The Prussian Officer and Other Stories

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Title: The Prussian Officer and Other Stories
Author: D. H. Lawrence
Release Date: August 31, 2007 [EBook #22480]
Last updated: September 27, 2019
Language: English
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*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PRUSSIAN OFFICER AND OTHER STORIES ***
Produced by David Widger
cover
THE PRUSSIAN OFFICER
_and Other Stories_
by D. H. Lawrence
LONDON
DUCKWORTH & CO,
3 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN
Published December 1914
Contents
The Prussian Officer
The Thorn in the Flesh
Daughters of the Vicar
A Fragment of Stained Glass
The Shades of Spring
Second Best
The Shadow in the Rose Garden
Goose Fair
The White Stocking
A Sick Collier
The Christening
Odour of Chrysanthemums
The Prussian Officer
I
They had marched more than thirty kilometres since dawn, along the
white, hot road where occasional thickets of trees threw a moment of
shade, then out into the glare again. On either hand, the valley, wide
and shallow, glittered with heat; dark green patches of rye, pale young
corn, fallow and meadow and black pine woods spread in a dull, hot
diagram under a glistening sky. But right in front the mountains ranged
across, pale blue and very still, snow gleaming gently out of the deep
atmosphere. And towards the mountains, on and on, the regiment marched
between the rye fields and the meadows, between the scraggy fruit trees
set regularly on either side the high road. The burnished, dark green
rye threw on a suffocating heat, the mountains drew gradually nearer
and more distinct. While the feet of the soldiers grew hotter, sweat
ran through their hair under their helmets, and their knapsacks could
burn no more in contact with their shoulders, but seemed instead to
give off a cold, prickly sensation.
He walked on and on in silence, staring at the mountains ahead, that
rose sheer out of the land, and stood fold behind fold, half earth,
half heaven, the heaven, the banner with slits of soft snow, in the
pale, bluish peaks.
He could now walk almost without pain. At the start, he had determined
not to limp. It had made him sick to take the first steps, and during
the first mile or so, he had compressed his breath, and the cold drops
of sweat had stood on his forehead. But he had walked it off. What were
they after all but bruises! He had looked at them, as he was getting
up: deep bruises on the backs of his thighs. And since he had made his
first step in the morning, he had been conscious of them, till now he
had a tight, hot place in his chest, with suppressing the pain, and
holding himself in. There seemed no air when he breathed. But he walked
almost lightly.
The Captain’s hand had trembled at taking his coffee at dawn: his
orderly saw it again. And he saw the fine figure of the Captain
wheeling on horseback at the farm-house ahead, a handsome figure in
pale blue uniform with facings of scarlet, and the metal gleaming on
the black helmet and the sword-scabbard, and dark streaks of sweat
coming on the silky bay horse. The orderly felt he was connected with
that figure moving so suddenly on horseback: he followed it like a
shadow, mute and inevitable and damned by it. And the officer was
always aware of the tramp of the company behind, the march of his
orderly among the men.
The Captain was a tall man of about forty, grey at the temples. He had
a handsome, finely knit figure, and was one of the best horsemen in the
West. His orderly, having to rub him down, admired the amazing
riding-muscles of his loins.
For the rest, the orderly scarcely noticed the officer any more than he
noticed himself. It was rarely he saw his master’s face: he did not
look at it. The Captain had reddish-brown, stilt hair, that he wore
short upon his skull. His moustache was also cut short and bristly over
a full, brutal mouth. His face was rather rugged, the cheeks thin.
Perhaps the man was the more handsome for the deep lines in his face,
the irritable tension of his brow, which gave him the look of a man who
fights with life. His fair eyebrows stood bushy over light blue eyes
that were always flashing with cold fire.
He was a Prussian aristocrat, haughty and overbearing. But his mother
had been a Polish Countess. Having made too many gambling debts when he
was young, he had ruined his prospects in the Army, and remained an
infantry captain. He had never married: his position did not allow of
it, and no woman had ever moved him to it. His time he spent
riding—occasionally he rode one of his own horses at the races—and at
the officers’ club. Now and then he took himself a mistress. But after
such an event, he returned to duty with his brow still more tense, his
eyes still more hostile and irritable. With the men, however, he was
merely impersonal, though a devil when roused; so that, on the whole,
they feared him, but had no great aversion from him. They accepted him
as the inevitable.
To his orderly he was at first cold and just and indifferent: he did
not fuss over trifles. So that his servant knew practically nothing
about him, except just what orders he would give, and how he wanted
them obeyed. That was quite simple. Then the change gradually came.
The orderly was a youth of about twenty-two, of medium height, and well
built. He had strong, heavy limbs, was swarthy, with a soft, black,
young moustache. There was something altogether warm and young about
him. He had firmly marked eyebrows over dark, expressionless eyes, that
seemed never to have thought, only to have received life direct through
his senses, and acted straight from instinct.
Gradually the officer had become aware of his servant’s young,
vigorous, unconscious presence about him. He could not get away from
the sense of the youth’s person, while he was in attendance. It was
like a warm flame upon the older man’s tense, rigid body, that had
become almost unliving, fixed. There was something so free and
self-contained about him, and something in the young fellow’s movement,
that made the officer aware of him. And this irritated the Prussian. He
did not choose to be touched into life by his servant. He might easily
have changed his man, but he did not. He now very rarely looked direct
at his orderly, but kept his face averted, as if to avoid seeing him.
And yet as the young soldier moved unthinking about the apartment, the
elder watched him, and would notice the movement of his strong young
shoulders under the blue cloth, the bend of his neck. And it irritated
him. To see the soldier’s young, brown, shapely peasant’s hand grasp
the loaf or the wine-bottle sent a flash of hate or of anger through
the elder man’s blood. It was not that the youth was clumsy: it was
rather the blind, instinctive sureness of movement of an unhampered
young animal that irritated the officer to such a degree.
Once, when a bottle of wine had gone over, and the red gushed out on to
the tablecloth, the officer had started up with an oath, and his eyes,
bluey like fire, had held those of the confused youth for a moment. It
was a shock for the young soldier. He felt something sink deeper,
deeper into his soul, where nothing had ever gone before. It left him
rather blank and wondering. Some of his natural completeness in himself
was gone, a little uneasiness took its place. And from that time an
undiscovered feeling had held between the two men.
Henceforward the orderly was afraid of really meeting his master. His
subconsciousness remembered those steely blue eyes and the harsh brows,
and did not intend to meet them again. So he always stared past his
master, and avoided him. Also, in a little anxiety, he waited for the
three months to have gone, when his time would be up. He began to feel
a constraint in the Captain’s presence, and the soldier even more than
the officer wanted to be left alone, in his neutrality as servant.
He had served the Captain for more than a year, and knew his duty. This
he performed easily, as if it were natural to him. The officer and his
commands he took for granted, as he took the sun and the rain, and he
served as a matter of course. It did not implicate him personally.
But now if he were going to be forced into a personal interchange with
his master he would be like a wild thing caught, he felt he must get
away.
But the influence of the young soldier’s being had penetrated through
the officer’s stiffened discipline, and perturbed the man in him. He,
however, was a gentleman, with long, fine hands and cultivated
movements, and was not going to allow such a thing as the stirring of
his innate self. He was a man of passionate temper, who had always kept
himself suppressed. Occasionally there had been a duel, an outburst
before the soldiers. He knew himself to be always on the point of
breaking out. But he kept himself hard to the idea of the Service.
Whereas the young soldier seemed to live out his warm, full nature, to
give it off in his very movements, which had a certain zest, such as
wild animals have in free movement. And this irritated the officer more
and more.
In spite of himself, the Captain could not regain his neutrality of
feeling towards his orderly. Nor could he leave the man alone. In spite
of himself, he watched him, gave him sharp orders, tried to take up as
much of his time as possible. Sometimes he flew into a rage with the
young soldier, and bullied him. Then the orderly shut himself off, as
it were out of earshot, and waited, with sullen, flushed face, for the
end of the noise. The words never pierced to his intelligence, he made
himself, protectively, impervious to the feelings of his master.
He had a scar on his left thumb, a deep seam going across the knuckle.
The officer had long suffered from it, and wanted to do something to
it. Still it was there, ugly and brutal on the young, brown hand. At
last the Captain’s reserve gave way. One day, as the orderly was
smoothing out the tablecloth, the officer pinned down his thumb with a
pencil, asking,
“How did you come by that?”
The young man winced and drew back at attention.
“A wood axe, Herr Hauptmann,” he answered.
The officer waited for further explanation. None came. The orderly went
about his duties. The elder man was sullenly angry. His servant avoided
him. And the next day he had to use all his willpower to avoid seeing
the scarred thumb. He wanted to get hold of it and—— A hot flame ran in
his blood.
He knew his servant would soon be free, and would be glad. As yet, the
soldier had held himself off from the elder man. The Captain grew madly
irritable. He could not rest when the soldier was away, and when he was
present, he glared at him with tormented eyes. He hated those fine,
black brows over the unmeaning, dark eyes, he was infuriated by the
free movement of the handsome limbs, which no military discipline could
make stiff. And he became harsh and cruelly bullying, using contempt
and satire. The young soldier only grew more mute and expressionless.
What cattle were you bred by, that you can’t keep straight eyes? Look
me in the eyes when I speak to you.
And the soldier turned his dark eyes to the other’s face, but there was
no sight in them: he stared with the slightest possible cast, holding
back his sight, perceiving the blue of his master’s eyes, but receiving
no look from them. And the elder man went pale, and his reddish
eyebrows twitched. He gave his order, barrenly.
Once he flung a heavy military glove into the young soldier’s face.
Then he had the satisfaction of seeing the black eyes flare up into his
own, like a blaze when straw is thrown on a fire. And he had laughed
with a little tremor and a sneer.
But there were only two months more. The youth instinctively tried to
keep himself intact: he tried to serve the officer as if the latter
were an abstract authority and not a man. All his instinct was to avoid
personal contact, even definite hate. But in spite of himself the hate
grew, responsive to the officer’s passion. However, he put it in the
background. When he had left the Army he could dare acknowledge it. By
nature he was active, and had many friends. He thought what amazing
good fellows they were. But, without knowing it, he was alone. Now this
solitariness was intensified. It would carry him through his term. But
the officer seemed to be going irritably insane, and the youth was
deeply frightened.
The soldier had a sweetheart, a girl from the mountains, independent
and primitive. The two walked together, rather silently. He went with
her, not to talk, but to have his arm round her, and for the physical
contact. This eased him, made it easier for him to ignore the Captain;
for he could rest with her held fast against his chest. And she, in
some unspoken fashion, was there for him. They loved each other.
The Captain perceived it, and was mad with irritation. He kept the
young man engaged all the evenings long, and took pleasure in the dark
look that came on his face. Occasionally, the eyes of the two men met,
those of the younger sullen and dark, doggedly unalterable, those of
the elder sneering with restless contempt.
The officer tried hard not to admit the passion that had got hold of
him. He would not know that his feeling for his orderly was anything
but that of a man incensed by his stupid, perverse servant. So, keeping
quite justified and conventional in his consciousness, he let the other
thing run on. His nerves, however, were suffering. At last he slung the
end of a belt in his servant’s face. When he saw the youth start back,
the pain-tears in his eyes and the blood on his mouth, he had felt at
once a thrill of deep pleasure and of shame.
But this, he acknowledged to himself, was a thing he had never done
before. The fellow was too exasperating. His own nerves must be going
to pieces. He went away for some days with a woman.
It was a mockery of pleasure. He simply did not want the woman. But he
stayed on for his time. At the end of it, he came back in an agony of
irritation, torment, and misery. He rode all the evening, then came
straight in to supper. His orderly was out. The officer sat with his
long, fine hands lying on the table, perfectly still, and all his blood
seemed to be corroding.
At last his servant entered. He watched the strong, easy young figure,
the fine eyebrows, the thick black hair. In a week’s time the youth had
got back his old well-being. The hands of the officer twitched and
seemed to be full of mad flame. The young man stood at attention,
unmoving, shut on.
The meal went in silence. But the orderly seemed eager. He made a
clatter with the dishes.
“Are you in a hurry?” asked the officer, watching the intent, warm face
of his servant. The other did not reply.
“Will you answer my question?” said the Captain.
“Yes, sir,” replied the orderly, standing with his pile of deep Army
plates. The Captain waited, looked at him, then asked again:
“Are you in a hurry?
“Yes, sir,” came the answer, that sent a flash through the listener.
“For what?”
“I was going out, sir.”
“I want you this evening.”
There was a moment’s hesitation. The officer had a curious stiffness of
countenance.
“Yes, sir,” replied the servant, in his throat.
“I want you tomorrow evening also—in fact, you may consider your
evenings occupied, unless I give you leave.”
The mouth with the young moustache set close.
“Yes, sir,” answered the orderly, loosening his lips for a moment.
He again turned to the door.
“And why have you a piece of pencil in your ear?”
The orderly hesitated, then continued on his way without answering. He
set the plates in a pile outside the door, took the stump of pencil
from his ear, and put it in his pocket. He had been copying a verse for
his sweetheart’s birthday card. He returned to finish clearing the
table. The officer’s eyes were dancing, he had a little, eager smile.
“Why have you a piece of pencil in your ear?” he asked.
The orderly took his hands full of dishes. His master was standing near
the great green stove, a little smile on his face, his chin thrust
forward. When the young soldier saw him his heart suddenly ran hot. He
felt blind. Instead of answering, he turned dazedly to the door. As he
was crouching to set down the dishes, he was pitched forward by a kick
from behind. The pots went in a stream down the stairs, he clung to the
pillar of the banisters. And as he was rising he was kicked heavily
again, and again, so that he clung sickly to the post for some moments.
His master had gone swiftly into the room and closed the door. The
maid-servant downstairs looked up the staircase and made a mocking face
at the crockery disaster.
The officer’s heart was plunging. He poured himself a glass of wine,
part of which he spilled on the floor, and gulped the remainder,
leaning against the cool, green stove. He heard his man collecting the
dishes from the stairs. Pale, as if intoxicated, he waited. The servant
entered again. The Captain’s heart gave a pang, as of pleasure, seeing
the young fellow bewildered and uncertain on his feet, with pain.
“Schöner!” he said.
The soldier was a little slower in coming to attention.
“Yes, sir!”
The youth stood before him, with pathetic young moustache, and fine
eyebrows very distinct on his forehead of dark marble.
“I asked you a question.”
“Yes, sir.”
The officer’s tone bit like acid.
“Why had you a pencil in your ear?”
Again the servant’s heart ran hot, and he could not breathe. With dark,
strained eyes, he looked at the officer, as if fascinated. And he stood
there sturdily planted, unconscious. The withering smile came into the
Captain’s eyes, and he lifted his foot.
“I—I forgot it—sir,” panted the soldier, his dark eyes fixed on the
other man’s dancing blue ones.
“What was it doing there?”
He saw the young man’s breast heaving as he made an effort for words.
“I had been writing.”
“Writing what?”
Again the soldier looked him up and down. The officer could hear him
panting. The smile came into the blue eyes. The soldier worked his dry
throat, but could not speak. Suddenly the smile lit like a name on the
officer’s face, and a kick came heavily against the orderly’s thigh.
The youth moved a pace sideways. His face went dead, with two black,
staring eyes.
“Well?” said the officer.
The orderly’s mouth had gone dry, and his tongue rubbed in it as on dry
brown-paper. He worked his throat. The officer raised his foot. The
servant went stiff.
“Some poetry, sir,” came the crackling, unrecognizable sound of his
voice.
“Poetry, what poetry?” asked the Captain, with a sickly smile.
Again there was the working in the throat. The Captain’s heart had
suddenly gone down heavily, and he stood sick and tired.
“For my girl, sir,” he heard the dry, inhuman sound.
“Oh!” he said, turning away. “Clear the table.”
“Click!” went the soldier’s throat; then again, “click!” and then the
half-articulate:
“Yes, sir.”
The young soldier was gone, looking old, and walking heavily.
The officer, left alone, held himself rigid, to prevent himself from
thinking. His instinct warned him that he must not think. Deep inside
him was the intense gratification of his passion, still working
powerfully. Then there was a counter-action, a horrible breaking down
of something inside him, a whole agony of reaction. He stood there for
an hour motionless, a chaos of sensations, but rigid with a will to
keep blank his consciousness, to prevent his mind grasping. And he held
himself so until the worst of the stress had passed, when he began to
drink, drank himself to an intoxication, till he slept obliterated.
When he woke in the morning he was shaken to the base of his nature.
But he had fought off the realization of what he had done. He had
prevented his mind from taking it in, had suppressed it along with his
instincts, and the conscious man had nothing to do with it. He felt
only as after a bout of intoxication, weak, but the affair itself all
dim and not to be recovered. Of the drunkenness of his passion he
successfully refused remembrance. And when his orderly appeared with
coffee, the officer assumed the same self he had had the morning
before. He refused the event of the past night—denied it had ever
been—and was successful in his denial. He had not done any such
thing—not he himself. Whatever there might be lay at the door of a
stupid, insubordinate servant.
The orderly had gone about in a stupor all the evening. He drank some
beer because he was parched, but not much, the alcohol made his feeling
come back, and he could not bear it. He was dulled, as if nine-tenths
of the ordinary man in him were inert. He crawled about disfigured.
Still, when he thought of the kicks, he went sick, and when he thought
of the threat of more kicking, in the room afterwards, his heart went
hot and faint, and he panted, remembering the one that had come. He had
been forced to say, “For my girl.” He was much too done even to want to
cry. His mouth hung slightly open, like an idiot’s. He felt vacant, and
wasted. So, he wandered at his work, painfully, and very slowly and
clumsily, fumbling blindly with the brushes, and finding it difficult,
when he sat down, to summon the energy to move again. His limbs, his
jaw, were slack and nerveless. But he was very tired. He got to bed at
last, and slept inert, relaxed, in a sleep that was rather stupor than
slumber, a dead night of stupefaction shot through with gleams of
anguish.
In the morning were the manœuvres. But he woke even before the bugle
sounded. The painful ache in his chest, the dryness of his throat, the
awful steady feeling of misery made his eyes come awake and dreary at
once. He knew, without thinking, what had happened. And he knew that
the day had come again, when he must go on with his round. The last bit
of darkness was being pushed out of the room. He would have to move his
inert body and go on. He was so young, and had known so little trouble,
that he was bewildered. He only wished it would stay night, so that he
could lie still, covered up by the darkness. And yet nothing would
prevent the day from coming, nothing would save him from having to get
up and saddle the Captain’s horse, and make the Captain’s coffee. It
was there, inevitable. And then, he thought, it was impossible. Yet
they would not leave him free. He must go and take the coffee to the
Captain. He was too stunned to understand it. He only knew it was
inevitable—inevitable however long he lay inert.
At last, after heaving at himself, for he seemed to be a mass of
inertia, he got up. But he had to force every one of his movements from
behind, with his will. He felt lost, and dazed, and helpless. Then he
clutched hold of the bed, the pain was so keen. And looking at his
thighs, he saw the darker bruises on his swarthy flesh and he knew
that, if he pressed one of his fingers on one of the bruises, he should
faint. But he did not want to faint—he did not want anybody to know. No
one should ever know. It was between him and the Captain. There were
only the two people in the world now—himself and the Captain.
Slowly, economically, he got dressed and forced himself to walk.
Everything was obscure, except just what he had his hands on. But he
managed to get through his work. The very pain revived his dull senses.
The worst remained yet. He took the tray and went up to the Captain’s
room. The officer, pale and heavy, sat at the table. The orderly, as he
saluted, felt himself put out of existence. He stood still for a moment
submitting to his own nullification, then he gathered himself, seemed
to regain himself, and then the Captain began to grow vague, unreal,
and the younger soldier’s heart beat up. He clung to this
situation—that the Captain did not exist—so that he himself might live.
But when he saw his officer’s hand tremble as he took the coffee, he
felt everything falling shattered. And he went away, feeling as if he
himself were coming to pieces, disintegrated. And when the Captain was
there on horseback, giving orders, while he himself stood, with rifle
and knapsack, sick with pain, he felt as if he must shut his eyes—as if
he must shut his eyes on everything. It was only the long agony of
marching with a parched throat that filled him with one single,
sleep-heavy intention: to save himself.
II
He was getting used even to his parched throat. That the snowy peaks
were radiant among the sky, that the whity-green glacier-river twisted
through its pale shoals, in the valley below, seemed almost
supernatural. But he was going mad with fever and thirst. He plodded on
uncomplaining. He did not want to speak, not to anybody. There were two
gulls, like flakes of water and snow, over the river. The scent of
green rye soaked in sunshine came like a sickness. And the march
continued, monotonously, almost like a bad sleep.
At the next farm-house, which stood low and broad near the high road,
tubs of water had been put out. The soldiers clustered round to drink.
They took off their helmets, and the steam mounted from their wet hair.
The Captain sat on horseback, watching. He needed to see his orderly.
His helmet threw a dark shadow over his light, fierce eyes, but his
moustache and mouth and chin were distinct in the sunshine. The orderly
must move under the presence of the figure of the horseman. It was not
that he was afraid, or cowed. It was as if he was disembowelled, made
empty, like an empty shell. He felt himself as nothing, a shadow
creeping under the sunshine. And, thirsty as he was, he could scarcely
drink, feeling the Captain near him. He would not take off his helmet
to wipe his wet hair. He wanted to stay in shadow, not to be forced
into consciousness. Starting, he saw the light heel of the officer
prick the belly of the horse; the Captain cantered away, and he himself
could relapse into vacancy.
Nothing, however, could give him back his living place in the hot,
bright morning. He felt like a gap among it all. Whereas the Captain
was prouder, overriding. A hot flash went through the young servant’s
body. The Captain was firmer and prouder with life, he himself was
empty as a shadow. Again the flash went through him, dazing him out.
But his heart ran a little firmer.
The company turned up the hill, to make a loop for the return. Below,
from among the trees, the farm-bell clanged. He saw the labourers,
mowing barefoot at the thick grass, leave off their work and go
downhill, their scythes hanging over their shoulders, like long, bright
claws curving down behind them. They seemed like dream-people, as if
they had no relation to himself. He felt as in a blackish dream: as if
all the other things were there and had form, but he himself was only a
consciousness, a gap that could think and perceive.
The soldiers were tramping silently up the glaring hillside. Gradually
his head began to revolve, slowly, rhythmically. Sometimes it was dark
before his eyes, as if he saw this world through a smoked glass, frail
shadows and unreal. It gave him a pain in his head to walk.
The air was too scented, it gave no breath. All the lush green-stuff
seemed to be issuing its sap, till the air was deathly, sickly with the
smell of greenness. There was the perfume of clover, like pure honey
and bees. Then there grew a faint acrid tang—they were near the
beeches; and then a queer clattering noise, and a suffocating, hideous
smell; they were passing a flock of sheep, a shepherd in a black smock,
holding his crook. Why should the sheep huddle together under this
fierce sun. He felt that the shepherd would not see him, though he
could see the shepherd.
At last there was the halt. They stacked rifles in a conical stack, put
down their kit in a scattered circle around it, and dispersed a little,
sitting on a small knoll high on the hillside. The chatter began. The
soldiers were steaming with heat, but were lively. He sat still, seeing
the blue mountains rising upon the land, twenty kilometres away. There
was a blue fold in the ranges, then out of that, at the foot, the
broad, pale bed of the river, stretches of whity-green water between
pinkish-grey shoals among the dark pine woods. There it was, spread out
a long way off. And it seemed to come downhill, the river. There was a
raft being steered, a mile away. It was a strange country. Nearer, a
red-roofed, broad farm with white base and square dots of windows
crouched beside the wall of beech foliage on the wood’s edge. There
were long strips of rye and clover and pale green corn. And just at his
feet, below the knoll, was a darkish bog, where globe flowers stood
breathless still on their slim stalks. And some of the pale gold
bubbles were burst, and a broken fragment hung in the air. He thought
he was going to sleep.
Suddenly something moved into this coloured mirage before his eyes. The
Captain, a small, light-blue and scarlet figure, was trotting evenly
between the strips of corn, along the level brow of the hill. And the
man making flag-signals was coming on. Proud and sure moved the
horseman’s figure, the quick, bright thing, in which was concentrated
all the light of this morning, which for the rest lay a fragile,
shining shadow. Submissive, apathetic, the young soldier sat and
stared. But as the horse slowed to a walk, coming up the last steep
path, the great flash flared over the body and soul of the orderly. He
sat waiting. The back of his head felt as if it were weighted with a
heavy piece of fire. He did not want to eat. His hands trembled
slightly as he moved them. Meanwhile the officer on horseback was
approaching slowly and proudly. The tension grew in the orderly’s soul.
Then again, seeing the Captain ease himself on the saddle, the flash
blazed through him.
The Captain looked at the patch of light blue and scarlet, and dark
heads, scattered closely on the hillside. It pleased him. The command
pleased him. And he was feeling proud. His orderly was among them in
common subjection. The officer rose a little on his stirrups to look.
The young soldier sat with averted, dumb face. The Captain relaxed on
his seat. His slim-legged, beautiful horse, brown as a beech nut,
walked proudly uphill. The Captain passed into the zone of the
company’s atmosphere: a hot smell of men, of sweat, of leather. He knew
it very well. After a word with the lieutenant, he went a few paces
higher, and sat there, a dominant figure, his sweat-marked horse
swishing its tail, while he looked down on his men, on his orderly, a
nonentity among the crowd.
The young soldier’s heart was like fire in his chest, and he breathed
with difficulty. The officer, looking downhill, saw three of the young
soldiers, two pails of water between them, staggering across a sunny
green field. A table had been set up under a tree, and there the slim
lieutenant stood, importantly busy. Then the Captain summoned himself
to an act of courage. He called his orderly.
The name leapt into the young soldier’s throat as he heard the command,
and he rose blindly stifled. He saluted, standing below the officer. He
did not look up. But there was the flicker in the Captain’s voice.
“Go to the inn and fetch me....” the officer gave his commands.
“Quick!” he added.
At the last word, the heart of the servant leapt with a flash, and he
felt the strength come over his body. But he turned in mechanical
obedience, and set on at a heavy run downhill, looking almost like a
bear, his trousers bagging over his military boots. And the officer
watched this blind, plunging run all the way.
But it was only the outside of the orderly’s body that was obeying so
humbly and mechanically. Inside had gradually accumulated a core into
which all the energy of that young life was compact and concentrated.
He executed his commission, and plodded quickly back uphill. There was
a pain in his head, as he walked, that made him twist his features
unknowingly. But hard there in the centre of his chest was himself,
himself, firm, and not to be plucked to pieces.
The captain had gone up into the wood. The orderly plodded through the
hot, powerfully smelling zone of the company’s atmosphere. He had a
curious mass of energy inside him now. The Captain was less real than
himself. He approached the green entrance to the wood. There, in the
half-shade, he saw the horse standing, the sunshine and the tuckering
shadow of leaves dancing over his brown body. There was a clearing
where timber had lately been felled. Here, in the gold-green shade
beside the brilliant cup of sunshine, stood two figures, blue and pink,
the bits of pink showing out plainly. The Captain was talking to his
lieutenant.
The orderly stood on the edge of the bright clearing, where great
trunks of trees, stripped and glistening, lay stretched like naked,
brown-skinned bodies. Chips of wood littered the trampled floor, like
splashed light, and the bases of the felled trees stood here and there,
with their raw, level tops. Beyond was the brilliant, sunlit green of a
beech.
“Then I will ride forward,” the orderly heard his Captain say. The
lieutenant saluted and strode away. He himself went forward. A hot
flash passed through his belly, as he tramped towards his officer.
The Captain watched the rather heavy figure of the young soldier
stumble forward, and his veins, too, ran hot. This was to be man to man
between them. He yielded before the solid, stumbling figure with bent
head. The orderly stooped and put the food on a level-sawn tree-base.
The Captain watched the glistening, sun-inflamed, naked hands. He
wanted to speak to the young soldier, but could not. The servant
propped a bottle against his thigh, pressed open the cork, and poured
out the beer into the mug. He kept his head bent. The Captain accepted
the mug.
“Hot!” he said, as if amiably.
The flame sprang out of the orderly’s heart, nearly suffocating him.
“Yes, sir,” he replied, between shut teeth.
And he heard the sound of the Captain’s drinking, and he clenched his
fists, such a strong torment came into his wrists. Then came the faint
clang of the closing of the pot-lid. He looked up. The Captain was
watching him. He glanced swiftly away. Then he saw the officer stoop
and take a piece of bread from the tree-base. Again the flash of flame
went through the young soldier, seeing the stiff body stoop beneath
him, and his hands jerked. He looked away. He could feel the officer
was nervous. The bread fell as it was being broken The officer ate the
other piece. The two men stood tense and still, the master laboriously
chewing his bread, the servant staring with averted face, his fist
clenched.
Then the young soldier started. The officer had pressed open the lid of
the mug again. The orderly watched the lid of the mug, and the white
hand that clenched the handle, as if he were fascinated. It was raised.
The youth followed it with his eyes. And then he saw the thin, strong
throat of the elder man moving up and down as he drank, the strong jaw
working. And the instinct which had been jerking at the young man’s
wrists suddenly jerked free. He jumped, feeling as if it were rent in
two by a strong flame.
The spur of the officer caught in a tree-root, he went down backwards
with a crash, the middle of his back thudding sickeningly against a
sharp-edged tree-base, the pot flying away. And in a second the
orderly, with serious, earnest young face, and under-lip between his
teeth, had got his knee in the officer’s chest and was pressing the
chin backward over the farther edge of the tree-stump, pressing, with
all his heart behind in a passion of relief, the tension of his wrists
exquisite with relief. And with the base of his palms he shoved at the
chin, with all his might. And it was pleasant, too, to have that chin,
that hard jaw already slightly rough with beard, in his hands. He did
not relax one hair’s breadth, but, all the force of all his blood
exulting in his thrust, he shoved back the head of the other man, till
there was a little cluck and a crunching sensation. Then he felt as if
his head went to vapour. Heavy convulsions shook the body of the
officer, frightening and horrifying the young soldier. Yet it pleased
him, too, to repress them. It pleased him to keep his hands pressing
back the chin, to feel the chest of the other man yield in expiration
to the weight of his strong, young knees, to feel the hard twitchings
of the prostrate body jerking his own whole frame, which was pressed
down on it.
But it went still. He could look into the nostrils of the other man,
the eyes he could scarcely see. How curiously the mouth was pushed out,
exaggerating the full lips, and the moustache bristling up from them.
Then, with a start, he noticed the nostrils gradually filled with
blood. The red brimmed, hesitated, ran over, and went in a thin trickle
down the face to the eyes.
It shocked and distressed him. Slowly, he got up. The body twitched and
sprawled there, inert. He stood and looked at it in silence. It was a
pity it was broken. It represented more than the thing which had kicked
and bullied him. He was afraid to look at the eyes. They were hideous
now, only the whites showing, and the blood running to them. The face
of the orderly was drawn with horror at the sight. Well, it was so. In
his heart he was satisfied. He had hated the face of the Captain. It
was extinguished now. There was a heavy relief in the orderly’s soul.
That was as it should be. But he could not bear to see the long,
military body lying broken over the tree-base, the fine fingers
crisped. He wanted to hide it away.
Quickly, busily, he gathered it up and pushed it under the felled
tree-trunks, which rested their beautiful, smooth length either end on
logs. The face was horrible with blood. He covered it with the helmet.
Then he pushed the limbs straight and decent, and brushed the dead
leaves off the fine cloth of the uniform. So, it lay quite still in the
shadow under there. A little strip of sunshine ran along the breast,
from a chink between the logs. The orderly sat by it for a few moments.
Here his own life also ended.
Then, through his daze, he heard the lieutenant, in a loud voice,
explaining to the men outside the wood, that they were to suppose the
bridge on the river below was held by the enemy. Now they were to march
to the attack in such and such a manner. The lieutenant had no gift of
expression. The orderly, listening from habit, got muddled. And when
the lieutenant began it all again he ceased to hear. He knew he must
go. He stood up. It surprised him that the leaves were glittering in
the sun, and the chips of wood reflecting white from the ground. For
him a change had come over the world. But for the rest it had not—all
seemed the same. Only he had left it. And he could not go back. It was
his duty to return with the beer-pot and the bottle. He could not. He
had left all that. The lieutenant was still hoarsely explaining. He
must go, or they would, overtake him. And he could not bear contact
with anyone now.
He drew his fingers over his eyes, trying to find out where he was.
Then he turned away. He saw the horse standing in the path. He went up
to it and mounted. It hurt him to sit in the saddle. The pain of
keeping his seat occupied him as they cantered through the wood. He
would not have minded anything, but he could not get away from the
sense of being divided from the others. The path led out of the trees.
On the edge of the wood he pulled up and stood watching. There in the
spacious sunshine of the valley soldiers were moving in a little swarm.
Every now and then, a man harrowing on a strip of fallow shouted to his
oxen, at the turn. The village and the white-towered church was small
in the sunshine. And he no longer belonged to it—he sat there, beyond,
like a man outside in the dark. He had gone out from everyday life into
the unknown, and he could not, he even did not want to go back.
Turning from the sun-blazing valley, he rode deep into the wood.
Tree-trunks, like people standing grey and still, took no notice as he
went. A doe, herself a moving bit of sunshine and shadow, went running
through the flecked shade. There were bright green rents in the
foliage. Then it was all pine wood, dark and cool. And he was sick with
pain, he had an intolerable great pulse in his head, and he was sick.
He had never been ill in his life, he felt lost, quite dazed with all
this.
Trying to get down from the horse, he fell, astonished at the pain and
his lack of balance. The horse shifted uneasily. He jerked its bridle
and sent it cantering jerkily away. It was his last connection with the
rest of things.
But he only wanted to lie down and not be disturbed. Stumbling through
the trees, he came on a quiet place where beeches and pine trees grew
on a slope. Immediately he had lain down and closed his eyes, his
consciousness went racing on without him. A big pulse of sickness beat
in him as if it throbbed through the whole earth. He was burning with
dry heat. But he was too busy, too tearingly active in the incoherent
race of delirium to observe.
III
He came to with a start. His mouth was dry and hard, his heart beat
heavily, but he had not the energy to get up. His heart beat heavily.
Where was he?—the barracks—at home? There was something knocking. And,
making an effort, he looked round—trees, and litter of greenery, and
reddish, night, still pieces of sunshine on the floor. He did not
believe he was himself, he did not believe what he saw. Something was
knocking. He made a struggle towards consciousness, but relapsed. Then
he struggled again. And gradually his surroundings fell into
relationship with himself. He knew, and a great pang of fear went
through his heart. Somebody was knocking. He could see the heavy, black
rags of a fir tree overhead. Then everything went black. Yet he did not
believe he had closed his eyes. He had not. Out of the blackness sight
slowly emerged again. And someone was knocking. Quickly, he saw the
blood-disgfigured face of his Captain, which he hated. And he held
himself still with horror. Yet, deep inside him, he knew that it was
so, the Captain should be dead. But the physical delirium got hold of
him. Someone was knocking. He lay perfectly still, as if dead, with
fear. And he went unconscious.
When he opened his eyes again, he started, seeing something creeping
swiftly up a tree-trunk. It was a little bird. And the bird was
whistling overhead. Tap-tap-tap—it was the small, quick bird rapping
the tree-trunk with its beak, as if its head were a little round
hammer. He watched it curiously. It shifted sharply, in its creeping
fashion. Then, like a mouse, it slid down the bare trunk. Its swift
creeping sent a flash of revulsion through him. He raised his head. It
felt a great weight. Then, the little bird ran out of the shadow across
a still patch of sunshine, its little head bobbing swiftly, its white
legs twinkling brightly for a moment. How neat it was in its build, so
compact, with pieces of white on its wings. There were several of them.
They were so pretty—but they crept like swift, erratic mice, running
here and there among the beech-mast.
He lay down again exhausted, and his consciousness lapsed. He had a
horror of the little creeping birds. All his blood seemed to be darting
and creeping in his head. And yet he could not move.
He came to with a further ache of exhaustion. There was the pain in his
head, and the horrible sickness, and his inability to move. He had
never been ill in his life. He did not know where he was or what he
was. Probably he had got sunstroke. Or what else?—he had silenced the
Captain for ever—some time ago—oh, a long time ago. There had been
blood on his face, and his eyes had turned upwards. It was all right,
somehow. It was peace. But now he had got beyond himself. He had never
been here before. Was it life, or not life? He was by himself. They
were in a big, bright place, those others, and he was outside. The
town, all the country, a big bright place of light: and he was outside,
here, in the darkened open beyond, where each thing existed alone. But
they would all have to come out there sometime, those others. Little,
and left behind him, they all were. There had been father and mother
and sweetheart. What did they all matter? This was the open land.
He sat up. Something scuffled. It was a little, brown squirrel running
in lovely, undulating bounds over the floor, its red tail completing
the undulation of its body—and then, as it sat up, furling and
unfurling. He watched it, pleased. It ran on friskily, enjoying itself.
It flew wildly at another squirrel, and they were chasing each other,
and making little scolding, chattering noises. The soldier wanted to
speak to them. But only a hoarse sound came out of his throat. The
squirrels burst away—they flew up the trees. And then he saw the one
peeping round at him, half-way up a tree-trunk. A start of fear went
through him, though, in so far as he was conscious, he was amused. It
still stayed, its little, keen face staring at him halfway up the
tree-trunk, its little ears pricked up, its clawey little hands
clinging to the bark, its white breast reared. He started from it in
panic.
Struggling to his feet, he lurched away. He went on walking, walking,
looking for something for a drink. His brain felt hot and inflamed for
want of water. He stumbled on. Then he did not know anything. He went
unconscious as he walked. Yet he stumbled on, his mouth open.
When, to his dumb wonder, he opened his eyes on the world again, he no
longer tried to remember what it was. There was thick, golden light
behind golden-green glitterings, and tall, grey-purple shafts, and
darknesses further off, surrounding him, growing deeper. He was
conscious of a sense of arrival. He was amid the reality, on the real,
dark bottom. But there was the thirst burning in his brain. He felt
lighter, not so heavy. He supposed it was newness.
The air was muttering with thunder. He thought he was walking
wonderfully swiftly and was coming straight to relief—or was it to
water?
Suddenly he stood still with fear. There was a tremendous flare of
gold, immense—just a few dark trunks like bars between him and it. All
the young level wheat was burnished gold glaring on its silky green. A
woman, full-skirted, a black cloth on her head for head-dress, was
passing like a block of shadow through the glistening, green corn, into
the full glare. There was a farm, too, pale blue in shadow, and the
timber black. And there was a church spire, nearly fused away in the
gold. The woman moved on, away from him. He had no language with which
to speak to her. She was the bright, solid unreality. She would make a
noise of words that would confuse him, and her eyes would look at him
without seeing him. She was crossing there to the other side. He stood
against a tree.
When at last he turned, looking down the long, bare grove whose flat
bed was already filling dark, he saw the mountains in a wonder-light,
not far away, and radiant. Behind the soft, grey ridge of the nearest
range the further mountains stood golden and pale grey, the snow all
radiant like pure, soft gold. So still, gleaming in the sky, fashioned
pure out of the ore of the sky, they shone in their silence. He stood
and looked at them, his face illuminated. And like the golden, lustrous
gleaming of the snow he felt his own thirst bright in him. He stood and
gazed, leaning against a tree. And then everything slid away into
space.
During the night the lightning fluttered perpetually, making the whole
sky white. He must have walked again. The world hung livid round him
for moments, fields a level sheen of grey-green light, trees in dark
bulk, and the range of clouds black across a white sky. Then the
darkness fell like a shutter, and the night was whole. A faint mutter
of a half-revealed world, that could not quite leap out of the
darkness!—Then there again stood a sweep of pallor for the land, dark
shapes looming, a range of clouds hanging overhead. The world was a
ghostly shadow, thrown for a moment upon the pure darkness, which
returned ever whole and complete.
And the mere delirium of sickness and fever went on inside him—his
brain opening and shutting like the night—then sometimes convulsions of
terror from something with great eyes that stared round a tree—then the
long agony of the march, and the sun decomposing his blood—then the
pang of hate for the Captain, followed, by a pang of tenderness and
ease. But everything was distorted, born of an ache and resolving into
an ache.
In the morning he came definitely awake. Then his brain flamed with the
sole horror of thirstiness! The sun was on his face, the dew was
steaming from his wet clothes. Like one possessed, he got up. There,
straight in front of him, blue and cool and tender, the mountains
ranged across the pale edge of the morning sky. He wanted them—he
wanted them alone—he wanted to leave himself and be identified with
them. They did not move, they were still and soft, with white, gentle
markings of snow. He stood still, mad with suffering, his hands
crisping and clutching. Then he was twisting in a paroxysm on the
grass.
He lay still, in a kind of dream of anguish. His thirst seemed to have
separated itself from him, and to stand apart, a single demand. Then
the pain he felt was another single self. Then there was the clog of
his body, another separate thing. He was divided among all kinds of
separate beings. There was some strange, agonized connection between
them, but they were drawing further apart. Then they would all split.
The sun, drilling down on him, was drilling through the bond. Then they
would all fall, fall through the everlasting lapse of space. Then
again, his consciousness reasserted itself. He roused on to his elbow
and stared at the gleaming mountains. There they ranked, all still and
wonderful between earth and heaven. He stared till his eyes went black,
and the mountains, as they stood in their beauty, so clean and cool,
seemed to have it, that which was lost in him.
IV
When the soldiers found him, three hours later, he was lying with his
face over his arm, his black hair giving off heat under the sun. But he
was still alive. Seeing the open, black mouth the young soldiers
dropped him in horror.
He died in the hospital at night, without having seen again.
The doctors saw the bruises on his legs, behind, and were silent.
The bodies of the two men lay together, side by side, in the mortuary,
the one white and slender, but laid rigidly at rest, the other looking
as if every moment it must rouse into life again, so young and unused,
from a slumber.
The Thorn in the Flesh
I
A wind was running, so that occasionally the poplars whitened as if a
flame flew up them. The sky was broken and blue among moving clouds.
Patches of sunshine lay on the level fields, and shadows on the rye and
the vineyards. In the distance, very blue, the cathedral bristled
against the sky, and the houses of the city of Metz clustered vaguely
below, like a hill.
Among the fields by the lime trees stood the barracks, upon bare, dry
ground, a collection of round-roofed huts of corrugated iron, where the
soldiers’ nasturtiums climbed brilliantly. There was a tract of
vegetable garden at the side, with the soldiers’ yellowish lettuces in
rows, and at the back the big, hard drilling-yard surrounded by a wire
fence.
At this time in the afternoon, the huts were deserted, all the beds
pushed up, the soldiers were lounging about under the lime trees
waiting for the call to drill. Bachmann sat on a bench in the shade
that smelled sickly with blossom. Pale green, wrecked lime flowers were
scattered on the ground. He was writing his weekly post card to his
mother. He was a fair, long, limber youth, good looking. He sat very
still indeed, trying to write his post card. His blue uniform, sagging
on him as he sat bent over the card, disfigured his youthful shape. His
sunburnt hand waited motionless for the words to come. “Dear
mother”—was all he had written. Then he scribbled mechanically: “Many
thanks for your letter with what you sent. Everything is all right with
me. We are just off to drill on the fortifications——” Here he broke off
and sat suspended, oblivious of everything, held in some definite
suspense. He looked again at the card. But he could write no more. Out
of the knot of his consciousness no word would come. He signed himself,
and looked up, as a man looks to see if anyone has noticed him in his
privacy.
There was a self-conscious strain in his blue eyes, and a pallor about
his mouth, where the young, fair moustache glistened. He was almost
girlish in his good looks and his grace. But he had something of
military consciousness, as if he believed in the discipline for
himself, and found satisfaction in delivering himself to his duty.
There was also a trace of youthful swagger and dare-devilry about his
mouth and his limber body, but this was in suppression now.
He put the post card in the pocket of his tunic, and went to join a
group of his comrades who were lounging in the shade, laughing and
talking grossly. Today he was out of it. He only stood near to them for
the warmth of the association. In his own consciousness something held
him down.
Presently they were summoned to ranks. The sergeant came out to take
command. He was a strongly built, rather heavy man of forty. His head
was thrust forward, sunk a little between his powerful shoulders, and
the strong jaw was pushed out aggressively. But the eyes were
smouldering, the face hung slack and sodden with drink.
He gave his orders in brutal, barking shouts, and the little company
moved forward, out of the wire-fenced yard to the open road, marching
rhythmically, raising the dust. Bachmann, one of the inner file of four
deep, marched in the airless ranks, half suffocated with heat and dust
and enclosure. Through the moving of his comrades’ bodies, he could see
the small vines dusty by the roadside, the poppies among the tares
fluttering and blown to pieces, the distant spaces of sky and fields
all free with air and sunshine. But he was bound in a very dark
enclosure of anxiety within himself.
He marched with his usual ease, being healthy and well adjusted. But
his body went on by itself. His spirit was clenched apart. And ever the
few soldiers drew nearer and nearer to the town, ever the consciousness
of the youth became more gripped and separate, his body worked by a
kind of mechanical intelligence, a mere presence of mind.
They diverged from the high road and passed in single file down a path
among trees. All was silent and green and mysterious, with shadow of
foliage and long, green, undisturbed grass. Then they came out in the
sunshine on a moat of water, which wound silently between the long,
flowery grass, at the foot of the earthworks, that rose in front in
terraces walled smooth on the face, but all soft with long grass at the
top. Marguerite daisies and lady’s-slipper glimmered white and gold in
the lush grass, preserved here in the intense peace of the
fortifications. Thickets of trees stood round about. Occasionally a
puff of mysterious wind made the flowers and the long grass that
crested the earthworks above bow and shake as with signals of oncoming
alarm.
The group of soldiers stood at the end of the moat, in their light blue
and scarlet uniforms, very bright. The sergeant was giving them
instructions, and his shout came sharp and alarming in the intense,
untouched stillness of the place. They listened, finding it difficult
to make the effort of understanding.
Then it was over, and the men were moving to make preparations. On the
other side of the moat the ramparts rose smooth and clear in the sun,
sloping slightly back. Along the summit grass grew and tall daisies
stood ledged high, like magic, against the dark green of the tree-tops
behind. The noise of the town, the running of tram-cars, was heard
distinctly, but it seemed not to penetrate this still place.
The water of the moat was motionless. In silence the practice began.
One of the soldiers took a scaling ladder, and passing along the narrow
ledge at the foot of the earthworks, with the water of the moat just
behind him, tried to get a fixture on the slightly sloping wall-face.
There he stood, small and isolated, at the foot of the wall, trying to
get his ladder settled. At last it held, and the clumsy, groping figure
in the baggy blue uniform began to clamber up. The rest of the soldiers
stood and watched. Occasionally the sergeant barked a command. Slowly
the clumsy blue figure clambered higher up the wall-face. Bachmann
stood with his bowels turned to water. The figure of the climbing
soldier scrambled out on to the terrace up above, and moved, blue and
distinct, among the bright green grass. The officer shouted from below.
