V

The Conversion of Penelope's Mother

"In converting the heathen," I told Penelope, "never make the mistake of converting your friends. There is nothing so unconquerable as the immortal grudge that your friend owes you for having had the impertinence to interfere with his opinions. You see, friendship, being a rare and elusive and provoking condition of the soul, has nothing to do with opinions. It matters what your casual acquaintance thinks about the subject of the hour, because you have to talk with him. It doesn't matter in the least what your friend thinks, because there is no conversation among friends, there is only intercourse, which has nothing to do with opinions. Naturally, I am not talking of eternal truths, because if your friend does not see eye to eye with you about those, no friendship is possible. One never converts people to eternal truths, only to the particular manifestation of these that is being revealed to the age through which we are pa.s.sing."

"According to that," objected Penelope, "there is no possibility of converting people to anything, unless they are already converted without knowing it."

"Exactly," I said. "That is why it is waste of time as well as impertinence to convert the person who is your friend. And as your mother is one of the few mothers I know who is also a friend to her children, I strongly advise you not to----"

"That is all very well," again objected Penelope; "but mother has not yet discovered that she is converted to the particular manifestation of eternal truth known as Votes for Women; and, to put it plainly, you can't go on living with some one who thinks all suffragists are hooligans, when you are one of the hooligans."

"Theoretically," I argued, "you could, if----"

"But I don't live with mother theoretically," interrupted Penelope; "and if you seriously mean that you cannot convert her because of the immortal grudge she would owe you for doing it, I suppose I shall have to take that risk myself. It is not at all easy to convert an old lady to eternal truth at the mouth of an ear-trumpet," she added insinuatingly.

In the end I was persuaded to undertake the conversion, being no wiser than other apostles of great movements who have bartered friendships for causes since the world began; and Sarah's greeting, when she opened the door to me the day I called upon Penelope's mother by appointment, was therefore disconcerting.

"Miss Penelope said, would you please wait in the back drawing-room till she's finished converting the mistress," said Sarah in the impa.s.sive tone of one whom no message, however strange, could disconcert. "It's the Suffragettics, I think," she added for my enlightenment. To Sarah all manifestations of the eternal truths rest on the level of rheumatics and other mortal infirmities.

I suggested that, folding-doors not being soundproof, I had better wait downstairs. Sarah led the way up to the back drawing-room without giving this proposal a moment's serious consideration.

"You can hear anything that's said to the mistress from the top of the house to the bottom--that is, if the mistress can hear it," she explained unemotionally.

The controversy had reached the acute stage when I arrived in the back drawing-room, an unwilling eavesdropper. This I gathered from the significant circ.u.mstance that both speakers were talking at once.

Presently there came a calm, in the course of which Penelope seemed to be getting on rather well. She was keeping her temper wonderfully, I thought, and was apparently convincing the enemy beyond the power of retort. The absence of retort became, indeed, astonishing, until it was explained by a sudden interruption from Penelope's mother, just as her daughter reached a fine pitch of persuasive eloquence.

"I can't hear a word you are saying, my dear. I wish you would pick up my ear-trumpet," said Penelope's mother, breaking unconsciously into the middle of a sentence.

Evidently the ear-trumpet was found and adjusted, for retorts came thick and fast as soon as Penelope began patiently to say it all over again.

"What rubbish, child!" was an early interruption. "I have never done anything to hinder your development, as you call it. I drew the line at ju-jitsu, I admit, because I didn't like the appearance of the unpleasant little yellow person with the pigtail--he had no pigtail?

Well, he was the style of person to whom one expects to find a pigtail attached. That is neither here nor there--"

"No, mother darling, it isn't," interposed Penelope firmly; "and I never said you hindered my development. We are not Suffragettes because we have personal grievances, but because of the general att.i.tude towards women----"

"You will never persuade me, my dear, that you can cure anybody's att.i.tude towards women by knocking off policemen's helmets----"

"We don't knock off----"

"I am convinced, Penelope, that I have seen a picture, in the _Daily Ill.u.s.trated_, I think it was, of a woman knocking off a policeman's helmet. Her mouth was wide open, and she was doing it with an umbrella--a dreadful, ill-bred, unwomanly creature she looked! I remember it distinctly. The _Daily Ill.u.s.trated_ is a most respectable paper; it would never----"

"Darling, you know you have told me over and over again how all the respectable papers of the day called Florence Nightingale a dreadful, unwomanly creature for wanting to go out to the war to nurse grown-up men without a chaperon, instead of staying at home to nurse the baby she hadn't got," shouted Penelope down the ear-trumpet.

