by E. H. Young
‘We have to bear each other’s burdens, dear,’ Hannah said quietly. ‘And I’ll have another crumpet, if I may. They’re so beautifully buttery.’
‘Very indigestible, I’m afraid. I daren’t touch them.’
‘And a crumpet that isn’t swimming in butter is about as much use as a ship in dry dock. I’ll try that little aphorism on Uncle Jim – if it is an aphorism. I’ll look it up. If you want to give me a Christmas present, Lilia, give me a dictionary.’
‘Mr. Corder must have dozens of dictionaries.’
‘Well, they’re not mine – yet,’ Hannah said.
Lilia pretended not to hear this remark. ‘I’m going to give you one of these little bags. And now,’ Hannah was waiting for this, ‘what do you want my advice about?’
‘No, no, I’m not going to worry you, but,’ she leaned forward eagerly, ‘I must just ask you one question. Have you ever heard that Mr. Corder walks in his sleep? That’s my one hope, Lilia. Did Mrs. Corder ever complain of that, among other things?’
‘Mrs. Corder never complained of anything. Why should she?’
‘There’s a skeleton in every cupboard. Now I wonder how that saying arose. We go on, using these expressions, part of our common heritage, Lilia –’
‘I wish you wouldn’t harp so much on being common, but just keep the fact to yourself.’
Hannah put down her cup with a shaking hand. ‘You shouldn’t make me laugh when I’m drinking. Oh, Lilia, what a treasure you are! All right, I won’t. But it’s part of our heritage, all the same, and neither you nor I know where it comes from. Now, the kind of dictionary I want is the kind that will tell me things like that. I’m afraid it will be rather expensive.’
‘I don’t see what you want with a dictionary, and I haven’t a skeleton in my cupboard and I don’t believe there’s one in Robert Corder’s. You’d better speak plainly, Hannah.’
‘I’ll speak as plainly as I can without being improper, though, really it wasn’t so very improper because I pretended to be asleep, as any nice woman would, but imagine my horror when Mr. Corder opened my bedroom door and came and had a look at me. It wasn’t a long look, and I don’t wonder, but a look it was! Now, how can you explain that?’
‘I can’t,’ Lilia said slowly, ‘but I’m sure you can. It’s no good trying those tricks on me, Hannah, and if it had really happened you wouldn’t have told me. I hope you won’t try them on anyone else. In the first place, they’re vulgar and, in the second, they’re not funny.’
Hannah looked disappointed. ‘I thought it was very funny at the time. I must have told it badly. I haven’t been very successful with my stories lately. And it would have been funnier still if I’d just opened an eye and winked at him. I meant to put that in when I told you and I forgot. Well, I must go back and call on Mr. Samson. He would have seen the joke. The good jokes, Lilia, are the ones in which character and circumstances conflict humorously and Mr. Samson would appreciate this one.’
‘For goodness’ sake, don’t tell him!’ Lilia exclaimed. ‘If he thinks you’re that kind of woman –’
‘He knows exactly what kind of woman I am, which is more than you do, Lilia dear.’
‘But what’s the real explanation?’ Lilia asked, almost wistfully.
‘Family secrets, family secrets!’ Hannah said. I’ve kept yours and I’m going to keep the Corders’.’