The soldier tramped along, fixed the ladder in another spot, and
carefully lowered himself on to the rungs. Bachmann watched the blind
foot groping in space for the ladder, and he felt the world fall away
beneath him. The figure of the soldier clung cringing against the face
of the wall, cleaving, groping downwards like some unsure insect
working its way lower and lower, fearing every movement. At last,
sweating and with a strained face, the figure had landed safely and
turned to the group of soldiers. But still it had a stiffness and a
blank, mechanical look, was something less than human.
Bachmann stood there heavy and condemned, waiting for his own turn and
betrayal. Some of the men went up easily enough, and without fear. That
only showed it could be done lightly, and made Bachmann’s case more
bitter. If only he could do it lightly, like that.
His turn came. He knew intuitively that nobody knew his condition. The
officer just saw him as a mechanical thing. He tried to keep it up, to
carry it through on the face of things. His inside gripped tight, as
yet under control, he took the ladder and went along under the wall. He
placed his ladder with quick success, and wild, quivering hope
possessed him. Then blindly he began to climb. But the ladder was not
very firm, and at every hitch a great, sick, melting feeling took hold
of him. He clung on fast. If only he could keep that grip on himself,
he would get through. He knew this, in agony. What he could not
understand was the blind gush of white-hot fear, that came with great
force whenever the ladder swerved, and which almost melted his belly
and all his joints, and left him powerless. If once it melted all his
joints and his belly, he was done. He clung desperately to himself. He
knew the fear, he knew what it did when it came, he knew he had only to
keep a firm hold. He knew all this. Yet, when the ladder swerved, and
his foot missed, there was the great blast of fear blowing on his heart
and bowels, and he was melting weaker and weaker, in a horror of fear
and lack of control, melting to fall.
Yet he groped slowly higher and higher, always staring upwards with
desperate face, and always conscious of the space below. But all of
him, body and soul, was growing hot to fusion point. He would have to
let go for very relief’s sake. Suddenly his heart began to lurch. It
gave a great, sickly swoop, rose, and again plunged in a swoop of
horror. He lay against the wall inert as if dead, inert, at peace, save
for one deep core of anxiety, which knew that it was _not_ all over,
that he was still high in space against the wall. But the chief effort
of will was gone.
There came into his consciousness a small, foreign sensation. He woke
up a little. What was it? Then slowly it penetrated him. His water had
run down his leg. He lay there, clinging, still with shame, half
conscious of the echo of the sergeant’s voice thundering from below. He
waited, in depths of shame beginning to recover himself. He had been
shamed so deeply. Then he could go on, for his fear for himself was
conquered. His shame was known and published. He must go on.
Slowly he began to grope for the rung above, when a great shock shook
through him. His wrists were grasped from above, he was being hauled
out of himself up, up to the safe ground. Like a sack he was dragged
over the edge of the earthworks by the large hands, and landed there on
his knees, grovelling in the grass to recover command of himself, to
rise up on his feet.
Shame, blind, deep shame and ignominy overthrew his spirit and left it
writhing. He stood there shrunk over himself, trying to obliterate
himself.
Then the presence of the officer who had hauled him up made itself felt
upon him. He heard the panting of the elder man, and then the voice
came down on his veins like a fierce whip. He shrank in tension of
shame.
“Put up your head—eyes front,” shouted the enraged sergeant, and
mechanically the soldier obeyed the command, forced to look into the
eyes of the sergeant. The brutal, hanging face of the officer violated
the youth. He hardened himself with all his might from seeing it. The
tearing noise of the sergeant’s voice continued to lacerate his body.
Suddenly he set back his head, rigid, and his heart leapt to burst. The
face had suddenly thrust itself close, all distorted and showing the
teeth, the eyes smouldering into him. The breath of the barking words
was on his nose and mouth. He stepped aside in revulsion. With a scream
the face was upon him again. He raised his arm, involuntarily, in
self-defence. A shock of horror went through him, as he felt his
forearm hit the face of the officer a brutal blow. The latter
staggered, swerved back, and with a curious cry, reeled backwards over
the ramparts, his hands clutching the air. There was a second of
silence, then a crash to water.
Bachmann, rigid, looked out of his inner silence upon the scene.
Soldiers were running.
“You’d better clear,” said one young, excited voice to him. And with
immediate instinctive decision he started to walk away from the spot.
He went down the tree-hidden path to the high road where the trams ran
to and from the town. In his heart was a sense of vindication, of
escape. He was leaving it all, the military world, the shame. He was
walking away from it.
Officers on horseback rode sauntering down the street, soldiers passed
along the pavement. Coming to the bridge, Bachmann crossed over to the
town that heaped before him, rising from the flat, picturesque French
houses down below at the water’s edge, up a jumble of roofs and chasms
of streets, to the lovely dark cathedral with its myriad pinnacles
making points at the sky.
He felt for the moment quite at peace, relieved from a great strain. So
he turned along by the river to the public gardens. Beautiful were the
heaped, purple lilac trees upon the green grass, and wonderful the
walls of the horse-chestnut trees, lighted like an altar with white
flowers on every ledge. Officers went by, elegant and all coloured,
women and girls sauntered in the chequered shade. Beautiful it was, he
walked in a vision, free.
II
But where was he going? He began to come out of his trance of delight
and liberty. Deep within him he felt the steady burning of shame in the
flesh. As yet he could not bear to think of it. But there it was,
submerged beneath his attention, the raw, steady-burning shame.
It behoved him to be intelligent. As yet he dared not remember what he
had done. He only knew the need to get away, away from everything he
had been in contact with.
But how? A great pang of fear went through him. He could not bear his
shamed flesh to be put again between the hands of authority. Already
the hands had been laid upon him, brutally upon his nakedness, ripping
open his shame and making him maimed, crippled in his own control.
Fear became an anguish. Almost blindly he was turning in the direction
of the barracks. He could not take the responsibility of himself. He
must give himself up to someone. Then his heart, obstinate in hope,
became obsessed with the idea of his sweetheart. He would make himself
her responsibility.
Blenching as he took courage, he mounted the small, quick-hurrying tram
that ran out of the town in the direction of the barracks. He sat
motionless and composed, static.
He got out at the terminus and went down the road. A wind was still
running. He could hear the faint whisper of the rye, and the stronger
swish as a sudden gust was upon it. No one was about. Feeling detached
and impersonal, he went down a field-path between the low vines. Many
little vine trees rose up in spires, holding out tender pink shoots,
waving their tendrils. He saw them distinctly and wondered over them.
In a field a little way off, men and women were taking up the hay. The
bullock-waggon stood by on the path, the men in their blue shirts, the
women with white cloths over their heads carried hay in their arms to
the cart, all brilliant and distinct upon the shorn, glowing green
acres. He felt himself looking out of darkness on to the glamorous,
brilliant beauty of the world around him, outside him.
The Baron’s house, where Emilie was maidservant, stood square and
mellow among trees and garden and fields. It was an old French grange.
The barracks was quite near. Bachmann walked, drawn by a single
purpose, towards the courtyard. He entered the spacious, shadowy,
sun-swept place. The dog, seeing a soldier, only jumped and whined for
greeting. The pump stood peacefully in a corner, under a lime tree, in
the shade.
The kitchen door was open. He hesitated, then walked in, speaking shyly
and smiling involuntarily. The two women started, but with pleasure.
Emilie was preparing the tray for afternoon coffee. She stood beyond
the table, drawn up, startled, and challenging, and glad. She had the
proud, timid eyes of some wild animal, some proud animal. Her black
hair was closely banded, her grey eyes watched steadily. She wore a
peasant dress of blue cotton sprigged with little red roses, that
buttoned tight over her strong maiden breasts.
At the table sat another young woman, the nursery governess, who was
picking cherries from a huge heap, and dropping them into a bowl. She
was young, pretty, freckled.
“Good day!” she said pleasantly. “The unexpected.”
Emilie did not speak. The flush came in her dark cheek. She still stood
watching, between fear and a desire to escape, and on the other hand
joy that kept her in his presence.
“Yes,” he said, bashful and strained, while the eyes of the two women
were upon him. “I’ve got myself in a mess this time.”
“What?” asked the nursery governess, dropping her hands in her lap.
Emilie stood rigid.
Bachmann could not raise his head. He looked sideways at the
glistening, ruddy cherries. He could not recover the normal world.
“I knocked Sergeant Huber over the fortifications down into the moat,”
he said. “It was an accident—but——”
And he grasped at the cherries, and began to eat them, unknowing,
hearing only Emilie’s little exclamation.
“You knocked him over the fortifications!” echoed Fräulein Hesse in
horror. “How?”
Spitting the cherry-stones into his hand, mechanically, absorbedly, he
told them.
“Ach!” exclaimed Emilie sharply.
“And how did you get here?” asked Fräulein Hesse.
“I ran off,” he said.
There was a dead silence. He stood, putting himself at the mercy of the
women. There came a hissing from the stove, and a stronger smell of
coffee. Emilie turned swiftly away. He saw her flat, straight back and
her strong loins, as she bent over the stove.
“But what are you going to do?” said Fräulein Hesse, aghast.
“I don’t know,” he said, grasping at more cherries. He had come to an
end.
“You’d better go to the barracks,” she said. “We’ll get the Herr Baron
to come and see about it.”
Emilie was swiftly and quietly preparing the tray. She picked it up,
and stood with the glittering china and silver before her, impassive,
waiting for his reply. Bachmann remained with his head dropped, pale
and obstinate. He could not bear to go back.
“I’m going to try to get into France,” he said.
“Yes, but they’ll catch you,” said Fräulein Hesse.
Emilie watched with steady, watchful grey eyes.
“I can have a try, if I could hide till tonight,” he said.
Both women knew what he wanted. And they all knew it was no good.
Emilie picked up the tray, and went out. Bachmann stood with his head
dropped. Within himself he felt the dross of shame and incapacity.
“You’d never get away,” said the governess.
“I can try,” he said.
Today he could not put himself between the hands of the military. Let
them do as they liked with him tomorrow, if he escaped today.
They were silent. He ate cherries. The colour flushed bright into the
cheek of the young governess.
Emilie returned to prepare another tray.
“He could hide in your room,” the governess said to her.
The girl drew herself away. She could not bear the intrusion.
“That is all I can think of that is safe from the children,” said
Fräulein Hesse.
Emilie gave no answer. Bachmann stood waiting for the two women. Emilie
did not want the close contact with him.
“You could sleep with me,” Fräulein Hesse said to her.
Emilie lifted her eyes and looked at the young man, direct, clear,
reserving herself.
“Do you want that?” she asked, her strong virginity proof against him.
“Yes—yes——” he said uncertainly, destroyed by shame.
She put back her head.
“Yes,” she murmured to herself.
Quickly she filled the tray, and went out.
“But you can’t walk over the frontier in a night,” said Fräulein Hesse.
“I can cycle,” he said.
Emilie returned, a restraint, a neutrality, in her bearing.
“I’ll see if it’s all right,” said the governess.
In a moment or two Bachmann was following Emilie through the square
hall, where hung large maps on the walls. He noticed a child’s blue
coat with brass buttons on the peg, and it reminded him of Emilie
walking holding the hand of the youngest child, whilst he watched,
sitting under the lime tree. Already this was a long way off. That was
a sort of freedom he had lost, changed for a new, immediate anxiety.
They went quickly, fearfully up the stairs and down a long corridor.
Emilie opened her door, and he entered, ashamed, into her room.
“I must go down,” she murmured, and she departed, closing the door
softly.
It was a small, bare, neat room. There was a little dish for
holy-water, a picture of the Sacred Heart, a crucifix, and a
_prie-Dieu_. The small bed lay white and untouched, the wash-hand bowl
of red earth stood on a bare table, there was a little mirror and a
small chest of drawers. That was all.
Feeling safe, in sanctuary, he went to the window, looking over the
courtyard at the shimmering, afternoon country. He was going to leave
this land, this life. Already he was in the unknown.
He drew away into the room. The curious simplicity and severity of the
little Roman Catholic bedroom was foreign but restoring to him. He
looked at the crucifix. It was a long, lean, peasant Christ carved by a
peasant in the Black Forest. For the first time in his life, Bachmann
saw the figure as a human thing. It represented a man hanging there in
helpless torture. He stared at it, closely, as if for new knowledge.
Within his own flesh burned and smouldered the restless shame. He could
not gather himself together. There was a gap in his soul. The shame
within him seemed to displace his strength and his manhood.
He sat down on his chair. The shame, the roused feeling of exposure
acted on his brain, made him heavy, unutterably heavy.
Mechanically, his wits all gone, he took off his boots, his belt, his
tunic, put them aside, and lay down, heavy, and fell into a kind of
drugged sleep.
Emilie came in a little while, and looked at him. But he was sunk in
sleep. She saw him lying there inert, and terribly still, and she was
afraid. His shirt was unfastened at the throat. She saw his pure white
flesh, very clean and beautiful. And he slept inert. His legs, in the
blue uniform trousers, his feet in the coarse stockings, lay foreign on
her bed. She went away.
III
She was uneasy, perturbed to her last fibre. She wanted to remain
clear, with no touch on her. A wild instinct made her shrink away from
any hands which might be laid on her.
She was a foundling, probably of some gipsy race, brought up in a Roman
Catholic Rescue Home. A naïve, paganly religious being, she was
attached to the Baroness, with whom she had served for seven years,
since she was fourteen.
She came into contact with no one, unless it were with Ida Hesse, the
governess. Ida was a calculating, good-natured, not very
straightforward flirt. She was the daughter of a poor country doctor.
Having gradually come into connection with Emilie, more an alliance
than an attachment, she put no distinction of grade between the two of
them. They worked together, sang together, walked together, and went
together to the rooms of Franz Brand, Ida’s sweetheart. There the three
talked and laughed together, or the women listened to Franz, who was a
forester, playing on his violin.
In all this alliance there was no personal intimacy between the young
women. Emilie was naturally secluded in herself, of a reserved, native
race. Ida used her as a kind of weight to balance her own flighty
movement. But the quick, shifty governess, occupied always in her
dealings with admirers, did all she could to move the violent nature of
Emilie towards some connection with men.
But the dark girl, primitive yet sensitive to a high degree, was
fiercely virgin. Her blood flamed with rage when the common soldiers
made the long, sucking, kissing noise behind her as she passed. She
hated them for their almost jeering offers. She was well protected by
the Baroness.
And her contempt of the common men in general was ineffable. But she
loved the Baroness, and she revered the Baron, and she was at her ease
when she was doing something for the service of a gentleman. Her whole
nature was at peace in the service of real masters or mistresses. For
her, a gentleman had some mystic quality that left her free and proud
in service. The common soldiers were brutes, merely nothing. Her desire
was to serve.
She held herself aloof. When, on Sunday afternoon, she had looked
through the windows of the Reichshalle in passing, and had seen the
soldiers dancing with the common girls, a cold revulsion and anger had
possessed her. She could not bear to see the soldiers taking off their
belts and pulling open their tunics, dancing with their shirts showing
through the open, sagging tunic, their movements gross, their faces
transfigured and sweaty, their coarse hands holding their coarse girls
under the arm-pits, drawing the female up to their breasts. She hated
to see them clutched breast to breast, the legs of the men moving
grossly in the dance.
At evening, when she had been in the garden, and heard on the other
side of the hedge the sexual inarticulate cries of the girls in the
embraces of the soldiers, her anger had been too much for her, and she
had cried, loud and cold:
“What are you doing there, in the hedge?”
She would have had them whipped.
But Bachmann was not quite a common soldier. Fräulein Hesse had found
out about him, and had drawn him and Emilie together. For he was a
handsome, blond youth, erect and walking with a kind of pride,
unconscious yet clear. Moreover, he came of a rich farming stock, rich
for many generations. His father was dead, his mother controlled the
moneys for the time being. But if Bachmann wanted a hundred pounds at
any moment, he could have them. By trade he, with one of his brothers,
was a waggon-builder. The family had the farming, smithy, and
waggon-building of their village. They worked because that was the form
of life they knew. If they had chosen, they could have lived
independent upon their means.
In this way, he was a gentleman in sensibility, though his intellect
was not developed. He could afford to pay freely for things. He had,
moreover, his native, fine breeding. Emilie wavered uncertainly before
him. So he became her sweetheart, and she hungered after him. But she
was virgin, and shy, and needed to be in subjection, because she was
primitive and had no grasp on civilized forms of living, nor on
civilized purposes.
IV
At six o’clock came the inquiry of the soldiers: Had anything been seen
of Bachmann? Fräulein Hesse answered, pleased to be playing a rôle:
“No, I’ve not seen him since Sunday—have you, Emilie?”
“No, I haven’t seen him,” said Emilie, and her awkwardness was
construed as bashfulness. Ida Hesse, stimulated, asked questions, and
played her part.
“But it hasn’t killed Sergeant Huber?” she cried in consternation.
“No. He fell into the water. But it gave him a bad shock, and smashed
his foot on the side of the moat. He’s in hospital. It’s a bad look-out
for Bachmann.”
Emilie, implicated and captive, stood looking on. She was no longer
free, working with all this regulated system which she could not
understand and which was almost god-like to her. She was put out of her
place. Bachmann was in her room, she was no longer the faithful in
service serving with religious surety.
Her situation was intolerable to her. All evening long the burden was
upon her, she could not live. The children must be fed and put to
sleep. The Baron and Baroness were going out, she must give them light
refreshment. The man-servant was coming in to supper after returning
with the carriage. And all the while she had the insupportable feeling
of being out of the order, self-responsible, bewildered. The control of
her life should come from those above her, and she should move within
that control. But now she was out of it, uncontrolled and troubled.
More than that, the man, the lover, Bachmann, who was he, what was he?
He alone of all men contained for her the unknown quantity which
terrified her beyond her service. Oh, she had wanted him as a distant
sweetheart, not close, like this, casting her out of her world.
When the Baron and Baroness had departed, and the young man-servant had
gone out to enjoy himself, she went upstairs to Bachmann. He had
wakened up, and sat dimly in the room. Out in the open he heard the
soldiers, his comrades, singing the sentimental songs of the nightfall,
the drone of the concertina rising in accompaniment.
“Wenn ich zu mei...nem Kinde geh’...
In seinem Au...g die Mutter seh’...”
But he himself was removed from it now. Only the sentimental cry of
young, unsatisfied desire in the soldiers’ singing penetrated his blood
and stirred him subtly. He let his head hang; he had become gradually
roused: and he waited in concentration, in another world.
The moment she entered the room where the man sat alone, waiting
intensely, the thrill passed through her, she died in terror, and after
the death, a great flame gushed up, obliterating her. He sat in
trousers and shirt on the side of the bed. He looked up as she came in,
and she shrank from his face. She could not bear it. Yet she entered
near to him.
“Do you want anything to eat?” she said.
“Yes,” he answered, and as she stood in the twilight of the room with
him, he could only hear his heart beat heavily. He saw her apron just
level with his face. She stood silent, a little distance off, as if she
would be there for ever. He suffered.
As if in a spell she waited, standing motionless and looming there, he
sat rather crouching on the side of the bed. A second will in him was
powerful and dominating. She drew gradually nearer to him, coming up
slowly, as if unconscious. His heart beat up swiftly. He was going to
move.
As she came quite close, almost invisibly he lifted his arms and put
them round her waist, drawing her with his will and desire. He buried
his face into her apron, into the terrible softness of her belly. And
he was a flame of passion intense about her. He had forgotten. Shame
and memory were gone in a whole, furious flame of passion.
She was quite helpless. Her hands leapt, fluttered, and closed over his
head, pressing it deeper into her belly, vibrating as she did so. And
his arms tightened on her, his hands spread over her loins, warm as
flame on her loveliness. It was intense anguish of bliss for her, and
she lost consciousness.
When she recovered, she lay translated in the peace of satisfaction.
It was what she had had no inkling of, never known could be. She was
strong with eternal gratitude. And he was there with her. Instinctively
with an instinct of reverence and gratitude, her arms tightened in a
little embrace upon him who held her thoroughly embraced.
And he was restored and completed, close to her. That little,
twitching, momentary clasp of acknowledgment that she gave him in her
satisfaction, roused his pride unconquerable. They loved each other,
and all was whole. She loved him, he had taken her, she was given to
him. It was right. He was given to her, and they were one, complete.
Warm, with a glow in their hearts and faces, they rose again, modest,
but transfigured with happiness.
“I will get you something to eat,” she said, and in joy and security of
service again, she left him, making a curious little homage of
departure. He sat on the side of the bed, escaped, liberated,
wondering, and happy.
V
Soon she came again with the tray, followed by Fräulein Hesse. The two
women watched him eat, watched the pride and wonder of his being, as he
sat there blond and naïf again. Emilie felt rich and complete. Ida was
a lesser thing than herself.
“And what are you going to do?” asked Fräulein Hesse, jealous.
“I must get away,” he said.
But words had no meaning for him. What did it matter? He had the inner
satisfaction and liberty.
“But you’ll want a bicycle,” said Ida Hesse.
“Yes,” he said.
Emilie sat silent, removed and yet with him, connected with him in
passion. She looked from this talk of bicycles and escape.
They discussed plans. But in two of them was the one will, that
Bachmann should stay with Emilie. Ida Hesse was an outsider.
It was arranged, however, that Ida’s lover should put out his bicycle,
leave it at the hut where he sometimes watched. Bachmann should fetch
it in the night, and ride into France. The hearts of all three beat hot
in suspense, driven to thought. They sat in a fire of agitation.
Then Bachmann would get away to America, and Emilie would come and join
him. They would be in a fine land then. The tale burned up again.
Emilie and Ida had to go round to Franz Brand’s lodging. They departed
with slight leave-taking. Bachmann sat in the dark, hearing the bugle
for retreat sound out of the night. Then he remembered his post card to
his mother. He slipped out after Emilie, gave it her to post. His
manner was careless and victorious, hers shining and trustful. He
slipped back to shelter.
There he sat on the side of the bed, thinking. Again he went over the
events of the afternoon, remembering his own anguish of apprehension
because he had known he could not climb the wall without fainting with
fear. Still, a flush of shame came alight in him at the memory. But he
said to himself: “What does it matter?—I can’t help it, well then I
can’t. If I go up a height, I get absolutely weak, and can’t help
myself.” Again memory came over him, and a gush of shame, like fire.
But he sat and endured it. It had to be endured, admitted, and
accepted. “I’m not a coward, for all that,” he continued. “I’m not
afraid of danger. If I’m made that way, that heights melt me and make
me let go my water”—it was torture for him to pluck at this truth—“if
I’m made like that, I shall have to abide by it, that’s all. It isn’t
all of me.” He thought of Emilie, and was satisfied. “What I am, I am;
and let it be enough,” he thought.
Having accepted his own defect, he sat thinking, waiting for Emilie, to
tell her. She came at length, saying that Franz could not arrange about
his bicycle this night. It was broken. Bachmann would have to stay over
another day.
They were both happy. Emilie, confused before Ida, who was excited and
prurient, came again to the young man. She was stiff and dignified with
an agony of unusedness. But he took her between his hands, and
uncovered her, and enjoyed almost like madness her helpless, virgin
body that suffered so strongly, and that took its joy so deeply. While
the moisture of torment and modesty was still in her eyes, she clasped
him closer, and closer, to the victory and the deep satisfaction of
both of them. And they slept together, he in repose still satisfied and
peaceful, and she lying close in her static reality.
VI
In the morning, when the bugle sounded from the barracks they rose and
looked out of the window. She loved his body that was proud and blond
and able to take command. And he loved her body that was soft and
eternal. They looked at the faint grey vapour of summer steaming off
from the greenness and ripeness of the fields. There was no town
anywhere, their look ended in the haze of the summer morning. Their
bodies rested together, their minds tranquil. Then a little anxiety
stirred in both of them from the sound of the bugle. She was called
back to her old position, to realize the world of authority she did not
understand but had wanted to serve. But this call died away again from
her. She had all.
She went downstairs to her work, curiously changed. She was in a new
world of her own, that she had never even imagined, and which was the
land of promise for all that. In this she moved and had her being. And
she extended it to her duties. She was curiously happy and absorbed.
She had not to strive out of herself to do her work. The doing came
from within her without call or command. It was a delicious outflow,
like sunshine, the activity that flowed from her and put her tasks to
rights.
Bachmann sat busily thinking. He would have to get all his plans ready.
He must write to his mother, and she must send him money to Paris. He
would go to Paris, and from thence, quickly, to America. It had to be
done. He must make all preparations. The dangerous part was the getting
into France. He thrilled in anticipation. During the day he would need
a time-table of the trains going to Paris—he would need to think. It
gave him delicious pleasure, using all his wits. It seemed such an
adventure.
This one day, and he would escape then into freedom. What an agony of
need he had for absolute, imperious freedom. He had won to his own
being, in himself and Emilie, he had drawn the stigma from his shame,
he was beginning to be himself. And now he wanted madly to be free to
go on. A home, his work, and absolute freedom to move and to be, in
her, with her, this was his passionate desire. He thought in a kind of
ecstasy, living an hour of painful intensity.
Suddenly he heard voices, and a tramping of feet. His heart gave a
great leap, then went still. He was taken. He had known all along. A
complete silence filled his body and soul, a silence like death, a
suspension of life and sound. He stood motionless in the bedroom, in
perfect suspension.
Emilie was busy passing swiftly about the kitchen preparing the
children’s breakfasts when she heard the tramp of feet and the voice of
the Baron. The latter had come in from the garden, and was wearing an
old green linen suit. He was a man of middle stature, quick, finely
made, and of whimsical charm. His right hand had been shot in the
Franco-Prussian war, and now, as always when he was much agitated, he
shook it down at his side, as if it hurt. He was talking rapidly to a
young, stiff Ober-leutnant. Two private soldiers stood bearishly in the
doorway.
Emilie, shocked out of herself, stood pale and erect, recoiling.
“Yes, if you think so, we can look,” the Baron was hastily and
irascibly saying.
“Emilie,” he said, turning to the girl, “did you put a post card to the
mother of this Bachmann in the box last evening?”
Emilie stood erect and did not answer.
“Yes?” said the Baron sharply.
“Yes, Herr Baron,” replied Emilie, neutral.
The Baron’s wounded hand shook rapidly in exasperation. The lieutenant
drew himself up still more stiffly. He was right.
“And do you know anything of the fellow?” asked the Baron, looking at
her with his blazing, greyish-golden eyes. The girl looked back at him
steadily, dumb, but her whole soul naked before him. For two seconds he
looked at her in silence. Then in silence, ashamed and furious, he
turned away.
“Go up!” he said, with his fierce, peremptory command, to the young
officer.
The lieutenant gave his order, in military cold confidence, to the
soldiers. They all tramped across the hall. Emilie stood motionless,
her life suspended.
The Baron marched swiftly upstairs and down the corridor, the
lieutenant and the common soldiers followed. The Baron flung open the
door of Emilie’s room and looked at Bachmann, who stood watching,
standing in shirt and trousers beside the bed, fronting the door. He
was perfectly still. His eyes met the furious, blazing look of the
Baron. The latter shook his wounded hand, and then went still. He
looked into the eyes of the soldier, steadily. He saw the same naked
soul exposed, as if he looked really into the _man_. And the man was
helpless, the more helpless for his singular nakedness.
“Ha!” he exclaimed impatiently, turning to the approaching lieutenant.
The latter appeared in the doorway. Quickly his eyes travelled over the
bare-footed youth. He recognized him as his object. He gave the brief
command to dress.
Bachmann turned round for his clothes. He was very still, silent in
himself. He was in an abstract, motionless world. That the two
gentlemen and the two soldiers stood watching him, he scarcely
realized. They could not see him.
Soon he was ready. He stood at attention. But only the shell of his
body was at attention. A curious silence, a blankness, like something
eternal, possessed him. He remained true to himself.
The lieutenant gave the order to march. The little procession went down
the stairs with careful, respectful tread, and passed through the hall
to the kitchen. There Emilie stood with her face uplifted, motionless
and expressionless. Bachmann did not look at her. They knew each other.
They were themselves. Then the little file of men passed out into the
courtyard.
The Baron stood in the doorway watching the four figures in uniform
pass through the chequered shadow under the lime trees. Bachmann was
walking neutralized, as if he were not there. The lieutenant went
brittle and long, the two soldiers lumbered beside. They passed out
into the sunny morning, growing smaller, going towards the barracks.
The Baron turned into the kitchen. Emilie was cutting bread.
“So he stayed the night here?” he said.
The girl looked at him, scarcely seeing. She was too much herself. The
Baron saw the dark, naked soul of her body in her unseeing eyes.
“What were you going to do?” he asked.
“He was going to America,” she replied, in a still voice.
“Pah! You should have sent him straight back,” fired the Baron.
Emilie stood at his bidding, untouched.
“He’s done for now,” he said.
But he could not bear the dark, deep nakedness of her eyes, that
scarcely changed under this suffering.
“Nothing but a fool,” he repeated, going away in agitation, and
preparing himself for what he could do.
Daughters of the Vicar
I
Mr Lindley was first vicar of Aldecross. The cottages of this tiny
hamlet had nestled in peace since their beginning, and the country folk
had crossed the lanes and farm-lands, two or three miles, to the parish
church at Greymeed, on the bright Sunday mornings.
But when the pits were sunk, blank rows of dwellings started up beside
the high roads, and a new population, skimmed from the floating scum of
workmen, was filled in, the cottages and the country people almost
obliterated.
To suit the convenience of these new collier-inhabitants, a church must
be built at Aldecross. There was not too much money. And so the little
building crouched like a humped stone-and-mortar mouse, with two little
turrets at the west corners for ears, in the fields near the cottages
and the apple trees, as far as possible from the dwellings down the
high road. It had an uncertain, timid look about it. And so they
planted big-leaved ivy, to hide its shrinking newness. So that now the
little church stands buried in its greenery, stranded and sleeping
among the fields, while the brick houses elbow nearer and nearer,
threatening to crush it down. It is already obsolete.
The Reverend Ernest Lindley, aged twenty-seven, and newly married, came
from his curacy in Suffolk to take charge of his church. He was just an
ordinary young man, who had been to Cambridge and taken orders. His
wife was a self-assured young woman, daughter of a Cambridgeshire
rector. Her father had spent the whole of his thousand a year, so that
Mrs Lindley had nothing of her own. Thus the young married people came
to Aldecross to live on a stipend of about a hundred and twenty pounds,
and to keep up a superior position.
They were not very well received by the new, raw, disaffected
population of colliers. Being accustomed to farm labourers, Mr Lindley
had considered himself as belonging indisputably to the upper or
ordering classes. He had to be humble to the county families, but
still, he was of their kind, whilst the common people were something
different. He had no doubts of himself.
He found, however, that the collier population refused to accept this
arrangement. They had no use for him in their lives, and they told him
so, callously. The women merely said, “they were throng,” or else, “Oh,
it’s no good you coming here, we’re Chapel.” The men were quite
good-humoured so long as he did not touch them too nigh, they were
cheerfully contemptuous of him, with a preconceived contempt he was
powerless against.
At last, passing from indignation to silent resentment, even, if he
dared have acknowledged it, to conscious hatred of the majority of his
flock, and unconscious hatred of himself, he confined his activities to
a narrow round of cottages, and he had to submit. He had no particular
character, having always depended on his position in society to give
him position among men. Now he was so poor, he had no social standing
even among the common vulgar tradespeople of the district, and he had
not the nature nor the wish to make his society agreeable to them, nor
the strength to impose himself where he would have liked to be
recognized. He dragged on, pale and miserable and neutral.
At first his wife raged with mortification. She took on airs and used a
high hand. But her income was too small, the wrestling with tradesmen’s
bills was too pitiful, she only met with general, callous ridicule when
she tried to be impressive.
Wounded to the quick of her pride, she found herself isolated in an
indifferent, callous population. She raged indoors and out. But soon
she learned that she must pay too heavily for her outdoor rages, and
then she only raged within the walls of the rectory. There her feeling
was so strong, that she frightened herself. She saw herself hating her
husband, and she knew that, unless she were careful, she would smash
her form of life and bring catastrophe upon him and upon herself. So in
very fear, she went quiet. She hid, bitter and beaten by fear, behind
the only shelter she had in the world, her gloomy, poor parsonage.
Children were born one every year; almost mechanically, she continued
to perform her maternal duty, which was forced upon her. Gradually,
broken by the suppressing of her violent anger and misery and disgust,
she became an invalid and took to her couch.
The children grew up healthy, but unwarmed and rather rigid. Their
father and mother educated them at home, made them very proud and very
genteel, put them definitely and cruelly in the upper classes, apart
from the vulgar around them. So they lived quite isolated. They were
good-looking, and had that curiously clean, semi-transparent look of
the genteel, isolated poor.
Gradually Mr and Mrs Lindley lost all hold on life, and spent their
hours, weeks and years merely haggling to make ends meet, and bitterly
repressing and pruning their children into gentility, urging them to
ambition, weighting them with duty. On Sunday morning the whole family,
except the mother, went down the lane to church, the long-legged girls
in skimpy frocks, the boys in black coats and long, grey, unfitting
trousers. They passed by their father’s parishioners with mute, clear
faces, childish mouths closed in pride that was like a doom to them,
and childish eyes already unseeing. Miss Mary, the eldest, was the
leader. She was a long, slim thing with a fine profile and a proud,
pure look of submission to a high fate. Miss Louisa, the second, was
short and plump and obstinate-looking. She had more enemies than
ideals. She looked after the lesser children, Miss Mary after the
elder. The collier children watched this pale, distinguished procession
of the vicar’s family pass mutely by, and they were impressed by the
air of gentility and distance, they made mock of the trousers of the
small sons, they felt inferior in themselves, and hate stirred their
hearts.
In her time, Miss Mary received as governess a few little daughters of
tradesmen; Miss Louisa managed the house and went among her father’s
church-goers, giving lessons on the piano to the colliers’ daughters at
thirteen shillings for twenty-six lessons.
II
One winter morning, when his daughter Mary was about twenty years old,
Mr Lindley, a thin, unobtrusive figure in his black overcoat and his
wideawake, went down into Aldecross with a packet of white papers under
his arm. He was delivering the parish almanacs.
A rather pale, neutral man of middle age, he waited while the train
thumped over the level-crossing, going up to the pit which rattled
busily just along the line. A wooden-legged man hobbled to open the
gate, Mr Lindley passed on. Just at his left hand, below the road and
the railway, was the red roof of a cottage, showing through the bare
twigs of apple trees. Mr Lindley passed round the low wall, and
descended the worn steps that led from the highway down to the cottage
which crouched darkly and quietly away below the rumble of passing
trains and the clank of coal-carts in a quiet little under-world of its
own. Snowdrops with tight-shut buds were hanging very still under the
bare currant bushes.
The clergyman was just going to knock when he heard a clinking noise,
and turning saw through the open door of a black shed just behind him
an elderly woman in a black lace cap stooping among reddish big cans,
pouring a very bright liquid into a tundish. There was a smell of
paraffin. The woman put down her can, took the tundish and laid it on a
shelf, then rose with a tin bottle. Her eyes met those of the
clergyman.
“Oh, is it you, Mr Lin’ley!” she said, in a complaining tone. “Go in.”
The minister entered the house. In the hot kitchen sat a big, elderly
man with a great grey beard, taking snuff. He grunted in a deep,
muttering voice, telling the minister to sit down, and then took no
more notice of him, but stared vacantly into the fire. Mr Lindley
waited.
The woman came in, the ribbons of her black lace cap, or bonnet,
hanging on her shawl. She was of medium stature, everything about her
was tidy. She went up a step out of the kitchen, carrying the paraffin
tin. Feet were heard entering the room up the step. It was a little
haberdashery shop, with parcels on the shelves of the walls, a big,
old-fashioned sewing machine with tailor’s work lying round it, in the
open space. The woman went behind the counter, gave the child who had
entered the paraffin bottle, and took from her a jug.
“My mother says shall yer put it down,” said the child, and she was
gone. The woman wrote in a book, then came into the kitchen with her
jug. The husband, a very large man, rose and brought more coal to the
already hot fire. He moved slowly and sluggishly. Already he was going
dead; being a tailor, his large form had become an encumbrance to him.
In his youth he had been a great dancer and boxer. Now he was taciturn,
and inert. The minister had nothing to say, so he sought for his
phrases. But John Durant took no notice, existing silent and dull.
Mrs Durant spread the cloth. Her husband poured himself beer into a
mug, and began to smoke and drink.
“Shall you have some?” he growled through his beard at the clergyman,
looking slowly from the man to the jug, capable of this one idea.
“No, thank you,” replied Mr Lindley, though he would have liked some
beer. He must set the example in a drinking parish.
“We need a drop to keep us going,” said Mrs Durant.
She had rather a complaining manner. The clergyman sat on uncomfortably
while she laid the table for the half-past ten lunch. Her husband drew
up to eat. She remained in her little round armchair by the fire.
She was a woman who would have liked to be easy in her life, but to
whose lot had fallen a rough and turbulent family, and a slothful
husband who did not care what became of himself or anybody. So, her
rather good-looking square face was peevish, she had that air of having
been compelled all her life to serve unwillingly, and to control where
she did not want to control. There was about her, too, that masterful
_aplomb_ of a woman who has brought up and ruled her sons: but even
them she had ruled unwillingly. She had enjoyed managing her little
haberdashery-shop, riding in the carrier’s cart to Nottingham, going
through the big warehouses to buy her goods. But the fret of managing
her sons she did not like. Only she loved her youngest boy, because he
was her last, and she saw herself free.
This was one of the houses the clergyman visited occasionally. Mrs
Durant, as part of her regulation, had brought up all her sons in the
Church. Not that she had any religion. Only, it was what she was used
to. Mr Durant was without religion. He read the fervently evangelical
_Life of John Wesley_ with a curious pleasure, getting from it a
satisfaction as from the warmth of the fire, or a glass of brandy. But
he cared no more about John Wesley, in fact, than about John Milton, of
whom he had never heard.
Mrs Durant took her chair to the table.
“I don’t feel like eating,” she sighed.
“Why—aren’t you well?” asked the clergyman, patronizing.
“It isn’t that,” she sighed. She sat with shut, straight mouth. “I
don’t know what’s going to become of us.”
But the clergyman had ground himself down so long, that he could not
easily sympathize.
“Have you any trouble?” he asked.
“Ay, have I any trouble!” cried the elderly woman. “I shall end my days
in the workhouse.”
The minister waited unmoved. What could she know of poverty, in her
little house of plenty!
“I hope not,” he said.
“And the one lad as I wanted to keep by me——” she lamented.
The minister listened without sympathy, quite neutral.
“And the lad as would have been a support to my old age! What is going
to become of us?” she said.
The clergyman, justly, did not believe in the cry of poverty, but
wondered what had become of the son.
“Has anything happened to Alfred?” he asked.
“We’ve got word he’s gone for a Queen’s sailor,” she said sharply.
“He has joined the Navy!” exclaimed Mr Lindley. “I think he could
scarcely have done better—to serve his Queen and country on the
sea....”
“He is wanted to serve _me_,” she cried. “And I wanted my lad at home.”
Alfred was her baby, her last, whom she had allowed herself the luxury
of spoiling.
“You will miss him,” said Mr Lindley, “that is certain. But this is no
regrettable step for him to have taken—on the contrary.”
“That’s easy for you to say, Mr Lindley,” she replied tartly. “Do you
think I want my lad climbing ropes at another man’s bidding, like a
monkey——?”
“There is no _dishonour_, surely, in serving in the Navy?”
“Dishonour this dishonour that,” cried the angry old woman. “He goes
and makes a slave of himself, and he’ll rue it.”
Her angry, scornful impatience nettled the clergyman and silenced him
for some moments.
“I do not see,” he retorted at last, white at the gills and inadequate,
“that the Queen’s service is any more to be called slavery than working
in a mine.”
“At home he was at home, and his own master. _I_ know he’ll find a
difference.”
“It may be the making of him,” said the clergyman. “It will take him
away from bad companionship and drink.”
Some of the Durants’ sons were notorious drinkers, and Alfred was not
quite steady.
“And why indeed shouldn’t he have his glass?” cried the mother. “He
picks no man’s pocket to pay for it!”
The clergyman stiffened at what he thought was an allusion to his own
profession, and his unpaid bills.
“With all due consideration, I am glad to hear he has joined the Navy,”
he said.
“Me with my old age coming on, and his father working very little! I’d
thank you to be glad about something else besides that, Mr Lindley.”
The woman began to cry. Her husband, quite impassive, finished his
lunch of meat-pie, and drank some beer. Then he turned to the fire, as
if there were no one in the room but himself.
“I shall respect all men who serve God and their country on the sea,
Mrs Durant,” said the clergyman stubbornly.
“That is very well, when they’re not your sons who are doing the dirty
work. It makes a difference,” she replied tartly.
“I should be proud if one of my sons were to enter the Navy.”
“Ay—well—we’re not all of us made alike——”
The minister rose. He put down a large folded paper.
“I’ve brought the almanac,” he said.
Mrs Durant unfolded it.
“I do like a bit of colour in things,” she said, petulantly.
The clergyman did not reply.
“There’s that envelope for the organist’s fund——” said the old woman,
and rising, she took the thing from the mantelpiece, went into the
shop, and returned sealing it up.
“Which is all I can afford,” she said.
Mr Lindley took his departure, in his pocket the envelope containing
Mrs Durant’s offering for Miss Louisa’s services. He went from door to
door delivering the almanacs, in dull routine. Jaded with the monotony
of the business, and with the repeated effort of greeting half-known
people, he felt barren and rather irritable. At last he returned home.
In the dining-room was a small fire. Mrs Lindley, growing very stout,
lay on her couch. The vicar carved the cold mutton; Miss Louisa, short
and plump and rather flushed, came in from the kitchen; Miss Mary,
dark, with a beautiful white brow and grey eyes, served the vegetables;
the children chattered a little, but not exuberantly. The very air
seemed starved.
“I went to the Durants,” said the vicar, as he served out small
portions of mutton; “it appears Alfred has run away to join the Navy.”
“Do him good,” came the rough voice of the invalid.
Miss Louisa, attending to the youngest child, looked up in protest.
“Why has he done that?” asked Mary’s low, musical voice.
“He wanted some excitement, I suppose,” said the vicar. “Shall we say
grace?”
The children were arranged, all bent their heads, grace was pronounced,
at the last word every face was being raised to go on with the
interesting subject.
“He’s just done the right thing, for once,” came the rather deep voice
of the mother; “save him from becoming a drunken sot, like the rest of
them.”
“They’re not _all_ drunken, mama,” said Miss Louisa, stubbornly.
“It’s no fault of their upbringing if they’re not. Walter Durant is a
standing disgrace.”
“As I told Mrs Durant,” said the vicar, eating hungrily, “it is the
best thing he could have done. It will take him away from temptation
during the most dangerous years of his life—how old is he—nineteen?”
“Twenty,” said Miss Louisa.
“Twenty!” repeated the vicar. “It will give him wholesome discipline
and set before him some sort of standard of duty and honour—nothing
could have been better for him. But——”
“We shall miss him from the choir,” said Miss Louisa, as if taking
opposite sides to her parents.
“That is as it may be,” said the vicar. “I prefer to know he is safe in
the Navy, than running the risk of getting into bad ways here.”
“Was he getting into bad ways?” asked the stubborn Miss Louisa.
“You know, Louisa, he wasn’t quite what he used to be,” said Miss Mary
gently and steadily. Miss Louisa shut her rather heavy jaw sulkily. She
wanted to deny it, but she knew it was true.
For her he had been a laughing, warm lad, with something kindly and
something rich about him. He had made her feel warm. It seemed the days
would be colder since he had gone.
“Quite the best thing he could do,” said the mother with emphasis.
“I think so,” said the vicar. “But his mother was almost abusive
because I suggested it.”
He spoke in an injured tone.
“What does she care for her children’s welfare?” said the invalid.
“Their wages is all her concern.”
“I suppose she wanted him at home with her,” said Miss Louisa.
“Yes, she did—at the expense of his learning to be a drunkard like the
rest of them,” retorted her mother.
“George Durant doesn’t drink,” defended her daughter.
“Because he got burned so badly when he was nineteen—in the pit—and
that frightened him. The Navy is a better remedy than that, at least.”
“Certainly,” said the vicar. “Certainly.”
And to this Miss Louisa agreed. Yet she could not but feel angry that
he had gone away for so many years. She herself was only nineteen.
III
It happened when Miss Mary was twenty-three years old, that Mr Lindley
was very ill. The family was exceedingly poor at the time, such a lot
of money was needed, so little was forthcoming. Neither Miss Mary nor
Miss Louisa had suitors. What chance had they? They met no eligible
young men in Aldecross. And what they earned was a mere drop in a void.
The girls’ hearts were chilled and hardened with fear of this
perpetual, cold penury, this narrow struggle, this horrible nothingness
of their lives.
A clergyman had to be found for the church work. It so happened the son
of an old friend of Mr Lindley’s was waiting three months before taking
up his duties. He would come and officiate, for nothing. The young
clergyman was keenly expected. He was not more than twenty-seven, a
Master of Arts of Oxford, had written his thesis on Roman Law. He came
of an old Cambridgeshire family, had some private means, was going to
take a church in Northamptonshire with a good stipend, and was not
married. Mrs Lindley incurred new debts, and scarcely regretted her
husband’s illness.
But when Mr Massy came, there was a shock of disappointment in the
house. They had expected a young man with a pipe and a deep voice, but
with better manners than Sidney, the eldest of the Lindleys. There
arrived instead a small, chétif man, scarcely larger than a boy of
twelve, spectacled, timid in the extreme, without a word to utter at
first; yet with a certain inhuman self-sureness.
“What a little abortion!” was Mrs Lindley’s exclamation to herself on
first seeing him, in his buttoned-up clerical coat. And for the first
time for many days, she was profoundly thankful to God that all her
children were decent specimens.
He had not normal powers of perception. They soon saw that he lacked
the full range of human feelings, but had rather a strong,
philosophical mind, from which he lived. His body was almost
unthinkable, in intellect he was something definite. The conversation
at once took a balanced, abstract tone when he participated. There was
no spontaneous exclamation, no violent assertion or expression of
personal conviction, but all cold, reasonable assertion. This was very
hard on Mrs Lindley. The little man would look at her, after one of her
pronouncements, and then give, in his thin voice, his own calculated
version, so that she felt as if she were tumbling into thin air through
a hole in the flimsy floor on which their conversation stood. It was
she who felt a fool. Soon she was reduced to a hardy silence.
Still, at the back of her mind, she remembered that he was an
unattached gentleman, who would shortly have an income altogether of
six or seven hundred a year. What did the man matter, if there were
pecuniary ease! The man was a trifle thrown in. After twenty-two years
her sentimentality was ground away, and only the millstone of poverty
mattered to her. So she supported the little man as a representative of
a decent income.
