A Woman's War by Warwick Deeping (ap literature book list .txt) đź“–
- Author: Warwick Deeping
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a healer’s name. Parker Steel was essentially a selfish
mortal, and selfish men are often the happiest, provided
they succeed.
Yet no man, however selfish, can wholly stifle his own
thoughts. That the silence he kept was an immoral
silence, no man knew better than did Parker Steel. People would have shrunk from him had they known the
truth, as a refined woman shrinks from the offensive
carcass of a drunken tramp. His own niceness of taste
revolted from the consciousness of chance and undeserved
pollution. Ambition was strong in him, however, and
the cold tenacity to hold what he had gained. More
isolated than Selkirk on his island, he had to bear the bitterness of it alone, knowing that sympathy was locked
out by silence.
The supreme trying of his powers of hypocrisy came for
him in his attitude towards his wife. Parker Steel was
in no sense an uxorious fellow, and neither he nor Betty
were ever demonstrative towards each other. An occasional half-perfunctory meeting of the lips had satisfied both after the first year of marriage. For this reason
Parker Steel’s ordeal was less complex and severe than
if he had had to repulse an emotional and warm-blooded
woman.
The first diplomatic development had been insomnia;
at least that was the excuse he made to Betty when he
chose to sleep alone in his dressing-room at the back of
the house. The faintest sound disturbed him, so he protested, and the rattle of wheels over the cobbles of the
Square kept him irritably sleepless in the early hours of
the morning. To Betty Steel there was no inconsistency
in the excuse he gave. She thought him worried and
overworked, and there was abundant justification for the
latter evil. Winter and early spring are the briskest
seasons of a doctor’s life. Dr. Steel had had seven severe
cases of pneumonia on his list one week.
“You are too much in demand, Parker,” she had said.
“There is always the possibility of a partner to be considered.”
“Thanks, no; I am not a believer in a co-operative
business.”
“You must take a jaunt somewhere as soon as the work
slackens.”
“All in good time, dear.”
“Sicily is fashionable.”
Parker Steel had indulged in optimistic reflections to
distract her vigilance. She had sought to prove that he
was in stale health by remarking that the wound on his
forefinger had not completely healed. He was still wearing the finger-stall that covered the fons et origo malt.
“There is absolutely no need for you to fuss about me,”
he had answered; “I am not made of iron, and the work
tells. Three thousand a year is not earned without
worry.”
“As much as that, Parker?”
He had touched a susceptible passion in her.
“Perhaps more. We shall be able to call our own tune
before we are five-and-forty.”
“Heaven defend us, Parker, you hint at terrible things.
Respectable obesity, and morning prayers.”
Her husband had laughed, and given her plausible
comfort.
“You will be more dangerous then than you are now,”
he had said.
In truth, their fortunes were very much in the ascendant, and the social side of professional life had prospered
in Mrs. Betty’s hands. The brunette was supreme in
Roxton so far as beauty was concerned, supreme also in
the yet more magic elements of graceful savoir-faire and
tact. She was one of those women who had learned to
charm by flattery without seeming to be a sycophant;
moreover, she had tested the wisdom of propitiating her
own sex by appearing even more amiable to women than
to men. Since the passing of the Murchisons she had
had nothing in the way of rivalry to fear. True, two
“miserable squatters” had put up brass plates in the
town, and scrambled for some of the poorer of James Murchison’s patients. Mrs. Betty had been able to call upon
the wives with patronizing magnanimity. They were both
rather dusty, round-backed ladies, with no pretensions to
style, either in their own persons or in the persons of their
husbands. One of these professional gentlemen, a huge
and flat-faced Paddy, resembled a police constable in
plain clothes. The other was rather a meek young man
in glasses, destitute of any sense of humor, and very useful in the Sunday-school.
Roxton had weathered Lent and Easter, and Lady
Sophia Gillingham, Dame President of the local habitation of the Primrose League; patroness of all Roxton
charities, Dissenting enterprises excepted; and late lady-inwaiting to the Queen; had called her many dear friends
together to discuss the coming Midsummer Bazaar that
was held annually for the benefit of the Roxton Cottage
Hospital. Roxton, like the majority of small country
towns, was a veritable complexity of cliques, and by
“Roxton” should be understood the superior people who
were Unionists in politics, and Church Christians in religion. There were also Chapel Christians in Roxton,
chiefly of Radical persuasion, and therefore hardly decent
in the sight of the genteel. People of ” peculiar views—”
were rare, and not generally encouraged. Some of the
orthodox even refused to buy a local tradesman’s boots,
because that particular tradesman was not a believer in
the Trinity. The inference is obvious that the “Roxton” concerned in Lady Sophia’s charitable bazaar, was
superior and highly cultured Roxton, the Roxton of dinner-jackets and distinction, equipages, and Debrett.
To be a very dear friend of Lady Sophia Gillingham’s
was to be one of the chosen and elect of God, and Betty
Steel had come by that supreme and angelic exaltation.
Perhaps Mignon’s kitten had purred and gambolled Mrs.
