Without looking up at the white-faced priest, without a word to Simon, she followed the Devil of Cordonay along the grass-grown track that led across the snow out of the valley to the unknown South.
TWO AND A THIRD
MRS HOBSON was the wife of Abel Hobson, my father’s senior partner in the Albion Mills. She was a shrewd Yorkshire woman, with a kind heart and a patronising manner. My mother was never allowed to forget that Hobson’s capital had made the business, and it was obvious to Mrs Hobson that the business had made my father.
For many years the Hobsons were childless. Then, twelve months before the old man’s death, a son was born. There seemed to be little of either parent in Jim, a harum-scarum youngster who said goodbye for ever to the West Riding when he ran away to sea. He said he hated school, especially the discipline and the food. I can imagine the cold, grim smile of the South Atlantic. Anyhow, Jim, who was big for his years and had imagination enough to spin a likely yarn, managed to get clear away. But Mrs Hobson never quite forgave him. He had placed something else before her and the mill, and there would never be a Hobson in the business again.
Jim, of course, used to come and stay with his mother when he was in England, and she would spoil him and quarrel with him, while Mary Shepherd, the girl who acted as Mrs Hobson’s companion, tried in vain to keep the peace. At times he spoke of giving up the sea, but it would only be because he knew a man who had done well with cattle in the Argentine or had made a fortune out of coconuts in some lost island of the East Indies.
The sea made of Jim Hobson a man tall and strong, loud-voiced and rough-mannered, with a vein of sentiment his friends might not have guessed at, had they not seen the play of emotion on his face in the flicker of the ‘movies’.
Though year after year the sea gave back her son, it never seemed to Mrs Hobson to give her back the whole Jim. I doubt if she had ever met a real friend of his, and he was always a poor letter-writer. She knew, in fact, little about him, and in her imaginings feared to penetrate into the unknown.
When the war came, Jim got a commission in the Royal Naval Reserve. I heard nothing of him for three years, and then there came the news that his ship had been torpedoed in the Mediterranean and had gone down with all hands. It was in the following August that I met Mrs Hobson in London. She spoke to me bravely about her loss, and asked me to come back with her to the house in Hampstead where she and Mary Shepherd were living.
‘Mary’s out,’ she said, as she poured out tea, ‘but I can talk to you all the more easily. I saw your review of that book on Spiritualism’—(she mentioned a popular work by a great scientist that had just been published)—‘and ever since I’ve been wanting to have a talk with you. I do so long to get in touch with Jim. He was far more to me than I ever knew; I just didn’t understand him. I want to tell him now that I’ve always loved him. I want to know that he loves me still. The last time that he came on leave there was something—I don’t know what—between us; I never felt the barrier of his reserve so strong.’
I asked her what she wished me to do.
‘You know about these things,’ she said. ‘It’s all new to me. I want you to arrange a meeting for me with some medium that I can trust.’ At first I tried to refuse. I spoke to her of some of the dangers of Spiritualism, but her mind was made up. ‘After all,’ she said, ‘you yourself study these things, and in my case it is not mere idle curiosity. I’ve not much imagination, as you know. I’m a hard-headed Yorkshire woman. I don’t know what hysteria is; you could search the flat in vain for smelling-salts.’ It ended by her having her own way. ‘I’ll write to Vera Harrison,’ I said. ‘She is an artist friend of mine, who has had some very remarkable results with automatic script.’
