The Passionate Heart (Timeless Classics Collection)

by Ursula Bloom

  ‘Yes, dear, but it is going to be rather a dangerous soul for us both.’

  ‘Why? I don’t see why. I love her.’

  ‘And you don’t love me?’ She was very calm, because she did not believe that George meant a word of it. He was being chivalrous and ‘Georgish’. The attitude appealed to all the romance in which his nature was steeped.

  ‘You’ve killed every atom of love I ever had for you,’ said George with a choke. ‘That other man … that child ‒’

  ‘What child?’

  ‘Why, Muriel. You named her after him, you know you did. I’ve lost my child, my little boy.’

  Mary sat up in bed very still and very straight, but her heart seemed to be shivering with fury. ‘George, are you inferring that Muriel is not your child?’

  ‘Oh no, no,’ said George, taken aback and hastily repudiating exactly what he had inferred.

  ‘Muriel was born three years after I had last seen Peter. He had been dead a whole year then. There is only one thing in my life that I regret, and that is that most unfortunately she is your child.’

  ‘That’s an amiable remark to make. My child died, my little son ‒’

  ‘Do stop harping on that. You know as well as I do that you never wanted the boy. Mrs. Dane has got to go.’

  ‘If she goes, I go too.’

  ‘George!’

  ‘I do. This is love! The real thing at last. You’ve accused me of being in the wrong, of ‒ of affairs; now you may as well know the truth. I love her. Why, even Muriel knows it.’

  ‘Muriel?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Have you ‒ have you ‒?’ The word stuck in her throat and she could not say it. But George said it for her; he said it pompously, with a triumphant diction: ‘She is my wife in the eyes of Heaven.’

  ‘Oh!’ She found that she was limp; she could not say anything else but just ‘Oh’. She had never supposed that George would actually do this. Somehow she had never thought that he was actually bad.

  ‘You can divorce me,’ he went on grandiloquently, ‘I shall not defend the case.’

  Very slowly Mary answered: ‘If I divorce you, you will be turned out of the Church. There’ll be nothing; Muriel and I will starve.’

  ‘I thought you’d think of the money; you have never thought of anything else.’

  ‘You’ll starve too, George, and you won’t like it. She won’t like it either.’

  ‘Love will feed us.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous! I shall not divorce you. I’ve got to think this thing out; I’ve got to get advice.’

  George swung his braces over his shoulders again. ‘Very well! This is the end as far as I am concerned. I shall sleep in the spare room.’

  ‘You must do what you feel to be the best thing.’

  He stepped across the floor, a long shadow flying behind him in the firelight. As he came to the door, she said slowly: ‘How much does Muriel know?’

  With his hand on the knob, George told her. ‘I couldn’t very well keep it from her; she’s a big girl and it is time she knew things. I don’t want her to grow up cold and hard and material like you. She sort of guessed herself. I’m not middle-class like you are; I discuss matters.’ And he charged on to the landing. He charged full into a small table, which crashed to the floor. She heard his muttered exclamation of pain and his efforts to pick up the pieces; afterwards his limping across to the spare room. George had hurt himself! Amusing things like that would happen; tragedy is so frequently interspersed with comedy. It was all wrong.

  She was surprised that she did not cry.

  IV

  When the great guns in Flanders were taking their terrible toll of life, Mary’s seemed a very small hurt. Somehow she knew that she ought to think of it in that way, but to her, because it happened to be her own hurt, it was big enough. She lay there in the bitter tranquillity of the night, trying to think of a way out. She believed George to be only philandering; she did not for a moment suppose him to be in love with Flora Dane, for the main reason that she knew him to be utterly incapable of a great passion. It would pass.

