by A. J. Cronin
After all her efforts to educate him satisfactorily, the idea of allowing him to take up some trifling and nugatory occupation was not only absurd, but a waste of all her effort, a clear admission of her failure. An office-boy? A clerk? An apprentice to some trade? All equally unthinkable!
No, her present hurt and rankling mood served only to intensify her determination. She had her objective – that the path to this objective was obscure did not dismay her – she could not see clearly, but she had faith in herself. She would get another situation immediately; she would do anything, everything. Grimly she folded the letter, and let her thoughts run forward.
She went to bed early, but she could not sleep. Again and again the recurrent thought of her dismissal flicked her on the raw. Restlessly, she drank some water from the carafe at her bedside, but the moment she lay down to compose herself that overactive brain seized once more upon the thought: this happening to her – dismissed by that shoddy little man, after she had worked and slaved for him:
She was hot asleep when Miss Hocking came in. Lying in the darkness, she heard the flat door open, opened in a fumbling, uncertain manner; then suddenly slam shut. She heard the other step along the lobby – not that usual bouncing step, but a slack, curious tread, which instantly engaged her notice. Listening, she forgot momentarily the trouble in her mind, as those dragging sounds went into Miss Hocking’s bedroom, and draggingly continued.
Most unusual, she thought, and she roused herself upon her elbow and looked towards the door, where a thin crack of light indicated that the gas had not been extinguished in the hall. Yes, it was all exceedingly unusual. She had expected that habitual exuberant entry, the subsequent bustlings about the flat, the little hummed snatches of song, perhaps an attempt to enter and declaim, with frequent ecstatic interjections, upon the delightful attractiveness of the party. Then, still resting upon her elbow, she heard another sound which came through the darkness with a startling clarity; neither tears nor laughter, but a combination of both – the sound of hysterical sobbing. At once she jumped up, drew on her felt slippers, and threw on her dressing-gown. She opened the door, and, thrusting her head into the lighted hall, called out: ‘What’s wrong?’
No answer came, only an exacerbation of that awful exaggerated grief.
Lucy frowned, and, drawing her dressing-gown tightly around her, she went down the lobby. She knocked at Miss Hocking’s door, paused for an answer which did not come, then turned the handle sharply and went into the room.
Again she paused, in astonishment and dismay. Reclining in her long chair, as though she had flung herself there in the midst of her undressing, her face and figure tinted oddly by the gas in its greenish coloured globe, was Miss Hocking. In extreme dis-order she lay, her dress and petticoat cast upon the floor, her laces ruffled, her shoulders bare, her thick yellow hair half hanging down her back – a magnificent creature, lying half-naked in a queer voluptuous abandon. One pink-tipped breast lay exposed above her corsage and above her long black stockings her white skin shone with the lustre of satin. Thus she lay, and she was sobbing, wailing aloud in utter misery.
‘What’s the matter?’ cried Lucy; and there was a sharpness in her tone.
For her, the sight of the other woman relaxed in this loose position of abandon was altogether too exotic, too indelicate, to provoke her sympathy; nor did that loud-voiced grief affect her. Not moving, it was to her, but absurd. She drew her dressing-gown more tightly around her trimly moulded figure.
‘I’m asking you what’s wrong?’ she exclaimed, in a louder tone.
‘He’s thrown me over – over – over!’ burst out Miss Hocking. ‘I heard it at the party.’ And her big eyes gushed fresh tears.
‘What do you mean?’ demanded Lucy acidly. She was outraged by the other’s behaviour. She recognised the grotesque obsession, but it was different somehow, and she was constrained to ask again: ‘Tell me what you mean!’
‘Over, over, over! He’s thrown me over. He’s got engaged to another woman – it was announced today,’ wailed the other. ‘He’s thrown me over after all those years, after all I’ve done for him, after the way I’ve loved him, after the way he looked at me.’ And she had a fresh spasm, kicking her heels into the carpet distractedly.
It was inconceivable! It was too wildly impossible! But it was so. The unfortunate woman flagellated herself with a frantic grief for the loss of something which had never been hers.
