by E. H. Young
When they returned to the dining-room, Ruth had her homework spread out on the green serge table cover, and a young man, with his shoulders wedged under the mantelpiece, was warming his back at the fire. He was rather a beautiful young man, Hannah thought, as she looked at his slenderness and the studied carelessness of his dark hair, but one, she decided the next moment, who would have to be kept in his place, for he was returning her glance quizzically, and the lift of his eyebrows condoled with her while his smile invited her to share his amusement at the alien atmosphere in which he and she found themselves. This was drawing a bow at a venture, but he was safe enough, for if the arrow missed its mark no one need know where he had aimed it, and Hannah’s demure response to his greeting did not discountenance him.
‘I’ve been trying to make Ruth tell me about you, he said gaily, ‘but she’s like David Balfour. She’s an awful poor hand at a description.’
‘I didn’t tell you a single thing!’ Ruth cried.
‘And now, methinks, you do protest too much.’
‘But I could tell you something about yourself! I knew you’d begin showing off at once!’
‘No, no,’ Wilfrid protested genially. ‘I was only letting Miss Mole know that this is a cultured household – as indeed it ought to be. We have Familiar Quotations on our bookshelves and they save a deal of trouble and hard work.’
‘If you’re hinting that Father hasn’t read as much as you have –’
‘I didn’t mention the uncle, dear child,’ Wilfrid said gently. ‘But all the same,’ he dropped his pose of an ironical young man and became a natural one, ‘all the same, I’ll bet you he hasn’t. Bet you anything you like. I don’t blame him. He’s a busy man. He’s the kind of man Familiar Quotations was made for, and he’d be a fool if he didn’t take advantage of it.’
‘He’s got more sense in his little finger –’ Ruth began. She looked as if she was going to cry. ‘It’s you that’s the fool! And I don’t know how I’m going to get my homework finished with so many people in the room! I shall have to do it in my bedroom. And I don’t care if I do catch cold,’ she said, in answer to Ethel’s expostulations, and from the door she gave half a glance at Hannah. ‘It won’t be my fault, anyhow.’
Ethel looked anxiously at Hannah. ‘I don’t know what’s the matter with her,’ she said. ‘And I don’t know what Miss Mole will think of us,’ she said to Wilfrid.
‘No, I don’t suppose we shall ever know that. Well, I’m sorry I teased the child. Is the uncle in?’
‘Yes,’ Ethel was anxious again, ‘and I said you had an engagement.’
‘So I had. An important committee meeting of the Medical Students’ Temperance Society – if he wants to know.’
‘Oh, Wilfrid! Really?’ Ethel clutched the blue beads round her neck and smiled with an alarming joyfulness.
Wilfrid dropped his eyelids. ‘But if he doesn’t want to know,’ he said drawlingly, ‘it wasn’t!’ and he slouched gracefully out of the room.
‘Dear me!’ Hannah said. They were the first words she had spoken and she wished Wilfrid could have heard them. It was the only possible comment and she thought he would have appreciated it in her own sense.
Ethel interpreted it as astonishment, and she hastened to explain that Wilfrid was a dreadful tease but he did not mean to be unkind. He did not realize how much she was in earnest about temperance reform. Or perhaps he did – what did Miss Mole think? – but liked to pretend he could take nothing seriously. She wished he was not a medical student. They were rather a wild lot, yet the doctor’s was a noble profession and that of a medical missionary was the best of all. She had wanted to be a missionary herself – in China – but, when her mother died, it seemed to be her duty to stay at home.
‘And now I’ve come, and if I turn out all right, perhaps you’ll be able to go after all.’
Ethel gave what was equivalent to a violent shy, keeping her eyes, meanwhile, on the object which had alarmed her. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I do such a lot for Father. And I have a Girls’ Club at the Mission. I’d given up all idea of going away.’
‘The missionary field, as they call it, or the stage,’ Hannah said. ‘It’s generally one or the other, in one’s teens, not that I ever fancied myself at either. But all the world’s a stage, as you’ll find in Familiar Quotations.’
‘And, in a way, a missionary field, too,’ Ethel said eagerly. ‘And perhaps it’s really harder to stay at home.’
