by H. E. Bates
Cartwright had sometimes made fussy, eager attempts to kiss her when they met in London. Now, as the spring came on and moved towards summer, he made more eager attempts to kiss her, on the stairs or in the stock-room or at the back of the shop. And in a cool, unawakened way she would let him kiss her and she did not mind.
When Cartwright kissed her it did not mean very much to her. The daily life of the shop was very strict. Mrs. Cartwright sat in the centre of the shop at the cash-desk from which radiated the wires of the new cash-and-change system that Cartwright had recently installed. Like the criss-crossed wires of a toy overhead railway, the system covered completely the two floors of Cartwright’s, the little cash receptacles flying smoothly and noisily over the counters, to and from the black figure of Mrs. Cartwright, the person who really governed them. No one who came into or left the shop escaped the eyes of the woman watching through the windows of the cash-desk. The eyes turned themselves, cold and brown and rather sick, on every movement of the assistants too. The long pale yellow hands reached out and checked the figures of every account. So when Cartwright kissed Miss Cassell on the stairs in the house, or in the stock-room, away from the eyes of his mother, there was an air of secrecy which should have excited her. But for some reason or other she did not feel excited. She knew that she had no thought of falling in love with Cartwright. His kisses were rather wet and brief, and it seemed to her that he was like a boy who eats jam in a dark pantry when his mother is no longer there to see. On the other hand she did not resist Cartwright. Whenever he wanted to kiss her, whether it was in the shop or between the street-lights under the lime-trees as they walked back together from choir-practice late at night, her lips were always there, cool and smooth as paper and almost as lifeless. Her eyes were always open, looking passively past his face, far into air.
All that summer she did the work that was expected of her at Cartwright’s, and she behaved as if she liked it. Outside the shop too she did the things that were expected of her, and she behaved also as if she liked them. She sang in the choir with Cartwright and played the piano at the mid-week practices. It was the day of outings in wagonettes on summer Saturday afternoons. She went on many of these outings with Cartwright, with the choir or the teachers of the Sunday school or the Order of Rechabites or the shop assistants of the town. They drove through miles of dusty gentle countryside, through small brown stone villages on the upper reaches of the river, where fishermen sat bent over rods on becalmed afternoons. She always sat still and rather erect and rather aloof. When Cartwright asked her if she liked it she would say that she liked it. But always, whether on the outings or in the shop or in the house, her eyes looked away from Cartwright when she answered him. They seemed sometimes to have an immunity from all emotion. They seemed like the eyes of someone living an utterly separate life.
Cartwright, for whom there were two lives, the life of domination by his mother and the life of secret moments with Miss Cassell, did not notice this. He had begun to fall in love with Miss Cassell some time before she came to Evensford. He thought of her as rather select: too good for the parochial commonness of the small, one-street town. He was pleased by her, and excited by her, as he would be by a new model from London. She was not only very different from all that Evensford stood for. He knew that other people thought of her too like that. That pleased him. It showed him to be, after all, a man of good taste and sane enterprise, and he felt flattered. Not many young men went far out of Evensford for a girl, and his love for her had a kind of tender pride. He was rather surprised about it too. He was surprised that whenever he wanted her she was there, that whatever he wanted to do she too wanted to do. He was surprised by the passive docility of a person who, all that summer, had not made another friend.
They came home late one August evening from an outing. It was very hot and the wagonette was white with dust and she could feel the dust in her throat and hair. They went into the side-door of the house, and as they stood in the passage Cartwright kissed her. ‘My lips are dusty,’ she said. ‘I feel dust all over. What time is it? He said it was past eleven o’clock and she said she would like a drink before she went to bed. The house was very silent and they talked in whispers. ‘Go up now,’ he said, ‘and I’ll bring you a drink. Some lemonade.’
She went upstairs and lay on the bed, not undressing, her arms outstretched. On very many nights the cat lay there, waiting for her, but to-night she lay on the bed alone, thinking. The street-light was out, and it was very dark in the room and when Cartwright came upstairs he had taken off his shoes and made no noise. He shut the door of the room as he came in and she felt him put the glass against her face. It was cool and she drank slowly. Then she gave him the glass and said ‘You’, and Cartwright drank a little and then put the glass on the chest-of-drawers. A moment later she felt him lie on the bed beside her. She felt him put his hand on her throat and try to unclasp the velvet band she was wearing. At last it came away and he ran his hand down her long clear neck and then kissed her again. She felt his hands moving up and down her body and she let them move wherever Cartwright wanted, passive, unexcited by whatever he did. She let it go on for a long time without speaking. And finally she turned her face on the pillow and spoke to him. ‘You know if you do this you’ll have to marry me? Sooner or later. One day?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I know. That’s what I want. That’s why I came.’
‘I don’t want you to go on if you don’t want that. If you don’t know what you’re doing.’
‘I do want it. I do know. It’s what I’ve always wanted. Always. Haven’t you? Haven’t you?’
Her eyes looked past him and remained fixed in the darkness broken only by the very faint light of the summer stars.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s what I’ve wanted.’
