“Oh, well, if you’re so sure — ” said Miss Pinnegar rather bitingly.
“I am quite sure — ” said Alvina. “I’m quite certain.”
“Cock-sure people are often most mistaken,” said Miss Pinnegar. “I’d rather have my own mistakes than somebody else’s rights,” said Alvina.
“Then don’t expect anybody to pay for your mistakes,” said Miss Pinnegar.
“It would be all the same if I did,” said Alvina.
When she lay in bed, she stared at the light of the street-lamp on the wall. She was thinking busily: but heaven knows what she was thinking. She had sharpened the edge of her temper. She was waiting till tomorrow. She was waiting till she saw Albert Witham. She wanted to finish off with him. She was keen to cut clean through any correspondence with him. She stared for many hours at the light of the street-lamp, and there was a narrowed look in her eyes.
The next day she did not go to Morning Service, but stayed at home to cook the dinner. In the evening she sat in her place in the choir. In the Withams’ pew sat Louie and Albert — no Arthur. Albert kept glancing up. Alvina could not bear the sight of him — she simply could not bear the sight of him. Yet in her low, sweet voice she sang the alto to the hymns, right to the vesper:
“Lord keep us safe this night Secure from all our fears, May angels guard us while we sleep Till morning light appears — ”
As she sang her alto, and as the soft and emotional harmony of the vesper swelled luxuriously through the chapel, she was peeping over her folded hands at Lottie’s hat. She could not bear Lottie’s hats. There was something aggressive and vulgar about them. And she simply detested the look of the back of Albert’s head, as he too stooped to the vesper prayer. It looked mean and rather common. She remembered Arthur had the same look, bending to prayer. There! — why had she not seen it before! That petty, vulgar little look! How could she have thought twice of Arthur. She had made a fool of herself, as usual. Him and his little leg. She grimaced round the chapel, waiting for people to bob up their heads and take their departure.
At the gate Albert was waiting for her. He came forward lifting his hat with a smiling and familiar “Good evening!”
“Good evening,” she murmured.
“It’s ages since I’ve seen you,” he said. “And I’ve looked out for you everywhere.”
It was raining a little. She put up her umbrella.
“You’ll take a little stroll. The rain isn’t much,” he said.
“No, thank you,” she said. “I must go home.”
“Why, what’s your hurry! Walk as far as Beeby Bridge. Go on.”
“No, thank you.”
“How’s that? What makes you refuse?”
“I don’t want to.”
He paused and looked down at her. The cold and supercilious look of anger, a little spiteful, came into his face.
“Do you mean because of the rain?” he said.
“No. I hope you don’t mind. But I don’t want to take any more walks. I don’t mean anything by them.”
“Oh, as for that,” he said, taking the words out of her mouth. “Why should you mean anything by them!” He smiled down on her. She looked him straight in the face.
“But I’d rather not take any more walks, thank you — none at all,” she said, looking him full in the eyes.
“You wouldn’t!” he replied, stiffening.
“Yes. I’m quite sure,” she said.
“As sure as all that, are you!” he said, with a sneering grimace. He stood eyeing her insolently up and down.
“Good-night,” she said. His sneering made her furious. Putting her umbrella between him and her, she walked off.
“Good-night then,” he replied, unseen by her. But his voice was sneering and impotent.
She went home quivering. But her soul was burning with satisfaction. She had shaken them off.
Later she wondered if she had been unkind to him. But it was done — and done for ever. Vogue la galère.
CHAPTER VI
HOUGHTON’S LAST ENDEAVOUR
The trouble with her ship was that it would not sail. It rode waterlogged in the rotting port of home. All very well to have wild, reckless moods of irony and independence, if you have to pay for them by withering dustily on the shelf.
Alvina fell again into humility and fear: she began to show symptoms of her mother’s heart trouble. For day followed day, month followed month, season after season went by, and she grubbed away like a housemaid in Manchester House, she hurried round doing the shopping, she sang in the choir on Sundays, she attended the various chapel events, she went out to visit friends, and laughed and talked and played games. But all the time, what was there actually in her life? Not much. She was withering towards old-maiddom. Already in her twenty-eighth year, she spent her days grubbing in the house, whilst her father became an elderly, frail man still too lively in mind and spirit. Miss Pinnegar began to grow grey and elderly too, money became scarcer and scarcer, there was a black day ahead when her father would die and the home be broken up, and she would have to tackle life as a worker.
