Mark Dunn - Under the Harrow

It had only been two days since Cecilia Pupker and her best-of-allpossible-friends Miss Alice Trimmers had received a bit of rather important information from Cecilia’s father. That illustrious worthy, who had been placed in charge of the Fête champêtre and who was responsible for every detail of its incumbent arrangements, decided only then to tell his daughter the true reason behind the recent flurry of activity engendered by the exclusive celebratory event. With this revelation came the father’s injunction to his daughter to gather in due course a few items of clothing and a few items of sentimental attachment, for she was leaving Dingley Dell with only a little luggage and would never be coming back. The disclosure was received at first with quite a measure of filial displeasure on the part of Miss Pupker (and with great observational fascination on the part of Cecilia’s best-of-all-possible-friends Alice Trimmers). The younger of the two Pupker daughters was so displeased, in fact, that she made a show of baulking and bridling and stamping her foot in a most unbecoming manner. Remaining in this place in which she had been largely sheltered and pampered and made relatively happy was far preferable, said she, to being cast to the winds like the peripatetic children of Israel.

“And what will you do, Papa,” speculated Cecilia in her closing argument, “if I choose not to go with you and Mama? Whatever will you do then?”

“Why, I know exactly what I should do, my obstinate daughter. Your mother and I will simply depart this vale without you. You are free to stay behind. You are free, should you wish it, to keep company with your lunatic sister in Bedlam for that matter. But I must caution you that Dingley Dell in our absence will be a not very hospitable place, and will little resemble the familiar Dingley Dell of this day.”

Cecilia Pupker was seated upon a cushioned all-weather settee as her father paced up and down the terrace. Her look was one of clear concern and anxiety (attended by manufactured petulance), such a look being one that rarely visited the girl’s face, it generally being carelessly languid, bearing hardly a lineament of worry. “Whatever do you mean, Papa?”

“I’ll not say it with your friend Alice present.”

Alice patted down the plaits in her skirts to give her hands something to do so that they should not betray too strong an investment of interest in the discussion at hand.

“And what do you mean by that, Papa? For Alice cares not a straw about those whose names have been left off the invitation list. Who are they to her, for she is one of us now,” said Cecilia, turning to her friend Alice.

“One of you, yes,” said a blushing Alice, who allowed her cheek to be delicately kissed by Cecilia to punctuate the sentiment with demonstrative affection.

Montague Pupker suspended his pacing and stopt before the chair occupied by Alice Trimmers, late of the Trimmers family and greatly glad, as just noted, to be done with them. “Is there truth, Miss Alice Trimmers, to what my daughter has just said? Is it true that you care not a fig what is to happen to your family or to any of those countrymen of yours, for that matter, who are to be left behind after our departure?”

“I care nothing whatsoever,” said Alice boldly. “They bore me to tears. My own family drives me so mad that you could put me directly into Bedlam alongside your other daughter, and I should like it better than having to a take another meal with Mama and Papa when even upon their very best behaviour.”

“Do you truly mean that, Alice? Do you truly mean that you could actually go off and leave your family here to whatever fate awaits them and feel no compunction whatsoever over the abandonment?”

Alice nodded. Then she shrugged. “They are dead to me, Mr. Pupker, and will always be dead to me. Hand me a shovel, sir, and I shall be first to dig a hole to inhume them.”

“Good God, girl, how forcefully do you renounce your very own family! And may I ask why?”

“Because my mother is a flighty, fluttering, pecking little bird that does nothing but chirp and peep when she isn’t scowling and sputtering and slapping the cheeks of those who incommode her.”

“Your mother strikes you?”

Nodding: “So hard across the face that she sometimes leaves a handprint there. It is most mortifying.”

“And your father—”

“A man of no talent and little ambition who had no business siring a family given his unwillingness to offer us anything but perpetual failure in every office and facet of his being. I will not speak ill of my younger brother, though, for he is probably dead. He has successfully severed his bond, just as I did, and I will commend him for that at least, though my flight to the embracing bosom of my friends the Pupkers—”

Here Alice Trimmers gave a beatific smile to shew affection for her newly adopted family.

“—has proven a far more practical route to sanity and sanguinity.”

“A solid course, my child,” said Pupker, resuming his contemplative pacing. “A most solid course. Now Cecilia, dear daughter, here is what we intend to do, because I know that you have been upon pins and needles over whether Alice will be joining us: we shall have the circumstantiallyorphaned Miss Alice Trimmers…” (With a courtly bow to Alice.) “…come with us to the Summit and emigrate with us to the Outland. There is no reason that she shouldn’t. So let us set your worrying little mind to rest on this count right this very moment.”

Consequently thrilled beyond words, both girls sprang up from their seats to put their loving arms round the neck of their benevolent benefactor. “And perhaps,” continued Pupker as he detached himself with a chuckle from all the clutching, supple young arms, “with Alice’s coming, you will find it in your own troubled heart, Cecilia, to join us now with a renewal of spirit and with a full and happy endorsement of our course, and leave off being morose about departing a place that is soon to become nothing more than a fast-fading memory. Shall we not all together, my dear girls, turn over a new leaf — begin this brand new chapter of our lives with an ebullition of glee and optimism for our well-paved future?”

“Of course we shall!” cried both girls in unison. Then there was a silence, which was shortly broken by a question from Alice: “So your other daughter, then, is to be left behind?”

Pupker nodded. “What else can be done? Hannah has been legally consigned to a madhouse. I doubt that I can gain her release as much as I try. Fate has determined that you, Miss Alice Trimmers, should take her place, and one never argues with fate.”

“I thank you for taking me along, Mr. Pupker. But what if I should see my father out there? How am I to present myself? Whatever should I do?”

Montague Pupker now turned to fully face my inquisitive niece. He threaded his hand through her long brown tresses, allowing the fingers to linger there for a moment so as to better feel the softness of her youthful locks. “Such a chatterbox of questions you are! But you’ll not worry about that one for another moment, fair Alice. Rest assured that your father will come nowhere near us. He’ll no longer bring shame upon you. Nor soon will your mother. You have my word on that. Banish them from your thoughts, my child, just as they have, no doubt, banished you from theirs.”

There was simplicity to the statement but there was little truth to it. For two mornings later Alice Trimmers had her own jolt of displeasure— and a rather consequential one it was at that — when in the course of that quiet forenoon stroll with her new spirit-sister Cecilia — both girls bending their steps to the Chuffey Bakery to break their fast — the two were halted by a sight of a most disturbing character. Through the upstairs window of Alice’s Uncle Frederick’s lodgings above Mrs. Lumbey’s Ladies’ Fine Dress Shop, Alice and Cecilia saw the following: Alice’s erstwhile mother, recently installed therein, and Alice’s erstwhile father, raised by all appearance from the proverbial dead, crossing the room, their arms locked in connubial affection.