It began in a Woman’s Club in London on a February afternoon—an
uncomfortable club, and a miserable afternoon—when Mrs. Wilkins, who
had come down from Hampstead to shop and had lunched at her club, took
up The Times from the table in the smoking-room, and running her
listless eye down the Agony Column saw this:
To Those who Appreciate Wistaria and Sunshine. Small mediaeval
Italian Castle on the shores of the Mediterranean to be Let
Furnished for the month of April. Necessary servants remain. Z,
Box 1000, The Times.
That was its conception; yet, as in the case of many another, the
conceiver was unaware of it at the moment.
So entirely unaware was Mrs. Wilkins that her April for that year had
then and there been settled for her that she dropped the newspaper with
a gesture that was both irritated and resigned, and went over to the
window and stared drearily out at the dripping street.
Not for her were mediaeval castles, even those that are specially
described as small. Not for her the shores in April of the
Mediterranean, and the wistaria and sunshine. Such delights were only
for the rich. Yet the advertisement had been addressed to persons who
appreciate these things, so that it had been, anyhow, addressed too
to her, for she certainly appreciated them; more than anybody knew;
more than she had ever told. But she was poor. In the whole world she
possessed of her very own only ninety pounds, saved from year to year,
put by carefully pound by pound, out of her dress allowance. She had
scraped this sum together at the suggestion of her husband as a shield
and refuge against a rainy day. Her dress allowance, given her by her
father, was £100 a year, so that Mrs. Wilkins’s clothes were what
her husband, urging her to save, called modest and becoming, and her
acquaintance to each other, when they spoke of her at all, which was
seldom for she was very negligible, called a perfect sight.
Mr. Wilkins, a solicitor, encouraged thrift, except that branch of it
which got into his food. He did not call that thrift, he called it bad
housekeeping. But for the thrift which, like moth, penetrated into Mrs.
Wilkins’s clothes and spoilt them, he had much praise. “You never
know,” he said, “when there will be a rainy day, and you may be very
glad to find you have a nest-egg. Indeed we both may.”
Looking out of the club window into Shaftesbury Avenue—hers was an
economical club, but convenient for Hampstead, where she lived, and for
Shoolbred’s, where she shopped—Mrs. Wilkins, having stood there some
time very drearily, her mind’s eye on the Mediterranean in April, and
the wistaria, and the enviable opportunities of the rich, while her
bodily eye watched the really extremely horrible sooty rain falling
steadily on the hurrying umbrellas and splashing omnibuses, suddenly
wondered whether perhaps this was not the rainy day Mellersh—Mellersh
was Mr. Wilkins—had so often encouraged her to prepare for, and whether
to get out of such a climate and into the small mediaeval castle wasn’t
perhaps what Providence had all along intended her to do with her
savings. Part of her savings, of course; perhaps quite a small part.
The castle, being mediaeval, might also be dilapidated, and
dilapidations were surely cheap. She wouldn’t in the least mind a few
of them, because you didn’t pay for dilapidations which were already
there; on the contrary—by reducing the price you had to pay they really
paid you. But what nonsense to think of it . . .
She turned away from the window with the same gesture of mingled
irritation and resignation with which she had laid down The Times,
and crossed the room towards the door with the intention of getting her
mackintosh and umbrella and fighting her way into one of the
overcrowded omnibuses and going to Shoolbred’s on her way home and
buying some soles for Mellersh’s dinner—Mellersh was difficult with
fish and liked only soles, except salmon—when she beheld Mrs.
Arbuthnot, a woman she knew by sight as also living in Hampstead and
belonging to the club, sitting at the table in the middle of the room
on which the newspapers and magazines were kept, absorbed, in her turn,
in the first page of The Times.
Mrs. Wilkins had never yet spoken to Mrs. Arbuthnot, who belonged to
one of the various church sets, and who analysed, classified, divided
and registered the poor; whereas she and Mellersh, when they did go
out, went to the parties of impressionist painters, of whom in
Hampstead there were many. Mellersh had a sister who had married one of
them and lived up on the Heath, and because of this alliance Mrs.
Wilkins was drawn into a circle which was highly unnatural to her, and
she had learned to dread pictures. She had to say things about them,
and she didn’t know what to say. She used to murmur, “Marvellous,” and
feel that it was not enough. But nobody minded. Nobody listened. Nobody
took any notice of Mrs. Wilkins. She was the kind of person who is not
noticed at parties. Her clothes, infested by thrift, made her
practically invisible; her face was non-arresting; her conversation was
reluctant; she was shy. And if one’s clothes and face and conversation
are all negligible, thought Mrs. Wilkins, who recognised her
disabilities, what, at parties, is there left of one?
Also she was always with Wilkins, that clean-shaven, fine-looking man,
who gave a party, merely by coming to it, a great air. Wilkins was
very respectable. He was known to be highly thought of by his senior
partners. His sister’s circle admired him. He pronounced adequately
intelligent judgments on art and artists. He was pithy; he was prudent;
he never said a word too much, nor, on the other hand, did he ever
say a word too little. He produced the impression of keeping copies
of everything he said; and he was so obviously reliable that it often
happened that people who met him at these parties became discontented
with their own solicitors, and after a period of restlessness
extricated themselves and went to Wilkins.
Naturally Mrs. Wilkins was blotted out. “She,” said his sister, with
something herself of the judicial, the digested, and the final in her
manner, “should stay at home.” But Wilkins could not leave his wife at
home. He was a family solicitor, and all such have wives and show them.
With his in the week he went to parties, and with his on Sundays he
went to church. Being still fairly young—he was thirty-nine—and
ambitious of old ladies, of whom he had not yet acquired in his
practice a sufficient number, he could not afford to miss church, and
it was there that Mrs. Wilkins became familiar, though never through
words, with Mrs. Arbuthnot.
She saw her marshalling the children of the poor into pews. She would
come in at the head of the procession from the Sunday School exactly
five minutes before the choir, and get her boys and girls neatly fitted
into their allotted seats, and down on their little knees in their
preliminary prayer, and up again on their feet just as, to the swelling
organ, the vestry door opened, and the choir and clergy, big with the
litanies and commandments they were presently to roll out, emerged. She
had a sad face, yet she was evidently efficient. The combination used
to make Mrs. Wilkins wonder, for she had been told by Mellersh, on days
when she had only been able to get plaice, that if one were efficient
one wouldn’t be depressed, and that if one does one’s job well one
becomes automatically bright and brisk.
About Mrs. Arbuthnot there was nothing bright and brisk, though much in
her way with the Sunday School children that was automatic; but when
Mrs. Wilkins, turning from the window, caught sight of her in the club
she was not being automatic at all, but was looking fixedly at one
portion of the first page of The Times, holding the paper quite
still, her eyes not moving. She was just staring; and her face, as
usual, was the face of a patient and disappointed Madonna.
Obeying an impulse she wondered at even while obeying it, Mrs. Wil