Wittgenstein S Whewell S Court Lectures Cambridge 1938 1941 From The Notes by Yorick Smythies 1st Edition Ludwig Wittgenstein
Wittgenstein S Whewell S Court Lectures Cambridge 1938 1941 From The Notes by Yorick Smythies 1st Edition Ludwig Wittgenstein
Wittgenstein S Whewell S Court Lectures Cambridge 1938 1941 From The Notes by Yorick Smythies 1st Edition Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Wittgenstein’s
Whewell’s Court Lectures
Wittgenstein’s
Whewell’s Court Lectures
Cambridge, 1938–1941
1 2017
To the memory of Peg
vii
Contents
Preface ix
Editorial Introduction xiv
List of Editorial Conventions xx
Abbreviations xxii
1 Lectures on Knowledge 6
⟨Easter Term 1938⟩
3 Lectures on Similarity 88
⟨Michaelmas Term 1939⟩
Appendix 297
Bibliography 348
Index 351
ix
Preface
Through Peg Smythies Rhees, I also came into possession of a few items that
shed light on Smythies’ personality, some of which are written by Wittgenstein.
Since they have not appeared in print, I would like to include them here. When
Smythies applied for a position as a librarian at Barnett House, in 1950, he
collected various testimonials by Georg Henrik von Wright, G. E. Moore,
Wittgenstein, and others. Wittgenstein wrote:
Already 10 years earlier in 1940, Wittgenstein had written his first reference for
Smythies:
Mr. Yorick Smythies has attended my classes for four years; I have also
had a great many discussions and conversations with him outside
these classes. He has always impressed me by his uncommon intelli-
gence as well as by his seriousness and sincerity. He is a kindhearted,
gentle, and even‐tempered man.2
Dear Mama,
I have been having lectures from Wittgenstein nearly every day.
He has been very good. Yesterday he lectured from 2 p.m.–7. Taylor
asked him if he would meet me at lunch; he said he would come to lunch,
but wouldn’t meet me. I don’t think he likes the look of me very much.3
In the last decade of his life, Smythies prepared his own notes for publication
and made various attempts to get them published. He also wrote an introduc-
tion to the notes in which he defends an austere editorial approach:
The two main reasons Smythies failed to get the notes published were this
editorial approach and the way he went about preparing the text for p
ublication.
Smythies returned to the notes in the early 1970s. He made tape recordings of
nearly all the notes he had made of Wittgenstein’s lectures during his time in
Cambridge. This was only possible because he had provided a clean handwrit-
ten version of most of the notes he had taken. As already mentioned, those first
notes were themselves barely legible, particularly because Smythies had devel-
oped his own kind of stenographic system.
Editorial Introduction
The contents of the present volume consist of notes taken by Yorick Smythies
(1917–1980) when attending Wittgenstein’s lectures at the University of
Cambridge from early 1938 to Lent Term 1941. Exceptions are Lecture 1 and
part of Lecture 10 of the Lectures on Knowledge, which Smythies copied from
notes made by James C. Taylor. Smythies also copied some of the lectures in
Chapter 2 of this volume from Taylor’s notes. Moreover, only part of the mate
rial in Chapter 10 is likely to derive from lectures Wittgenstein gave in 1945,
while the other part reflects Smythies’ own views. This item falls outside
the period of ‘1938–1941’, mentioned in the title of this volume, but since the
material of Chapter 10 cannot be described without qualification as ‘notes
of lectures’, we did not include the year 1945 in the title. Only a small amount
of this material has already been published, namely the Lectures on Freedom of
the Will, the second half of Lecture 4 on Description, and what has been
known as Lecture III of the Lectures on Religious Belief (cf. Introduction 3).
They are presented here in their original contexts and with a revised dating.
