As the weather became fair and stayed fair for several days, instead of hours, at a time, Highbury – that is, the part of Highbury that could boast a dining-room and a driveway – always closed down to some extent in winter – showed signs of an intention to become a livelier place.
‘This is the third invitation since Tuesday!’ Emma held up the cards to her sister at breakfast.
‘You are quite right, my dear. It is an imposition, a danger to our comfortable circle that must be resisted.’ Mr Woodhouse picked up the butter-knife as if ready to ward off outside forces with any weapon to hand.
‘My dear papa,’ Emma smiled, ‘I was saying it as a source of pleasure rather than pain. I am afraid you will be out-argued now that John is not here to support you.’
‘I am sure Miss Bates will not want to be out at all hours. I expect these are dinner engagements we are invited to.’
Miss Bates, recognising that she might be faced with the choice between disagreeing with father or daughter, became so busy with the teapot that it was clear she could neither see nor hear anything beyond its elegant spout.
‘Besides,’ continued Emma, more for the sake of argument than because she wished to dine out daily, ‘it is the Westons, the Goddards, the Coles – with dancing proposed, the Martins, and now, today, although I believe we should not hold our breaths for this one, the Eltons announce—’
‘The Sucklings!’ Isabella finished for her. ‘I am glad you will have some gaiety when I am gone, Emma. Papa, you must not allow your own disposition for tranquillity to overwhelm Emma and Mr Knightley’s right to company – particularly when Mr Knightley is not here to speak for himself.
‘My dear, but of course Mr Knightley and Emma shall go where they please – it is only myself I speak of. I shall stay quite happily – it will be quite like old times – Miss Bates and I – Miss Bates never wishes to leave Hartfield, I know – nor need she—’
This kind thought was interrupted by a loud noise as Miss Bates dropped the lid of the teapot. Her look of regret and distress must be attributed to that rather than any dissension with Mr Woodhouse over her wish to stay every night at Hartfield. Once the tea stain had been sprinkled with salt, Emma took up Isabella on her plans of departure.
‘You will at least have dinner at the Westons,’ she said, ‘since their dining-room is already built. However, you may be able to avoid the Martins since their room is only four bricks high so that a brisk wind would sweep the food from the table.’
‘You are not planning to eat in the open!’ exclaimed Mr Woodhouse with a look of horror.
‘Only from our waists up – or for Miss Bates hardly below her shoulders—’
‘Emma, you are too high-spirited—’ Mr Knightley had come in at the door. He had been out already – for this was a busy time of year at Donwell – and come back hungry for eggs and bacon.
‘Emma always keeps us merry,’ said Mr Woodhouse and would have said more if Emma had not suddenly risen and moved so swiftly to pull the bell to the kitchen that her sleeve caught her teacup.
‘Oh dear, oh dear – what did I set in motion—!’ began Miss Bates, eager as ever to take the blame.
So breakfast was completed in a very snowstorm of salt, and far too many rearrangements of the table to make Knightley comfortable, and to allow for any more discussion of social engagements or any words at all other than those of politeness, apology and goodwill.
A few hours later Emma sat at her desk in her parlour engaged in an activity she could not have imagined only a few weeks ago. She wrote a long letter to Philomena Tidmarsh. In front of her lay Mrs Tidmarsh’s last letter; it was not long but told of being sadly disappointed in a visit to Drury Lane where ‘upward of three thousand people laughed at veritable rubbish, but perhaps the odious fumes of the theatre was too much of a strain in my present state of being’. She had admitted under Emma’s close questioning that she had suffered from an indisposition – an old weakness of the lungs which struck her particularly at this time of year – but she had thrown it off enough for everyday life and it now usually left her alone unless a pupil at the harp made ‘the sort of a caterwauling that would make an archangel weep’. Her teaching was now a matter of openness between them and was often the source of human material for Mrs Tidmarsh’s favourite disquisition on ‘the natural superiority of the female sex until distorted by the male’s shameful need to prove them inferior in brain-power, application and organisation’. According to Mrs Tidmarsh, the younger the pupils came to her the higher their confidence and the greater their power of learning. It was her view that by the time they reached twenty, they were ‘sliding backwards down a slope which led them to become willing slaves in a world dominated by their fathers, brothers and husbands – called the stronger sex, but in truth, the weaker since they must subdue women for fear that they might equal or surpass them...’
Such ideas were very new to Emma and whereas, face to face, she might have found them distasteful and unladylike, in a letter – written in Mrs Tidmarsh’s graceful hand, with much wit and many felicitous expressions – she read of them rather as she might a novel, with eager interest and only partial belief. In the letter which Emma had presently in front of her, Mrs Tidmarsh confided her belief that Mr Tidmarsh – her late husband – had chosen her in particular for her youth and that an older lady would not have provided him with the independence of thought he so valued. She concluded the letter by asking, ‘I wonder whether the same conviction persuaded Mr Knightley in his choice of you, dear Emma’ (in correspondence they had returned to first names) ‘when he was looking for his life’s partner? The great disparity must find a cause somewhere; can it not lie here – in your youthful, untamed quality?’