His most irritating habit was that of a sneering little giggle, all on
his own, which came when he perceived or related some illogical
absurdity on the part of another person. It was the only form of humour
he had. Stupidity in thinking seemed to him exquisitely funny. But any
novel was unintelligibly meaningless and dull, and to an Irish sort of
humour he listened curiously, examining it like mathematics, or else
simply not hearing. In normal human relationship he was not there.
Quite unable to take part in simple everyday talk, he padded silently
round the house, or sat in the dining-room looking nervously from side
to side, always apart in a cold, rarefied little world of his own.
Sometimes he made an ironic remark, that did not seem humanly relevant,
or he gave his little laugh, like a sneer. He had to defend himself and
his own insufficiency. And he answered questions grudgingly, with a yes
or no, because he did not see their import and was nervous. It seemed
to Miss Louisa he scarcely distinguished one person from another, but
that he liked to be near her, or to Miss Mary, for some sort of contact
which stimulated him unknown.
Apart from all this, he was the most admirable workman. He was
unremittingly shy, but perfect in his sense of duty: as far as he could
conceive Christianity, he was a perfect Christian. Nothing that he
realized he could do for anyone did he leave undone, although he was so
incapable of coming into contact with another being, that he could not
proffer help. Now he attended assiduously to the sick man, investigated
all the affairs of the parish or the church which Mr Lindley had in
control, straightened out accounts, made lists of the sick and needy,
padded round with help and to see what he could do. He heard of Mrs
Lindley’s anxiety about her sons, and began to investigate means of
sending them to Cambridge. His kindness almost frightened Miss Mary.
She honoured it so, and yet she shrank from it. For, in it all Mr Massy
seemed to have no sense of any person, any human being whom he was
helping: he only realized a kind of mathematical working out, solving
of given situations, a calculated well-doing. And it was as if he had
accepted the Christian tenets as axioms. His religion consisted in what
his scrupulous, abstract mind approved of.
Seeing his acts, Miss Mary must respect and honour him. In consequence
she must serve him. To this she had to force herself, shuddering and
yet desirous, but he did not perceive it. She accompanied him on his
visiting in the parish, and whilst she was cold with admiration for
him, often she was touched with pity for the little padding figure with
bent shoulders, buttoned up to the chin in his overcoat. She was a
handsome, calm girl, tall, with a beautiful repose. Her clothes were
poor, and she wore a black silk scarf, having no furs. But she was a
lady. As the people saw her walking down Aldecross beside Mr Massy,
they said:
“My word, Miss Mary’s got a catch. Did ever you see such a sickly
little shrimp!”
She knew they were talking so, and it made her heart grow hot against
them, and she drew herself as it were protectively towards the little
man beside her. At any rate, she could see and give honour to his
genuine goodness.
He could not walk fast, or far.
“You have not been well?” she asked, in her dignified way.
“I have an internal trouble.”
He was not aware of her slight shudder. There was silence, whilst she
bowed to recover her composure, to resume her gentle manner towards
him.
He was fond of Miss Mary. She had made it a rule of hospitality that he
should always be escorted by herself or by her sister on his visits in
the parish, which were not many. But some mornings she was engaged.
Then Miss Louisa took her place. It was no good Miss Louisa’s trying to
adopt to Mr Massy an attitude of queenly service. She was unable to
regard him save with aversion. When she saw him from behind, thin and
bent-shouldered, looking like a sickly lad of thirteen, she disliked
him exceedingly, and felt a desire to put him out of existence. And yet
a deeper justice in Mary made Louisa humble before her sister.
They were going to see Mr Durant, who was paralysed and not expected to
live. Miss Louisa was crudely ashamed at being admitted to the cottage
in company with the little clergyman.
Mrs Durant was, however, much quieter in the face of her real trouble.
“How is Mr Durant?” asked Louisa.
“He is no different—and we don’t expect him to be,” was the reply. The
little clergyman stood looking on.
They went upstairs. The three stood for some time looking at the bed,
at the grey head of the old man on the pillow, the grey beard over the
sheet. Miss Louisa was shocked and afraid.
“It is so dreadful,” she said, with a shudder.
“It is how I always thought it would be,” replied Mrs Durant.
Then Miss Louisa was afraid of her. The two women were uneasy, waiting
for Mr Massy to say something. He stood, small and bent, too nervous to
speak.
“Has he any understanding?” he asked at length.
“Maybe,” said Mrs Durant. “Can you hear, John?” she asked loudly. The
dull blue eye of the inert man looked at her feebly.
“Yes, he understands,” said Mrs Durant to Mr Massy. Except for the dull
look in his eyes, the sick man lay as if dead. The three stood in
silence. Miss Louisa was obstinate but heavy-hearted under the load of
unlivingness. It was Mr Massy who kept her there in discipline. His
non-human will dominated them all.
Then they heard a sound below, a man’s footsteps, and a man’s voice
called subduedly:
“Are you upstairs, mother?”
Mrs Durant started and moved to the door. But already a quick, firm
step was running up the stairs.
“I’m a bit early, mother,” a troubled voice said, and on the landing
they saw the form of the sailor. His mother came and clung to him. She
was suddenly aware that she needed something to hold on to. He put his
arms round her, and bent over her, kissing her.
“He’s not gone, mother?” he asked anxiously, struggling to control his
voice.
Miss Louisa looked away from the mother and son who stood together in
the gloom on the landing. She could not bear it that she and Mr Massy
should be there. The latter stood nervously, as if ill at ease before
the emotion that was running. He was a witness, nervous, unwilling, but
dispassionate. To Miss Louisa’s hot heart it seemed all, all wrong that
they should be there.
Mrs Durant entered the bedroom, her face wet.
“There’s Miss Louisa and the vicar,” she said, out of voice and
quavering.
Her son, red-faced and slender, drew himself up to salute. But Miss
Louisa held out her hand. Then she saw his hazel eyes recognize her for
a moment, and his small white teeth showed in a glimpse of the greeting
she used to love. She was covered with confusion. He went round to the
bed; his boots clicked on the plaster floor, he bowed his head with
dignity.
“How are you, dad?” he said, laying his hand on the sheet, faltering.
But the old man stared fixedly and unseeing. The son stood perfectly
still for a few minutes, then slowly recoiled. Miss Louisa saw the fine
outline of his breast, under the sailor’s blue blouse, as his chest
began to heave.
“He doesn’t know me,” he said, turning to his mother. He gradually went
white.
“No, my boy!” cried the mother, pitiful, lifting her face. And suddenly
she put her face against his shoulder, he was stooping down to her,
holding her against him, and she cried aloud for a moment or two. Miss
Louisa saw his sides heaving, and heard the sharp hiss of his breath.
She turned away, tears streaming down her face. The father lay inert
upon the white bed, Mr Massy looked queer and obliterated, so little
now that the sailor with his sunburned skin was in the room. He stood
waiting. Miss Louisa wanted to die, she wanted to have done. She dared
not turn round again to look.
“Shall I offer a prayer?” came the frail voice of the clergyman, and
all kneeled down.
Miss Louisa was frightened of the inert man upon the bed. Then she felt
a flash of fear of Mr Massy, hearing his thin, detached voice. And
then, calmed, she looked up. On the far side of the bed were the heads
of the mother and son, the one in the black lace cap, with the small
white nape of the neck beneath, the other, with brown, sun-scorched
hair too close and wiry to allow of a parting, and neck tanned firm,
bowed as if unwillingly. The great grey beard of the old man did not
move, the prayer continued. Mr Massy prayed with a pure lucidity, that
they all might conform to the higher Will. He was like something that
dominated the bowed heads, something dispassionate that governed them
inexorably. Miss Louisa was afraid of him. And she was bound, during
the course of the prayer, to have a little reverence for him. It was
like a foretaste of inexorable, cold death, a taste of pure justice.
That evening she talked to Mary of the visit. Her heart, her veins were
possessed by the thought of Alfred Durant as he held his mother in his
arms; then the break in his voice, as she remembered it again and
again, was like a flame through her; and she wanted to see his face
more distinctly in her mind, ruddy with the sun, and his golden-brown
eyes, kind and careless, strained now with a natural fear, the fine
nose tanned hard by the sun, the mouth that could not help smiling at
her. And it went through her with pride, to think of his figure, a
straight, fine jet of life.
“He is a handsome lad,” said she to Miss Mary, as if he had not been a
year older than herself. Underneath was the deeper dread, almost
hatred, of the inhuman being of Mr Massy. She felt she must protect
herself and Alfred from him.
“When I felt Mr Massy there,” she said, “I almost hated him. What right
had he to be there!”
“Surely he had all right,” said Miss Mary after a pause. “He is
_really_ a Christian.”
“He seems to me nearly an imbecile,” said Miss Louisa.
Miss Mary, quiet and beautiful, was silent for a moment:
“Oh, no,” she said. “Not _imbecile_——”
“Well then—he reminds me of a six months’ child—or a five months’
child—as if he didn’t have time to get developed enough before he was
born.”
“Yes,” said Miss Mary, slowly. “There is something lacking. But there
is something wonderful in him: and he is really _good_——”
“Yes,” said Miss Louisa, “it doesn’t seem right that he should be. What
right has _that_ to be called goodness!”
“But it _is_ goodness,” persisted Mary. Then she added, with a laugh:
“And come, you wouldn’t deny that as well.”
There was a doggedness in her voice. She went about very quietly. In
her soul, she knew what was going to happen. She knew that Mr Massy was
stronger than she, and that she must submit to what he was. Her
physical self was prouder, stronger than he, her physical self disliked
and despised him. But she was in the grip of his moral, mental being.
And she felt the days allotted out to her. And her family watched.
IV
A few days after, old Mr Durant died. Miss Louisa saw Alfred once more,
but he was stiff before her now, treating her not like a person, but as
if she were some sort of will in command and he a separate, distinct
will waiting in front of her. She had never felt such utter steel-plate
separation from anyone. It puzzled her and frightened her. What had
become of him? And she hated the military discipline—she was
antagonistic to it. Now he was not himself. He was the will which obeys
set over against the will which commands. She hesitated over accepting
this. He had put himself out of her range. He had ranked himself
inferior, subordinate to her. And that was how he would get away from
her, that was how he would avoid all connection with her: by fronting
her impersonally from the opposite camp, by taking up the abstract
position of an inferior.
She went brooding steadily and sullenly over this, brooding and
brooding. Her fierce, obstinate heart could not give way. It clung to
its own rights. Sometimes she dismissed him. Why should he, inferior,
trouble her?
Then she relapsed to him, and almost hated him. It was his way of
getting out of it. She felt the cowardice of it, his calmly placing her
in a superior class, and placing himself inaccessibly apart, in an
inferior, as if she, the sensient woman who was fond of him, did not
count. But she was not going to submit. Dogged in her heart she held on
to him.
V
In six months’ time Miss Mary had married Mr Massy. There had been no
love-making, nobody had made any remark. But everybody was tense and
callous with expectation. When one day Mr Massy asked for Mary’s hand,
Mr Lindley started and trembled from the thin, abstract voice of the
little man. Mr Massy was very nervous, but so curiously absolute.
“I shall be very glad,” said the vicar, “but of course the decision
lies with Mary herself.” And his still feeble hand shook as he moved a
Bible on his desk.
The small man, keeping fixedly to his idea, padded out of the room to
find Miss Mary. He sat a long time by her, while she made some
conversation, before he had readiness to speak. She was afraid of what
was coming, and sat stiff in apprehension. She felt as if her body
would rise and fling him aside. But her spirit quivered and waited.
Almost in expectation she waited, almost wanting him. And then she knew
he would speak.
“I have already asked Mr Lindley,” said the clergyman, while suddenly
she looked with aversion at his little knees, “if he would consent to
my proposal.” He was aware of his own disadvantage, but his will was
set.
She went cold as she sat, and impervious, almost as if she had become
stone. He waited a moment nervously. He would not persuade her. He
himself never even heard persuasion, but pursued his own course. He
looked at her, sure of himself, unsure of her, and said:
“Will you become my wife, Mary?”
Still her heart was hard and cold. She sat proudly.
“I should like to speak to mama first,” she said.
“Very well,” replied Mr Massy. And in a moment he padded away.
Mary went to her mother. She was cold and reserved.
“Mr Massy has asked me to marry him, mama,” she said. Mrs Lindley went
on staring at her book. She was cramped in her feeling.
“Well, and what did you say?”
They were both keeping calm and cold.
“I said I would speak to you before answering him.”
This was equivalent to a question. Mrs Lindley did not want to reply to
it. She shifted her heavy form irritably on the couch. Miss Mary sat
calm and straight, with closed mouth.
“Your father thinks it would not be a bad match,” said the mother, as
if casually.
Nothing more was said. Everybody remained cold and shut-off. Miss Mary
did not speak to Miss Louisa, the Reverend Ernest Lindley kept out of
sight.
At evening Miss Mary accepted Mr Massy.
“Yes, I will marry you,” she said, with even a little movement of
tenderness towards him. He was embarrassed, but satisfied. She could
see him making some movement towards her, could feel the male in him,
something cold and triumphant, asserting itself. She sat rigid, and
waited.
When Miss Louisa knew, she was silent with bitter anger against
everybody, even against Mary. She felt her faith wounded. Did the real
things to her not matter after all? She wanted to get away. She thought
of Mr Massy. He had some curious power, some unanswerable right. He was
a will that they could not controvert.—Suddenly a flush started in her.
If he had come to her she would have flipped him out of the room. He
was never going to touch _her_. And she was glad. She was glad that her
blood would rise and exterminate the little man, if he came too near to
her, no matter how her judgment was paralysed by him, no matter how he
moved in abstract goodness. She thought she was perverse to be glad,
but glad she was. “I would just flip him out of the room,” she said,
and she derived great satisfaction from the open statement.
Nevertheless, perhaps she ought still to feel that Mary, on her plane,
was a higher being than herself. But then Mary was Mary, and she was
Louisa, and that also was inalterable.
Mary, in marrying him, tried to become a pure reason such as he was,
without feeling or impulse. She shut herself up, she shut herself rigid
against the agonies of shame and the terror of violation which came at
first. She _would_ not feel, and she _would_ not feel. She was a pure
will acquiescing to him. She elected a certain kind of fate. She would
be good and purely just, she would live in a higher freedom than she
had ever known, she would be free of mundane care, she was a pure will
towards right. She had sold herself, but she had a new freedom. She had
got rid of her body. She had sold a lower thing, her body, for a higher
thing, her freedom from material things. She considered that she paid
for all she got from her husband. So, in a kind of independence, she
moved proud and free. She had paid with her body: that was henceforward
out of consideration. She was glad to be rid of it. She had bought her
position in the world—that henceforth was taken for granted. There
remained only the direction of her activity towards charity and
high-minded living.
She could scarcely bear other people to be present with her and her
husband. Her private life was her shame. But then, she could keep it
hidden. She lived almost isolated in the rectory of the tiny village
miles from the railway. She suffered as if it were an insult to her own
flesh, seeing the repulsion which some people felt for her husband, or
the special manner they had of treating him, as if he were a “case”.
But most people were uneasy before him, which restored her pride.
If she had let herself, she would have hated him, hated his padding
round the house, his thin voice devoid of human understanding, his bent
little shoulders and rather incomplete face that reminded her of an
abortion. But rigorously she kept to her position. She took care of him
and was just to him. There was also a deep craven fear of him,
something slave-like.
There was not much fault to be found with his behaviour. He was
scrupulously just and kind according to his lights. But the male in him
was cold and self-complete, and utterly domineering. Weak, insufficient
little thing as he was, she had not expected this of him. It was
something in the bargain she had not understood. It made her hold her
head, to keep still. She knew, vaguely, that she was murdering herself.
After all, her body was not quite so easy to get rid of. And this
manner of disposing of it—ah, sometimes she felt she must rise and
bring about death, lift her hand for utter denial of everything, by a
general destruction.
He was almost unaware of the conditions about him. He did not fuss in
the domestic way, she did as she liked in the house. Indeed, she was a
great deal free of him. He would sit obliterated for hours. He was
kind, and almost anxiously considerate. But when he considered he was
right, his will was just blindly male, like a cold machine. And on most
points he was logically right, or he had with him the right of the
creed they both accepted. It was so. There was nothing for her to go
against.
Then she found herself with child, and felt for the first time horror,
afraid before God and man. This also she had to go through—it was the
right. When the child arrived, it was a bonny, healthy lad. Her heart
hurt in her body, as she took the baby between her hands. The flesh
that was trampled and silent in her must speak again in the boy. After
all, she had to live—it was not so simple after all. Nothing was
finished completely. She looked and looked at the baby, and almost
hated it, and suffered an anguish of love for it. She hated it because
it made her live again in the flesh, when she _could_ not live in the
flesh, she could not. She wanted to trample her flesh down, down,
extinct, to live in the mind. And now there was this child. It was too
cruel, too racking. For she must love the child. Her purpose was broken
in two again. She had to become amorphous, purposeless, without real
being. As a mother, she was a fragmentary, ignoble thing.
Mr Massy, blind to everything else in the way of human feeling, became
obsessed by the idea of his child. When it arrived, suddenly it filled
the whole world of feeling for him. It was his obsession, his terror
was for its safety and well-being. It was something new, as if he
himself had been born a naked infant, conscious of his own exposure,
and full of apprehension. He who had never been aware of anyone else,
all his life, now was aware of nothing but the child. Not that he ever
played with it, or kissed it, or tended it. He did nothing for it. But
it dominated him, it filled, and at the same time emptied his mind. The
world was all baby for him.
This his wife must also bear, his question: “What is the reason that he
cries?”—his reminder, at the first sound: “Mary, that is the
child,”—his restlessness if the feeding-time were five minutes past.
She had bargained for this—now she must stand by her bargain.
VI
Miss Louisa, at home in the dingy vicarage, had suffered a great deal
over her sister’s wedding. Having once begun to cry out against it,
during the engagement, she had been silenced by Mary’s quiet: “I don’t
agree with you about him, Louisa, I _want_ to marry him.” Then Miss
Louisa had been angry deep in her heart, and therefore silent. This
dangerous state started the change in her. Her own revulsion made her
recoil from the hitherto undoubted Mary.
“I’d beg the streets barefoot first,” said Miss Louisa, thinking of Mr
Massy.
But evidently Mary could perform a different heroism. So she, Louisa
the practical, suddenly felt that Mary, her ideal, was questionable
after all. How could she be pure—one cannot be dirty in act and
spiritual in being. Louisa distrusted Mary’s high spirituality. It was
no longer genuine for her. And if Mary were spiritual and misguided,
why did not her father protect her? Because of the money. He disliked
the whole affair, but he backed away, because of the money. And the
mother frankly did not care: her daughters could do as they liked. Her
mother’s pronouncement:
“Whatever happens to _him_, Mary is safe for life,”—so evidently and
shallowly a calculation, incensed Louisa.
“I’d rather be safe in the workhouse,” she cried.
“Your father will see to that,” replied her mother brutally. This
speech, in its indirectness, so injured Miss Louisa that she hated her
mother deep, deep in her heart, and almost hated herself. It was a long
time resolving itself out, this hate. But it worked and worked, and at
last the young woman said:
“They are wrong—they are all wrong. They have ground out their souls
for what isn’t worth anything, and there isn’t a grain of love in them
anywhere. And I _will_ have love. They want us to deny it. They’ve
never found it, so they want to say it doesn’t exist. But I _will_ have
it. I _will_ love—it is my birthright. I will love the man I marry—that
is all I care about.”
So Miss Louisa stood isolated from everybody. She and Mary had parted
over Mr Massy. In Louisa’s eyes, Mary was degraded, married to Mr
Massy. She could not bear to think of her lofty, spiritual sister
degraded in the body like this. Mary was wrong, wrong, wrong: she was
not superior, she was flawed, incomplete. The two sisters stood apart.
They still loved each other, they would love each other as long as they
lived. But they had parted ways. A new solitariness came over the
obstinate Louisa, and her heavy jaw set stubbornly. She was going on
her own way. But which way? She was quite alone, with a blank world
before her. How could she be said to have any way? Yet she had her
fixed will to love, to have the man she loved.
VII
When her boy was three years old, Mary had another baby, a girl. The
three years had gone by monotonously. They might have been an eternity,
they might have been brief as a sleep. She did not know. Only, there
was always a weight on top of her, something that pressed down her
life. The only thing that had happened was that Mr Massy had had an
operation. He was always exceedingly fragile. His wife had soon learned
to attend to him mechanically, as part of her duty.
But this third year, after the baby girl had been born, Mary felt
oppressed and depressed. Christmas drew near: the gloomy, unleavened
Christmas of the rectory, where all the days were of the same dark
fabric. And Mary was afraid. It was as if the darkness were coming upon
her.
“Edward, I should like to go home for Christmas,” she said, and a
certain terror filled her as she spoke.
“But you can’t leave baby,” said her husband, blinking.
“We can all go.”
He thought, and stared in his collective fashion.
“Why do you wish to go?” he asked.
“Because I need a change. A change would do me good, and it would be
good for the milk.”
He heard the will in his wife’s voice, and was at a loss. Her language
was unintelligible to him. And while she was breeding, either about to
have a child, or nursing, he regarded her as a special sort of being.
“Wouldn’t it hurt baby to take her by the train?” he said.
“No,” replied the mother, “why should it?”
They went. When they were in the train, it began to snow. From the
window of his first-class carriage the little clergyman watched the big
flakes sweep by, like a blind drawn across the country. He was obsessed
by thought of the baby, and afraid of the draughts of the carriage.
“Sit right in the corner,” he said to his wife, “and hold baby close
back.”
She moved at his bidding, and stared out of the window. His eternal
presence was like an iron weight on her brain. But she was going
partially to escape for a few days.
“Sit on the other side, Jack,” said the father. “It is less draughty.
Come to this window.”
He watched the boy in anxiety. But his children were the only beings in
the world who took not the slightest notice of him.
“Look, mother, look!” cried the boy. “They fly right in my face”—he
meant the snowflakes.
“Come into this corner,” repeated his father, out of another world.
“He’s jumped on this one’s back, mother, an’ they’re riding to the
bottom!” cried the boy, jumping with glee.
“Tell him to come on this side,” the little man bade his wife.
“Jack, kneel on this cushion,” said the mother, putting her white hand
on the place.
The boy slid over in silence to the place she indicated, waited still
for a moment, then almost deliberately, stridently cried:
“Look at all those in the corner, mother, making a heap,” and he
pointed to the cluster of snowflakes with finger pressed dramatically
on the pane, and he turned to his mother a bit ostentatiously.
“All in a heap!” she said.
He had seen her face, and had her response, and he was somewhat
assured. Vaguely uneasy, he was reassured if he could win her
attention.
They arrived at the vicarage at half-past two, not having had lunch.
“How are you, Edward?” said Mr Lindley, trying on his side to be
fatherly. But he was always in a false position with his son-in-law,
frustrated before him, therefore, as much as possible, he shut his eyes
and ears to him. The vicar was looking thin and pale and ill-nourished.
He had gone quite grey. He was, however, still haughty; but, since the
growing-up of his children, it was a brittle haughtiness, that might
break at any moment and leave the vicar only an impoverished, pitiable
figure. Mrs Lindley took all the notice of her daughter, and of the
children. She ignored her son-in-law. Miss Louisa was clucking and
laughing and rejoicing over the baby. Mr Massy stood aside, a bent,
persistent little figure.
“Oh a pretty!—a little pretty! oh a cold little pretty come in a
railway-train!” Miss Louisa was cooing to the infant, crouching on the
hearthrug opening the white woollen wraps and exposing the child to the
fireglow.
“Mary,” said the little clergyman, “I think it would be better to give
baby a warm bath; she may take a cold.”
“I think it is not necessary,” said the mother, coming and closing her
hand judiciously over the rosy feet and hands of the mite. “She is not
chilly.”
“Not a bit,” cried Miss Louisa. “She’s not caught cold.”
“I’ll go and bring her flannels,” said Mr Massy, with one idea.
“I can bath her in the kitchen then,” said Mary, in an altered, cold
tone.
“You can’t, the girl is scrubbing there,” said Miss Louisa. “Besides,
she doesn’t want a bath at this time of day.”
“She’d better have one,” said Mary, quietly, out of submission. Miss
Louisa’s gorge rose, and she was silent. When the little man padded
down with the flannels on his arm, Mrs Lindley asked:
“Hadn’t _you_ better take a hot bath, Edward?”
But the sarcasm was lost on the little clergyman. He was absorbed in
the preparations round the baby.
The room was dull and threadbare, and the snow outside seemed
fairy-like by comparison, so white on the lawn and tufted on the
bushes. Indoors the heavy pictures hung obscurely on the walls,
everything was dingy with gloom.
Except in the fireglow, where they had laid the bath on the hearth. Mrs
Massy, her black hair always smoothly coiled and queenly, kneeled by
the bath, wearing a rubber apron, and holding the kicking child. Her
husband stood holding the towels and the flannels to warm. Louisa, too
cross to share in the joy of the baby’s bath, was laying the table. The
boy was hanging on the door-knob, wrestling with it to get out. His
father looked round.
“Come away from the door, Jack,” he said, ineffectually. Jack tugged
harder at the knob as if he did not hear. Mr Massy blinked at him.
“He must come away from the door, Mary,” he said. “There will be a
draught if it is opened.”
“Jack, come away from the door, dear,” said the mother, dexterously
turning the shiny wet baby on to her towelled knee, then glancing
round: “Go and tell Auntie Louisa about the train.”
Louisa, also afraid to open the door, was watching the scene on the
hearth. Mr Massy stood holding the baby’s flannel, as if assisting at
some ceremonial. If everybody had not been subduedly angry, it would
have been ridiculous.
“I want to see out of the window,” Jack said. His father turned
hastily.
“Do _you_ mind lifting him on to a chair, Louisa,” said Mary hastily.
The father was too delicate.
When the baby was flannelled, Mr Massy went upstairs and returned with
four pillows, which he set in the fender to warm. Then he stood
watching the mother feed her child, obsessed by the idea of his infant.
Louisa went on with her preparations for the meal. She could not have
told why she was so sullenly angry. Mrs Lindley, as usual, lay silently
watching.
Mary carried her child upstairs, followed by her husband with the
pillows. After a while he came down again.
“What is Mary doing? Why doesn’t she come down to eat?” asked Mrs
Lindley.
“She is staying with baby. The room is rather cold. I will ask the girl
to put in a fire.” He was going absorbedly to the door.
“But Mary has had nothing to eat. It is _she_ who will catch cold,”
said the mother, exasperated.
Mr Massy seemed as if he did not hear. Yet he looked at his
mother-in-law, and answered:
“I will take her something.”
He went out. Mrs Lindley shifted on her couch with anger. Miss Louisa
glowered. But no one said anything, because of the money that came to
the vicarage from Mr Massy.
Louisa went upstairs. Her sister was sitting by the bed, reading a
scrap of paper.
“Won’t you come down and eat?” the younger asked.
“In a moment or two,” Mary replied, in a quiet, reserved voice, that
forbade anyone to approach her.
It was this that made Miss Louisa most furious. She went downstairs,
and announced to her mother:
“I am going out. I may not be home to tea.”
VIII
No one remarked on her exit. She put on her fur hat, that the village
people knew so well, and the old Norfolk jacket. Louisa was short and
plump and plain. She had her mother’s heavy jaw, her father’s proud
brow, and her own grey, brooding eyes that were very beautiful when she
smiled. It was true, as the people said, that she looked sulky. Her
chief attraction was her glistening, heavy, deep-blond hair, which
shone and gleamed with a richness that was not entirely foreign to her.
“Where am I going?” she said to herself, when she got outside in the
snow. She did not hesitate, however, but by mechanical walking found
herself descending the hill towards Old Aldecross. In the valley that
was black with trees, the colliery breathed in stertorous pants,
sending out high conical columns of steam that remained upright, whiter
than the snow on the hills, yet shadowy, in the dead air. Louisa would
not acknowledge to herself whither she was making her way, till she
came to the railway crossing. Then the bunches of snow in the twigs of
the apple tree that leaned towards the fence told her she must go and
see Mrs Durant. The tree was in Mrs Durant’s garden.
Alfred was now at home again, living with his mother in the cottage
below the road. From the highway hedge, by the railway crossing, the
snowy garden sheered down steeply, like the side of a hole, then
dropped straight in a wall. In this depth the house was snug, its
chimney just level with the road. Miss Louisa descended the stone
stairs, and stood below in the little backyard, in the dimness and the
semi-secrecy. A big tree leaned overhead, above the paraffin hut.
Louisa felt secure from all the world down there. She knocked at the
open door, then looked round. The tongue of garden narrowing in from
the quarry bed was white with snow: she thought of the thick fringes of
snowdrops it would show beneath the currant bushes in a month’s time.
The ragged fringe of pinks hanging over the garden brim behind her was
whitened now with snow-flakes, that in summer held white blossom to
Louisa’s face. It was pleasant, she thought, to gather flowers that
stooped to one’s face from above.
She knocked again. Peeping in, she saw the scarlet glow of the kitchen,
red firelight falling on the brick floor and on the bright chintz
cushions. It was alive and bright as a peep-show. She crossed the
scullery, where still an almanac hung. There was no one about. “Mrs
Durant,” called Louisa softly, “Mrs Durant.”
She went up the brick step into the front room, that still had its
little shop counter and its bundles of goods, and she called from the
stair-foot. Then she knew Mrs Durant was out.
She went into the yard to follow the old woman’s footsteps up the
garden path.
She emerged from the bushes and raspberry canes. There was the whole
quarry bed, a wide garden white and dimmed, brindled with dark bushes,
lying half submerged. On the left, overhead, the little colliery train
rumbled by. Right away at the back was a mass of trees.
Louisa followed the open path, looking from right to left, and then she
gave a cry of concern. The old woman was sitting rocking slightly among
the ragged snowy cabbages. Louisa ran to her, found her whimpering with
little, involuntary cries.
“Whatever have you done?” cried Louisa, kneeling in the snow.
“I’ve—I’ve—I was pulling a brussel-sprout stalk—and—oh-h!—something
tore inside me. I’ve had a pain,” the old woman wept from shock and
suffering, gasping between her whimpers—“I’ve had a pain there—a long
time—and now—oh—oh!” She panted, pressed her hand on her side, leaned
as if she would faint, looking yellow against the snow. Louisa
supported her.
“Do you think you could walk now?” she asked.
“Yes,” gasped the old woman.
Louisa helped her to her feet.
“Get the cabbage—I want it for Alfred’s dinner,” panted Mrs Durant.
Louisa picked up the stalk of brussel-sprouts, and with difficulty got
the old woman indoors. She gave her brandy, laid her on the couch,
saying:
“I’m going to send for a doctor—wait just a minute.”
The young woman ran up the steps to the public-house a few yards away.
The landlady was astonished to see Miss Louisa.
“Will you send for a doctor at once to Mrs Durant,” she said, with some
of her father in her commanding tone.
“Is something the matter?” fluttered the landlady in concern.
Louisa, glancing out up the road, saw the grocer’s cart driving to
Eastwood. She ran and stopped the man, and told him.
Mrs Durant lay on the sofa, her face turned away, when the young woman
came back.
“Let me put you to bed,” Louisa said. Mrs Durant did not resist.
Louisa knew the ways of the working people. In the bottom drawer of the
dresser she found dusters and flannels. With the old pit-flannel she
snatched out the oven shelves, wrapped them up, and put them in the
bed. From the son’s bed she took a blanket, and, running down, set it
before the fire. Having undressed the little old woman, Louisa carried
her upstairs.
“You’ll drop me, you’ll drop me!” cried Mrs Durant.
Louisa did not answer, but bore her burden quickly. She could not light
a fire, because there was no fire-place in the bedroom. And the floor
was plaster. So she fetched the lamp, and stood it lighted in one
corner.
“It will air the room,” she said.
“Yes,” moaned the old woman.
Louisa ran with more hot flannels, replacing those from the oven
shelves. Then she made a bran-bag and laid it on the woman’s side.
There was a big lump on the side of the abdomen.
“I’ve felt it coming a long time,” moaned the old lady, when the pain
was easier, “but I’ve not said anything; I didn’t want to upset our
Alfred.”
Louisa did not see why “our Alfred” should be spared.
“What time is it?” came the plaintive voice.
“A quarter to four.”
“Oh!” wailed the old lady, “he’ll be here in half an hour, and no
dinner ready for him.”
“Let me do it?” said Louisa, gently.
“There’s that cabbage—and you’ll find the meat in the pantry—and
there’s an apple pie you can hot up. But _don’t you_ do it——!”
“Who will, then?” asked Louisa.
“I don’t know,” moaned the sick woman, unable to consider.
Louisa did it. The doctor came and gave serious examination. He looked
very grave.
“What is it, doctor?” asked the old lady, looking up at him with old,
pathetic eyes in which already hope was dead.
“I think you’ve torn the skin in which a tumour hangs,” he replied.
“Ay!” she murmured, and she turned away.
“You see, she may die any minute—and it _may_ be swaled away,” said the
old doctor to Louisa.
The young woman went upstairs again.
“He says the lump may be swaled away, and you may get quite well
again,” she said.
“Ay!” murmured the old lady. It did not deceive her. Presently she
asked:
“Is there a good fire?”
“I think so,” answered Louisa.
“He’ll want a good fire,” the mother said. Louisa attended to it.
Since the death of Durant, the widow had come to church occasionally,
and Louisa had been friendly to her. In the girl’s heart the purpose
was fixed. No man had affected her as Alfred Durant had done, and to
that she kept. In her heart, she adhered to him. A natural sympathy
existed between her and his rather hard, materialistic mother.
Alfred was the most lovable of the old woman’s sons. He had grown up
like the rest, however, headstrong and blind to everything but his own
will. Like the other boys, he had insisted on going into the pit as
soon as he left school, because that was the only way speedily to
become a man, level with all the other men. This was a great chagrin to
his mother, who would have liked to have this last of her sons a
gentleman.
But still he remained constant to her. His feeling for her was deep and
unexpressed. He noticed when she was tired, or when she had a new cap.
And he bought little things for her occasionally. She was not wise
enough to see how much he lived by her.
At the bottom he did not satisfy her, he did not seem manly enough. He
liked to read books occasionally, and better still he liked to play the
piccolo. It amused her to see his head nod over the instrument as he
made an effort to get the right note. It made her fond of him, with
tenderness, almost pity, but not with respect. She wanted a man to be
fixed, going his own way without knowledge of women. Whereas she knew
Alfred depended on her. He sang in the choir because he liked singing.
In the summer he worked in the garden, attended to the fowls and pigs.
He kept pigeons. He played on Saturday in the cricket or football team.
But to her he did not seem the man, the independent man her other boys
had been. He was her baby—and whilst she loved him for it, she was a
little bit contemptuous of him.
There grew up a little hostility between them. Then he began to drink,
as the others had done; but not in their blind, oblivious way. He was a
little self-conscious over it. She saw this, and she pitied it in him.
She loved him most, but she was not satisfied with him because he was
not free of her. He could not quite go his own way.
Then at twenty he ran away and served his time in the Navy. This made a
man of him. He had hated it bitterly, the service, the subordination.
For years he fought with himself under the military discipline, for his
own self-respect, struggling through blind anger and shame and a
cramping sense of inferiority. Out of humiliation and self-hatred, he
rose into a sort of inner freedom. And his love for his mother, whom he
idealised, remained the fact of hope and of belief.
He came home again, nearly thirty years old, but naïve and
inexperienced as a boy, only with a silence about him that was new: a
sort of dumb humility before life, a fear of living. He was almost
quite chaste. A strong sensitiveness had kept him from women. Sexual
talk was all very well among men, but somehow it had no application to
living women. There were two things for him, the _idea_ of women, with
which he sometimes debauched himself, and real women, before whom he
felt a deep uneasiness, and a need to draw away. He shrank and defended
himself from the approach of any woman. And then he felt ashamed. In
his innermost soul he felt he was not a man, he was less than the
normal man. In Genoa he went with an under officer to a drinking house
where the cheaper sort of girl came in to look for lovers. He sat there
with his glass, the girls looked at him, but they never came to him. He
knew that if they did come he could only pay for food and drink for
them, because he felt a pity for them, and was anxious lest they lacked
good necessities. He could not have gone with one of them: he knew it,
and was ashamed, looking with curious envy at the swaggering,
easy-passionate Italian whose body went to a woman by instinctive
impersonal attraction. They were men, he was not a man. He sat feeling
short, feeling like a leper. And he went away imagining sexual scenes
between himself and a woman, walking wrapt in this indulgence. But when
the ready woman presented herself, the very fact that she was a
palpable woman made it impossible for him to touch her. And this
incapacity was like a core of rottenness in him.
So several times he went, drunk, with his companions, to the licensed
prostitute houses abroad. But the sordid insignificance of the
experience appalled him. It had not been anything really: it meant
nothing. He felt as if he were, not physically, but spiritually
impotent: not actually impotent, but intrinsically so.
He came home with this secret, never changing burden of his unknown,
unbestowed self torturing him. His navy training left him in perfect
physical condition. He was sensible of, and proud of his body. He
bathed and used dumb-bells, and kept himself fit. He played cricket and
football. He read books and began to hold fixed ideas which he got from
the Fabians. He played his piccolo, and was considered an expert. But
at the bottom of his soul was always this canker of shame and
incompleteness: he was miserable beneath all his healthy cheerfulness,
he was uneasy and felt despicable among all his confidence and
superiority of ideas. He would have changed with any mere brute, just
to be free of himself, to be free of this shame of self-consciousness.
He saw some collier lurching straight forward without misgiving,
pursuing his own satisfactions, and he envied him. Anything, he would
have given anything for this spontaneity and this blind stupidity which
went to its own satisfaction direct.
IX
He was not unhappy in the pit. He was admired by the men, and well
enough liked. It was only he himself who felt the difference between
himself and the others. He seemed to hide his own stigma. But he was
never sure that the others did not really despise him for a ninny, as
being less a man than they were. Only he pretended to be more manly,
and was surprised by the ease with which they were deceived. And, being
naturally cheerful, he was happy at his work. He was sure of himself
there. Naked to the waist, hot and grimy with labour, they squatted on
their heels for a few minutes and talked, seeing each other dimly by
the light of the safety lamps, while the black coal rose jutting round
them, and the props of wood stood like little pillars in the low,
black, very dark temple. Then the pony came and the gang-lad with a
message from Number 7, or with a bottle of water from the horse-trough
or some news of the world above. The day passed pleasantly enough.
There was an ease, a go-as-you-please about the day underground, a
delightful camaraderie of men shut off alone from the rest of the
world, in a dangerous place, and a variety of labour, holing, loading,
timbering, and a glamour of mystery and adventure in the atmosphere,
that made the pit not unattractive to him when he had again got over
his anguish of desire for the open air and the sea.
This day there was much to do and Durant was not in humour to talk. He
went on working in silence through the afternoon.
“Loose-all” came, and they tramped to the bottom. The whitewashed
underground office shone brightly. Men were putting out their lamps.
They sat in dozens round the bottom of the shaft, down which black,
heavy drops of water fell continuously into the sump. The electric
lights shone away down the main underground road.
“Is it raining?” asked Durant.
“Snowing,” said an old man, and the younger was pleased. He liked to go
up when it was snowing.
“It’ll just come right for Christmas,” said the old man.
“Ay,” replied Durant.
“A green Christmas, a fat churchyard,” said the other sententiously.
Durant laughed, showing his small, rather pointed teeth.
The cage came down, a dozen men lined on. Durant noticed tufts of snow
on the perforated, arched roof of the chain, and he was pleased.
He wondered how it liked its excursion underground. But already it was
getting soppy with black water.
He liked things about him. There was a little smile on his face. But
underlying it was the curious consciousness he felt in himself.
The upper world came almost with a flash, because of the glimmer of
snow. Hurrying along the bank, giving up his lamp at the office, he
smiled to feel the open about him again, all glimmering round him with
snow. The hills on either side were pale blue in the dusk, and the
hedges looked savage and dark. The snow was trampled between the
railway lines. But far ahead, beyond the black figures of miners moving
home, it became smooth again, spreading right up to the dark wall of
the coppice.
To the west there was a pinkness, and a big star hovered half revealed.
Below, the lights of the pit came out crisp and yellow among the
darkness of the buildings, and the lights of Old Aldecross twinkled in
rows down the bluish twilight.
Durant walked glad with life among the miners, who were all talking
animatedly because of the snow. He liked their company, he liked the
white dusky world. It gave him a little thrill to stop at the garden
gate and see the light of home down below, shining on the silent blue
snow.
X
By the big gate of the railway, in the fence, was a little gate, that
he kept locked. As he unfastened it, he watched the kitchen light that
shone on to the bushes and the snow outside. It was a candle burning
till night set in, he thought to himself. He slid down the steep path
to the level below. He liked making the first marks in the smooth snow.
Then he came through the bushes to the house. The two women heard his
heavy boots ring outside on the scraper, and his voice as he opened the
door:
“How much worth of oil do you reckon to save by that candle, mother?”
He liked a good light from the lamp.
He had just put down his bottle and snap-bag and was hanging his coat
behind the scullery door, when Miss Louisa came upon him. He was
startled, but he smiled.
His eyes began to laugh—then his face went suddenly straight, and he
was afraid.
“Your mother’s had an accident,” she said.
“How?” he exclaimed.
“In the garden,” she answered. He hesitated with his coat in his hands.
Then he hung it up and turned to the kitchen.
“Is she in bed?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Miss Louisa, who found it hard to deceive him. He was
silent. He went into the kitchen, sat down heavily in his father’s old
chair, and began to pull off his boots. His head was small, rather
finely shapen. His brown hair, close and crisp, would look jolly
whatever happened. He wore heavy moleskin trousers that gave off the
stale, exhausted scent of the pit. Having put on his slippers, he
carried his boots into the scullery.
“What is it?” he asked, afraid.
“Something internal,” she replied.
He went upstairs. His mother kept herself calm for his coming. Louisa
felt his tread shake the plaster floor of the bedroom above.
“What have you done?” he asked.
“It’s nothing, my lad,” said the old woman, rather hard. “It’s nothing.
You needn’t fret, my boy, it’s nothing more the matter with me than I
had yesterday, or last week. The doctor said I’d done nothing serious.”
“What were you doing?” asked her son.
“I was pulling up a cabbage, and I suppose I pulled too hard; for,
oh—there was such a pain——”
Her son looked at her quickly. She hardened herself.
“But who doesn’t have a sudden pain sometimes, my boy. We all do.”
“And what’s it done?”
“I don’t know,” she said, “but I don’t suppose it’s anything.”
The big lamp in the corner was screened with a dark green, so that he
could scarcely see her face. He was strung tight with apprehension and
many emotions. Then his brow knitted.
“What did you go pulling your inside out at cabbages for,” he asked,
“and the ground frozen? You’d go on dragging and dragging, if you
killed yourself.”
“Somebody’s got to get them,” she said.
“You needn’t do yourself harm.”
But they had reached futility.
Miss Louisa could hear plainly downstairs. Her heart sank. It seemed so
hopeless between them.
“Are you sure it’s nothing much, mother?” he asked, appealing, after a
little silence.
“Ay, it’s nothing,” said the old woman, rather bitter.
“I don’t want you to—to—to be badly—you know.”
“Go an’ get your dinner,” she said. She knew she was going to die:
moreover, the pain was torture just then. “They’re only cosseting me up
a bit because I’m an old woman. Miss Louisa’s _very_ good—and she’ll
have got your dinner ready, so you’d better go and eat it.”
He felt stupid and ashamed. His mother put him off. He had to turn
away. The pain burned in his bowels. He went downstairs. The mother was
glad he was gone, so that she could moan with pain.
He had resumed the old habit of eating before he washed himself. Miss
Louisa served his dinner. It was strange and exciting to her. She was
strung up tense, trying to understand him and his mother. She watched
him as he sat. He was turned away from his food, looking in the fire.
Her soul watched him, trying to see what he was. His black face and
arms were uncouth, he was foreign. His face was masked black with
coal-dust. She could not see him, she could not even know him. The
brown eyebrows, the steady eyes, the coarse, small moustache above the
closed mouth—these were the only familiar indications. What was he, as
he sat there in his pit-dirt? She could not see him, and it hurt her.
She ran upstairs, presently coming down with the flannels and the
bran-bag, to heat them, because the pain was on again.
He was half-way through his dinner. He put down the fork, suddenly
nauseated.
“They will soothe the wrench,” she said. He watched, useless and left
out.
“Is she bad?” he asked.
“I think she is,” she answered.
It was useless for him to stir or comment. Louisa was busy. She went
upstairs. The poor old woman was in a white, cold sweat of pain.
Louisa’s face was sullen with suffering as she went about to relieve
her. Then she sat and waited. The pain passed gradually, the old woman
sank into a state of coma. Louisa still sat silent by the bed. She
heard the sound of water downstairs. Then came the voice of the old
mother, faint but unrelaxing:
“Alfred’s washing himself—he’ll want his back washing——”
Louisa listened anxiously, wondering what the sick woman wanted.
“He can’t bear if his back isn’t washed——” the old woman persisted, in
a cruel attention to his needs. Louisa rose and wiped the sweat from
the yellowish brow.
“I will go down,” she said soothingly.
“If you would,” murmured the sick woman.
Louisa waited a moment. Mrs Durant closed her eyes, having discharged
her duty. The young woman went downstairs. Herself, or the man, what
did they matter? Only the suffering woman must be considered.
Alfred was kneeling on the hearthrug, stripped to the waist, washing
himself in a large panchion of earthenware. He did so every evening,
when he had eaten his dinner; his brothers had done so before him. But
Miss Louisa was strange in the house.
He was mechanically rubbing the white lather on his head, with a
repeated, unconscious movement, his hand every now and then passing
over his neck. Louisa watched. She had to brace herself to this also.
He bent his head into the water, washed it free of soap, and pressed
the water out of his eyes.
“Your mother said you would want your back washing,” she said.
Curious how it hurt her to take part in their fixed routine of life!
Louisa felt the almost repulsive intimacy being forced upon her. It was
all so common, so like herding. She lost her own distinctness.
He ducked his face round, looking up at her in what was a very comical
way. She had to harden herself.
“How funny he looks with his face upside down,” she thought. After all,
there was a difference between her and the common people. The water in
which his arms were plunged was quite black, the soap-froth was
darkish. She could scarcely conceive him as human. Mechanically, under
the influence of habit, he groped in the black water, fished out soap
and flannel, and handed them backward to Louisa. Then he remained rigid
and submissive, his two arms thrust straight in the panchion,
supporting the weight of his shoulders. His skin was beautifully white
and unblemished, of an opaque, solid whiteness. Gradually Louisa saw
it: this also was what he was. It fascinated her. Her feeling of
separateness passed away: she ceased to draw back from contact with him
and his mother. There was this living centre. Her heart ran hot. She
had reached some goal in this beautiful, clear, male body. She loved
him in a white, impersonal heat. But the sun-burnt, reddish neck and
ears: they were more personal, more curious. A tenderness rose in her,
she loved even his queer ears. A person—an intimate being he was to
her. She put down the towel and went upstairs again, troubled in her
heart. She had only seen one human being in her life—and that was Mary.
