‘Yes!’ she said, with a flash. ‘I am glad to be off! I do feel thrilled! Is it horrid of me?’
‘Not at all! You communicate your thrill to me, and I’m thrilled that you’re going. I feel my heart jumping like a fawn and saying: How wonderful! She’s really going! She’s nearly gone!’
She watched him with glowing eyes.
‘It is wonderful, don’t you think?’ she said. ‘Every departure snaps some bond, don’t you think?’
‘Possibly! The old sentimentalists used to say heart-strings: like Romeo and Juliet, whose heart-strings were torn when they parted. — But we say bonds! I suppose that’s how we feel it. The lust to say farewell! But every new meeting puts on a new pair of hand-cuffs, remember that.’
‘I shan’t let them snap them tight,’ she said.
‘Don’t boast too much, while the gods are listening,’ he said.
‘Yes!’ she said, pausing. ‘I suppose they are listening.’
And she was more cautious.
But she was strangely, wildly excited: to be gone! Strange gusts of electric energy swept through her. She could hardly sleep at all. And she felt as if, by some magic touch, she would make Wragby crumble into ruins as soon as she had left it. As soon as her presence was withdrawn. ‘Leaving a ripple barely distinguishable from non-entity!’ Who would care to distinguish it from non-entity, either, at that pass!
After a feverish morning, towards noon, she heard Hilda’s car. Hilda was as quiet, as grave and demure as ever. Both sisters had this odd, maidenly demureness. Perhaps it was something Scotch in them. Anyhow quite a number of devils could hide behind it.
Hilda washed her face and combed her nut-brown hair, that was soft and loose, so like Connie’s.
‘Are you ready to go?’ said Hilda.
‘Pining!’ said Constance. ‘But! — do you mind? — I want to stay the night near here! Quite near!’
‘Where?’ said Hilda.
‘You know I’ve got a man I’m in love with?’
Hilda looked at her sister in a wise steadiness.
‘I suspected it, from your letters. But no more. — Do you want to tell sue about him?’
‘Yes! He’s our gamekeeper!’
Hilda’s face took on a look of distaste.
‘Your gamekeeper! Is it worth while?’
‘He’s lovely as a lover,’ said Connie.
Hilda was silent for a time, in disapproval.
‘But won’t you regret it later?’ she said, with a tone of distaste, even of contempt.
‘I don’t think so,’ said Connie, labouring under a feeling of distance between herself and her sister. ‘You know sex never really meant anything to me before. Now it’s — wonderful.’
Hilda’s calm blue eyes looked at the glowing, excited eyes of confession that Connie lifted to her.
‘But does it matter — in the long run?’ said Hilda with a slight weary impatience. She herself was through with sex.
‘It matters fearfully, for the time,’ said Connie.
‘Well!’ said Hilda, at last, a little petulantly. ‘I think it’s unwise — a mistake! — it’s so much easier to have an affair with person on one’s own footing. But I suppose you’ll get over it. — Where do you want to go, for the night?’
‘Only to the keeper’s cottage.’
Hilda seemed more out of patience.
‘Don’t you think it’s very rash?’ she said.
‘No! Why? I’ve been before.’
Hilda disapproved, but she agreed to drive off with Connie that afternoon to Mansfield, where they would stay for dinner and she herself would stay the night. But she would drive Connie back at dusk to the lane-end at the bridge over the railway cutting, on the side-road to Crosshill, nearly three miles from Wragby park gates. There would be little risk. And the following morning she would pick up Connie again at the lane-end, at half-past eight.
So Connie hung out a green shawl from her bedroom window as a signal to Parkin that he was to wait for her at the lane-end by the bridge, at dusk. Green was Mohammed’s colour, and the Prophet had houris in paradise. And Connie had a bright green shawl, which suited her warm colouring.
Clifford and Hilda were polite and almost friendly. They got on quite well together, and had a long talk after lunch. And Clifford decided that Hilda, after all, had more brains and more stability than Constance, and that if he had married the elder sister instead of the younger, perhaps—!
There was an early cup of tea in the hall, whose doors were wide open to let in the sun. Constance and Clifford were both thrilled, as if parting were a real adventure to each of them.
‘Goodbye, Connie girl! Come back safely.’
