Paul Kelver

PAUL KELVER

was a philosopher who reconciled herself to all things by the reflection that there were only twenty-four hours in a day. It sounds a dismal theory, but from it Amy succeeded in extracting perpetual cheerfulness. My mother would apologise to her for my aunt’s interference.

“Lord bless you, mum, it don’t matter. If I wasn’t listening to her something else worse might be happening. Everything’s all the same when it’s over.”

Amy had come to us merely as a stop gap, explaining to my mother that she was about to be married and desired only a temporary engagement to bridge over the few weeks between then and the ceremony.

“It’s rather unsatisfactory,” had said my mother. “I dislike changes.”

“I can quite understand it, mum,” had replied Amy; “I dislike ‘em myself. Only I heard you were in a hurry, and I thought maybe that while you were on the lookout for somebody permanent – ”

So on that understanding she came. A month later my mother asked her when she thought the marriage would actually take place.

“Don’t think I’m wishing you to go,” explained my mother, “indeed I’d like you to stop. I only want to know in time to make my arrangements.”

“Oh, some time in the spring, I expect,” was Amy’s answer. “Oh!” said my mother, “I understood it was coming off al-

most immediately.”

Amy appeared shocked.

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“I must know a little bit more about him before I go as far as that,” she said.

“But I don’t understand,” said my mother; “you told me when you came to me that you were going to be married in a few weeks.”

“Oh, that one!” Her tone suggested that an unfair strain was being put upon her memory. “I didn’t feel I wanted him as much as I thought I did when it came to the point.”

“You had meantime met the other one?” suggested my mother, with a smile.

“Well, we can’t help our feelings, can we, mum?” admitted Amy, frankly, “and what I always say is” – she spoke as one with experience even then – “better change your mind before it’s too late afterwards.”

Amiable, sweet-faced, broad-hearted Amy! most faithful of friends, but oh! most faithless of lovers. Age has not withered nor custom staled her liking for infinite variety. Butchers, bakers, soldiers, sailors, Jacks of all trades! Does the sighing procession never pass before you, Amy, pointing ghostly fingers of reproach! Still Amy is engaged. To whom at the particular moment I cannot say, but I fancy to an early one who has lately become a widower. After more exact knowledge I do not care to enquire; for to confess ignorance on the subject, implying that one has treated as a triviality and has forgotten the most important detail of a matter that to her is of vital importance, is to hurt her feelings; while to angle for information is but to entangle oneself. To speak of Him as “Tom,” when Tom has belonged for weeks to the dead and buried past, to hastily correct oneself to “Dick” when there hasn’t been a Dick for years,

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clearly not to know that he is now Harry, annoys her even more. In my mother’s time we always referred to him as “Dearest.” It was the title with which she herself distinguished them all, and it avoided confusion.

“Well, and how’s Dearest?” my mother would enquire, opening the door to Amy on the Sunday evening.

“Oh, very well indeed, mum, thank you, and he sends you his respects,” or, “Well, not so nicely as I could wish. I’m a little anxious about him, poor dear!”

“When you are married you will be able to take good care of him.”

“That’s really what he wants – some one to take care of him. It’s what they all want, the poor dears.”

“And when is it coming off?”

“In the spring, mum.” She always chose the spring when possible.

Amy was nice to all men, and to Amy all men were nice. Could she have married a dozen, she might have settled down, with only occasional regrets concerning those left without in the cold. But to ask her to select only one out of so many “poor dears” was to suggest shameful waste of affection.

We had meant to keep our grim secret to ourselves; but to hide one’s troubles long from Amy was like keeping cold hands from the fire. Very soon she knew everything that was to be known, drawing it all from my mother as from some overburdened child. Then she put my mother down into a chair and stood over her.

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“Now you leave the house and everything connected with it to me, mum,” commanded Amy; “you’ve got something else to do.”

And from that day we were in the hands of Amy, and had nothing else to do but praise the Lord for His goodness.

Barbara also found out (from Washburn, I expect), though she said nothing, but came often. Old Hasluck would have come himself, I am sure, had he thought he would be welcome. As it was, he always sent kind messages and presents of fruit and flowers by Barbara, and always welcomed me most heartily whenever she allowed me to see her home.

