But Adolf was becoming too much for her. He dropped too many pills. And suddenly to hear him clumping downstairs when she was alone in the house was startling. And to keep him from the door was impossible. Cats prowled outside. It was worse than having a child to look after.
Yet we would not have him shut up. He became more lusty, more callous than ever. He was a strong kicker, and many a scratch on face and arms did we owe him. But he brought his own doom on himself. The lace curtains in the parlour—my mother was rather proud of them—fell on to the floor very full. One of Adolf’s joys was to scuffle wildly through them as though through some foamy undergrowth. He had already torn rents in them.
One day he entangled himself altogether. He kicked, he whirled round in a mad nebulous inferno. He screamed—and brought down the curtain-rod with a smash, right on the best beloved pelargonium, just as my mother rushed in. She extricated him, but she never forgave him. And he never forgave either. A heartless wildness had come over him.
Even we understood that he must go. It was decided, after a long deliberation, that my father should carry him back to the wild-woods. Once again he was stowed into the great pocket of the pit-jacket.
“Best pop him i’ th’ pot,” said my father, who enjoyed raising the wind of indignation.
And so, next day, our father said that Adolf, set down on the edge of the coppice, had hopped away with utmost indifference, neither elated nor moved. We heard it and believed. But many, many were the heartsearchings. How would the other rabbits receive him? Would they smell his tameness, his humanised degradation, and rend him? My mother pooh-poohed the extravagant idea.
However, he was gone, and we were rather relieved. My father kept an eye open for him. He declared that several times passing the coppice in the early morning, he had seen Adolf peeping through the nettlestalks. He had called him, in an odd, high-voiced, cajoling fashion. But Adolf had not responded. Wildness gains so soon upon its creatures. And they become so contemptuous then of our tame presence. So it seemed to me. I myself would go to the edge of the coppice, and call softly. I myself would imagine bright eyes between the nettlestalks, flash of a white, scornful tail, past the bracken. That insolent white tail, as Adolf turned his flank on us! It reminded me always of a certain rude gesture, and a certain unprintable phrase, which may not even be suggested.
But when naturalists discuss the meaning of the white rabbit’s tail, that rude gesture and still ruder phrase always come to my mind. Naturalists say that the rabbit shows his white tail in order to guide his young safely after him, as a nursemaid’s flying strings are the signal to her toddling charges to follow on. How nice and naïve! I only know that my Adolf wasn’t naïve. He used to whisk his flank at me, push his white feather in my eye, and say Merde! It’s a rude word—but one which Adolf was always semaphoring at me, flag-wagging it with all the derision of his narrow haunches.
That’s a rabbit all over—insolence, and the white flag of spiteful derision. Yes, and he keeps his flag flying to the bitter end, sporting, insolent little devil that he is. See him running for his life. Oh, how his soul is fanned to an ecstasy of fright, a fugitive whirlwind of panic. Gone mad, he throws the world behind him, with astonishing hind legs. He puts back his head and lays his ears on his sides and rolls the white of his eyes in sheer ecstatic agony of speed. He knows the awful approach behind him; bullet or stoat. He knows! He knows, his eyes are turned back almost into his head. It is agony. But it is also ecstasy. Ecstasy! See the insolent white flag bobbing. He whirls on the magic wind of terror. All his pent-up soul rushes into agonised electric emotion of fear. He flings himself on, like a falling star swooping into extinction. White heat of the agony of fear. And at the same time, bob! bob! bob! goes the white tail, merde! merde! merde! it says to the pursuer. The rabbit can’t help it. In his utmost extremity he still flings the insult at the pursuer. He is the inconquerable fugitive, the indomitable meek. No wonder the stoat becomes vindictive.
And if he escapes, this precious rabbit! Don’t you see him sitting there, in his earthly nook, a little ball of silence and rabbit-triumph? Don’t you see the glint on his black eye? Don’t you see, in his very immobility, how the whole world is merde to him? No conceit like the conceit of the meek. And if the avenging angel in the shape of the ghostly ferret steals down on him, there comes a shriek of terror out of that little hump of self-satisfaction sitting motionless in a corner. Falls the fugitive. But even fallen, his white feather floats. Even in death it seems to say: “I am the meek, I am the righteous, I am the rabbit. All you rest, you are evil doers, and you shall be bien emmerdés!”