Chapter 19
It was pleasant to see Ruth looking happier and Hannah subdued a sort of jealousy of Uncle Jim, whose advent had succeeded where her own presence had failed, and she determined to be happy too. It was pure wastefulness to spoil the present because the future might hold trouble, and everything conspired to help her. Ruth was less quarrelsome with Ethel, and Ethel, perhaps exhausted by her outburst, seemed more peaceful and more enthusiastic about the dub, though Doris had definitely deserted it in favour of her young man. There were Christmas festivities to be arranged, both there and at the chapel and, when she chose, Ethel could be as thorough in her work as in her grief. Hannah herself had more than enough to do with her own preparations, but she found time for a visit to Mr. Samson, now and then. That disreputable-looking old gentleman, who seemed to have been all over the world and to have tried all trades, who distrusted all men and most women with a good-humoured cynicism, whose chief prejudice was against parsons of every denomination and who had settled down in Beresford Road as though in obedience to some unsuspected craving for respectability, was the perfect antidote to Robert Corder. He was, in fact, in many ways, what Hannah would have been if she had been a man, and in his freedom from any received set of opinions, in his loose, but not offensive, tongue, in the stories he told her and, above all, in his appreciation of herself, she found a relief which, no doubt, had its subtle effect on the Corder household. Her demon of mischief, getting its exercise in talking to Mr. Samson and provoking his thick chuckle of amusement, had a less persistent desire to tease Robert Corder. It was impossible to resist puzzling him when the opportunity came, but she did not go out of her way to do it, and she could feel that he was inclining to think of her as the right woman in the right place. This, in itself, was irritating, but the contrast between his view and Mr. Samson’s, between the careful face Robert Corder knew and the one she could show Mr. Samson, between the self-conscious propriety of the minister and the old man’s lively disregard of it, was a secret delight. If Mr. Samson’s stories were true, he had known many women intimately; he talked of marriage with knowledge, though he did not mention a wife, and whatever his experiences had really been, they had produced what, to Hannah, seemed a sane apprehension of the relationship between men and women, giving due, and often humorous, importance to its physical side, but accepting it as naturally as he accepted food, and refusing to make a definite cleavage between male and female, anywhere. Mr. Samson, clearly, had not deliberately thought this out, nor did he express his opinions: like his red, puffy face and his wicked old eyes, they were the fruit of life as he had lived it, and though the fruit was ripe, it was not rotten. Ruth need have had no fear of him; indeed, as Hannah discovered, she had every cause to trust him, and Hannah herself could enjoy his approval of her remarkably neat legs and feet without feeling obliged to assure him of her inherent modesty. Hannah had no modesty in Robert Corder’s sense which implied a perpetual and restraining consciousness of her sex. She was not anxious to forget it; she was as feminine as anyone else and she had suffered too much from being treated as a machine, but she was a human being more abundantly than she was a woman, and this was what Mr. Samson understood.
She had her superstitious moments when she feared she had too many sources of happiness. She had the friendship of Wilfrid and Ruth and Mr. Samson, she was looking forward to the arrival of Howard and Uncle Jim, and she had Mr. Samson’s stories to remember and her own to concoct. These were a pleasant accompaniment to her household tasks. She could read when she was in bed, and she read late into every night at the expense of Robert Corder’s candles, but while she stoned the raisins for the Christmas puddings, dusted or darned, she was busy with her own romances in which sometimes Robert Corder and his wife, sometimes the bold buccaneer and herself were the chief actors or, more often, Mr. Blenkinsop struggled with the puzzling emotions she had created for him. She took most pleasure in the Blenkinsop story, for she could make it either comic or pathetic, and Mr. Blenkinsop was a subject to her taste. She could see the man who believed in safety being drawn into those dangerous, dim regions of pity where, as he groped his way, he would suddenly find himself on the frontier of a world still more dangerous and more attractive. As Mrs. Gibson said, he had a kind heart and it was touched by that spectacle of a slip of a girl pretending she had no troubles. Hannah, too, felt every admiration for Mrs. Ridding, but Mrs. Ridding had a baby, and a neurotic husband was a price worth paying for it. For the sake of one good baby Hannah would have paid more than that and there were times when she felt vexed with Mr. Blenkinsop. Because Mrs. Ridding was the first woma
n of his acquaintance who had faced a difficult situation bravely, he would naturally think she was the only one there was and, flattered by the belief that he had made this discovery for himself, he was ready to credit her with every other good quality, as a man, finding a new continent, would refuse to see a fault in it. She could now understand his resentment at the unnecessary preservation of Mr. Ridding, yet – here was the vicious circle again – if Mr. Ridding had been left to die, Mrs. Ridding would, in all likelihood, have disappeared from Prince’s Road or, if she had remained, Mr. Blenkinsop would have considered her fortunate and taken no further interest in her, and it seemed to Hannah that her own mistake in life always had been, and still was, her refusal to feel any sorrow for herself or to suggest herself as a subject for sorrow in other people. In her attempts to attract Mr. Blenkinsop’s attention, with sprightliness, intellect and ignorance, she had omitted the one method which would have been successful. Then she caught sight of her image in the glass and remembered that pathos without beauty is merely irritating, that a woman with a long nose could not be touching in her sadness, and at this point she neglected her stories for philosophical speculations on the effect of noses on destiny. In a woman, the perfect nose, in its appearance and its effects, was rather delicately cut, and very delicately tilted, while the suspicion of a droop had a tendency to produce tragedy unless its owner was a determined person, like herself. She had no theories about men’s noses. In the comparative unimportance of a man’s features, she reluctantly found proof of some sort of superiority in the other sex, and when she tried to remember the details of Mr. Blenkinsop’s face, she could recall no more than a clear skin, an impression of solid worth and a pair of spectacles.