  Meanwhile there was Muriel to be considered. Muriel with her budding years was probably curious with regard to sex; she was no longer a baby, and she was in the very state to be bruised by any harsh or sudden awakening. What did Muriel know of her father? That was the sword-thrust. Never before had George actually introduced his amatory intrigues into his own house. Was it better to endure, or to end it? And how did one end it? She was so weak and ill, and so incapable of earning. With the morning would come the necessity of facing Mrs. Dane. How would she face her? She wouldn’t, she told herself fiercely. She wouldn’t. Even now, she wondered fearfully, could she be certain that George was sleeping chastely in the spare room? She couldn’t be sure. She could not be sure of anything any more, ever. If she went away, and admitted defeat, what would people say? It was little and petty to think this, because in reality it was of no importance at all what anybody might say. But she was haunted and tortured by the vision of Mamma reiterating: ‘What did I tell you? What did I say? But there ‒ nobody pays any attention to me …’ and Wally, grown round and smug and wearing a dreadful bowler at the wrong angle: ‘We all knew what George was, we all told you.’ No, she couldn’t admit defeat.

  She crept out of bed; she staggered a little because she was so weak, and the swelling in her side had been worse lately. Sick for companionship, hideously alone, she stood there swaying. The moonlight fell on the white figure of a crucifix above her bed; she saw it and said to herself wearily:

  ‘How lonely He must have been, too.’

  She dragged her tired body across the moon-haunted landing and crept into Muriel’s little bed. The child turned in her sleep and flung her arms around her mother.

  The little hands would come down again, darling, precious little hands, and, reaching for her, they would uplift her from the waters of despair that made ready to drown her. The little hands which had dragged her up before; the adorable little hands. The warmth of the child suffused her own weak body, vitalised it, merged it into a semblance of sleep. As she dreamed, the little hands came down again, reaching, searching, and, finding her, holding her close and dragging her up into the light. Because after all there was light above, warm light, sweet white light, with radiance in it, with Peter!

  She did not see Mrs. Dane. She told George that she would not. ‘Whilst that woman remains in the house,’ she said, ‘I shall stay in my room.’

  George, murmuring something about having guessed that she would try and make things more difficult, declared that Flora Dane should never leave. She was his love; he could not live without her. However, she left within the week. When the car bearing her away had purred into the distance, George, tears in his eyes, came to Mary in her bedroom.

  ‘I’ll never forgive you, never. You’ve broken my heart.’

  ‘You have never thought of my heart.’

  ‘I’ve thought of you all along. If I hadn’t thought of you we should have run away. This is all the thanks I get for thinking of you.’

  ‘George,’ she said, ‘you weren’t thinking of me. If you had run away, your income would have stopped; that would have spoilt everything, and that is what you were thinking about.’

  ‘You’re so mercenary,’ complained George, leaning against the overmantel; ‘you would be the one who would have suffered; you’d only have had your savings. I know they would keep you some time, but …’ For George had never quite forgiven those eleven pounds in the post-office savings book.

  It could not go on. Much as it was against the grain, Mary wrote to Johnny. She must have somebody’s advice. Johnny was a fat little captain in a home service battalion on the East Coast. To give him his due, he had tried hard to get to the Front, and had been sent back time after time, on account of what he called his ‘smoker’s heart’. Johnny’s weakness with poor Papa’s port had told. Johnny said that he would come the moment he could get leave, but it was
Christmas week before he arrived for one breathless day and night.

  George was, of course, the devoted lover, parted from the beloved. He went about as though his heart were broken, sighing heavily, and writing long letters by every post. Mary felt certain that the letters were incriminating, and she had a nasty foreboding that one of these days George would find himself involved; and he would involve her too. She was still weak from the confinement; the swelling in her side, which had been caused by a strained muscle, had not gone down. At times she felt it tentatively.

  Johnny arrived, dressed up very smartly, with clinking spurs, and smelling of boot polish and furniture cream and leather. Johnny, looking extremely well ‒ so well that George sighed more heavily than ever and reiterated:

  ‘Ah! I ought to have been a soldier, I ought indeed. If it hadn’t been for my family …’

  But then, of course, George’s family had always been the great deterrents to his progress in any state.

  After tea Johnny and Mary sat in the dusk, George being called away to attend a carol practice in the coach-house. Faintly from the distance came sounds of George cranking away on the crazy harmonium, and shrill young voices piping bleakly with his braying basso.