"And so they did," cried her mother, as though her veracity were being called in question. "All sorts of wicked and untrue things were said about that n.o.ble woman, for whom I have the utmost veneration, because she taught me to air a room by opening the window a few minutes at the bottom instead of opening the door. Oh! it was shocking the things they said about her! But now----"

"Now," said the wily Penelope, "no woman in England is more honoured.

That shows, doesn't it, that we should not believe everything the papers----"

"Penelope," said her mother abruptly, "I have dropped my ear-trumpet again, so you had better ring the bell for tea."

Signs of the fray were still evident when Sarah admitted me to the front drawing-room. The ear-trumpet was sticking out of the coal-box, always a sign of mental disturbance in Penelope's home; and both she and her mother were looking for the spectacles which had been swept momentarily out of existence.

"I cannot think what I did with them," complained Penelope's mother, as though her loss were not an hourly occurrence. "If you had not upset me so dreadfully, Penelope----"

Then she looked up and saw me, Sarah's l.u.s.ty announcement of my name having pa.s.sed over her unheeded through the temporary disablement of the ear-trumpet. With a royal gesture of her hand she banished eternal truths and their tiresome topical manifestations to oblivion, and received me in the grand manner that was designed, fifty years ago, to hide from visitors and servants alike that the head of the house ever had any private emotions or any public interests. Now, as then, it deceived n.o.body; but it bridged the gulf between eternal truths and afternoon tea very pleasantly.

"How charming of you to look in just as Penelope and I were going to have tea! Come and sit near me," was the gracious greeting I received.

She turned a serene countenance towards Penelope, who was showing no inherited instinct for bridging impa.s.sable gulfs. "My dear, can you find my ear-trumpet? I am sure I had it a moment ago."

"You had," murmured the rebellious Penelope. "It might just as well have stayed in the coal-box the whole time, for all the good it was to either of us!"

It was only when, at the conclusion of a blameless discourse on ribbon embroidery, Penelope had been sent upstairs to look for a piece of needle-work, that Penelope's mother stopped being my Early Victorian hostess and became the mother of all the ages.

"I suppose," she said, with the true motherly mixture of appeal and disapproval in her tone, "it is you who have converted Penelope to all this nonsense."

"No," I said. "The age has converted her. Penelope is the child of the age."

"She has no business to be anybody's child but her mother's," was the indignant reply. "When I was a girl daughters were their mother's own children----"

I interrupted to ask if she really thought that this had ever been true.

The ear-trumpet described furious circles in the air--another danger signal, as I knew from experience.

"When I was a girl," said Penelope's mother once more, "we had the good manners not to let our mothers guess that we knew more than they did--even if we did."

I asked a depressed Penelope, on the way downstairs, why she had not taken my advice and left me to risk my friendship with her mother, instead of imperilling her own?

"It was idiotic of me," confessed Penelope; "she said something unfair about 'those dreadful women,' so I had to say I was one of them; and after that I had to go on, naturally. But if I haven't converted mother in the drawing-room, I seem to have succeeded incidentally in converting cook in the kitchen. It's a pity there were not a few more Antis concealed about the house while I was at the ear-trumpet, isn't it?"

"Listen!" I interrupted.

Sarah was clearing away tea, and through the open drawing-room door came sc.r.a.ps of conversation.

"It is only right to study both sides of a question, Sarah."

"Yes'm."

"Florence Nightingale, the n.o.blest Englishwoman who ever lived--I hope you open the window and not the door, when you wish to air your bedroom, Sarah?--Florence Nightingale was misrepresented just in the same way."

"Yes'm."

"I think I shall stop your monthly magazine and order a suffrage periodical for the kitchen instead."

"Yes'm. We have two of Miss Penelope's already. Thank you, ma'am."