by A. J. Cronin
The other woman observed her closely. There was a short, stiff silence.
‘But we are instructed,’ put in Joséphine, her small eyes creased out by the sunshine and her discomposure.
‘I am no longer instructed,’ answered Lucy. ‘Now I am myself.’
She got into the cab, pulled the door behind her. Through the small glass panel she saw the two faces turned towards her with uncomprehending, faintly discouraged eyes. Then the coachman whipped up the horse, and those faces receded backwards from her sight.
It was finished, then – so quietly, so dispassionately, she might have been returning from a simple visit instead of concluding the most desperate experience of her life.
The cab rattled on. At first she looked neither to right nor to left, but kept her bent gaze upon the jolting floor. Then slowly she raised her head and with an impassive face gazed on to the busy street. Full of women was this roadway, women and girls hurrying back to breakfast from the laceworks of Sentiens, laughing talking, gesticulating, clattering their sabots with a rude energy. How happy they looked, and how careless. The air rang with their loud, cheerful voices. Once she had set out in life like that, with the same energy, the same purpose.
She entered the outskirts of Brussels, going back – back the same way she had come. Here there was greater quietude and an empty thoroughfare – merely a boy washing the window of a charcuterie, a concierge in a green baize apron polishing the brasses of his doorway, a little blue gendarme waiting at a street-corner, all so casual and matter of fact.
Then into Brussels. Again the trams, the traffic, shops opening, cafés already open, some topers incredibly early at their bocks. How restless her eye was! A mirror for everything. Yes, it was merely a mirror. She perceived only with the surface of her mind – those quick passing reflections were the light and shadows fluttering upon the surface of a pool. Beneath the fleeting images lay a dull obscurity. She was in the square: vast, full of writhing statuary; pigeons strutting on the pedestals; horses drooping limp necks before dejected fiacres.
Then came the station – the train – the compartment with its sulphurous smell and seats of figured velvet.
Now she had started upon her return; through that same countryside. The neat square fields, peasants bent within those fields, the unwavering canals, the thin lines of poplars plunging like plumes before the wind. She had traversed this land before, filled then by a thrilling ecstasy, her heart leaping to the beating of the wheels. And whither had the ecstasy led her? To a mad scene within a walled-in garden, where reason had almost left her! She shivered and shut her mind against the thought. And now she was going back! It was so foolish, this return.
A sense of abject futility suddenly invaded her. All her life – what had it been but a blind reaching towards futility? On and on, striving for something that was never achieved. And she had struggled so hard, with all her forces, striving with both her hands to mould fate, for this egregious result. Everything she had done had been deliberate, firm. She was no shuttlecock; nothing was accidental; everything had come from within, from herself! And this raddled, ridiculous creature was the issue of it all – this beaten retreat the immutable conclusion of her destiny.
But was it the end? And was she defeated? Unconsciously she held her head to that familiar attitude of listening – listening to the thunder of the wheels and the note which rose insistently and throbbing as before. The same wheels, the same note – yes, and she the same woman! That was why to her the note was different. ‘On and on,’ it said to her. ‘On and on – on and on!’ – urging her forward – farther, farther.
Straightening herself, she lowered the window and let the flying air rush full against her face. That was better. The wind, stinging against her brow, cleared it of its furrow, infused, a tonic strength into her listless body. That wind, flailing the plunging poplars, casting a silver sheen upon the quivering willows, was better – better than the listless air which had recently enclosed her. Now she would do something!
No, she was not defeated. Something rose up within her at the thought. The past was finished and must be forgotten. She had the future; always she had the future. How muddled her head was, and how baffling the problem. She was actually stupid – yes, stupid and inarticulate. She could not think now, but later she would puzzle the whole thing out.
Her strength gathered. Instinctively she knew that something was reaching out to her. It was a conviction, a happy premonition. And she forgot her aching head, her exhausted body, her sorry clothing, her wretched predicament. She forgot them all, and was filled by a strange content.
