The Lone Hand (Pain)/Chapter 1

T is quite possible to love a person whom one does not respect—of whom one even disapproves. I loved my father, but I certainly did not respect him. He did not even respect himself.

When he married my mother, much against the wishes of his family, my grandfather bought him an annuity of two hundred a year, and desired to have nothing more to do with him. My mother died when I was quite a little girl, but I have a vivid recollection that she was just about as helpless as my father. In times of financial crisis—and, thanks to my father, these were very frequent—the two would sit staring at one another over the fire, and say that this was the beginning of the end, or exhort each other to hope and courage, but never, by any chance, take any practical way of dealing with the situation. On these gloomy occasions my father generally made a will. I do not think he, at any time, had anything to leave us worth mentioning, but the sonorous phrases and the feeling that he was doing something business-like seemed to give him a melancholy satisfaction. I have the last will that he made before me now. It begins: “I, Bernard Castel, being of sound mind and understanding, and at peace with God and man, do hereby give and bequeath all my real and personal estate, of whatsoever kind, to my only beloved daughter, Wilhelmina.” There followed directions as to the ways of disposing of this estate, supposing it should exceed twenty-five thousand pounds at the time of his death, and further directions if it should exceed fifty thousand. At that time we were as usual skating on the very edge of bankruptcy. I remember my father returned in triumph from dealing with the local tradesman, who was his principal creditor. “I have done it, Wilhelmina,” he said. “And I doubt if any other man in the world could have done it. Another coat of paint and there would have been a collision.”

I suppose he really loved me. He often told me, especially when a financial crisis was at its worst, that I was all he had in the world. But he never insured his life, and never made any provision for me after his death. After all, I believe that a father and a girl of sixteen, even if they happen to be gentlefolks, can live in the country on two hundred a year, and even put by a few pounds for insurance. The trouble was that my father could not let his income alone. Every quarter-day brought some new scheme, generally of a wildly speculative and gambling character. And before next quarter-day we were terribly hard up. At first my father confided these schemes to me, but I am quite practical, and I hated them, and told him so. Then he kept his schemes to himself, merely observing, in the deepest despondency when the bottom had dropped out of them: “Wilhelmina, I fear that I have made a fool of myself again.” He sometimes earned a little money by writing, and I think might have earned more. He wrote stories of the most extreme sentimentality, and of the most aggressively moral character; and one of the Sunday magazines used to publish them. He and I have screamed over them many a time. Shortly after one quarter-day he went down to a land auction in Essex and bought a small plot for ten pounds. When I remonstrated, he said feebly that an excellent free luncheon had been provided for all who attended the sale, and that, after all, much money had been made by poultry farming. I asked him if either he or I knew one single fact about poultry, except that they never laid as many eggs as one expected. He admitted it, and in a rare fit of remorse sat down at once and wrote a story about a girl with consumption which brought him in nearly enough to cover the difference between the price he had paid for the land and the price he sold it for a few days later.

He was popular, as most extravagant men with a sense of humour are, but his sense of humour had a blind point. He could never see that any of his wild-cat business was utterly ridiculous, or understand why sometimes in the middle of our deepest distress I could not help laughing at him. Yet he did not take his literary work seriously at all, and it used to be my chief amusement to get him to read out his own stories, with his own parenthetical comments. His popularity certainly served him at some of the times of crisis, and made his creditors lenient with him. During his last illness several people to whom he owed money, and had owed money for a long time, sent him presents. I thought it was rather touching. We were living then at a village called Castel-on-Weld, and we lived there simply and solely because my father happened to come upon the name in an old Bradshaw, and thought that it would be nice and hereditary to be Bernard Castel, Esq., of Castel-on-Weld. I am not aware that any of his ancestors had ever lived within a hundred miles of the place.

