Mrs. Tim of the Regiment by D. E. Stevenson

bunch of black grapes.
    Accept the reproof humbly and the grapes with gratitude and board a bus which will take me to Mrs. Parsons’ door.
    I like going to see Mrs. Parsons because she is so different from myself. Whereas I have too little time to think, Mrs. Parsons has too much. Sometimes I think she is like Meredith’s Emma ‘There is nothing the body suffers that the soul may not profit by that is Emma’s history.’
    Mrs. Parsons is propped up in bed and her bright eyes greet me at the door. We talk.
    I wish I could remember all Mrs. Parsons’ sayings. She says stimulating things that make you think, whether you want to or not. After a little while I tell Mrs. Parsons about our move to Westburgh. She says she will miss me there are so few people who bring her sunshine. Reply that I always find sunshine here, and add that I don’t think I am as nice as I used to be. (You can say foolish things like this to Mrs. Parsons.) She smiles and says I only think so because my standard has gone up. Reply that she really does not know me, I am a rebel at heart. ‘The only people who are not rebels are vegetable marrows,’ says Mrs. Parsons. Reply that it would be rather nice to be a vegetable marrow never to be discontented or miserable without any reason for being so. Mrs. Parsons laughs and says ‘Perhaps but how dull never to be joyful and happy without any reason for being so!’
    We talk about Westburgh and she asks me how I think I will like it. So many people have asked me this, but Mrs. Parsons really wants to know. I reply that I can’t tell, but that I hate the idea of leaving Biddington. I get rooted to places and it hurts tearing up roots. Of course, Scotland is not very far away, not like India but all the same it will be a foreign land to me and everybody will be strange not like moving with the regiment.
    Mrs. Parsons says, ‘I know exactly what you mean but I envy you all the same. I envy you going to new places every few years – meeting new people and making new friends. It is such an interesting thing to study people, to get inside their skins and see life from their point of view. And you can do it. Some people travel all over the world and see nothing. They go about clad in a thick fog of their own making through which no impressions can penetrate. I know a girl who went to Africa and all she could tell me when she came back was that the negroes have woolly hair. I learned more about Africa from reading a travel book than that girl learned from living there for three months. You’re not like that. You can see things and laugh at them.’
    My sense of humour is so obstreperous that it is a mixed blessing, and I tell her so.
    â€˜Nonsense,’ she says. ‘Laughter is a plendid disinfectant, take it with you to Westburgh, my dear.’
    â€˜You sound as if you think I shall need it there,’ I remark.
    â€˜You will need it wherever you go,’ she replies, ‘and just as much if you stay at home. Goodness me, I often wonder how I would get through life without a sense of humour. When things are as bad as they can be you can always find something to laugh at, even if it is only your own gloomy face in the mirror. Wait a moment,’ she adds, as I rise to go. ‘There is a passage here I want to find for you. Give me that book, child. R. L. S. has said what I mean better than I could think it.’ She turns over the pages as if she loved them and reads in her soft, husky voice:
    â€˜ “The strangest thing in all man’s travelling is that he should carry about with him incongruous memories. There is no foreign land; it is the traveller only who is foreign, and now and then, by a flash of recollection, lights up the contrasts of the earth.” ’
    Her hand lies in mine a shade longer than usual as we say ‘Goodbye’ and her eyes are very bright. I say huskily that I will write to her and she replies hastily: