by Ursula Bloom
VI
The Rogers called, and Admiral Guyson-Lord, and Mrs. Vincent, whose husband was a Commander on the China station, and the Misses Dawkins. They were all very much of a muchness.
Round all these people eddied furtive scandals. The rumour of why Commander Vincent had applied for the China station and had not suggested that his wife should accompany him. The Misses Dawkins, who still had hopes (‘so absurd of them, my dear, at their age, and with those faces’). The old Admiral who still had an eye for a pretty face and a good ankle, and who persistently harped on ‘dammit-what’s-the-Navy-coming-to? When-I-was-a-boy ‒ those-were-times. These-young-pups, sir, these-young-pups!’ But the young pups were careful to keep their wives out of his clutches. In their opinion the Navy had never altered, and a pretty face was still a pretty face, and a susceptible old admiral still a susceptible old admiral.
And during this troublous time of meeting strangers who frightened her, and of trying to do the right thing and inevitably doing the wrong, and of learning to understand George, there was much communication and correspondence upon the subject of the trust. It seemed that the trust funds had most miraculously and almost entirely disappeared. One could, of course, sue Mamma and Johnny for what Mary termed their gross negligence, but to which George attributed a nastier motive, but one would gain nothing by it. The reason was simple; the money having gone, there was nothing to gain.
‘It is very hard,’ said George. ‘Especially as our family are poor, and your money would have been such a help.’
Mary groped for his hand. ‘You did not marry me for that?’ she entreated, and her limbs shook.
‘Darling … as if ‒’
There was a certain liveliness about marriage that had an allure all its own. The tranquil nights, lying there at peace with the world; George’s arm about her, talking quietly together in the dusk. There was no passion about it, but a certain and lovely intimacy which held a grand allure. The snug warmth, the pillow of George’s shoulder with her face against his throat, the feeling that he held her thus against the onslaughts of a tempestuous world; a sweet and loving peace that was rapture.
During the day petty rifts were bound to occur. Hannah, who did try so hard that it seemed a shame to scold her; people calling, people like the Misses Dawkins, who did good works and had not the brains to do anything else. And Mrs. Vincent, who had the brain to do what she shouldn’t, and the will, and a husband in China, in fact every facility … George, too, very full of himself and his own importance, but somehow when the sentient night came he assumed a more proper sense of perspective, he wasn’t quite so full of his doings and his sayings; he wasn’t quite so ‘Georgish’.
And, after all, marriage stands for ever, and if one has made a mistake one must abide by it, and George was not exactly a mistake. She assured herself that there was something against all men, all marriages have spots where the threads wear thin, and though Wally might not have been egotistical, yet he had never troubled himself to look far for a job, and that had come dangerously near to laziness.
Wally had written to her twice since her marriage, and in the second letter had told her that the Congo Imperials were daily soaring, and that he would be a millionaire yet. All the same, she did not regret that she had chosen George. Marriage is eternal. It is a very young bride who thinks along that well-rutted course. Marriage, she felt, went on and on, and you could not get away from it; marriage was for ever.
In the June, Johnny had a daughter. He wrote quite airily about it, for the business of the trusteeship had not caused him a single blush, and he was perfectly at his ease about it.
I’ll admit it is more than usually rapid, wrote Johnny, but she is quite a pretty baby, and most pretty things are fast, so don’t blame us. Mamma has stumped up gallantly and we are keeping merry. What is Seaport like? A bit nautical? You be careful, my dear, we all know what sailors are.
None too grateful for the kind hint, Mary dutifully knitted her new niece a bonnet. George grumbled over the expense of the wool, for Johnny as a trustee had necessitated much frugality, and any little extra had to be very warily approached and after much consideration.
‘I need socks,’ said George, precipitating a ‘holey’ foot. ‘And you knit that bl ‒ baby bonnets.’
‘George! And you a parson.’
‘I was going to say “blessed”. It is more important that I should have socks. You once said you’d knit all mine.’
