Two Worlds and Their Ways Read online

  Ivy Compton-Burnett

  Two Worlds

  and Their Ways

  Contents

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter I

  “My Dear, Good wife!” said Sir Roderick Shelley.

  The former replied without raising her head.

  “The money subscribed divided by the number of subscribers gives you the average subscription. Twenty-four pounds, ten shillings and sixpence, divided by thirty-five. Would you do a sum like that in your head, Roderick? Or could you not do it at all?”

  The latter expressed no opinion, indeed had none.

  “Come, my pretty,” he said.

  “Fourteen shillings,” said Maria Shelley, looking at him over her pencil. “Of course I am neglecting the pence.”

  Her husband repeated his words, neglecting the pounds and shillings also.

  Maria gave him a smile and extended a hand in his direction, or gave the smile to herself and put a hand into space. He tapped a spoon on a saucer with more acquiescence than impatience, and rested his eyes on the scene beyond the window. His most satisfying vision was the flat, green land about his fading walls, and his only music the wind in his native trees sighing over the ground where he would lie. To be without it would be to be without a grave.

  “Meals are such a waste of time,” said his wife.

  “Any congenial way of spending it tends to be called that.”

  “I wish we could do without them, or without so many.”

  “The wish is often fulfilled in your case.”

  “I only eat to keep up my energy.”

  “You attain your object. I am a person of a wider range.”

  “You are always boasting, Roderick.”

  “That may be as true of yourself.”

  “People who do not know us, might think we were disagreeing.”

  “So they might,” said Sir Roderick, smiling. “And what kind of person would it take to know we were not?”

  Maria’s hand encountered the coffee-pot and closed on it. Her husband pushed a cup beneath it and pursued the uncertain stream, and as he withdrew it, tilted the spout to a safe angle. She gave him a glance at the suggested waste of energy, and filled her own cup before she put the pot down.

  “Thank you, my pretty,” he said, and stirred his cup.

  Maria opened a letter and ignored her own. With her broad, massive frame, her crumpled, weatherbeaten face, her prominent, greenish eyes and the signs of fifty-three years, she was no one’s pretty but Sir Roderick’s; while the latter, with his unshapely figure, his slits of blue eyes, his fleshy features and a chin and neck more undefined than is usual at sixty-eight, was no one’s pretty at all. He saw his wife as she was when he married her, sixteen years before, or at about that time had ceased to see her. She saw him as he was, and saw an engaging quality in him, that she believed was apparent to no one but herself, though it was the first thing that strangers noticed. He was aware of it himself, as he saw its effects, but was protected by his natural ease.

  “Are you having no breakfast this morning, Maria?” he said, holding a spoon above a dish.

  “I wonder why we still call them your sisters-in-law. Though I don’t know what word we are to use. And we give enough advice to ourselves, or at any rate, I do.”

  “And have some over for other people. There does seem to be a fair supply.”

  “The most trying part of being a second wife is the existence of the first wife’s family. I did not ask for their opinions, or if I did——”

  “You did not mean you wanted them. Advice suggests that we ought to change, and why should we tolerate that?”

  “I do not think I have ever followed their advice.”

  “It was necessary to increase the dose. And in its present strength it seems to be having some effect.”

  “You think you put things neatly, don’t you, Roderick?”

  “Yes,” said the latter, with a smile.

  “One would not think you would be able to express them at all.”

  “No,” said Sir Roderick, as if seeing the truth of this.

  “How did you come to have one sister-in-law who keeps a school, and another married to a man who keeps another? It does not seem to fit with you.”

  “I married into a different stock. I am a clod, a squire, a turnip, anything you please. Or nothing you please, I daresay.”

  “You are a very self-satisfied person.”

  “I have no great wish to improve. Perhaps that is what it means. But I have not much opinion of myself.”

  “I wonder if I have,” said Maria, with an air of turning her eyes on herself, but actually turning them on her husband. “I wonder why two women wanted to marry you, Roderick.”

  “You must answer for one,” said the latter, who knew the number was larger than this, and found it caused him no wonderment.

  “She was much better-looking than I have ever been,” said Maria, glancing at a protrait. “Would you call me plain?”

  Sir Roderick looked at the face before him, and realised it was years since he had called it anything.

  “You are yourself, my pretty. To me your face is your own.”

  “I wonder if a second wife often wishes she had known the first. I feel I should like to have a talk with her. But I am rather unlike other people.”

  “You are yourself,” repeated her husband, not disputing this.

  “I am glad my boy is a younger son. I want him to have a life of personal effort. It is what I should choose for him.”

  “I hope he will like it as well as you do, as he will not have any choice.”

  “I never grudge Oliver’s mother the place she left her son. I believe Sefton will go further.”

  “He probably will, and fare worse. If I had ten sons, I should like them to be elder sons. I have liked being one myself.”

