by E. H. Young
‘I’ll keep mine to myself. Suaviter in Modo. I’ll do my best.’ She looked at Mrs. Corder and hoped she was feeling grateful. ‘And, Mr. Corder, it’s a pity for Ruth to hear about things like this.’
‘It’s a pity for the things to occur. And – er – Miss Mole, you’ll forgive me, but I think you will agree I ought to know – is there any – any attachment between you and Mr. Blenkinsop?’
Hannah cast down her eyes and her lips twitched, but, suddenly she wanted to cry. She had lost Mr. Blenkinsop: the only use he had for her was gone, and the one she had for him, which was no more than the sense of a strange kind of fellowship, was growing greater as Mr. Pilgrim approached. She had meant to equivocate and tease Mr. Corder with the prospect of another amorous situation, even to raise her value in his opinion, and she found she could not do it. She looked up and she was afraid there were tears in her eyes. ‘No, none,’ she said firmly.
Chapter 35
Hannah went into the cold, dreary dining-room. Long ago, she had removed the dejected fern from the middle of the table and Uncle Jim had improved the behaviour of the gas, but now the fire was nearly out and nothing could change the aspect of a room which had not a single article of beauty in it, except the chrysanthemums in a shallow bowl of Hannah’s purchasing. She put her face against the flowers and drew in their bitter scent before she took off her hat and coat and knelt down to stir the fire, and she cast a grim look at the hat as it lay, upside-down, on the chair. She was glad she had not bought a new one for her happy day in the country, yet there would have been an excellent irony in spending her savings on adornment for the occasion, and, from the artistic point of view, that would have been the finishing touch, the master stroke, to this comic tragedy, for undoubtedly there had been something comic about it, and that, perhaps, was what made it harder to bear. There would have been consolation in seeing herself as a purely tragic figure, and that relief had been denied her.
Nothing had been further from her thoughts than tragedy when she reached Radstowe station. The sun was shining. Mr. Blenkinsop was watching for her from the entrance, the tickets in his pocket. He had secured seats in the waiting train, and Hannah sat in the corner of a first-class carriage with her feet on a foot-warmer that was really hot, too hot for the welfare of her shoes, which she was willing to jeopardize rather than disregard Mr. Blenkinsop’s efforts for her comfort. Mr. Blenkinsop sat opposite to her and he wore the kind of country suit she did not imagine he possessed, and she had a passing regret for her own shabbiness and then forgot it. She was too busy looking out of the window to think about herself, and when she looked at Mr. Blenkinsop it was only for response to her pleasure and the knowing remarks she made about the fields, what was to be sown, or had been sown in them, and how the ploughing had been done.
When she remembered the journey, and it was a slow one, giving her plenty of time to look at the winter landscape, more exquisitely coloured than a summer one, she thought Mr. Blenkinsop had treated her as though she were a child; he answered intelligently, but seemed preoccupied, as grown-ups will be, but once he broke a silence by announcing that the house they were going to see was not to be sold, but to be let.
‘So much the better,’ Hannah said. ‘A house can be a millstone round your neck. But I think you’ll find the train service inconvenient.’
‘So much the better,’ he echoed with a smile that vexed her in its complaisance, and the child he was taking into the country became the alert Miss Mole, who asked if he intended to resign his work at the bank.
At this, Mr. Blenkinsop had the grace to look a little embarrassed. ‘I’m thinking about it,’ he confessed.
Ah, she thought, things were easy for people with an income they had not to earn; they could take risks; they need not be afraid of being found out; yet she had compensations; no day, for instance, could ever be for Mr. Blenkinsop, with his inheritance from his mother and as many holidays as he liked, what this day was for her, and he, who was potentially free, could not get the full flavour out of a brief and lovely pause in a perpetual state of dependence on the whims and prejudices of other people. The sense of space, the fields, rippling gently into a distance where they lost their colour in the pale blue of hills so dimly outlined that they might have been clouds, were giving Hannah a liberty of spirit which made her material bondage unimportant, and she did not envy Mr. Blenkinsop; indeed, she felt a sort of pity for him. His material bonds might be nothing, but what spiritual ones was he forging for himself? She looked at him, trying to keep that question from shaping itself into words, and he smiled at her, rather shyly, as though he knew what was in her mind and wished to reassure her.
