by Ursula Bloom
Later that day she spoke to Muriel. ‘That boy ‒ I shouldn’t let him kiss you, dear.’
‘Why not, Mummy?’
‘Well, it isn’t very nice. If you let yourself be cheap, people will treat you cheaply. I shouldn’t if I were you.’
Muriel smiled tolerantly. ‘Darling old-fashioned little Mummy,’ she said.
‘Muriel, I mean it.’
‘I mean it, too. We aren’t living in nineteen hundred and seven, it’s nineteen-seventeen. There’s no harm in a kiss. I can take care of myself.’
‘Sweetheart, I know. Only I do so want my little girl to be ‒ to be ‒’
‘You’ll say “maidenly” next, Mummy.’
This was what the war had done. She blamed it on to the war for want of a better excuse. ‘Darling, you are not to kiss him.’
‘Oh, very well, if you put it like that.’
‘You … you don’t think you are in love?’
‘Of course not, Mummy; I’m curious, that’s all; just curious about love.’
‘It’s a dangerous curiosity, my dearest.’
‘We all have to buy our experience,’ she said. She was very sophisticated, this child with her wise blue eyes and her flower of a mouth. No wonder that he wanted to kiss her; Mary wanted to kiss her, always. Only it could not be allowed. He was a common boy, and it would be horrible if Muriel contracted what is known (for want of a better term) as an ‘unfortunate marriage’. She told George.
George had been reading the rather depressing news from the Front; lately he had been more than ever convinced that his place was with the dear boys fighting the foe. Whenever any particularly disastrous battle had taken place, when the casualties had been more than usually terrible, George would say, ‘Ah! I ought to have been there,’ but he never made any effort to get there.
Mary sounded him on the future of Muriel. ‘It would be a tragedy if she made an unfortunate marriage,’ she said.
‘I don’t care what she does, as long as she loves him,’ announced George. ‘You always think in a mercenary way; love is what matters.’ And he sighed.
‘I found her in the orchard with Caleb Steen.’
‘What! That common little brat from the farm?’
‘Yes.’
George set the paper down with a flourish. ‘But he is a horrid little oaf. Muriel mustn’t make a fool of herself.’
‘But,’ suggested Mary wickedly, ‘she may love him?’
‘Rubbish! She couldn’t love a little brat like that. I want Muriel to marry a duke or somebody great ‒’
‘We meet so many dukes.’
‘You never know. She might meet one by accident, even here.’
Mary, who knew the twist of George’s ever romantic mind, said: ‘Perhaps you mean a duke in disguise? How do you know Caleb Steen isn’t one, very much disguised?’
George hated Mary when she got into that mood. He elaborately explained his reasons for supposing Caleb to have no claims to the ducal strawberry leaves.
‘You must talk to Muriel,’ said Mary at last. ‘You must tell her that she is to marry entirely for love, only it must be a duke! I suppose there are about four unmarried dukes in England, not one of whom she has the ghost of a chance of meeting ‒ or loving, for the matter of that. But all the same, you’d better tell her.’
George lost his temper entirely. ‘You don’t understand love, you never have done. You laugh at beautiful and sacred things; it is sickening … sickening. It is purgatory living like this.’
She went to the door, and out into the hall beyond. The clean, sweet air came in from the porch, a purging, assailing sharpness. She wondered if George ever realised the depths of her purgatory.
VII
Mamma died the following Easter. She died rather hurriedly, and everybody blamed the badness of the food.
Mamma faced death with the same splendid and conquering courage with which she had faced life. Mary went to her when she heard that she was ill, and found her sitting up in bed, flanked by pillows. It was the old half-tester bed, with the maroon curtains, and there over the mantelpiece was the picture of Queen Victoria looking at a portrait of Albert the Good. Mamma, speaking in a funny croaking voice, and with great pits in her face, and eyes far distant. The doctor, said Mamma, was making a great fuss about nothing, and she hated being in bed, only her feet refused to work. She wanted to see Johnny, but she did not suppose that he would come, there wasn’t a single bottle of poor Papa’s port left now.