Tournai – Blaudin – Baisieux – Lille – they swept past her in turn. Then she was at Calais, passing the curious inspection of the Customs, boarding the steamer that lay against the quay. And now her eye, directed outside the harbour perceived the restless movement of the grey sea and the racing of the smoky clouds. She saw that the crossing would be rough. Strangely, this thought, which once would have moved her to the greatest dread, gave her no qualms. Her fibre had toughened since those days when she had quailed before a ruffled sea. Now she knew that she would be ill. It was inevitable, and she accepted it.
When the packet left the pier, she did not go below, but stood by the bulwark rail steadying herself against the sudden lurchings of the deck. It was bad – a dreadful crossing. The vessel jumped and pounded into the heavy seas, battered by the vast bulks of water which burst against its bow and hull. Like her own life, that passage – she and the ship were one. Staggering under every blow, yet rising, impelled by that inner force which drove them both, moving forward against those savage waves. On and on! The wind twanged through the rigging like a flight of whistling bolts; the flying spray stung her pale cheeks; a wave, cresting the bow, lapped the vertiginous decks and spilled itself gently towards her feet. A cold sickness assailed her: no physical nausea, but an inward deathly weakness.
She gripped the rail tightly and held herself rigid whilst the great masses of water rolled and raced beneath. Her hat was askew, her long loose dress flapping like a sail, her face blue with cold, her teeth tightly set.
A stewardess hurrying past, her figure trimmed against the gale, paused suddenly. Her eyes rested for a moment on Lucy.
‘Come down – come down below,’ she said, and then she added: ‘Madam.’
Madam – strange bedraggled creature to merit such a title – turned her wind-battered head.
‘I’m better here, I think,’ she answered dazedly.
‘But you look ill. Would you like some brandy?’
The stewardess awaited no answer, but went at once and brought a small glass of brandy. Still clutching the rail, Lucy drank the brandy. She thanked the stewardess, paid her fumblingly out of her foreign money.
It warmed her within, the liquor, glowing like a warm core within her chilled body. Yes, she was very cold. The cutting wind pierced her inadequate clothing, and lacerated her thin frame, which shivered as with a rigor. Her teeth chattered; her pinched features, drained of what blood they had, set with a frozen rigidity. A sharp stitch nipped her side.
Yet mercifully she conquered her sickness. She would not give in, but held firm to that rail, letting the biting wind chill the nausea until finally it left her.
Like the ship, she gallantly won through. They had said she was not fit to endure the journey; and she had endured it. She was here in England – home; and, after the torture of those Channel seas, the flat tranquillity of Dover harbour was peace indeed. Out of that shattering blast a feeble reaction stirred within her body – that stirring of that sanguine, inexhaustible courage. She had her fortitude!
It was not far to the boat-train, but somehow her legs did not now belong to her. She had a queer pain in her eyes and in her side.
‘Nothing to declare?’ Nothing – nothing but her fortitude! Where was the platform? She must follow the crowd. She would never get to that train. Yet, somehow, she achieved it. Actually she was now within the compartment,
though in her stupidity she had chosen a smoker filled with men, laughing, talking noisily. No matter: she would not change now. It was not worth while. She was near the end of her long journey.
Still, it was warm, very warm. Her hands and forehead glowed and throbbed, though her feet were still icy. Her face felt flushed. Surreptitiously she pressed her cheek against the cool window.
