So the time passed, and he sailed. Alvina missed him, missed the extreme excitement of him rather than the human being he was. Miss Frost set to work to regain her influence over her ward, to remove that arch, reckless, almost lewd look from the girl’s face. It was a question of heart against sensuality. Miss Frost tried and tried to wake again the girl’s loving heart — which loving heart was certainly not occupied by that man. It was a hard task, an anxious, bitter task Miss Frost had set herself.
But at last she succeeded. Alvina seemed to thaw. The hard shining of her eyes softened again to a sort of demureness and tenderness. The influence of the man was revoked, the girl was left uninhabited, empty and uneasy.
She was due to follow her Alexander in three months’ time, to Sydney. Came letters from him, en route — and then a cablegram from Australia. He had arrived. Alvina should have been preparing her trousseau, to follow. But owing to her change of heart, she lingered indecisive.
“Do you love him, dear?” said Miss Frost with emphasis, knitting her thick, passionate, earnest eyebrows. “Do you love him sufficiently? _That’s_ the point.”
The way Miss Frost put the question implied that Alvina did not and could not love him — because Miss Frost could not. Alvina lifted her large, blue eyes, confused, half-tender towards her governess, half shining with unconscious derision.
“I don’t really know,” she said, laughing hurriedly. “I don’t really.” Miss Frost scrutinized her, and replied with a meaningful: “Well — !”
To Miss Frost it was clear as daylight. To Alvina not so. In her periods of lucidity, when she saw as clear as daylight also, she certainly did not love the little man. She felt him a terrible outsider, an inferior, to tell the truth. She wondered how he could have the slightest attraction for her. In fact she could not understand it at all. She was as free of him as if he had never existed. The square green emerald on her finger was almost nonsensical. She was quite, quite sure of herself.
And then, most irritating, a complete volte face in her feelings. The clear-as-daylight mood disappeared as daylight is bound to disappear. She found herself in a night where the little man loomed large, terribly large, potent and magical, while Miss Frost had dwindled to nothingness. At such times she wished with all her force that she could travel like a cablegram to Australia. She felt it was the only way. She felt the dark, passionate receptivity of Alexander overwhelmed her, enveloped her even from the Antipodes. She felt herself going distracted — she felt she was going out of her mind. For she could not act.
Her mother and Miss Frost were fixed in one line. Her father said: “Well, of course, you’ll do as you think best. There’s a great risk in going so far — a great risk. You would be entirely unprotected.”
“I don’t mind being unprotected,” said Alvina perversely. “Because you don’t understand what it means,” said her father.
He looked at her quickly. Perhaps he understood her better than the others.
“Personally,” said Miss Pinnegar, speaking of Alexander, “I don’t care for him. But every one has their own taste.”
Alvina felt she was being overborne, and that she was letting herself be overborne. She was half relieved. She seemed to nestle into the well-known surety of Woodhouse. The other unknown had frightened her.
Miss Frost now took a definite line.
“I feel you don’t love him, dear. I’m almost sure you don’t. So now you have to choose. Your mother dreads your going — she dreads it. I am certain you would never see her again. She says she can’t bear it — she can’t bear the thought of you out there with Alexander. It makes her shudder. She suffers dreadfully, you know. So you will have to choose, dear. You will have to choose for the best.”
Alvina was made stubborn by pressure. She herself had come fully to believe that she did not love him. She was quite sure she did not love him. But out of a certain perversity, she wanted to go.
Came his letter from Sydney, and one from his parents to her and one to her parents. All seemed straightforward — not very cordial, but sufficiently. Over Alexander’s letter Miss Frost shed bitter tears. To her it seemed so shallow and heartless, with terms of endearment stuck in like exclamation marks. He seemed to have no thought, no feeling for the girl herself. All he wanted was to hurry her out there. He did not even mention the grief of her parting from her English parents and friends: not a word. Just a rush to get her out there, winding up with “And now, dear, I shall not be myself till I see you here in Sydney — Your ever-loving Alexander.” A selfish, sensual creature, who would forget the dear little Vina in three months, if she did not turn up, and who would neglect her in six months, if she did. Probably Miss Frost was right.
