Ivy Compton-Burnett - Dolores

The resemblance between Mrs Blackwood and Mrs Hutton went deeper than what is meant by “a strong family likeness;” and consists of a film of suggestions insistent on the stranger’s eyes, but unheeded by those which have long seen it transparent. They were sisters in the fullest sense — clearly of the same stock and strain. They were, in a word, in that stage of affinity where, with human creatures as with other complex things, contact is another word for clashing. For it happens with character as colours, that, though different examples may make a grateful whole, two shades of the same are likely in touching to offend. Mrs Hutton had the quickness of feeling and intelligence which marked Mrs Blackwood, and greater depth in both; though hardly sufficient to warrant her contempt of her sister’s shallowness. Mrs Blackwood’s tendency to jealousy and peevishness had also its place in her sister, and was also rooted to further depth; though under this head the latter did not insist upon the difference. The strain of kindliness which nature had implanted in both — perhaps with a firmer and more generous hand in Mrs Hutton — had grown in Mrs Blackwood under the influence of Mr Blackwood, and her own endeavour to live her religion in her dealings, into a consistent effort to attain to charity which might almost claim the name. In Mrs Hutton it had found itself in conflict with a talent for hitting on the foibles of her kind with a causticity which passed for wit, and a mingling of wit itself; had found the struggle for supremacy vain; and now held to a suppressed existence. Mrs Hutton had a greater dignity of presence and a truer culture than Mrs Blackwood, and did not fail to recognise the latter’s deficiency; not seldom entertaining the Reverend Cleveland by mimicry of her sister “speaking” at a temperance meeting, or talking for display with gesticulation.

Now, as a person of observation, and knowledge of human nature in its subtler aspects, for example, as acted upon by difference in religious views and sameness of blood, are you disposed to dark surmise on the relations of the houses of Blackwood and Hutton; or wondering how long it had been since relations between them existed? In this thing you may take heart. Their ground of intercourse never presented clefts on its surface, though the ensuing stratum was at times volcanic. As far as the masters of the families went, the intercourse was so entirely on the surface, that this covered eruptiveness did not affect it. Mr Blackwood combated Mr Hutton’s leanings to ritual, and urged him to stronger influence on the side of temperance, in unfaltering defiance of years and lack of result, affording to himself enjoyment unutterable, and only moderate annoyance to the latter, whose feelings were not so impervious to blunting influence. He regarded his mission as a high and significant one, and reported the degree of his success to the doctor in a serious spirit. The Reverend Cleveland enjoyed at his pleasure his neighbour’s masculine fellowship; and maintained towards him an easy goodwill; whose basis in his view of himself as a man of erudition of the more abstruse and higher order, as opposed to the doctor’s practical knowledge, did not render it strong to the inconvenient extent of showing him an unsuitable subject for Mrs Hutton’s mimicry.

Of the intercourse between Mrs Hutton and Mrs Blackwood an equally easy account can hardly be given. The local view of them was as an affectionate pair of sisters; and it was a current remark how “nice” it was, that they should spend their married life so near each other. But their intercourse was not confined to the safe, if easily exhaustible, sphere of the surface; and in its more perilous province sustained upheavals which would have threatened the exposed exterior, had not they been of that subtle kind to which open notice is forbidden. For example, when they met one day in the village, they expressed content that their ways coincided, and in making their farewells showed a cordial affection, which, however rarefied, was not in the least degree transparent. But if we suppose it was transparent, our knowledge will go further; for in a very few minutes the jar had come, the note of discord been struck. It was Mrs Blackwood who struck it. She neglected to show enthusiasm over an account by Mrs Hutton of a eulogy in a church paper of one of the Reverend Cleveland’s pamphlets; and when Mrs Hutton was goaded to exaggerate the terms, made it known that she had read the paragraph, and corrected her sister’s version. This was more than could be supported by flesh and blood — from flesh and blood of kindred substance; and hence the sisters’ dialogue was charged with hidden currents. It became a series of thrusts with verbal weapons seemingly innocent, but carrying each its poisoned point. Before they parted, Mrs Hutton had observed with candour and humility, that she recognised now how bigoted she had once been in her views upon Wesleyanism, and of how much higher a type church-people really were; and that intercourse with a university man made one so different, that it was quite an effort to associate with people of another order. Mrs Blackwood had let fall the casual opinions, that no woman who did not marry before thirty knew marriage in its truest sense; and that Dolores was clearly a great comfort to her father — of course she brought back the old days to him.

The old days! They were old indeed to Dolores; when her early memories were stirred by the signs that they were present with another than those who had known them. But she hardly saw her lot as holding ground for sorrowing, or rebelled against its barrenness of fellowship, and constraint before the watchful eyes for food for jealousy. It was not her way to pass sentence on men and women. Her sense of kinship with her kind was deep to pain; holding her shrinking from judgment, and pitiful of the much that embittered even the gladsome portion. She saw it her part to ease the burdens her stepmother bore with the hardness of rebellion; setting this before her as a duty; which, if it called for her highest effort, neither tried her past her strength, nor merited esteem of self in its doing. For the keynote of Dolores’ nature — as it had been of her mother’s before her — was instinctive loyalty of service to that rigorous lofty thing, to which we give duty as a name; a stern, devoted service, to duty interpreted as that which was the best which conditions could demand; an unfaltering, unquestioning, it may soon be said, unreasoning service, which showed her in a crisis no place for conflict or conscious sacrifice, but simply laid a course before her as that which was due from herself to her kind. Thus she was equal to the hardness of watching her stepmother’s days and her own through her stepmother’s eyes, and of accepting her father’s formal dealings as the best for the saving of them all.

For the Reverend Cleveland had learned the dread of domestic friction, and the moulding of his doings for his wife’s witnessing of them. It was a lesson which nine years earlier he would not have confessed the power to learn. Unthought-of conditions bring out unthought-of powers; and he took what his lot gave him, forbearing to throw away what it yielded in vain struggling for what was denied. But let it not be thought that his wife was a virago or termagant, or that he was not the master of his home. Mrs Hutton was merely an irritable, jealous, sensitive woman; and none knew better that, her husband’s home was a sphere where the latter was master. A ponderous, remote man, mentally and bodily disposed to heaviness, he lived his domestic routine in a manner which told little in covering much. He showed himself blind to things that awakened his resentment, but experienced more than his family guessed. From time to time he would combat the domestic spirit in days which the household dreaded in accord, and which it was an unspoken family law that no one should heed. He would openly seek the companionship of Dolores — who, living in the emotions under which he sustained, and his wife submitted to, this subtly militant temper, was by far the saddest sufferer, — would even speak of his earlier wedded experience; not referring to the change in his course, but intending it to carry its lesson. Mrs Hutton regarded these periods as the standing trial of her lot; and lived them with a sense of rebuke, and a keener sense of perplexity; not perceiving that the smothered smouldering of months had simply reached ignition point and broken into flames. It is a proof that her husband’s was the really dominant spirit, that she was docile while they endured, and less prone for some time after to peevish jealousy.