You know the kind of people I mean. People Like That. People who think that way, and do those things, and behave like that. They probably vote like that, too. Ugh. People. They give me headaches.
Fortunately, for all they get up your nose in the real world, People Like That are terrific fun to read about. Healthy, too, for it’s always a good idea to find ways to re-humanise the people we loathe en masse. I have been too busy to get through even a single novel this week, but I did serendipitously rediscover one of my favourite short stories — nothing too serious or taxing, but it did have the virtue of setting me laughing over not only People Like That, but quarantines, too.
Miss McPherson of Avonlea is very much Like That. She is known for it, as she frequently reminds you in the twelve pages of The Quarantine at Alexander Abraham’s, from Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Chronicles of Avonlea. (You can read the story in full by following the link, or purchase the whole collection inexpensively from a variety of booksellers.)
Have you ever noticed that People who are Like That consider it a virtue? Miss McPherson, a Presbyterian spinster of 48 with Strong Moral Fiber, who answers to her masculine middle name of “Peter”, certainly does. In the course of the narrative she enumerated a long list of things she is noted for in the community of Avonlea. (This is the same little town on Prince Edward Island where Montgomery placed Green Gables, the home of the precocious orphan, Anne Shirley.) The reputation of Miss Peter McPherson, in her understanding, comprises several key traits: never doing what a man asks her to, general antipathy to men and dogs, decisiveness, not being a dismal failure when she makes up her mind to do a thing, getting up suppers, doing things thoroughly, and never shirking her duty. Yes, there is a better than even chance that — in the modern parlance — she would like to speak to the manager, but there is substance beneath the censure with which this woman judges, and is judged by, the world.
The Quarantine at Alexander Abraham’s was once described to me as Pride and Prejudice in twelve pages. I recall resisting this typology as Miss McPherson is hardly a Lizzie Bennet. If she can be likened to anyone from the Austen canon, she might be an aging Mary Bennet with a generous pinch of Lady Catherine De Bourgh. She is not wholly dissimilar to Emma’s Miss Bates, though there is nothing silly about her manner. Of course, the likening to Pride and Prejudice has nothing to do with the specific characters, but rather the story arc.
Austen’s stories are very clearly romances, and only secondarily comedies. This story, however, strikes one first and foremost as a comedy, even if one can spot the inevitable romantic denouement a mile off. Doubtless this has as much to do with the characters as the form. Elizabeth Bennet is a woman one longs to see happily matched. Indeed she is so appealing in her wit and self-possession that it’s easy to miss that Pride and Prejudice is as much about her reform as Mr Darcy’s, despite the very title pointing the way: his sin is pride, but hers is prejudice, a tendency to form strong judgments on a weak basis. Lacking Lizzie’s charm as she does, we are not taken in by Miss McPherson. She is a Person Like That and we tend to think that People Like That are not fodder for romance. She has six cats, after all.
One afternoon, Miss McPherson goes in search of one of her Sunday school students, who has been absent some weeks. She hears he is a hired farm hand out at Alexander Abraham Bennet’s place, and so she hitches the pony to the trap and, taking her favourite cat, William Adolphus, with her, sets off with purpose. Alexander Abraham, she has heard, is a notorious woman hater, and she is having none of it.
It all goes terribly wrong, of course. Alexander Abrahams keeps a huge, ugly, lovable dog named Mr Riley, and unable to bring herself to walk past this inquisitive hellhound, Miss McPherson climbs a tree, William Adolphus in tow, and lets herself into Alexander Abraham Bennet’s house through an open second story window. Priggish cat lady she may be, but let us nonetheless take a moment to admire the gumption of this act, which demonstrates both an insane, if admirable, degree of self-belief, but also no small amount of athleticism. The story being set in about 1880, Miss Mcpherson likely made this climb and got through the window in a corset, a floor-length layered hoop skirt and bustle. And no woman of Strong Moral Fibre would have flashed so much as a glimpse of ankle in the process. I, for one, am impressed.
Alexander Abraham was not. The boy in question was no longer his farm hand, and he was not in a temper to entertain unexpected female guests who let themselves in through upstairs windows. He tries to sneak her out the back door, but it is too late. Dr Blair arrives and Miss McPherson is horrified to discover the full scale of her misstep: Alexander Abraham is under quarantine following exposure to smallpox. She is to be confined for a minimum of two weeks with a woman hater and his dog. Alexander Abrahams is no happier, declaring he’d rather have smallpox than a cat about the place, and that was even before William Adolphus rode Mr Riley, bucking bronco style, around the house.
The thing about People Like That is that they can surprise you. Miss McPherson may have unswerving views about how things ought to be, but she also has an admirable work ethic. She sets about cleaning Alexander Abraham’s dusty, grimy, untouched-by-woman house from cellars to gables, over any protests he offers. She cooks his dinner and bosses him around until she “heard him say, in capitals, ‘WHAT AN AWFUL WOMAN!’.” He in turn is caustic, sarcastic, and on edge, except in the instances where he would forget all of this and speak to her sensibly and intelligently.
Let the reader understand that any story that begins ‘boy meets girl; boy and girl take an instant intractable dislike to each other’ can only end in a wedding. Montgomery describes the sea change following supper one evening near the end of quarantine:
“You can certainly cook. It’s a pity you are such a detestable crank in other respects.”
“It’s kind of convenient being a crank,” I said. “People are careful how they meddle with you. Haven’t you found that out in your own experience?”
“I am NOT a crank,” growled Alexander Abraham resentfully. “All I ask is to be let alone.”
“That’s the very crankiest kind of crank,” I said. “A person who wants to be let alone flies in the face of Providence, who decreed that folks for their own good were not to be let alone. But cheer up, Mr. Bennett. The quarantine will be up on Tuesday and then you’ll certainly be let alone for the rest of your natural life, as far as William Adolphus and I are concerned. You may then return to your wallowing in the mire and be as dirty and comfortable as of yore.”
Alexander Abraham growled again. The prospect didn’t seem to cheer him up as much as I should have expected. Then he did an amazing thing. He poured some cream into a saucer and set it down before William Adolphus. William Adolphus lapped it up, keeping one eye on Alexander Abraham lest the latter should change his mind. Not to be outdone, I handed Mr. Riley a bone.
Peter McPherson and Alexander Abraham are both far too charmless for things to go right just then. People Like That usually are. All the story needs is for Alexander Abraham to sicken with the smallpox, which he obligingly does the following morning, and for Miss McPherson to agree, in the absence of a suitable nurse, to tend him, which she does: “He is a man, and he has smallpox, and he keeps a vile dog; but I am not going to see him die for lack of care for all that.”
He does live, but then she just goes away — following the precautionary fumigation of William Adolphus — for the quarantine is ended. There is some cost involved in being Like That. For Miss McPherson, it is two weeks of abject misery and the horrifying realisation that she misses not only the man, but the dog as well, as, it seems, does William Adolphus. I’ll let you read the final scene for yourself. It’s one of my favourite proposal scenes ever, which is saying something in light of the amount of my youth I squandered reading romantic fiction. Even People Like That sometimes get a happy ending despite themselves. It takes a good writer to help us see they deserve it, really.
Victoria Seed is a writer and editor; she works in publishing.
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