The Stepson

by Martin Armstrong

  Mrs. Jobson with her sympathetic motherly eye had read and understood much of Kate’s trouble, and gently and carefully she did her best to reconcile her to her disillusionment. ‘Remember, my dear,’ she said to Kate during one of their many private talks, ‘that men are strange creatures. Their ways and ideas are different from ours; much more different than you know. There’s many men worse than Mr. Humphrey; in fact, except for this one thing in him, there’s nothing I know of but good. Remember the good, my dear, and try to forget the bad. When he married you, he did it in good faith; of that I feel certain, because I spoke my mind to him on the subject when he told me he was marrying again. And I spoke to him once again, too, last Easter it was, when I found out that for once he hadn’t kept to his resolve. The mistake was, of course, that Emma was kept on here. It was asking for trouble not to send her away when you came. Try and bear with him, my dear, and don’t think too much about what’s happened. Time and hard work, you’ll find, are wonderful healers.’

  With the help of talks such as these with her old friend, Kate, after the first shock had spent itself, began to feel that she might be able to achieve some measure of tolerance. If only Ben himself had dared to speak to her on the subject, to tell her the truth and ask for her forgiveness, even more might have been accomplished. But secrecy and evasion in such matters were too deeply ingrained in his nature: it was no longer in him to make a clean breast of it, and so the breach between them remained unhealed, for his silence kept it open; and although what Mrs. Jobson had believed about his honest intention was no less than the truth, Kate was never fully convinced of it, for Ben alone could have convinced her. Her anger at his unfaithfulness cooled before long, for she had never been in love with him; but she could not forgive him his dishonesty. For her their relation could never again be the same: he had destroyed its finer elements; the generosity had died out of it. All that remained, to her mind, was a kind of business arrangement. She would give him his due and no more; bare justice untempered by mercy. In everything beyond that, she would consider her own feelings before she considered his.

  Such meditations, impulsive and undefined, welled up in Kate’s resentful heart as she leaned above the kitchen table ironing the sheets. She did not stop to consider what she meant by justice or mercy. Her mind was too simple for such subtleties; it obeyed intuitions, not arguments. It was simple and innocent, but the harsh years of her youth had made it also somewhat hard and resentful. Her nature had been starved for so long that it grasped at life now with an almost fierce determination which new thwartings might soon drive into recklessness. Who can blame her, for the fault was not hers. The growing plant will burst through walls and pavements if they bar its passage towards light and air, or if it fails it will die in the attempt. Such is nature’s law, and the law for human nature is no different.

  Kate folded up the last sheet and laid it on the pile of others, and then, lifting the pile in both hands, she carried it upstairs to the linen-closet. When she had stowed it away in its proper place she stood for a while in the doorway of the closet where, on the morning of David’s departure, she had stood and heard the gig drive out of the yard; and slowly, like a gradual fire, growing, spreading, enveloping her, there stole over her something of the ecstasy which had possessed her when she had stood there with the feeling of David’s kiss still on her cheek and the sense of him thrilling her blood. Again, it seemed to her, he was there; not visibly, this time, but burnt into her senses almost as deeply, — in some ways more deeply, it seemed to her, than material presence can burn. The half-dreaming, half-surprised tilt of his eyebrows, the very curve of his cheek with the glisten of golden down on the ruddy flesh, his large innocent red hands, the very feel of his coat where she had laid her hands on his shoulders, the very texture and colours of it as her eyes had taken them in, - all these things had become a part of her very self, life of her life. Her lips moved. ‘David!’ she whispered to herself; ‘David!’, trying over his name as though it were some precious symbol which her baffled soul laboured to understand. In the quiet, friendly attic, full of the cool light of the sky and the homely smell of warm woodwork, it seemed to her that she stood in a secret world of her own, a place apart from the rest of the house and the rest of life. How small, here, and how far away seemed all her pain and disillusionment. What did Ben and his virtues and vices matter beside this all-absorbing love? For her illusions and self-deceptions were gone now and she knew and confessed to herself that she loved David passionately, longed for him as the lover longs for the beloved. She did not ask herself in her new-found rapture what fulfilment such a love could have. No questions disturbed her yet. Her love was sufficient in itself. Under its life-giving rays, like a bird spreading its feathers to the sunlight, her starved heart unfolded itself, and for days she carried her rapturous secret about with her, careless of all else.

