by Ursula Bloom
‘I daresay. All the same, I am sure I had better not see her.’
‘But, George, she says she has taken Agnes to a doctor, and he ‒’
Then she saw the blood fly from his face, a sickly chalkiness replacing it. He clutched at the table edge, and lurched to a wooden kitchen chair. He sat there, suddenly aged, and she watched him with eyes that stung, and with a dry mouth that bulged. ‘You’ve got to tell me the truth,’ she said at last.
Terribly afraid, he told her brokenly. ‘It wasn’t much. I’ve always been fond of romance, and you never seemed to understand. We oughtn’t to have married; we were not cut out for each other. Not really! Agnes was like her name … she was a lamb ‒’
‘You’ll tell me next that she was so innocent,’ said Mary, and her eyes were hard like steel. She was remembering her own desperate cleaving to a Victorian morality, and a destroyer bearing Peter out of her life for ever, and it made her sick.
‘She was innocent. Then one day in the organ-loft she put her little hand in mine, and ‒’
‘Yes, you needn’t tell me.’
‘It’s easy for you to look hard and to judge me harshly; you were born of a different temperament.’
‘I see.’ She pulled herself together with a jerk. ‘George, your whole career is tottering. You’ve got to pull yourself together, you’ve got to see Mrs. Spencer, and to deny it all.’
‘I daren’t. You’ll do it better for me. I daren’t, Mary, really I daren’t.’
‘You’ve got to.’
‘I can’t.’
She made no answer. She gave him one look as she turned, a look which he never forgot, and she went back to the dining-room alone.
She understood much now.
PART III: MURIEL
I
They left Seaport that May, and went up to Cumberland. Mary went with a very sick heart; she was glad to get away. People were kind to her, but she felt their kindness as some crude charity, and it nauseated her. No one save Mrs. Spencer had actually mentioned the scandal, but Mr. Clarridge sent for George, who returned with an ashy face and trembling hands, and said that he hated Mr. Clarridge, who was an abominable old egoist ‒ which, coming from George, was almost amusing.
And somehow no one mentioned organ-lofts to either George or Mary; one talked away from church subjects, and discussed the Jasmine on her way to China ‒ a very safe topic, that, which could assuredly hurt no one ‒ and the new guardship which had taken her place.
Then they left.
One would have supposed George to be feeling thoroughly ashamed of himself, but instead he portrayed his position as that of an heroic young martyr. His amazing way of referring to the lamb-like demeanour of Agnes infuriated Mary. Once she had said bitingly: ‘Your lamb seemed to have been a little less innocent than most.’ George had been deeply hurt and had referred to the beastliness of people’s minds. But Mary had been much more hurt. It wasn’t that she was jealous of Agnes; anyone could have George, really, but she hated his silly romanticism and his selfish outlook. She disliked him making a fool of himself, and that was what it amounted to.
Cumberland was remote, and remoteness would do George good. They arrived at Kirby when the rhododendrons were out, and the bluebells and the lemon-scented Welsh poppies. She thought that she had never seen anything so beautiful since the vineyards beyond the Rhine, and the castles with the mountains purple and blue in the distance.
Here, in the shadow of Black Coome, she prayed that she might find the bluebird of their happiness. They had got to make a success of life; marriage was so big, so vital. She had not made a success of the early life at home, and she must therefore make a success of this. She would never mention Agnes Spencer again, and she would try not to think of Peter.
They spent a year in Cumberland, but George never got on with the rector there, who was a difficult man. A curate is largely at the mercy of the eccentricities of his rector, and Mr. Drake was a strange man, a hermit, who shut himself away from the world. The parish described him as a Trappist monk, and it seemed that all his tendencies were Romish. George had always been high in his ritual, and now he endeavoured to climb to the height of Mr. Drake. He lived for choral mass, and preached the Real Presence. Confession became habitual. Mary trembled for George that his confessional might include another Agnes Spencer, but she need not have worried. Nothing of that sort happened in Cumberland.