All the rest were strangers. Now her soul was going to open, she was
going to see another. She felt strange and pregnant.
“He’ll be more comfortable,” murmured the sick woman abstractedly, as
Louisa entered the room. The latter did not answer. Her own heart was
heavy with its own responsibility. Mrs Durant lay silent awhile, then
she murmured plaintively:
“You mustn’t mind, Miss Louisa.”
“Why should I?” replied Louisa, deeply moved.
“It’s what we’re used to,” said the old woman.
And Louisa felt herself excluded again from their life. She sat in
pain, with the tears of disappointment distilling her heart. Was that
all?
Alfred came upstairs. He was clean, and in his shirt-sleeves. He looked
a workman now. Louisa felt that she and he were foreigners, moving in
different lives. It dulled her again. Oh, if she could only find some
fixed relations, something sure and abiding.
“How do you feel?” he said to his mother.
“It’s a bit better,” she replied wearily, impersonally. This strange
putting herself aside, this abstracting herself and answering him only
what she thought good for him to hear, made the relations between
mother and son poignant and cramping to Miss Louisa. It made the man so
ineffectual, so nothing. Louisa groped as if she had lost him. The
mother was real and positive—he was not very actual. It puzzled and
chilled the young woman.
“I’d better fetch Mrs Harrison?” he said, waiting for his mother to
decide.
“I suppose we shall have to have somebody,” she replied.
Miss Louisa stood by, afraid to interfere in their business. They did
not include her in their lives, they felt she had nothing to do with
them, except as a help from outside. She was quite external to them.
She felt hurt and powerless against this unconscious difference. But
something patient and unyielding in her made her say:
“I will stay and do the nursing: you can’t be left.”
The other two were shy, and at a loss for an answer.
“Wes’ll manage to get somebody,” said the old woman wearily. She did
not care very much what happened, now.
“I will stay until tomorrow, in any case,” said Louisa. “Then we can
see.”
“I’m sure you’ve no right to trouble yourself,” moaned the old woman.
But she must leave herself in any hands.
Miss Louisa felt glad that she was admitted, even in an official
capacity. She wanted to share their lives. At home they would need her,
now Mary had come. But they must manage without her.
“I must write a note to the vicarage,” she said.
Alfred Durant looked at her inquiringly, for her service. He had always
that intelligent readiness to serve, since he had been in the Navy. But
there was a simple independence in his willingness, which she loved.
She felt nevertheless it was hard to get at him. He was so deferential,
quick to take the slightest suggestion of an order from her,
implicitly, that she could not get at the man in him.
He looked at her very keenly. She noticed his eyes were golden brown,
with a very small pupil, the kind of eyes that can see a long way off.
He stood alert, at military attention. His face was still rather
weather-reddened.
“Do you want pen and paper?” he asked, with deferential suggestion to a
superior, which was more difficult for her than reserve.
“Yes, please,” she said.
He turned and went downstairs. He seemed to her so self-contained, so
utterly sure in his movement. How was she to approach him? For he would
take not one step towards her. He would only put himself entirely and
impersonally at her service, glad to serve her, but keeping himself
quite removed from her. She could see he felt real joy in doing
anything for her, but any recognition would confuse him and hurt him.
Strange it was to her, to have a man going about the house in his
shirt-sleeves, his waistcoat unbuttoned, his throat bare, waiting on
her. He moved well, as if he had plenty of life to spare. She was
attracted by his completeness. And yet, when all was ready, and there
was nothing more for him to do, she quivered, meeting his questioning
look.
As she sat writing, he placed another candle near her. The rather dense
light fell in two places on the overfoldings of her hair till it
glistened heavy and bright, like a dense golden plumage folded up. Then
the nape of her neck was very white, with fine down and pointed wisps
of gold. He watched it as it were a vision, losing himself. She was all
that was beyond him, of revelation and exquisiteness. All that was
ideal and beyond him, she was that—and he was lost to himself in
looking at her. She had no connection with him. He did not approach
her. She was there like a wonderful distance. But it was a treat,
having her in the house. Even with this anguish for his mother
tightening about him, he was sensible of the wonder of living this
evening. The candles glistened on her hair, and seemed to fascinate
him. He felt a little awe of her, and a sense of uplifting, that he and
she and his mother should be together for a time, in the strange,
unknown atmosphere. And, when he got out of the house, he was afraid.
He saw the stars above ringing with fine brightness, the snow beneath
just visible, and a new night was gathering round him. He was afraid
almost with obliteration. What was this new night ringing about him,
and what was he? He could not recognize himself nor any of his
surroundings. He was afraid to think of his mother. And yet his chest
was conscious of her, and of what was happening to her. He could not
escape from her, she carried him with her into an unformed, unknown
chaos.
XI
He went up the road in an agony, not knowing what it was all about, but
feeling as if a red-hot iron were gripped round his chest. Without
thinking, he shook two or three tears on to the snow. Yet in his mind
he did not believe his mother would die. He was in the grip of some
greater consciousness. As he sat in the hall of the vicarage, waiting
whilst Mary put things for Louisa into a bag, he wondered why he had
been so upset. He felt abashed and humbled by the big house, he felt
again as if he were one of the rank and file. When Miss Mary spoke to
him, he almost saluted.
“An honest man,” thought Mary. And the patronage was applied as salve
to her own sickness. She had station, so she could patronize: it was
almost all that was left to her. But she could not have lived without
having a certain position. She could never have trusted herself outside
a definite place, nor respected herself except as a woman of superior
class.
As Alfred came to the latch-gate, he felt the grief at his heart again,
and saw the new heavens. He stood a moment looking northward to the
Plough climbing up the night, and at the far glimmer of snow in distant
fields. Then his grief came on like physical pain. He held tight to the
gate, biting his mouth, whispering “Mother!” It was a fierce, cutting,
physical pain of grief, that came on in bouts, as his mother’s pain
came on in bouts, and was so acute he could scarcely keep erect. He did
not know where it came from, the pain, nor why. It had nothing to do
with his thoughts. Almost it had nothing to do with him. Only it
gripped him and he must submit. The whole tide of his soul, gathering
in its unknown towards this expansion into death, carried him with it
helplessly, all the fritter of his thought and consciousness caught up
as nothing, the heave passing on towards its breaking, taking him
further than he had ever been. When the young man had regained himself,
he went indoors, and there he was almost gay. It seemed to excite him.
He felt in high spirits: he made whimsical fun of things. He sat on one
side of his mother’s bed, Louisa on the other, and a certain gaiety
seized them all. But the night and the dread was coming on.
Alfred kissed his mother and went to bed. When he was half undressed
the knowledge of his mother came upon him, and the suffering seized him
in its grip like two hands, in agony. He lay on the bed screwed up
tight. It lasted so long, and exhausted him so much, that he fell
asleep, without having the energy to get up and finish undressing. He
awoke after midnight to find himself stone cold. He undressed and got
into bed, and was soon asleep again.
At a quarter to six he woke, and instantly remembered. Having pulled on
his trousers and lighted a candle, he went into his mother’s room. He
put his hand before the candle flame so that no light fell on the bed.
“Mother!” he whispered.
“Yes,” was the reply.
There was a hesitation.
“Should I go to work?”
He waited, his heart was beating heavily.
“I think I’d go, my lad.”
His heart went down in a kind of despair.
“You want me to?”
He let his hand down from the candle flame. The light fell on the bed.
There he saw Louisa lying looking up at him. Her eyes were upon him.
She quickly shut her eyes and half buried her face in the pillow, her
back turned to him. He saw the rough hair like bright vapour about her
round head, and the two plaits flung coiled among the bedclothes. It
gave him a shock. He stood almost himself, determined. Louisa cowered
down. He looked, and met his mother’s eyes. Then he gave way again, and
ceased to be sure, ceased to be himself.
“Yes, go to work, my boy,” said the mother.
“All right,” replied he, kissing her. His heart was down at despair,
and bitter. He went away.
“Alfred!” cried his mother faintly.
He came back with beating heart.
“What, mother?”
“You’ll always do what’s right, Alfred?” the mother asked, beside
herself in terror now he was leaving her. He was too terrified and
bewildered to know what she meant.
“Yes,” he said.
She turned her cheek to him. He kissed her, then went away, in bitter
despair. He went to work.
XII
By midday his mother was dead. The word met him at the pit-mouth. As he
had known, inwardly, it was not a shock to him, and yet he trembled. He
went home quite calmly, feeling only heavy in his breathing.
Miss Louisa was still at the house. She had seen to everything
possible. Very succinctly, she informed him of what he needed to know.
But there was one point of anxiety for her.
“You _did_ half expect it—it’s not come as a blow to you?” she asked,
looking up at him. Her eyes were dark and calm and searching. She too
felt lost. He was so dark and inchoate.
“I suppose—yes,” he said stupidly. He looked aside, unable to endure
her eyes on him.
“I could not bear to think you might not have guessed,” she said.
He did not answer.
He felt it a great strain to have her near him at this time. He wanted
to be alone. As soon as the relatives began to arrive, Louisa departed
and came no more. While everything was arranging, and a crowd was in
the house, whilst he had business to settle, he went well enough, with
only those uncontrollable paroxysms of grief. For the rest, he was
superficial. By himself, he endured the fierce, almost insane bursts of
grief which passed again and left him calm, almost clear, just
wondering. He had not known before that everything could break down,
that he himself could break down, and all be a great chaos, very vast
and wonderful. It seemed as if life in him had burst its bounds, and he
was lost in a great, bewildering flood, immense and unpeopled. He
himself was broken and spilled out amid it all. He could only breathe
panting in silence. Then the anguish came on again.
When all the people had gone from the Quarry Cottage, leaving the young
man alone with an elderly housekeeper, then the long trial began. The
snow had thawed and frozen, a fresh fall had whitened the grey, this
then began to thaw. The world was a place of loose grey slosh. Alfred
had nothing to do in the evenings. He was a man whose life had been
filled up with small activities. Without knowing it, he had been
centralized, polarized in his mother. It was she who had kept him. Even
now, when the old housekeeper had left him, he might still have gone on
in his old way. But the force and balance of his life was lacking. He
sat pretending to read, all the time holding his fists clenched, and
holding himself in, enduring he did not know what. He walked the black
and sodden miles of field-paths, till he was tired out: but all this
was only running away from whence he must return. At work he was all
right. If it had been summer he might have escaped by working in the
garden till bedtime. But now, there was no escape, no relief, no help.
He, perhaps, was made for action rather than for understanding; for
doing than for being. He was shocked out of his activities, like a
swimmer who forgets to swim.
For a week, he had the force to endure this suffocation and struggle,
then he began to get exhausted, and knew it must come out. The instinct
of self-preservation became strongest. But there was the question:
Where was he to go? The public-house really meant nothing to him, it
was no good going there. He began to think of emigration. In another
country he would be all right. He wrote to the emigration offices.
On the Sunday after the funeral, when all the Durant people had
attended church, Alfred had seen Miss Louisa, impassive and reserved,
sitting with Miss Mary, who was proud and very distant, and with the
other Lindleys, who were people removed. Alfred saw them as people
remote. He did not think about it. They had nothing to do with his
life. After service Louisa had come to him and shaken hands.
“My sister would like you to come to supper one evening, if you would
be so good.”
He looked at Miss Mary, who bowed. Out of kindness, Mary had proposed
this to Louisa, disapproving of herself even as she did so. But she did
not examine herself closely.
“Yes,” said Durant awkwardly, “I’ll come if you want me.” But he
vaguely felt that it was misplaced.
“You’ll come tomorrow evening, then, about half-past six.”
He went. Miss Louisa was very kind to him. There could be no music,
because of the babies. He sat with his fists clenched on his thighs,
very quiet and unmoved, lapsing, among all those people, into a kind of
muse or daze. There was nothing between him and them. They knew it as
well as he. But he remained very steady in himself, and the evening
passed slowly. Mrs Lindley called him “young man”.
“Will you sit here, young man?”
He sat there. One name was as good as another. What had they to do with
him?
Mr Lindley kept a special tone for him, kind, indulgent, but
patronizing. Durant took it all without criticism or offence, just
submitting. But he did not want to eat—that troubled him, to have to
eat in their presence. He knew he was out of place. But it was his duty
to stay yet awhile. He answered precisely, in monosyllables.
When he left he winced with confusion. He was glad it was finished. He
got away as quickly as possible. And he wanted still more intensely to
go right away, to Canada.
Miss Louisa suffered in her soul, indignant with all of them, with him
too, but quite unable to say why she was indignant.
XIII
Two evenings after, Louisa tapped at the door of the Quarry Cottage, at
half-pas six. He had finished dinner, the woman had washed up and gone
away, but still he sat in his pit dirt. He was going later to the New
Inn. He had begun to go there because he must go somewhere. The mere
contact with other men was necessary to him, the noise, the warmth, the
forgetful flight of the hours. But still he did not move. He sat alone
in the empty house till it began to grow on him like something
unnatural.
He was in his pit dirt when he opened the door.
“I have been wanting to call—I thought I would,” she said, and she went
to the sofa. He wondered why she wouldn’t use his mother’s round
armchair. Yet something stirred in him, like anger, when the
housekeeper placed herself in it.
“I ought to have been washed by now,” he said, glancing at the clock,
which was adorned with butterflies and cherries, and the name of “T.
Brooks, Mansfield.” He laid his black hands along his mottled dirty
arms. Louisa looked at him. There was the reserve, and the simple
neutrality towards her, which she dreaded in him. It made it impossible
for her to approach him.
“I am afraid,” she said, “that I wasn’t kind in asking you to supper.”
“I’m not used to it,” he said, smiling with his mouth, showing the
interspaced white teeth. His eyes, however, were steady and unseeing.
“It’s not _that_,” she said hastily. Her repose was exquisite and her
dark grey eyes rich with understanding. He felt afraid of her as she
sat there, as he began to grow conscious of her.
“How do you get on alone?” she asked.
He glanced away to the fire.
“Oh——” he answered, shifting uneasily, not finishing his answer.
Her face settled heavily.
“How close it is in this room. You have such immense fires. I will take
off my coat,” she said.
He watched her take off her hat and coat. She wore a cream cashmir
blouse embroidered with gold silk. It seemed to him a very fine
garment, fitting her throat and wrists close. It gave him a feeling of
pleasure and cleanness and relief from himself.
“What were you thinking about, that you didn’t get washed?” she asked,
half intimately. He laughed, turning aside his head. The whites of his
eyes showed very distinct in his black face.
“Oh,” he said, “I couldn’t tell you.”
There was a pause.
“Are you going to keep this house on?” she asked.
He stirred in his chair, under the question.
“I hardly know,” he said. “I’m very likely going to Canada.”
Her spirit became very quiet and attentive.
“What for?” she asked.
Again he shifted restlessly on his seat.
“Well”—he said slowly—“to try the life.”
“But which life?”
“There’s various things—farming or lumbering or mining. I don’t mind
much what it is.”
“And is that what you want?”
He did not think in these times, so he could not answer.
“I don’t know,” he said, “till I’ve tried.”
She saw him drawing away from her for ever.
“Aren’t you sorry to leave this house and garden?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he answered reluctantly. “I suppose our Fred would come
in—that’s what he’s wanting.”
“You don’t want to settle down?” she asked.
He was leaning forward on the arms of his chair. He turned to her. Her
face was pale and set. It looked heavy and impassive, her hair shone
richer as she grew white. She was to him something steady and immovable
and eternal presented to him. His heart was hot in an anguish of
suspense. Sharp twitches of fear and pain were in his limbs. He turned
his whole body away from her. The silence was unendurable. He could not
bear her to sit there any more. It made his heart go hot and stifled in
his breast.
“Were you going out tonight?” she asked.
“Only to the New Inn,” he said.
Again there was silence.
She reached for her hat. Nothing else was suggested to her. She _had_
to go. He sat waiting for her to be gone, for relief. And she knew that
if she went out of that house as she was, she went out a failure. Yet
she continued to pin on her hat; in a moment she would have to go.
Something was carrying her.
Then suddenly a sharp pang, like lightning, seared her from head to
foot, and she was beyond herself.
“Do you want me to go?” she asked, controlled, yet speaking out of a
fiery anguish, as if the words were spoken from her without her
intervention.
He went white under his dirt.
“Why?” he asked, turning to her in fear, compelled.
“Do you want me to go?” she repeated.
“Why?” he asked again.
“Because I wanted to stay with you,” she said, suffocated, with her
lungs full of fire.
His face worked, he hung forward a little, suspended, staring straight
into her eyes, in torment, in an agony of chaos, unable to collect
himself. And as if turned to stone, she looked back into his eyes.
Their souls were exposed bare for a few moments. It was agony. They
could not bear it. He dropped his head, whilst his body jerked with
little sharp twitchings.
She turned away for her coat. Her soul had gone dead in her. Her hands
trembled, but she could not feel any more. She drew on her coat. There
was a cruel suspense in the room. The moment had come for her to go. He
lifted his head. His eyes were like agate, expressionless, save for the
black points of torture. They held her, she had no will, no life any
more. She felt broken.
“Don’t you want me?” she said helplessly.
A spasm of torture crossed his eyes, which held her fixed.
“I—I——” he began, but he could not speak. Something drew him from his
chair to her. She stood motionless, spellbound, like a creature given
up as prey. He put his hand tentatively, uncertainly, on her arm. The
expression of his face was strange and inhuman. She stood utterly
motionless. Then clumsily he put his arms round her, and took her,
cruelly, blindly, straining her till she nearly lost consciousness,
till he himself had almost fallen.
Then, gradually, as he held her gripped, and his brain reeled round,
and he felt himself falling, falling from himself, and whilst she,
yielded up, swooned to a kind of death of herself, a moment of utter
darkness came over him, and they began to wake up again as if from a
long sleep. He was himself.
After a while his arms slackened, she loosened herself a little, and
put her arms round him, as he held her. So they held each other close,
and hid each against the other for assurance, helpless in speech. And
it was ever her hands that trembled more closely upon him, drawing him
nearer into her, with love.
And at last she drew back her face and looked up at him, her eyes wet,
and shining with light. His heart, which saw, was silent with fear. He
was with her. She saw his face all sombre and inscrutable, and he
seemed eternal to her. And all the echo of pain came back into the
rarity of bliss, and all her tears came up.
“I love you,” she said, her lips drawn and sobbing. He put down his
head against her, unable to hear her, unable to bear the sudden coming
of the peace and passion that almost broke his heart. They stood
together in silence whilst the thing moved away a little.
At last she wanted to see him. She looked up. His eyes were strange and
glowing, with a tiny black pupil. Strange, they were, and powerful over
her. And his mouth came to hers, and slowly her eyelids closed, as his
mouth sought hers closer and closer, and took possession of her.
They were silent for a long time, too much mixed up with passion and
grief and death to do anything but hold each other in pain and kiss
with long, hurting kisses wherein fear was transfused into desire. At
last she disengaged herself. He felt as if his heart were hurt, but
glad, and he scarcely dared look at her.
“I’m glad,” she said also.
He held her hands in passionate gratitude and desire. He had not yet
the presence of mind to say anything. He was dazed with relief.
“I ought to go,” she said.
He looked at her. He could not grasp the thought of her going, he knew
he could never be separated from her any more. Yet he dared not assert
himself. He held her hands tight.
“Your face is black,” she said.
He laughed.
“Yours is a bit smudged,” he said.
They were afraid of each other, afraid to talk. He could only keep her
near to him. After a while she wanted to wash her face. He brought her
some warm water, standing by and watching her. There was something he
wanted to say, that he dared not. He watched her wiping her face, and
making tidy her hair.
“They’ll see your blouse is dirty,” he said.
She looked at her sleeves and laughed for joy.
He was sharp with pride.
“What shall you do?” he asked.
“How?” she said.
He was awkward at a reply.
“About me,” he said.
“What do you want me to do?” she laughed.
He put his hand out slowly to her. What did it matter!
“But make yourself clean,” she said.
XIV
As they went up the hill, the night seemed dense with the unknown. They
kept close together, feeling as if the darkness were alive and full of
knowledge, all around them. In silence they walked up the hill. At
first the street lamps went their way. Several people passed them. He
was more shy than she, and would have let her go had she loosened in
the least. But she held firm.
Then they came into the true darkness, between the fields. They did not
want to speak, feeling closer together in silence. So they arrived at
the Vicarage gate. They stood under the naked horse-chestnut tree.
“I wish you didn’t have to go,” he said.
She laughed a quick little laugh.
“Come tomorrow,” she said, in a low tone, “and ask father.”
She felt his hand close on hers.
She gave the same sorrowful little laugh of sympathy. Then she kissed
him, sending him home.
At home, the old grief came on in another paroxysm, obliterating
Louisa, obliterating even his mother for whom the stress was raging
like a burst of fever in a wound. But something was sound in his heart.
XV
The next evening he dressed to go to the vicarage, feeling it was to be
done, not imagining what it would be like. He would not take this
seriously. He was sure of Louisa, and this marriage was like fate to
him. It filled him also with a blessed feeling of fatality. He was not
responsible, neither had her people anything really to do with it.
They ushered him into the little study, which was fireless. By and by
the vicar came in. His voice was cold and hostile as he said:
“What can I do for you, young man?”
He knew already, without asking.
Durant looked up at him, again like a sailor before a superior. He had
the subordinate manner. Yet his spirit was clear.
“I wanted, Mr Lindley——” he began respectfully, then all the colour
suddenly left his face. It seemed now a violation to say what he had to
say. What was he doing there? But he stood on, because it had to be
done. He held firmly to his own independence and self-respect. He must
not be indecisive. He must put himself aside: the matter was bigger
than just his personal self. He must not feel. This was his highest
duty.
“You wanted——” said the vicar.
Durant’s mouth was dry, but he answered with steadiness:
“Miss Louisa—Louisa—promised to marry me——”
“You asked Miss Louisa if she would marry you—yes——” corrected the
vicar. Durant reflected he had not asked her this:
“If she would marry me, sir. I hope you—don’t mind.”
He smiled. He was a good-looking man, and the vicar could not help
seeing it.
“And my daughter was willing to marry you?” said Mr Lindley.
“Yes,” said Durant seriously. It was pain to him, nevertheless. He felt
the natural hostility between himself and the elder man.
“Will you come this way?” said the vicar. He led into the dining-room,
where were Mary, Louisa, and Mrs Lindley. Mr Massy sat in a corner with
a lamp.
“This young man has come on your account, Louisa?” said Mr Lindley.
“Yes,” said Louisa, her eyes on Durant, who stood erect, in discipline.
He dared not look at her, but he was aware of her.
“You don’t want to marry a collier, you little fool,” cried Mrs Lindley
harshly. She lay obese and helpless upon the couch, swathed in a loose,
dove-grey gown.
“Oh, hush, mother,” cried Mary, with quiet intensity and pride.
“What means have you to support a wife?” demanded the vicar’s wife
roughly.
“I!” Durant replied, starting. “I think I can earn enough.”
“Well, and how much?” came the rough voice.
“Seven and six a day,” replied the young man.
“And will it get to be any more?”
“I hope so.”
“And are you going to live in that poky little house?”
“I think so,” said Durant, “if it’s all right.”
He took small offence, only was upset, because they would not think him
good enough. He knew that, in their sense, he was not.
“Then she’s a fool, I tell you, if she marries you,” cried the mother
roughly, casting her decision.
“After all, mama, it is Louisa’s affair,” said Mary distinctly, “and we
must remember——”
“As she makes her bed, she must lie—but she’ll repent it,” interrupted
Mrs Lindley.
“And after all,” said Mr Lindley, “Louisa cannot quite hold herself
free to act entirely without consideration for her family.”
“What do you want, papa?” asked Louisa sharply.
“I mean that if you marry this man, it will make my position very
difficult for me, particularly if you stay in this parish. If you were
moving quite away, it would be simpler. But living here in a collier’s
cottage, under my nose, as it were—it would be almost unseemly. I have
my position to maintain, and a position which may not be taken
lightly.”
“Come over here, young man,” cried the mother, in her rough voice, “and
let us look at you.”
Durant, flushing, went over and stood—not quite at attention, so that
he did not know what to do with his hands. Miss Louisa was angry to see
him standing there, obedient and acquiescent. He ought to show himself
a man.
“Can’t you take her away and live out of sight?” said the mother.
“You’d both of you be better off.”
“Yes, we can go away,” he said.
“Do you want to?” asked Miss Mary clearly.
He faced round. Mary looked very stately and impressive. He flushed.
“I do if it’s going to be a trouble to anybody,” he said.
“For yourself, you would rather stay?” said Mary.
“It’s my home,” he said, “and that’s the house I was born in.”
“Then”—Mary turned clearly to her parents, “I really don’t see how you
can make the conditions, papa. He has his own rights, and if Louisa
wants to marry him——”
“Louisa, Louisa!” cried the father impatiently. “I cannot understand
why Louisa should not behave in the normal way. I cannot see why she
should only think of herself, and leave her family out of count. The
thing is enough in itself, and she ought to try to ameliorate it as
much as possible. And if——”
“But I love the man, papa,” said Louisa.
“And I hope you love your parents, and I hope you want to spare them as
much of the—the loss of prestige, as possible.”
“We _can_ go away to live,” said Louisa, her face breaking to tears. At
last she was really hurt.
“Oh, yes, easily,” Durant replied hastily, pale, distressed.
There was dead silence in the room.
“I think it would really be better,” murmured the vicar, mollified.
“Very likely it would,” said the rough-voiced invalid.
“Though I think we ought to apologize for asking such a thing,” said
Mary haughtily.
“No,” said Durant. “It will be best all round.” He was glad there was
no more bother.
“And shall we put up the banns here or go to the registrar?” he asked
clearly, like a challenge.
“We will go to the registrar,” replied Louisa decidedly.
Again there was a dead silence in the room.
“Well, if you will have your own way, you must go your own way,” said
the mother emphatically.
All the time Mr Massy had sat obscure and unnoticed in a corner of the
room. At this juncture he got up, saying:
“There is baby, Mary.”
Mary rose and went out of the room, stately; her little husband padded
after her. Durant watched the fragile, small man go, wondering.
“And where,” asked the vicar, almost genial, “do you think you will go
when you are married?”
Durant started.
“I was thinking of emigrating,” he said.
“To Canada? or where?”
“I think to Canada.”
“Yes, that would be very good.”
Again there was a pause.
“We shan’t see much of you then, as a son-in-law,” said the mother,
roughly but amicably.
“Not much,” he said.
Then he took his leave. Louisa went with him to the gate. She stood
before him in distress.
“You won’t mind them, will you?” she said humbly.
“I don’t mind them, if they don’t mind me!” he said. Then he stooped
and kissed her.
“Let us be married soon,” she murmured, in tears.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll go tomorrow to Barford.”
A Fragment of Stained Glass
Beauvale is, or was, the largest parish in England. It is thinly
populated, only just netting the stragglers from shoals of houses in
three large mining villages. For the rest, it holds a great tract of
woodland, fragment of old Sherwood, a few hills of pasture and arable
land, three collieries, and, finally, the ruins of a Cistercian abbey.
These ruins lie in a still rich meadow at the foot of the last fall of
woodland, through whose oaks shines a blue of hyacinths, like water, in
Maytime. Of the abbey, there remains only the east wall of the chancel
standing, a wild thick mass of ivy weighting one shoulder, while
pigeons perch in the tracery of the lofty window. This is the window in
question.
The vicar of Beauvale is a bachelor of forty-two years. Quite early in
life some illness caused a slight paralysis of his right side, so that
he drags a little, and so that the right corner of his mouth is twisted
up into his cheek with a constant grimace, unhidden by a heavy
moustache. There is something pathetic about this twist on the vicar’s
countenance: his eyes are so shrewd and sad. It would be hard to get
near to Mr Colbran. Indeed, now, his soul had some of the twist of his
face, so that, when he is not ironical, he is satiric. Yet a man of
more complete tolerance and generosity scarcely exists. Let the boors
mock him, he merely smiles on the other side, and there is no malice in
his eyes, only a quiet expression of waiting till they have finished.
His people do not like him, yet none could bring forth an accusation
against him, save, that “You never can tell when he’s having you.”
I dined the other evening with the vicar in his study. The room
scandalizes the neighbourhood because of the statuary which adorns it:
a Laocoön and other classic copies, with bronze and silver Italian
Renaissance work. For the rest, it is all dark and tawny.
Mr Colbran is an archæologist. He does not take himself seriously,
however, in his hobby, so that nobody knows the worth of his opinions
on the subject.
“Here you are,” he said to me after dinner, “I’ve found another
paragraph for my great work.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Haven’t I told you I was compiling a Bible of the English people—the
Bible of their hearts—their exclamations in presence of the unknown?
I’ve found a fragment at home, a jump at God from Beauvale.”
“Where?” I asked, startled.
The vicar closed his eyes whilst looking at me.
“Only on parchment,” he said.
Then, slowly, he reached for a yellow book, and read, translating as he
went:
“Then, while we chanted, came a crackling at the window, at the great
east window, where hung our Lord on the Cross. It was a malicious
covetous Devil wrathed by us, rended the lovely image of the glass. We
saw the iron clutches of the fiend pick the window, and a face flaming
red like fire in a basket did glower down on us. Our hearts melted
away, our legs broke, we thought to die. The breath of the wretch
filled the chapel.
“But our dear Saint, etc., etc., came hastening down heaven to defend
us. The fiend began to groan and bray—he was daunted and beat off.
“When the sun uprose, and it was morning, some went out in dread upon
the thin snow. There the figure of our Saint was broken and thrown
down, whilst in the window was a wicked hole as from the Holy Wounds
the Blessed Blood was run out at the touch of the Fiend, and on the
snow was the Blood, sparkling like gold. Some gathered it up for the
joy of this House....”
“Interesting,” I said. “Where’s it from?”
“Beauvale records—fifteenth century.”
“Beauvale Abbey,” I said; “they were only very few, the monks. What
frightened them, I wonder.”
“I wonder,” he repeated.
“Somebody climbed up,” I supposed, “and attempted to get in.”
“What?” he exclaimed, smiling.
“Well, what do you think?”
“Pretty much the same,” he replied. “I glossed it out for my book.”
“Your great work? Tell me.”
He put a shade over the lamp so that the room was almost in darkness.
“Am I more than a voice?” he asked.
“I can see your hand,” I replied. He moved entirely from the circle of
light. Then his voice began, sing-song, sardonic:
“I was a serf in Rollestoun’s Newthorpe Manor, master of the stables I
was. One day a horse bit me as I was grooming him. He was an old enemy
of mine. I fetched him a blow across the nose. Then, when he got a
chance, he lashed out at me and caught me a gash over the mouth. I
snatched at a hatchet and cut his head. He yelled, fiend as he was, and
strained for me with all his teeth bare. I brought him down.
“For killing him they flogged me till they thought I was dead. I was
sturdy, because we horse-serfs got plenty to eat. I was sturdy, but
they flogged me till I did not move. The next night I set fire to the
stables, and the stables set fire to the house. I watched and saw the
red flame rise and look out of the window, I saw the folk running, each
for himself, master no more than one of a frightened party. It was
freezing, but the heat made me sweat. I saw them all turn again to
watch, all rimmed with red. They cried, all of them when the roof went
in, when the sparks splashed up at rebound. They cried then like dogs
at the bagpipes howling. Master cursed me, till I laughed as I lay
under a bush quite near.
“As the fire went down I got frightened. I ran for the woods, with fire
blazing in my eyes and crackling in my ears. For hours I was all fire.
Then I went to sleep under the bracken. When I woke it was evening. I
had no mantle, was frozen stiff. I was afraid to move, lest all the
sores of my back should be broken like thin ice. I lay still until I
could bear my hunger no longer. I moved then to get used to the pain of
movement, when I began to hunt for food. There was nothing to be found
but hips.
“After wandering about till I was faint I dropped again in the bracken.
The boughs above me creaked with frost. I started and looked round. The
branches were like hair among the starlight. My heart stood still.
Again there was a creak, creak, and suddenly a whoop, that whistled in
fading. I fell down in the bracken like dead wood. Yet, by the peculiar
whistling sound at the end, I knew it was only the ice bending or
tightening in the frost. I was in the woods above the lake, only two
miles from the Manor. And yet, when the lake whooped hollowly again, I
clutched the frozen soil, every one of my muscles as stiff as the stiff
earth. So all the night long I dare not move my face, but pressed it
flat down, and taut I lay as if pegged down and braced.
“When morning came still I did not move, I lay still in a dream. By
afternoon my ache was such it enlivened me. I cried, rocking my breath
in the ache of moving. Then again I became fierce. I beat my hands on
the rough bark to hurt them, so that I should not ache so much. In such
a rage I was I swung my limbs to torture till I fell sick with pain.
Yet I fought the hurt, fought it and fought by twisting and flinging
myself, until it was overcome. Then the evening began to draw on. All
day the sun had not loosened the frost. I felt the sky chill again
towards afternoon. Then I knew the night was coming, and, remembering
the great space I had just come through, horrible so that it seemed to
have made me another man, I fled across the wood.
“But in my running I came upon the oak where hanged five bodies. There
they must hang, bar-stiff, night after night. It was a terror worse
than any. Turning, blundering through the forest, I came out where the
trees thinned, where only hawthorns, ragged and shaggy, went down to
the lake’s edge.
“The sky across was red, the ice on the water glistened as if it were
warm. A few wild geese sat out like stones on the sheet of ice. I
thought of Martha. She was the daughter of the miller at the upper end
of the lake. Her hair was red like beech leaves in a wind. When I had
gone often to the mill with the horses she had brought me food.
“‘I thought,’ said I to her, ‘’twas a squirrel sat on your shoulder.
’Tis your hair fallen loose.’
“‘They call me the fox,’ she said.
“‘Would I were your dog,’ said I. She would bring me bacon and good
bread, when I called at the mill with the horses. The thought of cakes
of bread and of bacon made me reel as if drunk. I had torn at the
rabbit holes, I had chewed wood all day. In such a dimness was my head
that I felt neither the soreness of my wounds nor the cuts of thorns on
my knees, but stumbled towards the mill, almost past fear of man and
death, panting with fear of the darkness that crept behind me from
trunk to trunk.
“Coming to the gap in the wood, below which lay the pond, I heard no
sound. Always I knew the place filled with the buzz of water, but now
it was silent. In fear of this stillness I ran forward, forgetting
myself, forgetting the frost. The wood seemed to pursue me. I fell,
just in time, down by a shed wherein were housed the few wintry pigs.
The miller came riding in on his horse, and the barking of dogs was for
him. I heard him curse the day, curse his servant, curse me, whom he
had been out to hunt, in his rage of wasted labour, curse all. As I lay
I heard inside the shed a sucking. Then I knew that the sow was there,
and that the most of her sucking pigs would be already killed for
tomorrow’s Christmas. The miller, from forethought to have young at
that time, made profit by his sucking pigs that were sold for the
mid-winter feast.
“When in a moment all was silent in the dusk, I broke the bar and came
into the shed. The sow grunted, but did not come forth to discover me.
By and by I crept in towards her warmth. She had but three young left,
which now angered her, she being too full of milk. Every now and again
she slashed at them and they squealed. Busy as she was with them, I in
the darkness advanced towards her. I trembled so that scarce dared I
trust myself near her, for long dared not put my naked face towards
her. Shuddering with hunger and fear, I at last fed of her, guarding my
face with my arm. Her own full young tumbled squealing against me, but
she, feeling her ease, lay grunting. At last I, too, lay drunk,
swooning.
“I was roused by the shouting of the miller. He, angered by his
daughter who wept, abused her, driving her from the house to feed the
swine. She came, bowing under a yoke, to the door of the shed. Finding
the pin broken she stood afraid, then, as the sow grunted, she came
cautiously in. I took her with my arm, my hand over her mouth. As she
struggled against my breast my heart began to beat loudly. At last she
knew it was I. I clasped her. She hung in my arms, turning away her
face, so that I kissed her throat. The tears blinded my eyes, I know
not why, unless it were the hurt of my mouth, wounded by the horse, was
keen.
“‘They will kill you,’ she whispered.
“‘No,’ I answered.
“And she wept softly. She took my head in her arms and kissed me,
wetting me with her tears, brushing me with her keen hair, warming me
through.
“‘I will not go away from here,’ I said. ‘Bring me a knife, and I will
defend myself.’
“‘No,’ she wept. ‘Ah, no!’
“When she went I lay down, pressing my chest where she had rested on
the earth, lest being alone were worse emptiness than hunger.
“Later she came again. I saw her bend in the doorway, a lanthorn
hanging in front. As she peered under the redness of her falling hair,
I was afraid of her. But she came with food. We sat together in the
dull light. Sometimes still I shivered and my throat would not swallow.
“‘If,’ said I, ‘I eat all this you have brought me, I shall sleep till
somebody finds me.’
“Then she took away the rest of the meat.
“‘Why,’ said I, ‘should I not eat?’ She looked at me in tears of fear.
“‘What?’ I said, but still she had no answer. I kissed her, and the
hurt of my wounded mouth angered me.
“‘Now there is my blood,’ said I, ‘on your mouth.’ Wiping her smooth
hand over her lips, she looked thereat, then at me.
“‘Leave me,’ I said, ‘I am tired.’ She rose to leave me.
“‘But bring a knife,’ I said. Then she held the lanthorn near my face,
looking as at a picture.
“‘You look to me,’ she said, ‘like a stirk that is roped for the axe.
Your eyes are dark, but they are wide open.’
“‘Then I will sleep,’ said I, ‘but will not wake too late.’
“‘Do not stay here,’ she said.
“‘I will not sleep in the wood,’ I answered, and it was my heart that
spoke, ‘for I am afraid. I had better be afraid of the voice of man and
dogs, than the sounds in the woods. Bring me a knife, and in the
morning I will go. Alone will I not go now.’
“‘The searchers will take you,’ she said.
“‘Bring me a knife,’ I answered.
“‘Ah, go,’ she wept.
“‘Not now—I will not——’
“With that she lifted the lanthorn, lit up her own face and mine. Her
blue eyes dried of tears. Then I took her to myself, knowing she was
mine.
“‘I will come again,’ she said.
“She went, and I folded my arms, lay down and slept.
“When I woke, she was rocking me wildly to rouse me.
“‘I dreamed,’ said I, ‘that a great heap, as if it were a hill, lay on
me and above me.’
“She put a cloak over me, gave me a hunting-knife and a wallet of food,
and other things I did not note. Then under her own cloak she hid the
lanthorn.
“‘Let us go,’ she said, and blindly I followed her.
“When I came out into the cold someone touched my face and my hair.
“‘Ha!’ I cried, ‘who now——?’ Then she swiftly clung to me, hushed me.
“‘Someone has touched me,’ I said aloud, still dazed with sleep.
“‘Oh hush!’ she wept. ‘’Tis snowing.’ The dogs within the house began
to bark. She fled forward, I after her. Coming to the ford of the
stream she ran swiftly over, but I broke through the ice. Then I knew
where I was. Snowflakes, fine and rapid, were biting at my face. In the
wood there was no wind nor snow.
“‘Listen,’ said I to her, ‘listen, for I am locked up with sleep.’
“‘I hear roaring overhead,’ she answered. ‘I hear in the trees like
great bats squeaking.’
“‘Give me your hand,’ said I.
“We heard many noises as we passed. Once as there uprose a whiteness
before us, she cried aloud.
“‘Nay,’ said I, ‘do not untie thy hand from mine,’ and soon we were
crossing fallen snow. But ever and again she started back from fear.
“‘When you draw back my arm,’ I said, angry, ‘you loosen a weal on my
shoulder.’
“Thereafter she ran by my side, like a fawn beside its mother.
“‘We will cross the valley and gain the stream,’ I said. ‘That will
lead us on its ice as on a path deep into the forest. There we can join
the outlaws. The wolves are driven from this part. They have followed
the driven deer.’
“We came directly on a large gleam that shaped itself up among flying
grains of snow.
“‘Ah!’ she cried, and she stood amazed.
“Then I thought we had gone through the bounds into faery realm, and I
was no more a man. How did I know what eyes were gleaming at me between
the snow, what cunning spirits in the draughts of air? So I waited for
what would happen, and I forgot her, that she was there. Only I could
feel the spirits whirling and blowing about me.
“Whereupon she clung upon me, kissing me lavishly, and, were dogs or
men or demons come upon us at that moment, she had let us be stricken
down, nor heeded not. So we moved forward to the shadow that shone in
colours upon the passing snow. We found ourselves under a door of light
which shed its colours mixed with snow. This Martha had never seen, nor
I, this door open for a red and brave issuing like fires. We wondered.
“‘It is faery,’ she said, and after a while, ‘Could one catch such——
Ah, no!’
“Through the snow shone bunches of red and blue.
“‘Could one have such a little light like a red flower—only a little,
like a rose-berry scarlet on one’s breast!—then one were singled out as
Our Lady.’
“I flung off my cloak and my burden to climb up the face of the shadow.
Standing on rims of stone, then in pockets of snow, I reached upward.
My hand was red and blue, but I could not take the stuff. Like colour
of a moth’s wing it was on my hand, it flew on the increasing snow. I
stood higher on the head of a frozen man, reached higher my hand. Then
I felt the bright stuff cold. I could not pluck it off. Down below she
cried to me to come again to her. I felt a rib that yielded, I struck
at it with my knife. There came a gap in the redness. Looking through I
saw below as it were white stunted angels, with sad faces lifted in
fear. Two faces they had each, and round rings of hair. I was afraid. I
grasped the shining red, I pulled. Then the cold man under me sank, so
I fell as if broken on to the snow.
“Soon I was risen again, and we were running downwards towards the
stream. We felt ourselves eased when the smooth road of ice was beneath
us. For a while it was resting, to travel thus evenly. But the wind
blew round us, the snow hung upon us, we leaned us this way and that,
towards the storm. I drew her along, for she came as a bird that stems
lifting and swaying against the wind. By and by the snow came smaller,
there was not wind in the wood. Then I felt nor labour, nor cold. Only
I knew the darkness drifted by on either side, that overhead was a lane
of paleness where a moon fled us before. Still, I can feel the moon
fleeing from me, can feel the trees passing round me in slow dizzy
reel, can feel the hurt of my shoulder and my straight arm torn with
holding her. I was following the moon and the stream, for I knew where
the water peeped from its burrow in the ground there were shelters of
the outlaw. But she fell, without sound or sign.
“I gathered her up and climbed the bank. There all round me hissed the
larchwood, dry beneath, and laced with its dry-fretted cords. For a
little way I carried her into the trees. Then I laid her down till I
cut flat hairy boughs. I put her in my bosom on this dry bed, so we
swooned together through the night. I laced her round and covered her
with myself, so she lay like a nut within its shell.
“Again, when morning came, it was pain of cold that woke me. I groaned,
but my heart was warm as I saw the heap of red hair in my arms. As I
looked at her, her eyes opened into mine. She smiled—from out of her
smile came fear. As if in a trap she pressed back her head.
“‘We have no flint,’ said I.
“‘Yes—in the wallet, flint and steel and tinder box,’ she answered.
“‘God yield you blessing,’ I said.
“In a place a little open I kindled a fire of larch boughs. She was
afraid of me, hovering near, yet never crossing a space.
“‘Come,’ said I, ‘let us eat this food.’
“‘Your face,’ she said, ‘is smeared with blood.’
“I opened out my cloak.
“‘But come,’ said I, ‘you are frosted with cold.’
“I took a handful of snow in my hand, wiping my face with it, which
then I dried on my cloak.
“‘My face is no longer painted with blood, you are no longer afraid of
me. Come here then, sit by me while we eat.’
“But as I cut the cold bread for her, she clasped me suddenly, kissing
me. She fell before me, clasped my knees to her breast, weeping. She
laid her face down to my feet, so that her hair spread like a fire
before me. I wondered at the woman. ‘Nay,’ I cried. At that she lifted
her face to me from below. ‘Nay,’ I cried, feeling my tears fall. With
her head on my breast, my own tears rose from their source, wetting my
cheek and her hair, which was wet with the rain of my eyes.
“Then I remembered and took from my bosom the coloured light of that
night before. I saw it was black and rough.
“‘Ah,’ said I, ‘this is magic.’
“‘The black stone!’ she wondered.
“‘It is the red light of the night before,’ I said.
“‘It is magic,’ she answered.
“‘Shall I throw it?’ said I, lifting the stone, ‘shall I throw it away,
for fear?’
“‘It shines!’ she cried, looking up. ‘It shines like the eye of a
creature at night, the eye of a wolf in the doorway.’
“‘’Tis magic,’ I said, ‘let me throw it from us.’ But nay, she held my
arm.
“‘It is red and shining,’ she cried.
“‘It is a bloodstone,’ I answered. ‘It will hurt us, we shall die in
blood.’
“‘But give it to me,’ she answered.
“‘It is red of blood,’ I said.
“‘Ah, give it to me,’ she called.
“‘It is my blood,’ I said.
“‘Give it,’ she commanded, low.
“‘It is my life-stone,’ I said.
“‘Give it me,’ she pleaded.
“‘I gave it her. She held it up, she smiled, she smiled in my face,
lifting her arms to me. I took her with my mouth, her mouth, her white
throat. Nor she ever shrank, but trembled with happiness.
“What woke us, when the woods were filling again with shadow, when the
fire was out, when we opened our eyes and looked up as if drowned, into
the light which stood bright and thick on the tree-tops, what woke us
was the sound of wolves....”
“Nay,” said the vicar, suddenly rising, “they lived happily ever
after.”
“No,” I said.
The Shades of Spring
I
It was a mile nearer through the wood. Mechanically, Syson turned up by
the forge and lifted the field-gate. The blacksmith and his mate stood
still, watching the trespasser. But Syson looked too much a gentleman
to be accosted. They let him go in silence across the small field to
the wood.
There was not the least difference between this morning and those of
the bright springs, six or eight years back. White and sandy-gold fowls
still scratched round the gate, littering the earth and the field with
feathers and scratched-up rubbish. Between the two thick holly bushes
in the wood-hedge was the hidden gap, whose fence one climbed to get
into the wood; the bars were scored just the same by the keeper’s
boots. He was back in the eternal.
Syson was extraordinarily glad. Like an uneasy spirit he had returned
to the country of his past, and he found it waiting for him, unaltered.
The hazel still spread glad little hands downwards, the bluebells here
were still wan and few, among the lush grass and in shade of the
bushes.
The path through the wood, on the very brow of a slope, ran winding
easily for a time. All around were twiggy oaks, just issuing their
gold, and floor spaces diapered with woodruff, with patches of
dog-mercury and tufts of hyacinth. Two fallen trees still lay across
the track. Syson jolted down a steep, rough slope, and came again upon
the open land, this time looking north as through a great window in the
wood. He stayed to gaze over the level fields of the hill-top, at the
village which strewed the bare upland as if it had tumbled off the
passing waggons of industry, and been forsaken. There was a stiff,
modern, grey little church, and blocks and rows of red dwellings lying
at random; at the back, the twinkling headstocks of the pit, and the
looming pit-hill. All was naked and out-of-doors, not a tree! It was
quite unaltered.
