None So Pretty

by Margaret Irwin

  “What is a shaking white jelly?” she asked sleepily.

  “Half the fine ladies today from what I’ve heard tell,” said Nurse, in a grim, say-no-more-about-it tone. Yet she seemed about to say a great deal more. She opened her mouth once or twice but shut it again very firmly and stood there doggedly, as though she were listening, waiting to hear someone else say what she would not. Framed in her white cap, her face looked almost the colour of earth. The nose is a hill in the middle, thought Nan, and the eyes are two little pits, and two deep ditches run from the nose to the mouth, which is a ridge where they haven’t quite cut all the corn (for Nurse had a distinct moustache), and the forehead—but she could not find words even to herself to express her pleasure in the forehead with its two big bumps or mounds and all the fine lines running parallel in that broad expanse as it swept upwards just like a ploughed field to the white cloud of a cap.

  When Nurse left her, she lay alone in the strange bed that her mother had made for her, and wondered now not what adventures she should choose, but what would come to her. Presently she would hear her husband’s step on the stairs, he would turn the handle and come up to the curtains and draw them back and put his arms round her and kiss her as young Diggory had done this very morning in the dairy. She thought now that she liked Diggory’s kisses, that she would like them better from someone she did not know to be a dairy boy, stuck for ever in the same place like a clod in the earth, she would like them from someone who was not her husband, from someone she did not know at all. Her face grew hot in the darkness, her heart beat, thumping out the seconds; she heard a board creak under a heavy tread and suddenly she felt cold and rigid; all curiosity fell from her and she was only desperately afraid. But nothing happened and nobody came, the darkness remained thick in front of her, until once again she saw a lighter patch on the bedpost, a patch that might perhaps be the shape of a hand. She would not look at it, there were no companions now to be frightened with her, and if she called out in her fear, it would not be her father who would come up to her. Perhaps, however loud she called, no one would come up.

  She sprang out of bed and tugged at the window shutter. It held at first, then opened suddenly. She stared out of the dark room into a clear blue twilight, lit by one star, but as she stood there, star after star came out; there was a new one wherever she looked. A wakened bird called out and was still again. The waiting, watching night crept on, to what fulfilment?

  There came at last a definite sound below, a door opened and a man went out of the house. Nan saw Mr. Hambridge walking with slow, uneven steps towards the drive. From her window she could only just see the tall beech-trees at the side, but she had pushed it open, and now heard the sound of footsteps change from the muffled thud they made on the grass to a rougher and harder quality. Clippety clop, clip clop, heavily, unevenly, they clumped away down the drive until, just as they were beginning to get faint, they suddenly ceased. The steps had stood still at the end of the drive.

  At the end of the drive was the ramshackle cottage, the hens, the oddly bedizened figure that had stood in the doorway, lifting her ringed hand to her breast.

  In the light of this sudden memory, of Nurse’s dark hints and her mother’s far more emphatic warnings, disregarded because she had not understood them, Nan saw that scene far more vividly than her actual sight had done. For ever now the woman would stand there, lumpish and white in the semi-darkness of her cottage, a passive enemy, too secure to hide or fight.

  So that was what Nurse had meant by a white jelly, yes, and the creature would certainly shake if she ever had to run. She would like to drive her off the estate with a corn-pike as Nurse had driven Captain Moreton, but she did not want actually to prod her, the pike would go in too far. No, she would just make her run, shaking and panting and jolting up and down, gasping and snorting, wobbling from side to side, her heavy feet going flumpety flump, flimp flump, to the same tune as Mr. Hambridge’s as he turned his back on his house and trudged away, down, down, down the drive and then stopped.

  Mr. Hambridge had gone to her, had meant all along to go to her, and that was why he had insisted on bringing his bride back to Cricketts on her wedding day instead of staying the night at home. She would never go home again, none of them there should know. Alice would cry for her and think of her as “Poor Nan.” Moll would not cry, she would laugh if she ever knew that Nan’s only embrace on her wedding day had been from the dairy boy. At that Nan began to laugh herself, at first from ridicule, and then from relief, and then from a sudden wild hopefulness.

