For he had one dreadful and secret fear, the dread of being left utterly alone, and it made him as jealous as Jehovah. There were other men who could see, men who could filch from him the little that he had, for that was his illusion. He thought of the little instead of the much. He did not realize how much was given him. It might be so much less or so much more.
He sat and brooded and listened, and it was this deadness that provoked his daughter.
“He might try and do things. It would be better for him if he did things. Look at St. Dunstan’s. But he won’t try.”
Bessie could have found him jobs. He could have cut fire-wood; he could have taught himself to wash cups and saucers. Yes, women’s jobs perhaps. And, in secret, she accused him of being the graven image of a hero. He would not or could not bend to the little trivial things.
Her mother was more compassionate.
“A man’s hands aren’t a woman’s hands, my dear. Men are made different, or some of them. He always was for the big things. He liked to show his strength.”
Bessie shrugged her shoulders.
“He can’t forget his old God and his Bible. He ought to have been Moses or Elijah. I sometimes wish——”
But she checked herself. She had been about to say that she felt moved on occasions to burn her father’s Bible, yes—“shove it in the furnace under the copper and let it assist in the Monday washing.”
Every day a particular van pulled up outside the Rainbow. It was the baker’s van from Four Oaks delivering the bread that was needed for the Rainbow teas, and it was driven by a cheerful, florid, jocund man named Smith. He was a widower aged three and forty, with two small children and a sister who kept house for him, and Mr. Smith had the reputation of being something of a Juan, for he had a good skin, a fair moustache, and very neatly gaitered legs.
“Morning, Mr. Tredgold.”
Invariably he was cheerful, and somehow his cheerfulness was an offence to the blind man. He would hear Mr. Smith go whistling up the steps to the bungalow, and make bright conversation for the ladies. He was full of persiflage. He called Bessie by her Christian name.
“Hallo, Bess. How are the boys?”
He was more polite to Mrs. Mary.
“Good morning, Mrs. Tredgold. Same as usual, is it? Yes, we’ve got Maurice on the pictures. Coming to see him? Yes, you should. He’s a lad.”
It seemed to the blind man down below that the fellow’s voice had an insinuating slyness. He was too familiar, too confoundedly pleased with himself. He swaggered.
“Morning, Mr. Tredgold. Feeling the sun nice and warm, aren’t you?”
Patronizing brute! And during the war he had been somewhere at the base driving a lorry. To Tredgold the fellow’s daily call became something more than an unpleasant incident, and about it the blind man’s mistrust of the other world began to crystallize. He hated this fellow who careered cheerfully about the country and who behaved as though the sun and the green trees and the sky were his.
Tredgold’s blindness had made him suspicious. Was it necessary for that van to call every day? Had the fellow cast eyes upon Bessie?
He spoke to his daughter. It was a June evening, and she had come down the steps and was waiting for a red bus to take her up to Four Oaks.
“Bessie.”
“Hallo.”
“Where are you going?”
“Pictures.”
“Who with?”
She bridled. What was it to do with him? She had been working hard all day and she had her life to live.
“Guess.”
“That fellow Smith.”
She broke into laughter.
“Try again. An old fellow like that! Why, he’s got two kids. No, if you must know—it’s Peter.”
“Peter. Peter who?”
The red bus was coming up the hill, and she stood forward to signal to the driver.
“I suppose you expect me to get married some day, dad. You and mother did it.”
He was angry. She was not treating him with proper respect.
“Yes, but I expect to see the lad.”
“Well, you couldn’t see him, could you, if I——?”
The words had slipped out, and she regretted them.
“Sorry, dad. I didn’t mean that. I’ll tell Peter to drop in some evening.”
The bus carried her away, and Tredgold sat and gloomed. It was as though youth had mocked him, and then fobbed him off with a casual apology. Yes, he was of no account, a kind of Samson fooled by the Philistines. His right hand went out and touched the handle of the bell; he rang it.
His wife appeared at the top of the steps.
“Yes, John?”
“Come down here.”
“What is it? There’s no car.”
“The girl’s gone to Four Oaks.”
“Yes.”
“To meet a man.”
She had come down the steps and was standing beside him.
“Yes. Young Holland of Holland’s Garage.”
“No one told me.”
“I thought Bessie had told you. He’s quite a nice lad.”
His fingers rapped on the arms of the chair.
“No one tells me anything. The girl goes gadding about——”
Mrs. Mary’s tired face winced.
“Don’t, Jack. What do you expect? She’s young; it’s only natural.”
“Natural!”
His voice was harsh.
“I may be blind, but I’m not a fool. I don’t hold with a girl gadding about alone.”
“But they all do it, Jack, these days. Life’s freer than it was when we were kids.”
“Free and easy, what? No morals. You ought to be ashamed——”
Her pale face flushed, but she restrained herself.
“I don’t believe in playing the tyrant.”
“I’m the tyrant, am I?”
She put a hand on his shoulder.
“Don’t, John. My dear, I know it’s hard for you, and sometimes—it’s a little hard for us. You can’t keep the girl shut up.”
He moved his body away from her hand.