  But when she had gone down from the attic into the house again, she had at the same time descended once more into her daily world with its own cares and concerns, and she could not long remain oblivious of it. Soon it became real to her again, claiming her time and attention. Yet even so, its power over her was gone, for she was safe, unassailably safe in the warm security of her love. Not that she could continue much longer free from all questioning. Questions came, questions of expediency and moral questions, raised by her reason. What could be the end of her desire? How would she ever be able, separated as they were, to give herself to David and to have him for her own? Was it not a sinful thing, a thing monstrous and terrible, that a woman should love the son of her own husband? So it would have seemed to her if she had been told of such a case; but now that the case was her own, the question had no meaning for her. The bright radiance of her love was its own supreme and indisputable justification: it blinded her to clabbed arguments of right and wrong, burning them up and consuming them as so much dry rubbish, the dead offscourings of life. As for those other questions, she was content to wait. To have David there at The Grange, to see him and hear him and feel his presence transforming her daily life, would be, she told herself, enough, – oh, richly enough; and if in the end it grew to be not enough, a lifetime lay before them; she could wait. She could wait, she felt now in the faith and strength of her new love, patiently, happily, for years and years.

  During these days Kate went about her work in a happy dream. Mrs. Jobson saw the change in her and wondered at it. It was clear in the steady inward glow of her eyes, in the strength and sureness of her movements, in the things she said and the voice that spoke them, throwing into the most trivial phrase a soft and unaccountable intensity, as though words and voice were no more than the overtones of some full inner music, inaudible and not understood in the world outside.

  A few days more and the girl arrived whom Kate had engaged in Elchester, and Kate found herself once again with more leisure on her hands. Her day was no longer one ceaseless activity from morning till night: she had quiet moments once more, an odd hour here and there when, if she wished, she could pause to read or to walk out into the front garden or down the lane to the orchard, or to step into the barn, walking softly for fear she should disturb the silence of its immense age and half afraid to be discovered there for no visible purpose.

  In one of such hours on a warm grey afternoon in the front garden, she felt the need of greater solitude and, opening the little gate, she went out and stood on the edge of the steep grass slope looking across the great sweep of fertile plain below. A field away from the foot of the slope, the Eavon between its banks of reeds, flags, and occasional willows, swung a great loop parallel with the base of the slope and then, doubling back on itself, drove its narrowing coils into the receding plain, a great invading serpent, softly gleaming and pied along its length with grey, black, and silver.

  How empty and quiet the country was under the quiet grey of the afternoon. Kate began slowly to descend the slope and soon she was crossing the meadow towards the river-bank. Under all that seeming stillness the river
was flowing, ceaselessly and unhurryingly flowing on like blood in the veins of a sleeping body, now curling full and leisurely in some great dark hollow of its bed, now slipping with a clear, soothing loquacity over the pebbles that floored its shallows. Kate followed the river. Its movement and the subdued watery noises that at moments seemed almost to be articulate syllables quietly spoken to a single listener, helped her thoughts. She had not known what it was that she wanted to think about: she had felt only the pressure of varied and unaccustomed emotions which strove to unfold themselves; and now as she walked along the bank they began to unfold, stirring her heart with fluctuating joys and sadnesses as growing seeds stir the soil and the little stones of the earth, twining upwards into consciousness in vagrant trains of thoughts and memories. Her new spring of love had flooded all her mind, sweetening its bitterness and softening its hardness. Her anger and resentment against Ben were changed into sorrow, her old hatred of her father was melted into a pity, by which she seemed, for the first time, to reach some sort of sympathy and understanding of him. She saw herself now, and all those whom she had loved or hated, as helpless children whose hopes and longings for what seemed to them good and desirable were at the mercy of an inscrutable Will which sometimes withheld all, sometimes granted a little. Though the mere thought of David still had power to plunge her in an all-absorbing happiness, her reason had by now so far returned to her that she could tell herself that the inscrutable Will might deny her all upon which she had almost unconsciously staked her happiness. She thought of her past life, remembering her early beginning of love for young Graham which her father had so summarily crushed. But there, surely, happiness had been within her grasp and it was no alien Will which had opposed it, but simply her own cowardice. If she had dared to brush aside her father’s bidding, if she had simply ignored him as she had done years later when she accepted Ben Humphrey, she could have been the mistress of her fate. What, she wondered now, had been his reason for crushing her intimacy with young Graham? He had said that Graham was beneath her, but was that the true reason? Was he not, rather, clinging desperately to a shred of his own threadbare life which threatened to tear itself from his grasp? For though he showed no affection for Kate, she was a part of his life, it was she who made his home for him; and thinking of her father’s action in that light, Kate saw the Schoolmaster not as a hard and cruel parent but as a lonely old man trying to rescue his threatened existence.

