I had, I suppose, some reason for
calling on Canon Beresford, but I have totally forgotten
what it was. In all probability my mother sent
me to discuss some matter connected with the management
of the parish or the maintenance of the fabric of
the church. I was then, and still am, a church
warden. The office is hereditary in my family.
My son Miss Pettigrew recommended my having
several sons will hold it when I am gone.
My mother has always kept me up to the mark in the
performance of my duties. Without her at my elbow
I should, I am afraid, be inclined to neglect them.
I am bored, not interested as a churchwarden should
be, when the wall of the graveyard crumbles unexpectedly.
I fail to find either pleasure or excitement in appointing
a new sexton. Canon Beresford, our rector, is
no more enthusiastic about such things than I am.
He and I are very good friends, but when he suspects
me of paying him a business visit he goes out to fish.
There are, I believe, trout in the stream which flows
at the bottom of the glebe land, but I never heard
of Canon Beresford catching any of them.
It must have been business of some
sort which took me to the rectory that afternoon,
for Canon Beresford had gone out with his rod.
Miss Battersby told me this and added, as a justification
of her own agreeable solitude, that Lalage was with
her father. Miss Battersby is Lalage’s
governess, and she would not consider it right to spend
the afternoon over a novel unless she felt sure that
her pupil was being properly looked after. In
this case she was misinformed. Lalage was not
with her father. She was perched on one of the
highest branches of a horse-chestnut tree. I
heard her before I saw her, for the chestnut tree
was in full leaf and Lalage had to hail me three or
four times before I discovered where she was.
I always liked Lalage, and even in those days she
had a friendly feeling for me. I doubt, however,
whether a simple desire for my conversation would
have brought her down from her nest. I might
have passed without being hailed if it had not happened
that I was riding a new bicycle. In those days
bicycles were still rare in the west of Ireland.
Mine was a new toy and Lalage had never seen it before.
She climbed from her tree top with remarkable agility
and swung herself from the lowest branch with such
skill and activity that she alighted on her feet close
beside the bicycle. She was at that time a little
more than fourteen years of age. She asked at
once to be allowed to ride the bicycle. I was
a young man then, active and vigorous; but I was hot,
breathless, and exhausted before Lalage had enough
of learning to ride. I doubt whether she would
have given in even after an hour’s hard work
if we had not met with a serious accident. We
charged into a strong laurel bush. Lalage’s
frock was torn. The rent was a long one, extending
diagonally from the waistband to the bottom hem.
I knew, even while I offered one from the back of
my tie, that a pin would be no use.
“Cattersby,” said Lalage,
“will be mad raging mad. She’s
always at me because things will tear my clothes.
Horrid nuisance clothes are, aren’t they?
But Cattersby doesn’t think so of course.
She likes them.”
The lady’s name is Battersby,
not Cattersby. She held the position of governess
to Lalage for more than a year and is therefore entitled
to respect. Her predecessor, a Miss Thomas, resigned
after six weeks. It was my mother who recommended
Miss Battersby to Canon Beresford. I felt that
I ought to protest against Lalage’s irreverent
way of speaking. In mere loyalty to my mother,
apart altogether from the respect which, as a landed
proprietor, I naturally entertain for all forms of
law and order, I was absolutely bound to say something.
“You should speak of her as
Miss Battersby,” I said firmly.
“I call her Cattersby,”
said Lalage, “because that is her nature.”
I said that I understood what this
marker meant; but Lalage, who even then had a remarkable
faculty for getting at the naked truth of things,
did not even pretend to believe me.
“Come along,” she said, “and I’ll
show you why.”
I followed her meekly, leading my
bicycle, which, like Lalage’s frock, had suffered
in its contest with the laurel. We passed through
the stable yard and I stopped to put my bicycle into
the coach house. An Irish terrier, Lalage’s
property, barked at me furiously, thinking, I suppose,
that I intended to steal Canon Beresford’s cart.
Lalage chose to regard this as a ridiculous affectation
on the part of the dog and shut him up in the stable
as a punishment for folly. Then we climbed a
stile, paddled round a large manure heap, crossed an
ash pit, and came at last to a pigsty. There
were no pigs in it, and it was, for a pigsty, very
clean. Lalage opened the gate and we entered the
small enclosure in which the pigs, if there had been
pigs, would have taken food and exercise.