‘Be quiet!’ said Lucy, in an altered voice, ‘and let me help you into bed.’
‘How can I be quiet?’ shrieked the other. ‘I loved him; yes, I loved him, and he loved me. I know it. I’m positive of it. We trusted each other. Waiting for him. I was – I was!’
The enormous fabric of her self-deception, that one monstrous illusion, had been crumbled by a single unexpected shock. The mainstay of her life was shattered, and it looked now as if she were shattered with it.
She moaned again, and her eye had a wild gleam.
‘I loved him! I loved him!’ she cried again. ‘We were married in the sight of God.’
Lucy was alarmed. ‘Stop crying now,’ she coaxed, patting the other’s shoulder, and at the same time attempting to cover that vast expanse of nudity.
‘You believe me, don’t you?’ sobbed Miss Hocking, clutching that outstretched hand and rubbing it wildly against her tear-ravaged cheek. ‘Kind Lucy, kind Lucy.’
‘Yes – yes,’ said Lucy hastily. ‘Come now, we must get you to bed.’
Actually she induced the other to rise, began with persuasive fingers to undo her corsets and undress her.
At this touch Pinkie stopped weeping, and stood passive, a tragic dishevelled spectacle in her long lacy drawers; a ravishing figure she was, but her face, fixed and now dry of tears, was blank – void of all but a grotesque bewilderment.
‘What’s to become of me?’ she declared suddenly. ‘Now!’
‘Hush,’ said Lucy determinedly.
At last she got rid of the corset, which had pressed the white skin into pinkish creases, and she slipped a nightdress over the other’s shoulders and helped her to climb into the huge four-poster.
‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ she demanded. She had a profound belief in the efficacy of this beverage as a restorative.
Miss Hocking nodded her head with that same absent look. Lucy went out and made some tea, bringing in a full cup – the large breakfast-cup which Miss Hocking always used.
‘Here!’ she said directly. ‘Take this.’
Pinkie stretched out an obedient hand, that large, beautifully manicured hand, and took the cup; but no sooner had she clasped it than it sliped apathetically from her grasp and fell to the floor. The cup did not break, but the tea spilled instantly, and flooded the carpet with a steaming puddle.
‘Now look what you’ve done!’ cried Lucy.
At the senseless action her temper flared. As she bent down to pick up the cup and saucer, she declared: ‘You can do without it now.’
‘I beg your pardon,’ said Miss Hocking abjectly, ‘I was thinking about something. My love for Malcolm. Is it not sublime?’
Straightening herself, with a flushed face Lucy stared at the pitiable creature on the bed. She had no sympathy for her, simply a pricking annoyance. With an intense exasperation, in her phrase ‘she wished she could knock some sense into her’. Passionately she despised herself for having so long tolerated this foolishness. And she had her own worries; at the back of her mind she balanced the triviality of this idiotic woe, this utterly fatuous emotion, against the serious anxiety of her own position, into which she had been so suddenly thrust today.
Yet she was moved to say: ‘Would you like some of your bromide?’
‘I would like some bromide,’ echoed the other, like a child; and when Lucy gave her the dose she took it in the same helpless, unresistant fashion, covering Lucy’s hand with her own as the former raised the spoon firmly to her lips.
She was no longer devastated by her grief
; she had become remote.
Lucy continued to look at her with a frown.
‘Good night,’ she said at length.
‘Good night,’ said Miss Hocking placidly.
Lucy turned out the gas, and went quietly out of the room. She had been at first profoundly disturbed, but now she was almost reassured. As she went along the corridor, a neat and modest figure, the stereotyped phrase kept running through her mind: ‘It never rains but it pours’. She thought of herself, and again the thought recurred. Her life had gone on quietly for years. She had tolerated Miss Hocking; she had felt herself reasonably secure; and now, in the course of a single day, this double catastrophe!
Yet she was not profoundly disturbed about her companion.
‘She’ll be better in the morning,’ ran her thoughts, rather severely, as she got into bed.