The Last Straw [Fanny and Annie]
Flame-lurid his face as he turned among the throng of flame-lit and dark faces upon the platform. In the light of the furnace she caught sight of his drifting countenance, like a piece of floating fire. And the nostalgia, the doom of home-coming went through her veins like a drug. His eternal face, flame-lit now! The pulse and darkness of red fire from the furnace towers in the sky, lighting the desultory, industrial crowd on the wayside station, lit him and went out.
Of course, he did not see her. Flame-lit and unseeing! Always the same, with his meeting eyebrows, his common cap, and his red-and-black scarf knotted round his throat. Not even a collar to meet her! The flames had sunk, there was shadow.
She opened the door of her grimy, branch-line carriage and began to get down her bags. The porter was nowhere, of course, but there was Harry, obscure, on the outer edge of the little crowd, missing her, of course.
“Here! Harry!” she called, waving her umbrella in the twilight. He hurried forward.
“Tha’s come, has ter?” he said, in a sort of cheerful welcome. She got down, rather flustered, and gave him a peck of a kiss.
“Two suit-cases!” she said.
Her soul groaned within her, as he clambered into the carriage after her bags. Up shot the fire in the twilight sky, from the great furnace behind the station. She felt the red flame go across her face. She had come back, she had come back for good. And her spirit groaned dismally. She doubted if she could bear it.
There, on the sordid little station under the furnaces she stood, tall and distinguished, in her well-made coat and skirt and her broad, grey velour hat. She held her umbrella, her bead chatelaine, and a little leather case in her grey-gloved hands, while Harry staggered out of the ugly little train with her bags.
“There’s a trunk at the back,” she said, in her bright voice. But she was not feeling bright. The twin black cones of the iron foundry blasted their sky-high fires into the night. The whole scene was lurid. The train waited cheerfully. It would wait another ten minutes. She knew it. It was all so deadly familiar.
Let us confess it at once. She was a lady’s maid, thirty years old, come back to marry her first love, a foundry worker, after having kept him dangling, off and on, for a dozen years. Why had she come back—did she love him? No! She didn’t pretend to. She had loved her brilliant and ambitious cousin, who had jilted her, and who had died. She had had other affairs which had come to nothing. So here she was, come back suddenly to marry her first-love, who had waited—or remained single—all these years.
“Won’t a porter carry those?” she said, as Harry strode with his workman’s stride down the platform towards the guard’s van.
“I can manage,” he said.
And with her umbrella, her chatelaine, and her little leather case, she followed him.
The trunk was there.
“We’ll get Heather’s greengrocer’s cart to fetch it up,” he said.
“Isn’t there a cab?” said Fanny, knowing dismally enough that there wasn’t.
“I’ll just put it aside o’ the penny-in-the-slot, and Heather’s greengrocer’s ’ll fetch it about half past eight,” he said.
He seized the box by its two handles and staggered with it across the level-crossing, bumping his legs against it as he waddled. Then he dropped it by the red sweetmeats machine.
“Will it be safe
there?” she said.
“Ay—safe as houses,” he answered. He returned for the two bags. Thus laden, they started to plod up the hill, under the great long black building of the foundry. She walked beside him—workman of workmen, he was, trudging with that luggage. The red lights flared over the deepening darkness. From the foundry came the horrible, slow clang, clang, clang, of iron, a great noise, with an interval just long enough to make it unendurable.
Compare this with the arrival at Gloucester; the carriage for her mistress, the dog-cart for herself with the luggage; the drive out past the river, the pleasant trees of the carriage approach; and herself sitting beside Arthur, everybody so polite to her.
She had come home—for good! Her heart nearly stopped beating as she trudged up that hideous and interminable hill, beside the laden figure. What a come-down! What a comedown! She could not take it with her usual bright cheerfulness. She knew it all too well. It is easy to bear up against the unusual, but the deadly familiarity of an old stale past!
He dumped the bags down under a lamp-post, for a rest. There they stood, the two of them, in the lamp-light. Passers-by stared at her, and gave good-night to Harry. Her they hardly knew, she had become a stranger.