She brought, as ever, sunshine with her, making all trouble seem far off and shadowy. My mother tended to the fire of love, but Barbara lit the cheerful lamp of laughter.

And with the lessening days my father seemed to grow younger, life lying lighter on him.

One summer’s night he and I were walking with Barbara to Poplar station, for sometimes, when he was not looking tired, she would order him to fetch his hat and stick, explaining to him with a caress, “I like them tall and slight and full grown. The young ones, they don’t know how to flirt! We will take the boy with us as gooseberry;” and he, pretending to be anxious that my mother did not see, would kiss her hand, and slip out quietly with her arm linked under his. It was admirable the way he would enter into the spirit of the thing.

The last cloud faded from before the moon as we turned the corner, and even the East India Dock Road lay restful in front of us.

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“I have always regarded myself,” said my father, “as a failure in life, and it has troubled me.” I felt him pulled the slightest little bit away from me, as though Barbara, who held his other arm, had drawn him towards her with a swift pressure. “But do you know the idea that has come to me within the last few months? That on the whole I have been successful. I am like a man,” continued my father, “who in some deep wood has been frightened, thinking he has lost his way, and suddenly coming to the end of it, finds that by some lucky chance he has been guided to the right point after all. I cannot tell you what a comfort it is to me.

“What is the right point?” asked Barbara.

“Ah, that I cannot tell you,” answered my father, with a laugh. “I only know that for me it is here where I am. All the time I thought I was wandering away from it I was drawing nearer to it. It is very wonderful. I am just where I ought to be. If I had only known I never need have worried.”

Whether it would have troubled either him or my mother very much even had it been otherwise I cannot say, for Life, so small a thing when looked at beside Death, seemed to have lost all terror for them; but be that as it may, I like to remember that Fortune at the last was kind to my father, prospering his adventures, not to the extent his sanguine nature had dreamt, but sufficiently: so that no fear for our future marred the peaceful passing of his tender spirit.

Or should I award thanks not to Fate, but rather to sweet Barbara, and behind her do I not detect shameless old Hasluck, grinning good-naturedly in the background?

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“Now, Uncle Luke, I want your advice. Dad’s given me this cheque as a birthday present. I don’t want to spend it. How shall I invest it?”

“My dear, why not consult your father?”

“Now, Uncle Luke, dad’s a dear, especially after dinner, but you and I know him. Giving me a present is one thing, doing business for me is another. He’d unload on me. He’d never be able to resist the temptation.”

My father would suggest, and Barbara would thank him. But a minute later would murmur: “You don’t know anything about Argentinos.”

My father did not, but Barbara did; to quite a remarkable extent for a young girl.

“That child has insisted on leaving this cheque with me and I have advised her to buy Argentinos,” my father would observe after she was gone. “I am going to put a few hundreds into them myself. I hope they will turn out all right, if only for her sake. I have a presentiment somehow that they will.”

A month later Barbara would greet him with: “Isn’t it lucky we bought Argentinos!”

“Yes; they haven’t turned out badly, have they? I had a feeling, you know, for Argentinos.”

“You’re a genius, Uncle Luke. And now we will sell out and buy Calcuttas, won’t we?”

“Sell out? But why?”

“You said so. You said, ‘We will sell out in about a month and be quite safe.’”

“My dear, I’ve no recollection of it.”

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But Barbara had, and before she had done with him, so had he. And the next day Argentinos would be sold – not any too soon – and Calcuttas bought.

Could money so gained bring a blessing with it? The question would plague my father.

“It’s very much like gambling,” he would mutter uneasily to himself at each success, “uncommonly like gambling.”

“It is for your mother,” he would impress upon me. “When she is gone, Paul, put it aside, Keep it for doing good; that may make it clean. Start your own life without any help from it.”

He need not have troubled. It went the road that all luck derived however indirectly from old Hasluck ever went. Yet it served good purpose on its way.

But the most marvellous feat, to my thinking, ever accomplished by Barbara was the bearing off of my father and mother to witness “A Voice from the Grave, or the Power of Love, New and Original Drama in five acts and thirteen tableaux.”