  And for a while he had rescued it at the expense of hers: just as, when life beckoned to her for the second time, she had rescued hers at the expense of his. And, remembering that at a given moment it had been hers to choose and that she had chosen and so, by her own action, had altered her life, she reflected that, after all, man is not altogether powerless; for although the inscrutable Will might offer or withhold, it rested still with men to grasp or refrain when the offer was made. So far, at least, they could control their fates. It was by her own exertion that she had gained her freedom: if she had again submitted to her father she would to this day have been living the narrow life in the schoolhouse at Penridge and would never have come to The Grange.

  At the thought of The Grange she paused in her abstracted walk along the river-bank and turned to look back at the green slope on which the farm was perched. She was surprised to see how far she had come. So busy had she been with her thoughts that time and distance had been forgotten. Where she stood, a line of five willows bordered the opposite bank of the stream — five still, upward-leaping fountains of green whose greyer reflections showered downwards into the dim underworld of water which lay deep and unstirring at their feet. Between them the distant slope showed smooth and symmetrical as the shaven, artificial bank of a lawn, and on the top of it, behind the low wall and the fruit trees of the garden, the long red front of the house with its grey and golden roof and the two dormer windows, one of which was David’s bedroom, looked small and neat as a toy. A medley of red walls and low roofs rose to the right of it, and behind it Kate could see the great thatched roof of the barn and, rising above all, the clustered elms, mound above mound of dark green, sombre, bountiful, and protective. It was the first time she had seen the farm gathered thus into a single unit, for when approached from the Elchester side, where for the last two miles the road was on a level with it, nothing of it was visible but the elms and a glimpse of roof and chimney. It seemed to her now marvellously beautiful and lovable. It had become a vital and familiar part of her life, and at this new aspect of it her heart warmed. As she walked home and began to climb the slope she thought how, since she had confessed to herself her love for David, her heart had warmed towards all things, both animate and inanimate, as though the concentrating of her love upon one thing had aroused in her a love that included everything.

  She unlatched the garden gate and, as she did so, she resolved that as soon as she had a free afternoon she would go to Penridge to see her father.

  XVII

  Kate and Ben sat at their midday dinner. Their talk was commonplace and unconstrained, for Kate’s feelings towards Ben had by this time so far composed themselves that in his presence she no longer felt actively hostile to him. But that her attitude to him had altered since she had dismissed Emma, Ben knew well enough. That restraint which he had felt in her from the first, but which he had hoped that marriage would gradually thaw, had increased of late. She behaved to him much as usual, but he knew that she had withdrawn a great part of herself into a world in which he had no share. What touchy things women were! How much did she know of the silly business with Emma? Something she certainly knew: that glance of hers which had silenced him so effectually when he had begun to expostulate about Emma’s dismissal had told him that much. But, even if she knew all, why should she go on resenting it so long? Surely she didn’t imagine that he loved Emma as he loved her? He had assured her of that, not explicitly, for he could not bring himself to speak to her of Emma, but no less certainly in what seemed to him a hundred sure and subtle ways which any woman would understand.