  That heavy and inert figure at the supper table was not then the man for her. If he did not trouble about her she would not trouble about him. She was free to love someone else, she did not know whom, but there was the whole world before her, now fading from her sight in the growing darkness. She stretched out her arms to it, she raised herself on tiptoe, she was trembling with happiness, with expectation.

  Part II

  On Nan’s departure from the table, Mr. Hambridge’s boisterous humour revived. Shifting his wide leather chair sideways, he leaned confidentially across its arm, and demanded of his chaplain, “What d’you think of that? Seventeen and with no more sense than a brat of seven. Chatters like an ape. And a slut if ever there was one. She’s got her eye on you, my Puritan saint. Not Benjamin but Joseph is your true name, hey? Don’t take after your father, do you?”

  Mr. Cork was the bastard son of a footman and a lady of quality, a misfortune that Mr. Hambridge had joked about too frequently to make him wince now. He was a scholar and a schemer, but as a scholar was the sounder of the two. He had remained a Puritan too long, and was caught by the tide when it turned at the Restoration. He had been in prison, he might have starved, he might even have hanged, but instead he had been able to retire from public life as a country parson, “for a while” as he had been telling himself now for some years. His only duties as chaplain at Cricketts Manor were to take a hand at cards occasionally with his patron, and listen to him while he drank. These activities were insufficient to his ambitious energy. He consoled his leisure with a hidden printing press in Cambridge, which necessitated long absences from Cricketts, and alleviated his presence there with the occasional visit of a pedlar. That secret as well as public messenger of the day was often engaged in business more important than that of mere packman, and might bring privately printed books or news for him alone. In the liberty of the press he found an object worthy of his powers; amid all his disillusions he could still believe with his greatest leader that he would “as soon kill a man as kill a good book.”

  At this moment, Mr. Cork would indeed have said “sooner.” He was waiting for Mr. Hambridge to take the opportunity afforded by his mention of his bride to compare the physical qualities of various types of women. His interest Mr. Cork believed to be the result of ignorance. Lady Ingleby had been right in attributing bashfulness to her son-in-law; his modesty was so great that it would never permit him to aspire to any woman of higher rank than a village drab. His marriage was an accident, as he had explained to his chaplain every evening since he himself had been told of it. He did so again tonight and with a greater bitterness now that he was confronted with the actual presence of a wife in the house.

  “Trapped into it,” he confided in the hoarse whisper of a stage conspirator, “trapped by the mother bitch. Badger she is, got a mouth like a badger, and a nose like an eagle. A pox on all women I say.”

  The inconsistency of this prayer on the lips of a man who was only waiting to finish his bottle before he sought his wench struck Mr. Cork as a subject worthy of the ingenious Dr. Donne.

  Oh do not die, for I shall hate

  All women so when thou art gone,

  That thee I shall not celebrate

  When I remember thou wast one.

  His lips silently shaped the words; rugged and old-fashioned as he knew them to be, they roused him to pride in mankind and contempt for the specimen of it that confronted him. “Shall a poet
measure the appetite of a baboon?” he asked himself. Such a thought held promise that perhaps he too might be a poet. The late Protector’s secretary had been out of work since the Restoration, and had dignified his leisure with long poems in blank verse of no interest or value to the public, but they had served to amuse himself and furnish endless employment to the daughters to whom he dictated them. To have daughters and secretaries combined appealed to Mr. Cork as the perfect consummation of human ties, until he remembered to have heard that Mr. Milton’s three daughters were stupid and unwilling and that his three wives had also been unsatisfactory. The essential solitude of all men seemed to him at this moment a state so pitiful that he attempted an approach to sympathy with his patron.

  “Surely,” he said, “you do not wish to die without the common heritage of mankind, an heir to your body and estate?”