  “Mary!” said Maria, in a meditative manner. “Mary Shelley. How familiar the name must have been to you! It is strange that she and I should have different forms of the same name, when we were to be different forms of the same thing; your wife, Roderick.”

  “It is a common name,” said the latter, and said no more.

  Maria gave him a look in which sympathy predominated.

  “I can never bear to think of those years between your marriages. I cannot imagine what you did.”

  “My dear, good wife!” said Sir Roderick, not referring to his earlier marriage and only romance.

  “You do not often look at her portrait. I suppose you can look at the one in your mind.”

  Sir Roderick was silent, finding he had looked at neither so often of late. He had ceased to speak of his first wife, not because her death had broken his heart, though it once had done so, but because the heart had mended.

  “My dear, the past has its own life and its own death.”

  “It is said that it never does. But I suppose it gets old like everything else. Miss Petticott will miss the children, if we take this advice and send them to school.”

  “We can easily make up to her.”

  “We can impose demands on her time and patience. That is what they do. It will be harder to make up to ourselves. I wonder if they all know they are to have breakfast down here today.”

  “Has anyone told them?”

  “They must know that workmen are repairing the wall of the schoolroom. The damp was coming through. Do not be slow, my dear. Did Mary treat Oliver as I treat my children?”

  “No. It was different.”

  “Was she fonder of him?”

  “It was
not quite that. She did not want to improve him.”

  “Perhaps there was less room for improvement when he was a child. How I talk like the ordinary stepmother! But it has been good of me to have her father in my house for all these years. Of course these letters are really addressed to you.”

  “Why ‘of course’, when you have read them?”

  “The advice is meant for us both. I wish I could regard myself as exempt from it. I always read the letters and give you the gist of them. You will not read the writing.”

  “What is the good of writing that cannot be read? And why make the characters in Greek when you are writing in English?”

  “I can read any writing as if it were print.”

  “People are proud of such trivial things,” said Sir Roderick, interpreting the tone. “And the gift may have its danger.”

  “You and I have no secrets from each other. Indeed I have none from anyone. Have you any secrets, Roderick?”

  “No,” said the latter, after the pause of a man who, if he had secrets, would have them remain so.

  “They think we are failing in our duty to our children. The curate at two about the charity sale. I wonder what makes me think of that.”

  “The sight of an envelope prompted you to make a note on the back.”

  “Well, remind me that the note is there. I shall be keeping the envelopes.”

  “Why should I remember what you will not, when it is your affair, not mine?”

  “I have a great many things on my mind.”

  “And so have I. And their all going wrong does not make them any fewer,” said Sir Roderick, frowning over the problems of his estate, in which he could not command success.

  Maria smiled over her own problems, in which she found she could.

  “Well, how about these schools and the children?” she said, putting her pencil in the middle of an envelope, as though in observance of a correct course.

  “I was never the better for education.”

  “You might have been, if you had had more of it. I daresay that is what the schoolkeepers think. And you do not know what you would have been without it.”

  “What I am now, as long as I had learned to read and write.”

  “What more did you learn?” said Maria. “They feel the children should go further. And you need not say ‘and fare worse’, as there is no likelihood of it.”

  “They want them in their schools for their own purposes. We want them in our home for ours. And as our stake is the larger, we have the right to decide.”

  “We must use it fairly. And I doubt if you have it, Roderick. You gave up your rights during your first marriage, and such things do not come back. But we will leave the matter for the moment. It may all look different presently.”

  “It will look the same to me. I never understand the effect of a different time on other people.”

  “Good morning, Sir Roderick; good morning, Lady Shelley. I suppose I should put the names in the other order. I am always impressing on Sefton the doctrine of ‘ladies first’, and then I fail myself on the first opportunity. Well, I suppose few of us practise what we preach.”

  “Good morning, Miss Petticoat,” said Sir Roderick, with a movement of rising, that he did not complete.

  The newcomer looked at the table, as though uncertain of her claims to what it afforded.

  “I understood we were to have breakfast down here, Lady Shelley.”

  Maria gave a smile and gesture with her eyes down.

  “Sit down, Miss Petticoat, sit down,” said Sir Roderick, with a note of putting someone at ease, who might not be so. “Sit down and give us your opinion on a matter that concerns you as much as ourselves. The question is arising again of the children’s leaving their home for school. Our connections cannot let it rest, and we are forced to the point of considering it. What help can you be to us?”

  “Well, really, Sir Roderick, I had not thought of the matter. And perhaps I am hardly the person to be consulted. It might be thought to involve me too closely. Not that I should not despise myself, if I could not give an honest opinion. And I do see there is much to be said on both sides.”

  “Come, Miss Petticoat, you will not leave us. You are one of ourselves. My wife could not make a list or go to a meeting without you. And the children will always be having holidays, or being ill or expelled. We had no thought of a parting. Maria is upset at the bare idea.”

  “I have never had the idea, so that is not quite true,” said the latter, putting down the letters. “Will you have a hot roll, Miss Petticott? They ought to be finished today—that is why my husband and I are struggling with them.”

