Three Loves

by A. J. Cronin

  She ran up the stairs, and – out of breath from her running – unlocked the door and entered the house. Immediately she paused, still panting. The hall was now quite dark. She could see nothing; but across the blackness came a strange tearing sound which fell coldly upon her ear.

  ‘Where are you?’ she called out, the blood pounding in her ears.

  There was no answer but that slow rending noise which came insistently from the sitting-room. And in a panic Lucy rushed into that room. Then she saw Miss Hocking, and abruptly paused. Pinkie was there, standing by the table, the outlines of her huge figure shadowy, magnified by that fast-fading light. Stooping she was, her shoulders bulky, her head drooping, her hands moving unceasingly with a slow vindictive malice, tearing into shreds the papers which Lucy had left upon the table.

  ‘Pinkie!’ gasped Lucy. ‘What are you doing?’

  The other woman looked back at her.

  ‘Where have you been?’ she demanded, and her voice – no longer composed – was harsh, heavy with a sullen animosity.

  ‘I only went out for a moment,’ said Lucy, her breath still coming quickly.

  ‘You said that before,’ burst out Miss Hocking, and her lip hung down in a malignant sneer; ‘but I know where you’ve been. Going – going – going behind my back in everything.’ She paused heavily, and, indicating the torn strips between her fingers, she called out in a loud voice: ‘ Is this your paper?’

  ‘Yes,’ gasped Lucy, ‘it is mine – but don’t go on like that. You frighten me. Let me – let me light the gas.’

  Suddenly she was appalled by that wild stare with which the other transfixed her; in the gathering darkness that immense amorphous form loomed with an indescribable menace.

  ‘I haven’t done anything – really I haven’t, Pinkie,’ she faltered.

  ‘You have!’ shouted Miss Hocking, madly, accusingly. ‘You’ve admitted it. I saw that notice about him in your paper. I saw it when you were out. I read it, I tell you; I read it myself.’ Yes, she had read that fatal announcement; by a wild deduction of her insane logic, fastened the entire blame on Lucy. ‘ You’re against me,’ she shouted again, in that loud, malignant voice; ‘you’ve done it all. Everything! You hate me, and I hate you.’

  Still keeping up that lowering, malicious stare, she began slowly to move round the edge of the table. She advanced on Lucy.

  ‘Don’t, Pinkie! Don’t look like that!’ cried out Lucy, shrinking back against the wall.

  ‘I will! I will!’ shouted Miss Hocking; at last she had found an outlet for all that pent-up passion, an object on which to spend the bewildered forces of her immense vitality. Madly she began to tear off her clothes, whirling them behind her with wild movements of her arms. Her face, vaguely pallid in the darkness, shrouded by the wild tangle of her hair, transcended by an insane fury, was a sight indescribably terrifying.

  ‘For God’s sake, Pinkie!’ panted Lucy. ‘I’ve done nothing! Don’t do that!’

  But the other gave no heed. She ripped the last of her garments from her, and her huge white body swam terrifying as a ghost towards Lucy.

  She was close to her now, her nakedness complete, obscene, and as in a frenzy she clasped her firm breasts.

  ‘You did it,’ she shrieked. ‘ You have ruined my life.’

  ‘Leave me alone,’ cried Lucy, and she tried to slip sideways towards the door.

  ‘I’ve got you,’ shouted the other madly, ‘I’ve got you here.’

  Then all at once she lunged forward.

  Lucy screamed, but, even as she screamed, out of that darkness two powerful hands seized her suddenly by the neck. The hands had thumbs like steel, which dug into the softness of her neck and compressed themselves upon her gullet like a vice. She struggled; she struggled desperately, trying to tear herself free. Again she shrieked – or made to shriek. She did not know. Those two hands were choking the life out of her. Desperately she flung herself against that naked body which so closely oppressed her and so gladly received her struggles. She kicked; she twisted her head, and sank her sharp teeth firmly into those devilish compressing hands. But those hands only held more closely. That soft, warm body closed over hers more ardently. She tried – she tried – again she tried to scream – to utter some feeble cry. She was in agony; dumbly her body writhed; then slowly began to yield. Her head slipped, then sagged slowly backwards; her eye-balls were bursting; the darkness vanished, supplanted by a red and swimming haze through which there floated elusive lights. Dazedly, terrified, she thought of Peter. She was dying – what would he do without her? Her blue lips fell apart; feebly she tried to whisper; then suddenly a roaring – a battering – burst upon her ears; limply she sank back, and utter blackness rose up to envelop her.

