by Ursula Bloom
‘That’s a pretty thing,’ said Ethel, who had stopped talking while he sang it.
‘Yes, people always fall for it. Don’t know why. I think it is a darned sight too quiet down here.’
‘Have you anything else like it?’ asked Ethel.
Arthur was flattered. He gave them ‘Summer Time on Bredon,’ and then quite unasked, ‘The End of a Perfect Day,’ ‘There’s a Long, Long Trail a-winding,’ and finally, in another vein, ‘Valencia,’ to show his versatility. ‘Valencia’ was an unfortunate choice, for it had the effect of waking up old Stillmer, who, under the unusual influence of a heavy evening meal, had nodded himself to sleep by the fireside. Ethel and Twit had been conversing quite happily, having thus provided for their fellows, one in the arms of Morpheus, and the other in the arms of Orpheus, where he seemed content to remain with no persuasion from the rest of the party. Then ‘Valencia’ banged in upon them. Arthur believed in putting ‘go’ into it. He had thus inconsiderately woken up old Stillmer. Twit, glancing at the clock, realised that it was nearly ten.
‘I must be getting back,’ he said.
‘Not yet,’ urged Ethel.
‘I must.’
Arthur rose reluctantly. He had hoped the old man would bring out a spot of whisky to ease the pang of parting, but old Stillmer was keeping his grog until after the guests had gone, which he sincerely hoped would be soon.
‘I suppose I’ll have to be coming along too,’ said Arthur, with a bad grace.
Outside the door, in the garden still glistening with rain, Twit fidgeted with his headlight. The bicycle stood against the wall, the laurels wept rainwater over it, but a pale moon struggled bravely against the cloud-drift above. It was going to be a fine night after all. Arthur could not be persuaded to leave him in spite of monosyllabic answers. He wished to discuss the whole evening.
‘I say, damned funny about that cream, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Fancy me snaffling the lot and the old chap having to go without! Sent empty away, what? I could have burst my sides, and you looking as solemn as an owl.’
‘Um.’
‘What a get-up that was of the old woman’s too. Last Armistice Day’s left-overs. If that doesn’t beat the band. Try blowing down it, that does it sometimes.’
‘I have blown.’
‘I hate acetylene. Why don’t you get a decent bike with electric lamps?’
‘Because I can’t afford it.’
‘Get the old man to shell out. He seems keen on you.’
‘Dry up.’
‘You’re not very matey, are you? I know it was a bad dinner, but not as bad as all that. And oh, my God, that piecrust! I shall suffer for it later. Ah, she’s burning now.’
‘I’ll make a get-away while she is burning,’ said Twit, and he eyed the lamp reproachfully.
‘Well, so long.’
‘Good night.’
Just outside the little town the lamp flickered out. There was nothing for it but to walk. Two miles, but a nice night, starlight and a rising moon. It might have been much worse.
There was an attractive burnish about the trees and the hedges; they reminded him of the ciré ribbon Jill had on a new hat. The road ahead of him lay like a long shining snake, writhing into the distance. The earth smelt warmly, for it was a pleasant night, and as he passed outlying farms there came the fertile smell of stables and cow-sheds. When the moon rose definitely, as it did after the first half-mile, it was a radiant world of ebon and silver. Walking, he thought of Ethel. He thought how terrible the house had been, as if it were the frame of Ethel. A red plush frame, a good frame, comfortable but irritating. He thought of the dinner, and though, as a rule, food was a minor consideration to him, he smiled a little grimly. Old Stillmer was incredibly mean, it served him right that he had had to eat tough chicken, and that Arthur Simpson had taken all the cream. Anyway, what was eighteen-pennyworth of cream among four of them?
As he plodded along, his mind kept reverting to Ethel, to the awful house and the atmosphere. Although she might be mean, Ethel was comfortably off. Her mother had left her about three hundred a year, so Arthur had told him in confidence one afternoon at the office. ‘And even that hasn’t got the old frump married,’ he had added in triumph. Old Stillmer must have been bitterly disappointed that Ethel was a girl. If he had had a son, then that son would have inherited the office and have made a fine business of it. No wonder old Stillmer’s heart was not in his work. No wonder that he lacked the progressive spirit. When he died a stranger would stand in his shoes. That was unless Twit could manage the partnership. But he had decided this very evening that he and the old man had nothing in common, nothing whatsoever, and that old Stillmer disliked him. A pity that, because there was a perfectly good partnership going begging. It was unfortunate that he had no means of forcing old Stillmer’s hand. That was when the idea came to him.
It bore down upon him as he trudged along, his feet in tune to the rhythmic purring of the wheels of the bicycle that he pushed. Here or there the faint echo of trees dripping, the rush of wings of some night bird starting out to hunt, the stir of some field animal woken from sleep the other side of the hedge by Twit passing. The idea pricked in upon his mentality. It suddenly vitalised itself and became tangible and real. It disentangled itself from the mixture of thoughts in his disorderly focus, and stood out etched sharply before him. Who would inherit old Stillmer’s office? Why, no one more fitly than his son-in-law. After all, Ethel was not so bad. She had three hundred a year. If she could be dissociated from Madras muslin and china lions and nude bronze equestrian gentlemen, she would not be such a dire proposition. If Ethel could be induced to burn her flag-day relics and not wear black patent shoes and serviceable underwear she might not be Ethel any longer. He saw her as a new being, holding out to him the golden key that would open the door to liberty. She held out money and ensured position and escape from the drenching of Jill’s personality. In his colourful imagination he saw Ethel as a peri, as love, a nymph, a goddess, a siren, a Circe. Her lustreless hair changed to dark curls, her eyes mysteriously brightened, her lips rounded and reddened. He saw her flat breasts taking shape, her sunken hips becoming rounded. It was Ethel transformed.
He was thirty. In all those thirty years he had never stood alone save in those precious war months. He still did not understand post-war England, but Ethel was not of post-war England, and he did understand her. The idea crystallised and took form. It planted itself as the germ of a campaign within his heart. As he turned into the outskirting street of Morsegate, he told himself, ‘This thing has got to be kept from Jill. If she smells a rat, she won’t let me do it. I’ll never be able to thresh it out with her.’ Having decided this, it was disconcerting to find the cottage light still burning brightly. He put the motor-bike away, inserted the rattling key in the latch and stepped across the threshold. Jill was standing there staring down into the remains of a fire.
‘Hello!’ he said. ‘I didn’t think you’d be back.’
‘Didn’t you? Dora had a headache.’
She went to the side and unscrewed a Thermos full of cocoa, pouring it with a queer chucking noise into the cup.
‘How did you get on?’
‘It was pretty dreadful.’
‘Don’t tell me that it was cold beef and bread-and-butter pudding?’
‘No, chicken and plum pie. Arthur Simpson was there and he took all the cream! He sang afterwards.’
‘How sickening! What did the old woman look like?’
‘Pretty bad.’
‘What had she got on?’
‘Brown lace stuff, and a Flanders poppy.’
Jill nodded over the cup.
‘I suppose that was a gentle compliment to you, seeing that you served in the war. Though a lotus or a prickly pear would have been more appropriate. Fancy the old woman in a prickly pear!’
‘Yes, fancy!’ said Twit without interest.
He wished that Jill would not ta
lk like that. He drank the cocoa, and watched her under his eyelids across the rim of the cup. One of these days he intended to marry Ethel. He did not qualify it by saying if she’d have him. He knew she would have him.
CHAPTER II
‘Many things having full reference
To one consent, may work contrariously
As many arrows, loosed several ways.
Fly to one mark.’
‒ Henry V.
STRATAGEM.
I
Matters simplified themselves because it was at this time that Jill met Jock Cave. Jock was home on leave from Ceylon, where his life was spent in tea-planting. He always found his short leaves bewildering, because it was a new England every time, and he never had long enough in it to catch up with the tide of progress. He came to Morsegate to stay with Dora, who was a distant connection, and he was at a loss. Jock was big and brown, but he had always managed to maintain a ‘little boy’ outlook on life that was attractive. He danced the dances of three years ago, which had been his last leave. He thought as he had been taught to think by a charming, impersonal mother, and he went on thinking beautifully despite the eddies of an unbeautiful world splashing up against him.
