Saturday, August 1, 1903
Mary in tears in poor Cousin Jen's drawing-room; I've just run up to get the scrapbook so we can do sth. childish w. old magazines & drive away the howlers. A foolish, childish thing really; all our sorrows foolish and childish- scrumptious Baptist preacher turned out not to be a Baptist after all, or a preacher; Mary nearly
Later.
It was a very foolish thing, but we all fell for it to one degree or another. I did. Of course Heaven's own fire couldn't turn a Blake Baptist; we're far too knotty for that-– but I won't pretend I was immune. And it wasn't so bad for us as for certain Saint Clair matrons known to rumour, but it's been bad enough for poor Mary. She'd spent a week pleading with the Winters in the name of spiritual love etc., to be allowed to turn over even part of her little legacy to the Revival, and did give away her whole Mission Fund purse, and said a good many ignorant and childish things about the church and its modern shortcomings in the process. Winters are understandably put out, and want her to make up the Mission Fund money somehow, and have even threatened to pull her out of school with one year left, and sent her to work out in Boston. Mary's all in a panic, though I don't believe they'd really do it. Sending a child like Mary alone to Boston would be throwing her to the wolves. I should think the Carswells have a little more pride than that, even if Leslie Winter hasn't.
Did I say a word of I-told-you-so? No, not one! But perhaps I thought a few.
Mary says the worst of it was she never thought of a revival, or any need for one whatever, until that false Baptist turned up with his shivery sensual voice and his eyebrows. But they were such magnificent eyebrows! I'm lucky I'm a cold fish, Di, or I'd have nothing left in my purse to buy bread with.
Oh, that's terribly disingenuous of me to say- for I'm not really- but in a way it isn't disingenuous because it doesn't matter a bit that I'm not.
I helped Jen with the baking this morning, before Mary came, and felt very near to useful, though the bread didn't rise quite as it ought. Mary was in a state. She'd flown from May's cousin's, where she'd been staying; it was Anita Bell, that batting-brained little gossip, who spread the news that our Baptist had taken all the money he'd collected for his Revival and booked it to Boston on a spree. Some inspectors were down to interrogate some of the Saint Clair people about it, and they came to the Winters', and Mary couldn't face them in the least, so she slipped away. Of course they were in a panic over her disappearing and there was a scene – you can fill the dreary details in yourself.
In other news, poor Sarah Geordie's wedding went off as well as can be expected, Priests being Priests and Sarah being a meek little thin-necked thing with no backbone or opinions.
There were about five too many bridesmaids in the affair, and because there were so many, the ones who hadn't been asked felt fully justified in making a fuss about it. Of course it's to be expected of anyone having such an absurd number of relations, not to mention the clamjamfry of Priests to contend with. No one could possibly have been satisfied. Her new mother-in-law pecked at her mercilessly the whole while, and poor Sarah couldn't get away for a moment. The famous Eamon, of infinitely particular opinions, is a pudgy, sallow chap of about twenty or twenty-one, with sunken eyes, whose natural expression is a sort of painfully self-satisfied scowl, as if he were forever congratulating the world on living up to his low expectation of it.
A dismal affair all in all, though Sarah Geordie was the tiniest bit touching in her overwrought Priest veil and the handed-down-from-Eamon's-grandmother gown that fit her so ill she looked like a sausage in a yellow-ivory casing. But I caught a glimpse of the famous infidel Priest, who gallivants all over the world picking up rare diseases and trinkets and smiling sarcastically at history. He's a poor-looking specimen enough, with the garish green eyes common to the Priest connection and a bad twist in his spine that makes him thump about decisively, and (I imagine) something of the libertine in his manner. Kate claims he's seen the Black Mass performed, and while I don't believe it in the least, I couldn't help staring at him through the ceremony, and with a terrible, delicious fear that the moment I caught his eye I would ask him about it. Well, wouldn't you want to know what it was like? I confess I imagined the old sinner telling me all manner of things – I suppose I imagined an infidel to be free of the usual strictures concerning conversation with young girls of good family, and that he should happily regale me with tales of Alexandrian brothels and the like until one of his relatives struck him and hauled him out of the house.
His manner quite cured me of that; he's one of those self-satisfied old men who never look at a female creature as anything but a series of attributes : beauty of youth, flame of candor, eyes like opals and so on. Instead of speaking to one, he simply pours out a stream of meaningless insincere compliments in a tone meant to convey that he cannot possibly take such a collection of hovering jewels seriously and never could, and why on earth would he want to, when the creature before him is so charming and insubstantial a poetic fiction? "Ah, Miss Blake," he began, with a twisted little smile, and I could see at once where he was headed—straight toward the clouds. I hadn't anyone more interesting to talk to, so I persisted. "I've heard a good deal of your travels, Mr. Priest," I said, as sweetly as ever a Blake simpered. "I should think Priest Pond would be a dreadfully boring place after Egypt and Italy and Spain."
"On the contrary," he said, with that half-dazed, half-sarcastic look he seems to bestow on everything and everyone. "The charms of ancient empires, as all mournful and hopeful beauty, are meaningful only as a background for the beauty that is starry, unstained girlhood. I should be amiss if I preferred the winters of Rome and Egypt to the springs of Canada."
And he smiled a smile that seemed to recede even as it curled, like a little burning piece of paper, and stared past me with his smug, cold cat's eyes. I could see there was no point in trying to engage him in a real conversation; I simply rolled my eyes and headed for the spread. Oh, he thinks he's being "poetic" and "idealistic," I wager, drifting off on the clouds like than whenever he catches a breath of girlflesh, and scattering purple prose everywhere instead of speaking like an ordinary mortal, but I think it's the worst sort of cynicism. He wouldn't talk in such an idiotic manner to Tom or Cousin Ben or Eamon, I'm sure.
So the great Infidel of Priest Pond was a grave disappointment, and no progress was made toward knowledge of good and evil at the wedding party of Mr. and Mrs. Eamon Priest of Priest Pond. So much the better for your faithful sparkling fountain of dewy-freshness, I suppose!
But I wrote up "sketches" of all the principal Priests in my Poor Almira's house later, and his was quite the most satisfying!