by Ursula Bloom
‘The end of the bright weather,’ Clive had said, as they started for home.
She had been unsure whether she should go on knowing him, and she had gone on. She had looked upon the whole affair of that one evening as a lapse. She had promised herself that it would not happen again. Poor helpless little Jill, fighting the primitive which was too big for her, and unaware of its Titan qualities. For it had happened again, and now she was too much in love with Clive to resent it continually happening. She was a new Jill, metamorphosed by the post-war attitude. Clive represented life to her. He represented love. She wanted him more than she had ever wanted anything, and she blinded herself to the voice of conscience within her. For the first time in her life she was happy with a splendid emotional radiance. She had not been happy with Stanley. She had certainly not been happy with Edward. Just when she had supposed that she was growing old and stupid, and that the full sweet brightnesses of youth had passed her by, Clive had brought this to her. New life, love, a normal existence! She was in a hidden sense ashamed, yet the deepest shame was that she could not be more conscious of her sin. The pre-war fought the post-war within her. She knew that Clive made her happy, that he made her young. She knew that the very surrender of herself to him made her intensely happy. Not only that, but it made her view life differently, with a greater tolerance. It broadened her mind. The heart of the schönste Jungfrau, melting, brought a flood of humanity washing into her soul. It humanised her.
It was the embryo of the Jill that had to be. If only she had someone to whom she could look for guidance it might not have happened. If only Twit were possible as a mentor, or did not lean on her! But she had no one. She told herself that she was old enough to decide for herself. She must be brave and independent. She was an individual, and, as an individual, must strive and suffer, and fail or succeed.
Against Clive she was powerless. She always excused herself with the promise that they were to be married. She was still old-fashioned in her belief that marriage could condone the sin.
Clive had not spoken so much of marriage lately. There was some tacit understanding that, the wedding taking place at the end of September, they would depart for Cairo in mid-October. Jill told Twit, and he thought that it sounded a good idea. He knew that her happiness was at stake, that he ought to do something in this dilemma (for he guessed that there was a dilemma lying under it all), but he did not know what. So, as it happened, he behaved exactly as he had always done, sitting uncomfortably on the hedge of inaction with conscience the thorn in his flesh.
He did nothing.
Jill bought scraps of cambric lingerie and hid them in a drawer with her dearest dreams. Poor dreams! Too gossamer to materialise.
Early in September when the red cheeks of the roses were pressed against the dining-room windows, and the tritoma were standing redly declaring the approach of autumn in the garden, she became panicky. Suddenly she was poignantly aware that they were no nearer marriage. The affair had been drifting hopelessly. It was two months now and Clive had not mentioned Cairo of late. She could not remember his having spoken of it for quite a longish time.
Meanwhile, their too intimate engagement had gone on. She saw with a sudden horror that there had been all manner of wrong thought in this. The Merediths had always been very charming to her, but they had not accepted her in the more personal position of a daughter-in-law to be. If Clive had been spurred onward by good intentions he would have hastened to tell his people of his intended venture into matrimony.
That evening Jill persuaded him to take her out in the car so that she might talk to him. She could not wait for an auspicious moment, but she must pursue the subject now. All the while the soft web of a dream had misted her eyes. She had not dared look further than to-day. The to-morrow had shrouded itself, she had not wanted to question it. But now she had become suddenly aware that for Clive there was no to-morrow in that sense. She told herself that she was wrong. She must cling to her faith in the man, but she knew that fear was shuddering within her heart.
They went down a leafy lane, when the world was hushed in the truce of God which is the twilight. They drew to a standstill in a tiny road with a half-built stack on one side, and a break in the hedge on the other. Through the break there was a vista, framed darkly between the tall rutted trunks of twin elms. There was lichen on the pitted bark, lying lightly spangled like the first silver frost. Beyond lay the rounded shoulder of a hill, the dark smudge of a gorse bush, one gay corner brassy with blossom in vivid contrast. Opposite, an early shorn field rose with the pale blonde of cut corn, and slices of red loam gleaming wetly between. It rose in an uneven line to the pencilled sweep of a dusky hedgerow. Still further rose the bluish distance where a windmill with a broken sail stood crucified against the amber of sunset. She approached her subject badly, with the bluntness born of fear. It lay so near to her heart that she could not wait to be tactful.
‘Clive, haven’t you told your people about us?’
‘I told the Mater.’
‘There,’ she confessed to herself with a quickened pulse of triumph, ‘you doubted him, disbelieved him, and all the while he was loyal and true and splendid.’ Aloud she said, ‘What did she say?’
‘She thought it was a good idea.’
‘She has never spoken to me.’
He lit a cigarette from a gold case with a steady hand, shaking the match out deliberately and flinging it away. ‘She wouldn’t,’ he said; ‘the day of congratulations is dead and done with. The Mater doesn’t slush. She likes you and that is all there is to it.’
‘But we are making no arrangements, and time is getting on.’
He laughed. ‘And you’re getting fussed? As if it were not the simplest thing in the world to get a special licence! I suppose you are not pining after orange-blossom and white satin?’
‘No. Of course not.’
‘What is it then?’
‘It seems so vague.’
‘And you want it cut and dried?’
‘I want to know when,’ she admitted.
‘Oh hell!’
She watched the windmill with the broken sail. She was not sure that it did not typify herself. It was mutilated … hurt … crippled. A question stabbed through her and she asked it, hating the disloyalty that gave it voice.
‘You’ve never done this before?’ she asked in a quavering tone, eager for his swift denial.
‘Done what?’
‘This.’
He laughed, and it struck her that there was something spurious about the laugh. Its tinkle was like jazz music, its harshness hurt.
‘Don’t!’ she said sharply.
‘If you mean other women, of course … You never supposed that I was celibate, did you? Chastity has not been one of my crimes, if you care to put it that way.’
‘I thought I was the only one.’
It seemed that the pale star in her hemisphere was beginning to wink a derision at her.
‘The only one? Oh, ma chérie! How do you suppose a man occupied his leaves from France? How do you suppose I have submerged that ennui that gets everyone now and then? Life’s been fun, Jilly; I’ve made it fun.’
‘Then,’ she admitted bravely, ‘I’m only one of a crowd?’
‘You are the one.’
‘I expect you told them all that.’
‘Don’t be a little idiot. They weren’t all … what shall I say? … ladies. I don’t mean that I’ve ever taken anyone who made their living that way. That would have spoilt it.’
‘You mean having to pay?’ Some flash of the old Jill suddenly kindled again in the darkness of a grim despair. ‘You took a girl’s most priceless precious belonging, and let it go at that. You did not buy, you stole.’
‘Damn it all, they were willing. One little thing had a boot bill that worried her. I settled it. You’ve no idea the boots that kid had had. If she’d been a centipede, it couldn’t have totted up to more.’
‘Please ‒’
She was
seeing the mill again, and she saw now that she had been mutilated too. If only he had been the glamorous knight that she had supposed, it would not have been so terrible. But he was not glamorous. He was not a knight. He was a tin god of hopeless shoddiness who had been gilded. The male possesses and tires. It is only the female who accepts, and loves more fiercely for that acceptance. He was no longer holding her by sheer force of personality, and she perceived him for the first time as a very ordinary man who had sickened of his mistress.
‘Did you ever intend to marry me?’ she asked.
‘Don’t be silly. We are going to be married.’
‘No, we aren’t.’
The new Jill was born of that instant. The new Jill who had said good-bye to the stereotyped standards that believed sin could be condoned by subsequent ‒ even loveless ‒ marriage. Now she knew that this would be the most terrible sin of all. To marry Clive because he had seduced her would be weak folly, even if he gave her the chance, and she did not believe now that he would give her the chance. To live down the sin and rise phoenix-wise upon the ashes of her baser self would be her great chance. On the wings of sane thought the new and splendid spirit of Jill rose.
‘No, we aren’t.’
‘Well, you said it! I didn’t.’
‘You know that marriage has been the last thing that you have ever intended?’
‘Rot! It was all settled.’
‘Settled,’ she agreed bitterly, ‘so that you could obtain your end more easily.’
‘What end?’
‘Me!’
‘You’re making me out a cad.’
‘Isn’t that what you are?’
Angrily he switched the engine on.
‘Look here, if you’re going to talk like that, I’m going home. Anyway, you were willing enough. And what was that oaf of a brother of yours doing? He ought to have had me out time and time again, and you know it.’
‘It was nothing to do with Twit. The point is that you never intended to marry me.’
‘I haven’t said so.’
‘This thing has got to end.’
‘If you feel like that, of course it must end.’
‘You’re sick of me,’ she challenged, and the woman in her was faint with longing to hear him deny it. But he only set the engine racing, and solemnly turned the car on its homeward way. She caught a last glimpse of the windmill as it stood on the hillside, with the amber turning to grey behind it. Just like her life. She believed all the golden loveliness to be dying, all the grey of age and disillusion coming up. She would never marry again now. No one would want her. Nobody could care for her. She prayed for the courage to act as she knew she should act, the strength to say good-bye and mean it as good-bye, not to abandon herself to a sick pleading with him to return.
She caught at his arm.
‘Clive, it’s so hard for me to believe.’
‘I don’t know what’s come over you. You are suggesting such odd things.’
‘You have suggested some odd things to me.’
‘I loved you.’
‘You don’t love me now?’
‘Yes, I do. I’ll always love you.’ But the speech rang false, and she knew it as a lie.
She recognised then with an ominous certainty that the man never loves the woman who is his, but the woman is fated for ever to worship at the shrine of the man who has once possessed her.
‘But you don’t want to marry me?’ she urged, hating the feminine weakness that forced her to prolong the argument.
‘I’m not the marrying sort.’
At last! He was admitting it to her, admitting her worst fears, her most horrid doubts. She was on the verge of tears, and yet she well knew the futility of them. They were the tears of Eve, dismissed from Eden.