Dora asked Jill to meet him, because she could think of no one else who would interest him.
‘What is she like?’ asked Jock.
‘She’s ‒’ Dora waved her hands in the air. It was difficult to describe Jill. Once she had supposed that they were friends and they knew each other. But in the last few years, since the Clive episode, Jill was not the same. Dora had not been able to keep pace with her. ‘She’s pretty. She’s modern in a sense, and clever. She always gives me the idea of a person who meant to be one thing, pulled up short, and has gone on being something else.’
‘That isn’t helpful.’
‘No, but it’s Jill. She was quite fast at one time. There was a scandal about her and a fellow here, but it all fizzled out. Now she has odd ideas. She’s well-read. You’ll have to see her to judge.’
‘Somehow I feel that I shan’t like her,’ said Jock.
Jock saw Jill as all Morsegate had failed to see her. He saw the star shining in her soul. Jill saw Jock as a new world. He was to her senses as some exquisite piece of music. The very happiness that he radiated was an arpeggio upon her soul. He was the lovely Whitsuntide music of Solveig, yet a little kinder, a little enquiring, like Peer Gynt. He was harmony. He was a nature of soft pulsating chords demanding an echo within her own being. He made her think of all manner of beauties, and weep gloriously the deep tears of love of life. He reminded her of the throbbing loveliness of Schubert rather than the clashing discord of Liszt. In him lay the peace of the Serenata, river-like ecstasy of Chopin’s Nocturnes, the deep exquisite sobbing of the adagio from Pathétique.
Often they met, and yet again.
She would lie in her room, the window veiled by the light boughs of the birch tree, and peer into its exquisite lacework of twigs and foliage, and try to visualise in it her feelings for Jock. There was nothing of the physical in it. Nothing that was not transmuted into peaceful melody. There was nothing of the Clive in her emotion for Jock, but everything of loveliness. The tree was quick with whispering voices, it had a faint burnish of gold about its silver and green which was harbinger of autumn. She hardly dared believe that the autumn might give her Jock. With him she knew that she could accomplish much. She could leave for ever all that bright bitterness that was Clive and see only the star. She hardly deserved so much. And if the autumn did not give Jock to her, it would all flicker out like candle flame. The harmony which was Jock would silence itself. There would only be grey ghosts left in the prison-room of her heart. There would be the dark defiant ghost of Clive mocking her with his audacious eyes, and the tender lovable ghost of Jock stepping softly in threnody through her being.
On them both the same star stared down.
Jock occupied Jill’s time and kept her out of Twit’s way, and this was exactly what Twit wanted.
Ethel had taken to coming round to the office in the afternoon, as she put it, ‘calling for Father.’ In reality she was calling for Twit, and he knew it. The worst of it was that Arthur Simpson knew it too, and did not hesitate to comment upon it. Twit understood that it would be disastrous if Arthur went burbling round the town about it, and more so if eventually it found its way to Jill’s ears. He took steps to prevent this happening. He agreed with everything that Arthur said. It might be disloyal, but it was the only way to achieve his ends, so he laughed over Ethel with Arthur. This went excellently until, Arthur having told the world in general that Ethel was faint with pursuit after the flying Twit, the news did eventually reach Jill.
She was told by Grenville, who felt his duty was to repeat the information received.
In the interim, between her gaining the knowledge and Twit’s return from the office where he had taken up such a strategic position, Jock came to tea. It seemed to Jill that Jock had stooped and had picked up the ideals she had so long been attempting to put together. He had offered them to her whole. In her long hours of self-communion when she lay awake staring into the green and gold and silver depths of the birch tree, she knew that she wanted to marry him. She was afraid of the shadow deeply niched in the darkness of her heart, which was Clive. The physical experience had taught her everything, but the world did not review matters from that standpoint. Also she remembered with a deep thrusting pain, like the throb in a long-healed scar, the attitude adopted by Stephen.
