by Whispering Gums

 

A post in our series featuring works published in 1924 (or by authors who died in 1924). This post is a short story that was published in The Australian Women’s Mirror on 23 December 1924, and is by the Sydney-born daughter of a jail administrator, Jessie Urquhart.

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Novelist, short story writer and journalist Jessie Urquhart (1890-1948) featured twice on our blog in November last year. The first was a post giving her biography as we know it, and the second was a short story by her, “Hodden Grey”, which was published in 1930.  Today, we are sharing another short story, one published in 1924.

I won’t repeat all that Elizabeth wrote last year, but will reiterate that Jessie Urquhart was one of the authors Zora Cross felt worth writing about in her articles on Australia women writers. That Urquhart had some reputation is borne out not only by this but by the fact that, as Elizabeth also writes, there are articles for her in Wikipedia and the AustLit database. In terms of the time period for the story I am sharing today, Elizabeth wrote in her post:

In the 1920s, Urquhart turned to short story writing and journalism, with a dozen pieces appearing during this decade, including several stories for children. Most were published in The Sydney mail, a few in The Sydney morning herald, a couple in The Australian woman’s mirror and The Australian women’s weekly, and the odd one in The sun and Queensland figaro; the ones for children, some of which were reprints, appeared in School magazine. These stories cover a broad range of settings and topics, giving glimpses into the lives of modern Australian urban and rural women and men, encompassing the adventures of spies, adulterers, thieves and deserters; the faithful and unfaithful alike. I found them a lot of fun to read.

Today’s story, “The waiting”, is an urban story about a very patient woman. Its tagline reads

“Everything comes to him who waits” makes a nice line in a copy-book; but this story of Ellinor Wynne shows just how true it can sometimes be.

Ellinor’s is not a new story, but Urquhart writes it well.

The waiting

By Jessie Urquhart

THE friendship dated back to the closing days of the last century. It was then that Ellinor Wynne was rudely awakened to the consciousness of sex, and her friend Maud Carr was responsible. Talking, as girls will, of the future before them on leaving school, Maud had remarked:

“Nellie Wynne is all right. She will marry Peter Strange as soon as she is grown up.”

That was all. Yet Ellinor never looked into the boy’s eyes again with the same unconsciousness. Up till then the two had drifted together without apparent effort. At kiss-in-the-ring, for instance, Peter had always flung the handkerchief at Nellie and she, when opportunity offered, returned the compliment.

When they grew up gossip began to couple their names together. To Ellinor it was a source of immeasurable happiness, as it is to any girl who is drawn to a man and knows he feels the same toward her. As for Peter, had he paid any attention to the talk, he would probably have felt a glow of satisfaction, for Ellinor was a good looking girl; but he probably never heard it.

At private dances Peter, who was a rung lower on the social ladder than Ellinor, was asked for her sake; at gipsy teas —they were fashionable at that remote age —-they naturally gravitated together. He taught her tennis, too; proper tennis, that is. “Not merely tossing a ball backward and forward with always the fear your hair will get disarranged,” he said in his lordly way; “but the hard game men play.” To this end she brushed back her thick hair, eschewed dainty muslins for the more uncompromising blouses and skirts, and achieved at the sacrifice of many vanities dear to her feminine heart a complete mastery of the game. There was a never-to-be forgotten day when Peter selected her for his partner in a match. When she had acquitted herself with credit and he patted her on the back she felt she had not lived in vain.

Peter had a superb contempt for the frivolous girls who never saw anything beyond their own appearance. “Fools,” he dubbed them, and added: “No man would look at them who wanted a true mate.” And Ellinor thrilled at what his words implied.

Yet never once did Peter hint at marriage.

At this stage he was a Government clerk, bitterly rebellious over the mediocrity of such a position.

“I’m not going to be a Government drudge all my days,” he told Ellinor.

It was one of the ties that bound them, this complete confidence he placed in her, and she always endeavored to justify the honor.

“You are so ambitious, Peter,” she said admiringly.

“A man with his way to carve in the world has to be,” he assured her.

Peter liked to picture himself chopping his way through the Tree of Life —the expression was his own, and he considered it effective. And so he began to study law, devoting every moment to chopping, as it were, while Ellinor, watching the flyingchips with wistful eyes, consoled herself with the reflection that he would ask her to marry him when he was more sure of his future.

Years passed and the waiting was brightened for her by the knowledge that every one looked upon their engagement as a secret but accomplished fact. “Peter and Ellinor —Miss Wynne and Mr. Strange—an understanding, you know,” they said significantly. There was but one ending for a friendship such as theirs.