On the following Tuesday, Mrs Hobson, Mary Shepherd and I met at the little Camden Town studio. The séance was held in the back sitting-room. The windows were closed to shut out the noise, but through them filtered the deadened rhythm of street traffic and the golden haze of a still August afternoon. I suppose that both sound and light were of just sufficient intensity to create the right environment, for in a surprisingly short time the planchette began to write. At first the words were meaningless and scarcely decipherable, but gradually the character of the script changed. ‘Helford River! Helford River!’ wrote the planchette. ‘Who’s that a-calling so sweet?’ Now the Helford River was the mine-sweeper in which Jim Hobson had served in the Mediterranean. Mrs Hobson began to ask questions. There was something incongruous, something pathetic, in the way in which this shrewd, commonplace woman believed without doubt that she was speaking to her dead or rather to her living son. But stranger still were the light-hearted gaiety of the replies. They were characteristic of one side of Jim’s nature, but it was not the side that his mother had known. Her familiar landscape was of a dark-shouldered hill that faced the north, its hard outline softened only by rainstorm and cloud. She had never travelled far enough from home to watch the sunlight resting on the southern slopes. ‘Jim,’ she said at last, ‘tell me that you love me, that you’ve forgiven me!’ ‘Someone keeps butting in,’ came the reply. ‘I can’t get it over. Of course, I meant it with all my heart, now and for ever, little mother. You have only to read between the lines in those letters in the walnut cabinet.’ That was the last completed sentence; the rest was gibberish, for the most part undecipherable. Mrs Hobson seemed to have got what she wanted, and the séance broke up.
‘You’re coming back with us?’ she said. ‘I can’t say how much I owe you; it’s just made all the difference. I can face the future now. But he spoke of letters in the walnut cabinet. I don’t quite know what he meant, unless it’s some old bundles of school letters that I must have mislaid and forgotten about. Come and let us see if they are there.’
We travelled back on the top of a bus, Mrs Hobson keeping up a string of disconnected talk, as if she were seeking to isolate the experience of the afternoon from the insistent reality of a commonplace world. From where I was seated I could not see Mary Shepherd, but I know that as we passed Lord’s she stood up to watch the game, and I remembered what a mighty hitter Jim Hobson had been, and how safe a catch in the long field.
Mrs Hobson’s house in Hampstead was large and ugly, and as was the case on my first visit, I listened to her recital of the drawbacks of cellar-kitchens and the impossibility of keeping servants as we walked up the asphalt path that skirted the strip of soiled lawn. ‘Agnes is out,’ she said to Miss Shepherd; ‘would you mind telling cook that there will be three in for tea; nowadays one is almost afraid to ring.’ Mrs Hobson and I went upstairs to the drawing-room. She stood by the open window, her eyes fixed on the flight of a giant aeroplane that circled above the Hendon aerodrome and talked of Jim. Tea was late. I thought at the time that Mary Shepherd had purposely delayed it from a fear of intruding upon the older woman’s joy. As soon as it was over, Mrs Hobson led the way to a room at the top of the house that had been used as a storehouse for Jim’s belongings, and which was the only place where he could, without protestation, smoke his intolerable shag. Since his death it was used as a sewing-room; a gas stove had been installed, and I gathered that Miss Shepherd spent a good deal of her time there.
I don’t know what I expected to find in the walnut cabinet; I should not have been surprised if there had been letters, but I felt very differently from Mrs Hobson in regard to the afternoon’s happenings. There were so many explanations. No packet of letters rewarded our search; the shelves were empty, save for a litter of boxing-gloves, fishing-tackle, odds and ends of curios picked up in the days when foreign ports had the glamour of strange places, half a dozen novels by Jack London, a life of Napoleon, and a beautiful little model of the Scudding Foam, the ship in which Jim had sailed as an apprentice.
‘If there had been any letters of his here I feel sure I should have remembered,’ said Mrs Hobson. ‘I keep them all in a little sandalwood box he once brought me home from Java; they smell so sweet. It’s no good looking further. I’m more,
oh, more than satisfied!’
As I said goodbye I could not help but marvel at the peaceful joy that shone in her hard face; it seemed more than the afterglow of a sun lately set. And then I turned to Mary Shepherd. On her face, too, was a smile of calm beauty, the beauty of the downs on a June morning, when the gorse holds up the light to sky and sea. I accepted it without questioning. But later that evening there came unsought, uncalled for, from the dim storehouse of memories, a picture of Jim and Mary standing together on a hill-side overlooking the Channel. Mrs Hobson had her back turned towards them and was looking at her own face in a little pocket-mirror. She was a fool not to notice, just as I was a fool to have forgotten, that Mary Shepherd had a very attractive smile. So Mary and Jim were lovers. Mary, and not Mrs Hobson, was Jim’s ‘little mother’. His letters were in the walnut cabinet, but they were letters to Mary, who had snatched them away from Mrs Hobson’s prying eyes, while I was talking to her in the drawing-room.
