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Page 12
Tom had sensibility, not a doubt of it; but it seems to me that she
had something better.
Here again, on the 16th October, "My dear Bessy planting some roots
Miss Hughes has brought her, looking for a place to put a root of pink
hepatica in, where (as she said) 'I might best see them in my walk.'"
Yes, he had sensibility; but she had imagination. A little Tom was
born a week after that. She took it badly, as she did most of her
labours, and was in bed a month. On the 18th November she went out for
the first time after the event--"the day delightful." She "went round
to all her flower-beds to examine their state, for she has every
little leaf in the garden by heart." Tom himself had been much moved
by the birth of his first boy. He was called up at 11.30, sent for
the midwife, was upset, walked about half the night, thanked God--"the
maid, by the way, very near catching me on my knees." She might have
caught Bessy on them every day, and no thought taken of so simple a
thing. But Tom had sensibility.
But a man who, eight years after marriage, can make his wife an April
fool, and record it, is no bad husband, and it would be a trespass on
his good fame to suggest it. He loved her dearly and could never have
been unkind to her. Far from that, happy domestic pictures abound in
his diaries. Here is one of a time when she had joined him in London,
on her way to stay with her sister in Edinburgh. They went together to
Hornsey, to see Barbara's grave. "At eight o'clock she and I sauntered
up and down the Burlington Arcade, then went and bought some prawns
and supped most snugly together." He takes the state-rooms costing �7
apiece, for "his own pretty girl." Meantime he is preparing to shelter
in France from civil process served upon him for the defalcations of
his deputy in Bermuda.
I need not follow the scenes through as they come. The essence of
Bessy Moore is expressed in what I have written of the first flush of
her married life. There was much more to come. Moore outlived all his
children, and she, poor soul, outlived her rattling, melodious Tom,
having known more sorrow than falls, luckily, to the lot of most
mothers. The death of her last girl, Anastasia, is beautifully told by
Tom; but a worse stroke than even that was the wild career of little
Tom, the son, his illness, disgrace, and death in the French Foreign
Legion. That indeed went near to breaking Bessy's heart. "Why do
people sigh for children? They know not what sorrow will come with
them." That is her own, and only recorded, outcry.
In _The Loves of the Angels_, an erotic and perfervid poem, which
fails, nevertheless, from want of concentration of the thought,
Zeraph, the third angel, is Tom himself, and the daughter of man,
Nama, with whom he consorts, is Bessy.
Humility, that low, sweet root,
From which all heavenly virtues shoot,
Was in the hearts of both--but most
In Nama's heart, by whom alone
Those charms for which a heaven was lost
Seemed all unvalued and unknown...
Certainly she had humility; but he gives her other Christian virtues--
So true she felt it that to _hope_,
To _trust_ is happier than to know.
But we may doubt if Tom knew what Bessy knew and excused. Sensibility
will not dig very deep.
THE MAIDS
They tell me that a respectable and ancient profession, and one always
honoured by literature, is dying out; and if that is true, then two
more clauses of the tenth Commandment will lose their meaning. For
a long time to come we shall go on grudging our neighbour his
house--there's no doubt about that; but even as his ox and ass have
ceased to enter into practical ethics because our average neighbour
doesn't possess either, so we hear it is to be with his servant and
his maid.
They have had their day. There are no domestic servants at the
registries; the cap and apron, than which no uniform ever more
enhanced a fair maid or extenuated a plain one, will be found only in
the war museum, as relics of ante-bellum practice; we shall sluice our
own doorsteps in the early morning hours, receive our own letters from
the postman, have our own conversations with the butcher's young man
at the area gate; and in time, perhaps, learn how it may be possible
to eat a dinner which we have ourselves cooked and served up. Better
for us, all that, it may well be; but will it be better for our girls?
I am sure it will not.
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