She was as glad, then, as she was astonished, when, on another Wednesday night, he gave her an opportunity to look at him. She was alone in the house, for Ruth was at some school festivity and Hannah was working at a party frock which was to be a surprise for her. One of Ruth’s objections to the Spenser-Smiths’ parties was the inadequacy of her clothes and the grandeur of Margery Spenser-Smith’s, and Hannah, who had known worse than inadequacy in her own, was determined that her child should be as prettily dressed as Lilia’s.
She frowned at the interruption when the bell rang, but she smiled when she saw Mr. Blenkinsop. ‘You have a very bad memory,’ she told him. ‘It’s Wednesday night and Mr. Corder isn’t in.’
‘Is anyone else at home?’ he inquired.
‘Only me,’ Hannah said. ‘Would you like to leave a message?’
‘I’d rather come in, unless I shall be in the way.’
‘Not at all, and if you’re handy with your needle, I can give you plenty to do. But I expect,’ she said, looking at him gravely, ‘you can’t manage anything more complicated than buttons.’
‘I haven’t even got a needle. Mrs. Gibson makes that unnecessary.’
‘Mrs. Gibson spoils people. You’ll miss her when you leave her.’
In the act of following Hannah into the dining-room, Mr. Blenkinsop stood still. ‘Who said I was going to leave her?’
‘There was murmur about it, wasn’t there? A kind of subterranean growl? Come and sit down. And I thought you might have come to the conclusion that it was the best thing to do. If I had a little capital, I’d start a boarding-house, for what they call single gentlemen, myself, and I’d look after you like a mother, Mr. Blenkinsop.’
‘But I haven’t the slightest intention of leaving Mrs. Gibson.’
‘Oh, well, Mr. Blenkinsop, you’re the best judge, of course,’ she said primly, picking up her sewing.
‘Certainly I am,’ he said stoutly. ‘And as for starting a boarding-house, that would be a very silly thing to do.’
‘Why? If I can manage this family,’ Hannah said impressively, ‘I should make child’s play of the single gents.’
‘You’re too young,’ Mr. Blenkinsop said, frowning a little.
‘Young!’ Hannah’s laughter, the sound which had silenced Wilfrid’s whistling as he came down the street, was like a mockery of her own derision. ‘Why, how old do you think I am?’
‘About my own age, I suppose.’
Hannah shook her head. ‘Centuries older, Mr. Blenkinsop. Perhaps only a few years, as we count time, but while you’ve been behind your bars in the bank I’ve been pushing my way into other people’s houses and being pushed out again. Great fun!’ she added hastily. ‘I’d rather be allowed to run wild and pick up my living than be kept in your gilded cage. And the only thing I don’t like about Mr. Samson –’
‘Who’s Mr. Samson?’
‘Nobody seems to know Mr. Samson and he’s an extraordinary character. I really think I like him as well as Robert Corder,’ Hannah said thoughtfully. ‘But he keeps birds in cages, and you know about the robin redbreast in a cage, don’t you, Mr. Blenkinsop? He puts all Heaven in a rage and that’s how I feel when I think of you in the bank. From the first moment I saw you, looking through the kitchen window – I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to refer to that again – you reminded me of a bird. My favourite bird,’ she said, but she would not tell him what that was and, as she looked at him, she decided that he was not so owlish as she had thought. The spectacles gave him most of his solemnity, his firmly shut mouth seemed to mark his determination to support them, and Hannah wished she dared ask him to take them off.
‘You talk a lot of nonsense, don’t you?’ he asked patiently. ‘Does Mr. Corder understand it?’
‘I shouldn’t think of trying to find out,’ she replied. ‘Mr. Corder’s mind moves in different spheres from mine and I just accept the fact.’
She smiled trustfully at Mr. Blenkinsop, who said, ‘I should hope it does.’
‘So does Mr. Corder,’ Miss Mole said demurely and, to her great surprise, Mr. Blenkinsop let out a modest burst of laughter.
‘I didn’t know you could do it,’ she said.
‘What?’ Mr. Blenkinsop asked, preparing to be affronted. ‘I didn’t know you could laugh and I don’t know why you did.’
‘Because you meant me to,’ he said mournfully, ‘and I haven’t had many chances.’
‘You should make them.’
‘And I’m worried.’
‘Ah!’ Hannah said. ‘Can’t you balance the cash properly, or whatever it is you do in a bank?’
