by Hugh Walpole
And yet, after a little while, her unrest returned. As Mr. Smart and the congregation hurried through the psalms for the day, trying, as it were, to beat one another in the friendly race, Katherine felt again that insistent pressure and pursuit. Her mind left the church: she was back again with Philip at Rafiel ... and now she was searching that mysterious town for that elusive, laughing figure. Katherine had in her mind a clear picture; she saw a woman, tall and thin, a dark face with black, ironical eyes, hair jet black, a figure alert, independent, sometimes scornful, never tragic or despairing. “If she knew me she would despise me” ... this thought came flashing like a sudden stream of light across the church. “If she knew me she’d despise me ... despise me for everything, even perhaps for loving Philip” — and yet she felt no hostility; of a certainty no jealousy, only a little pain at her heart and a strange conviction that the world was altered now simply because there was a new figure in it. And there were so many things that she wanted to know. Why had Anna dismissed Philip? Was it simply because she was tired of him? Was it perhaps for his own sake, because she thought that he was wasting his life and character there. No, Anna probably did not think about his character.... Did she still care for him and, now that he was gone, long for him? Well, Katherine had him now, and no one should take him.... Would she, perhaps, write to Philip and try to compel him to return? Did she think of the son who had died? Had she much heart or was she proud and indifferent?
“... grant that this day we fall into no sin, neither run into any kind of danger: but that all our doings may be ordered by Thy governance to do that which is right....” Mr. Smart’s voice brought back the church, the choir with two girls in large flowered hats, the little boys, Mr. Hart, the butcher, and Mr. Swithan, the grocer, the broad backs in the family pew. Aunt Aggie, Aunt Betty, Henry, Mrs. Trenchard, Millie, Philip, George Trenchard, Rachel Seddon (the family pew was a hideous box with a door to it, and you could see only the top half of the Trenchards.... They, however, could see everything: Mrs. Trenchard could see the choir, and the choir knew it). Because Katherine was never late, therefore was she denied the opportunity of studying the Collective Trenchard Back. To-day she had it in front of her, and it seemed, suddenly, to be something with which she herself had no concern at all. For an amazing, blinding, and most desolating moment she viewed the Trenchards as a stranger might view them. Her loneliness was appalling. She belonged to no one. She had no place nor country: her mother and Philip had left her ... only a strange woman, watching her to see what she would do, laughed at her. As she stood up and Mr. Smart gave out the hymn, she saw that there was a hole in her glove. She felt shabby and hot, and covered the hole with her other hand, because during that moment she was positively, actively conscious of the other woman’s curious, hostile gaze; then, as the hymn began, security came back to her — her heart beat quietly again.
“Why were you late, dear?” said Aunt Aggie, walking back through the wood.
“I dawdled.”
“Dawdled! How unlike you, dear! I remember years ago when I dawdled one Sunday mother saying ... Oh, dear, there it begins again!”
“Is your tooth bad?”
“Never mind, dear, say nothing about it. The last thing I should wish for would be a fuss. I thought poor Mr. Smart at his very worst this morning. Since his last child was born he’s never preached a good sermon. Really, it’s difficult to be patient with him.”
“Have you done anything for it, Aunt Aggie?”
“Iodine. It comes and goes. If it were only steady....”
Katherine knew that it was of the utmost importance to be sympathetic, but all that she could think of in her head was, “How silly to worry about a tooth! How silly to worry about a tooth!...” She knew at once that Aunt Aggie saw that she was unsympathetic, and that she resented it deeply.
“Mind you say nothing, dear,” she said, as they crossed the lawn. “You know that I hate a fuss.” And Katherine, who had stopped on the grass and was staring at the horizon, did not even answer. Then Aunt Betty came up and said: “What a delightful sermon! Mr. Smart gets better and better.”
Aunt Aggie did not trust herself to speak.
Meanwhile Philip also had been unhappy. He did frankly hate an English Sunday, and to-day the damp-grey heaviness overwhelmed him, so that he was almost melodramatic in his resentment.
