Three Loves

by A. J. Cronin

  He had left Anna – who lay dazedly against the casing – and now, bent down, a dreadful anxiety in his gaze, he said:

  ‘He’s bad. He looks awful bad.’

  ‘Get some water!’ she cried out, in a voice of anguish, and she clenched her free hand so tightly that the knuckles showed white beneath the reddish streaks that stained them. ‘Bring it quick!’

  With the water that he brought she washed his face, laving his lips and brow tenderly with trembling fingers.

  Then suddenly, incredibly, he opened his eyes, which filled with a last faint flickering recognition.

  ‘Lucy,’ he gasped, making a feeble effort to cling to her, ‘don’t leave me.’

  A quick, stifled sigh broke from her constricted lips, hung suspended.

  ‘No, Frank,’ she sobbed, ‘I couldn’t let you go. We’ll be together, always.’

  ‘But why –’ he gasped once more; and stopped. Then, slurring weakly the words, he whispered: ‘ It was nothing with. Anna – only seeing Anna – seeing her to the boat.’

  Her heart stood still. At first she did not understand. Then all at once, as with a lightning stroke, something struck her – a paralysing shaft of horror which sank quivering in her breast.

  ‘I’m thirsty,’ he whispered, and with a frightful travesty of his old-time irony he panted weakly, ‘But – but I can’t swallow.’

  She could not speak for the rending in her bosom. The universe, with all its constellations, had ceased to move. She was void suddenly, wishing for death. What – oh, what had she done!

  ‘It’s dark surely,’ he gasped feebly. ‘Is it here; or – or – there?’

  ‘Oh, God!’ she sobbed out suddenly, her posture suppliant with her desire, tears gushing from her livid eyes. ‘Save him for me! Frank, beloved, come back – back to me! I’ll – I’ll get you better. I love you!’

  But his jaw went slack; those heavy eyelids dropped, shuttered the dulling eyes. His head rolled over, the lips fell leeringly apart, leaving a final emptiness which mocked her.

  Book Two

  Chapter One

  ‘Check!’ said Uncle Edward, blowing his nose delicately. ‘Mate!’

  Peter frowned. He knew the moves of all the pieces: a pleasant thrill to jump the knight about! Yet, somehow, it always happened – this – without the slightest warning.

  ‘Funny,’ he said. ‘I thought –’

  A half-smile lay on the priest’s face; his long white fingers caressed the glass of port, which shone like a warm ruby beside the dish of walnuts on the polished mahogany table. The red velvet curtains of the room, tight against the wet wind blowing gustily from the firth, shut out the encroaching darkness and enriched the mellow gaslight, which fell comfortably upon the two players. Uncle Edward raised his port, savoured it with slightly pursed lips, then suddenly a loud batter of wind and rain rattling the window made him look up, and after a moment, complacently remark:

  ‘More pleasant inside tonight – don’t you think so, my good sir?’

  Peter let himself slide down so that his head rested on the back of his chair.

  ‘Wet often comes after fog,’ he said oracularly; he had heard old Bowie make that remark, and now he repeated it with a strong air of originality.

  ‘And what comes after I’ve taken your queen?’ said Uncle Edward slyly.

  They both laughed, and into the middle of their laughter came a knocking upon the door – an unexpected knocking, for they had hoped to have the evening to themselves.

  ‘Come in!’ called out Edward; and Miss O’Regan glided into the room.

  ‘Your reverence,’ she began hesitatingly, faltered, and began again: ‘Your reverence –’

  Then all at once her downcast eyes lifted to heaven with a wild rolling gesture, so that the whites were exposed in an orgy of resigned misgiving: distracted, almost, she seemed for some obscure reason, and her upturned face had the look of the martyred saint that hung upon the wall behind her.

  ‘This – it came,’ she ejaculated from her pale lips, and, withdrawing an orange envelope from behind her back, she profferred it tremulously.

  He opened the telegram mechanically, whilst his ivory skin whitened and his mouth drew in. Then all at once he made a curious sound in his throat.

  ‘Dear me!’ he said in a vague, frightened voice. ‘Dear me!’

  Then all the blood rushed into his face again, making it look full, and he rose up agitatedly, scattering the litter of walnut-shells that lay on his lap.

