Chapter XIV: The First Attempt

After all, if Oliver had always been ushered into the drawing-room which these closed books were supposed to embellish, he would not have found many traces of higher aspirations in its gaudy carpet, and chairs and tables of one ponderous monotonous style, since Mrs. Polley’s influence had at least saved them from being slim and gimcrack, with its samples of meretricious fancy-work, in which there was as little fancy as there was use, than he could discover in the back parlour. The family room was furnished with the darkest drugget and coarsest mahogany and hair cloth. It did not, according to the Polleys’ ideas, admit of any attempt at ornament. It was reserved to fulfil their notions of ease and comfort, the table being often covered and littered with the materials employed in the girls’ home dressmaking, and the chimney-piece given over to Mr. Polley’s tobacco-pouch and pipes, and Mrs. Polley’s thimble and reels of cotton.

’Mily Polley was not a bad mimic in that lowest development of art which is contented to grasp and caricature such salient details and absurdities of human nature as come within the artist’s limited observation. And though there was a horrible absence of reverence and tenderness in the girl’s rendering of some old woman’s palsied utterance, or some half-imbecile boy’s stutter, in her cool giving of her own father’s stock phrases, even in her close copies of Mr. Holland—the Polleys’ clergyman’s—stiff or strained gestures in the most solemn part of his services, the representation was the only version of the drama which ever reached the Polleys, while it was as good as a play in forcing Mrs. Polley to relax into a grim smile and to forget for a moment her rare achievements, and in stimulating Mr. Polley to clap his hands magnanimously at the mocking echo of himself.

There was no theatre in Friarton, and if there had been, the Polleys belonged to a branch of the Christian Church which condemns theatres without reservation, nay, sometimes, as in the case of Mrs. Polley, extends the condemnation to play-books as well as players.

Yet it struck Oliver Constable that the Polleys were at the level of civilisation when the theatre, if not abused and tabooed, would have naturally come in as an effective instrument in their training. He arrived at the conclusion as he formed one of the audience to the mimicry which ’Mily Polley, who was proud of her gift, was sometimes tempted to practise before her friends and acquaintances, in addition to her family; as he took notice of the nicknames which abounded in her vocabulary in about an equal degree to that in which they flourished in Jack Dadd’s speech; and as Oliver observed the glee with which the girl utilised any exceptionally silly or stupid person who had the misfortune to enter her circle, making him or her serve for a temporary butt. The last was grievously disloyal, and the worst thing was that nobody—neither the mistress nor the master of the house, not even ’Liza, who was certainly gentler than the others, who sometimes read a little from choice, and who was therefore under the impression that she had culture—recognised the disloyalty.

But the mimicry was an intellectual effort a shade in advance of the bald individual experiences, the tittle-tattle purely peddling, or more or less mischievous, which constituted the staple of the Polleys’ conversation, and was just such an effort as the theatre might have spurred on and supplemented. Oliver imagined the Polleys might have liked to go to a respectable theatre which was not under an ecclesiastical ban, might have enjoyed a broad farce, and relished and profited so far by one of the homelier order of tragedies.

What he could not imagine was, that till they had gone a little farther in elementary knowledge, and without the theatre, which comes in to meet the intellectual law that perception and imitation are among the first acts of the mental powers of a child, or an undeveloped man or woman, any of the Polleys, with the exception of ’Liza, could derive the smallest benefit or satisfaction from the mass of books, which, to be sure, they left untouched. He ceased also to be surprised that the Polley family should be in the section of Mr. Holland’s congregation, the members of which composed themselves, after the prayers and hymns, to look round on their neighbours and manifestly take stock of their presence, looks and clothes, or who openly nodded and audibly snored throughout their clergyman’s finest peroration, with which, however, they would not have consented to dispense, since they took a reflected pride in his fervid eloquence as contrasted with the vicar’s well-bred conversation in the pulpit. Oliver had ceased to get impatient with what he had been accustomed to consider Holland’s violent transitions in a variety of bad styles—from the strongly sensational to the familiarly anecdotal—bordering on the facetious, when the critic was better able to estimate the order of intelligence with which, to a large extent, the preacher had to deal. Oliver began to pity the poor teacher, who was bound alike by his calling and his conscience to impart the highest truths which could be addressed to humanity, to these dense minds and stolid hearts.