Chapter Eleven
But in the morning Pinkie was not better. After breakfast, fully dressed preparatory to her departure, Lucy went into the other’s bedroom – Miss Hocking never rose before nine – for her usual good-bye.
‘Are you all right?’ she enquired.
‘I’m all right,’ echoed Miss Hocking languidly. ‘You see, I – I’ve been thinking.’
They made a strange contrast, the two women: the one standing erect, neat, assured, tapping her tightly rolled umbrella against her shining shoe; the other lying indolently in négligé, her hair blousily across the lace pillow, her large, beautiful eyes blurred into a tragic dullness.
‘Yes,’ she continued, with the same stuporous air of reason; ‘I think it must be because I don’t play the church organ that – you know. If I could play that organ, he would take me back.’ She paused. ‘I must learn today.’
Lucy frowned uneasily beneath her taut veil. How different was this from the other’s usual gushing good-bye: ‘Bye, bye, my dear Lucy. Home soon!’
‘Did you not sleep well?’ she enquired.
‘I slept,’ declared Miss Hocking, ‘and today I shall learn to play. I’ll go down to the church this morning,’ She sighed. ‘All – I’ll do it for him. Malcolm! My husband in God’s sight.’
‘Stop that, now,’ said Lucy brusquely, as though by her very will she could infuse a modicum of reason into that fatuous head. ‘You know I can’t be bothered with that talk.’
‘I know you can’t be bothered, Lucy,’ repeated the other dully. ‘But you don’t understand. I have to be bothered. I’ve got to think about him. I can’t help it.’
Lucy bit her lip, and looked at her watch. She must go for her train; she had her own affairs to attend to; she would not spend her entire day looking after this silly creature; and so she turned on her heel.
‘I’m going then,’ she said abruptly, and went out of the room, leaving Miss Hocking still staring in front of her with that air of dreamy lethargy.
Yet in the hall she paused; she would have liked to give a few words of instruction to the daily woman, but that laggard – her very unpunctuality a direct tribute to Miss Hocking’s easy-going nature – had characteristically not yet arrived; and so, still unsettled in her mind, Lucy was compelled to leave the house.
Throughout the day she put the matter determinedly away from her. She impressed upon herself the urgency of her own affairs: that she had a month in which to discover a new occupation; that she had her son to consider; that this consideration and the consideration of his future took precedence before all others. Yes, even upon this first day she started – started by asking her customers lightly, and with a specious infusion of jocularity, to suggest an opening commensurate with her talents. Most expressed concern that she should be constrained to relinquish her work – ‘Good sakes, you don’t mean to say!’ ‘Well, to my mind it’s a downright shame, and it beats me how a woman of your ability –’ But in these exclamations she perceived rather bitterly that same superficial solicitude which had been evoked by Frank’s death. Did they mean, after all, what they said? Not all, however, were serious. Some, with an answering jocularity, propounded in the abstract the attractive possibilities of matrimony; some even were more jocular and less abstract; but all promised faithfully to bear her in mind; yes, should they hear of anything which might be suitable, ‘they would mind her, for certain.’ That at least was something. She had set the wheels moving.
She came home with a feeling of accomplishment. So constant had been her purpose that only when she turned along Victoria Crescent did her mind revert to the subject of Pinkie.
‘She’s sure to be out of it now,’ she thought optimistically. ‘Silly creature!’
But Pinkie, apparently, was not yet out of it, and there was, moreover, the unusual sight of the daily woman in hat and coat waiting in the hall, her departure delayed until the arrival of Lucy.
‘I had to stop on ma’am,’ began the woman immediately, in a low voice. ‘She’s been that queer. Thinks I, “ Extra money or no extra money, I’d better wait on till you come back.”’
‘What’s been the matter?’ demanded Lucy quickly.
‘She’s that different, ma’am. You know how she is, ordinary, singing and laughing half the time, and playing that big fiddle of hers, with a “ Will you have this, Dick?” or “ Could you do with that, Dick?” but today – well –’ She paused.
‘I see,’ said Lucy shortly.