  ‘I’ve got to go into the church,’ he stammered, without looking at Peter, but addressing the little statue of the Madonna by the door. ‘Yes, I’ve – I’ve got to go into the church. I must go to the church.’

  He took his biretta from the mantelpiece and stepped forward, his large buckled shoes crunching the shells upon the hearthrug. Holding the open telegram in his hand, he went out of the room and Miss O’Regan followed him, shivering like an agitated shadow. As she passed through the door, she dipped her fingers in the little holy water font and signed herself with a fearful spiritual abandon.

  The boy’s face clouded at the sudden change in the happy warm room, and he sat up in his chair, his thin body stiff and apprehensive.

  The waves of wind which billowed against the windows became sea waves which flowed coldly around him as he traversed in fancy the nine miles of rough water which separated him from his home across the estuary. With the remote yet positive intuition of his age, he had incredibly a glimmering of understanding, and vaguely the tall figure of his father rose up before him. Clad ridiculously in a long white nightdress was this figure – grotesque, disturbing.

  What a nuisance to have the pleasant evening broken into like this, especially when Uncle Edward had promised him a three penny piece if he won a game. Actually it was there – the pledged reward – shining beside the board. Petulantly he picked up a walnut, made to crack it, laid it down again. Then he picked up the threepenny piece. He would have won it – really he would; yes, now he was positive he would have won it; and so, with an abstracted air, he slipped the coin into his pocket. Then he rose up quickly, and began to put away the chessmen.

  When he had put the box and the board into the proper drawer of the roll-top desk, he thought again for a moment, with his head lowered. Then he went out of the room.

  Seeking companionship of some sort, he descended the stairs and walked along the cold, waxcloth-covered passage. Miss O’Regan and Eileen were in, the kitchen: Miss O’Regan weeping and walking up and down, saying her beads with her long heavy rosary in her thin hands, Eileen standing by the fire watching the housekeeper with concerned eyes. When he came in Miss O’Regan paused in the middle of a ‘Hail Mary’ and shot out under her breath to Eileen:

  ‘He hasn’t been told’; then she resumed: ‘Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death, Amen.’ And her tears fell afresh from her red-lidded eyes.

  He knew that Miss O’Regan was not crying because of what was in the telegram, but simply because his uncle was upset. Yet, for the sake of saying something, he exclaimed:

  ‘Why are you crying, Miss O’Regan?’

  ‘I’ve a headache,’ the housekeeper returned through her sobs, pressing her hand to her brow.

  It was a reasonable excuse: Miss O’Regan’s headaches ranked equally in incidence with her ecstasies. Still, the room, felt uncomfortable; the fire had gone out; and the blister on his finger, where he had burnt it the other day whilst roasting chestnuts, began to throb again painfully.

  ‘My finger’s hurting, too,’ he remarked idly, regarding it sympathetically. But he was not to have much attention tonight.

  Eileen, as often as not, would look at his thin shanks, and laugh:

  ‘Hasn’t he the leg for the kilt, the boy?’ or make a joke about his sporran – why was that sporran a source of secret joy for Eileen? But now she said, with a glance at the clock, merely:

  ‘It’s near nine, Master Peter. I’ll give you a glass of milk and
a biscuit. Then I’ll take you to your bed.’

  Miss O’Regan stopped praying whilst he sadly sipped his milk and nibbled his ginger snap; delicately she wiped her nose several times with her small lace-edged handkerchief. She and Eileen watched him whilst pretending not to, and through their eyes he felt the finger of calamity pointing at him. But the finger was too unreal for him to be impressed. When, in spite of prolonging his meal, he had finished, Eileen looked at the housekeeper for authority, and said:

  ‘I’ll take him up now, will I, miss, or not?’

  Miss O’Regan nodded her inclined head once slowly, and in this acquiescence he felt the unusual significance of the evening: At the beginning of his stay, when Eileen had offered to undress him, Miss O’Regan had shrivelled the awful suggestion with a burning word which had shamed the young maiden to a blush.

  ‘If you can’t,’ the elder virgin had remarked, ‘get modesty in the priest’s house, Eileen, where in God’s name will you get it?’