‘So I do,’ she said truthfully. ‘I can’t do everything. Hannah doesn’t know much, and I have to help her a lot. Besides, somebody else sent you socks.’
‘That stupid little Spencer girl,’ said George redly; ‘socks like corrugated cardboard.’
‘I don’t think she should have done it.’
‘Oh, don’t start being ridiculous. Sometimes I think you are jealous of me.’
‘Jealous of you, George?’
‘Yes, jealous of the way I get on, my popularity and all that. Lots of girls give parsons socks and braces and muffetees and scarves.’
She laughed. ‘It’s rather comic, isn’t it?’
Huffed, George retired behind the Church Times. ‘I don’t think your sense of humour very well developed,’ he said. ‘Goodness knows what you see comic in that.’
‘Socks like corrugated cardboard. The prentice hand tried on the poor parson.’ She laughed again. Then she suddenly realised that she had made a mistake. George was distinctly offended now, she knew that by the colour rising on his neck.
‘Agnes knits very nicely,’ he declared. ‘She’s clever with her fingers.’
‘But you can’t wear her socks.’
‘Not those socks, but other socks, possibly. I don’t like my parishioners being laughed at. It’s so cheap.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘It’s very kind of people giving me anything, it shows how they appreciate me; they like me here. You may sneer at it and the Clarridges may sneer at it. It’s very easy to sneer, but you can’t do away with the fact that people like me.’
‘I didn’t sneer.’
‘It is always so easy to be cynical and then to deny it. It’s always so easy to laugh at one’s own people, but the time may come when you rather laugh at yourself, then it is humiliating for me. Now one day I may be a bishop.’
‘And I shall be a bishop’s wife,’ she said, and involuntarily to herself: ‘My Heaven!’
‘When I’m a bishop you won’t dare to sneer,’ said the outraged husband.
She went to him and knelt by his chair, her slim hands holding his big ones. ‘Bishop or no bishop, you’ll just be my George,’ she whispered.
But George wasn’t mollified. ‘I’d rather be a bishop,’ he pouted.
VII
Autumn again; furrows of mud with lakes of water in them all along the country lanes; withering rushes and ambered coppices. In the fields sloping down to the marshland, so recently vivid with sea-pinks and silvered with lavender, there were tall sedgy grasses with the gleam of little pools like glass in between. The green had gone, and once again there was the long line of dark hedge smudgy across the landscape, and the russet of thorn; here and there upstanding trees, with the black twigs denuded of leaves, for all the world like the most exquisite lace mantillas twisted about their proud heads.
Autumn again, and a greater understanding of life, perhaps, and certainly a greater understanding of George. ‘Still, as I am very unlikely to fall in love with anybody else,’ she promised herself, ‘it doesn’t matter, and I can see after him in a comfortable and material way, so it doesn’t hurt anybody really.’
And Agnes Spencer still knitted him the most execrable socks and George still protested that he liked them. Still, if it amused him …! He visited a great deal, and certainly he did seem to be popular with his parishioners, but the Clarridges held well aloof, and appeared to retain their deep loathing of him. They did not relent towards Mary either.
They were very monotonous, these days, each step
ping primly on the heels of its eve. She had thought Bonn to be wearisome enough and monotonous enough, but this was even worse. There, as her little blue fingers perambulated up and down the raucous old piano, there had been the promise of a fair to-morrow, based on the supposition of ‘when I go home’. Later ‒ oh adorable ‒ ‘when I marry’. But when you are married, what sugar-plum can you dangle over your head with which to make a visionary to-morrow more delectable? None, for assuredly all the sugar-plums have been swallowed.
She thought rather forlornly, ‘when I die,’ which showed that she was not very old, and that she had a tendency to morbidness.
Breakfast with George, having watched him in the unexciting ritual of shaving and dressing; a morning while he toured the parish, and she scoured the shops and devised some means of enabling the very sparse housekeeping allowance to ‘make do’. Lunch, and George a hearty eater, and the fare of necessity frugal. But she herself abstained from that second helping which made all the difference to the dimensions of the Sunday joint, for she always told herself that it was her money which had failed; as the lapse had been on her side of the family, it was she who should go without to atone. George had kept his part of the financial bargain, it was she who had fallen short.