There lay the only alternative: in work. She might slave her days away teaching the piano, as Miss Frost had done: she might find a subordinate post as nurse: she might sit in the cash-desk of some shop. Some work of some sort would be found for her. And she would sink into the routine of her job, as did so many women, and grow old and die, chattering and fluttering. She would have what is called her independence. But, seriously faced with that treasure, and without the option of refusing it, strange how hideous she found it.
Work! — a job! More even than she rebelled against the Withams did she rebel against a job. Albert Witham was distasteful to her — or rather, he was not exactly distasteful, he was chiefly incongruous. She could never get over the feeling that he was mouthing and smiling at her through the glass wall of an aquarium, he being on the watery side. Whether she would ever be able to take to his strange and dishuman element, who knows? Anyway it would be some sort of an adventure: better than a job. She rebelled with all her backbone against the word job. Even the substitutes, employment or work, were detestable, unbearable. Emphatically, she did not want to work for a wage. It was too humiliating. Could anything be more infra dig than the performing of a set of special actions day in day out, for a life-time, in order to receive some shillings every seventh day. Shameful! A condition of shame. The most vulgar, sordid and humiliating of all forms of slavery: so mechanical. Far better be a slave outright, in contact with all the whims and impulses of a human being, than serve some mechanical routine of modern work.
She trembled with anger, impotence, and fear. For months, the thought of Albert was a torment to her. She might have married him. He would have been strange, a strange fish. But were it not better to take the strange leap, over into his element, than to condemn oneself to the routine of a job? He would have been curious and dishuman. But after all, it would have been an experience. In a way, she liked him. There was something odd and integral about him, which she liked. He was not a liar. In his own line, he was honest and direct. Then he would take her to South Africa: a whole new milieu. And perhaps she would have children. She shivered a little. No, not his children! He seemed so curiously cold-blooded. And yet, why not? Why not his curious, pale, half cold-blooded children, like little fishes of her own? Why not? Everything was possible: and even desirable, once one could see the strangeness of it. Once she could plunge through the wall of the aquarium! Once she could kiss him!
Therefore Miss Pinnegar’s quiet harping on the string was unbearable.
“I can’t understand that you disliked Mr. Witham so much?” said Miss Pinnegar.
“We never can understand those things,” said Alvina. “I can’t understand why I dislike tapioca and arrowroot — but I do.”
“That’s different,” said Miss Pinnegar shortly.
“It’s no more easy to understand,” said Alvina.
“Because there’s no need to unders
tand it,” said Miss Pinnegar. “And is there need to understand the other?”
“Certainly. I can see nothing wrong with him,” said Miss Pinnegar.
Alvina went away in silence. This was in the first months after she had given Albert his dismissal. He was at Oxford again — would not return to Woodhouse till Christmas. Between her and the Woodhouse Withams there was a decided coldness. They never looked at her now — nor she at them.
None the less, as Christmas drew near Alvina worked up her feelings. Perhaps she would be reconciled to him. She would slip across and smile to him. She would take the plunge, once and for all — and kiss him and marry him and bear the little half-fishes, his children. She worked herself into quite a fever of anticipation.
But when she saw him, the first evening, sitting stiff and staring flatly in front of him in Chapel, staring away from everything in the world, at heaven knows what — just as fishes stare — then his dishumanness came over her again like an arrest, and arrested all her flights of fancy. He stared flatly in front of him, and flatly set a wall of oblivion between him and her. She trembled and let be.
After Christmas, however, she had nothing at all to think forward to. And it was then she seemed to shrink: she seemed positively to shrink. “You never spoke to Mr. Witham?” Miss Pinnegar asked.
“He never spoke to me,” replied Alvina.
“He raised his hat to me.”