She gave the woman a shilling, and let her go. Then, composing herself with a factitious expression of cheerfulness she entered the sitting-room.
‘I’ve decided against the organ,’ said Miss Hocking immediately – she was dressed with some untidiness in her grey costume, and sitting upright on a hard chair in the middle of the room. ‘It wasn’t the slightest use.’
‘What do you mean?’ said Lucy, in spite of herself.
‘I got the organist – nice man – oh, yes, he knows me well – up in the organ loft to show me, but no use – I saw it at once – that piece of wood. Between the knees it sticks – how could I do it – play, you see, manipulate that, with my skirt?’ She paused idly, as it were, to reflect in a manner supremely reasonable. ‘ Unless – there’s that tunic I used to drill in. I could wear that under my skirt, you see. Take the skirt off when I got to church. Still – I think –’
‘Oh, don’t Pinkie!’ said Lucy. Her severity was gone; she was stricken by sudden alarm, by such alarm that she uttered the words entreatingly. ‘ Please don’t talk like that.’
‘No, I think not,’ returned Miss Hocking, in the same reasonable manner. ‘I think I shall learn Hebrew. Yes, I’ll get the book and learn Hebrew tomorrow. Then we’ll talk together, he and I, wandering nigh. He’ll love me for it’; and she turned her large bewildered eyes on Lucy.
‘Don’t talk like that, Pinkie!’ cried Lucy again. ‘You know it’s so silly. You’ll upset yourself – and me, too.’
‘I’ll get a Hebrew Testament first thing in the morning,’ logically averred the other. ‘Wandering nigh – Malcolm and I – reading the Hebrew together!’
It was ludicrous, but it was also profoundly distressing. Lucy was no longer angry; she was moved, and disturbed also beyond everything; and she was, for a moment, at a loss for what she should do. She was mystified, and yet –
She spent the evening trying to coax the other out of her frightful strangeness. She was sorry now for her original curtness, and she openly apologised by her attitude.
Next morning, too, which was Saturday, she waited and arranged that Mrs Dickens – who arrived, from curiosity rather than from virtue, with unexpected earliness – should remain until lunch-time, when she could return. She arranged also that Miss Hocking should rest in bed. Then she set out for the office.
Again, but with a greater effort, she turned her mind upon her own predicament. ‘I’ve got to do it,’ she told herself. Hurrying through her work – she had small compunction now about shortening her calls – she finished early, and returned to Glasgow about eleven o’clock. Then, following her premeditated plan, she went immediately to the new office of Hagelmann�
��s in Alston Street and demanded to see the manager. Yes, she demanded! But Hagelmann’s was not Lennox’s, nor was the elegant tiled entrance as penetrable as those small grimy backstairs in the Saddleriggs. She was barred by an Enquiry Chamber. She was asked first to give her name, then to state her business; and she did not see the manager. Suavely but firmly she was informed that she could expect neither an interview nor any prospect of employment with this firm.
Out into the street she went, her head high in the air. They did not know what they were missing, these people, to disdain her, an experienced business woman, a traveller with a clientèle, without an interview, without even a single expression of regret! But they would regret it! Yes, she would see that they regretted it. Some competitive firm would have the benefit of her connection. In the rebound of her indignation; and as it was not yet quarter past eleven – to think that she had allowed a full hour for that interview and composed carefully such persuasive arguments! – she decided to pursue the matter further, immediately.
Three other firms she knew to whom she might reasonably apply, firms carrying on the business of produce import. The largest of these was quite near – in Carswell Street, to be exact – and without delay she took her determined way thither. Here, at least, it was not difficult to obtain admittance: she smiled almost to herself at the complete contrast of her reception. She ought, she reflected, to have come here in the first instance. But when she stated her case, and she saw to it that she made her statement plain, a different complexion fell upon the matter. Trade, the manager averred, was bad, worse than ever it had been; that foreign competition was doing it. Besides, already they had an adequate staff of travellers, and in these hard times it would be unjust to deprive a man of his livelihood for the purpose of engaging a woman. Why not try Margotson’s, was the suggestion. They might be able to do with her.