“You’ll have to stoop
down now and crawl,” said Lalage. “You
needn’t be afraid. The pigs were sold last
week.”
I realized that I was being invited
to enter the actual home, the private sleeping room,
of the departed swine. The door of it had been
newly painted. While I knelt in front of it I
read a notice which stretched across it in large white
letters, done, apparently, with chalk:
The
Office of the Anti-cat
Editor: Miss Lalage
Beresford, B. A.
Sub-Editor:
Ditto. Ditto.
Underneath this inscription was a
carefully executed drawing of a spear with a large,
a disproportionately large, and vicious looking barb.
A sort of banner depended from its shaft, with these
words on it: “For Use on Cattersby.
Revenge is sweet!” I looked round at Lalage,
who was on her hands and knees behind me.
I intended asking for some explanation
of the extraordinarily vindictive spirit displayed
by the spear and the banner. Lalage forestalled
my question and explained something else.
“I have the office here,”
she said, “because it’s the only place
where I can be quite sure she won’t follow me.”
This time I understood thoroughly
what was said to me. Cattersby that
is to say, Miss Battersby if she were the
sort of person who mourned over torn frocks, and if,
as Lalage suggested, she liked clothes, would be very
unwilling to follow any one into the recesses of the
pigsty. Even a bower in the upper branches of
a tree would be less secure from her intrusion.
We crawled in. Against the far wall of the chamber
stood the trough from which the pigs, now no doubt
deceased, used to eat.
“It was put there,” said
Lalage, who seemed to know that I was thinking of
the trough, “after they had done cleaning out
the sty, so that it wouldn’t go rotten in the
wet before we got some more young pigs.”
“Was that Miss Battersby’s idea?”
“No, it wasn’t. Cattersby
wouldn’t think of anything half so useful.
All she cares about is sums and history and lessony
things. It was Tom Kitterick who put it there,
and I helped him. Tom Kitterick is the boy who
cleans the boots and pumps the water. It was that
time,” she added, “that I got paint all
over my blue dress. She said it was Tom Kitterick’s
fault.”
“It may have been,” I
said, “partly. Anyhow Tom Kitterick is a
red-haired, freckly youth. It wouldn’t do
him any harm to be slanged a bit for something.”
“It’s a jolly sight better
to have freckles, even if you come out all over like
a turkey egg, than to go rubbing stinking stuff on
your face at night. That’s what Cattersby
does. I caught her at it.”
Miss Battersby has a nice, smooth
complexion and is, ’no doubt, quite justified
in doing her best to preserve it. But I did not
argue the point with Lalage. A discussion might
have led to further revelations of intimate details
of the lady’s toilet. I was young in those
days and I rather prided myself on being a gentleman.
I changed the subject.
“Perhaps,” I said, “you
will now tell me why you have brought me here.
Are we to have a picnic tea in the pigs’ trough?”
Lalage crawled past me. She had
to crawl, for there was not room in the sty for even
a child to stand upright. She took out of the
trough a bundle of papers, pierced at the top left-hand
corner and tied with a slightly soiled blue ribbon.
She handed it to me and I looked it over. It
was, apparently, a manuscript magazine modelled on
those sold at railway bookstalls for sixpence.
It was called, as I might have guessed, the Anti-Cat.
The table of contents promised the following reading
matter:
1. Editor’s
Chat.
2. Poetry A
Farewell. To be recited in her presence.
3. The Ignominy
of Having a Governess.
4. Prize Competition
for the Best Insult Story.
“You can enter for that if you
like,” said Lalage, who had been following my
eyes down the page.
“I shall,” I said, “if
she insults me; but she never has yet.”
“Nor she won’t,”
said Lalage. “She’ll be honey to you.
That’s one of the worst things about her.
She’s a hypocrite. I loathe hypocrites,
don’t you?”
I returned to the table of contents:
5. On Sneaking First
Example.
6. Our Tactics,
by the Editor.
“She won’t insult you,”
said Lalage. “She simply crawls to any grown-up.