Betty into favor; more probably the physician’s wife had
nothing to learn from any cat. Betty Steel and her husband dined frequently at Roxton Priory. The brunette
had even reached the unique felicity of being encouraged
in informal and unexpected calls. Lady Sophia possessed
a just and proper estimate of her own social position.
She was fat, commonplace, and amiable, poorly educated,
a woman of few ideas. But she was Lady Sophia Gillingham, and would have expected St. Peter to give her proper
precedence over mere commoners in the anteroom of
heaven.
The third Thursday after Easter Mrs. Betty Steel
drove homeward in a radiant mood, with the spirit of
spring stolen from the dull glint of a fat old lady’s eyes.
There had been an opening committee meeting, and
Lady Sophia had expressed it to be her wish that Mrs.
Steel should be elected secretary. Moreover, the production of a play had been discussed, a pink muslin drama
suited to the susceptibilities of the Anglican public. The
part of heroine had been offered, not unanimously, to Mrs.
Betty. And with a becoming spirit of diffidence she had
accepted the honor, when pressed most graciously by the
Lady Sophia’s own prosings.
Mrs. Betty might have impersonated April as she
swept homeward under the high beneficence of St.
Antonia’s elms. The warmth of worldly well - being
plumps out a woman’s comeliness. She expands and
ripens in the sun of prosperity and praise, in contrast to
the thousands of the ever-contriving poor, whose sordid
faces are but the reflection of sordid facts.
Betty Steel’s face had an April alluringness that day;
its outlines were soft and beautiful, suggestive of the
delicacy of apple bloom seen through morning mist. She
was exceeding well content with life, was Mrs. Betty,
for her husband was in a position to write generous
checks, and the people of Roxton seemed ready to pay
her homage.
Parker Steel was reading in the diningroom when this
triumphant and happy lady came in like a white flower
rising from a sheath of green. It was only when selfishly
elated that the wife showed any flow of affection for her
husband. For the once she had the air of an enthusiastic girl whom marriage had not robbed of her
ideals.
“Dear old Parker”
She went towards him with an out-stretching of the
hands, as he dropped the Morning Post, and half rose
from the lounge chair.
“Had a good time?”
“Quite splendid.”
She swooped towards him, not noticing the furtive yet
watchful expression in her husband’s face.
“Give me a kiss, old Morning Post.”
“How is Madam Sophia?”
“Most affable.”
Parker Steel had caught her out-stretched hands. It
was as though he were afraid of touching his wife’s lips.
“Making conquests, eh?”
“Waal I guess that” and she spoke through her
nose.
“Dollars?”
“Enticing them into the family pocket.”
Something in her husband’s eyes touched Betty Steel
beneath her vivacity and easy persiflage. Her husband
had risen from his chair, released her hands, and moved
away towards the fire. She had a sudden instinct telling
her that he was not glad of her return.
The wife’s airiness was damped instantly. Parker
Steel had repelled her with the semi-playful air of a man
not wishing to be bothered. She had noticed this suggestion of aloofness much in him of late, and had ascribed
it to irritability, the result of overwork.
“Anything the matter, dear?”
“Matter?”
He looked at her frankly, with arched brows and open
eyes.
“Yes, you seem tired—”
“There is some excuse for me. This is the first ten
minutes I have had to myself all day. It is an effort to
talk when one’s tongue has been going for hours.”
His wife’s face appeared a little triste and peevish.
She glanced at herself in the mirror over the mantel-piece,
and found herself wondering why life seemed composed
of actions and reactions.
“Have you had tea?”
“No, I waited,” and he turned and rang the bell with
a feeling of relief. It was trying to his watchfulness for
Parker Steel to be left alone with his own wife. Even the
white cap of the parlor-maid was welcome to him, or the
flimsiest barrier that could aid him in his ordeal of silent
self-isolation. The art of hypocrisy grows more complex with each new statement of relationships. And
hypocrisy in the home is the reguilding of a substance
that tarnishes with every day. The wear and tear of
life erase the lying surface, and the daily daubing becomes
a habit by necessity, even as a single dying of the hair
pledges the vain mortal to perpetual self-decoration.
THERE were many men in Wilton who had looked
at their children’s graves, little banks of green turf
ranged on the hillside where the winds wailed in winter
like the mythical spirits of the damned. A gaunt, graceless place, this cemetery, a place where the insignificant
dead lived only in the few notches of a mason’s chisel
upon stone. A high yellow brick wall encompassed its
many acres. Immediately within the iron gates stood
a tin chapel, a building that might have stood for the
Temple of Ugliness, the deity of commercialized towns.
On either side of the main walk a row of sickly aspens
lifted their slender branches against a hueless sky.
To the man and the woman who stood in one corner of
this burial-ground, looking down upon a grave that had
been but lately banked with turf, there was an infinite and
sordid sadness in the scene. Two graves, not ten yards
away, had been filled in but the day before, and the grass
was caked and stained with yellow clay. Near them stood
the black wooden shelter used by the officiating priest in
dirty weather. A few wreaths, sodden, rain-drenched,
the flowers already turning brown, seemed to mock the
hands that had placed them there.
White headstones everywhere; a few obelisks; a few
plain wooden crosses; rank mounds where no name lingered after death. Ever and again the thin clink of
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