by Hugh Walpole
A dull flush of gratification coloured her cheeks.
“Either she goes or I,” she repeated. “It can’t go on. You must see that it can’t. Fancy what people must be thinking!”
As always, he postponed the issue. “We’ll settle something. Don’t you worry, dear. You go and lie down. That’s what you want — a thorough good rest.”
She plodded off. For himself he decided that fresh air was what he needed. He went for a stroll. As soon as he was in the Charleston Road that led to the High Street he was pleased with the day. Early spring; mild, faint haze, trees dimly purple, a bird clucking, the whisper of the sea stirring the warm puddles and rivulets across the damp dim road. Warm, yes, warm and promising. Lent ... tiresome. Long services, gloomy sermons. Rebuking people, scolding them — made them angry, did them no good. Then Easter. That was better. Jolly hymns. “Christ is risen! Christ is risen!” Jolly flowers — primroses, crocuses — (no, they were earlier). They’ll have forgotten about Maggie’s uncle by then. Live it down — that’s the thing. Give them a good genial sermon this Sunday. Show them he wasn’t caring ... If only the women would get on together. Women — women. How difficult they were! Yes, Sunday would be difficult — facing them all. He knew what they’d be thinking. He wanted to be jolly again. Jolly. That was the thing. Joking with Grace, jolly even with Maggie. Jolly with his congregation. Jolly with God. Why wasn’t he left alone? Had been until Maggie came. Maggie like a stone flung into a frosty pool! Broke everything up, simply because she was unlike other people. He’d married her because he thought he could make her into what he pleased. Well, it had been the other way. Oh, she was queer, queer, queer.
He stopped, his large boots in a warm puddle. He felt the warm sun hot through the damp mist. He wanted to take her into his arms, to hug her, above all to feel her response. To feel her response, that was what, for years now, he had been wanting, and never once had she responded. Never once. She let him do as he pleased, but she was passive. She didn’t love him. Grace loved him, but how dull Grace was! Dull — it was all dull! Grace was dull, Skeaton was dull, the church was dull — God was dull! God? Where was God? He looked around. There was no God. To what had he been praying all these years? He had not been praying. His congregation had not been praying. They were all dead and God was dead too.
He looked up and saw that his boots were in a puddle. He walked on. For a moment, the mists of sloth and self-indulgence that had for years obscured his vision had shifted and cleared, but even as he moved they settled down and resolved themselves once more. The muscles of Paul’s soul were stiff with disuse. Training is a lengthy affair and a tiresome business to the stout and middle-aged.
The hedges gave way to houses; he was in the High Street. He saw then, plastered at intervals on the hoardings, strange phenomena. It was the colour that first attracted him — a bright indecent pink with huge black lettering. Because it was the offseason in Skeaton other announcements were few. All the more prominent then the following:
THE KINGSCOTE BEETHEEN WILL HOLD A RELIGIOUS FESTIVAL IN THE TOWN
OF SKEATON-ON-SEA FROM APRIL 10 TO 16. —— SERVICES 10 A.M., 3 P.M. SPECIAL SONG SERVICE, 7.30 P.M. DAILY All are Cordially Invited. ADDRESSES BY REV. JOHN THURSTON. REV. WILLIAM CRASHAW. SISTER AVIES.
Paul stared at this placard with horror and disgust in his soul. For the moment Maggie and Grace and all the scandal connected with them was forgotten. This was terrible. By temperament, tradition, training, he loathed and feared every phase of religion known to him as “Methodistic.” Under this term he included everything that was noisy, demonstrative, ill-bred and melodramatic. Once when an undergraduate at Cambridge he had gone to some meeting of the kind. There had been impromptu prayers, ghastly pictures of hell-fire, appeals to the undergraduates to save themselves at once lest it be too late, confessions and appeals for mercy. The memory of that evening still filled him with physical nausea. It was to him as though he had seen some gross indecent act in public or witnessed some horrible cruelty.