Emma smiled and finding Mr Knightley entering the room, asked him gaily, ‘Mrs Tidmarsh holds the belief that you married me for my “untamed” quality? It makes me sound quite like one of your farmyard beasts!’
‘I have always held Mrs Tidmarsh to be a clever woman; I would not dare refute any opinion of hers on my reason for doing anything – least of all on my attitude to you, my dear. I am sure she knows you far better than I ever can.’
Emma could not quite make out this speech, whether Knightley joked or was vexed; deciding it suited her best to believe the former – for she never wished to be on contrary terms with Mr Knightley, however often it turned out that way – she smiled more and asked him if he stayed in the house long.
For answer, Mr Knightley sat down and inquired with a meditative look, ‘What else does your friend – because I believe she is your friend once more – write to you?’
‘She believes that women are the equal of men if they are allowed to be.’
‘I should be afraid lest the sex should lose in softness what they gain in force. Yet Mrs Tidmarsh is correct; in their own sphere, women may surpass men.’
‘I am not sure she would agree with that “in their own sphere” – it has an ominous ring.’
‘And do you?’
‘My own sphere is a very comfortable one. I would be ungrateful indeed to ask for more.’
‘So she writes you turbulent philosophy and you – what do you write to her?’
‘You are not jealous, by any chance? I have never known you so interested in my correspondence. But my letters would disappoint you. Mrs Tidmarsh cannot get enough of the hedgerows, the hawthorn, the ducklings, the lambs and, now and again, as if for a change, the people of Highbury.’
‘You paint the picture of a perfect Arcadia.’
‘She thinks so.’
‘Oh, Emma!’ he started, sighed, stopped and stood. ‘I was at Donwell today, the buds are already fat on the lime trees and the primroses seem to go on and on but the garden is becoming neglected – how sadly I miss good old William Larkins! Perhaps when Isabella has gone and you are less constantly occupied—?’
‘You forget our invitations,’ said Emma gaily, although why she so put off his suggestion, couched quite like an appeal, she could not fathom. It was some perversity born of these weeks of estrangement which she felt so deeply and he did not seem to recognise – it was that and his comment, ‘I should be afraid lest the sex should lose in softness what they gain in force.’ She did not want to be soft.
‘And besides, I may perhaps expect a guest.’
‘A guest? I take it you refer to an invitation extended to Mrs Tidmarsh.’
‘I have not given any such invitation.’ Indeed, until this moment she had no intention of doing so.
‘But you may do so?’
‘With your permission.’
‘My dear, you do not need my permission. I am not your master,’ he tried to smile. ‘And I do sincerely believe that I appreciate the qualities of Mrs Tidmarsh a vast deal more than you allow. She is an intelligent friend for you to have and if I do not agree with all her opinions, then that is a reason for discussion, and discussion can never be bad.’
‘You are so fair, so balanced.’
‘I make my apologies for it,’ he bowed gravely.
‘I did not mean—’ Emma broke off; she could not lie directly, and she had meant to criticise, for it was in his balanced judgement that she saw a want of emotion, a lack of passion—
Mr Knightley walked to the door but, as he reached it, turned back to Emma. ‘As for Mrs Tidmarsh, I would suggest to you that her opinions on the position of the fairer sex are not held with the kind of steadfastness that could not bend to circumstances.’
With such gnomic utterance as her companion, Emma must continue the rest of the day; it was all of a piece, she thought, with any intimate conversation held between them recently: it ended in disagreement either lightly clad in humour or more heavily in politeness. Neither disguised a want of real warmth between them, which only seemed to show itself in the tenderness that still sometimes led him to hold her close in the night hours.
It was with relief that she turned to her paper and began, in sprightly style, a letter to Mrs Tidmarsh:
You would not believe how busy I am about to become – Isabella leaves in a week, but Highbury puts on its fine feathers. Dinner with the dear Westons – an invitation extended entirely so that we may admire the clutch of babies including now Frank Churchill’s, a most blooming representation of his father, showing all the evidence of the latter’s unconfin’d spirits—
Emma found she needed a pause here before continuing the letter which ended, despite many protestations of affection, without an invitation to Hartfield.
***
The dinner at Randalls took place two nights before Isabella’s departure and the Westons’ parlour was, as Emma had foretold, as thickly decorated with babies as the ceiling of an Italian chapel may be decorated with cherubs. Putting forward this idea to Mr Elton as they waited for dinner to be served, Emma could not refrain from adding, The difference being that, whereas the painted article are blessedly silent and immobile, the human variety have the vocal chords of a pack of hounds in full throat and much of their activity also.’
‘There is one other difference,’ Mr Elton put his fingertips together as if to make a theological pronouncement – which indeed Emma quite expected since he was more full of pomposity every time they met – ‘the human babies are clothed, whereas the heavenly are naked as God intended.’