Alvina knew the tears she was costing all round. She went upstairs and looked at his photograph — his dark and impertinent muzzle. Who was he, after all? She did not know him. With cold eyes she looked at him, and found him repugnant.
She went across to her governess’s room, and found Miss Frost in a strange mood of trepidation.
“Don’t trust me, dear, don’t trust what I say,” poor Miss Frost ejaculated hurriedly, even wildly. “Don’t notice what I have said. Act for yourself, dear. Act for yourself entirely. I am sure I am wrong in trying to influence you. I know I am wrong. It is wrong and foolish of me. Act just for yourself, dear — the rest doesn’t matter. The rest doesn’t matter. Don’t take any notice of what I have said. I know I am wrong.”
For the first time in her life Alvina saw her beloved governess flustered, the beautiful white hair looking a little draggled, the grey, nearsighted eyes, so deep and kind behind the gold-rimmed glasses, now distracted and scared. Alvina immediately burst into tears and flung herself into the arms of Miss Frost. Miss Frost also cried as if her heart would break, catching her indrawn breath with a strange sound of anguish, forlornness, the terrible crying of a woman with a loving heart, whose heart has never been able to relax. Alvina was hushed. In a second, she became the elder of the two. The terrible poignancy of the woman of fifty-two, who now at last had broken down, silenced the girl of twenty-three, and roused all her passionate tenderness. The terrible sound of “Never now, never now — it is too late,” which seemed to ring in the curious, indrawn cries of the elder woman, filled the girl with a deep wisdom. She knew the same would ring in her mother’s dying cry. Married or unmarried, it was the same — the same anguish, realized in all its pain after the age of fifty — the loss in never having been able to relax, to submit.
Alvina felt very strong and rich in the fact of her youth. For her it was not too late. For Miss Frost it was for ever too late.
“I don’t want to go, dear,” said Alvina to the elder woman. “I know I don’t care for him. He is nothing to me.”
Miss Frost became gradually silent, and turned aside her face. After this there was a hush in the house. Alvina announced her intention of breaking off her engagement. Her mother kissed her, and cried, and said, with the selfishness of an invalid:
“I couldn’t have parted with you, I couldn’t.” Whilst the father said: “I think you are wise, Vina. I have thought a lot about it.”
So Alvina packed up his ring and his letters and little presents, and posted them over the seas. She was relieved, really: as if she had escaped some very trying ordeal. For some days she went about happily, in pure relief. She loved everybody. She was charming and sunny and gentle with everybody, particularly with Miss Frost, whom she loved with a deep, tender, rather sore love. Poor Miss Frost seemed to have lost a part of her confidence, to have taken on a new wistfulness, a new silence and remoteness. It was as if she found her busy contact with life a strain now. Perhaps she was getting old. Perhaps her proud heart had given way.
Alvina had kept a little photograph of the man. She would often go and look at it. Love? — no, it was not love! It was something more primitive still. It was curiosity, deep, radical, burning curiosity. How she looked and looked at his dark, impertinent-seeming face. A flicker of derision ca
me into her eyes. Yet still she looked.
In the same manner she would look into the faces of the young men of Woodhouse. But she never found there what she found in her photograph. They all seemed like blank sheets of paper in comparison. There was a curious pale surface-look in the faces of the young men of Woodhouse: or, if there was some underneath suggestive power, it was a little abject or humiliating, inferior, common. They were all either blank or common.
CHAPTER III
THE MATERNITY NURSE
Of course Alvina made everybody pay for her mood of submission and sweetness. In a month’s time she was quite intolerable.
“I can’t stay here all my life,” she declared, stretching her eyes in a way that irritated the other inmates of Manchester House extremely. “I know I can’t. I can’t bear it. I simply can’t bear it, and there’s an end of it. I can’t, I tell you. I can’t bear it. I’m buried alive — simply buried alive. And it’s more than I can stand. It is, really.”
There was an odd clang, like a taunt, in her voice. She was trying them all.
“But what do you want, dear?” asked Miss Frost, knitting her dark brows in agitation.