The train rushed on through the mellow evening. Strangely, the wind had dropped, and gauzy veils of mist crept quietly into the hollows of the land. And some of that mist crept quietly into her mind, drifting in, then out again, in little swirling eddies. Travelling all day – that was what had tired her. Only a little fatigued. Someone was looking at her, asking her if she would like the window down. She nodded her head. That was better – the cool breeze of the train’s passage, sweetly fragrant with autumnal scents; the tang of dried leaves, a whiff of wood smoke, the bite of the early frost. No matter about her feet, nor that tiny stitch within her side; the sharp nip braced her. And how she had always loved that subtle fragrance of this season. On and on; rushing forward; linked not now to the ship, but to the train. Her head throbbing in sympathy. Still, she must now be nearly there, and Peter would meet her at the station. Her own – he at least was something left to her, something tangible, real, amongst all her recent unrealities. Hazily she considered the wire she had sent him: her wire, for its wording had devolved entirely upon her. So short she had made it – already the letter had acquainted him with everything: ‘Arrive seven-thirty Victoria Mother.’ A wan smile trembled on her lips as she considered the sending of that wire: not so much a caprice as a challenge; a banner unfurled in the face of destiny. He would understand, and know that she was not defeated. Yes, her son knew that she would never admit to failure – she was bruised and battered, a tattered remnant of herself, but she was not defeated. And she had come back to him. Rushing memories of tenderness swept over her. That so familiar, teasing smile upon his face.
‘You’re not a bad-looking little woman, mother.’
Arm in arm alone the front at Doune on just such a night as this. Sitting together at the entertainers’, close together in the dusk, and Val Pinkerton singing for them:
‘Daisy, Daisy … I’m just crazy,
All for the love of you.’
She smiled again faintly. Perhaps she had been hard, unyielding. In obstinacy she had battered her head against that stern wall of inevitability. But now she would accept the unalterable, accept Rose, accept everything – now.
The engine whistled an answering blast, and with a scrunch of brakes the train slowed into Victoria. She was home – or nearly home – at last!
She let the compartment empty of her fellow passengers before she got out. Then, on the platform, she stood waiting. Her eyes had a bright and almost feverish light; she felt her heart throbbing painfully. Was it her heart, or that stabbing pain within her side? ‘A running pain’ Peter had called it when he was a little boy come back to her, flushed from racing at rounders. And now her face was flushed, too, as she walked slowly down the platform.
The crowd was thinning, and she could see more clearly, but, although she strained her eyes, she could not discern his figure. But the train was early. Perhaps he was detained. She had no fear that he would not come. She could wait – only for a few moments – until he came. She would walk up and down – it was easier that way. And so, slowly, uncertainly, she began to walk up and down – a little grey rat of a woman huddled in her ridiculous clothes. Walking up and down the station platform – waiting.
Chapter Thirteen
She walked up and down that platform for an hour. She might have set out alone for her son’s house; but a sort of powerlessness prevented her. She was dazed, bereft suddenly of the final vestige of her strength. With no English money in her pocket, no consciousness of the passage of time, no power to move from this inertia which kept her swinging like a pendulum, with simply the faith that he would come, she waited.
But he could not come. He was away. Even as she waited, the letter of Bonne Mere Générale was following him to Brittany, whither he had gone upon his holiday with Rosie – yes, they had always said they would return! – to recapture the rapture of their first visit. And the wire, that wire of her own composition – so definite, so positive, she had known it must bring him to the station? Opened by his partner, who knew nothing of its significance – who was, moreover, rushed by double work – it had occasioned merely the passing thought: ‘She’ll come on to his house,’ a message to the maid within that empty house, a vague expectation on the maid’s part that someone might arrive. And that was all.
The situation was of her making, the blame entirely her own, She should have remained at Sentiens until she was stronger; until she had heard from him; until all arrangements had been made for her return. But that was not she! And so she had come; she was here; waiting. ‘On and on,’ those wheels had said. But really it was impossible for her legs to go on much further. They dragged and stumbled weakly under her; they did not belong to her, but wavered numbly beneath the light ethereal substance of her body. Her body was airy now, and might have floated but for that stabbing pain in her side which became a chain – each breath she took forging a new link – that weighted her and bound her to reality.
She must do something; that at last was certain, piercing her numbed consciousness as from afar. She could not remain here for ever, walking back and forwards so aimlessly upon this unending platform.