  Tonight, however, was clearly different, and upstairs Eileen tucked him in warmly. First, of course, he had to look at the Linton Lighthouse, which threw its flat revolving beam across the wet blackness of the firth. Three sweeping beams, then a long pause; three lovely beams again – it was an ecstatic sight.

  Then a quick rattle of prayers – ‘Glorbefar-sun-olygost-men –’; it was fun to see how soon you could finish them – and a jump into bed. Eileen smiled gently – that missing tooth in front gave her such a lovely piquant air – and she kissed him with a sudden surreptitious solicitude, so that one of her curls fell into his eye. Then he was alone.

  The tiny peep of gas flickered behind its pink-rimmed frosted globe – for the window was open a little at the top – and out-landish shadows chased across the wall towards which he had turned. Although he was nearly nine, these monstrous racing figures still retained the power to make his room a strange chamber of fear. Sometimes he would fall into a sweat to think that long, gripping hands cast these shadows, and it would be minutes before he could clench his teeth hard enough to twist round and confront the emptiness which was always there, and yet might not be there.

  But tonight the waving forms were not the forms of his swift imagination. Another figure – grotesque, white-robed – floated back once more into the sensitive screen of his sight, aweing him somewhat but causing him neither grief nor fear. He had, besides, a comfortable feeling at the back of his mind. Fumbling drowsily, he all at once remembered. The threepenny bit! Yes, that was it. Then he slept.

  Next morning began with a warm sun that sent wheels of yellow light over the waters of the firth, with a high blue sky that held a quivering expectancy for the day. And yet the same disastrous sense of the unusual clung like a stale odour to the fabric of the household. He did not see his uncle at breakfast; Miss O’Regan’s head, which he knew to be the barometer of her feelings, was still set to a melancholy inclination; even Eileen, who silently brought him his porridge and boiled egg, seemed a different and more complex being from the soft and intimate creature who had clasped him in her warm embrace on the night before.

  Altogether, he began to feel a slow depression settling upon him like a lethargy. He went out after breakfast, and, after weighing the matter, bought himself some sweets – peardrops: a new confection he had recently discovered in a shop where the lady, a parishioner of Uncle Edward, might be trusted to give him generous measure: but he did not succeed in lifting his discomfort. For a moment he stood observing some troops filing away up the gangway into a long yellow ship at the pier; then he turned, looked at some shop windows without interest; listened to a man who was singing ‘Beautiful Flossie’; went finally and disconsolately to the Presbytery.

  In the hall he found Miss O’Regan awaiting him.

  ‘Peter!’ she exclaimed as soon as he came through the door. ‘I’ve looked for you everywhere. Where have you been, child?’

  ‘Oh, out,’ he returned listlessly.

  ‘I know, but –’ she paused.

  The duty she must perform at once distressed and flattered her. His reverence had said that morning:

  ‘You had better tell the boy, Miss O’Regan. He’ll take it better from you.’ And at these words her lowered eyelids had flickered with a profound though humble satisfaction. She felt indeed, that such a task favoured her with a high esteem, elevated her to a confidential position far above that of mere housekeeper. Yet she shrank a little from projecting this thunderbolt through her palely pious lips.

  ‘Peter,’ she began at length, ‘come upstairs.’ She took his warm palm between her thin, cold fingers, and as she led him up the figured Axminster he felt those fingers like the thin legs of a frog he had once touched in the garden – cold yet living – productive of a feeling of great discomfort.

  They went into the sitting-room, which was empty; sat down on the plush sofa by the window; faced one another. For an awkward moment silence hung self-consciously between them; then the housekeeper’s lips trembled, her eyes rolled twice in their orbits and widened with a faintly curious expectancy.

  ‘Peter, my boy,’ she whispered, ‘you’ll have to be brave.’ She put her arm round his shoulders, still gazing at him sideways. ‘Yes, a big brave boy,’ she continued. ‘I’ve got sad news for you, Peter.’

  He felt her watching him, and her look troubled him; he began to wish ardently that she would tell him quickly.

  ‘You know, Peter,’ she resumed, with a little sniff, ‘ your – your father’s ill – very ill indeed.’

  His discomfort grew, yet he saw that Miss O’Regan was doing her best for him, and he nodded his head jerkily in acquiescence, as though, in effect, he encouraged her.