They were married in the October of that year and it was as if the marriage also meant nothing to her. As before, she continued to work in the shop. She was cool and efficient and if anything rather more aloof. As before, from the cash-desk with its neat system of wires, Mrs. Cartwright, the mother, dominated everything.
And as before, the younger Mrs. Cartwright seemed to let herself be dominated. She was quite obedient and docile. It seemed as if there were nothing she wanted. She went on doing whatever was expected of her, as if she liked doing it, the same as ever. When Cartwright wanted her to go out with him she went; when he wanted her to play hymns for him on Sunday evenings she played them on the piano in the drawing-room; whenever he wanted her she was ready and he could take her.
The weather that winter was very cold and the wind whipped bitterly into the shop from the frozen street whenever the door was open. It cut into the pigeon-hole of the cash-desk where the elder Mrs. Cartwright sat with her coat buttoned about her neck.
One morning when the assistants came in to work Mrs. Cartwright was not at the cash-desk. Upstairs, in the elder Mrs. Cartwright’s bedroom, the two women were talking.
‘Two days in bed and you will be yourself again.’
‘I will not be told what to do and what not to do and I will not stay in bed.’
‘If you get up it may eventually mean a week in bed.’
‘I’ve never had a week in bed in my life!’
‘You look very poorly and I think you’re running a temperature. But, anyway, we’ll see what the doctor says.’
‘Doctor? Doctor?’
‘Yes. I sent for him. Fred and I agreed that it would be better.’
‘You’ve no right to do that! You’ve no right!’
‘Fred has a right,’ the girl said. ‘You don’t want to die, do you?’
‘Die? Die? Who’s going to die? I am not going to die and I don’t want a doctor.’
‘All right,’ the young Mrs. Cartwright said. ‘If you don’t want a doctor no one can make you have one. I’ll send Maisie to tell him not to come.’
The doctor did not come that day or the next and on the afternoon of the second day Mrs. Cartwright got out of
her bed and walked about the shop, staring at the assistants with sick brown eyes. After some time she began to walk up the shop stairs to the upstairs department. She walked very slowly, clinging to the banisters with one hand, and she was half-way up the stairs when she fell down.
For six weeks Mrs. Cartwright lay in bed, and now she looked like an old shrunken woman. Each day she asked to get up. ‘With rheumatic fever?’ the doctor said. ‘Don’t you value your heart? It’s the heart that has to be watched with this thing.’ There was nothing much she could say in answer to that and the old look of domination in her eyes was very small.
All the time, downstairs, in the shop, though she was not to know of it until the day she shuffled down in her dressing-gown, groping from chair to counter like a person who could not see, there was a new source of domination. It was as if the younger Mrs. Cartwright had suddenly woken up. It was she now who sat in the cash-desk. It was she now who shut herself in the rear office on Thursday afternoons and, while Cartwright himself slept, went slowly and with methodical concentration over the books.
On these afternoons, when she had finished the books for the week, she would go back over the books for the year, and then for many years. There gradually formed in her mind a picture of the history of the shop. She saw how it had grown from being in 1880 a little millinery business carried on in the front parlour of the newly-married Cartwrights. She saw how it had grown from this one room to its first shop, with two rooms above, in a side street, and so from the side street to the main street in 1900. She saw how it had grown up with Evensford, selling what Evensford wanted. She saw in the change of handwriting in the ledgers the mark of the elder Cartwright’s death and then the long smooth sequence of pages never damaged or broken until now, at last, she had changed them herself.
In this same way, relentlessly simple and efficient, she took over the rest of the shop. For years the windows had been dressed by Cartwright every Monday morning: drab, over-crowded, old-fashioned, safe. Now she began to dress them herself. She did things that began to startle Evensford. She began to change the window on Fridays; it gave colour to the eyes of people who were paid on Fridays. She began to give Evensford styles and patterns that Evensford had only dreamed about and for a time did not want. And during these weeks of change it seemed to Cartwright that she was very wonderful.
Finally when the elder Mrs. Cartwright came downstairs again the young Mrs. Cartwright’s change had become part of the routine and tradition of the shop. The old woman stood in the shop, one hand on the counter, the other holding the shawl about her neck, and looked at the changes there and tried to protest. She opened her mouth, but her teeth were not in, and the dark cavity of the mouth looked weak and old. The brown, once dominating eyes roved weakly to and fro and blinked as if they could not see. The long thin fingers, quivering and jerking spasmodically, looked blue and scaly and dead like the feet of a dead chicken.
‘It’s all right, mother. Ida is taking care of things,’ Cartwright said. ‘You’re not strong yet. You’ve got to remember your heart. You’ve got to leave things more to Ida now.’
After that it was only the heart of the elder Mrs. Cartwright that expressed any domination in the changing shop. The weakened heart dominated all she felt, or did or wanted to do. ‘With a heart like yours,’ Cartwright said, ‘you can’t do quite as you used to do.’ So she no longer did the books or sat in the cash-desk or helped to buy and sell the things for the shop. She came into the shop sometimes and sat behind the counter and with frail jerky hands cut off a length of ribbon and twined it crudely about her fingers. She sat for a time and talked to the people she knew.