Vaguely she perceived a policeman standing beside a pillar watching her. He had been there for a long time: for minutes or hours or centuries he had been observing her with a curious concentrated suspicion. Then suddenly she felt worse, unutterably limp and faint. She thought hurriedly of her dizzy turns. This was another coming on. She would be all right, but she must do something – she must have assistance. She approached that policeman, opened her lips to speak, stammered, struggled with all her forces to speak. Was she speaking? She did not know. His round red face above the bright buttons of his tunic swam before her vision. What would he think? Would he smell upon her breath that brandy the stewardess had given her? Would he imagine she – Lucy Moore – Then all at once she solved the difficulty for him, and for herself, by sinking down into unconsciousness at his feet.
There was a crowd, of course, a crowd as if by magic: a sympathetic crowd, who knew wisely that she had fainted, and demanded that she be given air. But, curiously, she did not recover from that faint.
There was then an ambulance: a white motor ambulance that swung like a grey ghost into the dimness of the vaulted station.
She was in that ambulance, lying upon her back, like an odd lay figure. Her eyes were open and faintly wondering; advancing and receding above her through the mists were two figures – the policeman, a man who wore a long white coat.
Hoot – hoot! Hoot – hoot! Something in her ears – something warm crackling in her side – and a roaring, rushing noise! She gave it up and weakly closed her eyes. From her dry lips came quick and shallow breaths.
‘She breathes queer, don’t she?’ said the policeman at length.
The white-coated man nodded his head.
‘These old women – what makes them get about on their own beats me.’
‘Yes, asking for trouble it is.’
A pause.
‘St Thomas’s your mate’s taking us.’
‘That’s right, mate.’
Into the courtyard of the hospital; and still she was detached, still a lay figure, now lying limply upon a stretcher. It was all happening so quickly – a cataract of speed; she tried to lift up her hand to protest. But there was no power in her hand. The cataract still swept her forward. On and on through vast, interminable corridors; being wheeled through labyrinths of corridors. Lights and faces.
Tap-tap, tap-tap, over that really serious pain. Worse it was now, quite serious and bad. Was it toothache? It was in her side, yet, so like – yes, she remembered – so like the tearing pa
ng of those teeth coming out. ‘ We’ll take four out for a start!’ – and her deliberate voice: ‘ How much without the anæsthetic?’ Lying back calmly in that red plush chair. She felt the pangs again. Then the big, smiling face of the dentist bending over her. But this was not his face; another, younger face smiling encouragingly; then the sharp prick of a needle in her arm, and herself trying to smile back, trying to speak, trying to tell them who she was – about her son.
Pain – more pain: each stabbing pain her own breath. And, finally, dark smoky clouds and grey seas rolling over her, rolling her into a blessed oblivion.
‘Fulminating,’ said the house physician at the foot of the bed. ‘And no reaction.’
‘When we bathed her,’ said the sister, ‘frightful, it was – the emaciation.’
‘Better inform the relatives.’
‘There’s nothing. No markings on the clothing. No bag, no letters, only some Belgian money in the pocket of the dress. And such a dress!’
He looked towards the bed.
‘I’ll let the police know, then.’
‘Yes.’
‘And screens!’ As he moved away he glanced at her significantly. ‘An apical pneumonia and that constitution!’
And so the screens were put round No. 7. These were the white curtains which danced and fluttered occasionally before her clouded eyes: white curtains like those she had hung upon the windows of her house in Ardfillan. And hands parted those curtains; faces peeped at her – Peter’s face. His laughing face was there, flushed from running as he came in from school. And she was back sometimes, rambling on Ardmore Point. Those picnics to the fishing-pool and to the shore. Farther back now: she was seated upon that shore suckling her infant son. The sun shone; the tang of sea wrack drifted to her nostrils; and, looking upwards from her lap, Peter’s baby face smiled at her – laughing, a trickle of milk running from the corner of his mouth.
And then dim consciousness returned, wherein she heard a low bubbling beside her bed and felt someone giving her a drink. How thirsty she was. Her cracked lips were burning, her tongue dry and swollen with a feverish thirst. She tried to wipe her lips, but her hands, it seemed, were bloated to a size enormous, and to the heaviness of lead. And through it all her breath was so entangled, so difficult – caught in a web, a forest of crushing undergrowth through which she toiled and chased it pantingly. Panting, panting–