  She knew nothing of that blackness, but vaguely throughout its span there came to her a flickering of lights, shouting, a sense of crowding, rushing forms; then silence.

  When she woke up again, she was on the sofa. A powerful smell of ammonia was in her nostrils; the place seemed full of light and stamping people; Hudson was there, bending over her, and, ridiculously, a man in uniform – a policeman. From the adjoining room – or a mile away, perhaps – came a high, insistent shrieking, like the frantic madness of a wounded animal. It was Pinkie’s voice.

  ‘That’s better,’ she heard Hudson say. ‘But didn’t I tell you not to come?’

  Why was that policeman looking at her so anxiously? What was he doing here? She tried to smile at him, to nod her head, and again that stab of agony ran into her throat. And so, once more, she fainted.

  Chapter Twelve

  Four days elapsed before she could struggle out of bed. Hudson had said a week; but she had her own ideas about things; and so, upon the afternoon of that fourth day, when she had dismissed the attendant Mrs Dickens, she raised herself and made determinedly the effort. But as her foot touched the ground she winced from the jarring shock, and with difficulty restrained an exclamation of pain. Her neck, upon the slightest movement, sent a twinge along her spine which was excruciating. She was obliged to step cautiously, to hold her head quite motionless, to keep even her features expressionless and rigid in order to avoid that shooting pang. Still she went on.

  Supporting herself by the furniture, she made the passage of the room, and looked at herself in the mirror. She was pale, and upon the pallid skin of her throat two great purple weals lay spread like the wings of an enormous butterfly. Curiously she gazed at these for a moment, then, with a faint shiver, she turned away. In the same stiff fashion she pulled on her dressing-gown, and shuffled slowly into the hall. She felt extremely weak, but she had an almost impatient desire to get away from the restraining influence of her bed.

  Instinctively – this time the pang was that of recollection! – she avoided the sitting-room; and, entering the kitchen, she sat herself cautiously by the window. Before her lay that same shining scene of sea and sky which she had so often viewed from her own house. For three days after those first hours of semi-consciousness she had stared stiffly at the opposite wallpaper – a patch of unchanging green – and now, in the present weakness of her body, this lovely familiar sight gripped her with a voluptuous sadness. Everything was quiet. Around her, empty of all sound, was the flat; and it was empty of Miss Hocking’s presence. They had taken her to the asylum. How strange it was to think of that – driven her off in a closed cab to Blandford Asylum, upon the outskirts of Glasgow. She had often seen it from the train – a noble building of grey stone, turreted like a castle, set upon a hill in charming grounds. Yet she had never dreamed that Pinkie –. In retrospect, she viewed the whole calamity dispassionately, like a woman gazing with studious detachment at a picture. It had moved so swiftly: that frightful screaming of Miss Hocking under restraint, which she had heard dimly through her dream, then her awakening; later, Hudson’s enquiries; his wire to Miss Hocking’s brother – a tall, dark, angular man, with a keen and worried face above his high white collar. Somehow that collar stuck in Lucy�
�s mind, which had been feverish when he arrived – a stiffly rigid collar, unpeaked, shaped like a clergyman’s. But though, somehow, that collar typified him, he was not a clergyman. He was a barrister, with a reputation – a coming man, Hudson had inferred to her – which he guarded jealously.

  ‘We’ve always been afraid of this,’ she heard him say again, in his clear English voice. ‘ We’ve dreaded it.’ He dreaded, too, the repercussions upon his practice. ‘It mustn’t be known,’ he had repeated, not once, but twenty times, with an anxious insistence. ‘It would be fatal – in my profession.’ A wise consideration, in a way, she thought; no one would want to trust a lawyer with a mad sister.