Mrs Hobson was deceived, but she was happy. Mary was happy. Was she, too, deceived? The voice of the dead may have been but the echo of her own sweet thoughts. Who can tell?
MISS AVENAL
MY FRIENDS could never understand why I went in for mental nursing. I could have stayed on at the Yorborough Infirmary, as ward-sister, but I disliked the matron and knew few people in the place. Then I had heard, too, that mental nursing was less poorly paid, and I had a certain amount of influence behind me, since my uncle had been for many years the chief medical officer of the Raddlebarn Asylum.
I went from the Yorborough Infirmary to The Haven. It was a large place, one of the best semi-private asylums in the north, and certainly the oldest. I liked the work. I was strong and happy. I did not worry, and the other girls were lively. We had dancing and music and private theatricals, and a really good hockey team. But after a time the routine became too monotonous, and I took up private nursing. The home, which adjoined the asylum, was in charge of the same committee that managed The Haven, and, since most of the nurses had been trained at The Haven, I was among friends.
One Monday in August three years ago—I remember it was the first Monday in the month—the matron after breakfast called me into her room. I can picture the scene quite clearly: Miss Simpson, with her cheerful face and white cap, seated at her desk, with a tea-tray at her elbow and her old grey parrot in the bow window pecking impatiently at the husks in his seed-tin.
‘I want you,’ she said, ‘to go to this case, a Miss Avenal; some sort of nervous breakdown, I gather; but you had better read the doctor’s letter for yourself. It should be light work, more of a companion than anything else, and since you’ve had some rather unfortunate experiences lately, I felt it only fair to offer it to you. It will mean leaving first thing tomorrow morning. I understand Miss Avenal has taken rooms somewhere on the moors. If you can go, I will wire to her at once.’
As Miss Simpson had said, I had had a run of disagreeable cases, and, as this promised to be quiet and uninteresting, I was only too glad to go. I met Miss Avenal next afternoon at the Station Hotel at Yorborough. I could not say how old she was. Her hair was dark, and, though untouched with grey, was strangely lustreless. Her eyes were dark, but with no spark of fire in them. She would have been beautiful, for her features were good, but her face lacked expression. There were no tell-tale wrinkles; the skin was stretched smoothly, somewhat tightly, over her forehead.
She shook hands with me, letting her limp, cold fingers lie in mine, while she told me that her doctor, who should have been there to give me my instructions, had at the last moment been unable to come.
‘He told me that he would write to you in a day or two,’ she said. ‘What I want most of all is the companionship and sympathy of some cheerful young person like yourself. That, I am sure, you can give me. We shall be very quiet at Kildale, alone together on the moors.’
‘I hope you have plenty of books with you,’ she said again as we stood on the platform. ‘We shall be very lonely at Kildale in the evenings.’
There is only one other thing I remember in connection with that afternoon at Yorborough. Just before the train started, I had got up from my seat in order to take out a novel from the handbag which the porter had placed in the rack, when, looking round, I saw that a gentleman had walked up to the carriage door and was speaking to Miss Avenal.
I don’t think I have ever met anyone who filled me with so strong a dislike. His face and figure were those of a young man who would never grow old because he was old already in the experience of all that life could bring.
‘Fancy meeting you here!’ he said, in a voice smooth and expressionless. ‘And so you are off for your cure again? To the same place? It’s years since I’ve been there. Well, I hope it will be as successful as the last. You certainly look as if you could do with another lease of life. Goodbye! So glad to have met you once again. You change at Maltley for the local line.’
The train started.
‘You’ll be alone,’ he said, hurrying along the platform.
‘Oh, yes,’ Miss Avenal replied, ‘quite alone; it’s part of the cure, you know.’