Oliver found the girls by fits and starts furiously busy, or, in spite of their mother, absolutely idle. It was clear that notwithstanding, or because of, their mental vacuity, they luxuriated in idleness a little after the fashion of the dwellers in Eastern zenanas. The Polleys still regarded idleness much as their poor young drudge of a maid-of-all-work, taken from the workhouse school, looked upon it, with more reason, as one of the great gains of having risen and prospered in business and the world. To do nothing save gabble idle gossip was next best to wearing fine clothes every day of the week and every hour of the day, and eating at every meal early lamb and salmon, pastry, plum-cake, and strawberry ices, which the Polleys’ class are now in circumstances to add to their more primitive dainties of pork-pies, muffins, and shrimps. Idleness was one of the established privileges of ladies to which the girls gave full credit, and of which they were not slow to avail themselves when they had the opportunity. It might pall in time, and so might the fine clothes and fine food in unlimited quantities, but such satiety the Polley girls were not likely to attain so long as they lived under their mother’s rule. And they prized their advantages the more because they were still reduced to snatch at and make the most of them when these only came in their way occasionally, by the arbitrary will of Mrs. Polley.

Oliver observed that the girls had none of the sustained industry of Fan, and that they were constantly seeking to shirk the share of work in the shop and house which their mother laid upon them. ’Mily was particularly adroit in slipping off her burdens, and her active mother made more allowance for ’Mily’s adroitness than for ’Liza’s laziness or Ann’s slowness, showing that she considered rebellion incidental to youth, and admired in this case the cleverness with which it was carried out. Mrs. Polley said her youngest was ‘a sad pickle,’ but she admitted she had been thoughtless and fond of her pleasure beyond everything in her own girlhood. She daresayed a house and family on ’Mily’s refractory shoulders would steady her in time. She would rather have a girl smart for her own ends than a silly or a dawdle, any day; so far from regarding the smartness thus exercised as dishonourable to the culprit, Mrs. Polley saw in it a proof that ’Mily would be worth something in the end.

The household needlework, which is still done at home in houses like the Polleys’, was another task which the girls evaded, or discharged, with a grudge, in the most slovenly fashion. Such disgraceful needlework, to be worn in private, as the Polleys passed through their clumsy, careless fingers, Fan Constable would not have accepted from the least scholar in the vicar’s wife’s school.

It puzzled Oliver that Mrs. Polley, who insisted so strongly on the merits of energy and enterprise in her own case, could, as a matter of principle, permit the comparatively useless, frivolous lives her daughters led. But when he sounded her one day on whether she did not approve of training girls to self-help, as fit successors to their fathers and mothers in such a shop as she herself conducted successfully, he found, strange as it seemed to him, that she too, was tinged with the girls’ views of gentility. Oliver, who had thought to have pleased his father’s old friend by the suggestion, had never gone so near to sending her off in a huff—and Mrs. Polley in a huff was a formidable person to have to do with.

‘Well, to tell you the truth, Mr. Oliver,’ said Mrs. Polley, with a dry cough, ‘my gals don’t ought to look forward to going into the shop. I haven’t toiled my shoulders and my ’ead, and stood there till I was fit to drop on market-days, for my gals to have to follow in my shoes. If business goes with us as it has done, I’m ’appy to say, ever since I took it in hand, I expect I shall put enough by to enable the gals, if they ain’t provided with husbands in the meantime, to live on their means, and do nothing, like the best in the place.’

Oliver was silenced.

The one employment which entirely overcame the Polleys’ taste for idleness, and on which they entered with a will and the utmost zest, was what Oliver reckoned their unfortunate blunder in making objects of themselves in the line of dress. They could always be eagerly interested in frilling themselves from top to toe, in pulling down their old flounces, and furbelows, and bunches of skirts, and reconstructing them, if possible, in an uglier shape than before. They were never wearied of manufacturing the most grotesque apologies for hats and bonnets. Oliver thought, in contrast, of Fan and Catherine Hilliard’s simple gowns and quiet hats, which, if he had known it, ’Mily Polley classed as the dowdiest things out, and farther stated that it was her deliberate opinion, only a learned young lady with her head in the clouds, like Miss Hilliard, or a girl with the cool assurance of Fan Constable, would take it upon her to be so plain in her dress, and would not at least try to be wearing what was stylish.

Oliver, poor benighted man, only marvelled, on the contrary, how even girls in their vagaries could accomplish such tremendous mistakes in what one might have imagined would have been the congenial art of adorning their own bodies.

