by Ursula Bloom
Across the narrow cab George’s accusing eyes met Mary’s. She knew that he also had remembered. She knew that the future was going to be torment.
‘I suppose it is his child?’ George accused her in the privacy of their own room.
‘How can it be? The Jasmine left England three years ago. It is elephants who have three years of gestation.’
‘You would laugh over it. Oh, my God!’
‘Well, George, be sensible. You have no right to accuse me in this fashion, no right at all. Peter was in the ship, and I named the child after it. That’s all.’
George stamped up and down like a caged tiger. ‘It proves one thing to me,’ he declared. ‘And whatever you may say to deny it I shall still think it. Undoubtedly you were his mistress.’
‘George!’ She was genuinely shocked.
‘I have been betrayed.’
‘George, don’t be so absurd.’
‘Your own mother has pointed it out to me.’ Here he was trying to be melodramatic and posing as a hero. She tried very hard not to despise him, but down in her heart there seemed to be deep wells of scorn for him, wells which she could never hope to plumb.
The next few weeks were tragic. The wound of Peter’s death had been but a scar healed over by the thinnest skin, a raw cicatrix. George had taken it, torn it asunder, bleeding and gaping, a hideous, ugly thing. She found the days growing doubly long, the nights heavy with their accusation. She thought that she could not endure it. Why had she ever let Peter go away without her? Why had she ever let loyalty and a blindly simple faith steer her into this channel from which she could never hope to escape? It was bad enough that she could not love George, it was worse that she could not respect him. There was the child, and in the child lay her forlornly shipwrecked hopes.
There were few outside influences that could ease her miserable position. The village in the valley, cupped round by hills, was desolately alone. There were the village people only.
She flung herself heart and soul into their life. The people at the isolated farm near the church ‒ the Wests ‒ did not like George. They objected to his ritual, and every Sunday drove to another church four miles away, where it was more to their liking. One heard the brisk rolling of the wheels of the dogcart in winter, a humming echo in summer. They also took another form of retaliation which was more than a little trying. They bred magnificent shire horses, working their stallions in the plough all the week and turning them loose on the Sunday in the field which led to the church. George was afraid of the horses, but he would not admit it. He had never decided which was the better part, to sneak ingloriously round the hedge, ready to make a magnificent leap to the safety of the other side should necessity compel him; or to go boldly into the open in his effort to cross the field, and have to fly for his life half way. Every Sunday this occurred: the walk as far as the field and the debate at the gate as to the wiser course. Mary always chose the hedge, and as her skirts were too long to jump, she had perforce to crawl under it ‒ that was, if the horses noticed her. Often they went on browsing and did not even look up. It was George for whom they kept their special attentions. You hated to think that you had chosen the ignominious hedge when you might have paraded with safety in the bolder way. But the breach with the Wests being as it was, nothing could be done. The anguish of the field must be suffered. It was a very meet retaliation of theirs.
There was the forge. It was set in the side of the green hill; one viewed it from the nursery window. Here a man hammered out his life on horseshoes. He asked nothing more, he did not expect any more. He was content. ‘If only I were as content,’ she told herself often as she passed the old forge. Sparks which shot out of the fire, purr of bellows, pungent smell of hot singed hoof. And the man with his old leathern apron, and his long strings of grey hair, who had got nothing out of life’s lottery, nothing at all.
These people took it as their due. Dawn, when they rose and worked; dusk, when they sat down and ate and slept again. The young ones courted and loved, and some of life’s joys seemed suddenly to warm their hearts to virility. Perhaps they recognised that beyond their little circle lay more, much, much more, good to the taste. But after a while, married and with children, they tired of reaching out for the impossible; they drifted into that monotony, sowing, reaping, harvest, the sterility of winter, the prolific abundance of summer. Rising at dawn, toiling, sleeping with dusk! They asked no more. They were certain of the white slopes of Heaven, of wings and a crown. They were afraid of a red Hell. They were more plant than people. ‘And I must vegetate, too,’ she told herself. ‘For I am doing no more than the old man at the forge. He is waiting for death, and I am waiting for death …’
She would wander down the lane which led to the river and on to the main road half a mile further. A lane of such rapturous beauty that it maddened her senses. Elms arched over it, on either side sprawled enchanted fields, gold with buttercups, or pale with cowslips. A wood of dappled larches and matted scrub and undergrowth sloped down to the riverside, where in summer the banks were rosied with flowers. And here she often came when dusk and sleep had settled on the village. Here, with the cows’-parsley flowering like the surf of the sea eddying over a rockbound coast! She would think, and be ashamed of the passionate trend of her thoughts.