The former Miss Cassell did not know anybody in Evensford whom she could talk to over the counter. She did not want to know anybody she could talk to. In four years she had come no closer to Evensford than on the first rainy afternoon when she had walked, lonely and disappointed, up the deserted street. She did not want to come any closer than that. After four or five years she did not feel that she loved Cartwright any more than on the day he had first kissed her, and she knew that she would not love him now. She could not in fact remember having loved anyone and certainly, she thought, there is no one in Evensford who will ever trouble me.
After three years the elder Mrs. Cartwright had to be pushed about in a bath-chair and sometimes on fine afternoons, in the first slack hour after lunch, the young Mrs. Cartwright pushed her through the main street of Evensford as far as the edge of the town. From that point, beyond the end of the railway, you could see the green meadows of the river valley and the red and blue town, and scattered along the far valley-side and after heavy rain the floods that lay like a lake, pearl-grey with the sea-gulls, between. For a few moments the two women would gaze across the valley and then, not speaking, turn back. Going back through the town the young Mrs. Cartwright would stop the bath-chair from time to time so that people could speak to the elder Mrs. Cartwright. As they spoke, kind, considerate, compassionate, gossipy, foolish, she stood behind the bath-chair and grasped the handle formally with her hands and kept herself aloof and silent. There was no one in Evensford to whom she wanted to be kind or considerate or compassionate. There was no one with whom she wanted to gossip, and most of all she was not a fool.
One afternoon in the late winter of the fourth year she had been at Evensford she pushed Mrs. Cartwright to the edge of the town. The wind blowing over the dark edge of the valley was icy, driving with it sharp spits of rain. ‘Are you cold?’ the former Miss Cassell said.
‘I am a little cold.’
‘I don’t think it will hurt you.’
‘I would like to go back.’
‘I don’t think it will hurt you.’
She stood with her hands grasping the back of the bath-chair, gazing across the valley. She was not thinking of Mrs. Cartwright, but of the shop. What she wanted had begun to take shape in her mind. Below, across the valley, the many sea-gulls rose and fell in the wind above the waters. She watched them vaguely. What she saw in reality was the shop enlarging and extending itself: another window, perhaps two windows, another floor, a whole new fitting department, a rest room, perhaps a café. Her eyes were cold in the wind and grey and distant with calculation. She did not feel the rain. What she felt was the rosy impact of a dream. No one, looking at the cold grey blank eyes, could have told how warm and excited she was. No one could have told what she was thinking: how gradually, by calculated stages she would take the shop away from the Cartwrights and make it her own.
She must have stood there, gazing at the gulls on the water, for a long time. When she came to herself the elder Mrs. Cartwright was crying. The sharp cold rain was beating harshly into her face and she was crying like a child: ‘Take me back. I keep asking you. I’m so cold. I keep asking you. I keep asking you.’
Slowly, not speaking, the younger Mrs. Cartwright turned the bath-chair and pushed it back to the town.
By the following Sunday they were offering prayers in the chapel for the recovery of the elder Mrs. Cartwright. In the evening the younger Mrs. Cartwright sat at the back of the chapel, in the gas-light, and leaned her head on the hard cool rim of the pew. She did not close her eyes; she was not troubled. The words of appeal and prayer floated past her. ‘Oh, Lord! Oh, Lord! Look down on us and remember us. But remember we beseech Thee above all Thy servant who lies so ill at this time.’ They were words which might have concerned someone she did not know and had never known.
In the morning she stood at the window of her bedroom and watched two men spreading straw across the street below. It was raining and there was no wind and in the dark morning air the wide band of new wet straw shone brightly. The horse traffic drove over it and the sound of hoofs and wheels had a rustling ghostly sound.
In the shop the assistants did not talk much. The working of the overhead cash-carrying system had ceased. It was strangely silent. The two elder assistants, Miss Johnson and Miss Dickins, who had been with the Cartwrights for fifteen years
, came to work in shoes with rubber soles. They worked upstairs a great deal and that day you could not hear them walking overhead. After lunch Miss Johnson, who was short-sighted and wore spectacles, began to cry. The tears misted her spectacles and she could not see, and finally she cried for a long time alone in the stock-room.
All that day people came into the shop to ask, in whispers, how the elder Mrs. Cartwright was. The shop-keepers of the street ran in for a moment and whispered. Towards evening the doctor came again, for the third time, and seeing him, Miss Johnson burst into tears again and the shop was full of the painful sound of her crying.
The young Mrs. Cartwright did not understand the tears or the solicitude; and both, especially the tears of Miss Johnson, annoyed her. ‘Everyone has to die,’ she said to Miss Johnson, ‘Do you want her to live and suffer?’
She walked about the shop with calm unexalted face, speaking in her normal voice. Why should she change because someone else was dying? Did it matter if she was the only person in Evensford who did not care whether a grey, wasted, suffering woman died or not? She was outside the life of Evensford. The elder Mrs. Cartwright had given it the clothes and hats and underwear and fashions it wanted. They were the things that the former Miss Cassell hated: the old, shabby, out-of-date, ridiculous things that were part of the soul of a little town. She despised them and now, like Mrs. Cartwright, they were passing.