They had been bred in a narrow creed, both my father and my mother. That Puritan blood flowed in their veins that throughout our land has drowned much harmless joyousness; yet those who know of it only from hearsay do foolishly to speak but ill of it. If ever earnest times should come again, not how to enjoy but how to live being the question, Fate demanding of us to show not what we have but what we are, we may regret that they are fewer among us than formerly, those who trained themselves to despise all pleasure, because in pleasure they saw the subtlest foe to principle and duty. No graceful growth, this Puritanism, for its roots are in the hard, stern facts of life; but it is strong, and from it has sprung all that is

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worth preserving in the Anglo-Saxon character. Its men feared and its women loved God, and if their words were harsh their hearts were tender. If they shut out the sunshine from their lives it was that their eyes might see better the glory lying beyond; and if their view be correct, that earth’s threescore years and ten are but as preparation for eternity, then who shall call them even foolish for turning away their thoughts from its allurements.

“Still, I think I should like to have a look at one, just to see what it is like,” argued my father; “one cannot judge of a thing that one knows nothing about.”

I imagine it was his first argument rather than his second that convinced my mother.

“That is true,” she answered. “I remember how shocked my poor father was when he found me one night at the bedroom window reading Sir Walter Scott by the light of the moon.”

“What about the boy?” said my father, for I had been included in the invitation.

“We will all be wicked together,” said my mother.

So an evening or two later the four of us stood at the corner of Pigott Street waiting for the ‘bus.

“It is a close evening,” said my father; “let’s go the whole hog and ride outside.”

In those days for a lady to ride outside a ‘bus was as in these days for a lady to smoke in public. Surely my mother’s guardian angel must have betaken himself off in a huff.

“Will you keep close behind and see to my skirt?” answered my mother, commencing preparations. If you will remember that these were the days of crinolines, that the “knife-boards”

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of omnibuses were then approached by a perpendicular ladder, the rungs two feet apart, you will understand the necessity for such precaution.

Which of us was the most excited throughout that long ride it would be difficult to say. Barbara, feeling keenly her responsibility as prompter and leader of the dread enterprise, sat anxious, as she explained to us afterwards, hoping there would be nothing shocking in the play, nothing to belie its innocent title; pleased with her success so far, yet still fearful of failure, doubtful till the last moment lest we should suddenly repent, and stopping the ‘bus, flee from the wrath to come. My father was the youngest of us all. Compared with him I was sober and contained. He fidgeted: people remarked upon it. He hummed. But for the stern eye of a thin young man sitting next to him trying to read a paper, I believe he would have broken out into song. Every minute he would lean across to enquire of my mother: “How are you feeling – all right?” To which my mother would reply with a nod and a smile, She sat very silent herself, clasping and unclasping her hands. As for myself, I remember feeling so sorry for the crowds that passed us on their way home. It was sad to think of the long dull evening that lay before them. I wondered how they could face it.

Our seats were in the front row of the upper circle. The lights were low and the house only half full when we reached them.

“It seems very orderly and – and respectable,” whispered my mother. There seemed a touch of disappointment in her tone.

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“We are rather early,” replied Barbara; “it will be livelier when the band comes in and they turn up the gas.”

But even when this happened my mother was not content. “There is so little room for the actors,” she complained.

It was explained to her that the green curtain would go up, that the stage lay behind.

So we waited, my mother sitting stiffly on the extreme edge of her seat, holding me tightly by the hand; I believe with some vague idea of flight, should out of that vault-scented gloom the devil suddenly appear to claim us for his own. But before the curtain was quite up she had forgotten him.

You poor folk that go to the theatre a dozen times a year, perhaps oftener, what do you know of plays? You see no drama, you see but middle-aged Mr. Brown, churchwarden, payer of taxes, foolishly pretending to be a brigand; Miss Jones, daughter of old Jones the Chemist, making believe to be a haughty Princess. How can you, a grown man, waste money on a seat to witness such tomfoolery! What we saw was something very different. A young and beautiful girl – true, not a lady by birth, being merely the daughter of an honest yeoman, but one equal in all the essentials of womanhood to the noblest in the land – suffered before our very eyes an amount of misfortune that, had one not seen it for oneself, one would never have believed Fate could have accumulated upon the head of any single individual. Beside her woes our own poor troubles sank into insignificance. We had used to grieve, as my mother in a whisper reminded my father, if now and again we had not been able to afford meat for dinner. This poor creature, driven even from her wretched attic, compelled to wander through the snow

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