  ‘There they go at “Good King Winklepop”,’ said Johnny. ‘Let’s hope George likes it. Now, old girl, what’s the trouble?’

  ‘It’s George,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, I guessed that much. What’s he been doing?’

  She told him as briefly as she could. Johnny listened, and his round red nose grew rounder and redder.

  ‘George,’ he said at last, ‘should have been drowned at birth. You know, he was in that affair at the time of my marriage. That was why he left the curacy. Nobody liked to tell you; ought to have done, and all that, but … well, there you are.’

  ‘What am I to do?’

  ‘Do? Grab every farthing you can, and bunk. That’s what you ought to do.’

  ‘Bunk?’

  ‘Yes. What about old Wally? He has made his pile in those infernal shares he kept so dark about … Talk about meanness ‒’

  ‘You mean bunk with someone? Oh, Johnny, I couldn’t.’

  ‘Well, leave George, then. He’ll have to make a settlement on you, and so much for Muriel. Have it in black and white or he will howl and never pay up. Shall I talk to him?’

  She said suddenly: ‘I don’t want to leave him, Johnny.’

  ‘I daresay, but it will only go on and on, and there is Muriel to think of. She’ll be growing up soon.’

  He played his trump card there. She thought dully and then she said faintly: ‘Would you ‒ would you talk to him, Johnny?’

  ‘It’s my duty.’

  ‘You’re rather a dear.’

  ‘Oh no, I’m not. I’m an absolute wrong ’un, but I am not going to see you let down. Jove, won’t Mamma crow over this? She’ll enjoy it nearly as much as old Jones dying.’

  ‘You’re cruel,’ she said, and there was a catch in her throat.

  ‘How long will George be?’

  ‘Not long now.’

  ‘I suppose I couldn’t have a spot of something to wet my whistle before I start? This is going to be a ticklish job.’

  She was so grateful that she fetched up a new bottle of sloe gin, and set it before him. From the coach-house came the shuffle of the booted young leaving hurriedly. Sharp chink against the stone, steady slush through the mud. George would be in at any moment.

  She crept away, she was so bitterly ashamed. They were going to discuss a price, the price which her freedom was worth to George. How much would he pay to be rid of her, how much? She wanted to creep away like some sick animal into a shady corner to die. Somewhere dark and leafy, where there were only kind shadows and none of the crudities of the light. Surely the little hands could never lift her from this quagmire of despair? She had to be brave because of Muriel. Muriel could not bear to see her cry. She sat alone in her room, with the lamp unlit, staring out across the frosted loveliness of the night. White powdering on the lawn, and the laburnum opposite, and the great lean elm. The hills were etched against a sky which was the colour of grape-bloom, and the moon was hung like a cold white lantern in a pitiless Heaven. On such a night the Christ Child had been born. She thought of it; of the shepherds hurrying to Bethlehem, and the simple manger where ‘the little Lord Jesus laid down His sweet head’. Dear little Lord Jesus, she thought, how He suffered, how faint He grew, how tired …

  And she was tired …

  They were so long, so terribly long, and the waiting was suffocating. Finally George came up to her; he said in a rather amazed voice: ‘Why did you get out the sloe gin? Johnny’s hopelessly drunk.’

  ‘Haven’t you two been talking?’

  ‘Yes, but what on earth we have been talking about, I do not know. We’ve got to get him to bed somehow; the maids mustn’t know of this.’

  Poor Johnny! It was almost amusing.

  V

  Next day was Sunday, with church, and George bustling them up like a clucking old hen with chickens. And then the field to cross; four horses in it to-day, in the middle too.

  ‘I don’t care,’ said George, ‘I’m not afraid of horses.’ And off he went, full of a spurious bravery caused by self-righteous anger. Mary, Johnny, and Muriel went by the hedge. After five minutes they saw the nearest stallion fling its head down and its heels up, with large sods of earth flying in all directions, and the intrepid George, now overcome with an awesome fear, running for his life. They all scrambled through the nearest hole in the hedge. Johnny, who had scratched his new field boots badly, and was therefore furious, said:

  ‘I hope it catches him, and I hope it kills him, so there!’