‘Oh, Mr Elton!’ cried Emma, irresistibly, ‘surely you do not intend to recommend that the human species goes naked – as apes go naked!’
Mr Elton became a little confused under his companion’s sparkling gaze and had begun an exposition more as Emma had expected, along the lines of the virtue of nakedness as a symbol for spiritual purity which has no need of disguise, although not – to Emma’s thinking – with much clarity of thought, when he was rescued from chasms of misunderstanding and schisms of theological interpretations by the arrival of Mrs Elton.
Until this moment she had been crouched among the cherubs, uttering cries of admiration which occasionally gave way to an unrepressed sob of bitter frustration and envy. But the splendid train she sported at her back was unfortunately edged with loose, swinging tassels which the babies – in particular, the hearty Frank – could not be restrained from clutching and pulling as if they were attached to bells. Mrs Elton retreated therefore and arrived at her husband’s side in a discomposed and saddened state of mind.
‘I have interrupted your conversation, Mr E.!’ she cried and added, with a look at Emma, ‘your very deep and serious conversation, as I saw.’
As Emma knew pretty well that she was far too busy detaching herself from sticky fingers to see any such thing and therefore only ‘saw’ it in her mind’s eye as the thing she feared (Mrs Knightley of Hartfield and Donwell was always a rival to her for her husband’s admiration), Emma felt quite justified in a little defensive sally:
‘Not deep at all, my dear Mrs Elton, I assure you – in fact, you might more accurately call it shallow, since we discoursed on the subject of nakedness!’
Mrs Elton’s face at this word was all Emma could have wished and inspired Mr Elton to mutter ‘Adam and Eve’ several times in an ascending order of intensity and, when this did not change his wife’s expression of shock, out came the word ‘symbol!’, repeated quite half a dozen times.
‘Well, I do declare, Mr Elton may have been talking in symbolic terms,’ contributed Emma with a cheerful smile. ‘Symbols are very much in his line – I have often heard him use the word on Sunday and I remember poor Mrs Goddard once asking me why Mr Elton was so keen to talk of such a very loud and unnatural musical instrument. She talked of course of the “cymbal” for, although running an excellent school, even her understanding during sermons can sometimes fall short of Mr Elton’s learning. But I did not talk in symbols just now; I was talking of these babies and how the floor reminded me of a ceiling painted with cherubs; it was then Mr Elton introduced the theme of nakedness – but I am boring you!’
Mrs Elton, who was not looking bored but cross, gave Emma a sharp look and pronounced, ‘Dear Mrs Knightley, you and I must be paired together as the only married ladies who are not in the state of motherhood.’
She had chosen her barb well; to be paired with Mrs Elton in such a vulgar way – or in any way at all – depressed all Emma’s levity into a silent contemplation of the scene. Let the Eltons carry the conversation!
‘I have often noticed – in my experience at the baptismal font,’ began Mr Elton, ‘that no one baby is any different from any other. I am quite at a loss to put child to parent. Perhaps one of you ladies has a better-schooled eye?’
Emma owned this (but only to herself) a reasonable comment and wondered whether she could solve his problem. There were four very small babies in the room – Mrs Weston’s, Frank Churchill’s, Harriet Martin’s and Isabella’s – and several others belonging to Isabella and Mrs Weston, only slightly larger. They were all pink-cheeked, round-faced babies, all fair, all blue-eyed or at least without dark eyes. She thought, perhaps, her own nephews and nieces the handsomer, with higher brows and more slender noses, but that could have been merely the result of the partisan role of aunt.
‘I must agree with you,’ she said to Mr Elton, ‘they are identical; it makes one long for a strain of somewhere else. Italy or France,’ she added, recalling Mr Tidmarsh’s dark good looks.
Before Mrs Elton could express the dissension Emma intended to provoke, it became clear that the babies were being removed by their nurses and that they would soon lead off to dinner.
Mrs Weston, advancing to where they sat, her cheeks flushed, her look radiant – Emma could hardly believe it was the same woman who had seemed old to her fifteen years ago – cried, ‘You are so tolerant! I could not forego the pleasure to see my friends – their children – dear Isabella so soon to depart – but now we will sit down – Can you credit it, we will be sixteen, even though I could not persuade Mr Woodhouse nor Miss Bates to attend and I have only included Henry and John of the children! Our little dining-room will be quite stretched to the limits! Tell me, dear Emma,’ as they stood she took her old pupil to one side, ‘I hope you do not take offence at my inviting the Martins but Mr Knightley encouraged me and they go, of course, to the Coles’ – although old Mrs Martin will never stir outside her kitchen.’
There was no need for Emma to answer because Mrs Weston was off again, more excited than Emma had ever seen her and in a moment on Mr Knightley’s arm who was to lead her into dinner.
‘And may I have the honour of giving you my arm?’ Mr Weston’s friendly face was in front of Emma as, one by one, with all the ceremony due to such a large party, they proceeded, with the very few steps necessary in such a moderate-sized house, from parlour to dining-room.