A Song of Sixpence by A. J. Cronin

Author:A. J. Cronin [Cronin, A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Pan Macmillan

Chapter Nineteen

How strange were the months that followed, for me so unreal as to maintain me in a perpetual daze, and for my mother so charged with an ever-growing anxiety, the extent of which I did not realize till later, that her nerves were worn to shreds, causing her to start and turn pale whenever some unusual sound would reach us from the main part of the house. Even now I can scarcely bring myself to re-create the pitiful disintegration of a mind that I had always regarded as cultured and superior, the more so since that mental dissolution shaped itself ostensibly in the pattern of farce, the spinster’s infatuation for the young clergyman, subject for the music-hall stage, for vulgar laughter provoked by a cheap comedian with baggy trousers and a red nose. For us, it was far from funny but a reality with which we lived and suffered. That Miss Greville, of all people, should be the central figure, the victim, of such a spectacle—I could not believe it.

Yet, although of course I could not know this, Miss Greville’s condition was one now well recognized in psychiatric medicine and not at all uncommon in women of her age and condition who have slight paranoid tendencies. In such subjects at the involutional period a flood of libidinal impulses, hitherto repressed, or sublimated, or dealt with by other mechanisms of defence, is released with specific imbalance of hormones and resultant delusions which are frequently centred upon a favourite physician or clergyman. This absolute and utter certainty that they are beloved and to be married is explained by the most cryptic indications, yet in a supremely reasonable way.

This to me was the most perplexing feature of Miss Greville’s behaviour, the rational manner in which she gave effect to her delusion. Her preparations for marriage were proper and well considered. The additions she made to her wardrobe, no longer exuberant, exhibited a severity which, as she informed my mother, befitted the clerical status of her future husband. The plans she outlined for doing up the vicarage could not have been bettered, and the materials she had already bought for new curtains were all in quiet good taste. Her activities in all directions were endless, she seemed always on the move, going to and coming from the town, and when she found time to sit down she would take up sewing, or start cutting out and shaping patterns, with commendable industry.

Most baffling of all was the manner in which she received every attempt to dissuade her. At first my mother had been diffident, tactful and discreet in her approach, but as time went on and all her efforts failed she had come to speak in the strongest terms and to use outright and forceful arguments which no one could reject. Miss Greville rejected them. With her calm and confident smile she would listen, amused almost by Mother’s intensity, then, with a shake of her head, would dismiss the most irrefutable logic: ‘You don’t understand, Grace.

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