  As they sat at table together now, he glanced occasionally, with a look of baffled inquiry, at the calm, beautiful face beside him, which was, he felt vaguely but certainly, closed against him. Why was it that he was destined to be baffled and excluded by the women on whom he set his affections? His mind went back to David’s mother. She, too, had always withheld something of herself from him. He had never wholly possessed her: always there had been that fear that she might vanish and leave him alone as, in the end, she had vanished, withdrawing herself and leaving him baffled by her death.

  Looking now at Kate, he sighed, feeling that he was an old man, — old and dry, and that it was vain and absurd to try at this time of day to recapture that whole-hearted delight which he had found so rarely and kept for so short a time. As he gazed at her, Kate raised her calm, detached eyes to his.

  ‘I shall be late for tea to-day,’ she said, ‘so don’t wait for me.’

  ‘Going out somewhere?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m going over to Penridge to see Father.’

  ‘Then you’ll want the gig,’ said Ben.

  ‘No,’ she replied, ‘I’m walking.’

  ‘But you can’t walk all that way,’ Ben expostulated. ‘It’s fourteen miles there and back.’

  ‘Well, and what if it is? I hope I can still walk fourteen miles.’

  ‘No, no! You’ll have to have the gig. I’ll drive you over myself.’

  At the thought of having Ben’s company to Penridge and back Kate’s whole nature rebelled. She felt obscurely that, if Ben went with her, the reason for her visit would be destroyed; his presence would profane all those tender, new-awakened feelings which of late, like the little leaves and flowers of early spring, had been stirring and unfolding in her heart. The reason for the impulse to visit her father was hidden from her and it did not occur to her to try to understand it: she obeyed it without question, instinctively, for she knew that it was a part of those new stirrings in her. It was her instinct,
too, to go alone and on foot, like a pilgrim on her pilgrimage, for a lonely walk would give time and stimulus for that quiet reflection which she still felt to be necessary to her. Rather than be driven by Ben she would prefer not to go at all.

  ‘I don’t want to be driven, Ben,’ she replied to him. ‘Honestly, I prefer to walk.’

  But still Ben was not satisfied. His lips narrowed and his brow contracted. ‘But it’s not right that you should walk all that way, Kate,’ he persisted. ‘What’ll folks say if they see you tramping the road all that way from home, like a labourer’s wife?’

  ‘They’ll say what they like, Ben,’ replied Kate. ‘It doesn’t make any difference to me, so don’t let us bother any more about it.’

  Once again Ben had met that quiet persistence against which, he clearly perceived, it was useless to struggle.

  ‘Well,’ he said, drawing in a long breath as he rose from the table, ‘I don’t want to worry you, my dear’; and he went out of the parlour and down the passage into the yard.

  Ten minutes later Kate left the farm and set off across a field-path which took a short cut to the Elchester road. As she left the farm behind she sighed a sigh of relief. She felt that she had rescued something which was very precious to her: she was free to follow the promptings of her heart, which, a moment ago, had been threatened as a cluster of anemones is threatened by the passage of heavy feet through their thicket.

  As she went on her way she saw nothing of the country through which she was passing: all her attention was turned inwards. Yet she was not thinking: it was rather as if she had become intensely aware of her inner being, as if she were bathing in a great glow of inner sunshine. Whether it was joy or pain, she could not have said, for it was something too full and too intense for either, a state of activity beyond those irreconcilables. Yet when she tried to think, her thoughts in the light of it took on colours of joy and pain, so that her state seemed to be a continual fluctuation from one to the other. It was better, then, not to think, but to remain dumb, blind and self-contained, an earthen pot filled to the brim with the burning fluid of life. Meanwhile her feet, almost of their own accord, carried her down the Elchester road and took the turning to the right into the road that branched off to Penridge, and when she turned her eyes outwards again she was amazed to see that she was already passing the gates of Penridge Hall.