Syson turned, satisfied, to follow the path that sheered downhill into
the wood. He was curiously elated, feeling himself back in an enduring
vision. He started. A keeper was standing a few yards in front, barring
the way.
“Where might you be going this road, sir?” asked the man. The tone of
his question had a challenging twang. Syson looked at the fellow with
an impersonal, observant gaze. It was a young man of four or five and
twenty, ruddy and well favoured. His dark blue eyes now stared
aggressively at the intruder. His black moustache, very thick, was
cropped short over a small, rather soft mouth. In every other respect
the fellow was manly and good-looking. He stood just above middle
height; the strong forward thrust of his chest, and the perfect ease of
his erect, self-sufficient body, gave one the feeling that he was taut
with animal life, like the thick jet of a fountain balanced in itself.
He stood with the butt of his gun on the ground, looking uncertainly
and questioningly at Syson. The dark, restless eyes of the trespasser,
examining the man and penetrating into him without heeding his office,
troubled the keeper and made him flush.
“Where is Naylor? Have you got his job?” Syson asked.
“You’re not from the House, are you?” inquired the keeper. It could not
be, since everyone was away.
“No, I’m not from the House,” the other replied. It seemed to amuse
him.
“Then might I ask where you were making for?” said the keeper, nettled.
“Where I am making for?” Syson repeated. “I am going to Willey-Water
Farm.”
“This isn’t the road.”
“I think so. Down this path, past the well, and out by the white gate.”
“But that’s not the public road.”
“I suppose not. I used to come so often, in Naylor’s time, I had
forgotten. Where is he, by the way?”
“Crippled with rheumatism,” the keeper answered reluctantly.
“Is he?” Syson exclaimed in pain.
“And who might you be?” asked the keeper, with a new intonation.
“John Adderley Syson; I used to live in Cordy Lane.”
“Used to court Hilda Millership?”
Syson’s eyes opened with a pained smile. He nodded. There was an
awkward silence.
“And you—who are you?” asked Syson.
“Arthur Pilbeam—Naylor’s my uncle,” said the other.
“You live here in Nuttall?”
“I’m lodgin’ at my uncle’s—at Naylor’s.”
“I see!”
“Did you say you was goin’ down to Willey-Water?” asked the keeper.
“Yes.”
There was a pause of some moments, before the keeper blurted: “_I’m_
courtin’ Hilda Millership.”
The young fellow looked at the intruder with a stubborn defiance,
almost pathetic. Syson opened new eyes.
“Are you?” he said, astonished. The keeper flushed dark.
“She and me are keeping company,” he said.
“I didn’t know!” said Syson. The other man waited uncomfortably.
“What, is the thing settled?” asked the intruder.
“How, settled?” retorted the other sulkily.
“Are you going to get married soon, and all that?”
The keeper stared in silence for some moments, impotent.
“I suppose so,” he said, full of resentment.
“Ah!” Syson watched closely.
“I’m married myself,” he added, after a time.
“You are?” said the other incredulously.
Syson laughed in his brilliant, unhappy way.
“This last fifteen months,” he said.
The keeper gazed at him with wide, wondering eyes, apparently thinking
back, and trying to make things out.
“Why, didn’t you know?” asked Syson.
“No, I didn’t,” said the other sulkily.
There was silence for a moment.
“Ah well!” said Syson, “I will go on. I suppose I may.” The keeper
stood in silent opposition. The two men hesitated in the open, grassy
space, set around with small sheaves of sturdy bluebells; a little open
platform on the brow of the hill. Syson took a few indecisive steps
forward, then stopped.
“I say, how beautiful!” he cried.
He had come in full view of the downslope. The wide path ran from his
feet like a river, and it was full of bluebells, save for a green
winding thread down the centre, where the keeper walked. Like a stream
the path opened into azure shallows at the levels, and there were pools
of bluebells, with still the green thread winding through, like a thin
current of ice-water through blue lakes. And from under the twig-purple
of the bushes swam the shadowed blue, as if the flowers lay in flood
water over the woodland.
“Ah, isn’t it lovely!” Syson exclaimed; this was his past, the country
he had abandoned, and it hurt him to see it so beautiful. Wood-pigeons
cooed overhead, and the air was full of the brightness of birds
singing.
“If you’re married, what do you keep writing to her for, and sending
her poetry books and things?” asked the keeper. Syson stared at him,
taken aback and humiliated. Then he began to smile.
“Well,” he said, “I did not know about you....”
Again the keeper flushed darkly.
“But if you are married——” he charged.
“I am,” answered the other cynically.
Then, looking down the blue, beautiful path, Syson felt his own
humiliation. “What right _have_ I to hang on to her?” he thought,
bitterly self-contemptuous.
“She knows I’m married and all that,” he said.
“But you keep sending her books,” challenged the keeper.
Syson, silenced, looked at the other man quizzically, half pitying.
Then he turned.
“Good day,” he said, and was gone. Now, everything irritated him: the
two sallows, one all gold and perfume and murmur, one silver-green and
bristly, reminded him, that here he had taught her about pollination.
What a fool he was! What god-forsaken folly it all was!
“Ah well,” he said to himself; “the poor devil seems to have a grudge
against me. I’ll do my best for him.” He grinned to himself, in a very
bad temper.
II
The farm was less than a hundred yards from the wood’s edge. The wall
of trees formed the fourth side to the open quadrangle. The house faced
the wood. With tangled emotions, Syson noted the plum blossom falling
on the profuse, coloured primroses, which he himself had brought here
and set. How they had increased! There were thick tufts of scarlet, and
pink, and pale purple primroses under the plum trees. He saw somebody
glance at him through the kitchen window, heard men’s voices.
The door opened suddenly: very womanly she had grown! He felt himself
going pale.
“You?—Addy!” she exclaimed, and stood motionless.
“Who?” called the farmer’s voice. Men’s low voices answered. Those low
voices, curious and almost jeering, roused the tormented spirit in the
visitor. Smiling brilliantly at her, he waited.
“Myself—why not?” he said.
The flush burned very deep on her cheek and throat.
“We are just finishing dinner,” she said.
“Then I will stay outside.” He made a motion to show that he would sit
on the red earthenware pipkin that stood near the door among the
daffodils, and contained the drinking water.
“Oh no, come in,” she said hurriedly. He followed her. In the doorway,
he glanced swiftly over the family, and bowed. Everyone was confused.
The farmer, his wife, and the four sons sat at the coarsely laid
dinner-table, the men with arms bare to the elbows.
“I am sorry I come at lunch-time,” said Syson.
“Hello, Addy!” said the farmer, assuming the old form of address, but
his tone cold. “How are you?”
And he shook hands.
“Shall you have a bit?” he invited the young visitor, but taking for
granted the offer would be refused. He assumed that Syson was become
too refined to eat so roughly. The young man winced at the imputation.
“Have you had any dinner?” asked the daughter.
“No,” replied Syson. “It is too early. I shall be back at half-past
one.”
“You call it lunch, don’t you?” asked the eldest son, almost ironical.
He had once been an intimate friend of this young man.
“We’ll give Addy something when we’ve finished,” said the mother, an
invalid, deprecating.
“No—don’t trouble. I don’t want to give you any trouble,” said Syson.
“You could allus live on fresh air an’ scenery,” laughed the youngest
son, a lad of nineteen.
Syson went round the buildings, and into the orchard at the back of the
house, where daffodils all along the hedgerow swung like yellow,
ruffled birds on their perches. He loved the place extraordinarily, the
hills ranging round, with bear-skin woods covering their giant
shoulders, and small red farms like brooches clasping their garments;
the blue streak of water in the valley, the bareness of the home
pasture, the sound of myriad-threaded bird-singing, which went mostly
unheard. To his last day, he would dream of this place, when he felt
the sun on his face, or saw the small handfuls of snow between the
winter twigs, or smelt the coming of spring.
Hilda was very womanly. In her presence he felt constrained. She was
twenty-nine, as he was, but she seemed to him much older. He felt
foolish, almost unreal, beside her. She was so static. As he was
fingering some shed plum blossom on a low bough, she came to the back
door to shake the tablecloth. Fowls raced from the stackyard, birds
rustled from the trees. Her dark hair was gathered up in a coil like a
crown on her head. She was very straight, distant in her bearing. As
she folded the cloth, she looked away over the hills.
Presently Syson returned indoors. She had prepared eggs and curd
cheese, stewed gooseberries and cream.
“Since you will dine tonight,” she said, “I have only given you a light
lunch.”
“It is awfully nice,” he said. “You keep a real idyllic atmosphere—your
belt of straw and ivy buds.”
Still they hurt each other.
He was uneasy before her. Her brief, sure speech, her distant bearing,
were unfamiliar to him. He admired again her grey-black eyebrows, and
her lashes. Their eyes met. He saw, in the beautiful grey and black of
her glance, tears and a strange light, and at the back of all, calm
acceptance of herself, and triumph over him.
He felt himself shrinking. With an effort he kept up the ironic manner.
She sent him into the parlour while she washed the dishes. The long low
room was refurnished from the Abbey sale, with chairs upholstered in
claret-coloured rep, many years old, and an oval table of polished
walnut, and another piano, handsome, though still antique. In spite of
the strangeness, he was pleased. Opening a high cupboard let into the
thickness of the wall, he found it full of his books, his old
lesson-books, and volumes of verse he had sent her, English and German.
The daffodils in the white window-bottoms shone across the room, he
could almost feel their rays. The old glamour caught him again. His
youthful water-colours on the wall no longer made him grin; he
remembered how fervently he had tried to paint for her, twelve years
before.
She entered, wiping a dish, and he saw again the bright, kernel-white
beauty of her arms.
“You are quite splendid here,” he said, and their eyes met.
“Do you like it?” she asked. It was the old, low, husky tone of
intimacy. He felt a quick change beginning in his blood. It was the
old, delicious sublimation, the thinning, almost the vaporizing of
himself, as if his spirit were to be liberated.
“Aye,” he nodded, smiling at her like a boy again. She bowed her head.
“This was the countess’s chair,” she said in low tones. “I found her
scissors down here between the padding.”
“Did you? Where are they?”
Quickly, with a lilt in her movement, she fetched her work-basket, and
together they examined the long-shanked old scissors.
“What a ballad of dead ladies!” he said, laughing, as he fitted his
fingers into the round loops of the countess’s scissors.
“I knew you could use them,” she said, with certainty. He looked at his
fingers, and at the scissors. She meant his fingers were fine enough
for the small-looped scissors.
“That is something to be said for me,” he laughed, putting the scissors
aside. She turned to the window. He noticed the fine, fair down on her
cheek and her upper lip, and her soft, white neck, like the throat of a
nettle flower, and her fore-arms, bright as newly blanched kernels. He
was looking at her with new eyes, and she was a different person to
him. He did not know her. But he could regard her objectively now.
“Shall we go out awhile?” she asked.
“Yes!” he answered. But the predominant emotion, that troubled the
excitement and perplexity of his heart, was fear, fear of that which he
saw. There was about her the same manner, the same intonation in her
voice, now as then, but she was not what he had known her to be. He
knew quite well what she had been for him. And gradually he was
realizing that she was something quite other, and always had been.
She put no covering on her head, merely took off her apron, saying, “We
will go by the larches.” As they passed the old orchard, she called him
in to show him a blue-tit’s nest in one of the apple trees, and a
sycock’s in the hedge. He rather wondered at her surety, at a certain
hardness like arrogance hidden under her humility.
“Look at the apple buds,” she said, and he then perceived myriads of
little scarlet balls among the drooping boughs. Watching his face, her
eyes went hard. She saw the scales were fallen from him, and at last he
was going to see her as she was. It was the thing she had most dreaded
in the past, and most needed, for her soul’s sake. Now he was going to
see her as she was. He would not love her, and he would know he never
could have loved her. The old illusion gone, they were strangers, crude
and entire. But he would give her her due—she would have her due from
him.
She was brilliant as he had not known her. She showed him nests: a
jenny wren’s in a low bush.
“See this jinty’s!” she exclaimed.
He was surprised to hear her use the local name. She reached carefully
through the thorns, and put her fingers in the nest’s round door.
“Five!” she said. “Tiny little things.”
She showed him nests of robins, and chaffinches, and linnets, and
buntings; of a wagtail beside the water.
“And if we go down, nearer the lake, I will show you a
kingfisher’s....”
“Among the young fir trees,” she said, “there’s a throstle’s or a
blackie’s on nearly every bough, every ledge. The first day, when I had
seen them all, I felt as if I mustn’t go in the wood. It seemed a city
of birds: and in the morning, hearing them all, I thought of the noisy
early markets. I was afraid to go in my own wood.”
She was using the language they had both of them invented. Now it was
all her own. He had done with it. She did not mind his silence, but was
always dominant, letting him see her wood. As they came along a marshy
path where forget-me-nots were opening in a rich blue drift: “We know
all the birds, but there are many flowers we can’t find out,” she said.
It was half an appeal to him, who had known the names of things.
She looked dreamily across to the open fields that slept in the sun.
“I have a lover as well, you know,” she said, with assurance, yet
dropping again almost into the intimate tone.
This woke in him the spirit to fight her.
“I think I met him. He is good-looking—also in Arcady.”
Without answering, she turned into a dark path that led up-hill, where
the trees and undergrowth were very thick.
“They did well,” she said at length, “to have various altars to various
gods, in old days.”
“Ah yes!” he agreed. “To whom is the new one?”
“There are no old ones,” she said. “I was always looking for this.”
“And whose is it?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said, looking full at him.
“I’m very glad, for your sake,” he said, “that you are satisfied.”
“Aye—but the man doesn’t matter so much,” she said. There was a pause.
“No!” he exclaimed, astonished, yet recognizing her as her real self.
“It is one’s self that matters,” she said. “Whether one is being one’s
own self and serving one’s own God.”
There was silence, during which he pondered. The path was almost
flowerless, gloomy. At the side, his heels sank into soft clay.
III
“I,” she said, very slowly, “I was married the same night as you.”
He looked at her.
“Not legally, of course,” she replied. “But—actually.”
“To the keeper?” he said, not knowing what else to say.
She turned to him.
“You thought I could not?” she said. But the flush was deep in her
cheek and throat, for all her assurance.
Still he would not say anything.
“You see”—she was making an effort to explain—”_I_ had to understand
also.”
“And what does it amount to, this _understanding_?” he asked.
“A very great deal—does it not to you?” she replied. “One is free.”
“And you are not disappointed?”
“Far from it!” Her tone was deep and sincere.
“You love him?”
“Yes, I love him.”
“Good!” he said.
This silenced her for a while.
“Here, among his things, I love him,” she said.
His conceit would not let him be silent.
“It needs this setting?” he asked.
“It does,” she cried. “You were always making me to be not myself.”
He laughed shortly.
“But is it a matter of surroundings?” he said. He had considered her
all spirit.
“I am like a plant,” she replied. “I can only grow in my own soil.”
They came to a place where the undergrowth shrank away, leaving a bare,
brown space, pillared with the brick-red and purplish trunks of pine
trees. On the fringe, hung the sombre green of elder trees, with flat
flowers in bud, and below were bright, unfurling pennons of fern. In
the midst of the bare space stood a keeper’s log hut. Pheasant-coops
were lying about, some occupied by a clucking hen, some empty.
Hilda walked over the brown pine-needles to the hut, took a key from
among the eaves, and opened the door. It was a bare wooden place with a
carpenter’s bench and form, carpenter’s tools, an axe, snares, traps,
some skins pegged down, everything in order. Hilda closed the door.
Syson examined the weird flat coats of wild animals, that were pegged
down to be cured. She turned some knotch in the side wall, and
disclosed a second, small apartment.
“How romantic!” said Syson.
“Yes. He is very curious—he has some of a wild animal’s cunning—in a
nice sense—and he is inventive, and thoughtful—but not beyond a certain
point.”
She pulled back a dark green curtain. The apartment was occupied almost
entirely by a large couch of heather and bracken, on which was spread
an ample rabbit-skin rug. On the floor were patchwork rugs of cat-skin,
and a red calf-skin, while hanging from the wall were other furs. Hilda
took down one, which she put on. It was a cloak of rabbit-skin and of
white fur, with a hood, apparently of the skins of stoats. She laughed
at Syson from out of this barbaric mantle, saying:
“What do you think of it?”
“Ah—! I congratulate you on your man,” he replied.
“And look!” she said.
In a little jar on a shelf were some sprays, frail and white, of the
first honeysuckle.
“They will scent the place at night,” she said.
He looked round curiously.
“Where does he come short, then?” he asked. She gazed at him for a few
moments. Then, turning aside:
“The stars aren’t the same with him,” she said. “You could make them
flash and quiver, and the forget-me-nots come up at me like
phosphorescence. You could make things _wonderful_. I have found it
out—it is true. But I have them all for myself, now.”
He laughed, saying:
“After all, stars and forget-me-nots are only luxuries. You ought to
make poetry.”
“Aye,” she assented. “But I have them all now.”
Again he laughed bitterly at her.
She turned swiftly. He was leaning against the small window of the
tiny, obscure room, and was watching her, who stood in the doorway,
still cloaked in her mantle. His cap was removed, so she saw his face
and head distinctly in the dim room. His black, straight, glossy hair
was brushed clean back from his brow. His black eyes were watching her,
and his face, that was clear and cream, and perfectly smooth, was
flickering.
“We are very different,” she said bitterly.
Again he laughed.
“I see you disapprove of me,” he said.
“I disapprove of what you have become,” she said.
“You think we might”—he glanced at the hut—“have been like this—you and
I?”
She shook her head.
“You! no; never! You plucked a thing and looked at it till you had
found out all you wanted to know about it, then you threw it away,” she
said.
“Did I?” he asked. “And could your way never have been my way? I
suppose not.”
“Why should it?” she said. “I am a separate being.”
“But surely two people sometimes go the same way,” he said.
“You took me away from myself,” she said.
He knew he had mistaken her, had taken her for something she was not.
That was his fault, not hers.
“And did you always know?” he asked.
“No—you never let me know. You bullied me. I couldn’t help myself. I
was glad when you left me, really.”
“I know you were,” he said. But his face went paler, almost deathly
luminous.
“Yet,” he said, “it was you who sent me the way I have gone.”
“I!” she exclaimed, in pride.
“You _would_ have me take the Grammar School scholarship—and you would
have me foster poor little Botell’s fervent attachment to me, till he
couldn’t live without me—and because Botell was rich and influential.
You triumphed in the wine-merchant’s offer to send me to Cambridge, to
befriend his only child. You wanted me to rise in the world. And all
the time you were sending me away from you—every new success of mine
put a separation between us, and more for you than for me. You never
wanted to come with me: you wanted just to send me to see what it was
like. I believe you even wanted me to marry a lady. You wanted to
triumph over society in me.”
“And I am responsible,” she said, with sarcasm.
“I distinguished myself to satisfy you,” he replied.
“Ah!” she cried, “you always wanted change, change, like a child.”
“Very well! And I am a success, and I know it, and I do some good work.
But—I thought you were different. What right have you to a man?”
“What do you want?” she said, looking at him with wide, fearful eyes.
He looked back at her, his eyes pointed, like weapons.
“Why, nothing,” he laughed shortly.
There was a rattling at the outer latch, and the keeper entered. The
woman glanced round, but remained standing, fur-cloaked, in the inner
doorway. Syson did not move.
The other man entered, saw, and turned away without speaking. The two
also were silent.
Pilbeam attended to his skins.
“I must go,” said Syson.
“Yes,” she replied.
“Then I give you ‘To our vast and varying fortunes.’” He lifted his
hand in pledge.
“‘To our vast and varying fortunes,’” she answered gravely, and
speaking in cold tones.
“Arthur!” she said.
The keeper pretended not to hear. Syson, watching keenly, began to
smile. The woman drew herself up.
“Arthur!” she said again, with a curious upward inflection, which
warned the two men that her soul was trembling on a dangerous crisis.
The keeper slowly put down his tool and came to her.
“Yes,” he said.
“I wanted to introduce you,” she said, trembling.
“I’ve met him a’ready,” said the keeper.
“Have you? It is Addy, Mr Syson, whom you know about.—This is Arthur,
Mr Pilbeam,” she added, turning to Syson. The latter held out his hand
to the keeper, and they shook hands in silence.
“I’m glad to have met you,” said Syson. “We drop our correspondence,
Hilda?”
“Why need we?” she asked.
The two men stood at a loss.
“_Is_ there no need?” said Syson.
Still she was silent.
“It is as you will,” she said.
They went all three together down the gloomy path.
“‘_Qu’il était bleu, le ciel, et grand l’espoir_,’” quoted Syson, not
knowing what to say.
“What do you mean?” she said. “Besides, _we_ can’t walk in _our_ wild
oats—we never sowed any.”
Syson looked at her. He was startled to see his young love, his nun,
his Botticelli angel, so revealed. It was he who had been the fool. He
and she were more separate than any two strangers could be. She only
wanted to keep up a correspondence with him—and he, of course, wanted
it kept up, so that he could write to her, like Dante to some Beatrice
who had never existed save in the man’s own brain.
At the bottom of the path she left him. He went along with the keeper,
towards the open, towards the gate that closed on the wood. The two men
walked almost like friends. They did not broach the subject of their
thoughts.
Instead of going straight to the high-road gate, Syson went along the
wood’s edge, where the brook spread out in a little bog, and under the
alder trees, among the reeds, great yellow stools and bosses of
marigolds shone. Threads of brown water trickled by, touched with gold
from the flowers. Suddenly there was a blue flash in the air, as a
kingfisher passed.
Syson was extraordinarily moved. He climbed the bank to the gorse
bushes, whose sparks of blossom had not yet gathered into a flame.
Lying on the dry brown turf, he discovered sprigs of tiny purple
milkwort and pink spots of lousewort. What a wonderful world it
was—marvellous, for ever new. He felt as if it were underground, like
the fields of monotone hell, notwithstanding. Inside his breast was a
pain like a wound. He remembered the poem of William Morris, where in
the Chapel of Lyonesse a knight lay wounded, with the truncheon of a
spear deep in his breast, lying always as dead, yet did not die, while
day after day the coloured sunlight dipped from the painted window
across the chancel, and passed away. He knew now it never had been
true, that which was between him and her, not for a moment. The truth
had stood apart all the time.
Syson turned over. The air was full of the sound of larks, as if the
sunshine above were condensing and falling in a shower. Amid this
bright sound, voices sounded small and distinct.
“But if he’s married, an’ quite willing to drop it off, what has ter
against it?” said the man’s voice.
“I don’t want to talk about it now. I want to be alone.”
Syson looked through the bushes. Hilda was standing in the wood, near
the gate. The man was in the field, loitering by the hedge, and playing
with the bees as they settled on the white bramble flowers.
There was silence for a while, in which Syson imagined her will among
the brightness of the larks. Suddenly the keeper exclaimed “Ah!” and
swore. He was gripping at the sleeve of his coat, near the shoulder.
Then he pulled off his jacket, threw it on the ground, and absorbedly
rolled up his shirt sleeve right to the shoulder.
“Ah!” he said vindictively, as he picked out the bee and flung it away.
He twisted his fine, bright arm, peering awkwardly over his shoulder.
“What is it?” asked Hilda.
“A bee—crawled up my sleeve,” he answered.
“Come here to me,” she said.
The keeper went to her, like a sulky boy. She took his arm in her
hands.
“Here it is—and the sting left in—poor bee!”
She picked out the sting, put her mouth to his arm, and sucked away the
drop of poison. As she looked at the red mark her mouth had made, and
at his arm, she said, laughing:
“That is the reddest kiss you will ever have.”
When Syson next looked up, at the sound of voices, he saw in the shadow
the keeper with his mouth on the throat of his beloved, whose head was
thrown back, and whose hair had fallen, so that one rough rope of dark
brown hair hung across his bare arm.
“No,” the woman answered. “I am not upset because he’s gone. You won’t
understand....”
Syson could not distinguish what the man said. Hilda replied, clear and
distinct:
“You know I love you. He has gone quite out of my life—don’t trouble
about him....” He kissed her, murmuring. She laughed hollowly.
“Yes,” she said, indulgent. “We will be married, we will be married.
But not just yet.” He spoke to her again. Syson heard nothing for a
time. Then she said:
“You must go home, now, dear—you will get no sleep.”
Again was heard the murmur of the keeper’s voice, troubled by fear and
passion.
“But why should we be married at once?” she said. “What more would you
have, by being married? It is most beautiful as it is.”
At last he pulled on his coat and departed. She stood at the gate, not
watching him, but looking over the sunny country.
When at last she had gone, Syson also departed, going back to town.
Second Best
“Oh, I’m tired!” Frances exclaimed petulantly, and in the same instant
she dropped down on the turf, near the hedge-bottom. Anne stood a
moment surprised, then, accustomed to the vagaries of her beloved
Frances, said:
“Well, and aren’t you always likely to be tired, after travelling that
blessed long way from Liverpool yesterday?” and she plumped down beside
her sister. Anne was a wise young body of fourteen, very buxom,
brimming with common sense. Frances was much older, about twenty-three,
and whimsical, spasmodic. She was the beauty and the clever child of
the family. She plucked the goose-grass buttons from her dress in a
nervous, desperate fashion. Her beautiful profile, looped above with
black hair, warm with the dusky-and-scarlet complexion of a pear, was
calm as a mask, her thin brown hand plucked nervously.
“It’s not the journey,” she said, objecting to Anne’s obtuseness. Anne
looked inquiringly at her darling. The young girl, in her
self-confident, practical way, proceeded to reckon up this whimsical
creature. But suddenly she found herself full in the eyes of Frances;
felt two dark, hectic eyes flaring challenge at her, and she shrank
away. Frances was peculiar for these great, exposed looks, which
disconcerted people by their violence and their suddenness.
“What’s a matter, poor old duck?” asked Anne, as she folded the slight,
wilful form of her sister in her arms. Frances laughed shakily, and
nestled down for comfort on the budding breasts of the strong girl.
“Oh, I’m only a bit tired,” she murmured, on the point of tears.
“Well, of course you are, what do you expect?” soothed Anne. It was a
joke to Frances that Anne should play elder, almost mother to her. But
then, Anne was in her unvexed teens; men were like big dogs to her:
while Frances, at twenty-three, suffered a good deal.
The country was intensely morning-still. On the common everything shone
beside its shadow, and the hillside gave off heat in silence. The brown
turf seemed in a low state of combustion, the leaves of the oaks were
scorched brown. Among the blackish foliage in the distance shone the
small red and orange of the village.
The willows in the brook-course at the foot of the common suddenly
shook with a dazzling effect like diamonds. It was a puff of wind. Anne
resumed her normal position. She spread her knees, and put in her lap a
handful of hazel nuts, whity-green leafy things, whose one cheek was
tanned between brown and pink. These she began to crack and eat.
Frances, with bowed head, mused bitterly.
“Eh, you know Tom Smedley?” began the young girl, as she pulled a tight
kernel out of its shell.
“I suppose so,” replied Frances sarcastically.
“Well, he gave me a wild rabbit what he’d caught, to keep with my tame
one—and it’s living.”
“That’s a good thing,” said Frances, very detached and ironic.
“Well, it _is!_ He reckoned he’d take me to Ollerton Feast, but he
never did. Look here, he took a servant from the rectory; I saw him.”
“So he ought,” said Frances.
“No, he oughtn’t! and I told him so. And I told him I should tell
you—an’ I have done.”
Click and snap went a nut between her teeth. She sorted out the kernel,
and chewed complacently.
“It doesn’t make much difference,” said Frances.
“Well, ’appen it doesn’t; but I was mad with him all the same.”
“Why?”
“Because I was; he’s no right to go with a servant.”
“He’s a perfect right,” persisted Frances, very just and cold.
“No, he hasn’t, when he’d said he’d take me.”
Frances burst into a laugh of amusement and relief.
“Oh, no; I’d forgot that,” she said, adding, “And what did he say when
you promised to tell me?”
“He laughed and said, ‘he won’t fret her fat over that.’”
“And she won’t,” sniffed Frances.
There was silence. The common, with its sere, blonde-headed thistles,
its heaps of silent bramble, its brown-husked gorse in the glare of
sunshine, seemed visionary. Across the brook began the immense pattern
of agriculture, white chequering of barley stubble, brown squares of
wheat, khaki patches of pasture, red stripes of fallow, with the
woodland and the tiny village dark like ornaments, leading away to the
distance, right to the hills, where the check-pattern grew smaller and
smaller, till, in the blackish haze of heat, far off, only the tiny
white squares of barley stubble showed distinct.
“Eh, I say, here’s a rabbit hole!” cried Anne suddenly. “Should we
watch if one comes out? You won’t have to fidget, you know.”
The two girls sat perfectly still. Frances watched certain objects in
her surroundings: they had a peculiar, unfriendly look about them: the
weight of greenish elderberries on their purpling stalks; the twinkling
of the yellowing crab-apples that clustered high up in the hedge,
against the sky: the exhausted, limp leaves of the primroses lying flat
in the hedge-bottom: all looked strange to her. Then her eyes caught a
movement. A mole was moving silently over the warm, red soil, nosing,
shuffling hither and thither, flat, and dark as a shadow, shifting
about, and as suddenly brisk, and as silent, like a very ghost of _joie
de vivre_. Frances started, from habit was about to call on Anne to
kill the little pest. But, today, her lethargy of unhappiness was too
much for her. She watched the little brute paddling, snuffing, touching
things to discover them, running in blindness, delighted to ecstasy by
the sunlight and the hot, strange things that caressed its belly and
its nose. She felt a keen pity for the little creature.
“Eh, our Fran, look there! It’s a mole.”
Anne was on her feet, standing watching the dark, unconscious beast.
Frances frowned with anxiety.
“It doesn’t run off, does it?” said the young girl softly. Then she
stealthily approached the creature. The mole paddled fumblingly away.
In an instant Anne put her foot upon it, not too heavily. Frances could
see the struggling, swimming movement of the little pink hands of the
brute, the twisting and twitching of its pointed nose, as it wrestled
under the sole of the boot.
“It _does_ wriggle!” said the bonny girl, knitting her brows in a frown
at the eerie sensation. Then she bent down to look at her trap. Frances
could now see, beyond the edge of the boot-sole, the heaving of the
velvet shoulders, the pitiful turning of the sightless face, the
frantic rowing of the flat, pink hands.
“Kill the thing,” she said, turning away her face.
“Oh—I’m not,” laughed Anne, shrinking. “You can, if you like.”
“I _don’t_ like,” said Frances, with quiet intensity.
After several dabbling attempts, Anne succeeded in picking up the
little animal by the scruff of its neck. It threw back its head, flung
its long blind snout from side to side, the mouth open in a peculiar
oblong, with tiny pinkish teeth at the edge. The blind, frantic mouth
gaped and writhed. The body, heavy and clumsy, hung scarcely moving.
“Isn’t it a snappy little thing,” observed Anne twisting to avoid the
teeth.
“What are you going to do with it?” asked Frances sharply.
“It’s got to be killed—look at the damage they do. I s’ll take it home
and let dadda or somebody kill it. I’m not going to let it go.”
She swaddled the creature clumsily in her pocket-handkerchief and sat
down beside her sister. There was an interval of silence, during which
Anne combated the efforts of the mole.
“You’ve not had much to say about Jimmy this time. Did you see him
often in Liverpool?” Anne asked suddenly.
“Once or twice,” replied Frances, giving no sign of how the question
troubled her.
“And aren’t you sweet on him any more, then?”
“I should think I’m not, seeing that he’s engaged.”
“Engaged? Jimmy Barrass! Well, of all things! I never thought _he’d_
get engaged.”
“Why not, he’s as much right as anybody else?” snapped Frances.
Anne was fumbling with the mole.
“’Appen so,” she said at length; “but I never thought Jimmy would,
though.”
“Why not?” snapped Frances.
“_I_ don’t know—this blessed mole, it’ll not keep still!—who’s he got
engaged to?”
“How should I know?”
“I thought you’d ask him; you’ve known him long enough. I s’d think he
thought he’d get engaged now he’s a Doctor of Chemistry.”
Frances laughed in spite of herself.
“What’s that got to do with it?” she asked.
“I’m sure it’s got a lot. He’ll want to feel _somebody_ now, so he’s
got engaged. Hey, stop it; go in!”
But at this juncture the mole almost succeeded in wriggling clear. It
wrestled and twisted frantically, waved its pointed blind head, its
mouth standing open like a little shaft, its big, wrinkled hands spread
out.
“Go in with you!” urged Anne, poking the little creature with her
forefinger, trying to get it back into the handkerchief. Suddenly the
mouth turned like a spark on her finger.
“Oh!” she cried, “he’s bit me.”
She dropped him to the floor. Dazed, the blind creature fumbled round.
Frances felt like shrieking. She expected him to dart away in a flash,
like a mouse, and there he remained groping; she wanted to cry to him
to be gone. Anne, in a sudden decision of wrath, caught up her sister’s
walking-cane. With one blow the mole was dead. Frances was startled and
shocked. One moment the little wretch was fussing in the heat, and the
next it lay like a little bag, inert and black—not a struggle, scarce a
quiver.
“It is dead!” Frances said breathlessly. Anne took her finger from her
mouth, looked at the tiny pinpricks, and said:
“Yes, he is, and I’m glad. They’re vicious little nuisances, moles
are.”
With which her wrath vanished. She picked up the dead animal.
“Hasn’t it got a beautiful skin,” she mused, stroking the fur with her
forefinger, then with her cheek.
“Mind,” said Frances sharply. “You’ll have the blood on your skirt!”
One ruby drop of blood hung on the small snout, ready to fall. Anne
shook it off on to some harebells. Frances suddenly became calm; in
that moment, grown-up.
“I suppose they have to be killed,” she said, and a certain rather
dreary indifference succeeded to her grief. The twinkling crab-apples,
the glitter of brilliant willows now seemed to her trifling, scarcely
worth the notice. Something had died in her, so that things lost their
poignancy. She was calm, indifference overlying her quiet sadness.
Rising, she walked down to the brook course.
“Here, wait for me,” cried Anne, coming tumbling after.
Frances stood on the bridge, looking at the red mud trodden into
pockets by the feet of cattle. There was not a drain of water left, but
everything smelled green, succulent. Why did she care so little for
Anne, who was so fond of her? she asked herself. Why did she care so
little for anyone? She did not know, but she felt a rather stubborn
pride in her isolation and indifference.
They entered a field where stooks of barley stood in rows, the
straight, blonde tresses of the corn streaming on to the ground. The
stubble was bleached by the intense summer, so that the expanse glared
white. The next field was sweet and soft with a second crop of seeds;
thin, straggling clover whose little pink knobs rested prettily in the
dark green. The scent was faint and sickly. The girls came up in single
file, Frances leading.
Near the gate a young man was mowing with the scythe some fodder for
the afternoon feed of the cattle. As he saw the girls he left off
working and waited in an aimless kind of way. Frances was dressed in
white muslin, and she walked with dignity, detached and forgetful. Her
lack of agitation, her simple, unheeding advance made him nervous. She
had loved the far-off Jimmy for five years, having had in return his
half-measures. This man only affected her slightly.
Tom was of medium stature, energetic in build. His smooth, fair-skinned
face was burned red, not brown, by the sun, and this ruddiness enhanced
his appearance of good humour and easiness. Being a year older than
Frances, he would have courted her long ago had she been so inclined.
As it was, he had gone his uneventful way amiably, chatting with many a
girl, but remaining unattached, free of trouble for the most part. Only
he knew he wanted a woman. He hitched his trousers just a trifle
self-consciously as the girls approached. Frances was a rare, delicate
kind of being, whom he realized with a queer and delicious stimulation
in his veins. She gave him a slight sense of suffocation. Somehow, this
morning, she affected him more than usual. She was dressed in white.
He, however, being matter-of-fact in his mind, did not realize. His
feeling had never become conscious, purposive.
Frances knew what she was about. Tom was ready to love her as soon as
she would show him. Now that she could not have Jimmy, she did not
poignantly care. Still, she would have something. If she could not have
the best—Jimmy, whom she knew to be something of a snob—she would have
the second best, Tom. She advanced rather indifferently.
“You are back, then!” said Tom. She marked the touch of uncertainty in
his voice.
“No,” she laughed, “I’m still in Liverpool,” and the undertone of
intimacy made him burn.
“This isn’t you, then?” he asked.
Her heart leapt up in approval. She looked in his eyes, and for a
second was with him.
“Why, what do you think?” she laughed.
He lifted his hat from his head with a distracted little gesture. She
liked him, his quaint ways, his humour, his ignorance, and his slow
masculinity.
“Here, look here, Tom Smedley,” broke in Anne.
“A moudiwarp! Did you find it dead?” he asked.
“No, it bit me,” said Anne.
“Oh, aye! An’ that got your rag out, did it?”
“No, it didn’t!” Anne scolded sharply. “Such language!”
“Oh, what’s up wi’ it?”
“I can’t bear you to talk broad.”
“Can’t you?”
He glanced at Frances.
“It isn’t nice,” Frances said. She did not care, really. The vulgar
speech jarred on her as a rule; Jimmy was a gentleman. But Tom’s manner
of speech did not matter to her.
“I like you to talk _nicely_,” she added.
“Do you,” he replied, tilting his hat, stirred.
“And generally you _do_, you know,” she smiled.
“I s’ll have to have a try,” he said, rather tensely gallant.
“What?” she asked brightly.
“To talk nice to you,” he said. Frances coloured furiously, bent her
head for a moment, then laughed gaily, as if she liked this clumsy
hint.
“Eh now, you mind what you’re saying,” cried Anne, giving the young man
an admonitory pat.
“You wouldn’t have to give yon mole many knocks like that,” he teased,
relieved to get on safe ground, rubbing his arm.
“No indeed, it died in one blow,” said Frances, with a flippancy that
was hateful to her.
“You’re not so good at knockin’ ’em?” he said, turning to her.
“I don’t know, if I’m cross,” she said decisively.
“No?” he replied, with alert attentiveness.
“I could,” she added, harder, “if it was necessary.”
He was slow to feel her difference.
“And don’t you consider it _is_ necessary?” he asked, with misgiving.
“W—ell—is it?” she said, looking at him steadily, coldly.
“I reckon it is,” he replied, looking away, but standing stubborn.
She laughed quickly.
“But it isn’t necessary for _me_,” she said, with slight contempt.
“Yes, that’s quite true,” he answered.
She laughed in a shaky fashion.
“_I know it is_,” she said; and there was an awkward pause.
“Why, would you _like_ me to kill moles then?” she asked tentatively,
after a while.
“They do us a lot of damage,” he said, standing firm on his own ground,
angered.
“Well, I’ll see the next time I come across one,” she promised,
defiantly. Their eyes met, and she sank before him, her pride troubled.
He felt uneasy and triumphant and baffled, as if fate had gripped him.
She smiled as she departed.
“Well,” said Anne, as the sisters went through the wheat stubble; “I
don’t know what you two’s been jawing about, I’m sure.”
“Don’t you?” laughed Frances significantly.
“No, I don’t. But, at any rate, Tom Smedley’s a good deal better to my
thinking than Jimmy, so there—and nicer.”
“Perhaps he is,” said Frances coldly.
And the next day, after a secret, persistent hunt, she found another
mole playing in the heat. She killed it, and in the evening, when Tom
came to the gate to smoke his pipe after supper, she took him the dead
creature.
“Here you are then!” she said.
“Did you catch it?” he replied, taking the velvet corpse into his
fingers and examining it minutely. This was to hide his trepidation.
“Did you think I couldn’t?” she asked, her face very near his.
“Nay, I didn’t know.”
She laughed in his face, a strange little laugh that caught her breath,
all agitation, and tears, and recklessness of desire. He looked
frightened and upset. She put her hand to his arm.
“Shall you go out wi’ me?” he asked, in a difficult, troubled tone.
She turned her face away, with a shaky laugh. The blood came up in him,
strong, overmastering. He resisted it. But it drove him down, and he
was carried away. Seeing the winsome, frail nape of her neck, fierce
love came upon him for her, and tenderness.
“We s’ll ’ave to tell your mother,” he said. And he stood, suffering,
resisting his passion for her.
“Yes,” she replied, in a dead voice. But there was a thrill of pleasure
in this death.
The Shadow in the Rose Garden
A rather small young man sat by the window of a pretty seaside cottage
trying to persuade himself that he was reading the newspaper. It was
about half-past eight in the morning. Outside, the glory roses hung in
the morning sunshine like little bowls of fire tipped up. The young man
looked at the table, then at the clock, then at his own big silver
watch. An expression of stiff endurance came on to his face. Then he
rose and reflected on the oil-paintings that hung on the walls of the
room, giving careful but hostile attention to “The Stag at Bay”. He
tried the lid of the piano, and found it locked. He caught sight of his
own face in a little mirror, pulled his brown moustache, and an alert
interest sprang into his eyes. He was not ill-favoured. He twisted his
moustache. His figure was rather small, but alert and vigorous. As he
turned from the mirror a look of self-commiseration mingled with his
appreciation of his own physiognomy.
In a state of self-suppression, he went through into the garden. His
jacket, however, did not look dejected. It was new, and had a smart and
self-confident air, sitting upon a confident body. He contemplated the
Tree of Heaven that flourished by the lawn, then sauntered on to the
next plant. There was more promise in a crooked apple tree covered with
brown-red fruit. Glancing round, he broke off an apple and, with his
back to the house, took a clean, sharp bite. To his surprise the fruit
was sweet. He took another. Then again he turned to survey the bedroom
windows overlooking the garden. He started, seeing a woman’s figure;
but it was only his wife. She was gazing across to the sea, apparently
ignorant of him.
For a moment or two he looked at her, watching her. She was a
good-looking woman, who seemed older than he, rather pale, but healthy,
her face yearning. Her rich auburn hair was heaped in folds on her
forehead. She looked apart from him and his world, gazing away to the
sea. It irked her husband that she should continue abstracted and in
ignorance of him; he pulled poppy fruits and threw them at the window.
She started, glanced at him with a wild smile, and looked away again.
Then almost immediately she left the window. He went indoors to meet
her. She had a fine carriage, very proud, and wore a dress of soft
white muslin.
“I’ve been waiting long enough,” he said.
“For me or for breakfast?” she said lightly. “You know we said nine
o’clock. I should have thought you could have slept after the journey.”
“You know I’m always up at five, and I couldn’t stop in bed after six.
You might as well be in pit as in bed, on a morning like this.”
“I shouldn’t have thought the pit would occur to you, here.”
She moved about examining the room, looking at the ornaments under
glass covers. He, planted on the hearthrug, watched her rather
uneasily, and grudgingly indulgent. She shrugged her shoulders at the
apartment.
“Come,” she said, taking his arm, “let us go into the garden till Mrs
Coates brings the tray.”
“I hope she’ll be quick,” he said, pulling his moustache. She gave a
short laugh, and leaned on his arm as they went. He had lighted a pipe.
Mrs Coates entered the room as they went down the steps. The
delightful, erect old lady hastened to the window for a good view of
her visitors. Her china-blue eyes were bright as she watched the young
couple go down the path, he walking in an easy, confident fashion, with
his wife, on his arm. The landlady began talking to herself in a soft,
Yorkshire accent.
“Just of a height they are. She wouldn’t ha’ married a man less than
herself in stature, I think, though he’s not her equal otherwise.” Here
her granddaughter came in, setting a tray on the table. The girl went
to the old woman’s side.
“He’s been eating the apples, gran’,” she said.
“Has he, my pet? Well, if he’s happy, why not?”
Outside, the young, well-favoured man listened with impatience to the
chink of the teacups. At last, with a sigh of relief, the couple came
in to breakfast. After he had eaten for some time, he rested a moment
and said:
“Do you think it’s any better place than Bridlington?”
“I do,” she said, “infinitely! Besides, I am at home here—it’s not like
a strange seaside place to me.”
“How long were you here?”
“Two years.”
He ate reflectively.
“I should ha’ thought you’d rather go to a fresh place,” he said at
length.
She sat very silent, and then, delicately, put out a feeler.
“Why?” she said. “Do you think I shan’t enjoy myself?”
He laughed comfortably, putting the marmalade thick on his bread.
“I hope so,” he said.
She again took no notice of him.
“But don’t say anything about it in the village, Frank,” she said
casually. “Don’t say who I am, or that I used to live here. There’s
nobody I want to meet, particularly, and we should never feel free if
they knew me again.”
“Why did you come, then?”
“‘Why?’ Can’t you understand why?”
“Not if you don’t want to know anybody.”
“I came to see the place, not the people.”
He did not say any more.
“Women,” she said, “are different from men. I don’t know why I wanted
to come—but I did.”
She helped him to another cup of coffee, solicitously.
“Only,” she resumed, “don’t talk about me in the village.” She laughed
shakily. “I don’t want my past brought up against me, you know.” And
she moved the crumbs on the cloth with her finger-tip.
He looked at her as he drank his coffee; he sucked his moustache, and
putting down his cup, said phlegmatically:
“I’ll bet you’ve had a lot of past.”
She looked with a little guiltiness, that flattered him, down at the
tablecloth.
“Well,” she said, caressive, “you won’t give me away, who I am, will
you?”
“No,” he said, comforting, laughing, “I won’t give you away.”
He was pleased.
She remained silent. After a moment or two she lifted her head, saying:
“I’ve got to arrange with Mrs Coates, and do various things. So you’d
better go out by yourself this morning—and we’ll be in to dinner at
one.”
“But you can’t be arranging with Mrs Coates all morning,” he said.
“Oh, well—then I’ve some letters to write, and I must get that mark out
of my skirt. I’ve got plenty of little things to do this morning. You’d
better go out by yourself.”
He perceived that she wanted to be rid of him, so that when she went
upstairs, he took his hat and lounged out on to the cliffs,
suppressedly angry.
Presently she too came out. She wore a hat with roses, and a long lace
scarf hung over her white dress. Rather nervously, she put up her
sunshade, and her face was half-hidden in its coloured shadow. She went
along the narrow track of flag-stones that were worn hollow by the feet
of the fishermen. She seemed to be avoiding her surroundings, as if she
remained safe in the little obscurity of her parasol.
She passed the church, and went down the lane till she came to a high
wall by the wayside. Under this she went slowly, stopping at length by
an open doorway, which shone like a picture of light in the dark wall.
There in the magic beyond the doorway, patterns of shadow lay on the
sunny court, on the blue and white sea-pebbles of its paving, while a
green lawn glowed beyond, where a bay tree glittered at the edges. She
tiptoed nervously into the courtyard, glancing at the house that stood
in shadow. The uncurtained windows looked black and soulless, the
kitchen door stood open. Irresolutely she took a step forward, and
again forward, leaning, yearning, towards the garden beyond.
