by E. H. Young
On her last evening, she went into the kitchen and picked up the tray.
‘He won’t like it!’ Mrs. Gibson gasped.
‘He’ll have to lump it,’ Hannah said vulgarly. ‘What about your poor legs, as you call them?’
There were no limits to Miss Mole’s audacity: Mrs. Gibson could not cope with it and she looked at Hannah with the mournful, helpless interest she had once experienced when she saw a man go into a cage of lions.
Mr. Blenkinsop was sitting by the fire in a large sitting-room heavily furnished with his mother’s mahogany. In front of him was a chessboard on a stool and his hand was poised above one of the pieces. He did not look up and Hannah felt as if she had carelessly entered a church while a service was in progress. The proper thing was to slip away and trust the appetizing smell of cooked meats to creep through Mr. Blenkinsop’s absorption, but, instead of doing that, she said crisply, ‘Dinner is served, sir!’ and taking a step forward, she added, ‘So that’s what you do in the evenings! It must be a great resource.’
Mr. Blenkinsop looked astonished and then frowned. ‘It needs concentration,’ he said pointedly.
‘That’s what I mean,’ Hannah replied obtusely. ‘I’ve brought up your dinner because Mrs. Gibson’s legs ache.’
‘There’s no reason why Mrs. Gibson should do it.’
‘Fear,’ said Hannah, ‘is one of the strongest human emotions.’
‘I’m afraid I don’t follow you,’ Mr. Blenkinsop said with marked politeness.
‘The poor dear is afraid of losing you.’
‘She knows how to keep me.’ Mr. Blenkinsop took his seat at the table and unfolded his napkin. ‘And really,’ he went on, indignation mastering courtesy, ‘I don’t quite understand why you should interest yourself in the question.’
‘No, you don’t understand,’ Hannah said gently. ‘And I make no apology. I’m speaking, as it were, from my deathbed. Moriturus te saluto! To-morrow, you’ll be glad to know, I’m moving on. I’m going to live with Mr. Corder – as his housekeeper – oh Lord!’ A faint gleam of interest passed across Mr. Blenkinsop’s face and she took advantage of it. ‘Yes, think of that!’ she cried. ‘I’d rather live with the Riddings. Why don’t you teach Mr. Ridding to play chess? That would keep him out of the oven! And what an inconvenience for you to find new lodgings! And Mrs. Gibson’s heart will break! Stay where you are, Mr. Blenkinsop, and think of me to-morrow at this time, when you’re here in your comfortable room and I’m in a strange land. But perhaps I shall see you sometimes at the chapel. That will cheer me up.’
‘Not very likely,’ Mr. Blenkinsop said, firmly nipping this bud of hope, and he applied himself to his dinner with an unmistakable air of dismissal.
Chapter 7
Mrs. Gibson’s greengrocer undertook to deliver Miss Mole’s box at the home in Beresford Road and thither, in the dusk, Miss Mole walked, following the cart and feeling that this was her own funeral and she the solitary mourner. Slowly the cart creaked down the road and slowly Miss Mole walked after it, and it seemed to her that her old trunk was her coffin and that the solitary mourner was her own ghost. A little wind was driving the fallen leaves along the pavement, there was a rustling of the bushes in the gardens, the tired pony’s steps and the turning of the wheels were dismal sounds, and she wished she had gone to the expense of hiring a cab and arriving with some appearance of eagerness. This was a very melancholy procession, a detachment of an army of women like herself who went from house to house behind their boxes, a sad multitude of women with carefully pleasant faces, hiding their ailments, lowering their ages and thankfully accepting less than they earned. What became of them all? What was to become of herself? Age was creeping on her all the time and she had saved nothing, she would soon be told she was too old for this post or that, and, for a second, fear took hold of her with a cold hand and the whispering of the dead leaves warned her that, like them, she would be swept into the gutter and no one would ask where she had gone, and her fear changed into a craving that there should be at least one person to whom her disappearance would be a calamity. ‘No one!’ the leaves whispered maliciously, while a little gust of laughter came from the bushes, and at that, Hannah paused and looked disdainfully in their direction. She was not to be laughed at! She was not to be laughed at and she refused to be frightened! Her head went up and she walked more quickly, to get level with the cart, and the ruby glow in No. 16’s bow window applauded her spirit. It was pleasant to think he was in there by the fire with the parrot and the canary and the cats. He would be surprised when he saw her flicking a duster from a window of No. 14, and Hannah liked surprising people. This was something to look forward to and she was not depressed when she saw no welcoming lights shining from Mr. Corder’s house.