For a whole day Mamma was bright. Mary could not believe the doctor when he said that she was seriously ill. On the second night she had a bad change. Mamma lay back among the pillows, grey and ashy; when she did speak, she spoke more slowly.
‘Disgraceful laundry work,’ said Mamma, touching the pillow-cases with plucking fingers; ‘look at the frills, never touched with goffering irons. I won’t pay for it, upon my soul I won’t. I’ll see them somewhere else first.’
She wandered a little towards midnight, and in her wanderings Mr. Jones came to her and she bullied him disgracefully again. She went back to her schooldays in her extreme youth, when she sat in a row with a whole lot of other little girls and hemmed handkerchiefs. And there was something pathetic about Mamma as she lay there with her pitted face turned to the pillow, still in fancy hemming the handkerchiefs of her youth. She slept then till dawn was flushing the sky, never hearing Johnny arrive, and she was not aware that he sat beside her. When the amber spears of morning pierced the purple of the east, she suddenly awoke. She awoke magnificently.
‘Somebody is calling me,’ said Mamma in a masterful voice.
‘No … nobody …’ Mary went to her and lay her back among the pillows, but Mamma lifted herself up again.
‘Don’t contradict me,’ she said, ‘for someone is calling me. I expect it is some of Mr. Jones’s nonsense, and I’ll give him a piece of my mind.’ She quivered, as though a sudden gale had shaken her thin body; her voice died down.
‘Someone is calling me,’ she persisted, and she squared her shoulders to answer the last command. It was Mary who caught her as she lurched forward.
There was something rather splendid about the way in which Mamma had died. ‘If,’ said Johnny, ‘some of our generals had a few of Mamma’s qualities, we’d have won this war over and over again’ ‒ which Mary felt to be singularly true.
Mamma was buried one soft spring day, and Mary found herself a hundred pounds the richer.
‘I’d use that to leave George,’ advised Johnny.
‘George is behaving himself nicely now.’
‘Yes. I bet!’
‘Yes, he is, really he is ‒’
‘Look here,’ said Johnny, ‘George is only behaving nicely when you don’t happen to be finding him out. If you went home by surprise, I bet you’d be surprised.’
She hated the idea, but she felt rather inclined to try it. She and Johnny finished tending Mamma’s poor little affairs between them, and Isabel and three of the children spent the last day with them. Isabel had grown fat and blowsy. Time had not been kind to her. The children were common, and they all jarred on Mary very much.
‘Fine kids,’ as Johnny told her, ‘but what Isabel would call no class.’
‘Don’t, Johnny.’
‘Well, dash it all, poor Papa was trade. Mamma would have it that Isabel was beneath us, but she wasn’t really.’
‘We weren’t like that,’ said Mary, struggling to speak with dignity of Johnny’s wife.
‘Oh, I dunno. Now, your girl is different. She’ll go far.’
‘George thinks she’ll marry a duke.’ She said it, and then she giggled. It was schoolgirlish, but she could not resist it.
‘Umph! What’ll George gain by that? I don’t see how he will manage to get called “your grace” even if she does.’
Johnny had George sized up very accurately.
VIII
Mary did go home by surprise. She did not see how she could find George at any assignation.
The Flora Dane affair was dead. Flora had found a richer admirer who had given her orchids, and she had immediately discarded George, who had only ivy-leaves and forget-me-nots to offer. At the moment Mary had very good grounds for believing that no successor to Flora had presented herself in George’s affairs.
George was living a chaste and holy life, and was presumably bored to tears by it. But, as Mary told herself, all life was boring. There were moments, blissful moments, which were deliriously happy, moments in Peter’s arms, or when the little hands had come seeking and aiding, but George had never experienced such moments.
It was impossible to get a car from Stansfield, so Mary walked. It was a long way, although she took the short cuts, and when she eventually turned into the village she was dog-tired. A white ribbon of road, with red cottages along the left side; a hill rising suddenly with an orchard on the right of thickly blossoming apple-trees. She was so tired that the hill seemed to have grown out of all perspective into an enormity which she would never be able to ascend.