  He had to repeat his question, and Mr. Hambridge then made it clear that he did not wish to die at all, but if, or when, he should have to, it would make no difference to him what he left behind him. His forehead wrinkled like a crumpled red handkerchief, his body heaved backwards and then forwards, with a mighty effort he brought forth his conception of paternity. “My father beat me, but I paid him back in his lifetime and with good interest too. I’ve no need of a whelp of my own to kick.”

  “And the retribution you inflicted on your father might in its turn be visited on you. I admire, sir, the justice and prudence of your sentiments.”

  “Bah,” answered the patron. He hated it when the chaplain talked like a fine gentleman. In his hazy opinion they had always been the best of friends, but now a woman had come into the house, she was sure to spoil it all. People talked about weak women. He had thought he was a cunning dog when he wanted Tumpleton Park to extend his deer park, he had remembered that its owner was a widow with an enormous family, who had been impoverished by the Commonwealth and left unrecompensed by the Restoration; he had gone chuckling to drive his bargain. Well, he had had a pup sold him that time. He had not got Tumpleton near as cheap as he had hoped, not even with one of its owner’s daughters thrown in, a condition that the Dowager Lady Ingleby had persisted in pretending to be to his advantage as much as he knew it to be to hers.

  How it had happened he did not know, as again and again he had told Mr. Cork, but he had found himself thankful to quit the interview at any cost, and so greatly was his confidence shaken that he could congratulate himself on departure that she had made no trouble over the matter of Bess Tiddle at the Lodge, but reserved it all for her questioning of the settlements. Here indeed no tigress could have shown more tenderness for her cubs.

  It happened that in the village that morning Mr. Cork had encountered a puppy with a hurt paw. It had yelped when he touched it, but gambolled round his feet in an absurd, trustful, helpless fashion, it had nibbled the bows on his shoes, rolled against his ankles, sat up suddenly and yawned as though it laughed in his face. He had picked it up and caressed it with an unreasoning tenderness which he believed to be alien to the rest of his nature and therefore despised. He discovered that some boys had amused themselves by throwing stones at it, and his rage had so swelled and heated his veins, causing his face to burn and his hands to twitch with the longing to inflict torment on the tormentors, that he himself had been more frightened than the children at whom he had stormed. His noble rage had encouraged, once it had ceased to shake and trouble him; he had walked home repeating to himself a bitter passage from Juvenal.

  Now he thought of the merry and friendless little creature that had sat at supper with them, and once again his involuntary pity stood excused, for it was mingled with disgust at his patron, at Bess Tiddle and the Dowager Lady Ingleby, and he could justifiably encourage anything that ministered to his contempt for humanity. A hog, a slug, a harpy, was it for such as these that Christ died? If so, how could any man put faith in a fool for a God?

  The room was stuffy and smelt of food, affecting his weak digestion with a sense of nausea.

  “I have found shelter in a sty, and am held fortunate to have found it,” he said aloud in a gentle voice, for it had long been his opinion that at this stage of the evening Mr. Hambridge would distinguish no words that were said to him unless the tone were sufficiently marked to carry some of the sense with it. Tonight he was feeling reckless enough to try, and was justified, for his patron showed no offence but merely nodded his head and murmured vague approval. Mr. Cork laughed, and caught sight of his grimace in the flat pewter dish that stood upright against the wall, the only piece of plate that was kept well polished, because it was the first prize Mr. Hambridge had ever won at a fair.

  The mute reflection of his own ill-will exasperated Mr. Cork yet further. All his life he had postured and played a part which no one but himself had even observed. So dull and aching was this perpetual solitude that he could have

  welcomed any intrusion into it, even that of a body of horse for his arrest.

  Mr. Hambridge rose and with a swaggering gesture raised his bumper to a precarious height. Drunken tears stood in his eyes at the departure of his freedom. So long had they two sat together and made merry and now a woman would sit with them.

  “Here,” he said, “is a health to all jolly roaring boys like ourselves.”

