, so grossly, hideously, cruelly unfair.”
”It perhaps won't be when you see all round it, chum. It is so obvious we only see one side of things here. When we see the other side it will all look so different.”
”Perhaps, but in the meantime they are here, now, in our very midst, all _these unwanted_ women. If you saw as much of them as I do, I think you would feel even the letter had better not have been supplied.
A blank would have meant so much less suffering. A penniless woman without attractiveness, and with neither husband, child, nor father wanting her, is such an anomaly. She just drags on, hating her loneliness, dreading and fearing the future or illness, merely existing because she is called upon to do so for no apparent reason.”
”But she can always make friends, chum. If she is kind and cheerful and hopeful she will soon win love of some sort.”
”If... yes... but, Basil, to be all that, when one is weighed down with the inequality of chance and a horror of the future calls for a heroine; and Life didn't bother to make many of them heroines. She doesn't seem to have paid much attention to them at all. Orphans and widows and sick people she remembers; but the lonely, ageing, hardened, unwanted spinster! It sometimes seems to me it is just sentimentality to be persuaded everything is all right.
”I don't believe it is all right. There's too much useless, silent aching, and useless, pa.s.sionate resentment over circ.u.mstances that it seems should either never have been, or should be remedied if any Guiding Hand has power. I have determination and I'm strong, Basil; the future doesn't frighten me badly yet, but when you are gone, I feel as if the loneliness might half kill me, and as if then I ought to have the right to become a blank if I wish, since I was never consulted about becoming a letter in the great alphabet.”
He did not seek to stay her, knowing with his deep insight that to get such thoughts spoken was better than to brood inwardly; and because of his unshakable faith in her courage, he was not alarmed by them.
Yet he could not offer any comfort. Had not the enigma of useless pain racked and torn his soul piteously through the long years of his illness, leaving him indeed with a wonderful courage, but not with a theory that would fit the needs of suffering mankind? He could bear his own ills, because he had trained and taught himself to take them as a soldier takes the miseries of a hard campaign; but the general sum of suffering was another matter; and he shrank from saying either that suffering was sent by G.o.d to do good, or that it was necessary to the human race.
All he knew was simply that ills bravely borne seemed aided by some mysterious power outside their bearers; whereas the craven and the grumbler seemed but to add to their own burden. For the rest, though he would not say it for the pain it gave her, the knowledge of his growing weakness was already a solace to him, and he watched with hidden eagerness for the day that should set him free. At least a corpse was no drain upon the slender purse of a beloved sister; and the gnawing ache of his helplessness and uselessness would be stilled for ever.
If only Dudley had cared for her? From his vantage-ground of the looker-on, with his unnaturally sharpened sensitiveness, he knew perfectly how matters stood and how hopeless the desire seemed.
Dear old Dudlye, his life-long friend, would probably marry Doris and learn his mistake too late; and Ethel, with her fine nature, would go to some one else.
Well, one could not change either one's own little circle of fate, or the universe, just to suit oneself; one could only hope for the best, while there was still room for hope, and cultivate that soldier-spirit, undaunted even in a losing fight.
In the meantime there was the lonely, unwanted spinster opposite, with her immediate claim of nearness and loneness; and, as if to direct her thoughts into another channel, he said:
”You know, chum, I believe G was quite serious about wanting to come in here sometimes. Why not find out which afternoons she comes home early, and let her come and get tea and have it with me here. Then Doris need not worry about getting back in time.”
”But if you are feeling weak it will tire you so, Basil, to have a stranger. You will feel obliged to talk to her.”
”No, I don't think I shall; and it would be nice to feel she was rather glad not to be a blank after all. Let her come one afternoon and try.
Perhaps one way of grappling with the problem of human suffering - the best way - is to try and alleviate the atom of pain that is nearest each one of us.”
She a.s.sented to please him, and then kissed his forehead with a lingering, adoring tenderness, marvelling that such a sufferer could so think for others. Then she went quietly to bed, feeling, as the gaunt spinster had tried to put it, ”If _you_ can bear your ills so, surely I might manage to bear mine more courageously.”
CHAPTER XIX
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