Maggie had told him very little about the Chapel and its doings, and he had shrunk from asking her any questions, but everything that was odd and unusual in her behaviour he attributed to her months under that influence. As he stared at the flaunting pink sheet he felt as though it were a direct personal assault on himself and his church.
And yet he knew that he could do nothing. Once before there had been something of the kind in Skeaton and he had tried with others to stop it. He had failed utterly; the civic authorities in Skeaton seemed almost to approve of these horrors. He looked at the thing once more and then turned back towards home. Something must be done... Something must be done ... but, as on so many earlier occasions in his life, he could face no clear course of action.
That Saturday evening he tried to change his sermon. He had determined to deliver a very fine address on “Brotherly Love” and then, most fortunately, he had discovered a five-years’ old sermon that would, with a little adaptation, exactly fit the situation.
To-night he was sick of his adaptation. The sermon had not been a good one at the first, and now it was a tattered thing of shreds and patches. He tried to add to it some sentences about the approaching “Revival.” No sentences would come. What a horrible fortnight it had been! He looked back upon his district visiting, his meetings, his choir-practices with disgust. Something had come in between himself and his people. Perhaps the relationship had never been very real? Founded on jollity. An eagerness to accept anybody’s mood for one’s own if only that meant jollity. What had he thought, standing in the puddle that afternoon? That they were all dead, he and his congregation and God, all dead together? He sank into his chair, picked up the Church Times, and fell asleep.
Next morning as he walked into the choir this extraordinary impression that his congregation was dead persisted. As he recited the “Confession” he looked about him. There was Mr. Maxse, and there Miss Purves. Every one was in his and her appointed place; old Colonel Rideout with the purple gills not kneeling because of his gout; young Edward Walter, heir to the sugar factory, not kneeling because he was lazy; sporting Mr. Harper, whose golf handicap was +3, not kneeling because to do so would spoil the crease of his trousers; old Mrs. Dean with her bonnet and bugles, the worst gossip in Skeaton, her eyes raised to heaven; the Quiller girls with their hard red colour and their hard bright eyes; Mr. Fortinum, senior, with his County Council stomach and his J.P. neck; the dear old Miss Fursleis who believed in God and lived accordingly; young Captain Trent, who believed in his moustache and lived accordingly ... Oh yes, there they all were — and there, too, were Grace and Maggie kneeling side by side.
Maggie! His eyes rested upon her. Her face suddenly struck him as being of extraordinary beauty. He had never thought her beautiful before; very plain, of course. Every one knew that she was plain. But to-day her face and profile had the simplicity, the purity, the courage of a Madonna in one of the old pictures — or, rather, of one of those St. John the Baptist boys gazing up into the face of the Christ — child as it lay in its mother’s arms. He finished the “Confession” hurriedly — Maggie’s face faded from his view; he saw now only a garden of hats and heads, the bright varnished colour of the church around and about them all.
He gave out the psalms; there was a rustle of leaves, and soon shrill, untrained voices of the choir-boys were screaming the chant like a number of baby steam-whistles in competition.
When he climbed into the pulpit he tried again to discover Maggie’s face as he had already seen it. He could not; it had been, perhaps, a trick of light and, in any case, she was hidden now behind the stout stolidity of Grace. He looked around at the other faces beneath him and saw them settle themselves into their customary expressions of torpor, vacuity and expectation. Very little expectation! They knew well enough, by this time, the kind of thing to expect from him, the turn of phrase, the rise and fall of the voice, the pause dramatic, the whisper expostulatory, the thrust imperative, the smile seductive.
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He had often been told, as a curate, that he was a wonderful preacher. His round jolly face, his beaming smile, a certain dramatic gift, had helped him. “He is so human,” he had heard people say. For many years he had lived on that phrase. For the first time in his life, this morning he distrusted his gift. He was out of touch with them all — because they were dead, killed by forms and repetitions and monotony. “We’re all dead, you know, and I’m dead too. Let’s close the doors and seal this church up. Our day is over.” He said of course nothing of the kind. His sermon was stupid, halting and ineffective.