She had almost gained the corner of the house when a heavy step came
crunching through the trees. A gardener appeared before her. He held a
wicker tray on which were rolling great, dark red gooseberries,
overripe. He moved slowly.
“The garden isn’t open today,” he said quietly to the attractive woman,
who was poised for retreat.
For a moment she was silent with surprise. How should it be public at
all?
“When is it open?” she asked, quick-witted.
“The rector lets visitors in on Fridays and Tuesdays.”
She stood still, reflecting. How strange to think of the rector opening
his garden to the public!
“But everybody will be at church,” she said coaxingly to the man.
“There’ll be nobody here, will there?”
He moved, and the big gooseberries rolled.
“The rector lives at the new rectory,” he said.
The two stood still. He did not like to ask her to go. At last she
turned to him with a winning smile.
“Might I have _one_ peep at the roses?” she coaxed, with pretty
wilfulness.
“I don’t suppose it would matter,” he said, moving aside: “you won’t
stop long——”
She went forward, forgetting the gardener in a moment. Her face became
strained, her movements eager. Glancing round, she saw all the windows
giving on to the lawn were curtainless and dark. The house had a
sterile appearance, as if it were still used, but not inhabited. A
shadow seemed to go over her. She went across the lawn towards the
garden, through an arch of crimson ramblers, a gate of colour. There
beyond lay the soft blue sea with the bay, misty with morning, and the
farthest headland of black rock jutting dimly out between blue and blue
of the sky and water. Her face began to shine, transfigured with pain
and joy. At her feet the garden fell steeply, all a confusion of
flowers, and away below was the darkness of tree-tops covering the
beck.
She turned to the garden that shone with sunny flowers around her. She
knew the little corner where was the seat beneath the yew tree. Then
there was the terrace where a great host of flowers shone, and from
this, two paths went down, one at each side of the garden. She closed
her sunshade and walked slowly among the many flowers. All round were
rose bushes, big banks of roses, then roses hanging and tumbling from
pillars, or roses balanced on the standard bushes. By the open earth
were many other flowers. If she lifted her head, the sea was upraised
beyond, and the Cape.
Slowly she went down one path, lingering, like one who has gone back
into the past. Suddenly she was touching some heavy crimson roses that
were soft as velvet, touching them thoughtfully, without knowing, as a
mother sometimes fondles the hand of her child. She leaned slightly
forward to catch the scent. Then she wandered on in abstraction.
Sometimes a flame-coloured, scentless rose would hold her arrested. She
stood gazing at it as if she could not understand it. Again the same
softness of intimacy came over her, as she stood before a tumbling heap
of pink petals. Then she wondered over the white rose, that was
greenish, like ice, in the centre. So, slowly, like a white, pathetic
butterfly, she drifted down the path, coming at last to a tiny terrace
all full of roses. They seemed to fill the place, a sunny, gay throng.
She was shy of them, they were so many and so bright. They seemed to be
conversing and laughing. She felt herself in a strange crowd. It
exhilarated her, carried her out of herself. She flushed with
excitement. The air was pure scent.
Hastily, she went to a little seat among the white roses, and sat down.
Her scarlet sunshade made a hard blot of colour. She sat quite still,
feeling her own existence lapse. She was no more than a rose, a rose
that could not quite come into blossom, but remained tense. A little
fly dropped on her knee, on her white dress. She watched it, as if it
had fallen on a rose. She was not herself.
Then she started cruelly as a shadow crossed her and a figure moved
into her sight. It was a man who had come in slippers, unheard. He wore
a linen coat. The morning was shattered, the spell vanished away. She
was only afraid of being questioned. He came forward. She rose. Then,
seeing him, the strength went from her and she sank on the seat again.
He was a young man, military in appearance, growing slightly stout. His
black hair was brushed smooth and bright, his moustache was waxed. But
there was something rambling in his gait. She looked up, blanched to
the lips, and saw his eyes. They were black, and stared without seeing.
They were not a man’s eyes. He was coming towards her.
He stared at her fixedly, made unconscious salute, and sat down beside
her on the seat. He moved on the bench, shifted his feet, saying, in a
gentlemanly, military voice:
“I don’t disturb you—do I?”
She was mute and helpless. He was scrupulously dressed in dark clothes
and a linen coat. She could not move. Seeing his hands, with the ring
she knew so well upon the little finger, she felt as if she were going
dazed. The whole world was deranged. She sat unavailing. For his hands,
her symbols of passionate love, filled her with horror as they rested
now on his strong thighs.
“May I smoke?” he asked intimately, almost secretly, his hand going to
his pocket.
She could not answer, but it did not matter, he was in another world.
She wondered, craving, if he recognized her—if he could recognize her.
She sat pale with anguish. But she had to go through it.
“I haven’t got any tobacco,” he said thoughtfully.
But she paid no heed to his words, only she attended to him. Could he
recognize her, or was it all gone? She sat still in a frozen kind of
suspense.
“I smoke John Cotton,” he said, “and I must economize with it, it is
expensive. You know, I’m not very well off while these lawsuits are
going on.”
“No,” she said, and her heart was cold, her soul kept rigid.
He moved, made a loose salute, rose, and went away. She sat motionless.
She could see his shape, the shape she had loved, with all her passion:
his compact, soldier’s head, his fine figure now slackened. And it was
not he. It only filled her with horror too difficult to know.
Suddenly he came again, his hand in his jacket pocket.
“Do you mind if I smoke?” he said. “Perhaps I shall be able to see
things more clearly.”
He sat down beside her again, filling a pipe. She watched his hands
with the fine strong fingers. They had always inclined to tremble
slightly. It had surprised her, long ago, in such a healthy man. Now
they moved inaccurately, and the tobacco hung raggedly out of the pipe.
“I have legal business to attend to. Legal affairs are always so
uncertain. I tell my solicitor exactly, precisely what I want, but I
can never get it done.”
She sat and heard him talking. But it was not he. Yet those were the
hands she had kissed, there were the glistening, strange black eyes
that she had loved. Yet it was not he. She sat motionless with horror
and silence. He dropped his tobacco pouch, and groped for it on the
ground. Yet she must wait if he would recognize her. Why could she not
go! In a moment he rose.
“I must go at once,” he said. “The owl is coming.” Then he added
confidentially: “His name isn’t really the owl, but I call him that. I
must go and see if he has come.”
She rose too. He stood before her, uncertain. He was a handsome,
soldierly fellow, and a lunatic. Her eyes searched him, and searched
him, to see if he would recognize her, if she could discover him.
“You don’t know me?” she asked, from the terror of her soul, standing
alone.
He looked back at her quizzically. She had to bear his eyes. They
gleamed on her, but with no intelligence. He was drawing nearer to her.
“Yes, I do know you,” he said, fixed, intent, but mad, drawing his face
nearer hers. Her horror was too great. The powerful lunatic was coming
too near to her.
A man approached, hastening.
“The garden isn’t open this morning,” he said.
The deranged man stopped and looked at him. The keeper went to the seat
and picked up the tobacco pouch left lying there.
“Don’t leave your tobacco, sir,” he said, taking it to the gentleman in
the linen coat.
“I was just asking this lady to stay to lunch,” the latter said
politely. “She is a friend of mine.”
The woman turned and walked swiftly, blindly, between the sunny roses,
out of the garden, past the house with the blank, dark windows, through
the sea-pebbled courtyard to the street. Hastening and blind, she went
forward without hesitating, not knowing whither. Directly she came to
the house she went upstairs, took off her hat, and sat down on the bed.
It was as if some membrane had been torn in two in her, so that she was
not an entity that could think and feel. She sat staring across at the
window, where an ivy spray waved slowly up and down in the sea wind.
There was some of the uncanny luminousness of the sunlit sea in the
air. She sat perfectly still, without any being. She only felt she
might be sick, and it might be blood that was loose in her torn
entrails. She sat perfectly still and passive.
After a time she heard the hard tread of her husband on the floor
below, and, without herself changing, she registered his movement. She
heard his rather disconsolate footsteps go out again, then his voice
speaking, answering, growing cheery, and his solid tread drawing near.
He entered, ruddy, rather pleased, an air of complacency about his
alert figure. She moved stiffly. He faltered in his approach.
“What’s the matter?” he asked a tinge of impatience in his voice.
“Aren’t you feeling well?”
This was torture to her.
“Quite,” she replied.
His brown eyes became puzzled and angry.
“What is the matter?” he said.
“Nothing.”
He took a few strides, and stood obstinately, looking out of the
window.
“Have you run up against anybody?” he asked.
“Nobody who knows me,” she said.
His hands began to twitch. It exasperated him, that she was no more
sensible of him than if he did not exist. Turning on her at length,
driven, he asked:
“Something has upset you hasn’t it?”
“No, why?” she said neutral. He did not exist for her, except as an
irritant.
His anger rose, filling the veins in his throat.
“It seems like it,” he said, making an effort not to show his anger,
because there seemed no reason for it. He went away downstairs. She sat
still on the bed, and with the residue of feeling left to her, she
disliked him because he tormented her. The time went by. She could
smell the dinner being served, the smoke of her husband’s pipe from the
garden. But she could not move. She had no being. There was a tinkle of
the bell. She heard him come indoors. And then he mounted the stairs
again. At every step her heart grew tight in her. He opened the door.
“Dinner is on the table,” he said.
It was difficult for her to endure his presence, for he would interfere
with her. She could not recover her life. She rose stiffly and went
down. She could neither eat nor talk during the meal. She sat absent,
torn, without any being of her own. He tried to go on as if nothing
were the matter. But at last he became silent with fury. As soon as it
was possible, she went upstairs again, and locked the bedroom door. She
must be alone. He went with his pipe into the garden. All his
suppressed anger against her who held herself superior to him filled
and blackened his heart. Though he had not known it, yet he had never
really won her, she had never loved him. She had taken him on
sufference. This had foiled him. He was only a labouring electrician in
the mine, she was superior to him. He had always given way to her. But
all the while, the injury and ignominy had been working in his soul
because she did not hold him seriously. And now all his rage came up
against her.
He turned and went indoors. The third time, she heard him mounting the
stairs. Her heart stood still. He turned the catch and pushed the
door—it was locked. He tried it again, harder. Her heart was standing
still.
“Have you fastened the door?” he asked quietly, because of the
landlady.
“Yes. Wait a minute.”
She rose and turned the lock, afraid he would burst it. She felt hatred
towards him, because he did not leave her free. He entered, his pipe
between his teeth, and she returned to her old position on the bed. He
closed the door and stood with his back to it.
“What’s the matter?” he asked determinedly.
She was sick with him. She could not look at him.
“Can’t you leave me alone?” she replied, averting her face from him.
He looked at her quickly, fully, wincing with ignominy. Then he seemed
to consider for a moment.
“There’s something up with you, isn’t there?” he asked definitely.
“Yes,” she said, “but that’s no reason why you should torment me.”
“I don’t torment you. What’s the matter?”
“Why should you know?” she cried, in hate and desperation.
Something snapped. He started and caught his pipe as it fell from his
mouth. Then he pushed forward the bitten-off mouth-piece with his
tongue, took it from off his lips, and looked at it. Then he put out
his pipe, and brushed the ash from his waistcoat. After which he raised
his head.
“I want to know,” he said. His face was greyish pale, and set uglily.
Neither looked at the other. She knew he was fired now. His heart was
pounding heavily. She hated him, but she could not withstand him.
Suddenly she lifted her head and turned on him.
“What right have you to know?” she asked.
He looked at her. She felt a pang of surprise for his tortured eyes and
his fixed face. But her heart hardened swiftly. She had never loved
him. She did not love him now.
But suddenly she lifted her head again swiftly, like a thing that tries
to get free. She wanted to be free of it. It was not him so much, but
it, something she had put on herself, that bound her so horribly. And
having put the bond on herself, it was hardest to take it off. But now
she hated everything and felt destructive. He stood with his back to
the door, fixed, as if he would oppose her eternally, till she was
extinguished. She looked at him. Her eyes were cold and hostile. His
workman’s hands spread on the panels of the door behind him.
“You know I used to live here?” she began, in a hard voice, as if
wilfully to wound him. He braced himself against her, and nodded.
“Well, I was companion to Miss Birch of Torril Hall—she and the rector
were friends, and Archie was the rector’s son.” There was a pause. He
listened without knowing what was happening. He stared at his wife. She
was squatted in her white dress on the bed, carefully folding and
refolding the hem of her skirt. Her voice was full of hostility.
“He was an officer—a sub-lieutenant—then he quarrelled with his colonel
and came out of the army. At any rate”—she plucked at her skirt hem,
her husband stood motionless, watching her movements which filled his
veins with madness—“he was awfully fond of me, and I was of
him—awfully.”
“How old was he?” asked the husband.
“When—when I first knew him? Or when he went away?——”
“When you first knew him.”
“When I first knew him, he was twenty-six—now—he’s thirty-one—nearly
thirty-two—because I’m twenty-nine, and he is nearly three years
older——”
She lifted her head and looked at the opposite wall.
“And what then?” said her husband.
She hardened herself, and said callously:
“We were as good as engaged for nearly a year, though nobody knew—at
least—they talked—but—it wasn’t open. Then he went away——”
“He chucked you?” said the husband brutally, wanting to hurt her into
contact with himself. Her heart rose wildly with rage. Then “Yes”, she
said, to anger him. He shifted from one foot to the other, giving a
“Ph!” of rage. There was silence for a time.
“Then,” she resumed, her pain giving a mocking note to her words, “he
suddenly went out to fight in Africa, and almost the very day I first
met you, I heard from Miss Birch he’d got sunstroke—and two months
after, that he was dead——”
“That was before you took on with me?” said the husband.
There was no answer. Neither spoke for a time. He had not understood.
His eyes were contracted uglily.
“So you’ve been looking at your old courting places!” he said. “That
was what you wanted to go out by yourself for this morning.”
Still she did not answer him anything. He went away from the door to
the window. He stood with his hands behind him, his back to her. She
looked at him. His hands seemed gross to her, the back of his head
paltry.
At length, almost against his will, he turned round, asking:
“How long were you carrying on with him?”
“What do you mean?” she replied coldly.
“I mean how long were you carrying on with him?”
She lifted her head, averting her face from him. She refused to answer.
Then she said:
“I don’t know what you mean, by carrying on. I loved him from the first
days I met him—two months after I went to stay with Miss Birch.”
“And do you reckon he loved you?” he jeered.
“I know he did.”
“How do you know, if he’d have no more to do with you?”
There was a long silence of hate and suffering.
“And how far did it go between you?” he asked at length, in a
frightened, stiff voice.
“I hate your not-straightforward questions,” she cried, beside herself
with his baiting. “We loved each other, and we _were_ lovers—we were. I
don’t care what _you_ think: what have you got to do with it? We were
lovers before ever I knew you——”
“Lovers—lovers,” he said, white with fury. “You mean you had your fling
with an army man, and then came to me to marry you when you’d done——”
She sat swallowing her bitterness. There was a long pause.
“Do you mean to say you used to go—the whole hogger?” he asked, still
incredulous.
“Why, what else do you think I mean?” she cried brutally.
He shrank, and became white, impersonal. There was a long, paralysed
silence. He seemed to have gone small.
“You never thought to tell me all this before I married you,” he said,
with bitter irony, at last.
“You never asked me,” she replied.
“I never thought there was any need.”
“Well, then, you _should_ think.”
He stood with expressionless, almost childlike set face, revolving many
thoughts, whilst his heart was mad with anguish.
Suddenly she added:
“And I saw him today,” she said. “He is not dead, he’s mad.”
Her husband looked at her, startled.
“Mad!’ he said involuntarily.
“A lunatic,” she said. It almost cost her her reason to utter the word.
There was a pause.
“Did he know you?” asked the husband in a small voice.
“No,” she said.
He stood and looked at her. At last he had learned the width of the
breach between them. She still squatted on the bed. He could not go
near her. It would be violation to each of them to be brought into
contact with the other. The thing must work itself out. They were both
shocked so much, they were impersonal, and no longer hated each other.
After some minutes he left her and went out.
Goose Fair
I
Through the gloom of evening, and the flare of torches of the night
before the fair, through the still fogs of the succeeding dawn came
paddling the weary geese, lifting their poor feet that had been dipped
in tar for shoes, and trailing them along the cobble-stones into the
town. Last of all, in the afternoon, a country girl drove in her dozen
birds, disconsolate because she was so late. She was a heavily built
girl, fair, with regular features, and yet unprepossessing. She needed
chiselling down, her contours were brutal. Perhaps it was weariness
that hung her eyelids a little lower than was pleasant. When she spoke
to her clumsily lagging birds it was in a snarling nasal tone. One of
the silly things sat down in the gutter and refused to move. It looked
very ridiculous, but also rather pitiful, squat there with its head up,
refusing to be urged on by the ungentle toe of the girl. The latter
swore heavily, then picked up the great complaining bird, and fronting
her road stubbornly, drove on the lamentable eleven.
No one had noticed her. This afternoon the women were not sitting
chatting on their doorsteps, seaming up the cotton hose, or swiftly
passing through their fingers the piled white lace; and in the high
dark houses the song of the hosiery frames was hushed: “Shackety-boom,
Shackety-shackety-boom, Z—zzz!” As she dragged up Hollow Stone, people
returned from the fair chaffed her and asked her what o’clock it was.
She did not reply, her look was sullen. The Lace Market was quiet as
the Sabbath: even the great brass plates on the doors were dull with
neglect. There seemed an afternoon atmosphere of raw discontent. The
girl stopped a moment before the dismal prospect of one of the great
warehouses that had been gutted with fire. She looked at the lean,
threatening walls, and watched her white flock waddling in reckless
misery below, and she would have laughed out loud had the wall fallen
flat upon them and relieved her of them. But the wall did not fall, so
she crossed the road, and walking on the safe side, hurried after her
charge. Her look was even more sullen. She remembered the state of
trade—Trade, the invidious enemy; Trade, which thrust out its hand and
shut the factory doors, and pulled the stockingers off their seats, and
left the web half-finished on the frame; Trade, which mysteriously
choked up the sources of the rivulets of wealth, and blacker and more
secret than a pestilence, starved the town. Through this morose
atmosphere of bad trade, in the afternoon of the first day of the fair,
the girl strode down to the Poultry with eleven sound geese and one
lame one to sell.
The Frenchmen were at the bottom of it! So everybody said, though
nobody quite knew how. At any rate, they had gone to war with the
Prussians and got beaten, and trade was ruined in Nottingham!
A little fog rose up, and the twilight gathered around. Then they
flared abroad their torches in the fair, insulting the night. The girl
still sat in the Poultry, and her weary geese unsold on the stones,
illuminated by the hissing lamp of a man who sold rabbits and pigeons
and such-like assorted live-stock.
II
In another part of the town, near Sneinton Church, another girl came to
the door to look at the night. She was tall and slender, dressed with
the severe accuracy which marks the girl of superior culture. Her hair
was arranged with simplicity about the long, pale, cleanly cut face.
She leaned forward very slightly to glance down the street, listening.
She very carefully preserved the appearance of having come quite
casually to the door, yet she lingered and lingered and stood very
still to listen when she heard a footstep, but when it proved to be
only a common man, she drew herself up proudly and looked with a small
smile over his head. He hesitated to glance into the open hall, lighted
so spaciously with a scarlet-shaded lamp, and at the slim girl in brown
silk lifted up before the light. But she, she looked over his head. He
passed on.
Presently she started and hung in suspense. Somebody was crossing the
road. She ran down the steps in a pretty welcome, not effuse, saying in
quick, but accurately articulated words: “Will! I began to think you’d
gone to the fair. I came out to listen to it. I felt almost sure you’d
gone. You’re coming in, aren’t you?” She waited a moment anxiously. “We
expect you to dinner, you know,” she added wistfully.
The man, who had a short face and spoke with his lip curling up on one
side, in a drawling speech with ironically exaggerated intonation,
replied after a short hesitation:
“I’m awfully sorry, I am, straight, Lois. It’s a shame. I’ve got to go
round to the biz. Man proposes—the devil disposes.” He turned aside
with irony in the darkness.
“But surely, Will!” remonstrated the girl, keenly disappointed.
“Fact, Lois!—I feel wild about it myself. But I’ve got to go down to
the works. They may be getting a bit warm down there, you know”—he
jerked his head in the direction of the fair. “If the Lambs get
frisky!—they’re a bit off about the work, and they’d just be in their
element if they could set a lighted match to something——”
“Will, you don’t think——!” exclaimed the girl, laying her hand on his
arm in the true fashion of romance, and looking up at him earnestly.
“Dad’s not sure,” he replied, looking down at her with gravity. They
remained in this attitude for a moment, then he said:
“I might stop a bit. It’s all right for an hour, I should think.”
She looked at him earnestly, then said in tones of deep disappointment
and of fortitude: “No, Will, you must go. You’d better go——”
“It’s a shame!” he murmured, standing a moment at a loose end. Then,
glancing down the street to see he was alone, he put his arm round her
waist and said in a difficult voice: “How goes it?”
She let him keep her for a moment, then he kissed her as if afraid of
what he was doing. They were both uncomfortable.
“Well——!” he said at length.
“Good night!” she said, setting him free to go.
He hung a moment near her, as if ashamed. Then “Good night,” he
answered, and he broke away. She listened to his footsteps in the
night, before composing herself to turn indoors.
“Helloa!” said her father, glancing over his paper as she entered the
dining-room. “What’s up, then?”
“Oh, nothing,” she replied, in her calm tones. “Will won’t be here to
dinner tonight.”
“What, gone to the fair?”
“No.”
“Oh! What’s got him then?”
Lois looked at her father, and answered:
“He’s gone down to the factory. They are afraid of the hands.”
Her father looked at her closely.
“Oh, aye!” he answered, undecided, and they sat down to dinner.
III
Lois retired very early. She had a fire in her bedroom. She drew the
curtains and stood holding aside a heavy fold, looking out at the
night. She could see only the nothingness of the fog; not even the
glare of the fair was evident, though the noise clamoured small in the
distance. In front of everything she could see her own faint image. She
crossed to the dressing-table, and there leaned her face to the mirror,
and looked at herself. She looked a long time, then she rose, changed
her dress for a dressing-jacket, and took up _Sesame and Lilies._
Late in the night she was roused from sleep by a bustle in the house.
She sat up and heard a hurrying to and fro and the sound of anxious
voices. She put on her dressing-gown and went out to her mother’s room.
Seeing her mother at the head of the stairs, she said in her quick,
clean voice:
“Mother, what it it?”
“Oh, child, don’t ask me! Go to bed, dear, do! I shall surely be
worried out of my life.”
“Mother, what is it?” Lois was sharp and emphatic.
“I hope your father won’t go. Now I do hope your father won’t go. He’s
got a cold as it is.”
“Mother, tell me what is it?” Lois took her mother’s arm.
“It’s Selby’s. I should have thought you would have heard the
fire-engine, and Jack isn’t in yet. I hope we’re safe!” Lois returned
to her bedroom and dressed. She coiled her plaited hair, and having put
on a cloak, left the house.
She hurried along under the fog-dripping trees towards the meaner part
of the town. When she got near, she saw a glare in the fog, and closed
her lips tight. She hastened on till she was in the crowd. With peaked,
noble face she watched the fire. Then she looked a little wildly over
the fire-reddened faces in the crowd, and catching sight of her father,
hurried to him.
“Oh, Dadda—is he safe? Is Will safe——?”
“Safe, aye, why not? You’ve no business here. Here, here’s Sampson,
he’ll take you home. I’ve enough to bother me; there’s my own place to
watch. Go home now, I can’t do with you here.”
“Have you seen Will?” she asked.
“Go home—Sampson, just take Miss Lois home—now!”
“You don’t really know where he is—father?”
“Go home now—I don’t want you here——” her father ordered peremptorily.
The tears sprang to Lois’ eyes. She looked at the fire and the tears
were quickly dried by fear. The flames roared and struggled upward. The
great wonder of the fire made her forget even her indignation at her
father’s light treatment of herself and of her lover. There was a
crashing and bursting of timber, as the first floor fell in a mass into
the blazing gulf, splashing the fire in all directions, to the terror
of the crowd. She saw the steel of the machines growing white-hot and
twisting like flaming letters. Piece after piece of the flooring gave
way, and the machines dropped in red ruin as the wooden framework
burned out. The air became unbreathable; the fog was swallowed up;
sparks went rushing up as if they would burn the dark heavens;
sometimes cards of lace went whirling into the gulf of the sky, waving
with wings of fire. It was dangerous to stand near this great cup of
roaring destruction.
Sampson, the grey old manager of Buxton and Co’s, led her away as soon
as she would turn her face to listen to him. He was a stout, irritable
man. He elbowed his way roughly through the crowd, and Lois followed
him, her head high, her lips closed. He led her for some distance
without speaking, then at last, unable to contain his garrulous
irritability, he broke out:
“What do they expect? What can they expect? They can’t expect to stand
a bad time. They spring up like mushrooms as big as a house-side, but
there’s no stability in ’em. I remember William Selby when he’d run on
my errands. Yes, there’s some as can make much out of little, and
there’s some as can make much out of nothing, but they find it won’t
last. William Selby’s sprung up in a day, and he’ll vanish in a night.
You can’t trust to luck alone. Maybe he thinks it’s a lucky thing this
fire has come when things are looking black. But you can’t get out of
it as easy as that. There’s been a few too many of ’em. No, indeed, a
fire’s the last thing I should hope to come to—the very last!”
Lois hurried and hurried, so that she brought the old manager panting
in distress up the steps of her home. She could not bear to hear him
talking so. They could get no one to open the door for some time. When
at last Lois ran upstairs, she found her mother dressed, but all
unbuttoned again, lying back in the chair in her daughter’s room,
suffering from palpitation of the heart, with _Sesame and Lilies_
crushed beneath her. Lois administered brandy, and her decisive words
and movements helped largely to bring the good lady to a state of
recovery sufficient to allow of her returning to her own bedroom.
Then Lois locked the door. She glanced at her fire-darkened face, and
taking the flattened Ruskin out of the chair, sat down and wept. After
a while she calmed herself, rose, and sponged her face. Then once more
on that fatal night she prepared for rest. Instead, however, or
retiring, she pulled a silk quilt from her disordered bed and wrapping
it round her, sat miserably to think. It was two o’clock in the
morning.
IV
The fire was sunk to cold ashes in the grate, and the grey morning was
creeping through the half-opened curtains like a thing ashamed, when
Lois awoke. It was painful to move her head: her neck was cramped. The
girl awoke in full recollection. She sighed, roused herself and pulled
the quilt closer about her. For a little while she sat and mused. A
pale, tragic resignation fixed her face like a mask. She remembered her
father’s irritable answer to her question concerning her lover’s
safety—“Safe, aye—why not?” She knew that he suspected the factory of
having been purposely set on fire. But then, he had never liked Will.
And yet—and yet—Lois’ heart was heavy as lead. She felt her lover was
guilty. And she felt she must hide her secret of his last communication
to her. She saw herself being cross-examined—“When did you last see
this man?” But she would hide what he had said about watching at the
works. How dreary it was—and how dreadful. Her life was ruined now, and
nothing mattered any more. She must only behave with dignity, and
submit to her own obliteration. For even if Will were never accused,
she knew in her heart he was guilty. She knew it was over between them.
It was dawn among the yellow fog outside, and Lois, as she moved
mechanically about her toilet, vaguely felt that all her days would
arrive slowly struggling through a bleak fog. She felt an intense
longing at this uncanny hour to slough the body’s trammelled weariness
and to issue at once into the new bright warmth of the far Dawn where a
lover waited transfigured; it is so easy and pleasant in imagination to
step out of the chill grey dampness of another terrestrial daybreak,
straight into the sunshine of the eternal morning! And who can escape
his hour? So Lois performed the meaningless routine of her toilet,
which at last she made meaningful when she took her black dress, and
fastened a black jet brooch at her throat.
Then she went downstairs and found her father eating a mutton chop. She
quickly approached and kissed him on the forehead. Then she retreated
to the other end of the table. Her father looked tired, even haggard.
“You are early,” he said, after a while. Lois did not reply. Her father
continued to eat for a few moments, then he said:
“Have a chop—here’s one! Ring for a hot plate. Eh, what? Why not?”
Lois was insulted, but she gave no sign. She sat down and took a cup of
coffee, making no pretence to eat. Her father was absorbed, and had
forgotten her.
“Our Jack’s not come home yet,” he said at last.
Lois stirred faintly. “Hasn’t he?” she said.
“No.” There was silence for a time. Lois was frightened. Had something
happened also to her brother? This fear was closer and more irksome.
“Selby’s was cleaned out, gutted. We had a near shave of it——”
“You have no loss, Dadda?”
“Nothing to mention.” After another silence, her father said:
“I’d rather be myself than William Selby. Of course it may merely be
bad luck—you don’t know. But whatever it was, I wouldn’t like to add
one to the list of fires just now. Selby was at the ‘George’ when it
broke out—I don’t know where the lad was——!”
“Father,” broke in Lois, “why do you talk like that? Why do you talk as
if Will had done it?” She ended suddenly. Her father looked at her
pale, mute face.
“I don’t talk as if Will had done it,” he said. “I don’t even think
it.”
Feeling she was going to cry, Lois rose and left the room. Her father
sighed, and leaning his elbows on his knees, whistled faintly into the
fire. He was not thinking about her.
Lois went down to the kitchen and asked Lucy, the parlour-maid, to go
out with her. She somehow shrank from going alone, lest people should
stare at her overmuch: and she felt an overpowering impulse to go to
the scene of the tragedy, to judge for herself.
The churches were chiming half-past eight when the young lady and the
maid set off down the street. Nearer the fair, swarthy, thin-legged men
were pushing barrels of water towards the market-place, and the gipsy
women, with hard brows, and dressed in tight velvet bodices, hurried
along the pavement with jugs of milk, and great brass water ewers and
loaves and breakfast parcels. People were just getting up, and in the
poorer streets was a continual splash of tea-leaves, flung out on to
the cobble-stones. A teapot came crashing down from an upper story just
behind Lois, and she, starting round and looking up, thought that the
trembling, drink-bleared man at the upper window, who was stupidly
staring after his pot, had had designs on her life; and she went on her
way shuddering at the grim tragedy of life.
In the dull October morning the ruined factory was black and ghastly.
The window-frames were all jagged, and the walls stood gaunt. Inside
was a tangle of twisted _débris_, the iron, in parts red with bright
rust, looking still hot; the charred wood was black and satiny; from
dishevelled heaps, sodden with water, a faint smoke rose dimly. Lois
stood and looked. If he had done that! He might even be dead there,
burned to ash and lost for ever. It was almost soothing to feel so. He
would be safe in the eternity which now she must hope in.
At her side the pretty, sympathetic maid chatted plaintively. Suddenly,
from one of her lapses into silence, she exclaimed:
“Why if there isn’t Mr Jack!”
Lois turned suddenly and saw her brother and her lover approaching her.
Both looked soiled, untidy and wan. Will had a black eye, some ten
hours old, well coloured. Lois turned very pale as they approached.
They were looking gloomily at the factory, and for a moment did not
notice the girls.
“I’ll be jiggered if there ain’t our Lois!” exclaimed Jack, the
reprobate, swearing under his breath.
“Oh, God!” exclaimed the other in disgust.
“Jack, where have you been?” said Lois sharply, in keen pain, not
looking at her lover. Her sharp tone of suffering drove her lover to
defend himself with an affectation of comic recklessness.
“In quod,” replied her brother, smiling sickly.
“Jack!” cried his sister very sharply.
“Fact.”
Will Selby shuffled on his feet and smiled, trying to turn away his
face so that she should not see his black eye. She glanced at him. He
felt her boundless anger and contempt, and with great courage he looked
straight at her, smiling ironically. Unfortunately his smile would not
go over his swollen eye, which remained grave and lurid.
“Do I look pretty?” he inquired with a hateful twist of his lip.
“Very!” she replied.
“I thought I did,” he replied. And he turned to look at his father’s
ruined works, and he felt miserable and stubborn. The girl standing
there so clean and out of it all! Oh, God, he felt sick. He turned to
go home.
The three went together, Lois silent in anger and resentment. Her
brother was tired and overstrung, but not suppressed. He chattered on
blindly.
“It was a lark we had! We met Bob Osborne and Freddy Mansell coming
down Poultry. There was a girl with some geese. She looked a tanger
sitting there, all like statues, her and the geese. It was Will who
began it. He offered her three-pence and asked her to begin the show.
She called him a—she called him something, and then somebody poked an
old gander to stir him up, and somebody squirted him in the eye. He
upped and squawked and started off with his neck out. Laugh! We nearly
killed ourselves, keeping back those old birds with squirts and
teasers. Oh, Lum! Those old geese, oh, scrimmy, they didn’t know where
to turn, they fairly went off their dots, coming at us right an’ left,
and such a row—it was fun, you never knew! Then the girl she got up and
knocked somebody over the jaw, and we were right in for it. Well, in
the end, Billy here got hold of her round the waist——”
“Oh, dry it up!” exclaimed Will bitterly.
Jack looked at him, laughed mirthlessly, and continued: “An’ we said
we’d buy her birds. So we got hold of one goose apiece—an’ they took
some holding, I can tell you—and off we set round the fair, Billy
leading with the girl. The bloomin’ geese squawked an’ pecked. Laugh—I
thought I should a’ died. Well, then we wanted the girl to have her
birds back—and then she fired up. She got some other chaps on her side,
and there was a proper old row. The girl went tooth and nail for Will
there—she was dead set against him. She gave him a black eye, by gum,
and we went at it, I can tell you. It was a free fight, a beauty, an’
we got run in. I don’t know what became of the girl.”
Lois surveyed the two men. There was no glimmer of a smile on her face,
though the maid behind her was sniggering. Will was very bitter. He
glanced at his sweetheart and at the ruined factory.
“How’s dad taken it?” he asked, in a biting, almost humble tone.
“I don’t know,” she replied coldly. “Father’s in an awful way. I
believe everybody thinks you set the place on fire.”
Lois drew herself up. She had delivered her blow. She drew herself up
in cold condemnation and for a moment enjoyed her complete revenge. He
was despicable, abject in his dishevelled, disfigured, unwashed
condition.
“Aye, well, they made a mistake for once,” he replied, with a curl of
the lip.
Curiously enough, they walked side by side as if they belonged to each
other. She was his conscience-keeper. She was far from forgiving him,
but she was still farther from letting him go. And he walked at her
side like a boy who had to be punished before he can be exonerated. He
submitted. But there was a genuine bitter contempt in the curl of his
lip.
The White Stocking
I
“I’m getting up, Teddilinks,” said Mrs Whiston, and she sprang out of
bed briskly.
“What the Hanover’s got you?” asked Whiston.
“Nothing. Can’t I get up?” she replied animatedly.
It was about seven o’clock, scarcely light yet in the cold bedroom.
Whiston lay still and looked at his wife. She was a pretty little
thing, with her fleecy, short black hair all tousled. He watched her as
she dressed quickly, flicking her small, delightful limbs, throwing her
clothes about her. Her slovenliness and untidiness did not trouble him.
When she picked up the edge of her petticoat, ripped off a torn string
of white lace, and flung it on the dressing-table, her careless abandon
made his spirit glow. She stood before the mirror and roughly scrambled
together her profuse little mane of hair. He watched the quickness and
softness of her young shoulders, calmly, like a husband, and
appreciatively.
“Rise up,” she cried, turning to him with a quick wave of her arm—“and
shine forth.”
They had been married two years. But still, when she had gone out of
the room, he felt as if all his light and warmth were taken away, he
became aware of the raw, cold morning. So he rose himself, wondering
casually what had roused her so early. Usually she lay in bed as late
as she could.
Whiston fastened a belt round his loins and went downstairs in shirt
and trousers. He heard her singing in her snatchy fashion. The stairs
creaked under his weight. He passed down the narrow little passage,
which she called a hall, of the seven and sixpenny house which was his
first home.
He was a shapely young fellow of about twenty-eight, sleepy now and
easy with well-being. He heard the water drumming into the kettle, and
she began to whistle. He loved the quick way she dodged the supper cups
under the tap to wash them for breakfast. She looked an untidy minx,
but she was quick and handy enough.
“Teddilinks,” she cried.
“What?”
“Light a fire, quick.”
She wore an old, sack-like dressing-jacket of black silk pinned across
her breast. But one of the sleeves, coming unfastened, showed some
delightful pink upper-arm.
“Why don’t you sew your sleeve up?” he said, suffering from the sight
of the exposed soft flesh.
“Where?” she cried, peering round. “Nuisance,” she said, seeing the
gap, then with light fingers went on drying the cups.
The kitchen was of fair size, but gloomy. Whiston poked out the dead
ashes.
Suddenly a thud was heard at the door down the passage.
“I’ll go,” cried Mrs Whiston, and she was gone down the hall.
The postman was a ruddy-faced man who had been a soldier. He smiled
broadly, handing her some packages.
“They’ve not forgot you,” he said impudently.
“No—lucky for them,” she said, with a toss of the head. But she was
interested only in her envelopes this morning. The postman waited
inquisitively, smiling in an ingratiating fashion. She slowly,
abstractedly, as if she did not know anyone was there, closed the door
in his face, continuing to look at the addresses on her letters.
She tore open the thin envelope. There was a long, hideous, cartoon
valentine. She smiled briefly and dropped it on the floor. Struggling
with the string of a packet, she opened a white cardboard box, and
there lay a white silk handkerchief packed neatly under the paper lace
of the box, and her initial, worked in heliotrope, fully displayed. She
smiled pleasantly, and gently put the box aside. The third envelope
contained another white packet—apparently a cotton handkerchief neatly
folded. She shook it out. It was a long white stocking, but there was a
little weight in the toe. Quickly, she thrust down her arm, wriggling
her fingers into the toe of the stocking, and brought out a small box.
She peeped inside the box, then hastily opened a door on her left hand,
and went into the little, cold sitting-room. She had her lower lip
caught earnestly between her teeth.
With a little flash of triumph, she lifted a pair of pearl ear-rings
from the small box, and she went to the mirror. There, earnestly, she
began to hook them through her ears, looking at herself sideways in the
glass. Curiously concentrated and intent she seemed as she fingered the
lobes of her ears, her head bent on one side.
Then the pearl ear-rings dangled under her rosy, small ears. She shook
her head sharply, to see the swing of the drops. They went chill
against her neck, in little, sharp touches. Then she stood still to
look at herself, bridling her head in the dignified fashion. Then she
simpered at herself. Catching her own eye, she could not help winking
at herself and laughing.
She turned to look at the box. There was a scrap of paper with this
posy:
“Pearls may be fair, but thou art fairer.
Wear these for me, and I’ll love the wearer.”
She made a grimace and a grin. But she was drawn to the mirror again,
to look at her ear-rings.
Whiston had made the fire burn, so he came to look for her. When she
heard him, she started round quickly, guiltily. She was watching him
with intent blue eyes when he appeared.
He did not see much, in his morning-drowsy warmth. He gave her, as
ever, a feeling of warmth and slowness. His eyes were very blue, very
kind, his manner simple.
“What ha’ you got?” he asked.
“Valentines,” she said briskly, ostentatiously turning to show him the
silk handkerchief. She thrust it under his nose. “Smell how good,” she
said.
“Who’s that from?” he replied, without smelling.
“It’s a valentine,” she cried. “How do I know who it’s from?”
“I’ll bet you know,” he said.
“Ted!—I don’t!” she cried, beginning to shake her head, then stopping
because of the ear-rings.
He stood still a moment, displeased.
“They’ve no right to send you valentines, now,” he said.
“Ted!—Why not? You’re not jealous, are you? I haven’t the least idea
who it’s from. Look—there’s my initial”—she pointed with an emphatic
finger at the heliotrope embroidery—
“E for Elsie,
Nice little gelsie,”
she sang.
“Get out,” he said. “You know who it’s from.”
“Truth, I don’t,” she cried.
He looked round, and saw the white stocking lying on a chair.
“Is this another?” he said.
“No, that’s a sample,” she said. “There’s only a comic.” And she
fetched in the long cartoon.
He stretched it out and looked at it solemnly.
“Fools!” he said, and went out of the room.
She flew upstairs and took off the ear-rings. When she returned, he was
crouched before the fire blowing the coals. The skin of his face was
flushed, and slightly pitted, as if he had had small-pox. But his neck
was white and smooth and goodly. She hung her arms round his neck as he
crouched there, and clung to him. He balanced on his toes.
“This fire’s a slow-coach,” he said.
“And who else is a slow-coach?” she said.
“One of us two, I know,” he said, and he rose carefully. She remained
clinging round his neck, so that she was lifted off her feet.
“Ha!—swing me,” she cried.
He lowered his head, and she hung in the air, swinging from his neck,
laughing. Then she slipped off.
“The kettle is singing,” she sang, flying for the teapot. He bent down
again to blow the fire. The veins in his neck stood out, his shirt
collar seemed too tight.
“Doctor Wyer,
Blow the fire,
Puff! puff! puff!”
she sang, laughing.
He smiled at her.
She was so glad because of her pearl ear-rings.
Over the breakfast she grew serious. He did not notice. She became
portentous in her gravity. Almost it penetrated through his steady
good-humour to irritate him.
“Teddy!” she said at last.
“What?” he asked.
“I told you a lie,” she said, humbly tragic.
His soul stirred uneasily.
“Oh aye?” he said casually.
She was not satisfied. He ought to be more moved.
“Yes,” she said.
He cut a piece of bread.
“Was it a good one?” he asked.
She was piqued. Then she considered—_was_ it a good one? Then she
laughed.
“No,” she said, “it wasn’t up to much.”
“Ah!” he said easily, but with a steady strength of fondness for her in
his tone. “Get it out then.”
It became a little more difficult.
“You know that white stocking,” she said earnestly. “I told you a lie.
It wasn’t a sample. It was a valentine.”
A little frown came on his brow.
“Then what did you invent it as a sample for?” he said. But he knew
this weakness of hers. The touch of anger in his voice frightened her.
“I was afraid you’d be cross,” she said pathetically.
“I’ll bet you were vastly afraid,” he said.
“I _was_, Teddy.”
There was a pause. He was resolving one or two things in his mind.
“And who sent it?” he asked.
“I can guess,” she said, “though there wasn’t a word with it—except——”
She ran to the sitting-room and returned with a slip of paper.
“Pearls may be fair, but thou art fairer.
Wear these for me, and I’ll love the wearer.”
He read it twice, then a dull red flush came on his face.
“And _who_ do you guess it is?” he asked, with a ringing of anger in
his voice.
“I suspect it’s Sam Adams,” she said, with a little virtuous
indignation.
Whiston was silent for a moment.
“Fool!” he said. “An’ what’s it got to do with pearls?—and how can he
say ‘wear these for me’ when there’s only one? He hasn’t got the brain
to invent a proper verse.”
He screwed the sup of paper into a ball and flung it into the fire.
“I suppose he thinks it’ll make a pair with the one last year,” she
said.
“Why, did he send one then?”
“Yes. I thought you’d be wild if you knew.”
His jaw set rather sullenly.
Presently he rose, and went to wash himself, rolling back his sleeves
and pulling open his shirt at the breast. It was as if his fine,
clear-cut temples and steady eyes were degraded by the lower, rather
brutal part of his face. But she loved it. As she whisked about,
clearing the table, she loved the way in which he stood washing
himself. He was such a man. She liked to see his neck glistening with
water as he swilled it. It amused her and pleased her and thrilled her.
He was so sure, so permanent, he had her so utterly in his power. It
gave her a delightful, mischievous sense of liberty. Within his grasp,
she could dart about excitingly.
He turned round to her, his face red from the cold water, his eyes
fresh and very blue.
“You haven’t been seeing anything of him, have you?” he asked roughly.
“Yes,” she answered, after a moment, as if caught guilty. “He got into
the tram with me, and he asked me to drink a coffee and a Benedictine
in the Royal.”
“You’ve got it off fine and glib,” he said sullenly. “And did you?”
“Yes,” she replied, with the air of a traitor before the rack.
The blood came up into his neck and face, he stood motionless,
dangerous.
“It was cold, and it was such fun to go into the Royal,” she said.
“You’d go off with a nigger for a packet of chocolate,” he said, in
anger and contempt, and some bitterness. Queer how he drew away from
her, cut her off from him.
“Ted—how beastly!” she cried. “You know quite well——” She caught her
lip, flushed, and the tears came to her eyes.
He turned away, to put on his necktie. She went about her work, making
a queer pathetic little mouth, down which occasionally dripped a tear.
He was ready to go. With his hat jammed down on his head, and his
overcoat buttoned up to his chin, he came to kiss her. He would be
miserable all the day if he went without. She allowed herself to be
kissed. Her cheek was wet under his lips, and his heart burned. She
hurt him so deeply. And she felt aggrieved, and did not quite forgive
him.
In a moment she went upstairs to her ear-rings. Sweet they looked
nestling in the little drawer—sweet! She examined them with voluptuous
pleasure, she threaded them in her ears, she looked at herself, she
posed and postured and smiled, and looked sad and tragic and winning
and appealing, all in turn before the mirror. And she was happy, and
very pretty.
She wore her ear-rings all morning, in the house. She was
self-conscious, and quite brilliantly winsome, when the baker came,
wondering if he would notice. All the tradesmen left her door with a
glow in them, feeling elated, and unconsciously favouring the
delightful little creature, though there had been nothing to notice in
her behaviour.
She was stimulated all the day. She did not think about her husband. He
was the permanent basis from which she took these giddy little flights
into nowhere. At night, like chickens and curses, she would come home
to him, to roost.
Meanwhile Whiston, a traveller and confidential support of a small
firm, hastened about his work, his heart all the while anxious for her,
yearning for surety, and kept tense by not getting it.
II
She had been a warehouse girl in Adams’s lace factory before she was
married. Sam Adams was her employer. He was a bachelor of forty,
growing stout, a man well dressed and florid, with a large brown
moustache and thin hair. From the rest of his well-groomed, showy
appearance, it was evident his baldness was a chagrin to him. He had a
good presence, and some Irish blood in his veins.
His fondness for the girls, or the fondness of the girls for him, was
notorious. And Elsie, quick, pretty, almost witty little thing—she
_seemed_ witty, although, when her sayings were repeated, they were
entirely trivial—she had a great attraction for him. He would come into
the warehouse dressed in a rather sporting reefer coat, of fawn colour,
and trousers of fine black-and-white check, a cap with a big peak and a
scarlet carnation in his button-hole, to impress her. She was only half
impressed. He was too loud for her good taste. Instinctively perceiving
this, he sobered down to navy blue. Then a well-built man, florid, with
large brown whiskers, smart navy blue suit, fashionable boots, and
manly hat, he was the irreproachable. Elsie was impressed.
But meanwhile Whiston was courting her, and she made splendid little
gestures, before her bedroom mirror, of the constant-and-true sort.