The greengrocer shouldered the box, Hannah followed him up the asphalt path and rang the bell. There was a glimmer of light in the hall, but no one could be heard stirring in the house.
‘Seems as if they’re all out,’ the greengrocer said, and whistled under his breath.
Hannah rang the bell more loudly, the greengrocer cocked his head with polite attention, and now they heard the sound of someone running down the stairs.
Half an hour later, when Hannah was kneeling in front of her box, she fancied she could still hear that sound. It had struck her ear, at her first hearing of it, with a strange significance, as though Fate itself were coming to let her in, yet when the door was opened it revealed no more than the figure of a small, thin girl who did not know how to greet a stranger or to apologize for the necessary absence of her elders and the neglect of the servant who should have answered the door.
Hannah made a mental note about that servant and another that this girl, who must be the one who had holes in her stockings, was not at all pleased to see her, and she answered reserve with reserve, but when the greengrocer had struggled upstairs with the trunk and Ruth had found a box of matches and lighted the gas in Miss Mole’s attic bedroom and, doing her best, had gone to the window to pull down the blind, Hannah forgot to be dignified and called out, ‘Oh, don’t do that! I want to look. It faces nearly south, doesn’t it?’
It was a dormer window, the one she had seen from the road, and she felt like a pigeon peering from a hole in a dovecot. The house was set higher than she had thought and, over the opposite roofs, she could see thousands of twinkling lights and the dim outline of more roofs and chimneys. And this was a view which would be no less lovely in the morning, when the spires and towers of Radstowe’s innumerable churches and the factory chimneys with their pennons of smoke would clear themselves from the wide-spread huddle of buildings. She turned her head a little to the right and the wind came straight across the hills from the place where her pink cottage stood in its little orchard, and it was characteristic of Hannah to accept the pleasure and ignore the pain of the wind’s reminders, to overpay the greengrocer and to smile as she told Ruth she was going to unpack.
Cheerfully she looked about her when she was left alone and she decided that she liked this narrow room with its sloping walls, and then, with the wariness of an old campaigner, she examined the blankets, which were clean, and the sheets, which were rather coarse, and thumped the mattress critically.
‘Lumpy,’ she said, frowning a little. But never mind! She had the view from the window, she thought she would be able to hear the ships hooting up and down the river, and not far away there was the real Upper Radstowe with its old streets and crescents, its odd passages and flights of steps, and she unstrapped her box, forgetting she had seen it as a coffin.
The size of the box erroneously suggested that Miss Mole’s wardrobe was extensive. There was still plenty of room in drawers and cupboards when she had laid out and hung up her clothes, and there was still a good deal left in the box, for Miss Mole’s treasures travelled with her and the chief of these was the model of a sailing-ship miraculously enclosed in a pale-green bottle. She took it from its wrapping of cotton wool and gazed at it tenderly whe
n she had put it on the narrow mantelpiece. She liked to see it sailing all alone, never getting any further and never losing its gallantness, and it brought back memories of her very early childhood when it stood on the parlour mantelpiece, far out of her reach, a mystery in itself and a hint of greater mysteries. It was connected with the few sights, sounds and smells that remained to her of those days; heavy bees buzzing among the pinks on a hot afternoon, a turn in the garden path where danger lurked behind the hedge of box, the crackling of her starched pinafore, the rattling of milk-pails and the creaking of her father’s corded breeches.