‘Don’t let’s talk now,’ she begged, ‘we aren’t ourselves. Another time. To-morrow we may feel differently about it, but not now.’
‘I’m feeling all right about it. I wanted to go to a dance to-night and then all this fuss started. I don’t know what is the matter with you.’
‘I’m seeing things from the right point of view after a long time of seeing them all wrong.’
‘I think you are seeing them in a damned silly way. Are you dancing to-night?’
‘No.’
What it cost Jill to say that, no one could ever tell. It was the most momentous decision of her life. Deliberately she watched her tranquil star sink into an abyss of remorse.
‘Why the hell aren’t you?’
‘Because I am going away.’
‘Going away?’
‘Yes, to forget.’
He turned on her then, white with passion, and his mouth gave a little twist. She saw for the first time how cruel it was.
‘Another man, I suppose? The old lure of the fellow with the most money. I might have guessed it. All women are the same.’
As she went up her garden path she felt her eyes smarting and stinging with tears. She was not crying for him, but for the fact that she had ever stooped so low as to lay herself open to his insult.
III
She must go away at once, she told herself. If she stayed here and went on seeing him, she would weaken and relent towards him. She knew that. There was a train to London at seven and she would catch it upon the impulse of the moment. Twit was out. She wrote an ample housekeeping cheque and a note. Into that note Jill poured herself. If she waited to think, she would not be able to go on. She knew that for the moment she must not think.
Dear Twit, she wrote,
I have been a fool and, what is even worse, a bad fool. You must have guessed what has been happening between Clive and me. It is all my fault. He does not want to marry me really, and seeing how things are I could not marry him. I am going away for three days to get over the shock of it all. I will send you an address later. Please don’t worry about me. I had to tell someone and you seem to be the only person, but don’t say anything to Clive. What’s done is done. Make any excuse you like to people.
Jill.
She caught the London train. That night she stayed in a hotel at the London terminus. How she arrived there she never knew. She had a blurred impression of meeting Nigel on the way to the station; of exchanging banalities and feeling a surprise that she could still be banal. She had other impressions of the throb of a train like a giant pulse in her head; of entering the hotel, registering at an impersonal reception office, going up in the lift, fitting a large key into a door, of passing into the room beyond that door.
It was noisy. The smoke-filled air stagnated in her lungs, but nothing seemed to matter now. She was glad that this place was different, for had it been tranquil, it would have reminded her of Morsegate. She preferred this deep spate of hurry that was London, in which she had no time to remember.
In the morning she awoke, staring wanly round the alien room. Going to the window, she drew the blind and held back the lace curtains, stiffened by the sooty atmosphere. Below, the street rolled along. A train had unloaded hundreds of workers, who were clamouring for tube and tram and bus, eager to start their day’s work. She watched them. She felt that each of the typists was what is known as a ‘good girl.’ As yet the aftermath of war, that reckless rolling wave in the trough of which nothing matters, had left them untouched. They retained their hold upon the proprieties. Time would loosen their grip, as it had loosened hers. They, too, would err, but that did not help her now. She stood between the long lines of lace curtains, a pitifully small figure in her demure white nightgown, flotsam caught in the tide of war. She was so bitterly ashamed of the very act that had widened her outlook, normalised her, changed her from usual girl to unusual woman. She felt that at the moment she must hide herself. Anywhere to escape. She coveted a haven, somewhere that was sanctuary, until she had time to review her bewildered and perplexing emotions.
She dressed slowly, went downstairs into the dining-room; a mere waif among a crowd of people. They were all in a hurry, keenly anxious to start the day.
She was only anxious to delay it. In her present frame of mind the day held no charm for her. She felt that no day could ever hold charm again. It had been her own fault, she knew, for she had of her own accord tossed the charm out of them.
She took a ticket for Stratford-on-Avon. She did not know why she did it, save that somewhere in her early youth she had seen a picture of a thatched cottage that stood as background for a bravely gay garden. It had been thrust up with lupins, climbed by roses; a garden of old-world charm, of candytuft and aubretia. Yet when she arrived at the station she was disappointed. It was like every other station in England, only a little more so. Outside it was a deserted sale-yard, flanked by a dull brewery, a workhouse and a red hospital facing on to ugly brick villas. It held no inspiration at all. Disappointedly she found herself standing with her dressing-case in her hand, staring out at the empty sale-yard.
A porter touched his cap respectfully.
‘Are you waiting for someone, Miss?’
‘I was wondering where to stay. I thought it would be more countrified than this, and old … It’s not what I expected.’
‘’Tain’t what it used to be,’ the porter confided in her. ‘Birmingham folk have changed it. But the country round is lovely. There’s Shottery, very pretty there. And up on the hills.’
Jill opened a gold chain bag, and took half-a crown out of its chattering depths.
‘Tell me, please,’ she said, ‘somewhere where I can stay. I want quiet, and real country, and not too expensive.’