'Please, dear - only come closer. I don't want everyone to hear. You've no idea how she' - a nod to the right - 'and she'-a nod to the left-'try to spy into my business.'
Eleanor pulled her chair closer and began to read:
my dear caroline [the letter ran],
Robert and I are of course very sorry indeed to hear of your accident, and hope that you are getting on nicely and that the pain is not too bad. We are very glad indeed to hear that you have been sensible enough to stay in the infirmary, where I believe the nursing is always good as well as costing so much less. Of course this will no doubt mean an end to all your outside activities, which I dare say you will realize now is all to the good. I hope now that you will be sensible and apply for an Old Age Pension, which I am sure you deserve. As Eleanor is in London and looking after you, I expect she will be able to inquire about the proper steps.
Neither Robert nor I can come up to Town at present, as Robert has had sciatica, and I am very busy with the spring cleaning.
Times have not been good with the business, and now that there is this General Election coming on and some say that the Socialists may get in, and I hardly know what will happen then. We cannot of course help you much, as the calls on our purse are so heavy just now, but Robert sends you two pounds, which I am having changed into postal orders, and perhaps when you are convalescent, you could come to stay for a week or two. The girls are both well. Our love to Eleanor and all good wishes for a prompt recovery,
Your affectionate cousin,
enid smith.
'Rather a swine, isn't she?' asked Eleanor. 'I'd rather like you to make a fortune just to spite her.'
'Eleanor! Really. You must not talk like this, and I'm sure she means to be kind really, though of course she does not understand my position at all. Did the two pounds arrive?'
'Yes. The postal orders are here. I'll change them for you.'
'You'd better write and thank her for them.' Eleanor began to scribble shorthand notes on her block. 'Tell her,' continued Caroline, beginning to enjoy herself. 'Tell her about Mr. Plumer, and the two clergymen, and the Bishop of Kensington-Gore. Tell her I hope to get compensation from the motor-car for my injuries. Tell her I am already advancing my plans for the Christian Cinema Company.
'You know, I sometimes think that what is wrong with Enid is that she is a little jealous. Of course, I know she's comfortably off and has a home and children and all that, but what I feel is, she's never really seen life. She's always kept to the dull old sort of things. When you come to think of it, Eleanor, I've had a very remarkable life, really wonderful. I've been a pioneer in so many different ways - I mean, long before you knew me, I'd been fighting for progress in education and religion and diet and die Press and now the cinema, of course generally working in the background, but then I liked to be the power behind the throne, and then think of the interesting personalities I've met. I'm sure when I lie here hour after hour I sometimes go over my adventures, and you know if anyone ever wrote them down I'm sure half of them would not be believed, for truth is stranger than fiction, I always think. That's probably one of the things I shall do when I grow old - write my autobiography. Just think what a lot I shall have to say, I mean, take only one adventure. Take the Christian Cinema Company and all the personalities interested in it - Mr. St. Denis with his aristocratic connections and his lovely wife. You don't meet a couple like them every day, do you? And then Mr. Macafee. Well, he may become one of the really greatest inventors of the day, mayn't he? And if you really look at it in that light, I did discover him and as you might say the Christian Cinema Company did give him his first chance, didn't it? And then Mr. Isenbaum, of course Jews are rather a race apart, and I know he was less interested than some of us in the company, and I still don't know really why he ever came in or why he went out again, but I always felt that if one could know everything, there was something rather romantic about that man, and I suppose I shall know some day when the secrets of all hearts are revealed. And then Mr. Guerdon, who was at least a Quaker, though rather weaker than usual, I sometimes felt, Quaker and soda, I believe Mr. Johnson used to call him. And of course though Mr. Johnson may have been a crook, but I always think you haven't really lived until you've been done by a few crooks, have you? I mean, I don't suppose poor Enid ever met a crook in her life, leading that dull sheltered existence in the provinces. Well, you just write to her and make her a bit more jealous, Eleanor. Tell her that the C.C.C. is going to sweep England. Tell her Yorkshire isn't done yet!'
§5
Caroline's outburst invigorated her. By reassuring Enid, she convinced herself. After all, she had had a remarkable career.
The days that followed gave her ample opportunity for recollection. They passed in dream-like and not wholly unpleasant order. Eleanor came and went, bringing fruit and fresh butter and the caramels and Harrogate toffee that Caroline loved; she took down letters and reported progress, and acted as substitute for Caroline at three conferences and two deputations. She still looked tired and white, and became suddenly silent if America was mentioned, but she was a useful if ungracious visitor.
Day and night slid in and out of the ward as water fills and empties a deep garden tank. Caroline lay subdued and peaceful, taking pleasure in the sweets and oranges that Eleanor brought her, in her distribution of largesse to the other patients and in the small tributes of respect she gradually contrived to exact from the nurses. They called her 'Miss Denton-Smyth' now instead of 'Ma.' The almoner came to visit her, and appeared to be duly impressed by her declaration of profession as 'Journalist and secretary.'