  ‘But; Peter,’ whispered Miss O’Regan at last, ‘your father – your father’s not really ill any more. He’s in heaven with the blessed angels – he’s dead, Peter.’

  He had prepared himself, and immediately he burst into tears. By some strange presentiment, from the moment she had appeared with the telegram, he had suspected; yes, despite the specious pretence of concealment he had known; but now her manner, the sudden expression of his knowledge in words, the very anticipation with which she awaited some demonstration of his grief, all conspired to make him weep. He sobbed loudly; then, drawing him to her, she mingled her tears with his, wallowing in her grief. Thus, close-pressed, they wept together.

  He stopped crying to blow his nose and, turning his head without moving his body, gazed mournfully out of the window. Below him the movement of the streets continued; the thin stream of soldiers – more like ants than men – poured still into the troop-ship; on the window a sluggish wasp crawled to the top of the pane, buzzed loudly, then fell down again; a bone from Miss O’Regan’s corsets was sticking into his side and hurting him.

  At last reluctantly she relinquished him.

  ‘When you go back with his reverence you must tell your mother I’ve looked after you well,’ she exclaimed, wiping a teardrop from the end of her nose. ‘A thing like that would please his reverence proudly.’

  ‘Yes, Miss O’Regan,’ he assented willingly. ‘Of course I will.’

  He hardly thought of what he said, for at the sudden thought of his mother an immense joy possessed him that he was to see her again. A sudden thought struck him.

  ‘Shall we have lunch on the boat, Miss O’Regan?’ he asked timidly. Returning with Uncle Edward meant an exciting voyage on the steamer Lucy Lamond. Shocked, she looked at him, was about to reply, when suddenly the door opened and Edward came into the room. Immediately she rose to her feet, clasped her hands in front of her, and lowered her head.

  ‘Yes, your reverence,’ she murmured in reply to a muffled question, ‘he took it well, very well, considering. I did my best.’

  She seemed thus to claim modestly some success for the warm tact of her womanhood.

  They both turned, gazed at Peter, and under that united look he blushed, looked down, as though conscious that he had not wept enough. Then Miss O’Regan becko
ned spectrally; and, following her, he went out of the room.

  Yet he did not go home on that day; nor yet on the next. It was incredible, he could not understand it, but actually an entire fortnight elapsed before a general stirring awoke in the household, and he knew this as the day of his departure. When Miss O’Regan had washed his face and hands, and brushed his hair smooth, he hurried down to the foot of the garden to take a last look at the frog which lived in the dampness of the grotto. But, although he looked everywhere and dirtied his hands again by turning up the leaves of the ivy that overgrew the rockery, he could not find it. He spat gently upon his hands and wiped them upon the back of his kilt, so that Miss O’Regan should not be annoyed with him; then he went to inspect his own initials which he had cut as straight and deeply as he could in the lime-tree by the back gate. The sight of those yellowish letters, the consideration of their permanence – a monument to his name – afforded him a swelling gratification, made him even smile. Reluctantly he left them to return to the house.

  They had a light luncheon, followed by a heavy leave-taking, which left him gasping; before his trotting body had recovered breath he was on board the steamer with his uncle.

  The crossing passed in a curious suspense, half excitement, half fear – a stomach hollow that deepened the nearer the boat drew to Ardfillan. At first he wandered about the deck, but soon, very soon, he came back towards Uncle Edward and Uncle Edward’s hand. They disembarked in silence.

  On the way along the front, his steps flagged, he felt a lump in his throat; yet shortly he was at the end of the promenade, had passed at the corner the long smooth iron drinking-trough – the one into which he had once loosed some minnows; then the familiar white stone house confronted him with incredible reality.

  As he watched his uncle quietly pull the bell, a fearful desire came upon him to run, to run anywhere so long as he could escape from this unknown terror. Then the door opened, and he saw his mother’s face, a face which seemed strangely small and young, with large eyes washed strangely bright. Instantly his legs ceased to strain to run, and began instead to tremble. The hard lump rose from his stomach into his throat, and melted into a sob. Tears of real happiness and real sadness welled out of his eyes. Without knowing, he raised up his arms, and instantly the half-forgotten sweetness of his mother’s kiss flowed through him.