Whewell’s Court Lectures – pronounced ‘Hyou‐el’ – is the title Smythies used
to refer to the lecture notes of this volume. Whewell’s Court is the name of
several buildings of Trinity College, in one of which the lectures took place.1
G. E. Moore gives a good description of the location of Wittgenstein’s rooms in
that building: ‘Of the only two sets which are on the top floor of the gate‐way
from Whewell’s Courts into Sidney Street, they were the set which looks west
ward over the larger Whewell’s Court, and, being so high up, they had a large
view of sky and also of Cambridge roofs, including the pinnacles of King’s
Chapel’ (MWL: 49). The room where Wittgenstein lectured is the one behind
a tripartite set of neo‐Gothic windows on that side of the building.
Apart from the title of Chapter 2 and the descriptive titles of Chapters 9
and 10, which derive from titles Smythies used elsewhere, all titles were
1 William Whewell (1794–1866) was an English polymath, most influential in the philosophy of
science, the history of science and moral philosophy. He financed the construction of the courts
that were to bear his name.
Editorial Introduction xv
The differing, consecutive series, which these notes contain, are not
arranged in any chronological order of series. Others who attended
these lectures, may be able to specify year, term, etc., at which such and
such a series of lectures was delivered. But: – (a) I do not trust my own
memory sufficiently to do this myself, (b) I think that an arrangement of
the lectures in a logical, rather than a chronological, order, helps to make
evident the continuities and divisions characteristic of Wittgenstein’s
thinking.3
The aim of the present edition is, on the contrary, to reverse the intentions of
this plan and to reconstruct the original chronology of the individual lectures.
The final year, 1947, mentioned by Smythies may refer to a manuscript he
called ‘Miscellaneous Remarks Relating to Volition by Wittgenstein in Various
Other Lectures Which He Gave’. Smythies selected these remarks, which are
not printed in this volume, drawing primarily on Peter Geach’s version of
Wittgenstein’s Lectures on Philosophical Psychology, 1946–1947 (GWL: 3–116),
but also on the Lectures on Volition, Description, and Freedom of the Will.
Smythies possessed a typescript version of Geach’s notes, some 30 pages of
which were found among his papers. Why he did not take notes himself is an
open question. By that time, he was certainly the most proficient note‐taker
who could have been there, and the reports have it that he was indeed in
Cambridge at the time (cf. PPO: 358). A comparison of the manuscript to a
shorter typescript with the same title shows that Smythies ommitted the
remarks he had taken from the Lectures on Volition, Description and Freewill.
It is not clear, however, whether he would have stuck to his plan of including
2 Rose Rand refers to the material of the Belief Lectures as ‘Vorlesung über den Glauben’, i.e.,
‘Lecture on Belief ’, which suggests that Wittgenstein actually declared this to be his topic
(cf. Iven 2004: 87).
3 Quoted from Subsidiary Written Source [8].
xvi Editorial Introduction
For the most part, Smythies uses the same kind of small spiral‐bound note
books for both immediate lecture notes and rewritten versions of lectures.
By ‘small’, we mean notebooks with 20 to 21 lines to write on. Most of them
are ‘National Natty 300/2 Series’ notebooks of approximately 200 × 160 mm.
He also uses a larger version of the same type of notebook, the 300/6 Series,
which offers 27 writing lines and is approximately 255 × 200 mm. We refer to
notebooks of this size as ‘middle‐sized’ and to notebooks with 30 or more
writing lines as ‘large’. Other kinds of notebooks will be specified in the intro
ductions to the relevant chapters.
One can see a rather soft pencil in action from Smythies’ first lecture notes
in the academic year 1935/36 until Lent Term 1939, when he switches to a
fountain pen in Lecture XII of the Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics.
The soft pencil returns for the first notes of Lecture XXV and in Michaelmas
Term 1939 for the Similarity Lectures. It returns one more time early in
Lent Term 1940 for Description Lecture 1. In Lecture 2, Smythies switches to a
pencil with a harder lead and finally to what seems to be a fountain pen with
a fine nib, which he uses until the end of Easter Term 1940. This fountain pen
must have been particularly appropriate for its purpose, since he writes faster
than at any time before or after. This speed is also due to a system of abbrevia
tions that Smythies has been developing since 1938. The same system is still in
place when he returns in Michaelmas Term 1940, but the fountain pen with a
broad nib that he uses now makes his writing slower. It is the same model that
he employs for all rewritten versions. The broad nib and the absence of abbre
viations are reliable features by which to distinguish a rewritten version from
immediate lecture notes.