Nobody could call the Polleys’ lives gloomy or austere, yet to Oliver their enjoyments appeared grievously ignoble, even when they were not of an animal character. He was very sorry for those girls, whom no man had hired to worthy work and wages. He thought of the innumerable missions to the poor, and of the ladies who, to their unending credit, devoted much time and attention to raising the women of the lower ranks. He recalled the superior advantages which may be held at least to balance the increased temptations of the upper classes. And he reflected, with deep regret and shame, how Fan withdrew, and Catherine Hilliard recoiled, from all association with girls like the Polleys. What chance had they of escaping from irredeemable materialism and innate vulgarity—those deadly foes to all that is spiritual and really noble? What help was extended to them beyond the Sunday sermon which flew over their heads, and the verses in the Bible—which they read as a lesson, that had little or nothing to do with their past or present, but belonged, as Mrs. Polley would have said, to their ‘latter hends’—to rise above gross self-indulgence—so long as it was not what the world called vicious? For the Polleys were not merely respectable, but even inclined to be Pharisees in their loud boasting of their respectability. Yet self-indulgence, which was not absolutely vicious, was in their eyes perfectly admissible and actually laudable. A man or a woman who would not gratify himself or herself by well-nigh wallowing in the outward fruits of success, was either a screw or a minx. Heroes and saints had very little that was heroic and saintly in them to the Polleys’ mind. All were dragged down to the same low level.

The Polleys’ standard was very little above that of the most rudimentary Christians, whether in high places, in courts and alleys, or in the bush and the jungle. The Polleys would do no murder, would not pick or steal—unless in those adaptations and adulterations of groceries, which had become part of a wide-spread system, with which all trades complied, and which nobody, save a fanatic, dreamt of defining as stealing, would prove chaste maids and matrons, would not literally fall down and worship golden images, and for anything farther would regularly attend chapel—of which the heads of the house were members, and would contribute liberally and with great _esprit de corps_ to the minister’s salary.

It did not strike Oliver that the Polleys were much exposed to the temptation to break those commandments which they respected, and for the rest, with regard to the grand spiritual lives beyond, these were simply ignored and uncomprehended. Oliver feared there was a more impassable miserable chasm between the Polleys’ mode of existence and all that belongs to a higher life, than even the ghastly gulf which cuts off the outcast in his crimes and wretchedness from purity and peace, just as it was said of old that the publicans and harlots were nearer the kingdom of heaven than their extremely respectable, outwardly moral, nay, ostentatiously religious brethren. To do the Polleys justice, they made no great barren profession of religion; they contented themselves with being by inheritance and social politics chapel people, and despising the members of a state and priest-ridden church.

Oliver, in his arguments with Fan, had given all honour to the essential virtues of his class; now it pained him intensely to be forced to recognise wherein it fell short, even in precedent and tradition, not to say in word and deed, of the standards and practices of the more highly cultured and better educated classes.

Certainly truth was not confined to any rank, and flagrant deception was confessedly committed by ladies and gentlemen. But these ladies and gentlemen were not respectable members of their class and, unless in outrageous instances, counted falsehood brought home to them worldly dishonour, and concealed their lapses from truth with all their might.

But a certain amount of lying did not involve the same disgrace when it came to light in Oliver’s class. Jack Dadd was singularly obtuse in perceiving that the twists and turns which he gave to his words and actions, in order to serve himself, and of which he actually boasted to Oliver, in the sense of what some Americans would call ‘smart practice’ or as capital jokes, were neither more nor less than cunningly veiled lies. As for the Polley girls, they indulged with the utmost freedom in wild exaggerations, horribly prejudiced statements, and barefaced fibbing when it suited their purpose, until Oliver hung his head and almost groaned aloud.

Of course, as Oliver was thankful to think, there were many much better representatives of the small shopkeeping class than any he encountered in Friarton—young men whose public spirit and intelligence, if not their culture, far exceeded his own; girls as dutiful as Fan had been to her father, and with a still higher and truer idea of what made perfect womanliness, and of a necessity perfect ladyhood, in any rank. But he feared these formed the exceptions, more or less rare, to the ordinary rule. They were the salt of the earth, no doubt, but bore no greater proportion to the social body they preserved from corruption, than salt to the physical world with which it is incorporated. Oliver was compelled to suspect that the Dadds and Polleys presented an average specimen of their class.

Oliver sought to prove a friend and brother to the young Polleys and their girl companions as well as to Jack Dadd and his associates. In order to be so he struggled to show himself patient and judicious with the girls. He answered all their questions about his former college experience and present volunteer movement, as fully as he knew how. And then he tried to carry the inquisitors to something in earth or heaven beyond their small personalities and their life in Friarton, with so poor a result that he fell back in despair to asking ’Liza Polley about the poetry—of which she was said to be fond. She did not impress him as the most intelligent of the sisters, but he fancied if she had the shadow of a taste for poetry, he had a hold upon her.

Oliver was in blissful ignorance of Mrs. Polley’s objection to such a subject of conversation, as not merely trifling in the extreme, but verging on impropriety.

