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Authors: Stella Gibbons
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setting in which young love with honourable intentions could see its beloved in the home setting, and afterwards declare itself on the tennis court or in the vegetable garden, and her married life, on its personal side, had been cloudless and happy as her happy youth.
She thought with pity of Jean, whose upbringing and environment had been so different from her own.
Jean’s parents had married one another to spite two other people, and her own birth had been dreaded as an additional complication in lives already over-full with social activities and money. Her childhood had been conscientiously organised, and luridly brightened by too many visits to cinemas and theatres and the company of smart, corrupt servants, while her holidays had either been passed at whatever expensive school she happened to be attending (because her parents “can’t cope with Jean at home”) or with Alda’s casually kind family. Her hygienic nursery was filled with elaborate and extravagant toys, and in it her mother’s maid used gigglingly to read extracts from Lady Chatterley ’ s Lover to Jean while smoking her father’s Turkish cigarettes. Lady Chatterley and her lover rolled off Jean without effect, and her budding nature was saved from becoming precocious, bitter and shallow partly by its own qualities and partly by that lonely help of the lonely child: reading.
She was not clever, but she was affectionate, and her instincts were sound, and upon this surface, as she entered her teens, the hierarchy of the English novelists imposed their pictures—romantic or picaresque, subtle or passionate—of the world. Through Dickens and Scott to Rider Haggard and Baroness Orczy she passed by way of Conan Doyle to Kipling; she lingered hand in hand with Stanley Weyman to discover Hugh Walpole and Arnold Bennett, and thus, through Thomas Hardy and Marion Crawford, she walked out into the contemporary world of Charles Morgan and Ethel Mannin, Aldous Huxley and Graham Greene, and—so led and comforted—her poor little nature was saved alive.
It will be remarked that her taste was catholic, and none the worse, we believe, for that. It is doubtful if your picker and chooser and sniffer gets as much pleasure (not that pleasure is what he reads for, of course; he reads because, like Guinness, it is Good For Him) from his careful choice as does your plunger and wallower and gasper, who enjoys Ben-Hur equally with Tess of the D ’ Urbervilles and is usually devouring three books at once.
By the help of the novelists, and her own nature, Jean had slowly learned to tolerate her unsatisfactory life and to find amusement and entertainment, even some contentment, in watching the scene about her. But she was affectionate; novels could not satisfy her need to love, rather than to be loved, and she began with crushes upon Gary Cooper and Clark Gable and ended by fixing all her longings and hopes upon marriage—and upon any personable man who showed any signs of interest in her.
The reader will have gathered what had been happening at intervals to Jean and her personable men during the past fifteen years, and all that she gained from each successive disappointment had been an increase in her own responsiveness to life, and the slow development of a half-amused, half-rueful philosophy. And Alda and her sisters, who did not notice such developments in their friends’ characters unless they were verbally announced, continued to tease old Jean about her passion for reading novels.
Alda, having worked out her train of complacent reflections, began through force of habit to wonder if there was any man in the neighbourhood who would “do for Jean,” and decided that the only hope was Mr.-Waite-who-has-some-books. True, she herself did not know him, but he had provided her with an excellent excuse for getting to know him when she returned his loan, and she resolved to rush through To Haiti in a Ketch and the rest and make his acquaintance as soon as was
She thought with pity of Jean, whose upbringing and environment had been so different from her own.
Jean’s parents had married one another to spite two other people, and her own birth had been dreaded as an additional complication in lives already over-full with social activities and money. Her childhood had been conscientiously organised, and luridly brightened by too many visits to cinemas and theatres and the company of smart, corrupt servants, while her holidays had either been passed at whatever expensive school she happened to be attending (because her parents “can’t cope with Jean at home”) or with Alda’s casually kind family. Her hygienic nursery was filled with elaborate and extravagant toys, and in it her mother’s maid used gigglingly to read extracts from Lady Chatterley ’ s Lover to Jean while smoking her father’s Turkish cigarettes. Lady Chatterley and her lover rolled off Jean without effect, and her budding nature was saved from becoming precocious, bitter and shallow partly by its own qualities and partly by that lonely help of the lonely child: reading.
She was not clever, but she was affectionate, and her instincts were sound, and upon this surface, as she entered her teens, the hierarchy of the English novelists imposed their pictures—romantic or picaresque, subtle or passionate—of the world. Through Dickens and Scott to Rider Haggard and Baroness Orczy she passed by way of Conan Doyle to Kipling; she lingered hand in hand with Stanley Weyman to discover Hugh Walpole and Arnold Bennett, and thus, through Thomas Hardy and Marion Crawford, she walked out into the contemporary world of Charles Morgan and Ethel Mannin, Aldous Huxley and Graham Greene, and—so led and comforted—her poor little nature was saved alive.
It will be remarked that her taste was catholic, and none the worse, we believe, for that. It is doubtful if your picker and chooser and sniffer gets as much pleasure (not that pleasure is what he reads for, of course; he reads because, like Guinness, it is Good For Him) from his careful choice as does your plunger and wallower and gasper, who enjoys Ben-Hur equally with Tess of the D ’ Urbervilles and is usually devouring three books at once.
By the help of the novelists, and her own nature, Jean had slowly learned to tolerate her unsatisfactory life and to find amusement and entertainment, even some contentment, in watching the scene about her. But she was affectionate; novels could not satisfy her need to love, rather than to be loved, and she began with crushes upon Gary Cooper and Clark Gable and ended by fixing all her longings and hopes upon marriage—and upon any personable man who showed any signs of interest in her.
The reader will have gathered what had been happening at intervals to Jean and her personable men during the past fifteen years, and all that she gained from each successive disappointment had been an increase in her own responsiveness to life, and the slow development of a half-amused, half-rueful philosophy. And Alda and her sisters, who did not notice such developments in their friends’ characters unless they were verbally announced, continued to tease old Jean about her passion for reading novels.
Alda, having worked out her train of complacent reflections, began through force of habit to wonder if there was any man in the neighbourhood who would “do for Jean,” and decided that the only hope was Mr.-Waite-who-has-some-books. True, she herself did not know him, but he had provided her with an excellent excuse for getting to know him when she returned his loan, and she resolved to rush through To Haiti in a Ketch and the rest and make his acquaintance as soon as was
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