“I want to go away,” said Alvina bluntly.
Miss Frost gave a slight gesture with her right hand, of helpless impatience. It was so characteristic, that Alvina almost laughed. “But where do you want to go?” asked Miss Frost.
“I don’t know. I don’t care,” said Alvina. “Anywhere, if I can get out of Woodhouse.”
“Do you wish you had gone to Australia?” put in Miss Pinnegar.
“No, I don’t wish I had gone to Australia,” retorted Alvina with a rude laugh. “Australia isn’t the only other place besides Woodhouse.”
Miss Pinnegar was naturally offended. But the curious insolence which sometimes came out in the girl was inherited direct from her father.
“You see, dear,” said Miss Frost, agitated: “if you knew what you wanted, it would be easier to see the way.”
“I want to be a nurse,” rapped out Alvina.
Miss Frost stood still, with the stillness of a middle-aged disapproving woman, and looked at her charge. She believed that Alvina was just speaking at random. Yet she dared not check her, in her present mood.
Alvina was indeed speaking at random. She had never thought of being a nurse — the idea had never entered her head. If it had she would certainly never have entertained it. But she had heard Alexander speak of Nurse This and Sister That. And so she had rapped out her declaration. And having rapped it out, she prepared herself to stick to it. Nothing like leaping before you look.
“A nurse!” repeated Miss Frost. “But do you feel yourself fitted to be a nurse? Do you think you could bear it?”
“Yes, I’m sure I could,” retorted Alvina. “I want to be a maternity nurse — ” She looked strangely, even outrageously, at her governess. “I want to be a maternity nurse. Then I shouldn’t have to attend operations.” And she laughed quickly.
Miss Frost’s right hand beat like a wounded bird. It was reminiscent of the way she beat time, insistently, when she was giving music lessons, sitting close beside her pupils at the piano. Now it beat without time or reason. Alvina smiled brightly and cruelly.
“Whatever put such an idea into your head, Vina?” asked poor Miss Frost.
“I don’t know,” said Alvina, still more archly and brightly. “Of course you don’t mean it, dear,” said Miss Frost, quailing. “Yes, I do. Why should I say it if I don’t.”
Miss Frost would have done anything to escape the arch, bright, cruel eyes of her charge.
“Then we must think about it,” she said, numbly. And she went away.
Alvina floated off to her room, and sat by the window looking down on the street. The bright, arch look was still on her face. But her heart was sore. She wanted to cry, and fling herself on the breast of her darling. But she couldn’t. No, for her life she couldn’t. Some little devil sat in her breast and kept her smiling archly.
Somewhat to her amazement, he sat steadily on for days and days. Every minute she expected him to go. Every minute she expected to break down, to burst into tears and tenderness and reconciliation. But no — she did not break down. She persisted. They all waited for the old loving Vina to be herself again. But the new and recalcitrant Vina still shone hard. She found a copy of The Lancet, and saw an advertisement of a home in Islington where maternity nurses would be fully trained and equipped in six months’ time. The fee was sixty guineas. Alvina declared her intention of departing to this training home. She had two hundred pounds of her own, bequeathed by her grandfather.
In Manchester House they were all horrified — not moved with grief, this time, but shocked. It seemed such a repulsive and indelicate step to take. Which it was. And which, in her curious perverseness, Alvina must have intended it to be. Mrs. Houghton assumed a remote air of silence, as if she did not hear any more, did not belong. She lapsed far away. She was really very weak. Miss Pinnegar said: “Well, really, if she wants to do it, why, she might as well try.” And, as often with Miss Pinnegar, this speech seemed to contain a veiled threat.
“A maternity nurse!” said James Houghton. “A maternity nurse! What exactly do you mean by a maternity nurse?”
“A trained mid-wife,” said Miss Pinnegar curtly. “That’s it, isn’t it? It is as far as I can see. A trained mid-wife.”
“Yes, of course,” said Alvina brightly.
“But — !” stammered James Houghton, pushing his spectacles up on to his forehead, and making his long fleece of painfully thin hair uncover his baldness. “I can’t understand that any young girl of any — any upbringing, any upbringing whatever, should want to choose such a — such — an — occupation. I can’t understand it.”