  “Thank you, Lady Shelley; they make a nice change from toast. Not that that is not the best thing for every day. I say to the children, when they tire of it–” Miss Petticott broke off as Maria’s attention failed.

  “My dear, Miss Petticoat has no coffee.”

  Maria almost raised her eyes.

  “My dear, Miss Petticoat has no coffee,” said her husband in the same tone, as though a first appeal hardly qualified for success.

  “Do you know you always pronounce Miss Petticott’s name ‘Petticoat’?”

  “I pronounce it as it is said. Of course I know the name. What does Miss Petticoat say herself?”

  “Oh, do not worry about it, Sir Roderick. It has quite a nice, little, homely sound. I should quite miss my pet name,” said Miss Petticott, hurrying past these words. “Not that it is meant in that way, of course; that is only my way of putting it. But I should quite miss the variation in the name, as you pronounce it. And I believe the derivation is not very different. The name is derived–” Miss Petticott again broke off, finding that inattentiveness, which she had encountered in her pupils, was a family characteristic.

  “I shall take matters into my own hands, Miss Petticoat. I am not going to let you be neglected for another moment.”

  “Thank you, Sir Roderick. I do not know why I should be spoilt like this,” said Miss Petticott, taking a rather full view of conventional attention. “I cannot say why the children are so late. I cannot explain it.”

  “They are puzzled by finding no breakfast in the schoolroom,” said Maria. “If you would ring the bell in the hall, it will suggest that we are downstairs. They do little thinking for themselves.”

  “Allow me, allow me, Miss Petticoat,” said Sir Roderick, keeping his eyes averted from Miss Petticott’s progress to the door. “I do not know why our duties should devolve upon you.”

  The latter returned with the brisk steps of relief of mind. She saw every reason why duties should fall to her share, or saw the one reason, that they gave her her foothold in the house. She was a buxom, cheerful woman of forty-six, with cheeks of unvarying red, hair turning grey, bright, full, brown eyes, and features of the shapeless kind that involves so many shapes. She had the fewest wishes of any person in the house, indeed, had one wish, that she would have enough money for her old age; and this was eased by the hope that, if she remained long enough with the Shelleys, they would provide it.

  Voices sounded on the stairs and Maria raised her eyes.

  “The children are talking to Aldom again. I do not know how to prevent it.”

  “Neither do I, Lady Shelley, as you do not wish it to be forbidden.”

  “I can hardly wish that. There is nothing against their talking to him. But they talk to nobody else. I suppose they do need more companionship.”

  “I do my best for them, Lady Shelley.”

  “You do too much, Miss Petticoat. Do not give them another thought,” said Sir Roderick. “The little ruffians prefer the servants’ company. It is more on their own ground. They are all equally uneducated. I mean, you have not had time to get them up to your level. We hope they may reach it in the end.”

  A girl and boy entered and advanced to embrace their parents. They came to their father first, but he motioned them to pass him and give Maria the first greeting. They took no notice of Miss Petticott,
an omission that neither she nor they nor anyone else observed. Sir Roderick’s face lit up with affection and pride, Maria’s with affection and pride and eager hope, Miss Petticott’s with reflected light.

  Both children resembled both their parents, but they showed less likeness to each other. Clemence looked her father’s child, but her build was shapely and her own, and her features had a sharper mould. Sefton, still in a childish stage, already showed his mother’s massiveness. His features seemed to be Maria’s before life had changed them. They both had their mother’s grey-green eyes, Sefton’s the wider and more simply expressive. His sister’s seemed a veiled and deeper edition of them, but when the veil was lifted, held their own light. There was something uncertain and wary about them, and while they hardly saw Miss Petticott, they saw their father often, and their mother whenever her eyes fell upon them or attracted theirs.

  “Aldom says the walls of the house are rotten,” said Sefton, in clear, conscious tones.

  “I expect he said that the wall of the schoolroom had some rot in it,” said Maria. “Now is not that what he said?”

  “Yes, I think it was.”

  “We must quote people correctly another time. That is only fair to them, isn’t it? We must not give a wrong impression. Would you have waited upstairs until someone came to fetch you?”

  “We thought the breakfast might come up. It is sometimes late.”

  “Not as late as this. You are a very dependent pair. Would you like to go somewhere where you would learn to rely more on yourselves?”

  “No,” said Sefton, his eyes changing.

  “Go where?” said Clemence.

  “Maria, say what you mean,” said Sir Roderick. “Children do not need to have things made puzzling for them.”

  “Do they know what I mean?” said Maria, smiling.

  “Oliver’s aunts have written again,” said Clemence, looking at the letters.

  “They hardly need things to be made so easy,” said Maria. “And what have Oliver’s aunts to say, Clemence?”

  “They want us to go to their schools.”

  “Well, they think it would be better for you.”

  “Then they ought to want it.”