‘Goodbye, Clifford! Yes! I shan’t be long.’
‘Goodbye, Hilda! Take care of her, won’t you?’
‘I will! And I’ll bring her back,’ said Hilda.
‘It’s a promise!’ said Clifford.
The suitcases were in the back of the car, Hilda and Connie sat in front. They were off. Mrs Bolton waved, and shed a tear. Mrs Lecky at the lodge waved, and shed a tear likewise. Hilda steered out of the park gates and round on to the Crosshill Road.
‘It’s a pity we can’t go clear off!’ said Hilda, impatiently. ‘We could have slept at Grantham tonight.’
‘It is almost a pity!’ said Connie, half regretting, in Hilda’s presence, that she was delaying her freedom for a man.
‘I suppose you can’t let him know you’ve changed your mind about tonight?’ said Hilda.
‘Well, hardly!’ said Connie, who, once she had made up her mind was as difficult to move as the star Aldebaran.
So off they went to Mansfield, where Hilda took her room, and they both dined. The evening was wonderfully bright and clear and long-lingering. It would be half-light all night. So back they sped towards Crosshill, just after sunset. And Hilda hated going back on her steps. But to Connie, the warm luminous twilight, the sense of light lingering and sighing in the world, into the night, was wonderful.
‘Oh Hilda!’ she said. ‘It’s so wonderful to live and to be in the middle of all creation!’
But she regretted it, the moment she had spoken. One should hold one’s tongue on these matters.
‘I suppose it is, if one is in the middle of creation. But every mosquito thinks the same, if it thinks at all.’
‘I don’t begrudge it,’ said Connie.
Hilda had on the head-lights by the time they passed Crosshill. They ran along by the railway cutting. Hilda had looked at the bridge and calculated the turn, in the daylight. She slowed up at the bridge, and curved into the lane. A man’s figure moved in the outer dusk. Connie’s heart gave a jump.
‘There he is!’ she said.
But Hilda was absorbed, or pretended to be, manipulating the car. She backed, and made the turn, before she let Connie get out. Then she switched off the lights, and they were all in the dusk.
‘Did you wait long?’ Connie said to him, as he stood under a tree.
‘Not so very!’ he said.
They both waited for Hilda to get out of the car. But she sat on, and shut the door.
‘This is my sister Hilda! Hilda, this is Parkin!’ said Constance, going to the side of the car.
Parkin raised his hat, but came no nearer.
‘Why don’t you come down to the cottage with us?’ said Connie to her sister.
‘What! Leave the car here?’
‘People leave them, in the lanes.’
Hilda looked round.
‘Can I back just round that tree?’ she said, in a soft voice like Connie’s, but more masterful.
‘Yes!’ said Parkin. ‘I should think you could.’
He didn’t want her to come to the cottage, and she knew it.
Hilda backed the car, and got down. The three set off in silence down the overgrown lane, that led only to the cottage, between high hedges at the wood’s end. The dog Flossie ran ahead. The three walked a bit in silence, Constance carrying a little silk bag. There w
as a whiff of honeysuckle, the first bit! And a heavy scent of hawthorn, which Connie could see glistening in the warm, eerie twilight. And still no one spoke, though it was about a mile to the cottage, between the dark hedges. Parkin had a flashlight torch, for the bad places, and at last Connie saw the lonely little yellow light, that made her heart beat faster.
They went into the warm room where the fire was burning with a red glow. He turned up the lamp. The table was set, with two plates and bottled beer.
‘Shall yer drink a glass of beer?’ he asked.
‘I will if I may,’ said Hilda.
She had pulled on her hat, and was looking round the cheerless little room. He poured out the beer.
‘An’ shall yer eat a smite o’ ham?’ he asked. He was reverting, a little stiffly, to the dialect. ‘There’s ham, an’ there’s a pickled walnut,’ he added, standing flotsam in the middle of the floor.
‘Yes!’ said Connie, as she drank the fresh, sharp beer. ‘I should like it.’
He went to the pantry with a candle and brought the bread, butter, ham, cheese, jam and pickles, setting them on the table. Then he took his coat off, apologising.
‘Sit down!’ he said. ‘I’ll take my coat off, if you don’t mind.’