“True, true till death——”
That was her song. Whiston was made that way, so there was no need to
take thought for him.
Every Christmas Sam Adams gave a party at his house, to which he
invited his superior work-people—not factory hands and labourers, but
those above. He was a generous man in his way, with a real warm feeling
for giving pleasure.
Two years ago Elsie had attended this Christmas-party for the last
time. Whiston had accompanied her. At that time he worked for Sam
Adams.
She had been very proud of herself, in her close-fitting, full-skirted
dress of blue silk. Whiston called for her. Then she tripped beside
him, holding her large cashmere shawl across her breast. He strode with
long strides, his trousers handsomely strapped under his boots, and her
silk shoes bulging the pockets of his full-skirted overcoat.
They passed through the park gates, and her spirits rose. Above them
the Castle Rock loomed grandly in the night, the naked trees stood
still and dark in the frost, along the boulevard.
They were rather late. Agitated with anticipation, in the cloak-room
she gave up her shawl, donned her silk shoes, and looked at herself in
the mirror. The loose bunches of curls on either side her face danced
prettily, her mouth smiled.
She hung a moment in the door of the brilliantly lighted room. Many
people were moving within the blaze of lamps, under the crystal
chandeliers, the full skirts of the women balancing and floating, the
side-whiskers and white cravats of the men bowing above. Then she
entered the light.
In an instant Sam Adams was coming forward, lifting both his arms in
boisterous welcome. There was a constant red laugh on his face.
“Come late, would you,” he shouted, “like royalty.”
He seized her hands and led her forward. He opened his mouth wide when
he spoke, and the effect of the warm, dark opening behind the brown
whiskers was disturbing. But she was floating into the throng on his
arm. He was very gallant.
“Now then,” he said, taking her card to write down the dances, “I’ve
got _carte blanche_, haven’t I?”
“Mr Whiston doesn’t dance,” she said.
“I am a lucky man!” he said, scribbling his initials. “I was born with
an _amourette_ in my mouth.”
He wrote on, quietly. She blushed and laughed, not knowing what it
meant.
“Why, what is that?” she said.
“It’s you, even littler than you are, dressed in little wings,” he
said.
“I should have to be pretty small to get in your mouth,” she said.
“You think you’re too big, do you!” he said easily.
He handed her her card, with a bow.
“Now I’m set up, my darling, for this evening,” he said.
Then, quick, always at his ease, he looked over the room. She waited in
front of him. He was ready. Catching the eye of the band, he nodded. In
a moment, the music began. He seemed to relax, giving himself up.
“Now then, Elsie,” he said, with a curious caress in his voice that
seemed to lap the outside of her body in a warm glow, delicious. She
gave herself to it. She liked it.
He was an excellent dancer. He seemed to draw her close in to him by
some male warmth of attraction, so that she became all soft and pliant
to him, flowing to his form, whilst he united her with him and they
lapsed along in one movement. She was just carried in a kind of strong,
warm flood, her feet moved of themselves, and only the music threw her
away from him, threw her back to him, to his clasp, in his strong form
moving against her, rhythmically, deliriously.
When it was over, he was pleased and his eyes had a curious gleam which
thrilled her and yet had nothing to do with her. Yet it held her. He
did not speak to her. He only looked straight into her eyes with a
curious, gleaming look that disturbed her fearfully and deliriously.
But also there was in his look some of the automatic irony of the
_roué_. It left her partly cold. She was not carried away.
She went, driven by an opposite, heavier impulse, to Whiston. He stood
looking gloomy, trying to admit that she had a perfect right to enjoy
herself apart from him. He received her with rather grudging
kindliness.
“Aren’t you going to play whist?” she asked.
“Aye,” he said. “Directly.”
“I do wish you could dance.”
“Well, I can’t,” he said. “So you enjoy yourself.”
“But I should enjoy it better if I could dance with you.”
“Nay, you’re all right,” he said. “I’m not made that way.”
“Then you ought to be!” she cried.
“Well, it’s my fault, not yours. You enjoy yourself,” he bade her.
Which she proceeded to do, a little bit irked.
She went with anticipation to the arms of Sam Adams, when the time came
to dance with him. It _was_ so gratifying, irrespective of the man. And
she felt a little grudge against Whiston, soon forgotten when her host
was holding her near to him, in a delicious embrace. And she watched
his eyes, to meet the gleam in them, which gratified her.
She was getting warmed right through, the glow was penetrating into
her, driving away everything else. Only in her heart was a little
tightness, like conscience.
When she got a chance, she escaped from the dancing-room to the
card-room. There, in a cloud of smoke, she found Whiston playing
cribbage. Radiant, roused, animated, she came up to him and greeted
him. She was too strong, too vibrant a note in the quiet room. He
lifted his head, and a frown knitted his gloomy forehead.
“Are you playing cribbage? Is it exciting? How are you getting on?” she
chattered.
He looked at her. None of these questions needed answering, and he did
not feel in touch with her. She turned to the cribbage-board.
“Are you white or red?” she asked.
“He’s red,” replied the partner.
“Then you’re losing,” she said, still to Whiston. And she lifted the
red peg from the board. “One—two—three—four—five—six—seven—eight—Right
up there you ought to jump——”
“Now put it back in its right place,” said Whiston.
“Where was it?” she asked gaily, knowing her transgression. He took the
little red peg away from her and stuck it in its hole.
The cards were shuffled.
“What a shame you’re losing!” said Elsie.
“You’d better cut for him,” said the partner.
She did so, hastily. The cards were dealt. She put her hand on his
shoulder, looking at his cards.
“It’s good,” she cried, “isn’t it?”
He did not answer, but threw down two cards. It moved him more strongly
than was comfortable, to have her hand on his shoulder, her curls
dangling and touching his ears, whilst she was roused to another man.
It made the blood flame over him.
At that moment Sam Adams appeared, florid and boisterous, intoxicated
more with himself, with the dancing, than with wine. In his eyes the
curious, impersonal light gleamed.
“I thought I should find you here, Elsie,” he cried boisterously, a
disturbing, high note in his voice.
“What made you think so?” she replied, the mischief rousing in her.
The florid, well-built man narrowed his eyes to a smile.
“I should never look for you among the ladies,” he said, with a kind of
intimate, animal call to her. He laughed, bowed, and offered her his
arm.
“Madam, the music waits.”
She went almost helplessly, carried along with him, unwilling, yet
delighted.
That dance was an intoxication to her. After the first few steps, she
felt herself slipping away from herself. She almost knew she was going,
she did not even want to go. Yet she must have chosen to go. She lay in
the arm of the steady, close man with whom she was dancing, and she
seemed to swim away out of contact with the room, into him. She had
passed into another, denser element of him, an essential privacy. The
room was all vague around her, like an atmosphere, like under sea, with
a flow of ghostly, dumb movements. But she herself was held real
against her partner, and it seemed she was connected with him, as if
the movements of his body and limbs were her own movements, yet not her
own movements—and oh, delicious! He also was given up, oblivious,
concentrated, into the dance. His eye was unseeing. Only his large,
voluptuous body gave off a subtle activity. His fingers seemed to
search into her flesh. Every moment, and every moment, she felt she
would give way utterly, and sink molten: the fusion point was coming
when she would fuse down into perfect unconsciousness at his feet and
knees. But he bore her round the room in the dance, and he seemed to
sustain all her body with his limbs, his body, and his warmth seemed to
come closer into her, nearer, till it would fuse right through her, and
she would be as liquid to him, as an intoxication only.
It was exquisite. When it was over, she was dazed, and was scarcely
breathing. She stood with him in the middle of the room as if she were
alone in a remote place. He bent over her. She expected his lips on her
bare shoulder, and waited. Yet they were not alone, they were not
alone. It was cruel.
“’Twas good, wasn’t it, my darling?” he said to her, low and delighted.
There was a strange impersonality about his low, exultant call that
appealed to her irresistibly. Yet why was she aware of some part shut
off in her? She pressed his arm, and he led her towards the door.
She was not aware of what she was doing, only a little grain of
resistant trouble was in her. The man, possessed, yet with a
superficial presence of mind, made way to the dining-room, as if to
give her refreshment, cunningly working to his own escape with her. He
was molten hot, filmed over with presence of mind, and bottomed with
cold disbelief.
In the dining-room was Whiston, carrying coffee to the plain, neglected
ladies. Elsie saw him, but felt as if he could not see her. She was
beyond his reach and ken. A sort of fusion existed between her and the
large man at her side. She ate her custard, but an incomplete fusion
all the while sustained and contained her within the being of her
employer.
But she was growing cooler. Whiston came up. She looked at him, and saw
him with different eyes. She saw his slim, young man’s figure real and
enduring before her. That was he. But she was in the spell with the
other man, fused with him, and she could not be taken away.
“Have you finished your cribbage?” she asked, with hasty evasion of
him.
“Yes,” he replied. “Aren’t you getting tired of dancing?”
“Not a bit,” she said.
“Not she,” said Adams heartily. “No girl with any spirit gets tired of
dancing.—Have something else, Elsie. Come—sherry. Have a glass of
sherry with us, Whiston.”
Whilst they sipped the wine, Adams watched Whiston almost cunningly, to
find his advantage.
“We’d better be getting back—there’s the music,” he said. “See the
women get something to eat, Whiston, will you, there’s a good chap.”
And he began to draw away. Elsie was drifting helplessly with him. But
Whiston put himself beside them, and went along with them. In silence
they passed through to the dancing-room. There Adams hesitated, and
looked round the room. It was as if he could not see.
A man came hurrying forward, claiming Elsie, and Adams went to his
other partner. Whiston stood watching during the dance. She was
conscious of him standing there observant of her, like a ghost, or a
judgment, or a guardian angel. She was also conscious, much more
intimately and impersonally, of the body of the other man moving
somewhere in the room. She still belonged to him, but a feeling of
distraction possessed her, and helplessness. Adams danced on, adhering
to Elsie, waiting his time, with the persistence of cynicism.
The dance was over. Adams was detained. Elsie found herself beside
Whiston. There was something shapely about him as he sat, about his
knees and his distinct figure, that she clung to. It was as if he had
enduring form. She put her hand on his knee.
“Are you enjoying yourself?” he asked.
“_Ever_ so,” she replied, with a fervent, yet detached tone.
“It’s going on for one o’clock,” he said.
“Is it?” she answered. It meant nothing to her.
“Should we be going?” he said.
She was silent. For the first time for an hour or more an inkling of
her normal consciousness returned. She resented it.
“What for?” she said.
“I thought you might have had enough,” he said.
A slight soberness came over her, an irritation at being frustrated of
her illusion.
“Why?” she said.
“We’ve been here since nine,” he said.
That was no answer, no reason. It conveyed nothing to her. She sat
detached from him. Across the room Sam Adams glanced at her. She sat
there exposed for him.
“You don’t want to be too free with Sam Adams,” said Whiston
cautiously, suffering. “You know what he is.”
“How, free?” she asked.
“Why—you don’t want to have too much to do with him.”
She sat silent. He was forcing her into consciousness of her position.
But he could not get hold of her feelings, to change them. She had a
curious, perverse desire that he should not.
“I like him,” she said.
“What do you find to like in him?” he said, with a hot heart.
“I don’t know—but I like him,” she said.
She was immutable. He sat feeling heavy and dulled with rage. He was
not clear as to what he felt. He sat there unliving whilst she danced.
And she, distracted, lost to herself between the opposing forces of the
two men, drifted. Between the dances, Whiston kept near to her. She was
scarcely conscious. She glanced repeatedly at her card, to see when she
would dance again with Adams, half in desire, half in dread. Sometimes
she met his steady, glaucous eye as she passed him in the dance.
Sometimes she saw the steadiness of his flank as he danced. And it was
always as if she rested on his arm, were borne along, upborne by him,
away from herself. And always there was present the other’s antagonism.
She was divided.
The time came for her to dance with Adams. Oh, the delicious closing of
contact with him, of his limbs touching her limbs, his arm supporting
her. She seemed to resolve. Whiston had not made himself real to her.
He was only a heavy place in her consciousness.
But she breathed heavily, beginning to suffer from the closeness of
strain. She was nervous. Adams also was constrained. A tightness, a
tension was coming over them all. And he was exasperated, feeling
something counteracting physical magnetism, feeling a will stronger
with her than his own, intervening in what was becoming a vital
necessity to him.
Elsie was almost lost to her own control. As she went forward with him
to take her place at the dance, she stooped for her
pocket-handkerchief. The music sounded for quadrilles. Everybody was
ready. Adams stood with his body near her, exerting his attraction over
her. He was tense and fighting. She stooped for her
pocket-handkerchief, and shook it as she rose. It shook out and fell
from her hand. With agony, she saw she had taken a white stocking
instead of a handkerchief. For a second it lay on the floor, a twist of
white stocking. Then, in an instant, Adams picked it up, with a little,
surprised laugh of triumph.
“That’ll do for me,” he whispered—seeming to take possession of her.
And he stuffed the stocking in his trousers pocket, and quickly offered
her his handkerchief.
The dance began. She felt weak and faint, as if her will were turned to
water. A heavy sense of loss came over her. She could not help herself
anymore. But it was peace.
When the dance was over, Adams yielded her up. Whiston came to her.
“What was it as you dropped?” Whiston asked.
“I thought it was my handkerchief—I’d taken a stocking by mistake,” she
said, detached and muted.
“And he’s got it?”
“Yes.”
“What does he mean by that?”
She lifted her shoulders.
“Are you going to let him keep it?” he asked.
“I don’t let him.”
There was a long pause.
“Am I to go and have it out with him?” he asked, his face flushed, his
blue eyes going hard with opposition.
“No,” she said, pale.
“Why?”
“No—I don’t want to say anything about it.”
He sat exasperated and nonplussed.
“You’ll let him keep it, then?” he asked.
She sat silent and made no form of answer.
“What do you mean by it?” he said, dark with fury. And he started up.
“No!” she cried. “Ted!” And she caught hold of him, sharply detaining
him.
It made him black with rage.
“Why?” he said.
Then something about her mouth was pitiful to him. He did not
understand, but he felt she must have her reasons.
“Then I’m not stopping here,” he said. “Are you coming with me?”
She rose mutely, and they went out of the room. Adams had not noticed.
In a few moments they were in the street.
“What the hell do you mean?” he said, in a black fury.
She went at his side, in silence, neutral.
“That great hog, an’ all,” he added.
Then they went a long time in silence through the frozen, deserted
darkness of the town. She felt she could not go indoors. They were
drawing near her house.
“I don’t want to go home,” she suddenly cried in distress and anguish.
“I don’t want to go home.”
He looked at her.
“Why don’t you?” he said.
“I don’t want to go home,” was all she could sob.
He heard somebody coming.
“Well, we can walk a bit further,” he said.
She was silent again. They passed out of the town into the fields. He
held her by the arm—they could not speak.
“What’s a-matter?” he asked at length, puzzled.
She began to cry again.
At last he took her in his arms, to soothe her. She sobbed by herself,
almost unaware of him.
“Tell me what’s a-matter, Elsie,” he said. “Tell me what’s a-matter—my
dear—tell me, then——”
He kissed her wet face, and caressed her. She made no response. He was
puzzled and tender and miserable.
At length she became quiet. Then he kissed her, and she put her arms
round him, and clung to him very tight, as if for fear and anguish. He
held her in his arms, wondering.
“Ted!” she whispered, frantic. “Ted!”
“What, my love?” he answered, becoming also afraid.
“Be good to me,” she cried. “Don’t be cruel to me.”
“No, my pet,” he said, amazed and grieved. “Why?”
“Oh, be good to me,” she sobbed.
And he held her very safe, and his heart was white-hot with love for
her. His mind was amazed. He could only hold her against his chest that
was white-hot with love and belief in her. So she was restored at last.
III
She refused to go to her work at Adams’s any more. Her father had to
submit and she sent in her notice—she was not well. Sam Adams was
ironical. But he had a curious patience. He did not fight.
In a few weeks, she and Whiston were married. She loved him with
passion and worship, a fierce little abandon of love that moved him to
the depths of his being, and gave him a permanent surety and sense of
realness in himself. He did not trouble about himself any more: he felt
he was fulfilled and now he had only the many things in the world to
busy himself about. Whatever troubled him, at the bottom was surety. He
had found himself in this love.
They spoke once or twice of the white stocking.
“Ah!” Whiston exclaimed. “What does it matter?”
He was impatient and angry, and could not bear to consider the matter.
So it was left unresolved.
She was quite happy at first, carried away by her adoration of her
husband. Then gradually she got used to him. He always was the ground
of her happiness, but she got used to him, as to the air she breathed.
He never got used to her in the same way.
Inside of marriage she found her liberty. She was rid of the
responsibility of herself. Her husband must look after that. She was
free to get what she could out of her time.
So that, when, after some months, she met Sam Adams, she was not quite
as unkind to him as she might have been. With a young wife’s new and
exciting knowledge of men, she perceived he was in love with her, she
knew he had always kept an unsatisfied desire for her. And, sportive,
she could not help playing a little with this, though she cared not one
jot for the man himself.
When Valentine’s day came, which was near the first anniversary of her
wedding day, there arrived a white stocking with a little amethyst
brooch. Luckily Whiston did not see it, so she said nothing of it to
him. She had not the faintest intention of having anything to do with
Sam Adams, but once a little brooch was in her possession, it was hers,
and she did not trouble her head for a moment how she had come by it.
She kept it.
Now she had the pearl ear-rings. They were a more valuable and a more
conspicuous present. She would have to ask her mother to give them to
her, to explain their presence. She made a little plan in her head. And
she was extraordinarily pleased. As for Sam Adams, even if he saw her
wearing them, he would not give her away. What fun, if he saw her
wearing his ear-rings! She would pretend she had inherited them from
her grandmother, her mother’s mother. She laughed to herself as she
went down town in the afternoon, the pretty drops dangling in front of
her curls. But she saw no one of importance.
Whiston came home tired and depressed. All day the male in him had been
uneasy, and this had fatigued him. She was curiously against him,
inclined, as she sometimes was nowadays, to make mock of him and jeer
at him and cut him off. He did not understand this, and it angered him
deeply. She was uneasy before him.
She knew he was in a state of suppressed irritation. The veins stood
out on the backs of his hands, his brow was drawn stiffly. Yet she
could not help goading him.
“What did you do wi’ that white stocking?” he asked, out of a gloomy
silence, his voice strong and brutal.
“I put it in a drawer—why?” she replied flippantly.
“Why didn’t you put it on the fire back?” he said harshly. “What are
you hoarding it up for?”
“I’m not hoarding it up,” she said. “I’ve got a pair.”
He relapsed into gloomy silence. She, unable to move him, ran away
upstairs, leaving him smoking by the fire. Again she tried on the
ear-rings. Then another little inspiration came to her. She drew on the
white stockings, both of them.
Presently she came down in them. Her husband still sat immovable and
glowering by the fire.
“Look!” she said. “They’ll do beautifully.”
And she picked up her skirts to her knees, and twisted round, looking
at her pretty legs in the neat stockings.
He filled with unreasonable rage, and took the pipe from his mouth.
“Don’t they look nice?” she said. “One from last year and one from
this, they just do. Save you buying a pair.”
And she looked over her shoulders at her pretty calves, and the
dangling frills of her knickers.
“Put your skirts down and don’t make a fool of yourself,” he said.
“Why a fool of myself?” she asked.
And she began to dance slowly round the room, kicking up her feet half
reckless, half jeering, in a ballet-dancer’s fashion. Almost fearfully,
yet in defiance, she kicked up her legs at him, singing as she did so.
She resented him.
“You little fool, ha’ done with it,” he said. “And you’ll backfire them
stockings, I’m telling you.” He was angry. His face flushed dark, he
kept his head bent. She ceased to dance.
“I shan’t,” she said. “They’ll come in very useful.”
He lifted his head and watched her, with lighted, dangerous eyes.
“You’ll put ’em on the fire back, I tell you,” he said.
It was a war now. She bent forward, in a ballet-dancer’s fashion, and
put her tongue between her teeth.
“I shan’t backfire them stockings,” she sang, repeating his words, “I
shan’t, I shan’t, I shan’t.”
And she danced round the room doing a high kick to the tune of her
words. There was a real biting indifference in her behaviour.
“We’ll see whether you will or not,” he said, “trollops! You’d like Sam
Adams to know you was wearing ’em, wouldn’t you? That’s what would
please you.”
“Yes, I’d like him to see how nicely they fit me, he might give me some
more then.”
And she looked down at her pretty legs.
He knew somehow that she _would_ like Sam Adams to see how pretty her
legs looked in the white stockings. It made his anger go deep, almost
to hatred.
“Yer nasty trolley,” he cried. “Put yer petticoats down, and stop being
so foul-minded.”
“I’m not foul-minded,” she said. “My legs are my own. And why shouldn’t
Sam Adams think they’re nice?”
There was a pause. He watched her with eyes glittering to a point.
“Have you been havin’ owt to do with him?” he asked.
“I’ve just spoken to him when I’ve seen him,” she said. “He’s not as
bad as you would make out.”
“Isn’t he?” he cried, a certain wakefulness in his voice. “Them who has
anything to do wi’ him is too bad for me, I tell you.”
“Why, what are you frightened of him for?” she mocked.
She was rousing all his uncontrollable anger. He sat glowering. Every
one of her sentences stirred him up like a red-hot iron. Soon it would
be too much. And she was afraid herself; but she was neither conquered
nor convinced.
A curious little grin of hate came on his face. He had a long score
against her.
“What am I frightened of him for?” he repeated automatically. “What am
I frightened of him for? Why, for you, you stray-running little bitch.”
She flushed. The insult went deep into her, right home.
“Well, if you’re so dull——” she said, lowering her eyelids, and
speaking coldly, haughtily.
“If I’m so dull I’ll break your neck the first word you speak to him,”
he said, tense.
“Pf!” she sneered. “Do you think I’m frightened of you?” She spoke
coldly, detached.
She was frightened, for all that, white round the mouth.
His heart was getting hotter.
“You _will_ be frightened of me, the next time you have anything to do
with him,” he said.
“Do you think _you’d_ ever be told—ha!”
Her jeering scorn made him go white-hot, molten. He knew he was
incoherent, scarcely responsible for what he might do. Slowly,
unseeing, he rose and went out of doors, stifled, moved to kill her.
He stood leaning against the garden fence, unable either to see or
hear. Below him, far off, fumed the lights of the town. He stood still,
unconscious with a black storm of rage, his face lifted to the night.
Presently, still unconscious of what he was doing, he went indoors
again. She stood, a small stubborn figure with tight-pressed lips and
big, sullen, childish eyes, watching him, white with fear. He went
heavily across the floor and dropped into his chair.
There was a silence.
“_You’re_ not going to tell me everything I shall do, and everything I
shan’t,” she broke out at last.
He lifted his head.
“I tell you _this_,” he said, low and intense. “Have anything to do
with Sam Adams, and I’ll break your neck.”
She laughed, shrill and false.
“How I hate your word ‘break your neck’,” she said, with a grimace of
the mouth. “It sounds so common and beastly. Can’t you say something
else——”
There was a dead silence.
“And besides,” she said, with a queer chirrup of mocking laughter,
“what do you know about anything? He sent me an amethyst brooch and a
pair of pearl ear-rings.”
“He what?” said Whiston, in a suddenly normal voice. His eyes were
fixed on her.
“Sent me a pair of pearl ear-rings, and an amethyst brooch,” she
repeated, mechanically, pale to the lips.
And her big, black, childish eyes watched him, fascinated, held in her
spell.
He seemed to thrust his face and his eyes forward at her, as he rose
slowly and came to her. She watched transfixed in terror. Her throat
made a small sound, as she tried to scream.
Then, quick as lightning, the back of his hand struck her with a crash
across the mouth, and she was flung back blinded against the wall. The
shock shook a queer sound out of her. And then she saw him still coming
on, his eyes holding her, his fist drawn back, advancing slowly. At any
instant the blow might crash into her.
Mad with terror, she raised her hands with a queer clawing movement to
cover her eyes and her temples, opening her mouth in a dumb shriek.
There was no sound. But the sight of her slowly arrested him. He hung
before her, looking at her fixedly, as she stood crouched against the
wall with open, bleeding mouth, and wide-staring eyes, and two hands
clawing over her temples. And his lust to see her bleed, to break her
and destroy her, rose from an old source against her. It carried him.
He wanted satisfaction.
But he had seen her standing there, a piteous, horrified thing, and he
turned his face aside in shame and nausea. He went and sat heavily in
his chair, and a curious ease, almost like sleep, came over his brain.
She walked away from the wall towards the fire, dizzy, white to the
lips, mechanically wiping her small, bleeding mouth. He sat motionless.
Then, gradually, her breath began to hiss, she shook, and was sobbing
silently, in grief for herself. Without looking, he saw. It made his
mad desire to destroy her come back.
At length he lifted his head. His eyes were glowing again, fixed on
her.
“And what did he give them you for?” he asked, in a steady, unyielding
voice.
Her crying dried up in a second. She also was tense.
“They came as valentines,” she replied, still not subjugated, even if
beaten.
“When, today?”
“The pearl ear-rings today—the amethyst brooch last year.”
“You’ve had it a year?”
“Yes.”
She felt that now nothing would prevent him if he rose to kill her. She
could not prevent him any more. She was yielded up to him. They both
trembled in the balance, unconscious.
“What have you had to do with him?” he asked, in a barren voice.
“I’ve not had anything to do with him,” she quavered.
“You just kept ’em because they were jewellery?” he said.
A weariness came over him. What was the worth of speaking any more of
it? He did not care any more. He was dreary and sick.
She began to cry again, but he took no notice. She kept wiping her
mouth on her handkerchief. He could see it, the blood-mark. It made him
only more sick and tired of the responsibility of it, the violence, the
shame.
When she began to move about again, he raised his head once more from
his dead, motionless position.
“Where are the things?” he said.
“They are upstairs,” she quavered. She knew the passion had gone down
in him.
“Bring them down,” he said.
“I won’t,” she wept, with rage. “You’re not going to bully me and hit
me like that on the mouth.”
And she sobbed again. He looked at her in contempt and compassion and
in rising anger.
“Where are they?” he said.
“They’re in the little drawer under the looking-glass,” she sobbed.
He went slowly upstairs, struck a match, and found the trinkets. He
brought them downstairs in his hand.
“These?” he said, looking at them as they lay in his palm.
She looked at them without answering. She was not interested in them
any more.
He looked at the little jewels. They were pretty.
“It’s none of their fault,” he said to himself.
And he searched round slowly, persistently, for a box. He tied the
things up and addressed them to Sam Adams. Then he went out in his
slippers to post the little package.
When he came back she was still sitting crying.
“You’d better go to bed,” he said.
She paid no attention. He sat by the fire. She still cried.
“I’m sleeping down here,” he said. “Go you to bed.”
In a few moments she lifted her tear-stained, swollen face and looked
at him with eyes all forlorn and pathetic. A great flash of anguish
went over his body. He went over, slowly, and very gently took her in
his hands. She let herself be taken. Then as she lay against his
shoulder, she sobbed aloud:
“I never meant——”
“My love—my little love——” he cried, in anguish of spirit, holding her
in his arms.
A Sick Collier
She was too good for him, everybody said. Yet still she did not regret
marrying him. He had come courting her when he was only nineteen, and
she twenty. He was in build what they call a tight little fellow;
short, dark, with a warm colour, and that upright set of the head and
chest, that flaunting way in movement recalling a mating bird, which
denotes a body taut and compact with life. Being a good worker he had
earned decent money in the mine, and having a good home had saved a
little.
She was a cook at “Uplands”, a tall, fair girl, very quiet. Having seen
her walk down the street, Horsepool had followed her from a distance.
He was taken with her, he did not drink, and he was not lazy. So,
although he seemed a bit simple, without much intelligence, but having
a sort of physical brightness, she considered, and accepted him.
When they were married they went to live in Scargill Street, in a
highly respectable six-roomed house which they had furnished between
them. The street was built up the side of a long, steep hill. It was
narrow and rather tunnel-like. Nevertheless, the back looked out over
the adjoining pasture, across a wide valley of fields and woods, in the
bottom of which the mine lay snugly.
He made himself gaffer in his own house. She was unacquainted with a
collier’s mode of life. They were married on a Saturday. On the Sunday
night he said:
“Set th’ table for my breakfast, an’ put my pit-things afront o’ th’
fire. I s’ll be gettin’ up at ha’ef pas’ five. Tha nedna shift thysen
not till when ter likes.”
He showed her how to put a newspaper on the table for a cloth. When she
demurred:
“I want none o’ your white cloths i’ th’ mornin’. I like ter be able to
slobber if I feel like it,” he said.
He put before the fire his moleskin trousers, a clean singlet, or
sleeveless vest of thick flannel, a pair of stockings and his pit
boots, arranging them all to be warm and ready for morning.
“Now tha sees. That wants doin’ ivery night.”
Punctually at half past five he left her, without any form of
leave-taking, going downstairs in his shirt.
When he arrived home at four o’clock in the afternoon his dinner was
ready to be dished up. She was startled when he came in, a short,
sturdy figure, with a face indescribably black and streaked. She stood
before the fire in her white blouse and white apron, a fair girl, the
picture of beautiful cleanliness. He “clommaxed” in, in his heavy
boots.
“Well, how ’as ter gone on?” he asked.
“I was ready for you to come home,” she replied tenderly. In his black
face the whites of his brown eyes flashed at her.
“An’ I wor ready for comin’,” he said. He planked his tin bottle and
snap-bag on the dresser, took off his coat and scarf and waistcoat,
dragged his armchair nearer the fire and sat down.
“Let’s ha’e a bit o’ dinner, then—I’m about clammed,” he said.
“Aren’t you goin’ to wash yourself first?”
“What am I to wesh mysen for?”
“Well, you can’t eat your dinner——”
“Oh, strike a daisy, Missis! Dunna I eat my snap i’ th’ pit wi’out
weshin’?—forced to.”
She served the dinner and sat opposite him. His small bullet head was
quite black, save for the whites of his eyes and his scarlet lips. It
gave her a queer sensation to see him open his red mouth and bare his
white teeth as he ate. His arms and hands were mottled black; his bare,
strong neck got a little fairer as it settled towards his shoulders,
reassuring her. There was the faint indescribable odour of the pit in
the room, an odour of damp, exhausted air.
“Why is your vest so black on the shoulders?” she asked.
“My singlet? That’s wi’ th’ watter droppin’ on us from th’ roof. This
is a dry un as I put on afore I come up. They ha’e gre’t
clothes-’osses, an’ as we change us things, we put ’em on theer ter
dry.”
When he washed himself, kneeling on the hearth-rug stripped to the
waist, she felt afraid of him again. He was so muscular, he seemed so
intent on what he was doing, so intensely himself, like a vigorous
animal. And as he stood wiping himself, with his naked breast towards
her, she felt rather sick, seeing his thick arms bulge their muscles.
They were nevertheless very happy. He was at a great pitch of pride
because of her. The men in the pit might chaff him, they might try to
entice him away, but nothing could reduce his self-assured pride
because of her, nothing could unsettle his almost infantile
satisfaction. In the evening he sat in his armchair chattering to her,
or listening as she read the newspaper to him. When it was fine, he
would go into the street, squat on his heels as colliers do, with his
back against the wall of his parlour, and call to the passers-by, in
greeting, one after another. If no one were passing, he was content
just to squat and smoke, having such a fund of sufficiency and
satisfaction in his heart. He was well married.
They had not been wed a year when all Brent and Wellwood’s men came out
on strike. Willy was in the Union, so with a pinch they scrambled
through. The furniture was not all paid for, and other debts were
incurred. She worried and contrived, he left it to her. But he was a
good husband; he gave her all he had.
The men were out fifteen weeks. They had been back just over a year
when Willy had an accident in the mine, tearing his bladder. At the pit
head the doctor talked of the hospital. Losing his head entirely, the
young collier raved like a madman, what with pain and fear of hospital.
“Tha s’lt go whoam, Willy, tha s’lt go whoam,” the deputy said.
A lad warned the wife to have the bed ready. Without speaking or
hesitating she prepared. But when the ambulance came, and she heard him
shout with pain at being moved, she was afraid lest she should sink
down. They carried him in.
“Yo’ should ’a’ had a bed i’ th’ parlour, Missis,” said the deputy,
“then we shouldna ha’ had to hawkse ’im upstairs, an’ it ’ud ’a’ saved
your legs.”
But it was too late now. They got him upstairs.
“They let me lie, Lucy,” he was crying, “they let me lie two mortal
hours on th’ sleck afore they took me outer th’ stall. Th’ peen, Lucy,
th’ peen; oh, Lucy, th’ peen, th’ peen!”
“I know th’ pain’s bad, Willy, I know. But you must try an’ bear it a
bit.”
“Tha munna carry on in that form, lad, thy missis’ll niver be able ter
stan’ it,” said the deputy.
“I canna ’elp it, it’s th’ peen, it’s th’ peen,” he cried again. He had
never been ill in his life. When he had smashed a finger he could look
at the wound. But this pain came from inside, and terrified him. At
last he was soothed and exhausted.
It was some time before she could undress him and wash him. He would
let no other woman do for him, having that savage modesty usual in such
men.
For six weeks he was in bed, suffering much pain. The doctors were not
quite sure what was the matter with him, and scarcely knew what to do.
He could eat, he did not lose flesh, nor strength, yet the pain
continued, and he could hardly walk at all.
In the sixth week the men came out in the national strike. He would get
up quite early in the morning and sit by the window. On Wednesday, the
second week of the strike, he sat gazing out on the street as usual, a
bullet-headed young man, still vigorous-looking, but with a peculiar
expression of hunted fear in his face.
“Lucy,” he called, “Lucy!”
She, pale and worn, ran upstairs at his bidding.
“Gi’e me a han’kercher,” he said.
“Why, you’ve got one,” she replied, coming near.
“Tha nedna touch me,” he cried. Feeling his pocket, he produced a white
handkerchief.
“I non want a white un, gi’e me a red un,” he said.
“An’ if anybody comes to see you,” she answered, giving him a red
handkerchief.
“Besides,” she continued, “you needn’t ha’ brought me upstairs for
that.”
“I b’lieve th’ peen’s commin’ on again,” he said, with a little horror
in his voice.
“It isn’t, you know, it isn’t,” she replied. “The doctor says you
imagine it’s there when it isn’t.”
“Canna I feel what’s inside me?” he shouted.
“There’s a traction-engine coming downhill,” she said. “That’ll scatter
them. I’ll just go an’ finish your pudding.”
She left him. The traction-engine went by, shaking the houses. Then the
street was quiet, save for the men. A gang of youths from fifteen to
twenty-five years old were playing marbles in the middle of the road.
Other little groups of men were playing on the pavement. The street was
gloomy. Willy could hear the endless calling and shouting of men’s
voices.
“Tha’rt skinchin’!”
“I arena!”
“Come ’ere with that blood-alley.”
“Swop us four for’t.”
“Shonna, gie’s hold on’t.”
He wanted to be out, he wanted to be playing marbles. The pain had
weakened his mind, so that he hardly knew any self-control.
Presently another gang of men lounged up the street. It was pay
morning. The Union was paying the men in the Primitive Chapel. They
were returning with their half-sovereigns.
“Sorry!” bawled a voice. “Sorry!”
The word is a form of address, corruption probably of “Sirrah”. Willy
started almost out of his chair.
“Sorry!” again bawled a great voice. “Art goin’ wi’ me to see Notts
play Villa?”
Many of the marble players started up.
“What time is it? There’s no treens, we s’ll ha’e ter walk.”
The street was alive with men.
“Who’s goin’ ter Nottingham ter see th’ match?” shouted the same big
voice. A very large, tipsy man, with his cap over his eyes, was
calling.
“Com’ on—aye, com’ on!” came many voices. The street was full of the
shouting of men. They split up in excited cliques and groups.
“Play up, Notts!” the big man shouted.
“Plee up, Notts!” shouted the youths and men. They were at kindling
pitch. It only needed a shout to rouse them. Of this the careful
authorities were aware.
“I’m goin’, I’m goin’!” shouted the sick man at his window.
Lucy came running upstairs.
“I’m goin’ ter see Notts play Villa on th’ Meadows ground,” he
declared.
“You—_you_ can’t go. There are no trains. You can’t walk nine miles.”
“I’m goin’ ter see th’ match,” he declared, rising.
“You know you can’t. Sit down now an’ be quiet.”
She put her hand on him. He shook it off.
“Leave me alone, leave me alone. It’s thee as ma’es th’ peen come, it’s
thee. I’m goin’ ter Nottingham to see th’ football match.”
“Sit down—folks’ll hear you, and what will they think?”
“Come off’n me. Com’ off. It’s her, it’s her as does it. Com’ off.”
He seized hold of her. His little head was bristling with madness, and
he was strong as a lion.
“Oh, Willy!” she cried.
“It’s ’er, it’s ’er. Kill her!” he shouted, “kill her.”
“Willy, folks’ll hear you.”
“Th’ peen’s commin’ on again, I tell yer. I’ll kill her for it.”
He was completely out of his mind. She struggled with him to prevent
his going to the stairs. When she escaped from him, he was shouting and
raving, she beckoned to her neighbour, a girl of twenty-four, who was
cleaning the window across the road.
Ethel Mellor was the daughter of a well-to-do check-weighman. She ran
across in fear to Mrs Horsepool. Hearing the man raving, people were
running out in the street and listening. Ethel hurried upstairs.
Everything was clean and pretty in the young home.
Willy was staggering round the room, after the slowly retreating Lucy,
shouting:
“Kill her! Kill her!”
“Mr Horsepool!” cried Ethel, leaning against the bed, white as the
sheets, and trembling. “Whatever are you saying?”
“I tell yer it’s ’er fault as th’ peen comes on—I tell yer it is! Kill
’er—kill ’er!”
“Kill Mrs Horsepool!” cried the trembling girl. “Why, you’re ever so
fond of her, you know you are.”
“The peen—I ha’e such a lot o’ peen—I want to kill ’er.”
He was subsiding. When he sat down his wife collapsed in a chair,
weeping noiselessly. The tears ran down Ethel’s face. He sat staring
out of the window; then the old, hurt look came on his face.
“What ’ave I been sayin’?” he asked, looking piteously at his wife.
“Why!” said Ethel, “you’ve been carrying on something awful, saying,
‘Kill her, kill her!’”
“Have I, Lucy?” he faltered.
“You didn’t know what you was saying,” said his young wife gently but
coldly.
His face puckered up. He bit his lip, then broke into tears, sobbing
uncontrollably, with his face to the window.
There was no sound in the room but of three people crying bitterly,
breath caught in sobs. Suddenly Lucy put away her tears and went over
to him.
“You didn’t know what you was sayin’, Willy, I know you didn’t. I knew
you didn’t, all the time. It doesn’t matter, Willy. Only don’t do it
again.”
In a little while, when they were calmer, she went downstairs with
Ethel.
“See if anybody is looking in the street,” she said.
Ethel went into the parlour and peeped through the curtains.
“Aye!” she said. “You may back your life Lena an’ Mrs Severn’ll be out
gorping, and that clat-fartin’ Mrs Allsop.”
“Oh, I hope they haven’t heard anything! If it gets about as he’s out
of his mind, they’ll stop his compensation, I know they will.”
“They’d never stop his compensation for _that_,” protested Ethel.
“Well, they _have_ been stopping some——”
“It’ll not get about. I s’ll tell nobody.”
“Oh, but if it does, whatever shall we do?...”
The Christening
The mistress of the British School stepped down from her school gate,
and instead of turning to the left as usual, she turned to the right.
Two women who were hastening home to scramble their husbands’ dinners
together—it was five minutes to four—stopped to look at her. They stood
gazing after her for a moment; then they glanced at each other with a
woman’s little grimace.
To be sure, the retreating figure was ridiculous: small and thin, with
a black straw hat, and a rusty cashmere dress hanging full all round
the skirt. For so small and frail and rusty a creature to sail with
slow, deliberate stride was also absurd. Hilda Rowbotham was less than
thirty, so it was not years that set the measure of her pace; she had
heart disease. Keeping her face, that was small with sickness, but not
uncomely, firmly lifted and fronting ahead, the young woman sailed on
past the market-place, like a black swan of mournful, disreputable
plumage.
She turned into Berryman’s, the baker’s. The shop displayed bread and
cakes, sacks of flour and oatmeal, flitches of bacon, hams, lard and
sausages. The combination of scents was not unpleasing. Hilda Rowbotham
stood for some minutes nervously tapping and pushing a large knife that
lay on the counter, and looking at the tall, glittering brass scales.
At last a morose man with sandy whiskers came down the step from the
house-place.
“What is it?” he asked, not apologizing for his delay.
“Will you give me six-pennyworth of assorted cakes and pastries—and put
in some macaroons, please?” she asked, in remarkably rapid and nervous
speech. Her lips fluttered like two leaves in a wind, and her words
crowded and rushed like a flock of sheep at a gate.
“We’ve got no macaroons,” said the man churlishly.
He had evidently caught that word. He stood waiting.
“Then I can’t have any, Mr Berryman. Now I do feel disappointed. I like
those macaroons, you know, and it’s not often I treat myself. One gets
so tired of trying to spoil oneself, don’t you think? It’s less
profitable even than trying to spoil somebody else.” She laughed a
quick little nervous laugh, putting her hand to her face.
“Then what’ll you have?” asked the man, without the ghost of an
answering smile. He evidently had not followed, so he looked more glum
than ever.
“Oh, anything you’ve got,” replied the schoolmistress, flushing
slightly. The man moved slowly about, dropping the cakes from various
dishes one by one into a paper bag.
“How’s that sister o’ yours getting on?” he asked, as if he were
talking to the flour scoop.
“Whom do you mean?” snapped the schoolmistress.
“The youngest,” answered the stooping, pale-faced man, with a note of
sarcasm.
“Emma! Oh, she’s very well, thank you!” The schoolmistress was very
red, but she spoke with sharp, ironical defiance. The man grunted. Then
he handed her the bag and watched her out of the shop without bidding
her “Good afternoon”.
She had the whole length of the main street to traverse, a half-mile of
slow-stepping torture, with shame flushing over her neck. But she
carried her white bag with an appearance of steadfast unconcern. When
she turned into the field she seemed to droop a little. The wide valley
opened out from her, with the far woods withdrawing into twilight, and
away in the centre the great pit streaming its white smoke and chuffing
as the men were being turned up. A full, rose-coloured moon, like a
flamingo flying low under the far, dusky east, drew out of the mist. It
was beautiful, and it made her irritable sadness soften, diffuse.
Across the field, and she was at home. It was a new, substantial
cottage, built with unstinted hand, such a house as an old miner could
build himself out of his savings. In the rather small kitchen a woman
of dark, saturnine complexion sat nursing a baby in a long white gown;
a young woman of heavy, brutal cast stood at the table, cutting bread
and butter. She had a downcast, humble mien that sat unnaturally on
her, and was strangely irritating. She did not look round when her
sister entered. Hilda put down the bag of cakes and left the room, not
having spoken to Emma, nor to the baby, not to Mrs Carlin, who had come
in to help for the afternoon.
Almost immediately the father entered from the yard with a dustpan full
of coals. He was a large man, but he was going to pieces. As he passed
through, he gripped the door with his free hand to steady himself, but
turning, he lurched and swayed. He began putting the coals on the fire,
piece by piece. One lump fell from his hand and smashed on the white
hearth. Emma Rowbotham looked round, and began in a rough, loud voice
of anger: “Look at you!” Then she consciously moderated her tones.
“I’ll sweep it up in a minute—don’t you bother; you’ll only be going
head first into the fire.”
Her father bent down nevertheless to clear up the mess he had made,
saying, articulating his words loosely and slavering in his speech:
“The lousy bit of a thing, it slipped between my fingers like a fish.”
As he spoke he went tilting towards the fire. The dark-browed woman
cried out: he put his hand on the hot stove to save himself; Emma swung
round and dragged him off.
“Didn’t I tell you!” she cried roughly. “Now, have you burnt yourself?”
She held tight hold of the big man, and pushed him into his chair.
“What’s the matter?” cried a sharp voice from the other room. The
speaker appeared, a hard well-favoured woman of twenty-eight. “Emma,
don’t speak like that to father.” Then, in a tone not so cold, but just
as sharp: “Now, father, what have you been doing?”
Emma withdrew to her table sullenly.
“It’s nöwt,” said the old man, vainly protesting. “It’s nöwt at a’. Get
on wi’ what you’re doin’.”
“I’m afraid ’e’s burnt ’is ’and,” said the black-browed woman, speaking
of him with a kind of hard pity, as if he were a cumbersome child.
Bertha took the old man’s hand and looked at it, making a quick
tut-tutting noise of impatience.
“Emma, get that zinc ointment—and some white rag,” she commanded
sharply. The younger sister put down her loaf with the knife in it, and
went. To a sensitive observer, this obedience was more intolerable than
the most hateful discord. The dark woman bent over the baby and made
silent, gentle movements of motherliness to it. The little one smiled
and moved on her lap. It continued to move and twist.
“I believe this child’s hungry,” she said. “How long is it since he had
anything?”
“Just afore dinner,” said Emma dully.
“Good gracious!” exclaimed Bertha. “You needn’t starve the child now
you’ve got it. Once every two hours it ought to be fed, as I’ve told
you; and now it’s three. Take him, poor little mite—I’ll cut the
bread.” She bent and looked at the bonny baby. She could not help
herself: she smiled, and pressed its cheek with her finger, and nodded
to it, making little noises. Then she turned and took the loaf from her
sister. The woman rose and gave the child to its mother. Emma bent over
the little sucking mite. She hated it when she looked at it, and saw it
as a symbol, but when she felt it, her love was like fire in her blood.
“I should think ’e canna be comin’,” said the father uneasily, looking
up at the clock.
“Nonsense, father—the clock’s fast! It’s but half-past four! Don’t
fidget!” Bertha continued to cut the bread and butter.
“Open a tin of pears,” she said to the woman, in a much milder tone.
Then she went into the next room. As soon as she was gone, the old man
said again: “I should ha’e thought he’d ’a’ been ’ere by now, if he
means comin’.”
Emma, engrossed, did not answer. The father had ceased to consider her,
since she had become humbled.
“’E’ll come—’e’ll come!” assured the stranger.
A few minutes later Bertha hurried into the kitchen, taking off her
apron. The dog barked furiously. She opened the door, commanded the dog
to silence, and said: “He will be quiet now, Mr Kendal.”
“Thank you,” said a sonorous voice, and there was the sound of a
bicycle being propped against a wall. A clergyman entered, a big-boned,
thin, ugly man of nervous manner. He went straight to the father.
“Ah—how are you?” he asked musically, peering down on the great frame
of the miner, ruined by locomotor ataxy.
His voice was full of gentleness, but he seemed as if he could not see
distinctly, could not get things clear.
“Have you hurt your hand?” he said comfortingly, seeing the white rag.