Smythies’ notes never give the year of a lecture, and only in very few cases
do they come with a specific date. The dating of certain lectures printed here
has been revised more than once, as can be gleaned from comparing the
present dating with a preliminary dating in an earlier ‘Sketch of a Project’
(cf. Munz 2010). In most cases, comparison with the Nachlass was used only
to confirm a dating that had been established independently. The most impor
tant clues were derived from the names of students that occur in the lectures,
together with lecture summaries by other students, and Smythies’ recon
structed presence in Cambridge. As for lecture summaries, we wish to single
out Rose Rand’s summaries, published in Mathias Iven’s (2004) Rand und
Wittgenstein, as being particularly useful when it came to dating some of the
most recalcitrant items.
An ‘academic year’ at Cambridge University runs from October of one year
until June of the following year and is divided into Michaelmas Term, Lent
Term, and Easter Term. We speak of the Regular Michaelmas Term, when we
mean the period from 1 October to 19 December, and similarly for the other
terms, which last from 5 January to 25 March, or 24 in a leap year, and 10 or 17
April to 18 or 25 June, respectively. In all other cases, we refer to the corre
sponding Full Terms. A Full Term corresponds to the lecturing period and is
xviii Editorial Introduction
about two weeks shorter than a Regular Term. As will be seen, Wittgenstein
did not always stick to the dates of a Full Term, even in cases where he was
teaching a regular course, as opposed to his unofficial, ‘not open’, lectures.
We annotate the lectures with page references to Wittgenstein’s Nachlass
as well as published writings. ‘MS’ and ‘TS’ are used for Smythies’ notes and
typescripts of the lectures. We refer to the Nachlass by ‘vW’ plus an item num
ber and page. Since the item number already encodes whether an item is a
manuscript or a typescript (‘1–’ for manuscripts and ‘2–’ for typescripts), it is
possible to use ‘MS’ or ‘TS’ for another purpose here. We have decided to adopt
the abbreviation ‘vW’ for references to the Nachlass, in honour of Georg
Henrik von Wright (1916–2003), who, among Wittgenstein’s literary execu
tors, did most service to the Nachlass and also introduced the numbering.
With very few exceptions, no references to Wittgenstein’s own typescripts
are given. We concentrate on original manuscript sources of the ideas expressed
in the lectures and their dates. In cases where a manuscript has been edited
and published, or where a virtually identical print version exists, we usually
give reference to the published version only.7 We also give references for the
books and articles of authors Wittgenstein discusses. In some cases, it is likely
that his knowledge of their views derives from discussions, rather than reading.
In these cases, we nevertheless point out a printed passage in which the
corresponding view is expressed.
Wherever possible, the text is taken from immediate lecture notes (‘N’).
Additions in square brackets indicate significant additions in the rewritten
version (‘MS’) or, if there is no rewritten version, in the next‐closest textual
source, usually a typescript (‘TS’). Additions or modifications of our own
appear in diamond brackets, ‘⟨ ⟩’ (see section ‘List of Editorial Conventions’).
Brackets may be dropped if there is a footnote that specifies what has been
changed. Parentheses indicate parentheses in the original lecture notes, or the
most authoritative source of the corresponding lectures, where there are no
immediate lecture notes, regardless of whether square brackets or parentheses
are used in the original. There are only very few textual variants in Smythies’
notes. These are printed in the main text within parentheses. Whenever
possible, we have used square brackets in a way that allows for independent
quotation of N and of MS.