You should hear her talking to father and pretending
that she thinks fishing nice.”
“She’s perfectly right
to do that. After all, Lalage, your father is
a canon and a certain measure of respect is due to
his recreations as well as to his serious work.
Besides ”
“It’s never right to crawl to any one.”
“Besides,” I said, “what
you call crawling may in reality be sympathy.
I’m sure Miss Battersby has a sympathetic disposition.
It is very difficult to draw the line between proper
respect, flavoured with appreciative sympathy, and
what you object to as sycophancy.”
“If you’re going to try
and show off,” said Lalage, “by using ghastly
long words which nobody could possibly understand you’d
better go and do it to the Cat. She’ll
like it. I’m not going to sit here all day
listening to you. Either read the magazine or
don’t, whichever you like. I don’t
care whether you do or not, but I won’t be jawed.”
This subdued me at once. I began with the poem:
“Fair Cattersby
I weep to see
You
haste away by train,
As yet that Latin exercise
Has
not been done again.
Stay, stay,
Until
amo, I say.
(To
be continued in our next)”
“There was a difficulty about
the last three lines, I suppose,” I said.
“Yes,” said Lalage.
“I couldn’t remember how they went, and
Cattersby had the book. She pretends she likes
reading poetry, though she doesn’t really, and
she makes me learn off whole chunks of it.”
“You can’t deny that it
comes in useful occasionally. I don’t see
how you could have composed that parody if she hadn’t
made you learn ”
“She didn’t. That’s
not the sort of poetry she makes me learn. If
it was I might do it. She finds out rotten things
about ’Little Lamb, who made you?’ ‘We
are Seven,’ and stuff of that sort. Not
what I call poetry at all.”
I had the good sense while at Oxford
to attend some lectures given by the professor of
poetry. I also belonged for a time to an association
modestly called “The Brotherhood of Rhyme.”
We used to meet in my rooms and read original compositions
to each other until none of us could stand it any
longer. I am therefore thoroughly well qualified
to discuss poetry with any one.
I should, under ordinary circumstances,
have taken a pleasure in defending the reputations
of Blake and Wordsworth, but I shrank from attempting
to do so in a pigsty with Lalage Beresford as an opponent,
I turned to the last page of the Anti-Cat and
read the article entitled “Our Tactics.”
It was exceedingly short, but it struck me as able.
I began to have a great deal of pity for Miss Battersby.
“Calm” (or Balm.
There was an uncertainty about the first letter) “and
haughty in her presence. Let yourself out
behind her back.”
“What about your going in for
the competition?” said Lalage. “Even
if she doesn’t insult you you could easily invent
something. You’ve seen her and you know
quite well the sort she is. You might get the
prize.”
“May I read the story you’ve
got?” I asked. “If it’s not
very good I might perhaps try; but it is probably
quite superior to anything I could possibly produce,
and in that case there would be no use my attempting
to compete.”
“It is good,” said Lalage,
“but yours might be good too, and then I should
divide the prize, or you could give a second prize;
a box of Turkish Delight would do.”
This encouraged me and I read the “Insult Story.”
“I did my lessons studiously,
as good as I could.”, Lalage was a remarkably
good speller for her age. Many much older people
would have staggered over “studiously.”
She took it, so to speak, in her stride.
“I wrote out a lot of questions
on the history and answered them all without looking
at the book. I knew it perfectly. The morning
came and with it history. I answered all the
questions except one the character of Mary.
The insulter repeated it, commanding me to ‘Say
it now.’ I said it with a bland smile upon
my face, as I thought how well I knew my history.”
“Laiage,” I said, pausing
in the narrative, “did you make that smile bland
simply because you knew your history or was its blandness
part of the tactics, ‘Balm and haughty in her
presence?’”
“Calm,” said Lalage, “calm,
not balm. Never mind about that. Go on.”
“The insulter,” I read,
“turned crimson with rage and shrieked demnation
and stamped about the floor. Cooling down a bit,
she said, ’You shall write it out ten times
this afternoon.’ Naturally I was astonished,
for I had said it perfectly correctly when she told
me. I had, however, a better control over my
temper than she had, and managed, despite my passionate
thoughts, to smile blandly all through, though it made
her ten times worse.”