“It wor nöwt but a pestered bit o’ coal as dropped, an’ I put my hand
on th’ hub. I thought tha worna commin’.”
The familiar ‘tha’, and the reproach, were unconscious retaliation on
the old man’s part. The minister smiled, half wistfully, half
indulgently. He was full of vague tenderness. Then he turned to the
young mother, who flushed sullenly because her dishonoured breast was
uncovered.
“How are _you_?” he asked, very softly and gently, as if she were ill
and he were mindful of her.
“I’m all right,” she replied, awkwardly taking his hand without rising,
hiding her face and the anger that rose in her.
“Yes—yes”—he peered down at the baby, which sucked with distended mouth
upon the firm breast. “Yes, yes.” He seemed lost in a dim musing.
Coming to, he shook hands unseeingly with the woman.
Presently they all went into the next room, the minister hesitating to
help his crippled old deacon.
“I can go by myself, thank yer,” testily replied the father.
Soon all were seated. Everybody was separated in feeling and isolated
at table. High tea was spread in the middle kitchen, a large, ugly room
kept for special occasions.
Hilda appeared last, and the clumsy, raw-boned clergyman rose to meet
her. He was afraid of this family, the well-to-do old collier, and the
brutal, self-willed children. But Hilda was queen among them. She was
the clever one, and had been to college. She felt responsible for the
keeping up of a high standard of conduct in all the members of the
family. There _was_ a difference between the Rowbothams and the common
collier folk. Woodbine Cottage was a superior house to most—and was
built in pride by the old man. She, Hilda, was a college-trained
schoolmistress; she meant to keep up the prestige of her house in spite
of blows.
She had put on a dress of green voile for this special occasion. But
she was very thin; her neck protruded painfully. The clergyman,
however, greeted her almost with reverence, and, with some assumption
of dignity, she sat down before the tray. At the far end of the table
sat the broken, massive frame of her father. Next to him was the
youngest daughter, nursing the restless baby. The minister sat between
Hilda and Bertha, hulking his bony frame uncomfortably.
There was a great spread on the table, of tinned fruits and tinned
salmon, ham and cakes. Miss Rowbotham kept a keen eye on everything:
she felt the importance of the occasion. The young mother who had given
rise to all this solemnity ate in sulky discomfort, snatching sullen
little smiles at her child, smiles which came, in spite of her, when
she felt its little limbs stirring vigorously on her lap. Bertha, sharp
and abrupt, was chiefly concerned with the baby. She scorned her
sister, and treated her like dirt. But the infant was a streak of light
to her. Miss Rowbotham concerned herself with the function and the
conversation. Her hands fluttered; she talked in little volleys
exceedingly nervous. Towards the end of the meal, there came a pause.
The old man wiped his mouth with his red handkerchief, then, his blue
eyes going fixed and staring, he began to speak, in a loose, slobbering
fashion, charging his words at the clergyman.
“Well, mester—we’n axed you to come her ter christen this childt, an’
you’n come, an’ I’m sure we’re very thankful. I can’t see lettin’ the
poor blessed childt miss baptizing, an’ they aren’t for goin’ to church
wi’t—” He seemed to lapse into a muse. “So,” he resumed, “we’v axed you
to come here to do the job. I’m not sayin’ as it’s not ’ard on us, it
is. I’m breakin’ up, an’ mother’s gone. I don’t like leavin’ a girl o’
mine in a situation like ’ers is, but what the Lord’s done, He’s done,
an’ it’s no matter murmuring.... There’s one thing to be thankful for,
an’ we _are_ thankful for it: they never need know the want of bread.”
Miss Rowbotham, the lady of the family, sat very stiff and pained
during this discourse. She was sensitive to so many things that she was
bewildered. She felt her young sister’s shame, then a kind of swift
protecting love for the baby, a feeling that included the mother; she
was at a loss before her father’s religious sentiment, and she felt and
resented bitterly the mark upon the family, against which the common
folk could lift their fingers. Still she winced from the sound of her
father’s words. It was a painful ordeal.
“It is hard for you,” began the clergyman in his soft, lingering,
unworldly voice. “It is hard for you today, but the Lord gives comfort
in His time. A man child is born unto us, therefore let us rejoice and
be glad. If sin has entered in among us, let us purify out hearts
before the Lord....”
He went on with his discourse. The young mother lifted the whimpering
infant, till its face was hid in her loose hair. She was hurt, and a
little glowering anger shone in her face. But nevertheless her fingers
clasped the body of the child beautifully. She was stupefied with anger
against this emotion let loose on her account.
Miss Bertha rose and went to the little kitchen, returning with water
in a china bowl. She placed it there among the tea-things.
“Well, we’re all ready,” said the old man, and the clergyman began to
read the service. Miss Bertha was godmother, the two men godfathers.
The old man sat with bent head. The scene became impressive. At last
Miss Bertha took the child and put it in the arms of the clergyman. He,
big and ugly, shone with a kind of unreal love. He had never mixed with
life, and women were all unliving, Biblical things to him. When he
asked for the name, the old man lifted his head fiercely. “Joseph
William, after me,” he said, almost out of breath.
“Joseph William, I baptize thee....” resounded the strange, full,
chanting voice of the clergyman. The baby was quite still.
“Let us pray!” It came with relief to them all. They knelt before their
chairs, all but the young mother, who bent and hid herself over her
baby. The clergyman began his hesitating, struggling prayer.
Just then heavy footsteps were heard coming up the path, ceasing at the
window. The young mother, glancing up, saw her brother, black in his
pit dirt, grinning in through the panes. His red mouth curved in a
sneer; his fair hair shone above his blackened skin. He caught the eye
of his sister and grinned. Then his black face disappeared. He had gone
on into the kitchen. The girl with the child sat still and anger filled
her heart. She herself hated now the praying clergyman and the whole
emotional business; she hated her brother bitterly. In anger and
bondage she sat and listened.
Suddenly her father began to pray. His familiar, loud, rambling voice
made her shut herself up and become even insentient. Folks said his
mind was weakening. She believed it to be true, and kept herself always
disconnected from him.
“We ask Thee, Lord,” the old man cried, “to look after this childt.
Fatherless he is. But what does the earthly father matter before Thee?
The childt is Thine, he is Thy childt. Lord, what father has a man but
Thee? Lord, when a man says he is a father, he is wrong from the first
word. For Thou art the Father, Lord. Lord, take away from us the
conceit that our children are ours. Lord, Thou art Father of this
childt as is fatherless here. O God, Thou bring him up. For I have
stood between Thee and my children; I’ve had _my_ way with them, Lord;
I’ve stood between Thee and my children; I’ve cut ’em off from Thee
because they were mine. And they’ve grown twisted, because of me. Who
is their father, Lord, but Thee? But I put myself in the way, they’ve
been plants under a stone, because of me. Lord, if it hadn’t been for
me, they might ha’ been trees in the sunshine. Let me own it, Lord,
I’ve done ’em mischief. It could ha’ been better if they’d never known
no father. No man is a father, Lord: only Thou art. They can never grow
beyond Thee, but I hampered them. Lift ’em up again, and undo what I’ve
done to my children. And let this young childt be like a willow tree
beside the waters, with no father but Thee, O God. Aye an’ I wish it
had been so with my children, that they’d had no father but Thee. For
I’ve been like a stone upon them, and they rise up and curse me in
their wickedness. But let me go, an’ lift Thou them up, Lord....”
The minister, unaware of the feelings of a father, knelt in trouble,
hearing without understanding the special language of fatherhood. Miss
Rowbotham alone felt and understood a little. Her heart began to
flutter; she was in pain. The two younger daughters kneeled unhearing,
stiffened and impervious. Bertha was thinking of the baby; and the
younger mother thought of the father of her child, whom she hated.
There was a clatter in the scullery. There the youngest son made as
much noise as he could, pouring out the water for his wash, muttering
in deep anger:
“Blortin’, slaverin’ old fool!”
And while the praying of his father continued, his heart was burning
with rage. On the table was a paper bag. He picked it up and read,
“John Berryman—Bread, Pastries, etc.” Then he grinned with a grimace.
The father of the baby was baker’s man at Berryman’s. The prayer went
on in the middle kitchen. Laurie Rowbotham gathered together the mouth
of the bag, inflated it, and burst it with his fist. There was a loud
report. He grinned to himself. But he writhed at the same time with
shame and fear of his father.
The father broke off from his prayer; the party shuffled to their feet.
The young mother went into the scullery.
“What art doin’, fool?” she said.
The collier youth tipped the baby under the chin, singing:
“Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker’s man,
Bake me a cake as fast as you can....”
The mother snatched the child away. “Shut thy mouth,” she said, the
colour coming into her cheek.
“Prick it and stick it and mark it with P,
And put it i’ th’ oven for baby an’ me....”
He grinned, showing a grimy, and jeering and unpleasant red mouth and
white teeth.
“I s’ll gi’e thee a dab ower th’ mouth,” said the mother of the baby
grimly. He began to sing again, and she struck out at him.
“Now what’s to do?” said the father, staggering in.
The youth began to sing again. His sister stood sullen and furious.
“Why, does _that_ upset you?” asked the eldest Miss Rowbotham, sharply,
of Emma the mother. “Good gracious, it hasn’t improved your temper.”
Miss Bertha came in, and took the bonny baby.
The father sat big and unheeding in his chair, his eyes vacant, his
physique wrecked. He let them do as they would, he fell to pieces. And
yet some power, involuntary, like a curse, remained in him. The very
ruin of him was like a lodestone that held them in its control. The
wreck of him still dominated the house, in his dissolution even he
compelled their being. They had never lived; his life, his will had
always been upon them and contained them. They were only
half-individuals.
The day after the christening he staggered in at the doorway declaring,
in a loud voice, with joy in life still: “The daisies light up the
earth, they clap their hands in multitudes, in praise of the morning.”
And his daughters shrank, sullen.
Odour of Chrysanthemums
I
The small locomotive engine, Number 4, came clanking, stumbling down
from Selston with seven full waggons. It appeared round the corner with
loud threats of speed, but the colt that it startled from among the
gorse, which still flickered indistinctly in the raw afternoon,
outdistanced it at a canter. A woman, walking up the railway line to
Underwood, drew back into the hedge, held her basket aside, and watched
the footplate of the engine advancing. The trucks thumped heavily past,
one by one, with slow inevitable movement, as she stood insignificantly
trapped between the jolting black waggons and the hedge; then they
curved away towards the coppice where the withered oak leaves dropped
noiselessly, while the birds, pulling at the scarlet hips beside the
track, made off into the dusk that had already crept into the spinney.
In the open, the smoke from the engine sank and cleaved to the rough
grass. The fields were dreary and forsaken, and in the marshy strip
that led to the whimsey, a reedy pit-pond, the fowls had already
abandoned their run among the alders, to roost in the tarred
fowl-house. The pit-bank loomed up beyond the pond, flames like red
sores licking its ashy sides, in the afternoon’s stagnant light. Just
beyond rose the tapering chimneys and the clumsy black headstocks of
Brinsley Colliery. The two wheels were spinning fast up against the
sky, and the winding-engine rapped out its little spasms. The miners
were being turned up.
The engine whistled as it came into the wide bay of railway lines
beside the colliery, where rows of trucks stood in harbour.
Miners, single, trailing and in groups, passed like shadows diverging
home. At the edge of the ribbed level of sidings squat a low cottage,
three steps down from the cinder track. A large bony vine clutched at
the house, as if to claw down the tiled roof. Round the bricked yard
grew a few wintry primroses. Beyond, the long garden sloped down to a
bush-covered brook course. There were some twiggy apple trees,
winter-crack trees, and ragged cabbages. Beside the path hung
dishevelled pink chrysanthemums, like pink cloths hung on bushes. A
woman came stooping out of the felt-covered fowl-house, half-way down
the garden. She closed and padlocked the door, then drew herself erect,
having brushed some bits from her white apron.
She was a tall woman of imperious mien, handsome, with definite black
eyebrows. Her smooth black hair was parted exactly. For a few moments
she stood steadily watching the miners as they passed along the
railway: then she turned towards the brook course. Her face was calm
and set, her mouth was closed with disillusionment. After a moment she
called:
“John!” There was no answer. She waited, and then said distinctly:
“Where are you?”
“Here!” replied a child’s sulky voice from among the bushes. The woman
looked piercingly through the dusk.
“Are you at that brook?” she asked sternly.
For answer the child showed himself before the raspberry-canes that
rose like whips. He was a small, sturdy boy of five. He stood quite
still, defiantly.
“Oh!” said the mother, conciliated. “I thought you were down at that
wet brook—and you remember what I told you——”
The boy did not move or answer.
“Come, come on in,” she said more gently, “it’s getting dark. There’s
your grandfather’s engine coming down the line!”
The lad advanced slowly, with resentful, taciturn movement. He was
dressed in trousers and waistcoat of cloth that was too thick and hard
for the size of the garments. They were evidently cut down from a man’s
clothes.
As they went slowly towards the house he tore at the ragged wisps of
chrysanthemums and dropped the petals in handfuls along the path.
“Don’t do that—it does look nasty,” said his mother. He refrained, and
she, suddenly pitiful, broke off a twig with three or four wan flowers
and held them against her face. When mother and son reached the yard
her hand hesitated, and instead of laying the flower aside, she pushed
it in her apron-band. The mother and son stood at the foot of the three
steps looking across the bay of lines at the passing home of the
miners. The trundle of the small train was imminent. Suddenly the
engine loomed past the house and came to a stop opposite the gate.
The engine-driver, a short man with round grey beard, leaned out of the
cab high above the woman.
“Have you got a cup of tea?” he said in a cheery, hearty fashion.
It was her father. She went in, saying she would mash. Directly, she
returned.
“I didn’t come to see you on Sunday,” began the little grey-bearded
man.
“I didn’t expect you,” said his daughter.
The engine-driver winced; then, reassuming his cheery, airy manner, he
said:
“Oh, have you heard then? Well, and what do you think——?”
“I think it is soon enough,” she replied.
At her brief censure the little man made an impatient gesture, and said
coaxingly, yet with dangerous coldness:
“Well, what’s a man to do? It’s no sort of life for a man of my years,
to sit at my own hearth like a stranger. And if I’m going to marry
again it may as well be soon as late—what does it matter to anybody?”
The woman did not reply, but turned and went into the house. The man in
the engine-cab stood assertive, till she returned with a cup of tea and
a piece of bread and butter on a plate. She went up the steps and stood
near the footplate of the hissing engine.
“You needn’t ’a’ brought me bread an’ butter,” said her father. “But a
cup of tea”—he sipped appreciatively—“it’s very nice.” He sipped for a
moment or two, then: “I hear as Walter’s got another bout on,” he said.
“When hasn’t he?” said the woman bitterly.
“I heered tell of him in the ‘Lord Nelson’ braggin’ as he was going to
spend that b—— afore he went: half a sovereign that was.”
“When?” asked the woman.
“A’ Sat’day night—I know that’s true.”
“Very likely,” she laughed bitterly. “He gives me twenty-three
shillings.”
“Aye, it’s a nice thing, when a man can do nothing with his money but
make a beast of himself!” said the grey-whiskered man. The woman turned
her head away. Her father swallowed the last of his tea and handed her
the cup.
“Aye,” he sighed, wiping his mouth. “It’s a settler, it is——”
He put his hand on the lever. The little engine strained and groaned,
and the train rumbled towards the crossing. The woman again looked
across the metals. Darkness was settling over the spaces of the railway
and trucks: the miners, in grey sombre groups, were still passing home.
The winding-engine pulsed hurriedly, with brief pauses. Elizabeth Bates
looked at the dreary flow of men, then she went indoors. Her husband
did not come.
The kitchen was small and full of firelight; red coals piled glowing up
the chimney mouth. All the life of the room seemed in the white, warm
hearth and the steel fender reflecting the red fire. The cloth was laid
for tea; cups glinted in the shadows. At the back, where the lowest
stairs protruded into the room, the boy sat struggling with a knife and
a piece of whitewood. He was almost hidden in the shadow. It was
half-past four. They had but to await the father’s coming to begin tea.
As the mother watched her son’s sullen little struggle with the wood,
she saw herself in his silence and pertinacity; she saw the father in
her child’s indifference to all but himself. She seemed to be occupied
by her husband. He had probably gone past his home, slunk past his own
door, to drink before he came in, while his dinner spoiled and wasted
in waiting. She glanced at the clock, then took the potatoes to strain
them in the yard. The garden and fields beyond the brook were closed in
uncertain darkness. When she rose with the saucepan, leaving the drain
steaming into the night behind her, she saw the yellow lamps were lit
along the high road that went up the hill away beyond the space of the
railway lines and the field.
Then again she watched the men trooping home, fewer now and fewer.
Indoors the fire was sinking and the room was dark red. The woman put
her saucepan on the hob, and set a batter pudding near the mouth of the
oven. Then she stood unmoving. Directly, gratefully, came quick young
steps to the door. Someone hung on the latch a moment, then a little
girl entered and began pulling off her outdoor things, dragging a mass
of curls, just ripening from gold to brown, over her eyes with her hat.
Her mother chid her for coming late from school, and said she would
have to keep her at home the dark winter days.
“Why, mother, it’s hardly a bit dark yet. The lamp’s not lighted, and
my father’s not home.”
“No, he isn’t. But it’s a quarter to five! Did you see anything of
him?”
The child became serious. She looked at her mother with large, wistful
blue eyes.
“No, mother, I’ve never seen him. Why? Has he come up an’ gone past, to
Old Brinsley? He hasn’t, mother, ’cos I never saw him.”
“He’d watch that,” said the mother bitterly, “he’d take care as you
didn’t see him. But you may depend upon it, he’s seated in the ‘Prince
o’ Wales’. He wouldn’t be this late.”
The girl looked at her mother piteously.
“Let’s have our teas, mother, should we?” said she.
The mother called John to table. She opened the door once more and
looked out across the darkness of the lines. All was deserted: she
could not hear the winding-engines.
“Perhaps,” she said to herself, “he’s stopped to get some ripping
done.”
They sat down to tea. John, at the end of the table near the door, was
almost lost in the darkness. Their faces were hidden from each other.
The girl crouched against the fender slowly moving a thick piece of
bread before the fire. The lad, his face a dusky mark on the shadow,
sat watching her who was transfigured in the red glow.
“I do think it’s beautiful to look in the fire,” said the child.
“Do you?” said her mother. “Why?”
“It’s so red, and full of little caves—and it feels so nice, and you
can fair smell it.”
“It’ll want mending directly,” replied her mother, “and then if your
father comes he’ll carry on and say there never is a fire when a man
comes home sweating from the pit. A public-house is always warm
enough.”
There was silence till the boy said complainingly: “Make haste, our
Annie.”
“Well, I am doing! I can’t make the fire do it no faster, can I?”
“She keeps wafflin’ it about so’s to make ’er slow,” grumbled the boy.
“Don’t have such an evil imagination, child,” replied the mother.
Soon the room was busy in the darkness with the crisp sound of
crunching. The mother ate very little. She drank her tea determinedly,
and sat thinking. When she rose her anger was evident in the stern
unbending of her head. She looked at the pudding in the fender, and
broke out:
“It is a scandalous thing as a man can’t even come home to his dinner!
If it’s crozzled up to a cinder I don’t see why I should care. Past his
very door he goes to get to a public-house, and here I sit with his
dinner waiting for him——”
She went out. As she dropped piece after piece of coal on the red fire,
the shadows fell on the walls, till the room was almost in total
darkness.
“I canna see,” grumbled the invisible John. In spite of herself, the
mother laughed.
“You know the way to your mouth,” she said. She set the dustpan outside
the door. When she came again like a shadow on the hearth, the lad
repeated, complaining sulkily:
“I canna see.”
“Good gracious!” cried the mother irritably, “you’re as bad as your
father if it’s a bit dusk!”
Nevertheless she took a paper spill from a sheaf on the mantelpiece and
proceeded to light the lamp that hung from the ceiling in the middle of
the room. As she reached up, her figure displayed itself just rounding
with maternity.
“Oh, mother——!” exclaimed the girl.
“What?” said the woman, suspended in the act of putting the lamp glass
over the flame. The copper reflector shone handsomely on her, as she
stood with uplifted arm, turning to face her daughter.
“You’ve got a flower in your apron!” said the child, in a little
rapture at this unusual event.
“Goodness me!” exclaimed the woman, relieved. “One would think the
house was afire.” She replaced the glass and waited a moment before
turning up the wick. A pale shadow was seen floating vaguely on the
floor.
“Let me smell!” said the child, still rapturously, coming forward and
putting her face to her mother’s waist.
“Go along, silly!” said the mother, turning up the lamp. The light
revealed their suspense so that the woman felt it almost unbearable.
Annie was still bending at her waist. Irritably, the mother took the
flowers out from her apron-band.
“Oh, mother—don’t take them out!” Annie cried, catching her hand and
trying to replace the sprig.
“Such nonsense!” said the mother, turning away. The child put the pale
chrysanthemums to her lips, murmuring:
“Don’t they smell beautiful!”
Her mother gave a short laugh.
“No,” she said, “not to me. It was chrysanthemums when I married him,
and chrysanthemums when you were born, and the first time they ever
brought him home drunk, he’d got brown chrysanthemums in his
button-hole.”
She looked at the children. Their eyes and their parted lips were
wondering. The mother sat rocking in silence for some time. Then she
looked at the clock.
“Twenty minutes to six!” In a tone of fine bitter carelessness she
continued: “Eh, he’ll not come now till they bring him. There he’ll
stick! But he needn’t come rolling in here in his pit-dirt, for _I_
won’t wash him. He can lie on the floor—— Eh, what a fool I’ve been,
what a fool! And this is what I came here for, to this dirty hole, rats
and all, for him to slink past his very door. Twice last week—he’s
begun now——”
She silenced herself, and rose to clear the table.
While for an hour or more the children played, subduedly intent,
fertile of imagination, united in fear of the mother’s wrath, and in
dread of their father’s home-coming, Mrs Bates sat in her rocking-chair
making a ‘singlet’ of thick cream-coloured flannel, which gave a dull
wounded sound as she tore off the grey edge. She worked at her sewing
with energy, listening to the children, and her anger wearied itself,
lay down to rest, opening its eyes from time to time and steadily
watching, its ears raised to listen. Sometimes even her anger quailed
and shrank, and the mother suspended her sewing, tracing the footsteps
that thudded along the sleepers outside; she would lift her head
sharply to bid the children ‘hush’, but she recovered herself in time,
and the footsteps went past the gate, and the children were not flung
out of their playing world.
But at last Annie sighed, and gave in. She glanced at her waggon of
slippers, and loathed the game. She turned plaintively to her mother.
“Mother!”—but she was inarticulate.
John crept out like a frog from under the sofa. His mother glanced up.
“Yes,” she said, “just look at those shirt-sleeves!”
The boy held them out to survey them, saying nothing. Then somebody
called in a hoarse voice away down the line, and suspense bristled in
the room, till two people had gone by outside, talking.
“It is time for bed,” said the mother.
“My father hasn’t come,” wailed Annie plaintively. But her mother was
primed with courage.
“Never mind. They’ll bring him when he does come—like a log.” She meant
there would be no scene. “And he may sleep on the floor till he wakes
himself. I know he’ll not go to work tomorrow after this!”
The children had their hands and faces wiped with a flannel. They were
very quiet. When they had put on their nightdresses, they said their
prayers, the boy mumbling. The mother looked down at them, at the brown
silken bush of intertwining curls in the nape of the girl’s neck, at
the little black head of the lad, and her heart burst with anger at
their father who caused all three such distress. The children hid their
faces in her skirts for comfort.
When Mrs Bates came down, the room was strangely empty, with a tension
of expectancy. She took up her sewing and stitched for some time
without raising her head. Meantime her anger was tinged with fear.
II
The clock struck eight and she rose suddenly, dropping her sewing on
her chair. She went to the stairfoot door, opened it, listening. Then
she went out, locking the door behind her.
Something scuffled in the yard, and she started, though she knew it was
only the rats with which the place was overrun. The night was very
dark. In the great bay of railway lines, bulked with trucks, there was
no trace of light, only away back she could see a few yellow lamps at
the pit-top, and the red smear of the burning pit-bank on the night.
She hurried along the edge of the track, then, crossing the converging
lines, came to the stile by the white gates, whence she emerged on the
road. Then the fear which had led her shrank. People were walking up to
New Brinsley; she saw the lights in the houses; twenty yards further on
were the broad windows of the ‘Prince of Wales’, very warm and bright,
and the loud voices of men could be heard distinctly. What a fool she
had been to imagine that anything had happened to him! He was merely
drinking over there at the ‘Prince of Wales’. She faltered. She had
never yet been to fetch him, and she never would go. So she continued
her walk towards the long straggling line of houses, standing blank on
the highway. She entered a passage between the dwellings.
“Mr Rigley?—Yes! Did you want him? No, he’s not in at this minute.”
The raw-boned woman leaned forward from her dark scullery and peered at
the other, upon whom fell a dim light through the blind of the kitchen
window.
“Is it Mrs Bates?” she asked in a tone tinged with respect.
“Yes. I wondered if your Master was at home. Mine hasn’t come yet.”
“’Asn’t ’e! Oh, Jack’s been ’ome an’ ’ad ’is dinner an’ gone out. ’E’s
just gone for ’alf an hour afore bedtime. Did you call at the ‘Prince
of Wales’?”
“No——”
“No, you didn’t like——! It’s not very nice.” The other woman was
indulgent. There was an awkward pause. “Jack never said nothink
about—about your Mester,” she said.
“No!—I expect he’s stuck in there!”
Elizabeth Bates said this bitterly, and with recklessness. She knew
that the woman across the yard was standing at her door listening, but
she did not care. As she turned:
“Stop a minute! I’ll just go an’ ask Jack if e’ knows anythink,” said
Mrs Rigley.
“Oh, no—I wouldn’t like to put——!”
“Yes, I will, if you’ll just step inside an’ see as th’ childer doesn’t
come downstairs and set theirselves afire.”
Elizabeth Bates, murmuring a remonstrance, stepped inside. The other
woman apologized for the state of the room.
The kitchen needed apology. There were little frocks and trousers and
childish undergarments on the squab and on the floor, and a litter of
playthings everywhere. On the black American cloth of the table were
pieces of bread and cake, crusts, slops, and a teapot with cold tea.
“Eh, ours is just as bad,” said Elizabeth Bates, looking at the woman,
not at the house. Mrs Rigley put a shawl over her head and hurried out,
saying:
“I shanna be a minute.”
The other sat, noting with faint disapproval the general untidiness of
the room. Then she fell to counting the shoes of various sizes
scattered over the floor. There were twelve. She sighed and said to
herself, “No wonder!”—glancing at the litter. There came the scratching
of two pairs of feet on the yard, and the Rigleys entered. Elizabeth
Bates rose. Rigley was a big man, with very large bones. His head
looked particularly bony. Across his temple was a blue scar, caused by
a wound got in the pit, a wound in which the coal-dust remained blue
like tattooing.
“Asna ’e come whoam yit?” asked the man, without any form of greeting,
but with deference and sympathy. “I couldna say wheer he is—’e’s non
ower theer!”—he jerked his head to signify the ‘Prince of Wales’.
“’E’s ’appen gone up to th’ ‘Yew’,” said Mrs Rigley.
There was another pause. Rigley had evidently something to get off his
mind:
“Ah left ’im finishin’ a stint,” he began. “Loose-all ’ad bin gone
about ten minutes when we com’n away, an’ I shouted, ‘Are ter comin’,
Walt?’ an’ ’e said, ‘Go on, Ah shanna be but a’ef a minnit,’ so we
com’n ter th’ bottom, me an’ Bowers, thinkin’ as ’e wor just behint,
an’ ’ud come up i’ th’ next bantle——”
He stood perplexed, as if answering a charge of deserting his mate.
Elizabeth Bates, now again certain of disaster, hastened to reassure
him:
“I expect ’e’s gone up to th’ ‘Yew Tree’, as you say. It’s not the
first time. I’ve fretted myself into a fever before now. He’ll come
home when they carry him.”
“Ay, isn’t it too bad!” deplored the other woman.
“I’ll just step up to Dick’s an’ see if ’e _is_ theer,” offered the
man, afraid of appearing alarmed, afraid of taking liberties.
“Oh, I wouldn’t think of bothering you that far,” said Elizabeth Bates,
with emphasis, but he knew she was glad of his offer.
As they stumbled up the entry, Elizabeth Bates heard Rigley’s wife run
across the yard and open her neighbour’s door. At this, suddenly all
the blood in her body seemed to switch away from her heart.
“Mind!” warned Rigley. “Ah’ve said many a time as Ah’d fill up them
ruts in this entry, sumb’dy ’ll be breakin’ their legs yit.”
She recovered herself and walked quickly along with the miner.
“I don’t like leaving the children in bed, and nobody in the house,”
she said.
“No, you dunna!” he replied courteously. They were soon at the gate of
the cottage.
“Well, I shanna be many minnits. Dunna you be frettin’ now, ’e’ll be
all right,” said the butty.
“Thank you very much, Mr Rigley,” she replied.
“You’re welcome!” he stammered, moving away. “I shanna be many
minnits.”
The house was quiet. Elizabeth Bates took off her hat and shawl, and
rolled back the rug. When she had finished, she sat down. It was a few
minutes past nine. She was startled by the rapid chuff of the
winding-engine at the pit, and the sharp whirr of the brakes on the
rope as it descended. Again she felt the painful sweep of her blood,
and she put her hand to her side, saying aloud, “Good gracious!—it’s
only the nine o’clock deputy going down,” rebuking herself.
She sat still, listening. Half an hour of this, and she was wearied
out.
“What am I working myself up like this for?” she said pitiably to
herself, “I s’ll only be doing myself some damage.”
She took out her sewing again.
At a quarter to ten there were footsteps. One person! She watched for
the door to open. It was an elderly woman, in a black bonnet and a
black woollen shawl—his mother. She was about sixty years old, pale,
with blue eyes, and her face all wrinkled and lamentable. She shut the
door and turned to her daughter-in-law peevishly.
“Eh, Lizzie, whatever shall we do, whatever shall we do!” she cried.
Elizabeth drew back a little, sharply.
“What is it, mother?” she said.
The elder woman seated herself on the sofa.
“I don’t know, child, I can’t tell you!”—she shook her head slowly.
Elizabeth sat watching her, anxious and vexed.
“I don’t know,” replied the grandmother, sighing very deeply. “There’s
no end to my troubles, there isn’t. The things I’ve gone through, I’m
sure it’s enough——!” She wept without wiping her eyes, the tears
running.
“But, mother,” interrupted Elizabeth, “what do you mean? What is it?”
The grandmother slowly wiped her eyes. The fountains of her tears were
stopped by Elizabeth’s directness. She wiped her eyes slowly.
“Poor child! Eh, you poor thing!” she moaned. “I don’t know what we’re
going to do, I don’t—and you as you are—it’s a thing, it is indeed!”
Elizabeth waited.
“Is he dead?” she asked, and at the words her heart swung violently,
though she felt a slight flush of shame at the ultimate extravagance of
the question. Her words sufficiently frightened the old lady, almost
brought her to herself.
“Don’t say so, Elizabeth! We’ll hope it’s not as bad as that; no, may
the Lord spare us that, Elizabeth. Jack Rigley came just as I was
sittin’ down to a glass afore going to bed, an’ ’e said, ‘’Appen you’ll
go down th’ line, Mrs Bates. Walt’s had an accident. ’Appen you’ll go
an’ sit wi’ ’er till we can get him home.’ I hadn’t time to ask him a
word afore he was gone. An’ I put my bonnet on an’ come straight down,
Lizzie. I thought to myself, ‘Eh, that poor blessed child, if anybody
should come an’ tell her of a sudden, there’s no knowin’ what’ll ’appen
to ’er.’ You mustn’t let it upset you, Lizzie—or you know what to
expect. How long is it, six months—or is it five, Lizzie? Ay!”—the old
woman shook her head—“time slips on, it slips on! Ay!”
Elizabeth’s thoughts were busy elsewhere. If he was killed—would she be
able to manage on the little pension and what she could earn?—she
counted up rapidly. If he was hurt—they wouldn’t take him to the
hospital—how tiresome he would be to nurse!—but perhaps she’d be able
to get him away from the drink and his hateful ways. She would—while he
was ill. The tears offered to come to her eyes at the picture. But what
sentimental luxury was this she was beginning?—She turned to consider
the children. At any rate she was absolutely necessary for them. They
were her business.
“Ay!” repeated the old woman, “it seems but a week or two since he
brought me his first wages. Ay—he was a good lad, Elizabeth, he was, in
his way. I don’t know why he got to be such a trouble, I don’t. He was
a happy lad at home, only full of spirits. But there’s no mistake he’s
been a handful of trouble, he has! I hope the Lord’ll spare him to mend
his ways. I hope so, I hope so. You’ve had a sight o’ trouble with him,
Elizabeth, you have indeed. But he was a jolly enough lad wi’ me, he
was, I can assure you. I don’t know how it is....”
The old woman continued to muse aloud, a monotonous irritating sound,
while Elizabeth thought concentratedly, startled once, when she heard
the winding-engine chuff quickly, and the brakes skirr with a shriek.
Then she heard the engine more slowly, and the brakes made no sound.
The old woman did not notice. Elizabeth waited in suspense. The
mother-in-law talked, with lapses into silence.
“But he wasn’t your son, Lizzie, an’ it makes a difference. Whatever he
was, I remember him when he was little, an’ I learned to understand him
and to make allowances. You’ve got to make allowances for them——”
It was half-past ten, and the old woman was saying: “But it’s trouble
from beginning to end; you’re never too old for trouble, never too old
for that——” when the gate banged back, and there were heavy feet on the
steps.
“I’ll go, Lizzie, let me go,” cried the old woman, rising. But
Elizabeth was at the door. It was a man in pit-clothes.
“They’re bringin’ ’im, Missis,” he said. Elizabeth’s heart halted a
moment. Then it surged on again, almost suffocating her.
“Is he—is it bad?” she asked.
The man turned away, looking at the darkness:
“The doctor says ’e’d been dead hours. ’E saw ’im i’ th’ lamp-cabin.”
The old woman, who stood just behind Elizabeth, dropped into a chair,
and folded her hands, crying: “Oh, my boy, my boy!”
“Hush!” said Elizabeth, with a sharp twitch of a frown. “Be still,
mother, don’t waken th’ children: I wouldn’t have them down for
anything!”
The old woman moaned softly, rocking herself. The man was drawing away.
Elizabeth took a step forward.
“How was it?” she asked.
“Well, I couldn’t say for sure,” the man replied, very ill at ease. “’E
wor finishin’ a stint an’ th’ butties ’ad gone, an’ a lot o’ stuff come
down atop ’n ’im.”
“And crushed him?” cried the widow, with a shudder.
“No,” said the man, “it fell at th’ back of ’im. ’E wor under th’ face,
an’ it niver touched ’im. It shut ’im in. It seems ’e wor smothered.”
Elizabeth shrank back. She heard the old woman behind her cry:
“What?—what did ’e say it was?”
The man replied, more loudly: “’E wor smothered!”
Then the old woman wailed aloud, and this relieved Elizabeth.
“Oh, mother,” she said, putting her hand on the old woman, “don’t waken
th’ children, don’t waken th’ children.”
She wept a little, unknowing, while the old mother rocked herself and
moaned. Elizabeth remembered that they were bringing him home, and she
must be ready. “They’ll lay him in the parlour,” she said to herself,
standing a moment pale and perplexed.
Then she lighted a candle and went into the tiny room. The air was cold
and damp, but she could not make a fire, there was no fireplace. She
set down the candle and looked round. The candle-light glittered on the
lustre-glasses, on the two vases that held some of the pink
chrysanthemums, and on the dark mahogany. There was a cold, deathly
smell of chrysanthemums in the room. Elizabeth stood looking at the
flowers. She turned away, and calculated whether there would be room to
lay him on the floor, between the couch and the chiffonier. She pushed
the chairs aside. There would be room to lay him down and to step round
him. Then she fetched the old red tablecloth, and another old cloth,
spreading them down to save her bit of carpet. She shivered on leaving
the parlour; so, from the dresser-drawer she took a clean shirt and put
it at the fire to air. All the time her mother-in-law was rocking
herself in the chair and moaning.
“You’ll have to move from there, mother,” said Elizabeth. “They’ll be
bringing him in. Come in the rocker.”
The old mother rose mechanically, and seated herself by the fire,
continuing to lament. Elizabeth went into the pantry for another
candle, and there, in the little penthouse under the naked tiles, she
heard them coming. She stood still in the pantry doorway, listening.
She heard them pass the end of the house, and come awkwardly down the
three steps, a jumble of shuffling footsteps and muttering voices. The
old woman was silent. The men were in the yard.
Then Elizabeth heard Matthews, the manager of the pit, say: “You go in
first, Jim. Mind!”
The door came open, and the two women saw a collier backing into the
room, holding one end of a stretcher, on which they could see the
nailed pit-boots of the dead man. The two carriers halted, the man at
the head stooping to the lintel of the door.
“Wheer will you have him?” asked the manager, a short, white-bearded
man.
Elizabeth roused herself and came from the pantry carrying the
unlighted candle.
“In the parlour,” she said.
“In there, Jim!” pointed the manager, and the carriers backed round
into the tiny room. The coat with which they had covered the body fell
off as they awkwardly turned through the two doorways, and the women
saw their man, naked to the waist, lying stripped for work. The old
woman began to moan in a low voice of horror.
“Lay th’ stretcher at th’ side,” snapped the manager, “an’ put ’im on
th’ cloths. Mind now, mind! Look you now——!”
One of the men had knocked off a vase of chrysanthemums. He stared
awkwardly, then they set down the stretcher. Elizabeth did not look at
her husband. As soon as she could get in the room, she went and picked
up the broken vase and the flowers.
“Wait a minute!” she said.
The three men waited in silence while she mopped up the water with a
duster.
“Eh, what a job, what a job, to be sure!” the manager was saying,
rubbing his brow with trouble and perplexity. “Never knew such a thing
in my life, never! He’d no business to ha’ been left. I never knew such
a thing in my life! Fell over him clean as a whistle, an’ shut him in.
Not four foot of space, there wasn’t—yet it scarce bruised him.”
He looked down at the dead man, lying prone, half naked, all grimed
with coal-dust.
“‘’Sphyxiated,’ the doctor said. It _is_ the most terrible job I’ve
ever known. Seems as if it was done o’ purpose. Clean over him, an’
shut ’im in, like a mouse-trap”—he made a sharp, descending gesture
with his hand.
The colliers standing by jerked aside their heads in hopeless comment.
The horror of the thing bristled upon them all.
Then they heard the girl’s voice upstairs calling shrilly: “Mother,
mother—who is it? Mother, who is it?”
Elizabeth hurried to the foot of the stairs and opened the door:
“Go to sleep!” she commanded sharply. “What are you shouting about? Go
to sleep at once—there’s nothing——”
Then she began to mount the stairs. They could hear her on the boards,
and on the plaster floor of the little bedroom. They could hear her
distinctly:
“What’s the matter now?—what’s the matter with you, silly thing?”—her
voice was much agitated, with an unreal gentleness.
“I thought it was some men come,” said the plaintive voice of the
child. “Has he come?”
“Yes, they’ve brought him. There’s nothing to make a fuss about. Go to
sleep now, like a good child.”
They could hear her voice in the bedroom, they waited whilst she
covered the children under the bedclothes.
“Is he drunk?” asked the girl, timidly, faintly.
“No! No—he’s not! He—he’s asleep.”
“Is he asleep downstairs?”
“Yes—and don’t make a noise.”
There was silence for a moment, then the men heard the frightened child
again:
“What’s that noise?”
“It’s nothing, I tell you, what are you bothering for?”
The noise was the grandmother moaning. She was oblivious of everything,
sitting on her chair rocking and moaning. The manager put his hand on
her arm and bade her “Sh—sh!!”
The old woman opened her eyes and looked at him. She was shocked by
this interruption, and seemed to wonder.
“What time is it?”—the plaintive thin voice of the child, sinking back
unhappily into sleep, asked this last question.
“Ten o’clock,” answered the mother more softly. Then she must have bent
down and kissed the children.
Matthews beckoned to the men to come away. They put on their caps and
took up the stretcher. Stepping over the body, they tiptoed out of the
house. None of them spoke till they were far from the wakeful children.
When Elizabeth came down she found her mother alone on the parlour
floor, leaning over the dead man, the tears dropping on him.
“We must lay him out,” the wife said. She put on the kettle, then
returning knelt at the feet, and began to unfasten the knotted leather
laces. The room was clammy and dim with only one candle, so that she
had to bend her face almost to the floor. At last she got off the heavy
boots and put them away.
“You must help me now,” she whispered to the old woman. Together they
stripped the man.
When they arose, saw him lying in the naïve dignity of death, the women
stood arrested in fear and respect. For a few moments they remained
still, looking down, the old mother whimpering. Elizabeth felt
countermanded. She saw him, how utterly inviolable he lay in himself.
She had nothing to do with him. She could not accept it. Stooping, she
laid her hand on him, in claim. He was still warm, for the mine was hot
where he had died. His mother had his face between her hands, and was
murmuring incoherently. The old tears fell in succession as drops from
wet leaves; the mother was not weeping, merely her tears flowed.
Elizabeth embraced the body of her husband, with cheek and lips. She
seemed to be listening, inquiring, trying to get some connection. But
she could not. She was driven away. He was impregnable.
She rose, went into the kitchen, where she poured warm water into a
bowl, brought soap and flannel and a soft towel.
“I must wash him,” she said.
Then the old mother rose stiffly, and watched Elizabeth as she
carefully washed his face, carefully brushing the big blond moustache
from his mouth with the flannel. She was afraid with a bottomless fear,
so she ministered to him. The old woman, jealous, said:
“Let me wipe him!”—and she kneeled on the other side drying slowly as
Elizabeth washed, her big black bonnet sometimes brushing the dark head
of her daughter. They worked thus in silence for a long time. They
never forgot it was death, and the touch of the man’s dead body gave
them strange emotions, different in each of the women; a great dread
possessed them both, the mother felt the lie was given to her womb, she
was denied; the wife felt the utter isolation of the human soul, the
child within her was a weight apart from her.
At last it was finished. He was a man of handsome body, and his face
showed no traces of drink. He was blonde, full-fleshed, with fine
limbs. But he was dead.
“Bless him,” whispered his mother, looking always at his face, and
speaking out of sheer terror. “Dear lad—bless him!” She spoke in a
faint, sibilant ecstasy of fear and mother love.
Elizabeth sank down again to the floor, and put her face against his
neck, and trembled and shuddered. But she had to draw away again. He
was dead, and her living flesh had no place against his. A great dread
and weariness held her: she was so unavailing. Her life was gone like
this.
“White as milk he is, clear as a twelve-month baby, bless him, the
darling!” the old mother murmured to herself. “Not a mark on him, clear
and clean and white, beautiful as ever a child was made,” she murmured
with pride. Elizabeth kept her face hidden.
“He went peaceful, Lizzie—peaceful as sleep. Isn’t he beautiful, the
lamb? Ay—he must ha’ made his peace, Lizzie. ’Appen he made it all
right, Lizzie, shut in there. He’d have time. He wouldn’t look like
this if he hadn’t made his peace. The lamb, the dear lamb. Eh, but he
had a hearty laugh. I loved to hear it. He had the heartiest laugh,
Lizzie, as a lad——”
Elizabeth looked up. The man’s mouth was fallen back, slightly open
under the cover of the moustache. The eyes, half shut, did not show
glazed in the obscurity. Life with its smoky burning gone from him, had
left him apart and utterly alien to her. And she knew what a stranger
he was to her. In her womb was ice of fear, because of this separate
stranger with whom she had been living as one flesh. Was this what it
all meant—utter, intact separateness, obscured by heat of living? In
dread she turned her face away. The fact was too deadly. There had been
nothing between them, and yet they had come together, exchanging their
nakedness repeatedly. Each time he had taken her, they had been two
isolated beings, far apart as now. He was no more responsible than she.
The child was like ice in her womb. For as she looked at the dead man,
her mind, cold and detached, said clearly: “Who am I? What have I been
doing? I have been fighting a husband who did not exist. _He_ existed
all the time. What wrong have I done? What was that I have been living
with? There lies the reality, this man.”—And her soul died in her for
fear: she knew she had never seen him, he had never seen her, they had
met in the dark and had fought in the dark, not knowing whom they met
nor whom they fought. And now she saw, and turned silent in seeing. For
she had been wrong. She had said he was something he was not; she had
felt familiar with him. Whereas he was apart all the while, living as
she never lived, feeling as she never felt.
In fear and shame she looked at his naked body, that she had known
falsely. And he was the father of her children. Her soul was torn from
her body and stood apart. She looked at his naked body and was ashamed,
as if she had denied it. After all, it was itself. It seemed awful to
her. She looked at his face, and she turned her own face to the wall.
For his look was other than hers, his way was not her way. She had
denied him what he was—she saw it now. She had refused him as
himself.—And this had been her life, and his life.—She was grateful to
death, which restored the truth. And she knew she was not dead.
And all the while her heart was bursting with grief and pity for him.
What had he suffered? What stretch of horror for this helpless man! She
was rigid with agony. She had not been able to help him. He had been
cruelly injured, this naked man, this other being, and she could make
no reparation. There were the children—but the children belonged to
life. This dead man had nothing to do with them. He and she were only
channels through which life had flowed to issue in the children. She
was a mother—but how awful she knew it now to have been a wife. And he,
dead now, how awful he must have felt it to be a husband. She felt that
in the next world he would be a stranger to her. If they met there, in
the beyond, they would only be ashamed of what had been before. The
children had come, for some mysterious reason, out of both of them. But
the children did not unite them. Now he was dead, she knew how
eternally he was apart from her, how eternally he had nothing more to
do with her. She saw this episode of her life closed. They had denied
each other in life. Now he had withdrawn. An anguish came over her. It
was finished then: it had become hopeless between them long before he
died. Yet he had been her husband. But how little!
“Have you got his shirt, ’Lizabeth?”
Elizabeth turned without answering, though she strove to weep and
behave as her mother-in-law expected. But she could not, she was
silenced. She went into the kitchen and returned with the garment.
“It is aired,” she said, grasping the cotton shirt here and there to
try. She was almost ashamed to handle him; what right had she or anyone
to lay hands on him; but her touch was humble on his body. It was hard
work to clothe him. He was so heavy and inert. A terrible dread gripped
her all the while: that he could be so heavy and utterly inert,
unresponsive, apart. The horror of the distance between them was almost
too much for her—it was so infinite a gap she must look across.
At last it was finished. They covered him with a sheet and left him
lying, with his face bound. And she fastened the door of the little
parlour, lest the children should see what was lying there. Then, with
peace sunk heavy on her heart, she went about making tidy the kitchen.
She knew she submitted to life, which was her immediate master. But
from death, her ultimate master, she winced with fear and shame.
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