There is no general answer to the question of how reliable Smythies was
when he wrote up his immediate lecture notes. As for the status of MS, we
believe that it was Smythies’ practice either to rewrite his notes anything up to
several months after a lecture or not to rewrite them at all. Some additions he
7 For example, we refer not to the Manuscripts 114: 1–228, 115: 1–117 and 140: 1–39, but to
Part I of Philosophical Grammar; not to Manuscript 144, but to Philosophy of Psychology – A
Fragment (PPF); not to Manuscripts 172 and 174–177, but to On Certainty; similarly, to Remarks
on the Philosophy of Psychology, Volumes I and II, Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology,
Volumes I and II, and Remarks on Colour, but not to the corresponding manuscript sources.
Editorial Introduction xix
made to his immediate lecture notes may be based on notes of other students,
such as Taylor’s in 1938. Accordingly, we believe that the MS‐based text is fairly
accurate, as long as there is no evidence to the opposite.
We replace Smythies’ abbreviations (e.g. ‘B’ for ‘belief ’, ‘T’ for ‘thing’, ‘des’ for
‘describe’, or ‘description’, etc.) by the corresponding words without further
indication. He mostly uses the first‐person singular, but can move between
first and third person. We replace ‘W.’ by ‘I’, making the necessary changes
wherever this seems desirable, and add a footnote where the changes are non-
trivial. Obvious linguistic mistakes are corrected without further notification.
This extends to most cases of missing words or abbreviations, such as, cf., a(n),
the, or that. There is admittedly no clear line between linguistic corrections
and interpolations. In some cases, adding an article, for example, implies a
non‐trivial choice between a definite and an indefinite article, which may affect
the sense of a whole sentence. Whenever we find this to be the case, we mark a
one‐word addition of our own with diamond brackets. Incomplete or crossed
out sentences are sometimes omitted without any notification, sometimes kept
in a footnote, and sometimes restored in the main text. The choice depends on
the estimated usefulness for the reader.
Wittgenstein used to have a blackboard at his lectures, which he also used for
drawings (cf. MWL: 49, LSD: 293). The lectures in this volume feature more
than 70 illustrations, for the most part redrawn from Smythies’ immediate
lecture notes. In some cases, we decided to include vectorised versions of
Smythies’ original drawings, mostly taken from a rewritten version, where
redrawing them would have involved choosing between different ways of ren
dering the original. In other cases, illustrations have been newly drawn accord
ing to instructions given in Smythies’ text. This is never done without an
indication in a footnote.
Our division of the book into ‘chapters’ groups those sets of notes that refer
to one and the same lecture courses, or to groups of individual lectures that
followed each other chronologically in close proximity. The introductions to
the chapters adopt the following pattern: (1) a physical description of the
source material, (2) the dating of the corresponding lectures, and (3) general
remarks about textual parallels in Wittgenstein’s Nachlass.
xx
19‐/‐ We use a slash between years, e.g. ‘1938/39’, when what we mean is an
academic year, lasting from October to the following June, and a dash,
e.g. ‘1938–39’, for a period of two years.
— In the original lecture notes, a dash on a line by itself is used to indi
cate a gap of no note taking. These dashes are reproduced in the
printed text as they occur in N. Smythies did not indicate all gaps in
this way.
xxii
Abbreviations
MWL ‘Wittgenstein’s Lectures in 1930–33.’ In Mind, Vol. 63, No. 249, 1–15;
Vol. 64, No. 253, 1–27. Quoted after PO 45–114.
WVC Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle: Conversations Recorded by
Friedrich Waismann. Ed. B. F. McGuinness, Blackwell, Oxford, 1979.
