by E. H. Young
Mr. Corder put his head round the door and Hannah smiled at him as charmingly as she could. When he had disappeared, Ethel came in and fidgeted with the ornaments on the mantelpiece.
‘Finished the game?’ Hannah asked.
‘No, but I have to stay out till they call me in. Miss Mole, don’t you think it’s rather funny about Patsy?’
‘Is it? You’re really glad to get rid of her, aren’t you?’
‘Yes. But still, I think it’s funny.’
This was as near as Ethel would go to what was on her mind and Hannah would not give her the little push she wanted. ‘Is she a great friend of yours?’ she asked, instead.
‘Well, sometimes I think she is and sometimes I think she isn’t. That’s what she’s like.’
‘I know. You tell her something and then you wish you hadn’t. Have you ever told her anything about me?’
‘Oh, Miss Mole, yes!’ Ethel cried, for she was truthful and her deceptions were only for herself. ‘But only about these mattresses.’
‘Well, what else was there to tell?’ Hannah asked grimly. ‘You did all you could, it seems to me. Never mind, never mind! Don’t cry. You cry far too easily and it’s not becoming and they’ll know you’ve been doing it when you go into the other room. Stop it!’ Hannah cried.
‘But you’ll think I’m a sneak and you’ve been so kind to me lately.’
‘I’ll always be kind to you if you’ll let me,’ Hannah said.
‘It wasn’t that I wanted to tell tales, but I did want to talk to somebody.’
‘Then talk to me in future.’
‘Did she tell Father?’ Ethel asked in a strangled whisper.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Because, if she did – Oh, there! they’re calling me. I’ll come back next time I’m out.’
Wilfrid changed places with Ethel. ‘There’s trouble brewing,’ he said.
‘Man is born to trouble – and poke the fire for me, please.’
‘What I like about you, Mona Lisa –’
‘Yes, yes, I should love to hear it, but what’s the trouble?’
‘What I like about you is your allusive and elusive mind. There you are! The sparks are flying upward. And, of course, there are lots of other things I like.’
‘What’s the trouble?’ Hannah repeated self-denyingly.
‘Revolt’s the trouble. Howard says he’s chucking the ministry and all Mrs. Spenser-Smith’s good gold will be chucked away too. What do you think of that? She sent him to the University to make a high-class little minister of him and he says he won’t be a little minister. He’s just broken the news, and they’re arguing about it now instead of getting on with the game. So we’re going to have a happy Christmas, and I shall go as early as possible to my poor dear mother and stay with her as long as she’ll keep me. He’ll have a hell of a time, but it’s better than having it for life.’
Hannah sighed. ‘Why do people want to give each other hell?’
‘Because it makes them feel like God. And it’s so easy. Now the uncle –’
‘Be careful,’ Hannah said. ‘He’s in the hall, getting the letters.’
‘Yes, he likes turning over the letters. God, again! He has to know everything. And yet, Mona Lisa, to do the man justice, he’s a benevolent deity in the chapel. But that’s easy, too, when you come to think of it. His people get the reward of their obedience, and so would his children if they’d be what he considers good, which means admiring and believing in papa. Ruth’s quite right. It isn’t good for people to be ministers and there are times when I’m sorry for the poor devil. If you see yourself as the centre of the universe –’
‘I should have thought that’s what you do yourself.’
‘Yes, but I know I’m doing it. That makes all the difference. Now the uncle –’
‘I ought not to be listening to all this,’ Hannah said, but she liked having the boy there, sitting on the hearthrug with his back against a chair and his arms hugging his knees. She could pretend that thus her own son would have dealt with her and she with him, while she knew that the very lack of those demands which a mother and son make of each other was what constituted the charm of her relationship with Wilfrid.
‘Oh, nonsense,’ he said, ‘you and I are the only reasonable human beings in the house. Howard’s all right, but he’s dull, and depressed, poor lad. Ethel’s trying to make him change his mind and Ruth’s persuading him to keep the bomb until her Uncle Jim arrives.’
‘Ruth seems to think her Uncle Jim’s omnipotent,’ Hannah said, with the suspicion of a sniff.
‘Well, he’ll take part of the shock. It was silly of Howard to tell Ethel. She’s bound to blurt it out. She can’t see a difficulty without bumping into it, or giving such a jump that everybody else begins looking for it.’
He stopped speaking as Robert Corder came into the room, with a letter in his hand. ‘This is for you, Miss Mole,’ he said, giving it to her slowly, and he looked at her curiously and then at Wilfrid impatiently. ‘I thought you were playing with the others.’
‘So I am, sir. I’m waiting till they call me in. It’s one of those games where there’s more waiting than playing.’
Without examining it, Hannah had dropped the letter on to her knee, with the address turned upwards. ‘And they begin talking about something else,’ she said.
‘Oh, yes,’ Wilfrid returned her smile, ‘they’re doing that.’