“Well?” said Lalage when I had finished.
“I am a little confused,”
I said. “I thought the story was to be about
an insult offered by Miss Battersby to some one else,
you, or perhaps me.” “It is,”
said Lalage. “That’s what the prize
is for, the best insult.”
“But this seems to me to be
about an insult applied by the author to Miss Battersby.
I couldn’t conscientiously go in for a competition
in which I should represent myself as doing a thing
of that sort.”
“I don’t know what you’re
talking about,” said Lalage. “I didn’t
insult her. She insulted me.”
“Come now, Lalage, honour bright!
That smile of yours! How would you like any one
to make you ten times worse by smiling blandly at you
when you happened to be stamping about the floor crimson
in the face and shrieking ”
“I wouldn’t. I don’t
use words of that sort even when I’m angry.”
“It might be better if you did.
A frank outburst of that kind is at times less culpable
than a balmy smile. I have a much greater respect
and liking for the person who says plainly what she
means than ”
“She didn’t. She
wouldn’t think it ladylike.” “Didn’t
what?”
“Didn’t say straight out what she meant.”
“She can’t have meant
more,” I said. “After all, we must
be reasonable. There isn’t any more that
any one could mean.”
“You’re very stupid,”
said Lalage. “I keep on telling you she
didn’t say it. She’s far too great
a hypocrite.”
“Do you mean to say that she
didn’t stamp about the floor and say ”
I hesitated. I have been very
carefully brought up and I am a churchwarden.
Besides, there is a Latin tag which Canon Beresford,
who has a taste for tags, quotes occasionally, about
the great reverence due to boys. Obviously a
much greater reverence must be due to girls. I
did not want my conscience to have an opportunity for
reproaching me. Therefore I hesitated when it
came to the point of saying out loud a word which
Lelage ought certainly not to hear.
She came to my rescue and finished
my sentence for me in a way which got me out of my
difficulty. Very likely she felt that she ought
not to corrupt me.
“That word,” she said.
“Thanks! We’ll put
it that way. Am I to understand that she didn’t
say that word?”
“Certainly not,” said
Lalage. “She couldn’t if she tried.
I should I really think I should quite
like her if she did.”
I felt that this was as far as I was
at all likely to get in bringing Lalage to a better
frame of mind. Her attitude toward her governess
was very far indeed from that enjoined in the Church
Catechism, but I lacked the courage to tell her so.
Nor do I think I should have effected much even if
I had been as brave in rebuke as an archdeacon or a
bishop. Besides, I felt that I had accomplished
something. Lalage had committed herself to an
approval of a hypothetical Miss Battersby. If
a governess could be found in the world who would
stamp about the floor and shriek that word, or if
Miss Battersby would learn the habit of violent profanity,
Lalage would quite like her. It was a definite
concession. I had a mental vision of the changed
Miss Battersby, a lady freckled from head to foot,
magnificently contemptuous of glycerine and cucumber,
who hated clothes and tore them when she could, who
rejoiced to see blue dresses with blobs of bright
red paint on them, who scoffed openly at Blake’s
poetry, who had been to sea or companied with private
soldiers on the battlefield, and so garnered a store
of scorching blasphemies. I imagined Lalage taking
this paragon to her heart, clinging to her with warm
affection, leading her into pigstys for confidential
chats, and, if she published a magazine at all, calling
it Our Feline Friend. But the dream faded,
as such dreams do. Miss Battersby was plainly
incapable of rising to the heights required.
It is to my credit that in the end
I did make an effort to soften Lalage.
“I wish,” I said, “that
you’d try and call her Pussy instead of Cat.”
“Why? What’s the difference?”
“The meaning is the same,”
I said. “But it’s a much kinder way
of putting it. You ought to try and be kind,
Lalage.”
She pondered this advice for a while and then said:
“I would, if only she’d stop kissing me.”
“Does she do it often?”
“Every morning and every evening and sometimes
during the day.”
That settled it. I could not
press my point. Once, years afterward, Miss Battersby
very nearly kissed me, but even before there was any
chance of such a thing I was able to sympathize with
Lalage. I crept out of the pigsty and went home
again, leading my injured bicycle.