Value. In Life and Death. Changed Views.

by Algernon Blackwood

There was a funeral yesterday in this lonely little village of the Jura, and the world today looks somehow different. Human beings instinctively transfer their emotions to inanimate Nature, obtaining in this way relief. This endless sighing of deep woods expresses more than our little throats and breasts can compass. This streaming rain pours grief from all the hills with a wholesale grandeur that makes our tiny tears seem futile. Yea, the world looks different here today, and, to tell the truth we all feel ashamed to notice it. None of us say anything. Some try boldly to conceal it even, but all are silent. For the lonely old English lady who has left us we unanimously voted a bore while we had her and probably there is not one of us who has not said plainly to his neighbor “It is really time she went: she’s a perfect plague.”

But now that she has taken us at our word there is this strange difference in sky and forest and mountain. The English clergyman came out from the neighboring town to bury her, tall, striding, athletic figure of a man who walks but never takes the train, and the peasants asked one another, “Mais qu’est-ce qu’il fait, ce Pasteur anglais, avec sa robe de auit sur le bras?” having never seen a surplice before, nor a muscular Christian who carried his robes of office so openly.

For five years, in and out, we have known her wasted figure and high querulous voice at the Pension de la Poste, where we took our dejeuner and souper. We have known her oft-told stories every one, and heard them, summer, spring, winter; witnessed her incessant faultfinding, marvelled at her strenuous vitality for well past seventy, disliked, while secretly approving, her untiring efforts to introduce sweet old-fashioned manners into a heterogeneous collection of bourgeois foreigners, German, Swiss, Russian, Armenian, Persian, and Italian; and been worried out of our lives by her consistent high-mindedness in and out of season preached unflinchingly and stingingly whether the moment was ripe for it or not.

She was of Quaker stock, a thin, wiry, teasing little old lady, fearlessly outspoken, with a fiery temper, a dusty black dress, keen blue eyes that looked amazingly youthful in the deeply-lined face, and poor old hands that were knotted with rheumatism. Yet in life we should net have said “poor old hands;” the description would have been more harsh. Alert as a cricket and quick as a hawk, she would dart about the Pension on her self-imposed mission like a lean grey cat, pouncing upon offenders before they knew she was in the room. If an armchair racked up the carpet, its occupant, old or young, was forced to rise while she put it straight. If the boys came into the little salon with their muddy boots on, dirtying the furniture, she would have them upstairs, grumbling but obedient, in a twinkling; and if the girls we elders romped with sometimes sat unbecomingly on the sofa, she would dart across the room to pull their little skirts two inches nearer to their shoes, their alter their attitude, with the firm remark that “when I was a girl, young ladies did not cross their legs in the drawing-room.” These were the little tiresome things she did, but she carried her high, strict standard into the general conduct of life as well, and though ber interference was exasperating⁠—parents resenting it for their children as being a reflection upon themselves⁠—it was invariably right. There was the pinch, we all felt criticised. She was upright as a character in a Sunday school book, no slackness in her anywhere. Her standard became the standard of the entire Pension⁠—when she was present and, now that she has gone, the Pension realises that secretly it was rather proud of her. Even in the kitchen! Which of us can ever forget the storm that followed her discovery of the cook breaking a doubtful egg into our supper omelette⁠ ⁠… her knowledge of French being confined to “nong pas”, “mercy,” and “c’est honteux”⁠—pronounced “ongtoo?” She had the right of entrée into the kitchen after that. We all profited!