‘Well,’ said Robert Corder, ‘I hope you are not disturbing Miss Mole.’
‘No, we’re talking about something else too,’ she said pleasantly. ‘And I can sew at the same time. A woman can always do two things at once. If she couldn’t, she’d have a dreary time of it.’
‘I often envy women,’ Robert Corder said. ‘They have useful and not exacting occupation for their hands, and no labour need be dreary.’
To this, neither Wilfrid nor Miss Mole ventured a reply, and Robert Corder retired after another look at the letter on Hannah’s knee.
‘He wants to know who your letter’s from, he wants to know what we’re talking about, he wants to talk to somebody himself. You ought to have encouraged him, Mona Lisa.’
‘Ought I?’
‘Yes.’ He nodded his head sagely. ‘Just for the good of the community.’
‘Why didn’t you do it, then?’
‘He hates the sight of me,’ Wilfrid said. ‘Too much like my father. But you want to read your letter.’
‘I’m not sure that I do. I don’t know who it’s from.’
When she had read it, she realized that Robert Corder must have recognized the clerkly hand of Mr. Blenkinsop who asked her to tea with him early the next week. ‘I haven’t a hat fit to wear,’ was Hannah’s first thought, and the second was one of impatience that Mr. Blenkinsop could not manage his affairs without support, but there was something flattering in his desire to see her, and something touching, and, as she thought of him, who looked so self-sufficient, she was bound to wonder if Robert Corder, also, was not as much of a baby as the rest of them. Mr. Blenkinsop was a solemn infant who asked for what he wanted and Robert Corder was a spoilt one who expected his needs to be divined.
Chapter 22
Robert Corder’s work took him out of the house for a great part of the day, but it also brought him back at times when a business man is in his office and knows nothing of domestic affairs until he returns to find a meal awaiting him and the work of the day apparently done. Robert Corder was conscious perforce of the doings of the household. He would swing down the garden path in the morning and meet the butcher’s boy carrying a recognizable joint, and if the joint did not appear in a cooked condition that evening, he would wonder where it was and why Miss Mole had ordered it a day before it was needed, or he would come back and see half the drawing-room furniture in the hall and get a glimpse of Miss Mole doing something with a duster or a feather broom. His study was never disturbed in this manner. The fire was lighted before breakfast, and the room, presumab
ly, dusted and swept, and when he was in the house he chose to sit there, but, even in that sanctuary, he could not be unaware of sounds and movements. He could hear the front-door and the back-door bells when they were rung and the thumping feet of Doris as she ran up the three stairs from the kitchen, and if she did not introduce a visitor into the study, he would, as likely as not, hear her voice, with its Radstowe burr, calling Miss Mole to settle some question with which she could not deal herself. He could distinguish Ethel’s prancing step from Miss Mole’s quick, even one, and sometimes, when he heard the front door shut, he would stroll to his window to see whether it was his housekeeper or his daughter who had gone out. When it was his daughter, he would have a slight feeling of discomfort: when it was Miss Mole he felt an active irritation. There was something wrong with Ethel’s appearance and he could not give it a name, but he knew she did not look definitely feminine, like Miss Patsy Withers, in spite of her bright colours, or completely unconscious of herself, as her mother had been, and she certainly was not pretty. That, perhaps, was a good thing. It would have been a great and highly distasteful anxiety to have had a daughter who attracted young men, and Ethel had given her heart to her work and seemed to be content. People spoke very well of her in the chapel and told him he should be as proud of such a daughter as she should be of such a father. This praise of her seemed to him somewhat exaggerated, but there was no doubt she was a good girl and her fits of passion seemed to be less frequent, but it was difficult to be patient with her nervousness and secretly he resented, while he benefited from, her protective plainness.
When he watched Miss Mole it was with definitely antagonistic feelings. The alert bearing of her head, her quick step, seemed to him unsuitable in a housekeeper, and arrogant in a woman who had no pretensions to good looks. If she had to be plain and thin, she should also have been meek, and he supposed it was possible to be domestically intelligent without looking as though she had some secret source of satisfaction in herself. That look had been growing on her lately and he could not but connect it with the visit and the letter of Mr. Blenkinsop. He had seen her as an unfortunate woman, undesired by any man, and he had despised her accordingly, and with the suspicion that Samuel Blenkinsop had found something in her which he had missed himself, he immediately set about searching for it and felt uneasy. He remembered, too, his discovery of Wilfrid, sitting on the floor and talking to her, not dutifully, but with enjoyment sparkling in his dark eyes, and it was increasingly evident that Ruth liked her.
