The Common Reader
Bitterly she cursed her husband who had made her a lady of adventure
instead of what nature intended, “a harmless household dove”. More and
more wildly she ransacked her brains for anecdotes, memories, scandals,
views about the bottomless nature of the sea, the inflammable character
of the earth—anything that would fill a page and earn her a guinea. She
remembered that she had eaten plovers’ eggs with Swift. “Here, Hussey,”
said he, “is a Plover’s egg. King William used to give crowns apiece for
them. . . .” Swift never laughed, she remembered. He used to suck in his
cheeks instead of laughing. And what else could she remember? A great
many gentlemen, a great many landladies; how the window was thrown up
when her father died, and her sister came downstairs with the
sugar-basin, laughing. All had been bitterness and struggle, except that
she had loved Shakespeare, known Swift, and kept through all the shifts
and shades of an adventurous career a gay spirit, something of a lady’s
breeding, and the gallantry which, at the end of her short life, led her
to crack her joke and enjoy her duck with death at her heart and duns at
her pillow.
III
MISS ORMEROD[8]
The trees stood massively in all their summer foliage spotted and
grouped upon a meadow which sloped gently down from the big white house.
There were unmistakable signs of the year 1835 both in the trees and in
the sky, for modern trees are not nearly so voluminous as these ones,
and the sky of those days had a kind of pale diffusion in its texture
which was different from the more concentrated tone of the skies we
know.
Mr. George Ormerod stepped from the drawing-room window of Sedbury
House, Gloucestershire, wearing a tall furry hat and white trousers
strapped under his instep; he was closely, though deferentially,
followed by a lady wearing a yellow-spotted dress over a crinoline, and
behind her, singly and arm in arm, came nine children in nankeen jackets
and long white drawers. They were going to see the water let out of a
pond.
The youngest child, Eleanor, a little girl with a pale face, rather
elongated features, and black hair, was left by herself in the
drawing-room, a large sallow apartment with pillars, two chandeliers,
for some reason enclosed in holland bags, and several octagonal tables
some of inlaid wood and others of greenish malachite. At one of these
little Eleanor Ormerod was seated in a high chair.
“Now, Eleanor,” said her mother, as the party assembled for the
expedition to the pond, “here are some pretty beetles. Don’t touch the
glass. Don’t get down from your chair, and when we come back little
George will tell you all about it.”
So saying, Mrs. Ormerod placed a tumbler of water containing about half
a dozen great water grubs in the middle of the malachite table, at a
safe distance from the child, and followed her husband down the slope of
old-fashioned turf towards a cluster of extremely old-fashioned sheep;
opening, directly she stepped on to the terrace, a tiny parasol of
bottle green silk with a bottle green fringe, though the sky was like
nothing so much as a flock bed covered with a counterpane of white
dimity.
The plump pale grubs gyrated slowly round and round in the tumbler. So
simple an entertainment must surely soon have ceased to satisfy. Surely
Eleanor would shake the tumbler, upset the grubs, and scramble down from
her chair. Why, even a grown person can hardly watch those grubs
crawling down the glass wall, then floating to the surface, without a
sense of boredom not untinged with disgust. But the child sat perfectly
still. Was it her custom, then, to be entertained by the gyrations of
grubs? Her eyes were reflective, even critical. But they shone with
increasing excitement. She beat one hand upon the edge of the table.
What was the reason? One of the grubs had ceased to float: he lay at the
bottom; the rest, descending, proceeded to tear him to pieces.
“And how has little Eleanor enjoyed herself?” asked Mr. Ormerod, in
rather a deep voice, stepping into the room and with a slight air of
heat and of fatigue upon his face.
“Papa,” said Eleanor, almost interrupting her father in her eagerness to
impart her observation, “I saw one of the grubs fall down and the rest
came and ate him!”
“Nonsense, Eleanor,” said Mr. Ormerod. “You are not telling the truth.”
He looked severely at the tumbler in which the beetles were still
gyrating as before.
“Papa, it was true!”
“Eleanor, little girls are not allowed to contradict their fathers,”
said Mrs. Ormerod, coming in through the window, and closing her green
parasol with a snap.
“Let this be a lesson,” Mr. Ormerod began, signing to the other children
to approach, when the door opened, and the servant announced,
“Captain Fenton.”
Captain Fenton “was at times thought to be tedious in his recurrence to
the charge of the Scots Greys in which he had served at the battle of
Waterloo.”
But what is this crowd gathered round the door of the George Hotel in
Chepstow? A faint cheer rises from the bottom of the hill. Up comes the
mail coach, horses steaming, panels mud-splashed. “Make way! Make way!”
cries the ostler and the vehicle dashes into the courtyard, pulls up
sharp before the door. Down jumps the coachman, the horses are led off,
and a fine team of spanking greys is harnessed with incredible speed in
their stead. Upon all this—coachman, horses, coach, and passengers—the
crowd looked with gaping admiration every Wednesday evening all through
the year. But to-day, the twelfth of March, 1852, as the coachman
settled his rug, and stretched his hands for the reins, he observed that
instead of being fixed upon him, the eyes of the people of Chepstow
darted this way and that. Heads were jerked. Arms flung out. Here a hat
swooped in a semi-circle. Off drove the coach almost unnoticed. As it
turned the corner all the outside passengers craned their necks, and one
gentleman rose to his feet and shouted, “There! there! there!” before he
was bowled into eternity. It was an insect—a red-winged insect. Out the
people of Chepstow poured into the high road; down the hill they ran;
always the insect flew in front of them; at length by Chepstow Bridge a
young man, throwing his bandanna over the blade of an oar, captured it
alive and presented it to a highly respectable elderly gentleman who now
came puffing upon the scene—Samuel Budge, doctor, of Chepstow. By
Samuel Budge it was presented to Miss Ormerod; by her sent to a
professor at Oxford. And he, declaring it “a fine specimen of the rose
underwinged locust” added the gratifying information that it “was the
first of the kind to be captured so far west.”