“Oh, yes, you’re a couple of martyrs, aren’t you? Why don’t you go up to the pictures? Damned sobstuff—and sex. The whole world is going to the devil.”
Her eyes filled with tears, but he could not see her tears. She was beginning to be afraid of his God, for sometimes his God was a devil.
“No, John, it isn’t as bad as that. Don’t let your blindness get you down.”
His head gave a kind of jerk.
“Well, don’t blame me if anything happens.”
During those summer days John Tredgold’s mistrust of life seemed to increase. He sat and listened. He grew morose and silent. He began to be attacked by monstrous and preposterous suspicions, as though voices whispered to him that the invisible world deceived him. For, shut up in the dark world of his own imaginings, he became a creature of self-created fears and fallacies, like a man in a cave watching vague shadows on the wall.
He began to suspect his wife.
For, one wet and windy evening, when Bessie was out and Tredgold was sitting in the bungalow’s porch, he thought he heard footsteps go down the path to the steps leading to the road. Someone had slipped out by the back door, and that someone could only be his wife. He listened. He was sure that he could hear voices, and one of the voices was a man’s. Perhaps a car had pulled in, and he hadn’t noticed it, but the man’s voice was familiar, and suddenly he recognized it. His wife had gone out to speak with that fellow Smith.
The suspicion became like a horrible and sinister face. It grinned at him, and the evil spirit in him beheld the false face of his God.
He heard the footsteps return and go round to the back door. Did she think he had not heard? These two women, his daughter and his wife, one had gone out to meet her lover, and the other——! Treachery! Was he just a blind fool in a chair, a kind of idiot child to be spoken to soothingly and kept in ignorance of the secret hap
penings in that other world?
He sat there consuming the bitterness of his own thoughts. He was not quite sane, for insanity can be nothing but an exaggeration of man’s natural reactions and the emotions that emerge. He was like a blind prophet beholding in the darkness of his inward world a fantastic and terrible travesty of life.
He heard his wife moving in the house. She came to the porch door and opened it.
“Supper’s ready, Jack.”
He said nothing. He raised himself from the chair and groped his way in, and when she laid a hand upon his arm he shrugged her off.
“Don’t mess me about. I can manage.”
He could not see the wounded look she gave him. She stood off and watched him go blundering towards a little table upon which she kept a few poor ornaments, photos and little silver things.
“Jack—stop!”
But he walked blindly into the table and overturned it, but managed to save himself. She rushed to him, and then held back.
“Damn you! Why do you want to leave things about like that?”
She stood voiceless, like a woman overtired and weary, whose patience was near breaking point. And then sudden pity sustained her. She loved him—in spite of everything, poor, blind, bitter soul.
She spoke softly.
“I’m sorry. No, nothing’s broken. Here’s your chair, dear. I’ll pick the things up.”
His face looked all twisted.
“Oh, yes, nothing’s broken. That’s all right, then.”
And in the darkness of his clouded consciousness he thought that she was just humouring him, fooling him, and his unhappy rage concealed itself behind a dreadful dumbness. He would keep his ears open and his mouth shut—until he was sure. Yes, until he was sure.
The weather changed its temper, and a succession of still, warm days brought more custom to the Rainbow Garage, and Tredgold would sit in the sun listening to the world of wheels upon the road, and ready to ring his bell, and every day the baker’s van from Four Oaks brought bread to the bungalow. To Tredgold it became more and more the bread of sinister bitterness.
“Morning, Mr. Tredgold. You want a nice yellow umbrella over that chair of yours.”
Facetious fool! Tredgold’s sightless eyes glared. His jealousy was becoming an obsession like some evil animal tethered to his chair, and up above Mr. Smith indulged in harmless badinage, and behaved like a gay lad. It is possible that he did loiter longer than was necessary, but he loitered outside other doors where the women had looks, for he was that sort of man.
Tredgold heard his wife and daughter laughing. They never laughed in his presence, and he supposed that the world would say that the fault was his.
He was like some human vessel simmering on the fire. The crisis was very near, and later, when it arrived, the air was close and oppressive and working up for a storm. Bessie was out, or rather Tredgold imagined that she was out, and that his wife was alone in the bungalow, for it was about seven in the evening and the tea hour had passed. Tredgold heard a car glide up quietly and stop. Footsteps crossed the cinders and went up the steps. There were voices up above, his wife’s and a man’s, and they seemed to him secret and surreptitious. He recognized the man’s voice.
So the fellow had sneaked by him, had he?
Tredgold rang his bell, and its jangle was angry. He heard a man’s boots crunching across the cinders. The engine of the van was started up suddenly, and the vehicle sheered off.
Tredgold’s bell kept up its clangour.
“What is it, Jack?”
Did she think he was so innocent? He shouted:
“Come down here.”
She came. She was frightened. His blind face was flushed and furious.
“You’re carrying on with that fellow. Think I don’t know, do you? It’s got to stop.”
“John!”
“Yes, at your age, and with a girl——”
She looked white, horrified.
“It isn’t true. John, how can you——?”
“Not true, is it? You’ll swear by this book——”
He grabbed the big Bible from the table. He held it out to her.
“Put your hands on the book and swear. I’m not going to have secret and slimy sin in my home.”