“You ought to have married him, Miss Pinnegar,” said Alvina. “He would have been right for you.” And she laughed rather mockingly.
“There is no need to make provision for me,” said Miss Pinnegar.
And after this, she was a long time before she forgave Alvina, and was really friendly again. Perhaps she would never have forgiven her if she had not found her weeping rather bitterly in her mother’s abandoned sitting-room.
Now so far, the story of Alvina is commonplace enough. It is more or less the story of thousands of girls. They all find work. It is the ordinary solution of everything. And if we were dealing with an ordinary girl we should have to carry on mildly and dully down the long years of employment; or, at the best, marriage with some dull schoolteacher or office-clerk.
But we protest that Alvina is not ordinary. Ordinary people, ordinary fates. But extraordinary people, extraordinary fates. Or else no fate at all. The all-to-one-pattern modern system is too much for most extraordinary individuals. It just kills them off or throws them disused aside.
There have been enough stories about ordinary people. I should think the Duke of Clarence must even have found malmsey nauseating, when he choked and went purple and was really asphyxiated in a butt of it. And ordinary people are no malmsey. Just ordinary tap-water. And we have been drenched and deluged and so nearly drowned in perpetual floods of ordinariness, that tap-water tends to become a really hateful fluid to us. We loathe its out-of-the-tap tastelessness. We detest ordinary people. We are in peril of our lives from them: and in peril of our souls too, for they would damn us one and all to the ordinary. Every individual should, by nature, have his extraordinary points. But nowadays you may look for them with a microscope, they are so worn-down by the regular machine-friction of our average and mechanical days.
There was no hope for Alvina in the ordinary. If help came, it would have to come from the extraordinary. Hence the extreme peril of her case. Hence the bitter fear and humiliation she felt as she drudged shabbily on in Manchester House, hiding herself as much as possible from public view. Men can suck the heady juice of exalted self-importance from the bitter weed of failure — failures are usually the most conceited of men: even as was James Houghton. But to a woman, failure is another matter. For her it means failure to live, failure to establish her own life on the face of the earth. And this is humiliating, the ultimate humiliation.
And so the slow years crept round, and the completed coil of each one was a further heavy, strangling noose. Alvina had passed her twenty-sixth, twenty-seventh, twenty-eighth and even her twenty-ninth year. She was in her thirtieth. It ought to be a laughing matter. But it isn’t.
Ach, schon zwanzig Ach, schon zwanzig Immer noch durch’s Leben tanz’ ich Jeder, Jeder will mich küssen Mir das Leben zu versüssen.
Ach, schon dreissig Ach, schon dreissig Immer Mädchen, Mädchen heiss’ ich. In dem Zopf schon graue Härchen Ach, wie schnell vergehn die Jährchen.
Ach, schon vierzig Ach, schon vierzig Und noch immer Keiner find ‘sich. Im gesicht schon graue Flecken Ach, das muss im Spiegel stecken.
Ach, schon fünfzig Ach, schon fünfzig Und noch immer Keiner will ‘mich; Soll ich mich mit Bänden zieren Soll ich einen Schleier führen? Dann heisst’s, die Alte putzt sich, Sie ist fu’fzig, sie ist fu’fzig.
True enough, in Alvina’s pig-tail of soft brown the grey hairs were already showing. True enough, she still preferred to be thought of as a girl. And the slow-footed years, so heavy in passing, were so imperceptibly numerous in their accumulation.
But we are not going to follow our song to its fatal and dreary conclusion. Presumably, the ordinary old-maid heroine nowadays is destined to die in her fifties, she is not allowed to be the long-liver of the bygone novels. Let the song suffice her.
James Houghton had still another kick in him. He had one last scheme up his sleeve. Looking out on a changing world, it was the popular novelties which had the last fascination for him. The Skating Rink, like another Charybdis, had all but entangled him in its swirl as he pushed painfully off from the rocks of Throttle-Ha’penny. But he had escaped, and for almost three years had lain obscurely in port, like a frail and finished bark, selling the last of his bits and bobs, and making little splashes in warehouse-oddments. Miss Pinnegar thought he had really gone quiet.