“They’re too heavy for you, let me carry one,” she said.
“They begin to weigh a bit by the time you’ve gone a mile,” he answered.
“Let me carry the little one,” she insisted.
“Tha can ha’e it for a minute, if ter’s a mind,” he said, handing over the valise.
And thus they arrived in the street of shops of the little ugly town on top of the hill. How everybody stared at her; my word! how they stared! And the cinema was just going in, and the queues were tailing down the road to the corner. And everybody took full stock of her. “ ’Night, Harry!” shouted the fellows, in an interested voice.
However, they arrived at her aunt’s—a little sweet-shop in a side street. They “pinged” the door-bell, and her aunt came running forward out of the kitchen.
“There you are, child! Dying for a cup of tea, I’m sure. How are you?”
Fanny’s aunt kissed her, and it was all Fanny could do to refrain from bursting into tears, she felt so low. Perhaps it was her tea she wanted.
“You’ve had a drag with that luggage,” said Fanny’s aunt to Harry.
“Ay, I’m not sorry to put it down,” he said, looking at his hand which was crushed and cramped by the bag handle.
Then he departed to see about Heather’s greengrocery cart.
When Fanny sat at tea, her aunt, a grey-haired, fair-faced little woman, looked at her with an admiring heart, feeling bitterly sore for her. For Fanny was beautiful: tall, erect, finely coloured, with her delicately arched nose, her rich brown hair, her large lustrous grey eyes. A passionate woman—a woman to be afraid of. So proud, so inwardly violent. She came of a violent race.
It needed a woman to sympathise with her. Men had not the courage. Poor Fanny! She was such a lady, and so straight and magnificent. And yet everything seemed to do her down. Every time she seemed to be doomed to humiliation and disappointment, this handsome, brilliantly sensitive woman, with her nervous over-wrought laugh.
“So you’ve really come back, child?” said her aunt.
“I really have, Aunt,” said Fanny.
“Poor Harry! I’m not sure, you know, Fanny, that you’re not taking a bit of an advantage of him.”
“Oh, Aunt, he’s waited so long, he may as well have what he’s waited for.” Fanny laughed grimly.
“Yes, child, he’s waited so long, that I’m not sure it isn’t a bit hard on him. You know, I like him, Fanny—though, as you know quite well, I don’t think he’s good enough for you. And I think he thinks so himself, poor fellow.”
“Don’t you be so sure of that, Aunt. Harry is common, but he’s not humble. He wouldn’t think the Queen was any too good for him, if he’d a mind to her.”
“Well, it’s as well if he has a proper opinion of himself.”
“It depends what you call proper,” said Fanny. “But he’s got his good points——”
“Oh, he’s a nice fellow, and I like him. I do like him. Only, as I tell you, he’s not good enough for you.”
“I’ve made up my mind, Aunt,” said Fanny grimly.
“Yes,” mused the aunt; “they say all things come to him who waits——”
“More than he’s bargained for, eh, Aunt?” laughed Fanny, rather bitterly.
The poor aunt, this bitterness grieved her for her niece.
They were interrupted by the ping of the shop-bell, and Harry’s call of “Right?” But as he did not come in at once, Fanny, feeling solicitous for him presumably at the moment, rose and went into the shop. She saw a cart outside, and went to the door.
And the moment she stood in the doorway she heard a woman’s common vituperative voice crying from the darkness of the opposite side of the road:
“Tha’rt theer, are ter! I’ll shame thee, Mester! I’ll shame thee, see if I dunna.”
Startled, Fanny stared across the darkness, and saw a woman in a black bonnet go under one of the lamps up the side street.
Harry and Bill Heather had dragged the trunk off the little dray and she retreated before them as they came up the shop step with it.
“Wheer shalt ha’e it?” asked Harry.
“Best take it upstairs,” said Fanny.
She went up first to light the gas.
When Heather had gone, and Harry was sitting down having tea and pork pie, Fanny asked:
“Who was that woman shouting?”
“Nay, I canna tell thee. To somebody, I s’d think,” replied Harry. Fanny looked at him, but asked no more.