‘I can’t balance Mr. Corder’s religious views with my own.’
‘Is that all? Who could? I shouldn’t worry about that. I doubt whether he knows what his are.’
‘But I’m a member of his church.’
‘You can retire, I suppose?’
‘I’m going to,’ said Mr. Blenkinsop. ‘When my mother was alive, I let things drift. It didn’t seem worth while to upset her, but lately I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m not honest. The last sermon I heard him preach, on the subject of marriage, well, to put it plainly, it made me sick.’
‘Too lax?’ Hannah suggested.
‘Too idiotic,’ Mr. Blenkinsop said resignedly, and Hannah, taking a long time over her next stitch, asked carefully, ‘When was it? I must have missed that one.’
‘Oh, one evening, a few weeks ago.’
‘I see,’ Hannah said, and she paused in her work to connect Mr. Blenkinsop’s views on marriage with the complicated love affair of which she suspected him. ‘And you’ve come to-night to tell him what you think?’
‘No. I don’t want to lose my temper. I’m going to write to him. Argument would be a waste of time.’
‘Well, I’m glad you’ve warned me. It will be a stormy day, I’m afraid.’
‘Will it really? I’m sorry. But don’t you think I ought to do it?’
‘I don’t feel so keenly as you do about marriage, Mr. Blenkinsop.’
‘I didn’t say I felt particularly keenly.’
‘No, you didn’t say so,’ Hannah said, with an irritating smile.
‘That simply happened to be the subject that brought things to a head. I differ fundamentally from Mr. Corder and the d
octrines he has to teach.’
‘Exactly,’ Hannah said, ‘so you’d better declare your independence as quickly as possible. You’ll feel more comfortable, won’t you? How’s the chess getting on?’
‘I knew you’d ask that, sooner or later,’ he said, trying not to smile.
‘And the country walks?’ Hannah persisted. ‘You want to hide your light under a bushel, but Mrs. Gibson brings it out. You’re doing good by stealth and blushing to have it known.’
‘No,’ said Mr. Blenkinsop with an effort, ‘I’m afraid my motives are not altogether unselfish,’ and he looked as if he would have said more if he had not heard someone entering the hall.
Hannah hastily put away her sewing and wished she could do the same with Mr. Blenkinsop. ‘Every room,’ she said, looking at him with twinkling eyes, ‘ought to have two doors. If this is Mr. Corder, what are you going to do?’
‘I shall say good evening and walk out.’
‘And what about me?’
‘You?’
‘He won’t approve of finding a young spinster like me alone in the house with a single gent.’
‘Then he’ll have to put up with it,’ Mr. Blenkinsop said, and Hannah was telling him that so bold a spirit was wasted on a bank when Robert Corder opened the door.
Chapter 20
Mr. Blenkinsop would have been more tactful and more chivalrous if he had explained his presence by pretending he had been waiting for this arrival. He did nothing of the kind and, after shaking hands with Robert Corder, he went away and Robert Corder, looking hurt, retired to his study. It was his habit to go there at once, when he came home, unless he heard sounds which roused his curiosity, and he was very curious, from some other part of the house, and Hannah wished she had instructed Mr. Blenkinsop to talk in whispers. She was sorry his visit had been cut short just as he was beginning to be interesting and though it was a little puzzling that he should seek her out, Hannah, who was not modest, could make it natural enough. Mr. Blenkinsop, bewildered, and troubled by a new situation, had instinctively turned to the person who could understand it. And she could understand everything, she thought, in a kind of ecstasy. She knew that Robert Corder was now trying to decide whether he should ask questions and risk the evasions which he could not believe were snubs, or find the outlet he wanted in a reprimand, and he would not know what he was going to do until he saw her. That she would presently witness the solution to this problem was some compensation for Mr. Blenkinsop’s departure, and at a suspicion of rebellion against the necessity for making her visits to her old friend on the sly and receiving those of her young one under the shadow of Robert Corder’s displeasure, she reminded herself that these conditions prevented dullness. There had been peace between her and Robert Corder for the last two weeks and she told herself that she had no wish to break the truce, but she was not going to turn the other cheek: that was part of his profession, not hers, and when she took his tea into the study and saw him writing at his desk, she thought he was obeying the command laid on him, for he raised his head and thanked her, and she felt disappointed, but until she was actually through the door, she could not be sure he had nothing to say to her and it was when she was about to turn the handle that she heard him speak in a high, questioning tone.