The afternoon! The Mothers’ Meeting, or the Baby Show, or the Girls’ Friendly, where they were all so unfriendly. All the summer there had been cricket matches wherein George had never made a run, but displayed the most excellent style, so he said, which was far more important; and there was the sewing meeting for the Christmas bazaar, and the choir practice. The choir practice was not so bad, for Agnes Spencer played the organ and so relieved Mary of an onerous duty.
Then there would be tea ‒ tea with some staple dish, for the supper to follow was but a flimsy affair. After that George would speed to the young men’s recreation rooms, or the Sailors’ Home, or the Y.M.C.A. All the way it was loneliness, a dreadful, eternal self-communion, and the self with whom she communicated was rebellious. She tried to keep up her old studies, but books were expensive, and people not inclined to co-operate with her. Once the Clarridges had put their library at her disposal.
‘It is very large,’ said Mrs. Clarridge, who was in proportions like the library; ‘we have all the well-known writers. Is there anyone you fancy?’
‘If you have any Goethe,’ she replied, ‘or Victor Hugo?’
‘There is an edition of Les Misérables,’ said Mrs. Clarridge, and Alma fetched it. It was a translation.
‘I ‒ I meant in the original,’ stammered Mary, redly.
Mrs. Clarridge did not approve of people who ‘gave themselves airs’. She drew herself up to her full height, and stared haughtily at Mary. ‘In England,’ she explained, ‘it would be foolish to have French books.’
‘But … but they lose in the translation.’
Mrs. Clarridge avoided the subject. ‘Any other books?’ she enquired coldly.
‘If you have any Kant?’
‘Kant?’
‘Yes, the philosopher.’
‘I’m afraid not. We only have the well-known writers.’
That ended it. Cheap novels were easy to obtain, but the long wide roads to knowledge whereon the Fräuleins had set her feet were impossible. In her long hours of solitude she bought crochet cotton and crocheted yards of lace, and then, as George complained of the expense, undid it all, only to start again. But of course this could not go on for ever; it could not last. This was grim, it was frightful, a sterility; it was youth drowned in a stagnant pool.
Then it happened. Life does not always offer a mere husk; sometimes it shows the way to a kernel. It happened with George bursting in one October night, with the hall door clanging open, and the wind flickering the gas in the hoop.
‘A dance at the officers’ club!’ he exclaimed. ‘And they want us to go. I wonder if my dress-trousers are good enough. They’re absolutely green.’
And she had been selfish enough to wonder about her one evening-dress. She went upstairs, a little awed at the splendour which had overtaken them. She would dress. She wondered if this was one of those occasions on which they could dare to rise to the luxury of a fire in their bedroom. After all, they would be saving with no fire downstairs. She felt very rash as she set a match to it. She laid the frock out on the bed. Purple brocade, much, much too old for her, and yet this one frock would have to last her possibly all her life. She felt in spaces of time like that, in long vistas, for ever, all her life! A purple brocade all crumpled with lying by, long gloves yellowed at the tips, and little satin shoes. She laid them together and then George burst in again.
‘My trousers are dreadfully green. If I am going to be asked out much I shall just have to rise to another suit. It shows people have taken to me, invitations like this, doesn’t it? Yes, I shall most certainly have to get a new suit soon.’
‘My dress looks a little shabby,’ she ventured.
‘Yes, but a woman is different. You can hide it with a flower, or a bit of lace. Besides, people don’t take so ‒ much notice of a woman …’
‘Perhaps Mamma will send me a cheque for Christmas, and, if so, you shall have it for a new suit.’
‘Christmas is so far away.’ George was very childish in some matters. He wanted his new suit now.