Currents raced through her mind, tides swelled, and rose and fell. At one moment she was carried on the crest of the wave, and believed that if Jock knew then he would forgive. At another she fell into the trough of despond. Jock was delightful, but he was sadly orthodox. She trembled for his neatly docketed theories and opinions. In her dreams she had not forgotten Twit. She decided that while Jock was abroad tea-planting, Twit could live with her. He should not be homeless. They both were making secret plans for their futures, and the plans were hopelessly diverse.
Jock came to tea. She watched him from under her eyelids as he sat there, so big and so brown, with the hair growing back from the high wide forehead in two little inlets on either side a central peninsula. She thought the kind grey eyes to be incapable of hard lights, and the mouth almost too sweet for a man’s mouth, and equally silent to harsh words. She felt like that about him. He was good-looking. He was not good-looking with the too bright, glittering dazzle of Clive, but in a responsible way. His lights and shades were appealing. Behind all the little boyishness he was man. He was two persons in one. He made her feel maternal and protective and yet he was entirely protective towards her himself. ‘I can lean on him,’ she told herself frantically, ‘and God only knows how I want to lean.’
‘I go back to Ceylon next month,’ said Jock, drinking tea from thin china.
‘So soon?’
‘Yes. Rough luck, isn’t it?’
She tried to hide the fact that her heart was throbbing madly, and that she had a disposition to cry. ‘But you like Ceylon?’ she urged.
‘Rather, you’d like it too. It’s a wonderful country ‒ fertile type.’ His odd way of classifying things. She smiled whimsically.
‘I only wish I could see it,’ she said.
‘You can see it.’ His grey eyes suddenly seemed to hold her own. He was quite grave. ‘You can see it,’ he said, ‘with me.’
She believed that she must have dreamt the words. She felt her face flush and the odd little pulse throb chokingly in her throat. She gave a jerky cough. Instantly Jock was no longer little boy. He was all responsibility. He was tender and protective and strong. He was the vibrant chord in her being. She could feel him as that and she responded to him as that.
‘Darling, you have known all along, haven’t you? I want to take you back with me.’
‘I could not leave Twit,’ she said.
‘I’ll provide for him. I want you, darling Jill. I want you so much, my Jilly.’
She thought of the old odd name, Jilly sweet, and it struck a discordance in the music. It struck in jarringly. Jock must not call her that, not Jilly. It was too much like Clive, it was physical, it was inharmonious, it hurt. She sat there fingering the pearls at her throat, incapable of speech, so strange and so shy.
‘Do you think that we are suited?’ she asked at last.
‘Sweetheart, of course we are; I know you so well. I’ve watched you carefully; you’re wonderful.’
‘But you don’t know me, not the real me.’
‘I do, darling. Indeed I do. I am an ordinary sort of fellow ‒ simple type! Nothing much to know about me.’
‘You’re the dearest fellow in the world,’ she admitted, and after that there was no going back. It was horrible that here, with him close to her, she could again smell the cool humid smell of a church, of new wood, of sacred wine, of lilies. She tried to brush it aside. He kissed her as she sat there with the little tea-table an altar before her. An altar of silver complement, of late roses and white cloth, altar of a sacrificial love. She knew that it was the kiss she had been waiting for through the interminable ages since Edward had died. Jock’s warmth throbbed through her, but like a cold corpse in her heart lay the memory of that other man. Even Jock’s warmth could not radiate the cold clay of Clive. This lover of hers, this splendid Jock, seemed to hold her by his own beauty, and it was not the brittle beauty of infatuation. This was a deep and tender affection and it held her fast. It was a tree like the silver birch. It would grow into an immense strength, its roots fastened in her heart. It would bear a light shade for her from the scorchings of the world’s fierce suns; it would be a thing of beauty, of blues and greens and silvers, and gold in the autumn of life. She thought of it as the birch tree.
Yet all the while she knew that he did not know her, not as she really was. The Jill storm-tossed, cast up for a brief period on a gay island of sham, thrust forth shipwrecked into the waves again, learning of times and tides and moons in a boat of mist, and pale stars and the tang of the sea of life. Yet as his lips held her she suffered herself to be drawn into his arms and to lie there acquiescent. She loved him. For the moment let that love last. She asked no more of life.