  His chaplain also rose and raised his glass, he also drank. But in no way were Mr. Hambridge’s apprehensions lightened by any sense of good fellowship. A damned, sour, Protestant martyr sort of face loomed up before him; he would throw his wine in it as soon as drink it. But it was his pride that drink did not usually make him quarrelsome. He swallowed his wine and his resentment together, then moved heavily towards the door, out through the hall into the cool evening air, which struck so suddenly on his clogged senses that he became aware of the enormous silence encompassing him.

  His recent dissatisfaction with his chaplain passed into a shivering pity for himself. Women had attacked and trapped him, his best friend had left him in the lurch. He trudged down the drive in a condition that fast became maudlin. On Bess’s bosom he sobbed a little and reiterated that all women except village whores should be drowned. Her large white face did not move. The air in her room was close and thick. A comfortable heaviness settled on him, his head fell against an arm like a pillow, once again he was sunk in sloth and indifference, the dearest ties he had known since as a youth he had declared his passion to a fine lady who had laughed at him for a hobbledehoy.

  Bess looked over his head at the new ring he had given her on his wedding morning.

  Mr. Cork had left the empty glasses, the spilt wine and smell of food, he no longer heard his patron’s boots scrunching on the drive. He was walking in the walled garden in the front of the house, his head bent, his eyes fixed on the square black bows of his square black shoes, going up and down, up and down, on the dim and shining surface of the lawn.

  The quiet of the night intruded into his thoughts, the damp on his feet caused him at last to observe the dew on the grass. He looked up and saw the outline of the house and its many chimneys black against the sky. There were lights in one or two of the lower windows; at an upper one he saw something white which he took at first to be a blurred reflection of moonlight until he remembered that there was no moon; and as he looked, it disappeared. The window he now knew to be that of the wedding chamber; the white thing he had seen at it must have been the figure of the waiting bride. A sudden rage possessed him, with men for insensate brutes, with women for patient, pitiful clods, with himself for he did not know what, but he struck his forehead as it occurred to him that he was forty and had never been in love, that perhaps in more than politics he had remained a Puritan too long.

  Like the silly sluts of the household, all he had to look forward to was the visit of the next pedlar. He saw his life as brief and insignificant, his fruitless schemes to win advancement, power, any manner of notice, as a tedious beguiling of the time. Only death was certain. What then was life, if this was all? He longed to burst through the petty circumsc
riptions of his self-interest, to lose his anxious and fastidious pride, his whole self, in some large and generous nature.

  Without again thinking of the wakeful creature flitting behind the windows of the wedding chamber, he went to his room at the end of the long gallery, he lit the candles and read till late into the night. This was his form of drunkenness, which enabled him to enter the souls of heroes and philosophers. He could reason with Socrates and travel the world with Herodotus; in perusing a poem of Ovid’s he could believe himself a poet and a lover, had he ever encountered a female worthy of his regard.

  These fancies had sustained him in his youth through anxiety and disappointment, but the long dullness of his present life had clouded his spirit, and he read from habit rather than enthusiasm, returning to his books night after night like a patient plodding lover who dares not forsake his mistress, for lack of another. He might yawn and his eyes ache, but if he closed his book the heavy hours would still stretch between him and the dawn.

  At length his candle flame looked pale, and his chamber grey and unsubstantial as if made out of a cloud. The wedding night was over. He opened his window and saw the familiar outlines of tree and barn divorced from the solid earth, grey shapes that floated on a mist. A scrunching sound heralded the return of his patron.

  Mr. Hambridge stood on the threshold, looked round him and behind him and then upwards, kicked the mud from his boots with unaccustomed care, wiped his face two or three times, and then with great deliberation entered his house. He went into the dark hall, stubbed his toe against the chest and swore, but patiently and under his breath, made his way to the stairs and there paused with foot upraised over a shapeless object which he took to be a mess left by one of the dogs. He was addressing it as such with objurgations when the thing hopped into a shaft of light from between the shutters and there revealed itself as a large toad, which turned and looked at him, opening and shutting its mouth as if in silent protest against the terms applied to it.