In the meantime, “I haven’t much in common with the people at home,” Peter said; “the atmosphere is not congenial.”

His family at this period, living over a prosperous shop, could not follow, though they admired, the flights of their young eagle, and Peter had perforce to look elsewhere for sympathy. He found it at the Wynnes, who, being of a more assured position, had leisure to cultivate their tastes.

It was now that Ellinor for the first time thanked God she was not as others—the Stranges, for instance—and she devoted her time to pursuing the higher branches of literature with whole-hearted zeal.

“A man must have someone he can talk to,” she explained to herself, and to this end bought little handbooks of the classics and pored over the supplements of dictionaries till at length she could allude quite elegantly to “Day, Spring’s daughter, palm’d,” and suchlike rarities.

“You’re a wonderful pal, Ellinor,” Peter said on the occasion of her capping his own quotation.

It was at this time that two events affected the girl profoundly. Ralph Manners, good-looking and with an assured place in the world, singled her out for his attentions. He brought her flowers and sweets, took her to theatres and was as romantic a knight as ever grew between the boards of a novel. Ellinor suffered his devotion till its very persistence seemed an act of disloyalty to Peter, and then gave him his marching orders.

She watched his going with a dull sense of heartache. There went a very gallant gentleman and one it would be easy for any girl to love, she reflected. “But not for me,” she added.

Maud Carr’s marriage was the next thing. She had been chosen bridesmaid, with Peter as best man, and the intimacy of the ceremony, with its ever-present suggestion of what might have been, strained her tried nerves to breaking point. Afterwards she nearly fainted, and whispered to those who fluttered round her something about the scent of the flowers and the heat, yet knowing it was neither.

At last people had ceased to couple their names together openly. Fifteen years is a long time to maintain an interest in anyone. Still, on the occasion of a charity ball or ganisers would say, “Of course you will bring Miss Wynne, Mr. Strange?”

And Mr. Strange always did.

Then on the 20th of each October, which was her birthday, he invariably took her to the theatre, and sometimes in the half-light his hand would carelessly touch hers and remain on it—and Ellinor would be thankful for the merciful dimness that concealed her eyes.

On Saturday afternoon they would some times go to Manly. It was a commonplace thing for them to do, but they did it and enjoyed it. He read the first edition of the paper going over and the final coming home, while each way Ellinor, with the perception of a woman over 30, read her fellow-passengers. The boys and girls, these amorous young things pursuing their love-making with never a care for the public eye; those slightly older and more decorous, but still absorbed in each other—how she envied them.

“Is there anything in the world more nauseating than the present-day flapper?” Peter had laid aside his paper and was surveying his surroundings with obvious disgust. “There’s only one use for them.”

“And that?” she inquired.

“They make queens of women like you.”

His final examination, Ellinor felt, would seal her fate. He was waiting only till he could come to her a fully-fledged lawyer with the world at his feet.

“Of course,” he said to her while waiting for the results, “I’m older than most fellows in beginning my career.”

She murmured something about bringing the judgment of maturity to his work, and he went away soothed. Ellinor always said the right thing to a chap.

He passed with honors, and went straight to her for congratulations.

“Now,” she thought while listening to his outpourings, “there is nothing to wait for.”

They were under the light in her sitting room and suddenly he looked at her closely.

“I say, Nell.” Her heart leapt; then, “I can see a silver thread among your raven locks, old girl.”

She caught her breath.

“That’s where dark women are at a disadvantage,” she laughed.

The next morning she ceased to part her hair down the middle in the Madonna-like fashion Peter had once admired, and brushed it loosely back instead.

He soon got a position with an old-established firm of lawyers and came to tell her at once.

“The only fly in the ointment,” he complained when he had been there a month, is one of those insupportable flappers as typiste—the kind I specially abominate.”

Ellinor, calling at the office one day, saw the “fly”—a typical young thing who had brought flapping to a fine art, whose boneless body seemed to collapse in the middle when she sat down, whose ingenue shoes had ankle-straps, but whose eyes held the wisdom of Cleopatra.

“Be merciful to her, Peter,” Ellinor said. We were all young once.”

Yes, he agreed; “but there are young things and young things. When you were her age —”

But Ellinor laughed at him.

Peter, she said, “don’t be narrow minded.”

He wasn’t. On the 20th of that year’s October he married the flapper.

Sources:

Jessie Urquhart, “The waiting“, The Australian woman’s mirror, Vol. I. No. 3. (Tuesday, December 23, 1924). [Accessed 30 August 2024]

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