It was at the junction, when they changed to a still slower train, that Hannah began to be uneasy for herself, and now there was another question she dared not ask him. This train looked old enough to be the very one in which she had journeyed to Radstowe for those wonderful days with her parents, the very train which had taken her part of the way to school and back again, and every field they passed, every spinney and farmhouse, was familiar.
She said, a little breathlessly, ‘But this is my own part of the country!’ And she was not surprised; she was resigned to the ruin of her day, when, at her own station, Mr. Blenkinsop told her that it was here they must get out. She stood apart while he asked directions of the porter, so fearful was she of hearing the impossible words she dreaded, and then, defying her premonition of evil, she took the broad road to the right, instead of the one that led towards home.
‘No, it’s this way,’ Mr. Blenkinsop said, pointing with his stick, and he set off at a good pace.
‘Not so fast,’ Hannah begged. Her mind was like a map in which she saw every house and cottage in the district reached by this road. ‘How many miles?’ she asked.
‘About two.’ She stood still and Mr. Blenkinsop anxiously inquired if that was too much for her.
‘No, no.’ There was still a little hope and a good deal of courage in her heart. ‘Tell me about the house,’ she said, as they walked on.
Mr. Blenkinsop had not applied to any agencies for the cottage he wanted. He had heard of this one in a roundabout fashion which ended in a customer at the bank, and back again, through this customer, he had made his appointment with the owner, a procedure which suited his own desire for secrecy.
‘And I think those must be the chimneys,’ he said.
It was then that Hannah stopped dead. She had a physical feeling of sickness, a horrible, shrivelling feeling in her breast, as though her heart, with all its generosity and courage, had been squeezed in a hard hand to the size of a pea and, for a moment, she felt murderous at this outrage. Then shame swooped over her like a great flapping, threatening bird, and the robin piped his gay derisive note.
In the sunk lane, in sight of her own chimneys, she looked about her for escape. She could not face the man to whom she had given everything she had, she would not look at him and see the full folly of her surrender and her treasure broken at his poor feet of day. The black bird hovered, the robin piped, and she knew she had been befooling herself for years, making excuses for him, clinging to every memory that had beauty in it, and now the fingers, which had so quickly grown flaccid in hers, were insolently snapped in her face. This was the man she had loved! Her shame lay in his character and her misreading of it, not in the physical intimacy which, though it was misery to remember it, was comparatively unimportant, and no power could have dragged her, accompanied by Mr. Blenkinsop, into his presence.
‘I can’t go,’ she had said. ‘I can’t go. You must go alone,’ and she had scrambled up the steep earthy bank into a little wood, and there, as she heard the breeze very softly singing in the pine trees and felt their needles under her feet, she knew that the black bird had not followed her and she felt no shame, only a purely human grief that anyone could have hurt her so cruelly.
At this point in her memories, Hannah stopped and dropped her face into her hands. The rest was a confusion of wo
ods and fields and lanes, with Mr. Blenkinsop at her side and the bird shadowing them again. She did not know where she had gone, or what she had said, or whether she had been silent. Kind Mr. Blenkinsop, had he but known it, was retarding her recovery from shock. She longed to be free of him. Alone, she could have steadied herself and concocted more of her excuses, striving to find something not altogether dishonourable in this sorry business, but Mr. Blenkinsop persisted, and a funny pair they must have made – a distraught woman pursued by a solemn gentleman who vainly hoped for a clue to this mystery, and the longer she left her behaviour unexplained, and she might so easily have invented something, the more impossible explanation became, but, in truth, she hardly thought of him, except as someone she did not want, and someone who subtly made the conduct of the other more abominable.
She realized, and she grew hot, that he had treated her as the mental case she actually was, and, but that he had made her eat and drink, he had let her have her way which was that of physical exhaustion, until at last he had found a station and a train, and back they had jogged, in a darkness that hid the beauties she had rejoiced in earlier in the day.