The notes Smythies made during the lectures of this chapter, the Lectures on
Knowledge, are contained in two small spiral‐bound notebooks. The first
notebook begins with Smythies’ version of ‘Are There an Infinite Number of
Shades of Colour?’ (cf. Chapter 2), followed by this chapter’s Lectures 3, 4, 5, 6,
8, 9, and 10. Smythies inserted the lectures from the other notebook as Lectures
2, 7, and 11; Taylor’s notes as Lecture 1 and the first half of Lecture 10. The
latter he went on to cross out, for unknown reasons. We use ‘N’ for these origi-
nal notes and ‘MS’ for Smythies’ rewritten and expanded version of the original
notes. The immediate notes are written with a rather soft pencil, typical of
Smythies’ early lecture notes. The expanded version of Lectures 1 to 11 is
written with a broad‐nibbed fountain pen into the same kind of middle‐sized
notebook he used during the lectures. This was probably done in 1938, when
Smythies had Taylor’s notes available. We do not know whether his insertion of
Taylor’s notes and the other three lectures in their respective places was led by
chronological considerations, but nor do we know enough to interfere with
this arrangement. Lecture 10, as it appears in MS, may be a compilation. The
section before the words ‘My Notes’ has no parallel in Rhees’s unpublished
version of the lecture, while everything from ‘My Notes’ to the end of Lecture
10 does.1
The Lectures on Knowledge differ from other notes by Smythies in that most
of the meetings – six out of 11 – are dated. Unfortunately, no year is indicated,
and half of the day numbers are difficult to read. Moreover, those that are
relatively unambiguous do not correspond to the pattern that we were antici-
pating, being: 20 May (Friday), 27 May (Friday), 4 June (Saturday), 15 June
(Wednesday). We expected lectures on Mondays and discussions on Fridays,
as Wittgenstein had announced to Moore in a letter of April 1938: ‘I’ll have the
first meeting on Monday (25th) at 5 p.m. … We shall meet in Taylor’s rooms in
Wittgenstein’s Whewell’s Court Lectures: Cambridge, 1938–1941, From the Notes by Yorick Smythies,
First Edition. Edited by Volker A. Munz and Bernhard Ritter.
© 2017 Volker A. Munz and Bernhard Ritter. Published 2017 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
4 Whewell’s Court Lectures: Cambridge, 1938–1941
2 Rhees’ version was published, without any exact dating, in Philosophia 6, 1976, 430–433,
438–440, 442–445; reprinted as CE: 407–411, 419–421, 423–426.
Whewell’s Court Lectures: Cambridge, 1938–1941 5
‘the dream puzzle’: whether a dream occurs while we are asleep or is just
remembered as occurring while we are asleep (cf. vW 158: 37r–41r).3 At one
point in the notebook, he quotes an apparently typical phrase of one of his
pupils: ‘Watson: “The key question is …”’ (vW 158: 39v). A few pages later,
he draws the same figure of a cube that he uses in Knowledge Lecture 3 (cf. vW
158: 43v). The notebook says nothing about the philosophical meaning of the
figure, while this comes out very clearly in the lecture.
3 See also the passage towards the end of Smythies’ Preparatory Notes (Chapter 10), where it is
called ‘a most important fact about dreams’ that they occur while we are asleep.
6
Lectures on Knowledge
Lecture 1
Taylor’s notes.
If someone says ‘I have pain’ and someone else says of him, ‘he has pain’, does ‘I
have pain’ mean the same as ‘he has pain’? How can they mean the same,
since the ways of verifying them are different? You could say: ‘Our scheme of
paradigms is too simple.’
Is ‘It’s going to rain’ about the present or the future? You can say both (to a
large extent what you say depends on your mood). Whether a proposition is
‘about’ something or not is generally a complicated matter. You’re putting
(the question) into too straight a jacket.
There is a temptation to say that the two sentences refer to the same fact.
The temptation is due to the use of a certain picture. You think of ‘the same
fact’ as like ‘the same person’.
Is ‘He has pain’ about his behaviour?4 Cf. ‘I seem to have a rush’, ‘He seems to
have a rush.’
For such phrases as ‘I’m in pain’, ‘I see red’, ‘I have such and such a wish’, I’ll
use the word ‘utterance’. Like a moan, etc., as opposed to a description.
There is a complicated relation between ‘He’s in pain’ and the behaviour.
They don’t mean the same. Though ‘He moans’ may mean (under special
circumstances, e.g. when he is in bed dying, very, very ill) ‘He is in pain.’
(The two may come to exactly the same thing.)
The connection between ‘I’m in pain’ and ‘He’s in pain’ is that his saying the
former is a criterion for ‘He’s in pain.’ Is there a verification in the case of an
utterance? (Cf. Lecture 2.)