He was a fair-haired fellow of thirty-two, with a fair moustache. He was broad in his speech and looked like a foundry-hand, which he was. But women always liked him. There was something of a mother’s lad about him—something warm and playful and really sensitive.
He had his attractions, even for Fanny. What she rebelled against so bitterly was that he had no sort of ambition. He was a moulder, but of very commonplace skill. He was thirty-two years old, and hadn’t saved twenty pounds. She would have to provide the money for the home. He didn’t care. He just didn’t care. He had no initiative at all. He had no vices—no obvious ones. But he was just indifferent, spending as he went, and not caring. Yet he did not look happy. She remembered his face in the fire-glow: something haunted, abstracted about it. As he sat there eating his pork pie, bulging his cheek out, she felt he was like a doom to her. And she raged against the doom of him. It wasn’t that he was gross. His way was common, almost on purpose. But he himself wasn’t really common. For instance, his food was not particularly important to him, he was not greedy. He had a charm, too, particularly for women, with his blondness and his sensitiveness and his way of making a woman feel that she was a higher being. But Fanny knew him, knew the peculiar obstinate limitedness of him, that would nearly send her mad.
He stayed till about half-past nine. She went to the door with him.
“When are you coming up?” he said jerking his head in the direction, presumably, of his own home.
“I’ll come to-morrow afternoon,” she said brightly. Between Fanny and Mrs Goodall, his mother, there was naturally no love lost.
Again she gave him an awkward little kiss, and said good-night.
“You can’t wonder, you know, child, if he doesn’t seem so very keen,” said her aunt. “It’s your own fault.”
“Oh, Aunt, I couldn’t stand him when he was keen. I can do with him a lot better as he is.”
The two women sat and talked far into the night. They understood each other. The aunt, too, had married as Fanny was marrying, a man who was no companion to her—a violent man, brother of Fanny’s father. He was dead; Fanny’s father was dead.
Poor Aunt Lizzie, she cried woefully over her bright niece, when she had gone to bed.
Fanny paid the promised visit to his people th
e next afternoon. Mrs Goodall was a large woman with smooth-parted hair, a common, obstinate woman who had spoiled her four lads and her one vixen of a married daughter. She was one of those old-fashioned powerful natures that couldn’t do with looks or education or any form of showing off. She fairly hated the sound of correct English. She thee’d and tha’d her prospective daughter-in-law, and said:
“I’m none as ormin’ as I look, seest ta.”
Fanny did not think her prospective mother-in-law looked at all orming, so the speech was unnecessary.
“I towd him mysen,” said Mrs Goodall—“ ’Er’s held back all this long, let ’er stop as ’er is. ’E’d none ha’ had thee for my tellin’, tha hears. No, ’e’s a fool, an’ I know it. I says to him, ‘Tha looks a man, doesn’t ter, at thy age, goin’ an’ openin’ to her when ter hears her scrat’ at th’ gate, after she’s done gallivantin’ round wherever she’d a mind. Tha looks rare an’ soft.’ But it’s no use o’ any talking; he answered that letter o’ thine, and made his own bad bargain.”
But in spite of the old woman’s anger, she was also flattered at Fanny’s coming back to Harry. For Mrs Goodall was impressed by Fanny—a woman of her own match. And more than this, everybody knew that Fanny’s Aunt Kate had left her two hundred pounds, this apart from the girl’s savings.
So there was high tea in Princes Street, when Harry came home black from work, and a rather acrid odour of cordiality, the vixen Jinny darting in to say vulgar things. Of course, Jinny lived in a house whose garden end joined the paternal garden. They were a clan who stuck together, these Goodalls.
It was arranged that Fanny should come to tea again on the Sunday, and the wedding was discussed. It should take place in a fortnight’s time at Morley Chapel. Morley was a hamlet on the edge of the real country, and in its little Congregational Chapel Fanny and Harry had first met.
What a creature of habit he was! He was still in the choir of Morley Chapel—not very regular. He belonged just because he had a tenor voice and enjoyed singing. Indeed, his solos were only spoilt to local fame because, when he sang, he handled his aitches so hopelessly.
Selected Stories Page 27