For that matter, Mrs. Polley was not quite so good as her word where a well-to-do young fellow, who might be looking after one or other of her daughters, was concerned. She gave Oliver considerable license in his attempts to entertain the girls, leaving him to ‘get thick’ with them in his own way, refraining, to a remarkable extent and with some disinterestedness, from her usual custom of engrossing the conversation. She only dropped one little hint which, notwithstanding Fan’s warning, Oliver failed to appropriate. ‘If you encourage ’Liza in her liking for such nonsense, you must be prepared to take the responsibility upon yourself, Mr. Oliver,’ said Mrs. Polley, with something like a simper which might have been alarming in so downright, plain-spoken a woman, had it been addressed to a less single-hearted, self-forgetful man.

But Oliver undertook the responsibility with a frankness and fearlessness which were their own defence. He assured Mrs. Polley that Miss ’Liza need take no harm from the perusal of good poetry, and pledged himself that, so far from causing her to neglect any duty, it ought rather to spur her on and brace her to its better performance. He smiled to himself after the utterance of so great a platitude, while the hint evaporated in empty air.

It was poor Miss ’Liza who felt embarrassed. She had been accustomed to hear herself accused of literary tastes with an admixture of very mild vanity and rather more energetic deprecation. She was by no means sure that the tastes were sufficiently pronounced to stand the investigation of a university man. She fidgeted and hesitated, and caused ’Mily to mock her more than ever, when Oliver broached the word poetry to her. In addition, by common consent, in the light of compatibility of taste, ’Liza found Oliver Constable likely to be set aside by her family and friends as her ‘beau.’ He was in all probability coming after one of the sisters in his regular visits to the back parlour, and ’Liza was the one who struck her own set, at the first glance, as cut out for him.

’Liza was quite the girl to believe what everybody told her. And she was not without a sense of obligation to the world in general and to her sisters in particular, for handing over Oliver to her. She was struck by the disinterestedness of Ann and ’Mily, and she was flattered with the notion of a distinguished conquest on her own part.

On the other hand, ’Liza Polley was not so simple as to suppose that her sisters were actuated entirely by generosity in their early withdrawal from any rivalry in her pretensions to Oliver Constable. Indeed, in spite of her literary bent, ’Liza was ready to agree with ’Mily in her sweeping assertion that Oliver was ‘a handsome gorilla of a duffer,’ who was always talking sense, or nonsense which was no better than sense, since it was past their comprehension, and who was constantly on the verge of lecturing them. ’Liza did not relish the imminent prospect of a lecture, however delicately administered, any more than ’Mily or Ann relished it. She had an uneasy consciousness that Oliver would consider her a humbug, since she had really hardly any more topics to talk over with him than her sisters could find.

Above all, ’Liza knew in her inmost heart there were persons—young men—a young man whom, whoever the world might regard as well matched with her, she liked infinitely better than she could ever like Oliver Constable.

Oliver was a great scholar, and she was not nearly scholarly enough to be at home with him as she was with that other person, who chaffed her unmercifully about being a blue-stocking, but who, she was sure, nevertheless, looked up to her a little for her slender bookish attainments.

’Liza dreaded that ‘the word of’ Oliver would separate her from this more favoured aspirant to her regard.

On all these counts ’Liza was so reluctant and retiring when Oliver tried to ‘tackle’ her, as he called the process, on her reading, that he felt—even in being foiled anew—at least he could triumphantly refute Fan’s unwomanly assertion that the Polley girls would be eager and unmaidenly in receiving and misinterpreting his advances.

Oliver never got beyond the discovery that ’Liza’s theory of poetry was decidedly that of rhyme; and she inclined strongly to what was meretriciously sentimental, especially when the sentiment was that of pairs of lovers meeting by sunset or moonlight, under oak trees, or in bowers of roses, or amidst ruins in churchyards. These persons swore eternal fidelity and incontinently died by violent deaths, or one of them proved false, as it were for the purpose of breaking the heart of the other, who continued, to Oliver’s mind, wrongheadedly faithful to a creature who was not worth a moment’s regret. When ’Liza strayed slightly from these stock scenes, it was into the superficial splendour of palaces, or at least into the height of hackneyed picturesqueness as displayed in the castles and fortified towns, the crusades, sieges and battlefields of mediæval times. Followers at a humble distance of Moore, L.E.L., and Mrs. Hemans, constituted her antiquated school of poets.

It saddened Oliver to see that ’Liza’s faint poetic fancy could find no resting-place nearer home, and remained on that account utterly divorced from her daily life. It was like a wistful groping for better things far a field. It reminded him of the manlier sort of songs with which Jack Dadd and his comrades diversified their ‘If ever I cease to love’ and ‘Not for Joe.’ How the shop lads, who had not the remotest chance of being active participators in the open-air stir and joy of a hunting field, or who were in no danger of knowing any voyage more exciting than a holiday trip in a river steamer, would give the full force of their young lungs and hearts to the vigorous refrain of ‘John Peel’ or ‘The Bay of Biscay—O.’