Four days now had passed since the “Feast”, and he thought that they had been the worst four days of his life. He, positively, had not slept: he had been driven by a wild, uncertain spirit, inspiring him now to this action and now to that, making him cry out in the middle of the night. “What is she thinking about it? Is it changing her love for me?... Perhaps she doesn’t love me any more, and is afraid to tell me. She didn’t seem angry then when I told her, but she may not have realised — now—” He wanted her to tell him everything, and he wanted her also never to allude to the affair again. He had confessed to her, and there was no more to be said — and yet she must say what now, after four days, she felt about it. Meanwhile she said nothing and he said nothing. There was constraint between them for the only time since their first meeting. He had thought that his confession would have smashed the cobwebs — it had only made them the more blinding.
Meanwhile it was all so desperately serious to him that he simply could not endure the watching and waiting family. His insistent desire that ‘things should be perfect’ had from the beginning been balked by the family’s presence, now his sense that they all wanted to take Katherine away from him awoke in him a real hysterical nightmare of baffled impotence. He would willingly have strangled Aunt Aggie, Henry and Mrs. Trenchard, and then set fire to the house and garden. Then, into the middle of it all, came this impossible Sunday.
He set his teeth over the roast beef, Aunt Aggie’s complaints and George Trenchard’s hearty commonplace; directly luncheon was over he seized Katherine.
“Look here! we must go for a walk — now — at once!”
“My dear Phil! I can’t — there’s my Sunday School at three. I haven’t looked at anything.”
“Sunday School! Oh, my God!... Sunday School! Look here, Katie, if you don’t walk with me first I shall go straight down to the village pond and drown myself.”
“No, you mustn’t do that.” She seemed quite grave about it. “All right — wait for me. I’ll be down in two minutes.”
They set off along the road to Pelynt Cross, the thin sea mist driving in their faces.
He broke out: “I must go away from here. To-morrow, at once — I simply can’t stand it any longer.”
“Can’t stand what?”
“Seeing you swallowed up by the family, who all hate me and want to get rid of me. You yourself are changing — you aren’t frank with me any longer. You don’t say what you think. What use am I here anyway? What good is it my hanging round doing nothing? I’m sick of it. I’m losing you — I’m miserable. A Sunday like this is enough to make one commit murder.”
She put her hand inside his arm and drew him closer to her.
“I know what it is,” she said. “You’ve been wondering why I haven’t spoken to you about what you told me the other day. You’ve been thinking that I ought to, haven’t you?”
“No, it’s only that I’ve wondered whether perhaps you’ve changed your mind since then. Then you didn’t seem to be angry, but, thinking about it afterwards—”
“Why, Phil,” she said, “how could there be anything different? It’s all gone, finished. You don’t suppose that I ever imagined that you’d never loved another woman before you met me. I’m interested, that’s all. You’ve told me so little about her. I’d like to know all sorts of things — even quite little unimportant things—”
“It would be much better,” he said slowly, “if we just left it and didn’t talk about it.”
“But I thought you wanted me to talk about it?” she cried. “How funny you are!”
“No, I didn’t want you to talk about it. It’s only that I didn�
�t like there being constraint — I don’t see why you should care. It’s like talking about someone who’s dead.”
“But she isn’t dead. Do you suppose, Phil — would she, do you think, like you to go back?”
“No, I’m sure she wouldn’t — at least I don’t think so.”
“Was she the kind of woman who forgets easily, who can put people out of her life just as she wants to?”
“Anna ...” His voice lingered over the name. “No, I don’t think she ever forgot. She was simply independent.”
“Would she think of your boy and want him back?”
“She might.” He suddenly stopped. “She might. That evening he was so ill she—”
Katherine looked across the fields to Pelynt Cross, dim and grey beneath the rain.
“She had a heart, then,” she said slowly.
He suddenly wheeled about with his face to Garth. He spoke sharply and roughly in a voice that she had never heard him use before.
“Don’t, Katie — leave her alone. What do you go on about her for?”