She gave her age as fifty-eight; for supposing, she thought, Father Mortimer or any of the directors were to hear that she was over seventy. The knowledge that she was three months off her seventy-second birthday appeared far less real and true than her conviction that she was good for another ten years of work. Perhaps if they knew that she was over seventy they would want to superannuate her. After all, a woman was as old as she looked and felt. 'Except for the pain in my leg, I feel about forty-five,' thought Caroline. When Father Mortimer came to visit her, bringing her fruit and flowers, she felt not a day more than seventeen.
Meanwhile, she was content to lie and dream. The green distemper of the ward reminded her of the green hills of her old home near Leyburn, patterned by grey stone walls. The farm at Denton lay spread out along the side of a hill. Above it the black moorland climbed to the sunny sky, below it the rough road wound to the dale. Behind the house the cowshed and fold yard snuggled beneath a small plantation. Caroline had always wished that the farm buildings were not so near the house. She wished that there was a separate carriage drive to the front door. Visitors had to take their gigs and pony carts straight into the stable yard, which was also the farm yard, and walk through a narrow gate in the garden wall to the front door. No one could call a house with such an approach a Gentleman's Residence.
Long ago, when Caroline travelled with the Bassett-Grahams, she had called her father a gentleman farmer, and had tried to console herself by reflecting that, since he had bought the fields between the house and the moor, he was a landowner. But to-day she was content to think of him as a yeoman farmer, to remember how he had slapped his friends on the back in Middleham market, and told Yorkshire dialect stories in a loud, hearty voice. The humbler her origin, the more remarkable her achievement. What other farmers' daughters from the dales had done and seen all that she had done or seen?
It was strange, but that child's life at Denton now seemed more vivid to her than all her subsequent adventures. She remembered squeezing herself into the hay rack above the stalls in the cowshed, eating cubes of raw turnip and composing poetry.
'What is happiness made of?
What makes it sweet and dear?
Is it the things we look at?
Is it the things we hear?'
That had been real poetry, with rhymes and rhythm and the full blissful ecstasy of composition.
'If
I'd had more time, I could have been a poet,' reflected Caroline, 'only between the claims of art and service I had to choose service, being by nature a pioneer and fighter.'
Still, she had written some good poems in her day. There was that afternoon on the Malvern hills with Adelaide. Oh, Adelaide, Adelaide Thurlby. How lovely in those days she had been. So tall, so willowy, so distinguished, with her white swan's neck, curving above the embroidered collarless square of her Liberty gown. A lovely neck, Caroline then had thought. No wonder she had dared to expose it when everyone else confined theirs in net and whalebone. It was sad that later those swan-like curves had developed into a goitre.
But when they picnicked together on the hills above the school, and Adelaide read aloud The Lotus Eaters, while Caroline, who had carried the baskets, made the tea, nothing was missing from Adelaide's beauty.
'I am glad, I am glad, that I have known what a really intimate friendship can be,' thought Caroline. 'I am glad that I have known her even if it meant deeper suffering.'
For the days of bliss and art and companionship had been followed by months of anxiety, when one epidemic after another laid waste the school, and someone suggested that the drains were not quite right, and dear Adelaide grew nervy. Only Caroline knew what she had suffered from Adelaide's nerves when the pupils grew fewer and fewer, until at last only six assembled round the long dining-room table, and three of those were on reduced terms because their parents were abroad. Of course Caroline had put her own money into the school, and dear Adelaide had not paid her salary for three terms.
When the crash came - no, no - that was a time that Caroline did not want to remember. She had taken Adelaide up to Darlington to nurse her through her inevitable breakdown. Adelaide had recovered. From the moment Dr. Waddington had entered her room, Adelaide's recovery began. Ah, Sydney! thought Caroline, remembering that snatched kiss in the passage, when she was carrying a tray up for her mother's tea. It was the only time a man had ever kissed her like that. She dreamed of it for days and nights. She waited for his coming hour after hour. The clot, clot, clot of his grey mare's hoofs on the high road still echoed in her head.
She was in charge of two invalids then, her mother in one room and Adelaide in another, and she had had little time for dalliance. Afterwards, after the desperate day when Adelaide and Sydney announced their engagement, she had wondered bitterly whether, if she had spent more time with Sydney and less in looking after Adelaide, she might not have won him for herself. She had never believed that such a kiss could mean just nothing.
Ah, but that had been bitter, bitter. Deep waters had gone over her soul. Her mother had died in debt, and she had lost her lover, her friend, her mother, her home and her profession in one brief season. It seemed now so long ago, that it might have been another person who had sat after the funeral in the desolate house crying and crying, because she was left alone to wash up the dishes after the funeral tea. Her sister Daisy had had to catch a train back to Newcastle because her baby had whooping cough.
But in the anguish of her estrangement, she had written what was undoubtedly her best poem. It had been printed in the Northern Clarion - Epigram on the End of Love. By Caroline Smith.
'You said that death was not the End; most true; Death was not stronger than my love for you. But since sweet love so lightly goes, my friend, We are not dead, and yet - this is the End.'