Supposing he were with her. They would sit here in the ditches, with the cows’-parsley frothing about them. There would be the delicious hemlock smell, and the pungent odour of crushed dock. They would not talk much, but he would kiss her, crush her close, embarrass her with his delicious caresses. They would dream together whilst a sickle of a moon drifted over the treetops of a silvered world. She would tell him how she could not bear it, George’s accusations, the horror of it all. She would beg him to take her away. And he would take her then, at once … There would be no more visiting among these poor plant-like people, no more watching the forge, no more running from stallions in the meadow which led to the church. They would go … right away … now … her hand locked fast in his, her lips near his mouth.
That was when she would come back to the realisation that she was alone in the dusk, and that the cows’-parsley was like a shroud, and a shroud was significant of death.
They were hard times.
IX
It was Muriel who dragged her out of herself, Muriel, grown from little helpless babyhood to a delightful toddler, who demanded all Mary’s time and love as a matter of course.
Passion in a woman, if it is thwarted, turns often to a child. For two years Mary held out against it, but in the end she had to give in. Muriel clasped her heart with her little podgy hands; nothing else mattered very much. George was jealous of the child. His small daughter was a happy bundle, with a great deal more beauty than was good for her. Muriel took the attention from him. Mary guessed what it was from the start, for she nourished no illusions as to George’s egoism. She knew him for what he was.
It was gall and wormwood to George when adulating old ladies said: ‘What a darling child! What a perfect baby! Too sweet. What a lovely little pet!’ George wanted to be the lovely little pet! He admitted no rivals to his world, and for him his daughter was his sickening defeat.
‘Those babbling old women will turn the child’s head,’ he would protest. ‘It is a great mistake. Not that I suppose anyone will listen to what I say.’
‘Muriel is too young to understand.’
George sniffed. ‘It’s my firm opinion that the child understands a great deal more than you suppose, and it’s doing her no good. Sloppy old women.’
Yet Mary was assailed by the nauseating conviction that they would no longer have been sloppy old women had they alluded to George as a darling child, too sweet, and a lovely little pet!
Mary was finding a strangely new psychological study within herself these days. There had been the dreadful sense of loss over the episode of the Finch girl, followed swiftly by the resolve to fling discretion to the winds and go to China. Then had come the news with its s
tunning effect. She felt as she imagined those mad aviators at Hendon must feel when they crashed and fell … and yet lived! She had crashed from her pedestal of chastity, for she had determined to carry through this thing, and she had crashed into an abyss; though sinless, impregnated by sin. Nothing mattered any longer.
Then Muriel had drawn her up into the light again. Into the deep, stifling despair which seemed to be drowning her like water had come Muriel’s baby hands. At first she had refused to see them. She had become embittered and had made a resolve that she would never love again. It wasn’t any use loving people. She had tried to love Mamma. She had ignored the fact that one couldn’t love Mamma, and had been amazed and bewildered. She had loved Wally, but she couldn’t marry Wally, and she had been bewildered again. She had loved George; she wasn’t bewildered over that, only terribly, stunningly disillusioned. She had loved Peter, and he had died. She would never love anybody again, so she had pushed the little hands away; but the little hands persisted; their very helplessness had achieved their end, and they had deliberately dragged her up into the light again. Into love! She had not dared to love much at first, but, fight it as she would, it grew within her. It radiated within her. It was all in all. Nothing mattered any more, save Muriel. Her life was, it seemed, as a skein of wool knitted up into a garment and undone. It was being knitted up again. She had been wrong to revile her fate and hate George. George had given her Muriel. Precious gift! Most Heaven-sent blessing.