But they were not alone. Bessie was on the steps, and her dark and turbulent young face was ablaze. She swept down on them; she snatched the book from his hands, and flung it in front of the wheels of a lorry that came thundering by.
“How dare you?”
She stood over him. She ignored her mother’s appeal.
“Your god’s a brute, a blind beast. You and your Bible! The sin’s in you, and not in us. Sitting there and thinking vile things while she—— Why, she’s a saint, and you don’t know it. She’s been a saint to you for years.”
He sat strangely dumb under the lash of her young anger, but Mrs. Mary was out in the road, recovering that battered book. She smoothed its pages out as well as she could. She was weeping. She came and placed the book upon his knees.
“You’ll be sorry, John.”
She stood there helplessly, to be caught by the arm and dragged away by her daughter.
“I’ve had enough of this. I’m off. He’s not a man, he’s a——”
“Bessie!”
“Let him hear. I’m off, and you’re coming too. Oh, yes, you are. I’ve heard of a job at Tanbridge. You’ll come along with me.”
Now, whether Mrs. Mary was swept off her feet by her more impetuous and turbulent child, or whether Mother Eve entered into the heart of woman, Mary Tredgold allowed herself to be coerced by Bessie. She climbed the steps cut in the clay bank, and when she saw that little white hutch with its raw red lid she shivered.
“I have tried so hard all these years. I can’t stand any more of it.”
“I should think not,” said the daughter. “Let him sit and do a little thinking.”
Her mother looked very helpless.
“I can’t leave him like this, Bess.”
“Oh, yes, you can. You’ve got to. We can catch the eight o’clock bus to Tanbridge. We have twenty minutes to pack.”
At that critical moment she dominated her mother. She lugged out a couple of old suit-cases and stuffed a few necessaries into them. If you were leaving a few things behind, what did that matter? She got Mrs. Mary and the suit-cases down into the road and past that fatal figure in its chair. She held on firmly to her mother’s arm, and compelling her down the road to the bus halt at Lavender Lane, she confronted Fate. They stood there side by side with the suit-cases at their feet.
Mary Tredgold felt faint.
“I can’t go, Bess—I can’t—really.”
“You’ve got to. Let him sit and think.”
“There is going to be a storm.”
“Oh, he’ll find his way in. He’s done it before. That’s what he deserves, a good old crash-up.”
“My dear, you’re hard.”
“Hard! Well, I like that! If a man accused me, I should jolly well think it good to be hard. You’ve been too soft with him, mother.”
The bus stopped for them, and Tredgold’s daughter pushed her mother into it, and passed up the suit-cases to the conductor.
“You look hot, miss.”
Hot, indeed! Well, why not, with thunder in the air and a mother who had made a doormat of herself and a father who was more jealous than ten Jewish Jehovahs! She sat down on the cushioned seat beside her mother and allowed herself to contemplate that blind figure left derelict beside the road. She had inherited some of her father’s fanaticism. Let him and his old god have it out together. Yes, and a storm would be just the right accompaniment.
Meanwhile, John Tredgold sat with the Bible on his knees and the useless bell beside him. He could not curse with book or bell, and perhaps the spirit of condemnation was passing from him. His fingers fribbled with the leaves of the book and found no comfort in it.
He rang the bell, but less loudly than usual, and no one answered
it. He sat and listened and wondered, and suddenly he was afraid.
Had they left him? It couldn’t be true. It wasn’t possible.
Cars passed him occasionally, but they were mere sound and wind in the sultry twilight. He began to be more and more afraid, more conscious of the darkness about him, and of a dreadful loneliness.
He called to his wife.
“Mary, Mary.”
Still the same silence, an ominous, sultry hush. He heard in the distance the crumpling of thunder like the voice of an angry God. He shivered, and in the branches of the beech trees across the way an answering shudder made itself felt. A sudden gust of wind blew down the road, and the wood was full of rustling fear.
He put the Bible on the table beside him, and his hands trembled. What should he do? He became conscious of his sin, the sin of blasphemy against the spirit of love. It was as though his inward eyes had opened. He saw—— Good God! what had he said to her? How had the evil thing come to swell in him? Thunder, wind, shuddering trees!
The blackness about him became overwhelming. How helpless he was! Yes, and he deserved to be helpless. He had driven her away, the one creature who cared for him through all these years; he had blasphemed against her compassion and her patience. He began to see, to understand how he had tried her, vexed her with his eternal grumblings. He—a hero? Assuredly the heroism had been hers.
The thunder came nearer. There were flashes in the sky, but he could not see them. It was like the end of the world, his world. And then, suddenly, he felt the rain. It came at first in a few scattered heavy drops that struck his knees and his hands and his head. It gathered and thickened into a downpour that hissed on the tarred road. He sat there and let it soak him. He wept.
Presently the downpour ceased; the storm had passed over him and away along the hills. He was wet through, but he continued to sit there as though the mere flesh had ceased to matter. He could hear the moisture dripping from the beech trees across the road, but the road itself was silent and deserted. He put out a hand and touched the Book on the table beside him, and the thing was almost as sodden as he was.
Two in a Train Page 3