Her weariness and her poverty in friendship assailed her now. For the first time in her career she had behaved like a baby, and she was denied the luxury of having someone who would bear with her in that state and think no worse of her, and that, at the moment, was the greatest luxury she could think of. There was Mr. Samson and there was Wilfrid who both, in their different ways, would have offered sympathy and comfort, but Mr. Samson was not sensitive to human emotions and Wilfrid was too young to be made a confidant. On the shoulder of neither of these two could she lay her weary head. There was no one to look to beyond herself, and after all, this despondency would pass. She had had enough experience of unhappiness to know that it need not be permanent if she willed otherwise, and she willed it now with all her might. She told herself it was a good thing she had finished with the remains of her sentiment about her cottage and its occupant, and if she had lost her first motive for frustrating Mr. Pilgrim, she had found another in the simple necessity of earning her bread, yet, like a fool, she was encouraging Mr. Corder to have him to the house! That was the fault of Mrs. Corder who could hear every word spoken in the study and could do nothing more. It would be cowardly and cruel not to help her, moreover Hannah knew that what was not worth risking was not worth keeping, and while she was prepared to risk, she was also prepared to fight.
She sat there, waiting for Ethel to return, but it was Wilfrid who came in first, and, at once, she said, ‘You did well to give me that brooch and remind me that Cupid is blind.’
He hesitated for a moment and if, like everybody else, he knew of her excursion with Mr. Blenkinsop, he made no reference to it. ‘In wounding Ethel?’ he asked. ‘Is this Pilgrim fellow as bad as that? We had the hell of a Sunday dinner, Mona Lisa. What did you want to go out for?’
‘You may well ask that! But all things work together for good.’
‘To those who love God. I’ve always told you God’s the uncle and no one loves him at present, so there’s not much hope. Why couldn’t he take Ethel into the study and give her a wigging, instead of poisoning the food? But he wouldn’t have enjoyed it so much without an audience. I did my best. I tried to look bored, but he went, on and on. Streams of indignant eloquence! I wonder he had any breath left for the evening service. I found I had an engagement for tea and supper, and I think I’ll change my lodgings. My poor dear mother doesn’t pay three guineas a week to have her son’s nerves shattered. I want a nice, comfortable landlady and peace in which to pursue my studies.’
‘You’d better try Mrs. Gibson. She may have some rooms to let before long.’
‘But then, I don’t want to leave you, Mona Lisa. You are the extenuating circumstance.’
‘I don’t extenuate indefinitely.’
‘Ah, you’re wanting to change your lodgings too! Now, if you’d start a boarding-house of your own –’
‘I’ve thought of that, but I’ve no money and I’ve been told I’m too young. That surprises you, doesn’t it? But it shows you what some people think about me! And now they’d add that I haven’t enough sense! No, I can’t bother with a boarding-house. All I want is a little hole to crawl into – a nice dry cave – but people aren’t allowed to live in caves nowadays, are they? Everything always belongs to some one else. When I leave my present situation, I’m going to be a charwoman. A home of my own, if it’s only an attic, and no questions asked so long as I can scrub. I ought to have done it years ago, but I suppose I had some ridiculous notions about gentility. You’d better go to bed. I’m waiting up for Ethel and it will be no help to me if she finds you here!’