Robert Corder did not understand that he was always jealous of those who gave to some one who was not himself and of those who received: what he did realize was that Miss Mole had some mysterious power to make certain people like her and that she did not like him, and as it was impossible for him to like a person first, he remained in his state of irritated interest and curiosity. Mrs. Spenser Smith had been wise in her choice of a housekeeper: his house was well kept, his food was well cooked, and Ruth looked healthier, but Mrs. Spenser-Smith probably had no experience of Miss Mole as an inmate of her house, of this personality which gave every promise of being properly negative and then developed signs of positive character. Not once, since her arrival, had Miss Mole asked Robert Corder’s advice. The kitchen range, the gas, the hot water, might go wrong, and Miss Mole was equal to them or found some one else to manage them; she had no difficulty in keeping her accounts; she brought him no tales of dilatory or dishonest tradesmen. This peace from domestic care was what he wanted, what Mrs. Spenser-Smith had told him he ought to have and what Ethel had not been able to give him, but he would have been better pleased if he could have believed that Miss Mole was making determined efforts and overcoming her natural disabilities for his sake, instead of taking everything in her easy stride. He knew nothing of Miss Mole’s real difficulties, of the constant caution necessary to prevent Ethel’s jealousy when any two members of the family paid more attention to each other than they did to her, to give her encouragement without raising false hopes, to damp down her threatened returns to sentimentality about Wilfrid, to give her the position of mistress of the house while she did nothing to sustain it. Miss Mole had to intervene in the quarrels which sprang up so quickly between the sisters, to avoid giving evidence of the sympathy between Wilfrid and herself, to steer conversations into safe waters and, above all, to conceal the control she really exercised. It was exhausting work but it did not exist for Robert Corder. The family of the minister of Beresford Road Chapel should be, and therefore was, a happy one, and his own griefs, his consciousness of the different treatment he received in the chapel from what he received at home, were not allowed to mar the concord, but it seemed strange to him that while Mrs. Spenser-Smith should be ready, almost too ready at times, to help him and Miss Patsy Withers brought her rather touchingly simple little problems for him to solve, his own children should give him little and ask for less. There were no signs of Howard’s improvement in this or any other direction. He showed no affection and no enthusiasm, and Robert Corder was confirmed in his opinion that it was a mistake to make things too easy for a young man: his father had fought for his position and kept it; Howard accepted his advantages and did not use them. Robert Corder could speak of these dissatisfactions to no one, now that his wife had gone, and while she lived he had hardly noticed them, and there had been no Miss Mole to add to them. To discuss Miss Mole with Mrs. Spenser-Smith would be to criticize her judgment; to deplore the faults of his children might be to admit failures of his own, and when Miss Withers referred to them in terms of praise he could not buy her sympathy at the cost of her envy of a life in which work of eminent importance was combined with the amenities of the happy home he had made, yet it comforted him that she knew of the little rift in the lute for which he could not possibly be blamed. She seemed to have an intuitive distrust of Miss Mole which agreed with his own, and it was increased, no doubt, by Ethel’s story of the mattresses. It was wrong of Ethel not to have told him. It was a small matter, but it was indicative, and it was necessary for him to keep an eye on the stranger in the house. If it had not been Wilfrid’s mattress, he would have taken action, but he could not pamper the boy, even in the cause of discipline.
Such thoughts as these underlay his life when he was in the house; outside it, they were forgotten if no one jogged his memory, and he strode about the streets, visited the sick, attended his committee meetings, with an energy and liveliness which gave him a reputation as a man of action. His actions were generally those of his committees, but his enjoyment of an authority which never presented itself to his mind as being safely diluted, his look of vitality, his handsome head, his conviction that he was of importance in the religious and civic life of Radstowe, had a suggestive value for others as well as for himself. To those who were sad or sick, his entrance was re-animating; knowing this, he was able to help them as he sincerely desired to do, and it was inevitable that he should suffer from a feeling of neglect and of mis-valuation when he returned to his home, where his importance and his usefulness were diminished by the dullness or the wilfulness of its inmates.
He had no great power for concentration and no desire for peace in which to meditate or to read and, unless he had callers to interview, he had little to do in the house when his letters were written and his sermons prepared, and he had time and willingness to listen to the sounds of voices, feet, bells and doors, to conjecture or to criticize. He would hear a murmuring from the kitchen as he passed through the hall and, sometimes, a burst of laughter, and making some excuse, such as the need for another pair of boots, he would penetrate into the kitchen regions and find Miss Mole and Doris mysteriously busy at the table or the stove, when he had expected to find one or both of them idle.
‘The Christmas puddings are ready for stirring,’ Hannah said to him on one of these occasions. ‘Will you have your stir now?’
‘My stir?’
‘Everybody has to stir, for luck.’
Doris turned aside with a giggle. She was emb
arrassed by the presence of the minister in the kitchen and by Miss Mole’s airy way with him, and Robert Corder, interpreting this sound correctly and reacting to it immediately, took the opportunity to prove his essential homeliness. He stirred manfully, circling the wooden spoon through the unwieldy mixture and an unmistakable scent, very pleasant but forbidden, rose to his nostrils.