There had been never a word from Peter since the note written the night before he sailed ‒ a bitterly scornful note, written by a man in torment, a man twisted by his love and his hate. He had been burnt up with self-pity; he had been parched for her. Too proud to beg her to come to him, he had flung all to the winds, and had faced the world with his back to the wall, so bruised and hurt that he could do nothing but fight. He was through with women, he had done with them. A bitter enough letter, and carried by ‘Mr. Hoskings’ who had bidden a charming and altogether chaste farewell of Hannah in the scullery. Mary understood how this letter had come to be written; she grasped its pathetic purport and, because she understood, she let it go. That was the end.
Yet not quite the end. Sometimes when the day grew so stiflingly lonely, when the sun creeping westwards hid his golden glory in the kinder, more sacred, light of dusk, she would creep to her room and draw tremblingly from its drawer the tissue packet. She would let the sheer silk quiver through her fingers, hiding her face passionately in its sheen, and think. Here were the roses of promise, and the lilies of fulfilment; here were the humming-birds of happiness, and the blue butterflies of illusion; all the lovelinesses that he had promised her, embroidered by skilful fingers, nothing more than a picture, nothing more than a mirage mistily wreathing itself far away upon the horizon of her life’s desert, but lovely even in that. She would think sacred thoughts, touching the shawl as though it offered her flayed soul sanctuary; knowing that somewhere in the world he lived, and believing that one day all would be well. Two loves that, though the whole span of a world lay between them, must necessarily draw close together in the end.
During their stay in Cumberland Wally had written; his Congo Imperials had soared up to the skies, he was now quite well off. ‘So when you quarrel with George …’ Wally had ended airily. But, having tasted of real love since then, Mary knew how poor had been that affair with Wally, and how nothing like that could ever drag her down again. She had the memory of Peter! She had the rather depressing reminder of having done the right thing; and, anyway, George had needed a chance, and this she had given him.
They left Cumberland the following autumn, and, after a most unpleasant visit to Mamma (the first since the uproar of the trusteeship), they went to the new curacy in Sussex. That was in October. Mamma had given them a dreadful time. She had been in a vile temper all the while. She had had difficulties with Mr. Jones, which, she explained, had soured her. He, having been all his life a nincompoop, had suddenly found his feet. He had risen one memorable afternoon when Mamma had been rebuking him intolerably, and had told Mamma with brutal frankness that she could go to the devil. He had walked out of the house, when she had indulged in hysterics, and he had not returned. Mamma (after a week of consternation) had sent for Johnny and had begged him to aid her in the search for Mr. Jones. Johnny had said that he was hanged if he would do anything so ridiculous. She and Jones had never got on, so why try to find him? Obviously he was much better where he was, wherever that might be. So Mamma was the deserted wife, and making a sad song about it, and nobody ever mentioned Mr. Jones if they could help it, so the visit was a little strained.
The curacy in Sussex was in a small town with the downs behind it rising clear and gorse-spattered, and the sea somewhere beyond. It was not the grey North Sea, but a kinder, gentler sea, and somehow it never reminded Mary of Seaport. She always felt that George’s lapse had been a mere flash in the pan, and that it was very hard that he was so much blamed, when she herself had been carrying on a liaison (true, a moral one, but a liaison all the same) with Pe
ter! And when Mary thought like that she began to torture herself. Ought she to tell George? After all, he had admitted the ins and outs of the Agnes Spencer affair. Ought he not to know?
The confessional holds a charm for a woman, it enthrals her. It seemed to Mary that this was a guilty secret of hers, and George ought to know about it. Night after night, when she went to bed, she thought of it, cuddled down in the warmth with George sleeping serenely; it was then that the confused thoughts of the day became nicely ticketed, docketed, and niched into place. They would become an intimate part of herself; she would be introspective, and find additional delight in this self-examination. At night one could stare down into one’s heart and see things properly shaped, standing out in relief. She ought to tell George. She knew that she ought to tell him. He, as her husband, had a right to all her secrets, and he would understand.