Chapter 36
Sitting by the fire and waiting for Ethel’s arrival, Hannah was almost annoyed to find that the acute stage of her suffering had passed before she had had an opportunity to lie on her bed and cry until she could cry no longer. That was what she had meant to do, but first Ruth and then Robert Corder had made demands on her and the contact with their minds and Wilfrid’s, had diverted her thoughts into several channels and the strength had gone from the main one. ‘And a good thing too!’ Hannah said to herself. She was able to analyse the emotions she had no need to control and did not wish to express in an extravagance of weeping, and she could wonder how much the presence of Mr. Blenkinsop had contributed to her pain and whether, meeting the circumstances alone, she could have dealt with them more sanely, with her usual acceptance of human frailty. She ought to have gone on and got what humour she could out of a situation in which her lover offered her house to Mr. Blenkinsop, but she was not callous enough for that, nor cruel enough to put the offerer to such confusion. And his shame would have been hers; the worse he proved himself, the greater was her folly and, at once, she began to find excuses for him. Perhaps he wanted to let the house for her sake and intended to send her the money; perhaps his conscience had begun to prick him after ten years of somnolence, but even to Hannah’s eagerness, these explanations were unsatisfactory, and she knew it was more likely that he was weary of the place and wanted to get rid of it, and saw no difference between living there for nothing and taking the proceeds of someone else’s tenancy. There was the chance, and Hannah unwisely clung to it, that Mr. Blenkinsop’s information, received in such a roundabout fashion, had been distorted in transit, but all these speculations were useless. Though she had cured Mr. Blenkinsop of wishing to see her again, though she had given him food for curious thought, she was not otherwise much worse off than she had been before, and she would be actually better off if she could be ruthless with her memories and face the fact that the man she had loved, with a recklessness due to a hero who had risked death and been grievously wounded, had not been worth loving at all; that he, at least, had had no romantic notions of a life-long attachment; that he had merely seen her as a young woman, enamoured, like many others, of a soldier, who had offered him a home when he had none. He had taken her as part of the house, like the furniture and the fowls, and it was horrible to think that probably at no stage of their intercourse had he considered her as more than a temporary and amusing convenience. If there had been any other sentiment, at any time, any realization that a woman of her character was not one for easy alliances, or that she had imperilled her future while she made the present secure for him, he could not have treated her to years of silence and to this final insult.
Yet it was well that this had happened, Hannah thought. She was bare, she was bereft, but she was no longer trying to be blind, and she was the stronger to meet Mr. Pilgrim. She could transform herself into Cousin Hilda without any sickening qualms of disloyalty to a memory and, given a little time, she could put these hurts so far from her that she would persuade herself it was really Cousin Hilda who had endured them.
The expedition to her house had been an odd coincidence and, with the imminence of Mr. Pilgrim, it would have persuaded some people that God approved of the laws men had made,
and ratified them with cunningly contrived punishments for offenders, but this would be to make God responsible for Mr. Pilgrim, who had spared a little time from his exhortations to the troops encamped near Hannah’s cottage, for reproaching a woman for her care of a man broken in doing what Mr. Pilgrim had no intention of doing himself: it made God responsible for Mr. Pilgrim’s conscience, then and now, a state of things inconsistent with Hannah’s conception of her Deity. No, no, men made the laws and, impatient at seeing them broken, they devised the punishments, and their representatives, in the persons of Mr. Pilgrim, Robert Corder and Ethel, in Hannah’s case, would see that the penalties were rigorously administered, And no doubt it was God who suffered most, at the sight of His creatures making each other miserable. Hannah was sure He was more tenderly tolerant of her than she was herself, that He grieved for her in having mistaken her man, but knew her love had been largely compounded of pity, like God’s own; that, in her act, He saw a rashness emulative of deeds of another kind, not permitted to her sex, and, as He had watched, presumably in some wise helplessness, the torture of brave men, so He observed her lesser agonies, so small compared with theirs that Hannah was ashamed to dwell on them.
It was comforting to know that God and she understood each other, she told herself, with a cynical smile for her presumption, and it was strange to think that Mr. Pilgrim was probably as sure of God’s nature as she was, and, like her, made it fit his prejudices; strange that a God who had as many characters as the men and women who sought Him in times of trouble and forgot Him in their happiness, should yet have the power of giving peace to bewildered spirits; strange, too, that the dreary dining-room felt like a home. The resuscitated fire babbled its cheerful inanities, Uncle Jim’s corrected gas did its best to do as it had been told, the almost inaudible ticking of the marble clock had a faintly friendly sound. Hannah’s peace might only have been that of exhaustion, but she believed it was something more, and, in any case, it would serve her turn which was to fit her to waylay Ethel before she could rush upstairs and begin the process known to Ruth as banging, and persuade her to accept her father’s bargain.