He dressed rapidly, talking all the time, and then went downstairs to tell Hannah all about it. George loved impressing people. Mary stared into the glass. The purple enveloping frock with its bertha of faded old lace; her hair tumbled in its riotous mouse-hue to the top of her head ‒ it seemed
yellowed to-night, touched, as she thought fancifully, by fairy dust. ‘Oh,’ she yearned, ‘for the fairy godmother to come with a magic wand and make me beautiful for this one night!’
She took a great russet-red chrysanthemum and fixed it in her frock at her breast, red and purple, a glorious blending of imperialism. She fixed a second one in her hair. She thought that she looked a little white, and her eyes too dark. It was a pity that she had not been born good-looking, she felt, and yet somehow to-night she knew that she was good-looking. The fairy godmother had cast a spell over her. Just her stupid imagination, of course, and yet … and yet …
‘Are you coming?’ ‒ from George.
‘I’m just ready.’ She buttoned the old coat round her closely. In the hall George was standing impatiently in his inverness cape, with the gas gurgling in the bracket above,
and an expression of martyred patience on his face.
‘But, George, you have forgotten your muffler.’
‘So I have. You being so late put it out of my head. Where is it? Drat that girl, she moves everything.’
George fumbling with the hat-stand, with his silly little saucer hat falling with a plop on to the umbrellas; George stooping to retrieve it, only to find that Hannah had not dusted the umbrella-stand for days, and the saucer hat was smudged grey.
‘It’s in my drawer. I’ll fetch it, dear,’ and she ran for it.
When she came back he was still fumbling. ‘I can’t find my gloves,’ he said wretchedly.
She rescued them from the mat where they had fallen. ‘But, dear, I thought you were ready?’
He was very childish, really.
They went out into the night, spangled finely with the silver of the first frost. They went arm in arm, shyly, very solemnly. It was all so unusual.
VIII
The dance had already begun. As she heard the music her heart thudded, even though they were as yet crossing the gardens of the officers’ club. They entered the wide door, and a steward presented them with programmes. George, palpably nervous, consigned his inverness cape to the cloakroom; he eyed Mary on her way upstairs.
‘I’m not sure about that chrysanthemum in your hair,’ he said. ‘You aren’t the same …’
She thought of a book which she had read lately, The Woman with a Fan. Did the chrysanthemum alter her as the fan altered the woman? she wondered. ‘I think it is all right,’ she said.
/> In the cloak-room was Mrs. Danvers, whose husband had been drowned in a terrible wreck three years before, and who was always commissioned for this sort of thing. She eyed Mary approvingly. ‘My, mum, but you do look nice. Purple’s a rare colour, and it do suit you, that it do.’
‘It’s very kind of you,’ said Mary gratefully, and she asked how Mrs. Danvers’ little girl was, born three months after her poor father’s death, and with a withered hand, and all on account of it, so people said.
Then shyly, with no further excuse for staying, she went downstairs. George had not waited for her. He had found Agnes Spencer in white Indian muslin with pink roses, and he was waltzing with her. Disappointed, and full of the feeling that George should have waited, Mary stood just inside the doorway listening to the band. There was no one to speak to her at all. The several ships had deposited their willing and unwilling officers in the club. Blue and gold … She thought it very pretty. She wondered how she would feel peeping over the gold of an epaulette. She heard the sound of the Blue Danube, that divine waltz with its furtive memories of Bonn, and she saw George, pink-faced and fat, as he bounded round Agnes Spencer. She shut her eyes for a moment, and through it all she seemed to hear the beating of that other band as it clashed out Hussarenritt and the Death’s Head Hussars swept down the street.
‘Well?’ said a voice.
She looked up. She looked before her. He was standing there, tall and slight in his uniform, and there were gold epaulettes sparkling upon his shoulders.
‘Well?’ she said. She wasn’t shy. She was almost amused. She had guessed that it would happen. The man in the lane that day when she had called on the Spencers. Still bronze, with dark eyes, and an apple-red glow, and the mouth that made her think of kisses. She felt her eyes growing moist, her breath coming and going in sharp stabs.
‘Shall we dance?’ he asked.
‘Oh, please,’ she said breathlessly.