An Easter Communion decided her; a Communion with the pale fragrance of Lent lilies around her, and the poignant memory of how tenderly George had nursed her through laryngitis in the spring. ‘I will tell him,’ she promised herself at the altar rails. ‘He can’t reproach me, for, after all, I did not reproach him. I will tell him and ease my conscience. It is the right thing to do.’
And she went back to her pew and prayed for strength, prayed for courage to face this confessional and for George to understand it all. She told him that evening, for there were services all day, and until the warm sweetness of the April night they had no opportunity to talk. They had finished their supper and the maid was out. Mary went to him and knelt at his feet.
‘George, since Seaport we’ve got to know each other so much better,’ she whispered.
But George wasn’t thinking. ‘The best Easter sermon I’ve preached,’ said he. ‘Didn’t it strike you that way? Such point, and a new aspect …’
‘Yes, George dear, but I want to tell you something. I’ve felt very guilty. You remember your little affair with Agnes Spencer?’
‘What, that? Pooh, there wasn’t anything in that,’ said George. ‘Just people’s dirty minds, and your idea. I never looked twice at the girl.’
That was a disconcerting start. ‘The doctor said ‒’ she began.
‘Paid to say it! As if I’d do a thing like that!’
She thought perhaps it would be better to gloss it over. ‘I always felt a little guilty, because I myself had a … a little … oh, I don’t know. I wasn’t very happy, and I very nearly ran away from you.’
‘Who with?’ demanded George, suddenly becoming rigid.
‘A ‒ a man.’
‘I guessed it wasn’t a woman. Who was it?’
‘The name isn’t necessary.’
‘It is most necessary. Was there ‒ I mean ‒ did you ‒ that?’
‘No,’ she said whitely, and shocked at his misunderstanding. ‘Thank God there was nothing like that about it.’
‘Why should I believe you?’
She turned on him furiously. ‘We hadn’t an organ-loft, and we were decent people, that’s why.’
‘God,’ said George piously, ‘help me to bear it.’
She was bewildered that he should so have misinterpreted her poor confession. ‘But you’ve nothing to bear. I nearly ran away, that is all, and somehow I wanted to tell you, because my conscience would not let me be. You forget what I bore with you ‒ and that girl.’
‘But there was nothing in that.’
‘So you say now. At the time you shivered and shook like the poor coward you were ‒’ Then she stopped dead, her face paper-white, her eyes savagely dark. ‘Oh, George, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to say all these things, truly I don’t. You’re hurting me badly.’
‘But I am hurt.’
‘Why? Why? I didn’t do what you think.’
‘Any sin in a woman is double that of a man.’
‘That isn’t fair.’
‘I am stunned,’ said George. ‘Can you in your selfish lust imagine for one moment what my feelings can be?’
‘I can imagine you have no idea of anybody else’s feelings,’ she retorted.
‘Just as I’d hoped I’d found peace.’
‘You have found peace. This is all done with, quite done with.’
‘If these things are ever done with.’
‘I might say that of you and Agnes.’
‘Rubbish! That was hysteria. I couldn’t say so at the time, but that was what it was.’
‘I wonder.’
‘I’m bewildered.’
She got up from her knees; she wondered if Easter Communion were a mistake. Why, oh why, couldn’t he understand?
‘I’m going to bed,’ she said.
George looked up with quiet reproof. ‘I may go to bed,’ he told her, ‘but there will be no sleep for me.’
II
She deeply regretted that she had ever told him. If she had held her tongue he would never have guessed; he now seemed to be sure that there was more in the story than she had seen fit to admit. With the early dawn she lay uncertain of what to do, which road to take. She saw the dull space of white curtain which was window intensify, become whiter, touched by the hand of the risen morn. She lay staring at it, her eyes with swollen lids, hurting if she blinked, and all the while George sleeping comfortably beside her. She did not know when she became aware of another presence beside her bed, but it happened abruptly. A man standing there, looking down at her wistfully, a man tired as though he had come a long way and was weary. Oddly, too, it never struck her that there was anything unusual in his standing there. It seemed that he had come in answer to her pathetic, lonely prayer; she put out a hand and felt his close tenderly on it. Only then did it strike her that his fingers were ice-cold; she started violently, for the hideous thought broke in upon her fancy that it was a dead hand which she was holding.