  And so that sister had been certified – what had they called it? Acute mania! Yes, that was the phrase; and the outlook, Hudson had told her, was beyond doubt, hopeless. For more than five years she had lived with a foolish woman who was now a certified, incurable lunatic! The thought appalled her; it made those ordinary years of life so startling, so unique. Strangely, she remembered nothing of Miss Hocking’s peculiarity, harboured no grudge for that awful and unprovoked assault; she thought only of the kindness she had received from her. ‘Yes, she was kind,’ she thought, with a slightly humid eye.

  And now she had to get out of this flat within the month. The furniture would be removed then – stored or sold – which she did not know; it had been all arranged by that barrister brother. How kind he had been; but with that curious look like Hudson’s in his eyes. And she did know that alone she could not support the expenses of the flat.

  Abruptly, her thoughts swung round to her own predicament; her eye, no longer humid, lost its spell and hardened into reality. Her position was really serious. She had a handful of possessions – a wardrobe, a rocking-chair, a picture. She had some good clothes – how she grudged now what she had spent upon them at Pinkie’s rash enticement – and she had twenty pounds in money. Finally, she had her son: her dear son, whose face had risen before her at that agonising moment which she had thought to be her last. Him she counted no liability, but her chief asset upon the balance-sheet of life. She had also – an afterthought instantly dismissed – her relations. No, she would never, after these years, swallow the bitter lees of humiliation by approaching them. The gentle suppliant was not her rôle. She had changed, lost that mildness which had once been hers. And yet, by the end of this month, unless she bestirred herself, she would have neither occupation nor home.

  She moved restlessly, and was twinged by her pain. Exasperated by her own weakness, she twisted her head deliberately into that pain, encountering it fiercely, till it waned into numbness. Yes, that was her attitude towards life.

  Still, she chafed at her enforced inaction, deploring the loss of these last few days, realising that she could make no move till Monday. Her present absence from the office did not trouble her; she would be paid, and that sufficed her; already in her mind she had finished with Lennox’s. But she must quickly get herself right – that was imperative.

  At this she rose. It was four o’clock, but she did not want tea – she always knew herself to be ill when she took a distaste for tea – and, pouring some milk into a saucepan, she heated it on the gas-ring. She drank the milk slowly, then, feeling a little faint, she returned to bed. There she lay plotting out the future – thinking, till at last the darkness fell upon the quiet house, and sleep descended with it.

  It was Monday before she was able to go out, and even then she was shaky and giddy in the street, as she struggled up to business. At the office, she was utterly reticent about her accident – that was what they termed it – and she herself offered no contradiction. Nor did she yield herself to their sympathy; even when Dougal had remarked: ‘You’re not looking well, Mrs Moore,’ she had simply nodded; and Dougal was a favourite of hers now. Though her head throbbed, she went out upon her round in the usual fashion. It was not, of course, the demands of her present post which drew her, but her purpose to achieve another. She was in earnest now, she told herself, and, indeed, in grim earnest she began.

  Even yet she did not realise the full difficulty of her task, or she did not, at least, admit this difficulty. The district at this period lay stagnant, sunk in that bog of trade depression which long followed the Boer War. Everywhere a policy of cautious pessimism prevailed. Most of the shipyards were already on half time, the largest steelworks in Winton had closed down two blast furnaces, and, in sympathy, many of the pits were idle, or working only a single shift. These were actions upon the grand scale; but they had inevitably their reactions upon the lesser. Small tradesmen lengthened their faces and shortened their credit. Even upon her final rounds for Lennox’s, she found a dwindling of orders; a general glum anticipation of bad times ahead; in the colliery villages, miners, squatting upon their haunches, supported thus the walls of their dwellings, eyeing her despondently as she passed; in the Clydeside towns crowds of unemployed gathered in apathy outside the public-houses; the beat of the hammers – pulse of the district’s industry – no longer vigorous and vital, now throbbed with a feeble and intermittent note. Instinctively she felt these omens of misfortune. Those who had promised glibly to inform her ‘should they hear of something’, inferred, when she ventured to refresh their recollections, that it was a bad time to be looking for work.

