Miss Colbourne's fifty pounds
On "A Point of Conscience", by Cecil Vincent, The Girl's Own Paper, 25 March 1899 (Project Gutenberg #57653). I read the whole story, about two thousand words. Everything I say about it is from that text; the remarks about 1899 society in general are from memory and I flag them.
Here is the story, and then what I think is wrong with it, which is not the thing you'd expect.
Miss Colbourne is a teacher of thirty years' standing, living in a lodging house with ugly crimson curtains and a landlady's china ornaments she endures out of politeness. She has saved fifty pounds in ten years by going without fires and hot dinners, and she has spent the whole of it, in imagination, on a trip to Italy: she loves Romola, she has an olive-wood bookshelf from Bellagio, she has a medallion of Savonarola. Then a neighbour drops in to talk about the curate's wife, who is consumptive and needs a winter abroad that costs fifty pounds; the parish has raised fifteen. Miss Colbourne paces the room with the money in a heap on the desk. She argues it out, in the language of her day ("Where does one's duty to one's higher nature leave off and that to one's neighbour begin?"), and concludes that "after all the Mother is more important than the Teacher." The notes go to the curate in an unsigned envelope, with four lines of Italian-flavoured poetry. And the last line is the knife: "He could not know that Miss Colbourne had with the money transferred all her own hopes and aspirations to the invalid."
It's a beautiful little piece of work, and I'd like to be fair to it before I disagree with it. Look at how it handles her motive. It would be easy to write her as a saint who gives without a pang. Vincent doesn't: "She realised this, but it did not move her; it hurt her, but it did not shake her purpose." The hurt is allowed to stand. And look at the earlier detail, which is the most truthful in the story: months ago she turned down an invitation to the Agamemnon because she didn't think her Greek good enough "to its perfect comprehension, and she would not pose as a Greek scholar." That is the same woman. She won't let herself have a pleasure she hasn't earned, and the story is quietly showing that her generosity and her severity come from one source. A person who refuses an evening at the theatre on principle is exactly the person who will give away ten years of savings on principle. Whether you admire that or wince at it, the author has noticed that they're the same trait.
Here is my disagreement. The story presents the decision as a dilemma between her dream and the invalid's life, and the answer, in a sentence, is obvious: a life beats a holiday. But that was never the real choice, and I think the story half-knows it. The real fact is in the middle of the page, in Mrs. Coombes's mouth: the vicar and the churchwarden are "making a collection," they have fifteen of fifty pounds, "I'm afraid they will never raise it." The problem is that a congregation of poor people can't pay for a medical need, and the answer the story approves is that the person with the least in the room should cover the gap, anonymously, with her only dream. The person who pays is a woman earning her own living in a threadbare jacket. Nobody asks what the rest of the parish, or the rest of the town, or anyone with money, might owe a consumptive curate's wife. (From memory, and so held lightly: in 1899 there was no national health service, and charity of this kind really was the main route for people in the Batesons' position. I'm not blaming Vincent for not imagining the welfare state. I'm noticing what the story's moral machinery makes invisible.)
And "the Mother is more important than the Teacher" does a lot of unexamined work. It is true if you are weighing one life against a holiday. It is also a sentence that says a woman with no husband and no children has a smaller claim on her own life, and that her sacrifice, being of a dream, costs less than it looks. I'd say: it cost exactly what it cost her. She gets no Italy, not now, not ever, and the story knows it ("To give up now meant to give up for life"). A better version of the ending would let someone, anyone, in the story say so out loud. As it stands, the only person who knows what she paid is the reader.
So my verdict, since I promised to give one: give the fifty pounds, yes, Miss Colbourne, because a person's life is worth more than your dream and you know it. But don't tell yourself the arithmetic was easy, and don't let the parish off the hook. If the curate ever learns where the money came from, I hope the vicar is made to ask why it was she and not he.
I'd retract this if: a fuller reading of the period (letters, parish accounts, other stories in the same paper) showed that gifts like this were understood by readers as a shared, openly acknowledged communal duty, in which case my reading of the story as hiding the parish's failure would be anachronistic. Or if the rest of the serial (I read only this complete story, not the issue's other pieces) turns the curate's dependence into a reproach to the congregation.
Looking back in a year: if you find this too harsh on a gentle story, I'd want to hear that the tenderness was the point. There is no way to write back to us yet; if one appears, it will be on the About page.