She sprang up in bed; nothing but the pink pearl of dawn flooded the room. It had been a dream, of course, a dream thrust in upon an agonised mentality. She lay down again, afraid and sick with her fear. She might dream again. In her present state of mind she could not bear that.
A terrible strain had fettered her; a strain which the summer did not alleviate, nor the winter, with the subsequent spring.
That was a weary spring, of dripping trees and sucky grasses, a late spring too. George was involved with the confirmation. He prepared the candidates for this the solemn renewal of their infant vows with a pleasant ardour. There were nine girls and fourteen boys, and, when the bishop’s visit drew near, George went to London for the day in the cheap train, and bought small books to present to the candidates on their confirmation morning. He showed them proudly on his return to Mary. Fourteen simple books of devotion for the boys; a little pile for the girls. She took them out and counted them.
‘But you’re one short,’ she said.
‘One short? No!’ said George.
‘Yes, there are nine candidates, and there are only eight books here. You count them.’
George counted them. ‘I must have left one in the train,’ he answered.
‘But they were all tied up.’
‘I undid them to look at them.’
‘Isn’t that a nuisance!’ She sat back dismayedly. ‘Perhaps if you send you won’t be able to match them, and then there’ll be jealousy. Isn’t it trying?’
George did not seem much worried. He said that it would be all right, though Mary could not understand how it would be all right. Still, perhaps he knew best.
The day dawned for the confirmation. The fourteen little boys, brushed and polished and looking very solemn, sat down on one side of the aisle, and the nine little girls in white frocks and white veils sat on the other. Mary sat behind them, and she wondered how much of the solemnity of the occasion penetrated their little minds. The bishop doddered up the aisle, an old man with a venerable countenance, nodding as he came; his crozier-bearer, with a face surprisingly like Mephistopheles of Faust, shuffled along behind, trying desperately to look angelic, a task which his face made exceedin
gly difficult for him.
The service started with George flitting about in his newly-starched surplice, crackling as he went, and the vicar looking saintly, and the bishop bleating like some aged sheep. They rose and sang, they knelt and prayed, and the bishop, old and infirm, climbed with difficulty into the pulpit and mumbled inadequate remarks from it. Mary wished that she did not feel these things; she ought to be feeling saintly too, but somehow the funny side took a tremendous shape in life for her. If she hadn’t seen the funny side with Mamma, or with the affair of the lamb-like Agnes, in an organ-loft ‒ and how did George come to choose such an uncomfortable place? … She brought her thoughts up with a jerk. One must not think these things during a confirmation service.
It was all over. George had ushered his candidates up the aisle and had bowed deeply, and had looked impressive. The tea in the vicarage was over. That had been a terrible affair, arranged for the dear bishop to meet the parishioners. Cold tea and split penny cakes (the vicar was notoriously mean). People had been presented to the dear bishop, even down to Mrs. Garrett, who cleaned the church. Mary had presented her, and explained her humble mission in life.
‘Ah!’ burbled the dear bishop. ‘What a beautiful occupation it is to clean the House of God.’
And Mrs. Garrett, suitably impressed, had bobbed a curtsey, and had retired with obvious relief to her ambush in a corner.
Everybody had been introduced to the dear bishop, and finally they had gone their ways. The dear bishop himself was left to a grim evening with the vicar and the boiled fowl (the vicar’s love of economy had excluded a ‘roaster’) and the trifle which had been the cause of so much controversy earlier in the week.
Mary and George walked home arm in arm in the sweet dusk, and as they walked Mary glimpsed an approaching figure coming towards them. The glare of the newly-lighted gas lamp illuminated the face, and George instantly held back.
‘You go on,’ he said, ‘I’ll go another way. That’s Mrs. Finch; she and I have had a most frightful row,’ and he disappeared hastily.