‘I shouldn’t be surprised,’ Hannah said. ‘Oughtn’t I to be darning, or something?’
‘Oh, not on your first evening, Miss Mole! The basket’s in that cupboard and I’m afraid you’ll find a lot of socks in it.’
‘All the more reason for starting, then. And you said Mr. Corder likes his tea at ten o’clock?’
‘And biscuits.’
‘And biscuits,’ Hannah repeated. ‘Keeps him awake, I should think,’ she said, rummaging in the mending-basket. ‘Yes, there’s plenty to do here.’
Ethel shied again. ‘I’m always so busy,’ she said, fidgeting with her beads, while Hannah thrust a thin, probing hand into socks and stockings. ‘I’m so glad you’ve come, Miss Mole, and I knew I should like anyone recommended by Mrs. Spenser-Smith.’
‘Did she choose the servant for you, too?’ Hannah asked casually.
‘Oh, no! She’s one of my girls. One of my club girls. So she always has to go out on Wednesdays, Miss Mole. That’s the Club social evening. And it’s the week-night service at the chapel, so Father and Doris and I are all out and we have a high tea that evening.’
‘Sardines, I suppose?’
‘Not always,’ Ethel said simply, and Hannah, who had been ready to suggest that these piles of mending should be shared and Ethel’s restless hands employed, felt herself softening towards this young woman who wanted to approach and would be scared by a sudden movement. She went on with her darning, behaving as she would have behaved with the nervous colt, pretending she was not watching it and letting it get used to her presence before she advanced, and she could feel Ethel gaining confidence though her fears kept jerking her back.
Aloud, she said cunningly, ‘I’m afraid I’ve frightened everybody else away. Do you think your sister ought to be sitting up there, in the cold?’
Ethel showed the whites of her eyes, but, this time, she did not jump. ‘I think we’d better leave her alone, Miss Mole. Nobody knows how to manage her. Mother did.’ And now it was Ethel’s turn to look ready to cry. ‘And she gets on with my brother – everyone does – but she doesn’t seem to want me to be kind to her.’
‘She doesn’t look very strong.’
‘Perhaps that’s it,’ Ethel said hopefully, and it occurred to Hannah that here was another someone else who was not happy unless everybody appreciated her, and this one had less than common skill to evoke the admiration she wanted. Hannah was inclined to think that this was a feminine craving, the result of work in which the personal element was supreme, but she was to learn that in this household there was no one who was free from it. Robert Corder, it was true, made no efforts: he had found they were unnecessary and he accepted, as his due, the particular kind of adulation given to a man in his position and was astonished only if it was denied him, and when Hannah had seen him in his chapel, after a service, petting, and being petted by a docile flock, it was easy to understand why he treated her with marked coldness. She had tripped him up on her first evening in his house, and while his vanity and her appearance could persuade him that this was an accident, he was careful not to get in her way again. It was also easy to understand why Lilia had introduced the watch-dog. Miss Patsy Withers, a plump, fading, but still comely blonde, would have made a soothing companion for the Reverend Robert, a woman who would always say what she meant and, still more commendably, mean the thing most likely to please him, and when Hannah dusted the large photograph of the late Mrs. Corder which stood on the minister’s desk, she wondered if that lady had ever puzzled her husban
d. She looked capable of a silence which was certainly not due to any lack of ideas, and the more Hannah examined that face, the more she liked it, and the more she was convinced that Lilia’s loyalty to the dead was a romantic way of expressing her determination to keep her own place as leading lady in the chapel.
It amused Hannah to see Lilia walking down the aisle to her prominent pew, to meet her in the porch and receive an appropriate bow and sometimes even a handshake, and Hannah always took care to respond discreetly, but with a glance or a pressure which brought a wary look into Lilia’s eyes. It was hard to watch Ernest taking round the offertory plate and not to smile at him: it was harder not to encourage the kindness he was ready to bestow on her. His greetings were a little too enthusiastic to be those of her patroness’s husband, but, in the general cheerfulness of that porch and the heartiness with which the sharers of a spiritual banquet mingled before they separated for their more private and material feasts, this brotherliness was not likely to attract attention.