But alas, at that degenerated and shabby, down-at-heel club he met another tempter: a plump man who had been in the music-hall line as a sort of agent. This man had catered for the little shows of little towns. He had been in America, out West, doing shows there. He had trailed his way back to England, where he had left his wife and daughter. But he did not resume his family life. Wherever he was, his wife was a hundred miles away. Now he found himself more or less stranded in Woodhouse. He had nearly fixed himself up with a music-hall in the Potteries — as manager: he had all-but got such another place at Ickley, in Derbyshire: he had forced his way through the industrial and mining townlets, prospecting for any sort of music-hall or show from which he could get a picking. And now, in very low water, he found himself at Woodhouse.
Woodhouse had a cinema already: a famous Empire run-up by Jordan, the sly builder and decorator who had got on so surprisingly. In James’s younger days, Jordan was an obscure and illiterate nobody. And now he had a motor car, and looked at the tottering James with sardonic contempt, from under his heavy, heavy-lidded dark eyes. He was rather stout, frail in health, but silent and insuperable, was A. W Jordan.
“I missed a chance there,” said James, fluttering. “I missed a rare chance there. I ought to have been first with a cinema.”
He admitted as much to Mr. May, the stranger who was looking for some sort of “managing” job. Mr. May, who also was plump and who could hold his tongue, but whose pink, fat face and light-blue eyes had a loud look, for all that, put the speech in his pipe and smoked it. Not that he smoked a pipe: always cigarettes. But he seized on James’s admission, as something to be made the most of.
Now Mr. May’s mind, though quick, was pedestrian, not winged. He had come to Woodhouse not to look at Jordan’s “Empire,” but at the temporary wooden structure that stood in the old Cattle Market “Wright’s Cinematograph and Variety Theatre.” Wright’s was not a superior show, like the Woodhouse Empire. Yet it was always packed with colliers and work-lasses. But unfortunately there was no chance of Mr. May’s getting a finger in the Cattle Market pie. Wright’s was a family affair. Mr. and Mrs. Wright and a son and two daughters with their husbands: a tight old lock-up family concern. Yet it was the kind of show that appealed to Mr. May: pictures between t
he turns. The cinematograph was but an item in the program, amidst the more thrilling incidents — to Mr. May — of conjurors, popular songs, five-minute farces, performing birds, and comics. Mr. May was too human to believe that a show should consist entirely of the dithering eye-ache of a film.
He was becoming really depressed by his failure to find any opening. He had his family to keep — and though his honesty was of the variety sort, he had a heavy conscience in the direction of his wife and daughter. Having been so long in America, he had acquired American qualities, one of which was this heavy sort of private innocence, coupled with complacent and natural unscrupulousness in “matters of business.” A man of some odd sensitiveness in material things, he liked to have his clothes neat and spick, his linen immaculate, his face clean-shaved like a cherub. But alas, his clothes were now old-fashioned, so that their rather expensive smartness was detrimental to his chances, in spite of their scrupulous look of having come almost new out of the bandbox that morning. His rather small felt hats still curved jauntily over his full pink face. But his eyes looked lugubrious, as if he felt he had not deserved so much bad luck, and there were bilious lines beneath them.
So Mr. May, in his room in the Moon and Stars, which was the best inn in Woodhouse — he must have a good hotel — lugubriously considered his position. Woodhouse offered little or nothing. He must go to Alfreton. And would he find anything there? Ah, where, where in this hateful world was there refuge for a man saddled with responsibilities, who wanted to do his best and was given no opportunity? Mr. May had travelled in his Pullman car and gone straight to the best hotel in the town, like any other American with money — in America. He had done it smart, too. And now, in this grubby penny-picking England, he saw his boots being worn-down at the heel, and was afraid of being stranded without cash even for a railway ticket. If he had to clear out without paying his hotel bill — well, that was the world’s fault. He had to live. But he must perforce keep enough in hand for a ticket to Birmingham. He always said his wife was in London. And he always walked down to Lumley to post his letters. He was full of evasions.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 235