She had a lot to be thankful for, she thought. It was good to have such clean country memories and it was astonishing how solid a background they made to life. Consciously or unconsciously, they were there, and, however murky and sordid some of her experiences had been, her roots were in wholesome earth and she had sprouted among sweet-smelling things. No one loved streets better than Hannah Mole, but she had a secret satisfaction in her knowledge of matters on which these townspeople depended and which they took for granted, and it gave her a feeling of permanency, of something more real than anything else in her restless flittings about the world and her changing views of what she was or might have been.
She had finished dressing herself for the latest part she had undertaken when a knock came at the door and the thin little girl appeared again, evidently unwilling to be the messenger who summoned Miss Mole to supper. She was a little breathless, but whether with nervousness, indignation or the ascent of the stairs, Hannah did not know.
‘She wants feeding up,’ she thought, as she smiled with determined brightness, and she promised herself that the day would come when this child would be glad of an excuse to knock at Miss Mole’s door. Even now her eyes had lighted on the bottled ship with a quickly hidden interest, and of that, too, Hannah made a mental note.
Her bedroom had been a pleasant surprise; the rest of the house was what she had known it must be. The hall smelt faintly of the morning’s cooking, the gas was protected by a lantern of red and blue glass, and though, when she entered the dining-room, she missed the green serge cover on a table which was laid for supper, the rusty fern was there, under a three-armed chandelier. One of these arms was fitted for incandescent gas which bubbled inside a frosted globe; the others were neglected and stood out gauntly like withered branches on a tree, but the room was further illuminated – though it still seemed rather dark – by an ordinary gas jet on each side of the fireplace, and these flames gently hissed in their globes of pink and white.
She noticed these things with a glance of her practised eye, and she had no time to verify her suspicion that there was cold mutton on the table before her hand was seized by a young woman who pranced to meet her.
In her nervous or happy moments, prancing was Ethel Corder’s gait and, indeed, she reminded Hannah of an awkward-tempered colt. There was a display of teeth and eyeballs, a look of half-playful viciousness for which her physical peculiarities were chiefly responsible. Her pale, scanty hair started growing too far back and there was a deficiency of eyebrow, yet her plainness had a certain feverish quality which attracted and held the attention.
‘Someone’s been knocking her about in the stable or stealing her oats,’ Hannah thought, while Ethel volubly explained that an emergency committee meeting had engaged her father and herself. ‘I shall have to be careful. And the little one looks like a starved donkey. It’s lucky I was brought up on a farm.’ She wanted to stroke and reassure them both, to tell them she could make them plump and happy if they would trust her. She wanted to stop the gas from bubbling like a turkey and hissing like a pair of geese. She saw there was plenty here for a farmer’s daughter to do, and though this might not be the place Hannah Mole would have chosen for herself, it was the one that needed Hannah, and she was turning the cold mutton into a savoury hash for to-morrow’s dinner and getting rid of the rusty fern, when the voice which had cheered many a sewing-meeting bade her good evening.
‘So this is Miss Mole,’ he said, nicely fitting his tone to the one suitable for an emissary of Mrs. Spenser-Smith who was far from being Mrs. Spenser-Smith herself, and Hannah, prejudiced already, thought she saw him quickly appraising her as a useful nobody.
With the best will in the world it was impossible to think the same of him. His height, his handsome head of dark chestnut hair just flecked with grey, the pointed beard of a lighter colour, his suggestion of great physical energy, dominated the room, and with a stiffened back, but a crestfallen spirit, Hannah had to admit that Mr. Corder, too, was something of a surprise.
Meekly, she took her seat opposite to Ruth, the servant brought in a dish of damp potatoes, and Mr. Corder took up the carving-knife and fork. Ethel had fallen silent and Ruth seemed determined not to speak. She looked crossly at the mutton on her plate and at Miss Mole on the other side of the table, but she bent industriously over her food when her father began to talk.
‘This is a fine old city, Miss Mole,’ he said, ‘full of historic associations, and we have one of the finest parish churches in the country – if you are interested in architecture,’ he added, with a subtle suggestion that this was not likely.
Hannah longed to ask what effect her indifference would have on the building, but Mr. Corder did not wait for reassurance about its safety.