How did you learn the use of the word ‘pain’? You were crying and someone
told you you were in pain, etc.5 Cf. ‘I dreamt so and so.’ How do we learn the use
of this? Has anyone ever shown us what a dream is like? What red is like? We
woke up and told a story in the past tense. Then we were told, ‘you dreamt it’.
So we learned.6
Experiment (alarm clock etc.) to show that a long dream only takes two sec-
onds. Does the experiment show this? Someone might say: ‘Perhaps you didn’t
dream it, but only remembered dreaming it.’ Is the child correct in using the
present or the past tense about its dream? Is something now happening, or did
something happen? Correlated phenomena. (Events in the brain, moaning in
sleep, etc.) You can use the present or past tense, as you like. (The choice is a
linguistic one.)7
We’re inclined to say: ‘Something corresponds to the utterance.’ A case of
shifting the responsibility. To say ‘something corresponds’ is just another way
of saying, ‘What he says is true.’ Cf. saying, ‘“A statement is true” means “Reality
is in agreement”.’ What’s done? A grammatical recommendation is made.
Lecture 2
The fly catcher.8 The fly gets in but can’t get out. The stronger the wish to get
out, the harder it is for it to get out. (It is fascinated by one way of trying to
get out.) If we put the fly in glasses of shapes and shades different to this one,
where it was easier for it to get out, where it was less fascinated by the light,
etc., and we trained it to fly out of these, it might fly out of this one also.
Similarly, when we spoke about the dream puzzle, we shifted to a less
uzzling problem. We produce a similar puzzle in another case where the
p
puzzle is less alive.
5 Cf. PI §244.
6 Cf. GWL: 30 f., 180, 252.
7 Cf. Smythies’ Preparatory Notes, near the end, vW 158: 37v–38r (March 1938), vW 128: 22
(1944), vW 130: 251 (1 August 1946), PPF §52 f. = PI II: 184a–c.
8 Cf. Wittgenstein’s Reply, vW 149: 67 = NFL: 258 (1935/36), vW 118: 44r (1 September 1937),
71r–v (8 September 1937), vW 117: 60 f., 92 (1937, later than 11 September), RFM: 56, I, §44,
PI §309.
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was ready to go, however, she stopped on her way to the door, and
gave Mabin one long, curious look. It made the girl spring forward,
with a world of sympathy in her eyes.
“Oh, I’m so sorry for you!” she whispered. “So very, very sorry.
Much more than before I knew anything.”
Then Mrs. Dale gave way, and seeming for the first time to recover
her powers of thought and of speech, she sank down on the nearest
chair, and burst into tears, natural, healing tears, while she poured
into Mabin’s ears a broken, incoherent confession:
“It is quite true that I did it—did what she told you. But you know,
oh, Mabin, you do know how bitterly I have repented it! I would have
given my life to have been able to live those few minutes over again!
What did she tell you? Tell me, tell me! And how did she say it? Of
course she made the very worst of it; but it was bad enough without
that. Oh, Mabin, Mabin! Don’t you think she might forgive me now?”
While she talked in this wandering and excited way Mabin hardly
knew what to do; whether to try to divert her thoughts, or to let her
know in what a vixenish and hard manner the elder woman had
made the announcement of the terrible action which had cut short
one life and ruined another.
“Of course she ought to forgive you!” she said at last. “But you
must not give way to despair if she does not. She is a hard woman;
she will never treat you as tenderly as your own friends do.”
She paused, not liking to tell Mrs. Dale that the visitor was waiting
for her, and wondering whether her friend had forgotten the fact. As
she glanced toward the door, Mrs. Dale caught her eye, and
suddenly threw herself upon her knees, burying her head in the girl’s
lap.
“Oh, I daren’t, I daren’t go in—just yet!” she whispered almost
pleadingly. “I know I sent for her; I know I must see her; but now that
the moment has come, I feel as if I could not bear it. I know how she
will look—what she will say. And it is upon her, all upon her, that my
life, my very life depends!”