Each Sunday morning Hannah sat under the blue bespangled roof and she looked in vain for Mr. Blenkinsop. She would get a series of nods from Mrs. Gibson, and sometimes a whispered word, but their confidences were exchanged when Hannah dropped in for the cup of tea she had been promised, and she knew that Mr. Blenkinsop was still in Prince’s Road and that no further misadventure had disturbed his peace. Mrs. Gibson said it did her good to see Hannah sitting in the minister’s pew, with Ruth on one side of her and that handsome young man on the other. She liked to see a young man at chapel. While his mother was alive, Mr. Blenkinsop had been as regular as anyone could wish, and now he only went occasionally to the evening service, but, for all that, he was as steady as he could be and she was not the one to judge people entirely by their chapel-going.
‘No, indeed,’ Hannah said seriously, ‘but I shouldn’t enjoy the services so much if Mr. Corder’s nephew was not there.’ She did not tell Mrs. Gibson how neatly he sometimes paraphrased the hymns and sang them in her ear, or how his elbow met hers during the sermon or the extemporary prayers. Wilfrid was one of Hannah’s many difficulties and few joys for, in the Corder household, he alone flatteringly suspected something of her quality and acknowledged it by paying her attentions she did her best to repress, because, as she had early discovered, to be favoured by Wilfrid was to irritate Ethel and to be implicated in Ruth’s determined scorn of him. Ethel was friendliness itself when no one else was troubling about Miss Mole, but she was a bad sharer, in Hannah as in Wilfrid, and when Ethel was upset Ruth seemed to take pains to irritate her, while Wilfrid teased them both in turn with bewilderingly quick changes. The truth was that Ethel openly, and Ruth secretly, admired him for his looks, his nonchalance, and his disregard for all they had been taught to consider sacred, and Hannah was mortified and amused to find herself in the same condition, though her sight was clearer. Under his obvious faults, he was a lovable young man, and for her what was his most lovable quality was the quickness with which he sought her eye when his uncle was at his most ministerial, while those nudges of his elbow in chapel were his indication that, in spite of all rebuffs, she could not deceive him. She could pretend to be the plain Miss Mole, keeping house for Mr. Corder, doing her work efficiently, presenting an imperturbable obtuseness to Ruth’s continued hostility, meeting Ethel’s gusts of friendship quietly and ignoring signs of jealousy, letting slip her opportunities to cap Wilfrid’s wit with her own, but, so those nudges and those glances warned her, failing to deceive him.
This was heartening to Hannah. It lightened a task which could only be done well if she persisted in seeing it as a game in which Wilfrid’s appreciation and the improvement in the meals were the only points she had yet scored. She would score again when she had made harmony out of these discords and when she had persuaded Ruth that an interloper could be a friend, but she had to play with a cautiousness which was alien to her or lose the game.
Why did she take this trouble? she sometimes asked herself. Was it for the sake of the game itself or in a belated realization that, somehow, her future must be assured, that with youth behind her she could not afford more failures? She could not answer her own questions but, day by day, as she dusted Mrs. Corder’s photograph, she liked to fancy that between her and this woman there was some sort of pact which she was trusted not to break.
Chapter 9
It was a long time since Hannah had lived with a family. After an exhausting experience in which she had battled with half a dozen riotous children, an ailing mother and a father who tried to be confidential about the trials and disappointments of marriage, she had taken a post with an old lady in the hope of comparative leisure and, like an actress who makes a success in a particular kind of part and finds it difficult to get another, she had seemed doomed to old, invalid and lonely ladies for the rest of her life. She had naturally been suspected of inability to deal with the young after an existence of picking up dropped stitches, fetching clean pocket handkerchiefs and reading aloud, though Hannah could have been eloquent about the wearing nature of such work. Often she had looked at a charwoman with envy, desiring healthy labour with brush and bucket, and for her folly in not hiring a bedroom and letting herself out by the day, she blamed what must have been an odd lingering desire for the gentility she affected to despise. She would have made an admirable charwoman: that vulgar strain in her which Lilia justly deplored, so unsuitable in a companion or a housekeeper, would have been a positive recommendation in a charwoman, and she pictured herself, going from house to house, energetic, good-humoured, free of speech, the perfect charwoman of fiction, with a home which was all her own and none of these tangled personalities to deal with. Well, she would tell herself with a sniff, she might come to it yet, but women in that walk of life were not liable to be made the heirs of rich old gentlemen, and towards that pleasant prospect Hannah still pretended to be gazing. She had seen no one in the chapel who answered to the description, and though she had waved a duster out of every window, she had not met No. 16’s roguish leer. A sparkling October had given place to a damp November and the weather, she supposed, was bad for parrots and for gardening. She sometimes saw No. 16 trundling towards the back gate, she heard him calling in the cats at night, but she had no time to plan encounters, for she worked as hard as any charwoman and had to adapt herself to new and difficult conditions.