  ‘I believe,’ Muriel broke in, ‘that they try to be funny with Father, I do really.’

  ‘It’ll put him in a temper for the rest of the day,’ said Mary, ‘and just when we did want him to be nice.’

  But Johnny was not interested. ‘More likely put him in his grave for all time,’ he answered; ‘and look at my boots … damned fine boots, too … but not made for black-berrying.’

  Johnny was leaving by the six-ten train from Stansfield, the nearest station, and the car was coming for him at five-thirty, so there was little time for discussion. He and George fitted it in while Mary was taking the Sunday-school at three. Sunday-school was conducted in the coach-house; nine little boys in stuff suits and celluloid collars, and eleven little girls with crimped hair. They sang hymns and were very stupid about it, and once a year they were taken as a reward to some place of interest and were usually violently sick with excitement. They learnt the Collects as so many parrots, having no idea what it meant or why they said it. Hymns they preferred. As Mary whined out ‘Jesu, Lover of my Soul’ on the antiquated harmonium, Johnny and George discussed her price in the dining-room.

  Just before he left Johnny murmured the result in her ear, standing in the hall and waiting for the car. ‘He says he can manage a hundred and ten a year for you both. He can’t manage a penny more; it’s the uttermost. What do you think?’

  ‘I think it is starvation,’ she said bravely, and she tried to smile.

  VI

  She refused George’s magnanimous offer of one hundred and ten. She preferred to stay on for the present as she was. Starvation (for, with the food prices what they were, that was what it meant) was a poor prospect. George, who had received a Christmas card with a forget-me-not on it from Flora Dane and whose romance was therefore brilliantly rekindled, sulked. He had thought a hundred and ten a most munificent offer. He had always supposed that she wished to grab everything, but why should he give up so much? After all, it was not his fault; if she had not had a lover … if his darling little son had not died … etc.

  But she ignored George. In these few months ‒ and she felt that they would be her last at Pebbridge ‒ she devoted herself unsparingly to Muriel’s education. Any other governess was unthinkable. Muriel’s French and German left much to be d
esired; her knowledge was sadly limited, and she considered that her mother was cruel with the rigorous hours of study.

  And in the early summer of nineteen-seventeen Muriel found an admirer. Muriel was fifteen, and unlike either her father or mother. Her hair, of which she had a great abundance, curled all over her head. She had cut it off one evening without asking permission, and Mary, who had adored every strand of it, rescued the long tresses out of the waste-paper basket, and harvested them in a drawer with a baby’s blue boot and a little torn bib. These were what the years had left her: a boot, a bib, long tresses. Later, she would perhaps add a flower from a ballroom frock, a ribbon, a broken fan. Later still, perhaps, another little boot …

  Life did not supply much, really, not enough to be worth the pain and the heartache. Happiness seemed elusive, and when one had it clasped close one never realised it. Looking back, one could see it, but at the time one was always so sure that there was something better lying ahead, something sweeter.

  Muriel and the boy from the farm were inseparable. He was quite an inferior boy, who spoke with an Essex accent, calling cows ‘kyows’ and nice ‘noice’. But apparently Muriel was deaf to it. Once, Mary came upon her in the apple orchard, with rivers of gold sunshine rushing through the green of the leaves. Muriel had her arms locked close round the boy’s neck and their lips were met in a passionate kiss. It gave Mary a shock. Muriel was growing up. Supposing that she grew up like George? It was a staggering thought and it stabbed like a swiftly-drawn knife. It was hateful.

  Standing there hidden by the guelder rose bush, staring down into the enchanted gold and green orchard where these two young things caressed, she knew with a terrible certainty that this was the end of the little hands. The little hands would come no more to help her in the dark misery, to lift her up into the light above. They were laid aside with the other baby things, the boot, the tresses, and the bib; they would not come any more.