The Magnificent Spinster Read Online Free PDF

gathered for an hour’s reading aloud, the hour when she curled up on the bear rug, hugging its head, and listened dreamily to her mother’s voice, sitting in the big chair under the lamp. Sometimes the logs crackled so loudly, and occasionally made a sound like a pistol shot, that it was quite an interruption, but tonight Daisy had lit the fire early and it had quieted to a lovely red glow. James sat opposite his wife, smoking a cigar. Mr. Perkins chose the corner behind the lamp, and the two couples were squeezed onto the big sofa. Alix had taken a cushion and was sitting with her head against Pappa’s knee.
    â€œWe’ve just begun Nicholas Nickleby ,” Mamma said, “but I’m sure you remember it, Mr. Perkins? So I’ll go on to chapter two, if I may.”
    In Jane’s view Mamma’s reading was perfection. She had a gentle voice capable of every inflection and irony, and enjoyed herself so much that the pleasure was contagious. And soon the attention was absolute, punctuated by a ripple of laughter now and then. When Jane lifted her head to exchange a glance with Alix she noticed that Vyvian held Viola’s hand firmly in his. Whatever Dickens had to say at that moment went unheard, as Jane suffered one of those explosions of feeling that brought tears to her eyes. She buried her face in the bear’s comforting head so no one would notice, but she felt acute discomfort and didn’t know why, except that Vyvian and Viola were drawing a magic circle around themselves that excluded everyone else, and that would, eventually, break into and even destroy the precious family circle. I don’t want it to happen, Jane thought fiercely. I don’t want Viola to go away. I don’t want anything to change. In some terrible way it seemed the beginning of the end. Mamma and Papa hadn’t changed yet, but Jane in her gloom saw them grow old and die. Did passionate love always bring the shadow of death with it?
    It was a relief when Allegra reached the end of the chapter and Snooker suggested that it was time for bed.
    â€œJane was fast asleep already,” said Alix, for once not in tune with her sister, and handed Jane her candle already lit. They said their good nights and, preceded by their long shadows, climbed the wide staircase, each holding her candle flickering in the air currents, so it must be shielded with one hand.
    I have to admit that I am very disappointed with this first attempt at novelizing. There seem to be so many details, and it was so hard to get at the core of the matter. Maybe it will be easier when I myself appear as a character later on, and when memory rather than imagination can operate. But for now I feel I must cheat and tell the reader something of what had to be left out, or what I lacked the art to render effectively. What was most in my mind was to suggest that the island was both a real place, as it still is, but also a metaphor—the island and the life lived there in 1910 are a vanished world. Jane was a child at a time when there was strong belief in the perfectibility of man, when nothing immediately threatened peace, in the world before 1914.
    Those who experienced that world could not be prepared for cataclysm, or even for the income tax, which would make great wealth a little harder to come by. James Reid was already a rich man at thirty, when he married Allegra Trueblood, who was, herself, the inheritor of a fortune at a time when inheritance taxes were minimal. In those days a man could not propose marriage in their circles unless he could support his wife. But added to all this, the Reids were an especially close-knit family and the island enhanced the privacy of family life. I have hardly begun to suggest how rich and various this was through the summers when five daughters were growing up.
    James Reid had grown up in Minnesota and had with his three brothers become an experienced woodsman and camper long before he went East to