a beautiful princess, he asks, “As beautiful as Annie?”).
Alastair sits at a table with an exercise book and a pencil and learns to recognise and make letters and read little words. So far his progress is not striking. I heard Mums going over with him a n, an, with great patience, then she said: “Now, Alastair, tell me what is that word?” and Alastair with the most charmingly helpful air said, “I’d tell you in a minute if I knew.”
You say you want to know all about the people here. Barbara says they are the dullest crowd she ever struck, and indeed they are utterly ordinary—what are we ourselves?—and very far from exciting, but I like them.
Mrs. Heggie, who can’t see any one without offering hospitality, came to tea with her daughter the other day. The daughter was calm and collected and condescended to us a good deal, but her mother was absolutely simmering with excitement. It seems she has always had an intense desire to be inside the Harbour House, and she was like a child at her first pantomime. I escorted her through every nook and cranny of it—we even visited the coal-cellar—and she gasped out admiration at everything she beheld. She was so interested in the few photographs she saw in the bedrooms, that we raked out boxes of them, and I believe she would have sat entranced till bedtime listening to the life-histories of people she had never known existed. The daughter, Joan by name, dragged her away in the end, evidently ashamed of her exuberance. She writes, this girl, but I can’t quite gather what. She is rather plain, with a long nose and chin, and an ugly laugh.
Miss Symington, Alastair’s aunt, is a woman of about forty-seven, quite good-looking if she knew how to make the best of herself; rich, free to do what she likes; and here she stays all the year round in a hideous house, eating badly cooked food, wearing ugly clothes, seeing nothing beautiful, hearing nothing beautiful, hardly, I think, aware that there is such a thing as beauty. What could one do to wake her up?
Her minister and his wife are so different. The Lamberts live in a plain little grey stone house in the middle of a walled garden; you enter by a green door in the wall. They have £300 a year to live on, and it shows how little money really matters, for they are absolutely happy. They have everything that any reasonable being could desire, a house where love is, good health, good books and a good fire. Also, by a merciful dispensation of Providence, they have a small servant called Betha, a wise and virtuous child, and she and Mrs. Lambert between them cook, clean and look after the two children. Always by one o’clock Betha has got on her black dress, ready to carry in the early dinner, and when she has washed the dinner dishes out she goes to give the two little girls their daily walk. Mrs. Lambert makes all the clothes for her babies, besides visiting the congregation, presiding at meetings, and reading every book she can lay her hands on. Mr. Lambert is rather a pet. He has a most engaging stammer and helps out the words by giving himself little slaps; but he also has what his wife calls “a dry manner,” and isn’t sufficiently affable to his congregation. Small and thin, with a sort of twisted smile, he is like a benevolent gnome; but his sermons are excellent, and he is a man of wide reading.
Then there is Dr. Kilgour and his sister. He delves in the past and writes of what he finds without hope of it ever seeing the light of publication; and his sister collects pretty well everything—old glass, china, furniture, brass. Her house is like a very nice museum; everywhere you turn there is something worth looking at, not the least being Miss Kilgour herself. Quite old—seventy, I believe—round and comfortable, with such white hair and blue eyes, she is full of funny old rhymes and stories of the people who once lived in Kirkmeikle, and the rise of the new people in Langtoun. There is a bite in her talk which is refreshing; it is so tiresome when everybody says nothing but good of everybody else!
As to men, I’ve already mentioned Mr. Lambert and Dr. Kilgour. Then there is Mr. Buckler, the retired Indian judge, and—Mr. Simon Beckett. I’ve kept him to the last like the bit of icing on a cake, for he is no less a person than the Simon Beckett who almost succeeded in climbing Everest. You remember Beckett and Cullis were together, well on their way to the top, when Cullis was killed and his companion had to return?
We couldn’t believe that it was the same Beckett, it seemed so utterly unlikely that he should be here; but it appears that when he was a small boy he and his brothers came here for sea-bathing, and the little quiet town remained in his memory, and he thought of it when he wanted a place in which to write in peace. For, you must know, he is writing an account of what happened on that expedition, thus late in the day because he was for long ill and broken.
I like him for his kindness to the small Alastair, who follows him with dog-like devotion.
Poor old Babs sniffs at the whole of Kirkmeikle, but—thanks to Aunt Constance whose acquaintance list I am convinced ranges from Kew to Kotmandu—we have got to know one family with whom she can feel at home, people called Erskine, who have a place about ten miles from this, Queensbarns. They are very pleasant people and are full of schemes for amusing us. “What d’you do here?” one of the girls asked me, and for the life of me I couldn’t tell her. I could only assure her that I didn’t play bridge, and that stunned her into silence. Babs and I went over and played badminton the other day at Queensbarns: it was very nice, but oh! how glad I was to creep back to our own funny little house.
Could you help liking a town that contained a place called The Watery Wynd? and another of the name of The Puddock Raw?
I like Kirkmeikle, but I ache all the time for my own countryside. D’you remember what the old woman said to Dorothy Wordsworth when she told her she lived in a pretty place? “Ay, the water of Tweed is a bonny water” . . . Isn’t there a text about “Weep not for him who is dead but weep sore for him who goeth away. . . .”
All the same, I’m happy.—Your loving
Nicole.
CHAPTER XV
“. . . as to not meeting with many people in this neighbourhood . . . I know we dine with four-and-twenty families.”
Jane Austen.
Mrs. Jackson was going to her first dinner-party from Rutherfurd. It had lain like a weight on her since ever she had got the invitation. She had gone to bed every night dreading it, and wakened in the morning weighed down by the thought of it. She was almost thankful that the day had come—to-morrow would be free from the oppression.
She had kept her fears to herself until, at tea-time on the fatal day her son had said carelessly, “By the way, aren’t we going out to dinner to-night?” when she could contain herself no longer.
“Oh, Andy,” she wailed, “you can say it like that as if it was nothing, something that had just come into your head, when the thought of it has been like a nether mill-stone round my neck for a week.”
Andrew was helping himself to jam, and he paused with the spoon in his hand and looked at his mother.
“Nonsense, Mother,” he said, “a dinner-party’s nothing to you. You didn’t mind them in Glasgow, you enjoyed them.”
“Ah, but this is a very different thing. The Glasgow ones were all more or less official, I knew what I was there for, and all that was wanted of me, but this——” Mrs. Jackson threw out a despairing hand,—“I suppose this’ll be to meet our county neighbours, and I’m terrified. I know how frozen these kind of people can be, and the way they look at you.”
Andrew laughed. “A few perfectly harmless people hoping for