Muriel was nearly six when Mr. Jones died. It was the very hot summer, when after years of serenity at the rectory Mary had begun to feel comparatively safe. The volcano had died down, George had behaved himself. She assured her inner soul that George had had the fright of his life and was thoroughly sobered. She sincerely hoped that he would continue safely now, and he had the child to steady him, too. Mr. Jones’s death was conveyed by telegram from the neighbouring village, for there was no telegraph office in Pebbridge. The night was very hot and the postman was old and tired.
‘I fear it’s bad news, mum,’ he told Mary as he handed her the telegram. Mary read it. Mamma had been brief.
Mr. Jones died five. Please come. ‒ Mamma.
She sent the postman round to the kitchen for some supper, and she went indoors. She felt that she ought to cry, and yet she couldn’t. She went to tell George, but he was not in the library. She went back into the garden and, searching systematically, came upon him in the little alpine walk which they had built so carefully all the previous autumn. George was almost hidden by a big tree-lupin, and he was not alone, for Mrs. Knight ‒ a neighbouring farmer’s wife ‒ was with him. Mrs. Knight was nearly forty, and report had it that she was gay. In point of fact she was a ‘fast forty.’ They were engaged in the very innocent occupation of gathering pinks. Mary hesitated. They both knew very little of Mrs. Knight, who must have been passing on her bicycle and met George, who had offered the flowers. Mary did not want to intrude with her private loss upon a comparative stranger. And as she hesitated a queer thing happened: George put his arm round Mrs. Knight’s waist with a swaggeringly possessive gesture.
‘But never mind,’ said he, ‘we understand each other. We are not hard and cold and worldly, are we?’ And George’s head, bereft of its usual little saucer hat, inclined romantically towards Mrs. Knight’s, as though her shoulder were the natural abiding-place for it. Mary retreated. It wasn’t that she minded George being romantic, but she did mind the way in which his romance threatened her future. She felt the tears smarting to her eyes; tears of terror for herself and for Muriel. Nothing, nothing must happen to the child ‒ ever. Odd that she could not cry for Mr. Jones, yet she wept over Mrs. Knight.
She awaited George in the dining-room; he came in alone, his eyes too bright, his smile too glad.
‘Alone?’ questioned Mary.
‘Of course, dear; who did you think was here?’
‘I thought ‒’
He laughed. ‘Silly little woman. I’ve been wasting my sweetness on the desert air all the evening.’
‘Oh!’
‘Anything the matter?’
She stared at him coldly. ‘I happened to come to tell you that Mr. Jones was dead and Mamma wants me, and I saw … you know.’
‘What?’
‘I saw Mrs. Knight.’
George turned scarlet. He ignored the sad loss of Mr. Jones entirely. ‘It’s a fine thing,’ said he hotly, ‘when a man cannot give a friend a handful of flowers from his own garden without his wife sneaking in on him and spying.’
‘I was not spying.’
‘You’ll say I made love to her next.’
She spoke quite coldly, for George could never humiliate her love for him; all love had gone long ago. ‘You said you both were not hard and cold and worldly. You know what that means, George?’
‘I don’t know what I said. Why should I be cross-examined? I take things too easily, that’s what it is. I put up with too much.’
‘The old George,’ she said weakly, and tried to smile, but the smile was akin to tears. ‘I wonder if you ever think what I put up with?’
‘You had a lover.’
‘I had no lover in that sense,’ she answered. ‘What about Agnes … Emily … now?’
‘There is nothing in it, I tell you. You imagined Agnes and Emily. Lord, how women twist things! You admitted the affair with Peter.’
‘I admitted no sin.’
‘Neither did I.’
She said: ‘No, you were never brave enough nor big enough for that. The others admitted it for you’; and then suddenly: ‘Oh, don’t let’s talk like this, don’t let’s argue. Mr. Jones is dead. This ‒ this has happened when I did think you were going to be decent.’