It was strange that she could remember her poems so clearly now. Their rhymes sang themselves over in her mind at night.
It was something to have been a poet. Not everyone had been kindled by the divine fire. 'One day,' thought Caroline, 'I will write a long poem. All about pioneers.'
'Does the road wind up hill all the way?'
That was Elizabeth Browning, wasn't it? Or Jean Ingelow. Never mind. Caroline knew the answer.
'Yes, all the way and all the way,
Above Frienze all the way,
We'll climb for ever and a day,
But reach the heights to-morrow.
We'll climb the hot and dusty road
The paths where other pilgrims strode,
And cast aside our heavy load
Of loneliness and sorrow.'
She had composed that, hurrying up the hot, dusty hill towards Fiesole, behind poor Dodo Bassett-Graham. Dodo's tall, gaunt figure had raced up before her, Dodo's skirt trailing in the soft Italian dust. Caroline panting behind in her tight shoes, and knowing that she would have to brush Dodo's skirt when they returned to the villa, had almost failed for a time to appreciate the privilege of being actually in Italy, travelling with titled people. Poor Dodo had not, of course, been quite right in her head. It was sad that not even membership of the aristocracy exempted men and women from these afflictions. Lady Bassett-Graham had been an exacting woman, troubled, naturally, about her eccentric daughter, whose vagaries grew more and more impossible, until half-way through the Italian trip they had decided to place her in a nursing home.
But Caroline had seen Italy. She had seen Milan and Genoa and Florence. She had climbed the stairs of Savonarola's tower, she had looked at pictures in the Uffizi. She had learned how to say 'Dov'e?' and 'Duomo' and 'Grazie.' She had been to Paris. She remembered now the excitement of finding her way through the unfamiliar lighted streets, back to her small hotel.
Caroline was sorry for the sheltered, wealthy women who had never experienced the chill rapture of travelling alone. She was sorry for the vulgar little factory girl dying in the next bed, because she had never seen Paris.
Poor girl; she was rather like that naughty Barbara who had given them so much trouble at St. Angela's Home of Charity for Fallen Girls. Caroline had been secretary there for a whole year. It was then that she became definitely and blissfully a Catholic - an Anglo-Catholic, of course. The little chapel soothed and delighted her; the altar candles, the incense, and the quiet devotional movements of the Sisters in their grave black gowns, had been very pleasant to her. Yet even there she had felt a little superior to the Sisters. For they had fled from the world while she was still in it. She knew so well the sweet danger that had assailed the fallen girls. She knew so well, as none of the Sisters, she felt, could know, the startled delight of surreptitious kisses. Had Sydney not kissed her in the dark passage? Oh, she had been a pioneer in her sympathy with these poor fallen girls, even if she eventually quarrelled with Mother Ursula about the smoked haddock.
She had been a pioneer in the city. How well she remembered lifting her blue serge skirt with the braid binding to board a horse omnibus in Ludgate Circus. For nine months she had worked in the office of an educational publisher, drafting cultured little notices about history readers and First French Courses. He had been a difficult man. Oh, very difficult. It had been hard to lose her office job, but even that tribulation had led her to new experience. She had even ventured out to the suburbs as a canvasser for orders.
Poor Daisy, living in Newcastle with Edward growing fatter and balder. Poor Enid, so safe and dull and circumscribed at Marshington. What could they know of real experience and triumph? Of poetry and pain and loss and work? When had they sat up all through the night, drafting minutes, preparing reports, making coffee to keep them awake so that they might work on, with pricking eyes and aching necks and shoulders? All pain and discomfort and loneliness and failure became worth while if one had only a Great Cause to serve.
'What is the Cause? Oh Lord, I do not ask.
'Tis Thou appointeth, only Thou that guides,
I only pray for courage for my task,
And strength to shoulder it, whate'er betides.'
That had been one of her poems published in the Parish Magazine. It had been a great success.
'I do not crave that I should always see
The winding road before my straining eyes,
But only that Thy hand should beckon me,
Beyond the waning margin of the skies.5
A poem was company. If you had written poems, you would never go in want of a familia
r voice of comfort.
'I do not ask that I may win the crown, Only that I may still the Right defend,
I do not ask to lay my weapon down, Only to Fight unconquered till the end.
'I am Thy soldier, arm me with Thy might!
I am Thy pioneer; show me the way! I do not ask to triumph, but to fight, To travel upward till the perfect Day.'
This world's imperfect day was coming now. The dawn slid slowly past the narrow windows. The night staff was beginning to stir at the other end of the ward. In another minute or two, the pert probationer would hurry along wheeling a tray of mugs of morning tea. Surely there had been one other verse, the best of all? One that explained everything, that answered all her questions?
She must ask Eleanor to see about the office rent - and the printing of the new circulars. She did hope the girl would come early. There was so much to do. One must be faithful over little things before one could become a ruler over many things. One must never give way, never relax one's standards when pioneering. Faithful.
Poor Caroline Page 27