“But if it’s all dead?”
“Oh, drop it, I say! That’s enough.”
She knew that she was a fool, but something — or was it somebody? — drove her on.
“But you said just now that you wanted me to be frank.”
His voice was a cry.
“You’ll drive me mad, Katie. You don’t seem to have any conception—”
“Very well. I won’t say anything.”
They were quite silent after that: the silence swelled, like a rising cloud, between them: it became impossible to break it ... they were at Garth gates, and they had not spoken. She would have said something, but he turned abruptly off into the garden. She walked, with her head up, into the house.
She went up to her room, arranged her Sunday School books, felt suddenly a grinding, hammering fatigue, as though she had been walking all day; her knees were trembling and her throat was dry. She sat by her window, looking down on to the garden, where the sea mist drove in walls of thin rain against the horizon. Behind the mist the trees seemed to peer at her as though they were wondering who she was. “I don’t care,” she thought, “he shouldn’t have spoken to me like that.” But how had it happened? At one moment they had been so close together that no force, no power, would separate them — a word and they had been so far apart that they could not see one another’s eyes.
“I don’t care. He shouldn’t—”
She got up, rubbed her cheeks with her hand because they were burning, and, with a glance at Philip’s photograph (someone she had known years ago and would never know again), went out. The house was silent, and she met no one. As she crossed the lawn she thought: “How absurd! We’ve quarrelled — a real quarrel” — then— “It wasn’t my fault. He shouldn’t—” She held her head very high indeed as she walked down the road to the Bridge, but she saw no one, felt no rain upon her cheek, was not conscious that she was moving. At the door of the Schools she saw Mrs. Smart, and heard someone say quite sensibly and happily:
“We’re early. There won’t be many this afternoon, I expect.”
“Mrs. Douglas has told me that she won’t be able to come — I wonder, Katie, whether you’d mind taking—”
“Why, of course.”
Mrs. Smart was little and round and brown like a pippin. She was always breathless from having more to wrestle with than she could grasp. She was nervous, too, and short-sighted, and the one governing motive of her life was to bear her husband a son. She had now four daughters; she knew that her husband felt it very deeply. She had once unburdened herself to Katherine, but, after that, had been shyer with her than before. Katherine, against her will, had been often irritated by Mrs. Smart — she had wondered at her restlessness and incapacity to keep up with the business in hand, but to-day, out of the sinister gloom of that horrible afternoon, the little woman seemed to Katie suddenly sympathetic, eloquent, moving. Katie could hear her voice, rather husky, rather uncertain, on that afternoon of her confession: “... and we did really hope that Lucy would be a boy, we really did. He would have been called Edward. Harold has such plans for a son — we have often thought together what we would do ... and now, I’m afraid....”
Inside the schoolroom door Katie paused, looked at the room with the bare benches arranged in squares, the shining maps of the world and Europe, the case with beetles and butterflies, the hideous harmonium.
She suddenly caught Mrs. Smart’s hand and pressed it through the damp little glove. She knew that Mrs. Smart would be surprised — she had never been demonstrative to her before.... She moved to her part of the room, three only of her class were present, and to these were added two small boys from another division.
“Now, children,” said Mr. Smart’s cheerful voice (he always spoke to boys as though he were luring animals into a cage), “let us start with hymn No. 436, shall we?” After the hymn, a prayer, and then, for an hour that subdued, restrained hum which belongs to the Sunday School only; being religious as well as disciplined, persuasive as well as obedient. Katherine now was very proud — as she said: “Well, Robin, and what did Moses do then?” she was thinking— “But he must come to me — that’s fair. It was not my fault. He blamed me first for not speaking, and afterwards when I did speak.... Besides, if it’s all over and finished, why should he mind?” She looked very young as she sat there, her mouth hard and set and her eyes full of trouble. Her sensation was as though she had been suddenly marooned; the desolation, the terror, the awful loneliness came, as the evening fell, creeping up towards her. “Suppose he never makes it up — Suppose he goes away and leaves me.” She caught her hands tightly together on her lap and her breath suddenly left her.