On the day after the funeral I got the only letter I ever received from my grandfather. It did not pretend to any grief over the dead, and it informed me, in a courteously acidulated way, that he did not wish to see me and that I had nothing to expect from him. But it enclosed a cheque for two hundred pounds, to cover present expenses and until I was able to get work

Now, I think a really fine and high-spirited girl out of a penny book would have torn that cheque in half and sent it back to him with a few dignified words. But I did not see why my butcher and baker and candlestick-maker should be called upon to finance my exhibition of a proud and imperious nature. That was what it would have come to, for we owed money to the butcher and the baker, and I do not doubt we should have owed it to the candlestick-maker as well but for the fact that there was no candlestick-maker in the village. So I wrote: "Dear Grandpapa,—Thanks very much for the two hundred pounds, which will be most useful, but you don't seem to know how to write a letter to a girl who has just lost her father. I sha'n't bother you.—Your affectionate granddaughter, .”

Then the parson and the doctor came round, and they were two good men. The doctor said that medical etiquette did not permit him to make any charge to an orphan girl, and that if he took my money he would be hounded out of the profession, and quite properly. But I told him that I thought he was lying, and made him take the money. As it was, he had given us any amount of his care and time and charged about half nothing for it. He was not a rich man, either. The parson said that his wife wanted someone to act as a companion and to assist in looking after the little girls. I thanked him very much, but I said that I believed, if she thought it over, she would find that she didn't. They gave me lots of good advice, and when I sold all the furniture and effects, they bid frantically against one another for the six bottles of distinctly inferior sherry which at that time constituted our entire cellar. Other friends did similar acts of kindness at the sale. I had meant it to be a perfectly genuine sale, but all the time I felt that I was passing round the hat. I do not think the auctioneer has ever forgotten it. The way that sherry, with the maker's name giving it away on every bottle, fetched the price of a vintage Château d'Yquem of great age must have made an indelible impression.

I had thought it all out. I really did not want to take from these good people what was given in the merest charity. I was not, as a matter of fact, very intimate with any of them. I did not want to be a companion, even if the parson's wife had had any sort of use for a companion. I had quite clearly made up my mind that there was no work in the world that I should be ashamed to do, if I could do it; but that I would not take up anything which could not possibly lead to anything. Now, nearly every feminine occupation recommended to the distressed, but untrained, gentlewoman is a cul-de-sac, and when you get over the wall at the end of the cul-de-sac you are in the workhouse. I had also decided that I must get out of Castel-on-Weld, because things did not happen there, and in consequence I could not take advantage of things happening. I determined to go to London.

Beyond the general principles which I have indicated I had no clear idea of what I was going to do, but I had got new clothes, no debts, and about seventy-five pounds in cash. I think I was well educated, though rather in a general and erratic way. My father, who had never been in France in his life, spoke the most idiomatic and even the most argotic French, with the vilest of accents. He infinitely preferred French fiction to English, and I will do him the justice to say that he generally remembered to lock it up. It is possible that with my knowledge of French, music, and literature I might have become a governess, but to become a governess is to walk deliberately into the cul-de-sac. I had vague ideas that I should like to get into some kind of business, and by cleverness and practicality and temperance and early rising, and the rest of the bag-of-tricks, worm my way slowly upwards until I was a manageress and indispensable. All the time I should be saving money, and should then be ready to start for myself. I had not decided what the business was to be; once in London I should have time to look about me.

I had also thought of marriage. Even if I had not thought of it, the fact that the doctor proposed to me twice would have reminded me of it I was pretty enough, and though the idea of falling in love never occurred to me, I thought that I might marry rather well one day. That was an additional reason for leaving Castel-on-Weld. I had already twice refused the only marriageable man in the neighbourhood. But in any case I was only eighteen, and I did not mean to marry for some time to come.

I was going to play a lone hand, and the honest truth is that I rather enjoyed the prospect. I was going to London, a place where things happen, and I was going to do what I wanted in the way I wanted. And perhaps I should starve, and perhaps I should have fun. So one morning I got into a third-class railway carriage, and an old woman talked to me at length about her somewhat unseemly physical infirmities. I hope I was sympathetic, but my mind was already in London, looking out for the possibility of adventure.

I did not have to wait long in London to discover that strange things happen there. The first thing that I noticed on my arrival at Charing Cross was that on the platform, under the clock, there were some fifteen girls, all of whom bore the closest possible physical resemblance to myself. We might all have been sisters.