Mabin said nothing. She could not help thinking, from the wild
words and wilder manner of the wretched woman before her, that the
great strain of her crime and her repentance had ended by
weakening her mind. Unless——
The girl drew a long breath, frightened by the awful possibility,
which had just occurred to her, that the grim visitor in the drawing-
room had been threatening Mrs. Dale with the extreme penalty of her
crime. Mrs. Dale’s words—“My life depends upon her!” were explicit
enough. Instinctively Mabin’s arm closed more tightly round the
sobbing woman.
“Hush, hush, dear!” she whispered soothingly. “She will not dare,
she will not dare to be more cruel than she has been already! You
must try and be brave, and to bear her hard words; but she won’t do
anything more than scold you!”
In the midst of her grief Mrs. Dale looked up in the girl’s face with a
sad smile.
“Oh, she has dared so much more than that already!” she said
hopelessly. “I don’t want to excuse myself—nothing can excuse me
—but I want you to know the share she had in it all. For she had a
share. It would never have happened but for her.”
Mrs. Dale sprang to her feet, and walking up and down the room
with her little white hands clinched till the nails marked her flesh, she
began to pour into the young girl’s ears a story which kept her hearer
fascinated, spellbound.
“Listen, listen!” said Mrs. Dale in a low, breathless voice, without
glancing at the girl. “It is not a story for you; I would never have told
you a word of it if it had not been forced upon us both. But now, as
you have heard so much, told in one way, you must hear the rest,
told in another.”
Mabin said nothing.
In fact, it seemed to her that Mrs. Dale hardly cared whether she
listened or not. She went on with her story in the same hurried,
monotonous tone, as if it was merely the relief of putting it into words
that she wanted:
“I had always been spoiled, always had my own way, until I was
married. My father and mother both died when I was a little thing of
six, and I lived with my guardian and his family, and they let me do
just as I liked. I was supposed to be rich, almost an heiress; but
when my guardian died, it was found that the money had all gone; I
had nothing. I was not yet eighteen then. And Sir Geoffrey Mallyan
wanted to marry me. Every one said I must; that there was nothing
else for me to do. I didn’t care for him; but then I didn’t care for any
one else; so nobody thought it mattered. It was taken for granted,
don’t you see, that there was no question of my saying no.”
Mrs. Dale stopped short, and for the first time looked at Mabin:
“That’s what people always think, that it doesn’t matter whom a girl
marries, if she’s very young. But it does, oh, it does! And he had a
brother——”
Mabin started, and thought at once of Mr. Banks.
“A younger brother, who had been ordered home from India on
sick leave. No, I didn’t care for him,” she went on emphatically,
reading the expression of sympathy on the girl’s face. “But he was
livelier than his grave brother, my husband, and we were very good
friends. Nobody would have thought that there was any harm in that
if old Lady Mallyan hadn’t interfered. You can guess now, I suppose,
who Lady Mallyan is!”
Mabin nodded emphatically without speaking.
“She came posting to the place to find out the evil which was only
in her own mind. We had been getting on quite well together, my
husband and I. I was rather afraid of him, but I liked him, and he was
kind to me. I believe he was really fond of me; and that I should have
grown fond of him. I was fond of him in a way; but he was fifteen
years older than I, and very quiet and grave in his manners. But he
let me do what I liked, and took me to all the dances and races I
wanted, and was proud of me, and seemed pleased that I should
enjoy myself. But when his mother came, everything was changed.
She had great influence with him, and she told him that he was
spoiling me, and making me fit for nothing but amusement, and that
these constant gayeties were ruining my character. And so he told
me, very gently, very kindly, that I must settle down, and live a
quieter life.
“I was sorry, disappointed, and not too grateful to Lady Mallyan.
Would you have been? Would anybody have been? But I submitted.