‘Ruth must take you to see it, some day. On a Saturday afternoon, perhaps, Ruthie?’
‘I play hockey on Saturday afternoons,’ Ruth muttered. ‘Ah, yes, of course, these games!’ Mr. Corder said good-humouredly. ‘Well, Miss Mole may find her way there herself. The Cathedral is not so good. I don’t care about the Cathedral, but we are rather proud of our Chapter House. It may surprise you –’ He interrupted himself. ‘By the way, what has happened to Wilfrid? Wilfrid is my nephew and he is supposed to be studying medicine at the University,’ he told Hannah. ‘Do you know where he is, Ethel?’ Ethel’s eyes goggled nervously. ‘He had an engagement,’ she said in haste, and Hannah suspected that Ruth’s smile had been calculated to make her sister exclaim angrily, ‘it’s perfectly true, Ruth! He told me about it yesterday.’
‘And I knew he’d have it a week ago,’ Ruth retorted coolly, and Hannah realized that this rude little girl was hinting that her cousin had taken care to avoid Miss Mole’s first evening.
Robert Corder lifted his eyebrows and managed to look bland as he said, ‘I think Ruth shares my opinion about the genuineness of Wilfrid’s engagements. However, we need not waste our time over Wilfrid. I was saying, Miss Mole, that you may be surprised at my interest in ecclesiastical architecture, but whatever our religious differences may be, these buildings are a common heritage, and when I first came to Radstowe, fifteen years ago, I made a point of seeing everything of interest or importance, and very valuable the knowledge has been to me. I have been able to wake a civic pride in a great many people, I believe, but not, I’m afraid,’ he said playfully, ‘in my own children. You know the saying about the prophet! I’m pretty sure Ruth has never been inside St. Mary’s – eh, Ruthie?’
Ruth flushed an angry red and said she hated churches. ‘Ruth is a stout Non-conformist, Miss Mole, but we mustn’t be narrow. And there are other beauties in Radstowe. “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.” You recognize that, Ruth, Ethel? And there are other interests. Radstowe was once the most important port in England, but with the increase in tonnage she has lost her place. The big ships can’t get up the river. It is a tidal river – most picturesque in its gorge – you must be sure to see that, too – but the channel is very narrow, with large deposits of mud.’ And at some length and with what accuracy Hannah could not judge, he explained how these deposits were made. ‘Dredging goes on, but does very little good. It is a great misfortune for our trade.’
‘Yes,’ said Hannah, deciding to be dumb no longer as she could not be deaf, ‘but it’s well worth it. At low tide the mud is beautiful. All the colours of the rainbow, and it makes such a nice promenade for the gulls.’
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Mr. Corder was like a horse bewildered by a check in full gallop. ‘So you have seen our river?’
‘Oh yes,’ Hannah said lightly, ‘I’ve known Radstowe all my life.’
‘Ah, really –’ said Mr. Corder, and suddenly Radstowe became of very little importance. ‘Ruth, will you ring the bell. I think we are ready for the pudding.’
Chapter 8
Family loyalties and disloyalties are like currents in the sea: they intermingle, jostle each other, change places and are diverted or united according to the strength of the obstacles they meet, and Hannah, sailing alone, like her bottled ship, on this unknown ocean, found that her little craft, which might be upset at any moment, was quite robust enough to affect these currents. Ruth, undoubtedly, had been embarrassed by her father’s instructive monologue, but she could not tolerate his discomfiture by a stranger, though the stranger’s intention might have been innocent, and in the mild amiability she showed him until the meal was over and the few remarks she made to Ethel, who seemed to have missed what Ruth resented, she proclaimed her allegiance to the Corder clan.
Her tongue was always Hannah’s danger and its readiness had sometimes been her undoing. She could control the expression of her face, but the temptation of a quick reply or a disconcerting statement was too much for her, and she would have been superhuman if she had resisted this one, and remarkably careless of her future if she had not tried to disarm suspicion by a quietly sensible demeanour while her duties were explained by Ethel and they made a tour of the house together.