And so, at the age of twenty-four Miss Eleanor Ormerod was thought the
proper person to receive the gift of a locust.
When Eleanor Ormerod appeared at archery meetings and croquet
tournaments young men pulled their whiskers and young ladies looked
grave. It was so difficult to make friends with a girl who could talk of
nothing but black beetles and earwigs—“Yes, that’s what she likes,
isn’t it queer?—Why, the other day Ellen, Mama’s maid, heard from Jane,
who’s under-kitchenmaid at Sedbury House, that Eleanor tried to boil a
beetle in the kitchen saucepan and he wouldn’t die, and swam round and
round, and she got into a terrible state and sent the groom all the way
to Gloucester to fetch chloroform—all for an insect, my dear!—and she
gives the cottagers shillings to collect beetles for her—and she spends
hours in her bedroom cutting them up—and she climbs trees like a boy to
find wasps’ nests—oh, you can’t think what they don’t say about her in
the village—for she does look so odd, dressed anyhow, with that great
big nose and those bright little eyes, so like a caterpillar herself, I
always think—but of course she’s wonderfully clever and very good, too,
both of them. Georgiana has a lending library for the cottagers, and
Eleanor never misses a service—but there she is—that short pale girl
in the large bonnet. Do go and talk to her, for I’m sure I’m too stupid,
but you’d find plenty to say—” But neither Fred nor Arthur, Henry nor
William found anything to say—
“. . . probably the lecturer would have been equally well pleased
had none of her own sex put in an appearance.”
This comment upon a lecture delivered in the year 1889 throws some
light, perhaps, upon archery meetings in the ’fifties.
It being nine o’clock on a February night some time about 1862 all the
Ormerods were in the library; Mr. Ormerod making architectural designs
at a table; Mrs. Ormerod lying on a sofa making pencil drawings upon
grey paper; Eleanor making a model of a snake to serve as a paper
weight; Georgiana making a copy of the font in Tidenham Church; some of
the others examining books with beautiful illustrations; while at
intervals someone rose, unlocked the wire book case, took down a volume
for instruction or entertainment, and perused it beneath the chandelier.
Mr. Ormerod required complete silence for his studies. His word was law,
even to the dogs, who, in the absence of their master, instinctively
obeyed the eldest male person in the room. Some whispered colloquy there
might be between Mrs. Ormerod and her daughters—
“The draught under the pew was really worse than ever this morning,
Mama—”
“And we could only unfasten the latch in the chancel because Eleanor
happened to have her ruler with her—”
“—hm—m—m. Dr. Armstrong—Hm—m—m—”
“—Anyhow things aren’t as bad with us as they are at Kinghampton. They
say Mrs. Briscoe’s Newfoundland dog follows her right up to the chancel
rails when she takes the sacrament—”
“And the turkey is still sitting on its eggs in the pulpit.”
—“The period of incubation for a turkey is between three and four
weeks”—said Eleanor, thoughtfully looking up from her cast of the snake
and forgetting, in the interest of her subject, to speak in a whisper.
“Am I to be allowed no peace in my own house?” Mr. Ormerod exclaimed
angrily, rapping with his ruler on the table, upon which Mrs. Ormerod
half shut one eye and squeezed a little blob of Chinese white on to her
high light, and they remained silent until the servants came in, when
everyone, with the exception of Mrs. Ormerod, fell on their knees. For
she, poor lady, suffered from a chronic complaint and left the family
party forever a year or two later, when the green sofa was moved into
the corner, and the drawings given to her nieces in memory of her. But
Mr. Ormerod went on making architectural drawings at nine p.m. every
night (save on Sundays when he read a sermon) until he too lay upon the
green sofa, which had not been used since Mrs. Ormerod lay there, but
still looked much the same. “We deeply felt the happiness of ministering
to his welfare,” Miss Ormerod wrote, “for he would not hear of our
leaving him for even twenty-four hours and he objected to visits from my
brothers excepting occasionally for a short time. They, not being used
to the gentle ways necessary for an aged invalid, worried him . . . the
Thursday following, the 9th October, 1873, he passed gently away at the
mature age of eighty-seven years.” Oh, graves in country
churchyards—respectable burials—mature old gentlemen—D.C.L., LL.D.,
F.R.S., F.S.A.—lots of letters come after your names, but lots of women
are buried with you!
There remained the Hessian Fly and the Bot—mysterious insects! Not, one
would have thought, among God’s most triumphant creations, and yet—if
you see them under a microscope!—the Bot, obese, globular, obscene;
the Hessian, booted, spurred, whiskered, cadaverous. Next slip under the
glass an innocent grain; behold it pock-marked and livid; or take this
strip of hide, and note those odious pullulating lumps—well, what does
the landscape look like then?