“Naturally,” as Colonel Rideout said over his port at lunch, “when a feller’s wife’s uncle has just hung himself in public, so to speak, it does take the wind out of you. He usen’t to preach badly once. Got stale. They all do.”
As Paul dismissed the congregation with the Blessing he felt that everything was over. He was more completely miserable than he had ever been. He had in fact never before been really miserable except when he had the toothache. And now, also, the custom of years made it impossible for him to be miserable for long. He had had no real talk with Maggie since the inquest. Maggie came into his study that afternoon. Their conversation was very quiet and undemonstrative; it happened to be one of the most important conversations in both their lives, and, often afterwards, Paul looked back to it, trying to retrace in it the sentences and movements with which it had been built up. He could never recover anything very much. He could see Maggie sitting in a way that she had on the edge of her chair, looking at him and looking also far beyond him. He knew afterwards that this was the last moment in his life that he had any contact with her. Like a witch, like a ghost, she had come into his life; like a witch, like a ghost, she went out of it, leaving him, for the remainder of his days, a haunted man.
As he looked at her he realised that she had aged in this last fortnight. Yes, that horrible affair had taken it out of her. She seemed to have recovered self-control at some strange and unnatural cost — as though she had taken some potion or drug.
She began by asking Grace’s question:
“Paul, what are we going to do?”
But she did not irritate him as Grace had done. His one idea was to help her; unfortunately he had himself thought out nothing clearly.
“Well, Maggie,” he answered, smiling, “I thought you might help me about that. I want your advice. I thought — well, as a matter of fact I hadn’t settled anything — but I thought that I might get a locum for a month or two and we might go abroad for a trip perhaps. To Paris, or Venice, or somewhere.”
“And then come back?” she asked.
“For a time — yes — certainly,” he answered.
“I don’t think I can ever come back to Skeaton,” she said in a whisper, as though speaking to herself. He could see that she was controlling herself and steadying her voice with the greatest difficulty. “Of course I must come, Paul, if you want me to. It’s been all my fault from the very beginning — —”
“Oh no,” he broke in, “it hasn’t.”
“Yes, it has. I’ve just spoilt your life and Grace’s. You were both very happy until I came. I had no right to marry you when I didn’t love you. I didn’t know then all I know now. But that’s no excuse. I should have known. I was younger than most girls are, though.”
Paul said:
“But Maggie, you’re not to blame yourself at all. I think if we were somewhere else than Skeaton it would be easier. And now after what has happened—”
Maggie broke in: “You couldn’t leave Skeaton, Paul. You know you couldn’t. It would just break your heart. All the work of your life has been here — everything you’ve ever done. And Grace too.”
“No, no, you’re wrong,” said Paul vigorously. “A change is probably what I need. I’ve been too long in the same place. Time goes so fast that one doesn’t realise. And for Grace, too, I expect a change will be better.”
“And do you think,” said Maggie, “that Grace will ever live with me now in the same house when she knows that I’ve driven you from Skeaton? Grace is quite right. She’s just to feel as she does about me.”
“Then Grace must go,” said Paul firmly, looking at Maggie and feeling that the one thing that he needed was that she should be in his arms and he kissing her. “Maggie, if we go away, you and I, right away from all of this, perhaps then you can — you will—” he stopped.
She shook her head. “Never, Paul. Never. Do you know what I’ve seen this last week? That I’ve left all those who really wanted me. My aunts, very much they needed me, and I was selfish and wouldn’t give them what they wanted, and tried to escape from them. You and Grace don’t need me. Nobody wants anything here in Skeaton. You’re all full. It isn’t my fault, Paul, but everything seems to me dead here. They don’t mean anything they say in Church, and the Church doesn’t mean anything either. The Chapel was wrong in London too, but it was more right than the Church here is. I don’t know what religion is or where it is: I don’t know anything now except that one ought to be with the people who want one and not with the people who don’t. Aunt wanted me and I failed her. Uncle wanted me and I — I — I—”
She broke down, crying, her head in her arms. He went over to her and put his arms around her. At his touch she shrank a little, and when he felt that he went away from her and stood, silently, not knowing what to do.