Her memory was sadly failing when she arrived five years ago with her three black tin boxes, but within another year or so it had finally disappeared. And the contrast was singular between this indication of great age and the active energy she had of genuine youth. Within fifteen minutes of being introduced to some new arrival, she would ask in her courteous way, “Please, who are those people? Would you kindly introduce me?” yet she would dance with us in the corridor when someone played a waltz, and even join in pillow-fighis, while pulling down skirts and making sure that the servant was clearing the supper-table properly. She would walk four miles into town to pay a boot bill, forgotten for many months, and when she reached the shop would wonder why she had come there, and order another pair of boots instead. “I do believe my memory must be failing,” was her invariable explanation of every similar confusion, adding proudly, “How old do you think I am? Don’t guess too low. I don’t mind!” People guessed according to their balance between tact and interest, but the answer was always the same: “I was born the year Queen Victoria came to the throne!” And the other, Armenian, Russian, German, or English, had to make the calculation, or else feel foolish. Immediately then, if her listener betrayed a sign of sympathy, the stories would appear: there were eight or ten of them, each leading neatly into the other, and hardly a day passed without someone receiving the entire collection full in the face. Escape, once they began, was impossible. The first was usually about the brother whose beard was so long that he tied it round his neck when playing cricket; and the last was to do with the superiority of Cornish over Devonshire cream. In between were two others, about the Cornish woman who talked with Queen Victoria, the Cornish man who had seen a fairy. Her acuteness of hearing was uncanny. The faintest mention at the table of “Cornish Cream,” “Fairy,” or “Beard” tickled the memory cell and produced the story. If teasing is a sign of loving then the children loved her well! The old lady had not the slightest idea that she had told the stories before⁠—perhaps at the beginning of the very meal that witnessed their repetition. Out they poured, and with much conviction, dignity, and personal interest in the telling, that her end of the table was compelled to listen or provoke a crushing criticism of its manners, “Devonshire Cream is the best,” would say one of the English children in a pause, whispering it probably; and instantly the keen old face would lighten up, eyes grown alert, and manner imperieus. “There’s no such thing; there’s only Cornish Cream. The Phoenicians brought the method first into Cornwall when they came for tin⁠—.” “Venetians?” a child always asked gravely. “No, Phoenicians, I said; you don’t listen properly, dear.” “They brought their tins with them?” would be asked at once. “No,” with perfect good temper, “I said they came te get tin from the Cornish mines, and introduced the method of making the cream at the same time. And the real way of making it is this⁠—” while the entire table listened to the bitter end. It was a recognised game to see how many times in a single meal the stories could be produced; and the elders did not interfere, because the old lady obviously enjoyed the telling so enormously, provided her suspicions were not aroused. Personally, though I heard the stories daily for many months, I never saw them aroused: her patience and good temper were inexhaustible. They were an expression of her standard. She invariably won the day.

And the stories she read lasted as long as the ones she told, for in the several years of our acquaintance I never saw her with a new book. A paper-covered novel, grey with use, supplied all her reading, because she began the book every day afresh, forgetting that she had already finished it. It was pathetic to see her in the evenings, two cats inextricably mingled on her small, sloping lap, while she turned the opening pages of this everlasting volume, and wondered audibly who it was had “fingered it and turned the leaves down” when she wasn’t looking. She must have read that novel a hundred times, yet each day she came to it with original, fresh interest. Sometimes she fell asleep: the book would slip to the ground; someone would mention her name; she would wake with a start, glance sharply round the room, miss her novel, pick it up, and⁠—begin again at the first page. Questioned about it, she would say, “It begins well; I think I shall like it.” It was the same with everything. That consecutive thinking which is memory was no longer possible, Yet in other ways the stream of life ran so forcibly in her. She painted pretty watercolors, and was energetic with her lace. “I’ll show you one of my pictures,” she would say, and fly up the steep stairs two steps at a time to her tiny room on the top floor⁠—to come down again with some lace, or her book, or perhaps to forget why she had made the journey at all, and not to reappear again. More than once, on these occasions, she undressed and got into bed. “Now, tell me, when dees Christmas fall this year?” she asked me once the very day after the festivities, and it was no uncommon thing to have a week composed entirely of Sundays. There was one story, however, she never repeated, She told it once in a fit of confidence, and the Irishwoman who heard it passed it on to me. It is eloquent of the splendid pluck which was her outstanding characteristic, of that generous, high courage, rather, which was the foundation of her “standard.” For she lived still with her old love story of fifty years ago, her pain, her great sacrifice⁠—yet without a hint of bitterness or regret. A clergyman, well on the way to preferment in his calling, loved her and asked her to be his wife. She loved him in return. But first she consulted a next-of-kin, who was married and had many children, the man whe would naturally inherit from her. And this next-of-kin explained to her bluntly that his children might suffer if she married. “I don’t regret it,” she said to the Irishwoman. “The man I loved is dead now, and | should be a widow.” An orphan, and without brothers or sisters, she went lonely through her long life, ending it here in this little village Pension in the Jura, where we teased, admired, respected, and avoided her.⁠ ⁠… Her income was £60 a year!

We were in the Alps when the news came that she was sinking. We got back too late. Everybody came to inquire. It was astonishing how many friends she had made among the vignerons and local shop folk. “On ne touche pas,” went out the word from the mistress of the Pension, a kindly woman, who had borne with her all these years with infinite sympathy and patience. For the custom in this village after a death is to come and shake hands formally with the relatives, or those who pass for such. “On touche” is their way of describing the little function. But in a case like this, where there are no blood relations, the formality is dispensed with. “On ne touche pas”⁠—and the little old lady has gone to her grave in the village cemetery among the larches, more respected than when she lived among us, and certainly more loved. She had value. We miss her keenly. Her high standard will live after her, for a time at least, and she has not lived in vain. The world looks different today.