Hilda was going to sit in his chair, against the wall at the window corner. But Connie said:
‘That’s his chair.’
‘Sit wheer yer like — it matters nowt ter me!’ he said, in broad dialect, now he’d got his coat off, and had metaphorically rolled his sleeves up to them.
But Hilda took another chair. He sat in his shirt-sleeves, very clean, clean-washed-looking, as working-men look.
‘Yo’ mun ’elp yerselves!’ he said. ‘Dunna wait f’r axin’.’
And he sat with his hands motionless, with a queer distance and sang froid, under cover of the dialect. And Hilda noticed, that though the aspirate of the h was dropped, the dialect used the French stopped h.
He watched her, and she sometimes stared with a soft, queer stare, at him. She was handsomer than her sister, larger, more like a large-featured, warm-coloured Pallas Athene, regular and almost always in repose. But he judged her harder, with that hard opposition inside her, which modern men know so well in modern women. No, he wouldn’t want her for a lover. She could never curl up soft, all curved in a man’s arms, as her sister could. She seemed shy, demure, modest. But he felt she was hard, with a heavy, dark hardness like mysterious flint whose fire is sparks, never flame.
The three ate in silence.
‘Ta’e what ter wants,’ he said to Connie, who was hesitating with her fork. And he knew Hilda’s flesh shrank from the intimacy of the thou.
‘But you’ve had hardly any,’ Connie expostulated to him.
‘I ate afore this. This woe a’ for thee!’ he said. ‘So now it’s for thee an’ thy sister.’
‘Hilda!’ she said giving him the name.
‘Ay!’ he said, comforting her, because she was ill-at-ease.
‘Do you keep house for yourself?’ Hilda asked him, all at once.
‘Ay!’ he said. “Xcept f’r th’ bit as my mother does, a-Sat’days.’
‘But do you go shopping for yourself? Did you buy this ham and this beer?’ she asked him.
‘Yes!’ he said, with a smile.
‘You don’t mind?’ Hilda persisted.
‘Nay, what’s there to mind i’ that? I’m by mysen’, so I mun fend for mysen’. No, it non troubles me.’
She finished the food in silence. He was fully armed for defence.
‘Do you think it’s safe for Connie to come here?’ she asked him.
He seemed taken back for a moment. Then he said, in that queer voice of indifference which Connie could not quite understand:
‘As safe as owt else, I s’d think, if she’s a mind to’t! It’s not as if the German guns ’ad got us located —’
Hilda looked at him, puzzled. Then she said:
‘She’s my sister. It would be very awful if she came to any harm.’
Again he put up his eyebrows in the odd look.
‘Ay!’ he said. ‘I know it! ‘Er’s non my sister, but ’er’s what ’er is. — What d’yer want me ter say? Anythink? — ’Er comes as long as ’er’s a mind to come! when ’er doesna want to, ’er wunna. What else?’
‘I only hope,’ Hilda faltered, ‘you’ll take care.’
‘Care, ay! Care! Care killed t’ cat, as ’ad nine lives. Ay, I’ll take care! But what by that?’
Hilda frowned with sudden impatience.
‘It would be horrid if there were a mess, a scandal.’
He was silent. Then he said:
‘I know it! It wouldna do me no good. Shall y’ave some more beer?’
‘No thank you! I must go.’
She rose, and picked up her hat.
‘Would you like to go with Hilda to the car, and leave me here?’ Connie said to him.
He stood still, holding his breath, looking at her.
‘You’d better let me go alone,’ said Hilda.
‘Nay!’ he said quickly: in both directions.
‘I’ll come,’ said Connie.
They walked again in silence down the dark, eerie, overgrown lane. Halfway, Hilda suddenly said:
‘I only wonder if it’s worth it, that’s all. I don’t blame anybody, or think anybody is wrong. But I do wonder if it’s worth
Her voice came out of the night into the silence, and was received in silence. Nobody answered. They walked in silence, while an owl softly hooted. Then suddenly he stopped, and looked at the little stars of summer beyond the high edge. The air was scented with a mid-summer night.
‘Is folks very different, or aren’t they?’ he said. ‘There’s a few stars. When I look at ’em, it seems to me worth it, over an’ above. What do you think? Is it worth it?’ He looked at Connie.