There were some scenes first, of course. I had been spoiled; I am
bad-tempered, I know; and I was indignant with her for her
interference. What harm had I been doing, after all? I was not
unhappy, however, and it was easy to reconcile myself to everything
but to her. For she seemed to have settled down in my husband’s
house, and I did not dare to hint that I resented this. Then things
went on smoothly for a time. I had given up my balls, and nearly all
what my mother-in-law was pleased to call ‘dissipations.’ But now
that I was oftener at home, I naturally saw more of Willie, my
husband’s brother, than before, since he was not strong enough to
go out so much as Sir Geoffrey and I had done.
“We were all very anxious about him, as he seemed to be on the
verge of consumption. He was very bright and amusing, however,
even then, and I was certainly more at ease with him than I was with
my mother-in-law, or even with my own husband, who was a silent
and undemonstrative man. But it was shameful of Lady Mallyan to
suspect that I cared more for him than for my husband; it never
entered into his head or mine to suppose any one would think such a
wicked thing; and certainly Sir Geoffrey would never have thought of
such a thing except at the suggestion of his mother.
“I cannot tell you, child, of the wretchedness this miserable old
woman brought about, in her jealousy at Sir Geoffrey’s love for me,
and her anxiety to get back the influence over him which she thought
I had usurped. Of course if I had been an older woman, as old as I
am now, for example, I should have rebelled; I should have insisted
on her leaving the house where she had brought nothing but misery.
I should have known how to take my proper place as mistress of the
house in which she was only an interloper.
“But I did not know how to do it, although I knew what I ought to
do.
“So it went on, the misery of every one growing greater every day,
Willie and I feeling a restraint which made us afraid to exchange a
word under her eyes; my husband growing shorter in his manner,
more reserved in his speech, having had his mind poisoned against
his brother and against me.
“At last a crisis came. Willie told us that he was going away. I knew
he was in no fit state to travel, but I did not dare to tell him to stay, or
to tell the fears I felt for him. When he was ready to go, I spoke out to
him at last. We were in the drawing-room, standing by the fire, and I
told him it was his mother who had made us all miserable and afraid
to speak to one another, and I begged him to come with me to Sir
Geoffrey, and to back me up in telling him the truth, in insisting that
Lady Mallyan should leave the house.
“ ‘If you go away now, without speaking to Geoffrey,’ I said, ‘I shall
be left in the power of this hateful, wicked woman for the rest of my
life. For she will never leave of her own accord; and I dare not speak
to Geoffrey about her with no one to back me up.’
“And then I saw Lady Mallyan’s shadow outside the window on the
path. She had been listening, she was always listening; hoping to
find out something as we said good-by.
“I ran to the window, but she escaped me. When Willie was gone, I
went to look for my husband. He was in the gun-room, looking
harder than usual. His mother had just left him. I had never seen him
look so stern, and I was frightened. I began to see that I was
powerless against the mischievous woman who was spoiling our
lives.
“ ‘Geoffrey!’ I said. ‘What has your mother been saying to you? She
has been saying something unkind I know; something untrue,
probably. What is it?’
“Then he said something which made me feel as if I had been
turned into stone. Lady Mallyan had been with him, had
misrepresented my words to Willie, had put a hideous meaning into
all we had said. I forget Sir Geoffrey’s exact words; if I remembered
them I would not repeat them. But they were cold, full of suspicion.
They roused in me a mad feeling of hatred. I can remember that I
shook till my dress rustled; that I could not speak. Then—God
forgive me! I took up a little pistol—revolver—I don’t know what they
call it; but it was something so small it looked like a toy—and, hardly
knowing what I did, I pointed it at him, and—and—he cried out, and
fell down.
“I don’t know what happened then, whether I shrieked out, or what
happened. But they came in, a lot of them, and took me away. And—
and I never saw him again. She would not even let me see him when
he lay dead. Though I begged, how I begged!”
Suddenly Mrs. Dale stopped in her speech, and crossed quickly to
the door. Flinging it open suddenly, she revealed Lady Mallyan,
standing within a couple of feet of it, erect, very pale.
Mrs. Dale smiled.
“Come in, pray come in, your ladyship. You have not lost your old
habits, I see,” she said with cutting emphasis as she bowed to her
visitor.
CHAPTER XIV.
NO MERCY.