“Yes, Johnny. His name was Aaron. That’s right.”
The ordeal was over; she was hurrying back through the dusk to the lighted house. She went up again to her room, and sat down again by the window. She listened. The house was very still, but she thought that, perhaps, he would guess that she was here, in her bedroom, and would come up. She wished that her heart would stop beating so that she might hear the better.
She listened to every sound, to distant voices, to the whimper of rain upon the window, to the sharp crack of some shutting door. Her whole mind now was concentrated upon his coming: her eyes left the window and turned to the door. She waited....
Quite suddenly, as though someone else had commanded her, she began to cry. She did not move her hands to her face, but little dry sobs shook her body. She hated herself for her weakness, and then that very contempt broke her down completely, so that with her hands pressed against her face, desolately and almost, it might seem, ironically, she wept. Through her crying she heard the door open, and, looking up, saw her mother there. Mrs. Trenchard closed the door very carefully. “Why, Katherine!” she said in a whisper, as though this were a matter simply between the two of them. “I came to see,” said Mrs. Trenchard, “whether you weren’t coming in to tea. The Drakes are here.”
It was no use to pretend that she had not been crying. She rubbed her eyes with her handkerchief, turning her back for a moment on her mother and gazing down on to the dark lawn that had all melted now into the rain. Then, when she had gained her control, she faced the room again.
“It’s nothing, mother. I’ve had a headache. It’s better. I’ll lie down a little and then come in. Is Agnes Drake here?”
“Yes. She wants to see you.”
“Well. I’ll come.”
But Mrs. Trenchard did not go away. Her large soft eyes never left her daughter’s face.
“What’s really the matter, dear?”
“Really — a headache. This weather and then Sunday School. I felt bad in church this morning.”
“You’ve been unlike yourself, dear, for some days.”
“No, mother — I’ve been just the same.”
“You’ve been unhappy.”
Katherine raised her head proudly and gave back her mother’s gaze.
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“There’s been nothing — nothing at all—”
But Mrs. Trenchard’s eyes never faltered. She suddenly, with an action that was full of maternal love, but love restrained by fear of its rejection, love that had tenderness in its request to be accepted, raised her hands as though she would take her daughter, and hold her safe and never let her depart into danger again.
“Katie—” her voice was soft, and she let her hands fall again. “Give it up, dear. Break the engagement. Let him go.”
Katherine did not answer, but she raised her head higher than it had been before, and then, suddenly, as though the irony of her whole relationship with her mother, with Philip, with the very world itself, had driven in upon her, she smiled.
Mrs. Trenchard went on: “You aren’t happy, Katie, darling. We all notice it. It was so sudden, the engagement. You couldn’t tell at the time. But now — I’ve never said anything, have I? You’ve seen that I’ve been perfectly fair, but you know that I’ve never liked him — I said give it its chance. But now that he’s been down here, you can judge how different we all are — it’s plain that it won’t do. Of course you couldn’t tell at the time. But now—”
“Ah,” Katherine said quietly, “that’s why you asked him here. I wondered.”
At the sudden hostility in Katherine’s voice Mrs. Trenchard started. Then, quite timidly, as though she were asking some great favour, she said:
“You mustn’t be angry with me for that. I only care about your happiness. I’m older — If I think that you are not going to be happy I’m worried and distressed of course. What can he be to me compared with you? And lately you yourself have been different — different to all of us ... Yes ... You know that if I thought that he would make you happy....” Her voice was quickly sharp sounding on a trembling, quivering note. “Katie — give him up. Give him up. There’ll be somebody much better. There are all of us. Give him up, darling. Tell him that you don’t love him as you thought you did.”
“No, I don’t,” said Katherine, her voice low. “I love him more than ever I thought I could love anything or anyone. I love him more every day of my life. Why you — all of you—” She broke away from her fierceness. She was gentle, putting her hand against her mother’s cheek, then bending forward and kissing her.