‘You know what I think,’ said Connie, a little self-righteously.
‘Yes,’ said Hilda. ‘But we live in the world, not in the stars.’
‘We live under ’em,’ he said. ‘But I know. It’s the same when I look at the Daily Mirror, or the Illustrated London News. All them royalty and Lords an’ Ladies an’ people who’ve got divorces or been had up for something! You think to yourself:
My Christ, I’m puttin’ my foot i’ th’ man-trap! — is it worth it? But then nothing’s worth nothing at that price. So I put th’ newspapers on th’ fire-back, an’ forget ’em an’ a’ the faces in ’em.
‘But you can’t put the world on the fire-back,’ said Hilda.
‘I canna. No! But if I could I’d kick it in th’ face — all of ’em, an’ the faces they show! But what’s the bother! There’s stars i’ th’ sky, an’ leaves on th’ trees, mayblossom an’ dog-roses into th’ bargain. An’ I’m a man. What am I a man for! What’s a woman a woman for? What are you a woman for?’
‘Not merely for lovemaking, certainly,’ said Hilda softly.
‘Nay! But for lovemakin’ if yer got a chance: an’ same for me, if I get a chance: what else am I a man for? If I get a chance? An’ I’ve got a chance. Would y’ave me wear my breeches arse forrards?’
There was a curious hostile sarcasm and human hopelessness in his voice. Connie felt, how alone he was, and how wary of a hostile universe. How afraid! but also, how fixed and inimical! There was something hard, fatal, dangerous, in his spirit. Yet she knew, he felt himself in tune with the natural things of the night, stars and hidden leaves. It was only humanly he felt the hard hopelessness, the eternal hostility.
‘Still,’ said Hilda, ‘we must consider how it will end.’
‘What’s the good! How will anything end? How did the war end? How will you end? Any of us! I leave it.’
‘Yes,’ said Hirda. ‘Laisser-faire and laisser aller!’
‘I dunno what that means: “Lacey fair and Lacey alley”.’
‘It means nothing, anyhow,’ Connie interposed.
The car was there all right, getting dewy. Hilda got
in, and started her engine.
‘Then I’ll be here at half-past eight in the morning,’ she said.
‘Right!’ said Connie.
Suddenly Hilda leaned over the side of the car, holding out her hand.
‘Good-night, Mr Parkin!’ she said. He strode up, and took her hand.
‘Good-night!’ he said.
‘If you feel you’re right —’ she said, ‘I suppose nobody has any business to interfere.’
‘Nay, I don’t say as I feel I’m right. But if an apple falls on my head, I eat it. I like what I like, an’ gimme lashin’s —’
Hilda, who was hardly listening, flashed on her head-lights There was a blare of white light, frightening every natural creature. And the hulk of the car swayed and slowly eased out of the lane, mounted the bridge, and slid away into the dark country.
Connie and he stood under a tree in the night. She turned to him. She felt a bit miserable.
‘Kiss me!’ she murmured, lifting her face to him.
‘Nay!’ he said impatiently. ‘Wait a bit! I don’t feel like it I’m put out.’
Instead of being angry, she laughed.
‘But you’ll give me your hand, won’t you?’ she said.
He held out his hand to her, rather crossly. She took it and nestled her own in it. It was so warm! The warm life! That was really all she wanted from him, the warm physical contact. But as they walked home, he was so silent, she asked him at last:
‘What were you thinking about?’
‘Nothing!’ he said.
Yet when he was home, the door was locked, and he had taken off his coat and was unfastening his boots, he said:
‘It strikes me the Bolshevists was about right, to smash ’em up. What good are they?’
‘Who?’ she said.
‘Folks!’
She was silent, feeling her heart sink. Then at last she asked:
‘But didn’t you like Hilda?’
‘Ay — ay — all right!’
‘Then why do you talk about Bolshevists?’
‘Eh well! I don’t!’
‘I think Bolshevists are such dreary, uninspired people, just smashing things and creating nothing.’
He received this in silence. But as he pushed off his boot with his other foot, he said:
‘It’s us or them. One or t’other’s got to go smash.’
John Thomas and Lady Jane Page 31