We stayed at Kildale Mill. I had been to Kildale Church before, the oldest Saxon church in the Riding and close to Kildale Cave. Kildale Church had seemed far enough from the string of villages that fringe the great plain, but Kildale Mill was two miles farther up the valley.
It was a very quiet valley, steep slopes, thickly wooded, rising from green meadows. The Kildale Beck ran down past the mill and there was swallowed, so that the course of the stream, except in flood-time, was only marked by dry boulders. Below the mill the dale was strangely silent, for, though the stream was there, the stream was dumb.
Kildale Mill was very old. I believe it is mentioned in Domesday. It was more of a farm than a mill, though the water-race is kept open and the water-wheel in repair for the sawing of timber. I think it was the quietest place I had ever seen. Above the valley were the moors, and many miles beyond the moors the sea.
Three rooms at the end of the house were reserved for Miss Avenal. A large room downstairs, which we used as a sitting-and dining-room, faced on to sombre woods of larch and pine. Above were two bedrooms, reached from the room below by a separate stair and communicating with one another. Indeed these three rooms were quite cut off from the rest of the house, and except for the rare occasions when Miss Avenal came to Kildale they were not used. The lord of the manor had strict rules prohibiting his tenants from taking in summer visitors, so that there were only occasional cyclists on the valley roads, and no strangers on the moor.
I found Kildale intensely lonely. The house was reached by a rough track through the woods that went no farther than the mill. The people of the house seemed as silent as the dumb Kildale Beck that was swallowed in the limestone meadow below the weir; they were as hard as the dry rocks of its bed. Naturally I saw a great deal of Miss Avenal. I was with her the whole day long, except for two hours in the afternoon, when I was free to go for walks. I am not fond of solitary country rambles. I do not know the names of birds and flowers, for all my life has been lived in towns.
Kildale was so far from any village, that I never had time to escape from the solitude of the empty valley. The walk I took more often than any other was by a path through the fields that followed the side of the dried-up river-bed to Kildale Church. There were no houses by the church. It stood alone, two miles from the nearest village, and the door was always locked. The locked, ever-empty church, silent and solitary, the valley with its waterless river-bed, shut in by woods too thick for birds to sing in, made a deep impression on my mind. For the stream seemed to be the soul of the valley, and when it disappeared it was as if it took with it all the valley’s life that mattered.
Kildale evidently suited Miss Avenal. For a week or two after our arrival she would lie all day long on a couch I made for her among the fern in the woods. She did not talk much, but she could not bear to be left alone. Hour after hour she would spend looking up
at the little patches of sky that pricked through the pine branches, as if she were gazing into blue pools hidden in the crevices of dark rocks.
‘You must not leave me, nurse,’ she would say. ‘I am so weak and feeble, and you are so young and so strong. Talk to me, nurse. Make me forget myself.’
As I sat beside her in the fern, I did not mean to speak more intimately than I should have done to any other chance acquaintance; but the world seemed very small, and everything in these hot August days was so remote, that when a week had passed there must have been little about me that Miss Avenal did not know. She was a wonderful listener.
Then, as the days stole by in monotonous procession, her strength gradually came back to her; her cheeks, which before had had something of the horrible bloodless pallor of old ivory, were tinged with colour, and there shone on her long, dark hair a new lustre.
‘I am already feeling so much stronger, nurse,’ she said once, as leaning on my arm she walked by the waterless stream. ‘If you only knew what it is to have been without sympathy for as long as I have been; what it is to have been cut off from the strong currents of life, you would realise how thankful I am for all that you have given me.’
And yet what had I given her beyond my confidence? She had said that I sympathised with her. How could I sympathise with her, when I knew so little about her?
The letter which Miss Avenal told me that the doctor would send never came. ‘I cannot conceive how it has miscarried,’ she said; ‘but after all the matter is of no importance, since you can now judge of me for yourself. Doctors claim too much and nurses far too little for themselves. It costs more to give sympathy hour after hour through tedious days and wakeful nights than to label with a learned name some case they can never even remotely understand.’ It seemed that Miss Avenal shared that belief, so common among nervous hysterical women, that hers was no ordinary illness to be cured by ordinary means.
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