  Moreover, it was not even yet the age when women were admitted freely to equality in business, nor had she qualifications fitted for this still unequal struggle. Those letters which she had so confidently despatched brought her not a single reply. She had moments, indeed; when she contemplated with a sort of dull amazement the lack of response to her applications. Did those people not comprehend what they were missing? She, Lucy Moore, so brisk, so competent, so eager to serve, to be overlooked in this atrocious fashion. She could not understand it.

  Still, she knew her worth and she persisted. She would achieve a magnificent post, somehow, in spite of them, in spite of everything. Every day she bought her two newspapers – that almost fatal newspaper! – approaching them each morning with fresh hope, studying one by one those advertisements, marking with her pen each slender chance.

  She wrote her applications with a sort of dogged pertinacity, forcing herself to a note of optimism. She bought better note-paper; she spent shillings upon postage-stamps; she began even to apply for the impossible: the matronship of an orphanage – a secretary’s post in London – actually the post of manageress in a laundry. Finally, in desperation, she inserted an advertisement offering her services in any capacity which might yield a modest wage.

  And nothing happened but a passage of the days. She had not fully recovered from her shock; Hudson had spoken vaguely of a holiday, but that she dismissed instantly as impossible; still, her assumption of vivacity began to wear thin. She had moments when she discovered herself staring at nothing, with doubtful eyes. Sometimes at night she would wake up, wondering what would become-of her. And Peter! He, of course, was her main concern. Still unconscious of her altered circumstances, he continued his blandly optimistic letters, demanding in one a better fountain-pen, alluding in another to the prospects of his career. Each letter was to her a sublime incentive, a happy spur, urging her forward to succeed. She must and she would succeed for him. And yet she could not.

  With a feeling of galling desolation she came into the office in the Saddleriggs on the Saturday which was her last day. Despondently she went to her desk, and began those entries which were the last she would ever make in that drab and grimy den. Yet, painfully almost, she embraced its drabness and regretted her departure from its grime. She knew it now so well. Frank had worked here; her livelihood had sprung from here; she had filled it with something of her life.

  At length she looked up, to find Lennox regarding her. He cleared his throat awkwardly, at once removed his eyes. But in a moment he was over at her desk. They were alone in the office.

  ‘Have ye got anything to do?’ he enquired, with the same awkwardness; and she saw in his face that curious concern
which had been growing for those last few days. For a moment there was silence, then she faced him directly, confidently.

  ‘Yes,’ she lied, stung by the compassion in his eyes. ‘I got fixed up nicely yesterday.’

  His face cleared slightly. ‘Did you, though? That’s fine, now, that is.’ His eyes lightened and he gave his conscious little laugh. ‘ I was beginning to worry about you. You’ve been looking real poorly these last days. It’s an extraordinary thing, but it’s fair upset me.’

  ‘I’m perfectly well,’ she answered calmly. ‘Perfectly strong and healthy.’

  ‘I know,’ he said hurriedly. ‘You’re as fit as a smart-stepping pony. I’ve always known that. But it’s just that you’ve looked down in the mouth lately. I wouldn’t for anything think that I was maybe responsible.’

  He broke off, caressing his neat beard sheepishly, as though scarcely comprehending why he spoke. Strange man that he was, he had cherished for her unawares a curious regard, which, overlaid by the passion of his business, squeezed away by his natural shrewdness, had been compressed through the years into small compass: present yet unrecognised. And now, by his own act, he had wrenched himself from business. He was a little lost; he had not yet found his feet in this new and unsubstantial world. But now, as he encompassed her trim small figure, he had a sweeping recollection of that quiet afternoon when involuntarily he had slipped his arm around her waist. How neat it had felt, neat yet soft! Unconsciously his sallow, perky features coloured. He had been a bachelor by inclination – of course, he knew that – but he was only fifty-seven, and, in his own words, spry as a sparrow.

  ‘I was so taken up with the signing of the settlement that other things went out of my head,’ he said at last, rather vaguely and with unusual diffidence.