‘I am decent,’ said George. ‘You don’t understand I am a live man. I am flesh and blood, and I’m married to a glacier. You think of nothing but that child. I’m despised, I’m treated as a nonentity; how different I should have been if I had had a son.’
She got up, a plain woman grown rather beautiful in her proud aloofness. She faced him. ‘George,’ she said, ‘if only I had the money, or the power, to earn enough for myself and the child, I should leave you this very night. And you know it.’
‘You have no grounds ‒’
‘I have every ground possible. You did not need a wife; you needed a harem.’
‘That’s it. Be disgusting. It shows what a mind you have.’
‘We’ve never quarrelled save on this subject.’
‘We shall never think alike,’ he told her. ‘I don’t see vice in every petty caress.’
‘You make me sick,’ she whispered and put her hands over her eyes to shut out the impression of his presence.
And all the while Mr. Jones was dead.
X
All the way in the train, speeding towards her old home, Mary turned the situation over in her mind. It was the financial aspect which was so defeating. She had twenty pounds a year, and Muriel. If she left George she had a very small earning capacity. Her education would stand her good stead in a post as governess or companion, but what would become of the child? It was fairer to Muriel to remain as she was, to put up with anything so that the little girl could be brought up decently and in happy surroundings. Mary’s own humiliation did not matter; nothing mattered, save Muriel.
Harriet had been sent to meet her at the station with a cab. Harriet had grown older, greyer, and less jumpy. Mary wondered how she had stuck all these years with Mamma, and considered her to be one of the wonders of the world omitted from the seven in the catalogue.
The house, nicely shuttered, was like a mortuary. In the dining-room Mamma, worn out with hysterics, lay prone on the sofa, with the magenta crochet rug drawn over her feet. By the empty grate sat Johnny drinking port. The change in Johnny was noticeable. He had grown fat and bloated; his cheeks hung in two flabby sacks on either side his face, and his nose was a little puce-coloured button of an affair in the middle. But Mamma, who had seen him more recently
than Mary, seemed still to regard him as the apple of her eye, and was quite unaware that his habits were evincing themselves in his appearance.
‘Oh, hello,’ said Johnny. ‘Hello, Mary! Here’s a go. Jones is dead.’
‘How is Mamma?’
Mamma at the mention of Mr. Jones burst into fresh tears. She could not bear to have him alluded to, and yet if he were not mentioned she thought them all heartless. The situation was fraught with difficulties.
Mr. Jones had died; he had died as pathetically as he had lived. He had had a cold and had made a great fuss about it, and refused to get up. Mamma had been indignant; she hated fusses, and she hated people who wouldn’t get up. In the evening she had gone to his room to have it out with him; she had said her say. It had been a most successful say, because Mr. Jones had not attempted to defend himself ‒ had, in fact, left the field clear for Mamma. Then he had started coughing. He had made ugly rasping sounds, and it had irritated Mamma beyond measure. She had been furious. She had told him to stop it; she had stood at the side of the bed, telling him that she wouldn’t have it, stamping her foot, and declaring that he was doing it on purpose to annoy her; and all the while he had rasped and rattled, and choked and panted, wheezy as an unoiled engine. Mamma had lost her temper and screamed to him, but he hadn’t stopped; only his eyes had stared at her, mutely appealing. Because he couldn’t stop. The last grating rattle had been torn out of him. He had died with Mamma’s raillery in his ears.
‘How awful,’ said Mary, as Johnny told her.
‘Oh, I dunno. He must have been used to it. I don’t suppose he listened.’
‘Johnny, you shouldn’t talk like that. He was dying.’
‘Death doesn’t make plaster saints of people. I’ll be no better for dying.’
‘But it seems so awful.’
‘It was just like Mamma and just like Jones, too. And that’s that. How are you getting on? Still got that pretty housemaid?’
‘No,’ said Mary tersely.
In the evening Wally called. Wally, so Johnny told her, had been doing very well lately. It had all come of some shares which he had bought ages ago, and which had turned out excellently. The mean pig, said Johnny, had kept damned quiet about them, never giving another chap a chance, and now here he was wallowing in his ill-gotten gold, and growing fat on it!