“Can’t you?” said Alvina brightly.
“Oh, well, if she does — ” said Miss Pinnegar cryptically.
Miss Frost said very little. But she had serious confidential talks with Dr. Fordham. Dr. Fordham didn’t approve, certainly he didn’t — but neither did he see any great harm in it. At that time it was rather the thing for young ladies to enter the nursing profession, if their hopes had been blighted or checked in another direction! And so, enquiries were made. Enquiries were made.
The upshot was, that Alvina was to go to Islington for her six months’ training. There was a great bustle, preparing her nursing outfit. Instead of a trousseau, nurse’s uniforms in fine blue-and-white stripe, with great white aprons. Instead of a wreath of orange blossom, a rather chic nurse’s bonnet of blue silk, and for a trailing veil, a blue silk fall.
Well and good! Alvina expected to become frightened, as the time drew neat But no, she wasn’t a bit frightened. Miss Frost watched her narrowly. Would there not be a return of the old, tender, sensitive, shrinking Vina — the exquisitely sensitive and nervous, loving girl? No, astounding as it may seem, there was no return of such a creature. Alvina remained bright and ready, the half-hilarious clang remained in her voice, taunting. She kissed them all good-bye, brightly and sprightlily, and off she set. She wasn’t nervous.
She came to St. Pancras, she got her cab, she drove off to her destination — and as she drove, she looked out of the window. Horrid, vast, stony, dilapidated, crumbly-stuccoed streets and squares of Islington, grey, grey, greyer by far than Woodhouse, and interminable. How exceedingly sordid and disgusting! But instead of being repelled and heartbroken, Alvina enjoyed it. She felt her trunk rumble on the top of the cab, and still she looked out on the ghastly dilapidated flat facades of Islington, and still she smiled brightly, as if there were some charm in it all. Perhaps for her there was a charm in it all. Perhaps it acted like a tonic on the little devil in her breast. Perhaps if she had seen tufts of snowdrops — it was February — and yew-hedges and cottage windows, she would have broken down. As it was, she just enjoyed it. She enjoyed glimpsing in through uncurtained windows, into sordid rooms where human beings moved as if sordidly unaware. She enjoyed the smell of a toasted bl
oater, rather burnt. So common! so indescribably common! And she detested bloaters, because of the hairy feel of the spines in her mouth. But to smell them like this, to know that she was in the region of “penny beef-steaks,” gave her a perverse pleasure.
The cab stopped at a yellow house at the corner of a square where some shabby bare trees were flecked with bits of blown paper, bits of paper and refuse cluttered inside the round railings of each tree. She went up some dirty-yellowish steps, and rang the “Patients’“ bell, because she knew she ought not to ring the “Tradesmen’s.” A servant, not exactly dirty, but unattractive, let her into a hall painted a dull drab, and floored with cocoa-matting, otherwise bare. Then up bare stairs to a room where a stout, pale common woman with two warts on her face, was drinking tea. It was three o’clock. This was the matron. The matron soon deposited her in a bedroom, not very small, but bare and hard and dusty-seeming, and there left her. Alvina sat down on her chair, looked at her box opposite her, looked round the uninviting room, and smiled to herself. Then she rose and went to the window: a very dirty window, looking down into a sort of well of an area, with other wells ranging along, and straight opposite like a reflection another solid range of back-premises, with iron stair-ways and horrid little doors and washing and little W. C.’s and people creeping up and down like vermin. Alvina shivered a little, but still smiled. Then slowly she began to take off her hat. She put it down on the drab-painted chest of drawers.
Presently the servant came in with a tray, set it down, lit a naked gas-jet, which roared faintly, and drew down a crackly dark-green blind, which showed a tendency to fly back again alertly to the ceiling.
“Thank you,” said Alvina, and the girl departed.
Then Miss Houghton drank her black tea and ate her bread and margarine.
Surely enough books have been written about heroines in similar circumstances. There is no need to go into the details of Alvina’s six months in Islington.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 228