In her other situations where there was a man of the house, he had left it at a reasonable hour in the morning and could be trusted not to reappear until the evening: there was no such regularity in the movements of Mr. Corder. The absence or presence of his hat and coat was the only surety that he was out or in, and it became a habit with Hannah to glance at the pegs as she went through the hall and to feel her spirits rising or falling with what she saw there, another unwilling confession that his personality was not negligible. Hannah’s somewhat toneless singing, which contrasted so strangely with the quality of her speaking voice, was generally silenced when he was in the house; he damped down the tempers of his daughters and Hannah wondered if he knew they had them; he stifled conversation, for he was ready with information on all subjects, and opinions which differed from his own either amused or angered him, yet hardly a day passed without a caller, someone needing help or advice, an ardent chapel worker with some difficulty to be solved, a deacon on a mission of importance, and the voice which came from the study was not always Robert Corder’s, and though he might lead the laughter, there was response to it, and people went away looking happier than they had come. Nevertheless, Hannah would make a grimace at the study door as she passed. She was sure Mrs. Corder, from her place on the great man’s desk, was listening gravely to what he said and making her acute, silent comments, balancing the counsels he gave against what she knew of him and yet, more tolerant than Hannah, refusing to judge him harshly.
She had made of Mrs. Corder a person like herself, with more wisdom, more kindness and more patience, qualities she must have needed in excess, Hannah thought grimly, for
she who prided herself on her willingness to accept the good and bad in men and women as easily as she accepted their physical and mental parts, was deliberately antagonistic to Robert Corder. The swing of his coat-tails vexed her as probably the swing of her skirts vexed him; she would not believe in the boasted broadmindedness of a man who sneered at opposing views or waved them aside, and whose small tight mouth she could discern under the moustache which masked it. Like most childless women, she exaggerated the joys and privileges of possessing offspring, and Robert Corder seemed unaware of them. He was not an unkind father; he was amiable enough and ready to expand under the affection he had made it impossible for them to show him, but he seemed to Hannah to treat his daughters as an audience for his sentiments and the record of his doings and to forget that these girls had characters, unless they happened to annoy him. While Hannah chafed under his bland assumptions, she enjoyed watching for corroborative evidence of the estimate she had made of him and he rarely disappointed her, for, when things went well with him, he had to talk, and it was then that Wilfrid’s eyes sought hers and with the tiniest droop of an eyelid, lift of an eyebrow or face of unnatural solemnity, sent his message to her across the table.
Hannah took a penitential pleasure in controlling herself. If she asserted her personality before she had established herself firmly, even Lilia’s patronage would not save her. She had to persuade Robert Corder that she was useful before she let him suspect her of a mind quicker than his own, and she behaved discreetly, for she had her compact with Mrs. Corder to keep, she had her own powers to prove, and, though she would have laughed at the idea, she had the zeal of a reformer under her thin crust of cynicism. She wanted to fatten Ruth and see an occasional look of happiness on her face, to ease Ethel’s restlessness and get some sort of beauty into the house. She could not change the ugly furniture – and there Mrs. Corder had badly failed – but friendliness and humour and gaiety cost no money; they were, in fact, in the penniless Hannah’s pocket, waiting for these difficult people to take them, and Hannah bided their time and her own.