“Maggie, don’t — don’t, Maggie. I can’t bear to hear you cry.”
“I’ve done all wrong — I’ve done all wrong,” she answered him. “I’ve been wrong always.”
His helplessness was intolerable. He knew that she would not allow him to touch her. He went out closing the door softly behind him.
CHAPTER X
THE REVIVAL
Maggie cried for a little while, then, slowly recovering, realised that she was alone in the room. She raised her head and listened; then she dried her eyes and stood up, wondering what she should do next.
During the last week she had spent all her energy on one thing alone — to keep back from her the picture of Uncle Mathew’s death. That at all costs she must not see. There it was, just behind her, hovering with all its detail, at her elbow. All day and most of the night she was conscious of it there, but she would not turn and look. Uncle Mathew was dead — that was all that she must know. Aunt Anne was dead too. Martin had written to her, and then, because she had not answered, had abandoned her. Paul and Grace were to be driven out of Skeaton because of her. Grace hated her; Paul would never love her unless she in return would love him — and that she would never do because she loved Martin. She was alone then.
She had made every one unhappy — Aunt Anne, Uncle Mathew, Paul, Grace; the best thing that she could do now was to go away and hide herself somewhere.
That, at least, she saw very clearly and she clung to it. If she went away Paul and Grace need not leave Skeaton; soon they would forget her and be happy once more as they had been before she came. But where should she go? All her life she had depended upon her own self-reliance, but now that had left her. She felt as though she could not move unless there was some one somewhere who cared for her. But there was no one. Katherine Mark. No, she certainly could never go there again. Behind all this was the constant preoccupation that she must not look, for an instant, at Uncle Mathew’s death. If she did everything would break ... She must not. She must not. She must not.
She went up to her bedroom, took from their box Martin’s letters and the ring with the three pearls, and the tattered programme. She sat on her bed and turned them over and over. She was bewildered and scarcely knew where she was. She repeated again and again: “I must go away at once ... I must go away at once.”
Then as though moved by some compelling force that she did not recognise she fell on her knees beside the bed, crying: “Martin, Martin, I want you. I don’t know where you are but I must find you. Martin, tell me where you are. I’ll go to you anywhere. Martin, where are you? Where are you?”
It m
ay not have been a vocal cry; perhaps she made no sound, but she waited, there on her knees, hearing very clearly the bells ringing for evening service and seeing the evening sun steal across her carpet and touch gently, the pictures on the wall. Gradually as she knelt there, calm and reassurance came back to her. She felt as though he, somewhere lost in the world, had heard her. She laid her cheek upon the quilt of the bed and, for the first time since Uncle Mathew’s death, her thoughts worked in connected order, her courage returned to her, and she saw the room and the sun and the trees beyond the window as real objects, without the mist of terror and despair that had hitherto surrounded her.
She rose from her knees as though she were withdrawing from a horrible nightmare. She could remember nothing of the events of the last week save her talk with Paul that afternoon. She could recall nothing of the inquest, nor whether she had been to Church, nor any scene with Grace.
“So long as I’m alive and Martin’s alive it’s all right,” she thought. She knew that he was alive. She would find him. She put away the things into the box again; she had not yet thought what she would do, but, in some way, she had received during those few minutes in her room a reassurance that she was not alone.
She went out into the spring dusk. She chose the road towards Barnham Wood because it was lonely there and the hedges were thin; you could feel the breath of the sea as it blew across the sparse fields. The hush of an English Sunday evening enfolded the road, the wood, the fields. The sun was very low and the saffron light penetrated the dark lines of the hedges and hung like a curtain of misty gold before the approaches to the wood. The red-brown fields rolled to the horizon and lay, like a carpet, at the foot of the town huddled against the pale sky.
She was near the wood, and could see the little dark twisted cone-strewn paths that led into the purple depths, when a woman came out of it towards her. She saw that it was Miss Toms. It seemed quite natural to see her there because it was on this same road that she had first met the lady and her brother. Miss Toms also did not seem at all surprised. She shook Maggie warmly by the hand.