Mrs Vambrace was a devout Roman Catholic lady, and when she had married the Professor it had been with a strong hope that he would shortly join her in her faith. It had seemed likely enough at the time. The romantic side of Catholicism had appealed to the young Vambrace, and his ravenous intellect had rapidly mastered subtleties of Catholic philosophy which were beyond her understanding. When her parents urged her to wait for his conversion before marrying, she had declined to do so, for the conversion was, in her mind, a certainty. But it had not come about. For a time the Professor stuck where he was, elegantly juggling with coloured balls of belief. But then his enthusiasm had cooled, and without anything definite being said, it became clear that he had lost interest in the project. His wife was free to do as she pleased.
What she pleased to do did not strengthen the bond between her and her husband, nor did it especially endear her to her Church. She sought mystical experience. She read, reflected, meditated, fasted, did spiritual exercises, and prayed, hoping humbly that some crumb of unmistakeable manna would be vouchsafed to her. She was gentle and kind and tried to do her best for her husband and child, but her yearning for a greater enlightenment blinded her to many of their commonplace needs. Pearl, as a child, had always been oddly dressed. She had never had a party, and was rarely asked to the parties of others. Her father, after a few disputes with his wife and one really blazing row with a monsignor who called to protest, caused Pearl to be educated in Protestant schools, but made her way difficult by insisting she be entered on the school records as an agnostic. It was the Professor’s contention, after his experiment in Catholicism, that a man could lead a life of Roman virtue without any religion at all, and he harangued Pearl on this theme from her fifth year. Her mother, tentatively and ineffectually, tried to soften this chilly doctrine with some odds and ends of spiritual counsel, snippets from a store of knowledge which led her daily farther from the world in which her body had its existence, which no child was capable of understanding. If Pearl had not been a girl of more than common strength of character she would have been in danger of losing her reason in that household.
Instead she was, at eighteen, a shy, dark girl with the fine eyes which Valentine had remarked, and the look of distinction which sometimes appears on the faces of those who have had to depend very much upon their own spiritual resources. Submissive to her father, loving and helpful to her mother, she was nevertheless conscious that she had a destiny apart from these unhappy creatures, and she waited patiently for the day of her deliverance.
Had it come, had the Great Experience arrived, which would free her from the loneliness which that divided household had imposed upon her? She thought with shame of her awkwardness when he had put out his hand for hers, and she had lacked courage to give it. But what had she done to deserve such luck as to have that wonderful young man to play her lover in The Tempest!
She murmured the words to herself as she sat on the side of her bed brushing her hair. Her father had always said that she would marry. Would she marry anyone half so thrilling as Roger Tasset? Her attempt to get new information about him on the way home had come to nothing. But her father meant to ask him to the house!
Was that anything to be thankful for? It was a neglected house, reasonably clean, but everything in it was threadbare, not from lack of money but from lack of desire for anything better. A Roman father, a mother who desired only to be alone with the Alone—what kind of household would such people maintain? She looked at her familiar room with new eyes; a white iron bedstead, a chest of drawers, a small mirror with a whorl in it, and a chair with weak back legs; her clothes hung behind a faded chintz curtain in a corner; the only picture was a framed postcard of Dürer’s “Praying Hands”, put there by her mother when she was a child, as next best thing to a crucifix; but there were many bookshelves with books of childhood, and the books of a sensitive, curious lonely girl. But to Pearl, in her present mood, it looked a pitiful room for a girl who hoped to attract the notice, and perhaps the love, of a prince among men. Such a girl should have a lovely room—the kind of room which she was convinced that Griselda Webster must have—and stocks of lovely clothes. Her father had taught her to talk, as he said, intelligently, but she was not convinced that this would be allurement enough for Roger Tasset. We always undervalue what we have never been without; Pearl thought little of intelligence and the conversation that goes with it.
She peered into the cloudy depths of the mirror, expertly avoiding the worst of the distortion caused by the whorl. In her white cotton nightdress, short-sleeved and falling only to her knees, she might have been a sibyl looking for a portent in the sacred smoke; but she was only a girl with the unfashionable sort of good looks staring at herself in a bad mirror. What right had she to be thinking of that glorious Apollo, of that planner of twenty shabby seductions?
Rye and tap water; it was to this melancholy potion that Solly turned for solace after he had called in at his mother’s room, and put her mind at ease for the night. He was guiltily conscious that, as he talked to her, he was comparing her age and dilapidated face, so baggy without its teeth, to Griselda’s fresh beauty; when he bent to kiss her a whiff of her medicine rose unappetizingly in his face; she mumbled his cheek and called him “lovey”, a name that he detested. Then, escaping to his attic sitting-room, he was free of her.
Free? Not much more so than when he sat at her side. He sipped at his flat drink and reflected upon his condition. His loyalty to his mother was powerful. Why? Because she depended so heavily upon it. She had told him, he could not reckon how many times, that he was all that she had in the world. This was true only in an emotional sense, of course. Mrs Bridgetower had come of a family well established in an importing business in Montreal, and when her father died, well before the days of succession duties, she and a sister had shared his considerable estate. Nor had her husband left her unprovided for. Without being positively wealthy, she was a woman of means. It requires a good deal of capital for two people to live as Mrs Bridgetower and her son lived, when there has been no breadwinner in the family for ten years. Money, it is often said, does not bring happiness; it must be added, however, that it makes it possible to support unhappiness with exemplary fortitude.
If only his father had lived, he thought. But when Solly was twelve Professor Bridgetower had surprisingly tumbled from a small outcropping of rock, while with a group of students on a field expedition, and as they gaped at him in dismay and incomprehension, he had died of heart failure in two minutes. The eminent geologist, with his bald head and his surprised blue eyes and his big moustache, was suddenly no more. That night Solly had sat by his mother’s bed until dawn, and in the coherent passages of her grief she made it plain to him that he was, henceforth, charged with the emotional responsibility toward her which his father had so unaccountably abdicated. The intellectual facade, the intricate understanding of the Yellow Peril, the sardonic manner, were a shell within which dwelt the real Mrs Bridgetower, who feared to be alone in the world and who was determined that she should not be so long as there was a man from whom she could draw vitality.
It was not that she offered nothing in return. She told Solly, embarrassingly, at least once a year that if it were necessary she would gladly lay down her life for him. But in the sort of life they led nothing resembling such a sacrifice was ever likely to be required. He never made any corresponding declaration, but daily and hourly he was required not to die but to live for her. This had meant the sacrifice of much that would have made his schooldays happier, and when he had gone to Waverley it had made it impossible for him to share fully in the university life.