She reached the top at last, where it bent round by the red barn, and the first glimpse of the forge etched itself through the trees. How green the hill on which it stood! And the grey and white geese with heads craned superciliously forward, walking in heavy pounding measure across it. There was the pleasant chink of the anvil, and the smell of sappy wood from the trees alongside. She redoubled her efforts, down the hill again with the old red farm on the left where the white lilac tree was heavily budded in the front garden and the daffodils palely gold beneath it. The yard door was open, and she caught a glimpse of the cows in the pleasant sunshine. They were waiting to be milked, placidly enough, standing knee-deep in straw. That smelt delicious, too; warmth of sweaty roan hide, and soft, slobbery muzzles, of straw and dung, and new milk scudding against the bright tin pails.
She went on tiredly down the lane, and came to the low red rectory wall, with its stunted hedge in front. The wall surrounded the acre of kitchen garden, and was a continual plague to George. The coping-stones were always being knocked off it, and the least puff of wind seemed to leave its mark. George was always saying: ‘When I want to leave, the Ecclesiastical surveyors will rush me a pretty penny for that confounded wall; I shall probably have to starve to pay for it.’ She went round to the main entrance; she never used the back, by reason of her early training. Mamma had considered it the height of inferiority to use a back entrance. Tired as she was, Mary went on, turning in by the yew hedge and the laurels into the wide arc of the drive.
The hall door stood open; she went in quietly. There was a sweet laziness about the place. No sign of Muriel; from the kitchen, shut off by the baize door, came the sound of a maid singing. The dining-room was empty. She went across the hall with its multi-coloured turkey carpet lying on the flagstones. As she went, she noticed how the rug was wearing; it was quite thready by the chest against the wall. Afterwards she remembered how insistently that little point had struck her.
She came to the foot of the stairs and, seeing that the door was ajar there, she peered incuriously into George’s study. He was standing in the window, she could see his silhouette. He was standing there clasping a woman to his heart, and the woman was Mrs. Knight. Mary felt herself turned to stone, and yet her heart thudded out the words to her that Johnny had used: ‘If you went home by surprise, I bet you’d be surprised.’ George had not heard her; neither of them had heard her. They were speaking and she was standing there listening. It might be all wrong, but she wanted to know the worst now.
‘She is so cold,’ George was saying. ‘When we were married I did not understand. She was supposed to have money, but now you can imagine what my life is like. Still, I’ve got you.’
‘For ever,’ said Mrs. Knight.
‘Amen,’ said George solemnly, and he kissed her again.
That was when they turned and saw Mary, with her face greenly white, and her eyes grown intensely dark. She was quivering, but she did not speak; even the thread of scarlet which was her mouth had paled.
‘Oh,’ gasped Mrs. Knight with a scream.
It was George who could afford to be passionate. ‘You spy upon me, in my very own house you spy upon me,’ he stormed. ‘How dare you creep in like that?’
But still she stood there, staring beyond them to the still fields and the line of hedge three-quarters of a mile away denoting the main road. The evening bus was jolting along it; she could see it as it went. If she had waited she would have been able to catch that bus from Stansfield, and then she would not have been so terribly tired. She tried to take her eyes from the bus, but they seemed to have stuck. She lurched into the room; she was faintly conscious that George was orating at a great pace, and that something had happened. She tried to tell him that she had had no tea, but the words would not come. She made a pathetic gesture of despair, and the floor rose up to meet her.
She had fainted.
IX
Life could not go on like this. George, of course, protested that it had never happened save in her imagination, that there had never been any other woman save Mrs. Knight. He called her Dorothy. Somehow it did not matter very much what George said now. Her only thought was for Muriel. The child could not go on in this; she turned it over and over in her tormented mind, in the silence of the moon-flooded night. She was so afraid of making a false step, but she must make some move. She could not stay. She went in her nightdress, with the grey dressing-gown over it, to George’s room, where he lay sleepless. The place was bright with the vivid moonshine; they needed no other light.
‘George,’ she said, standing beside him and staring down at the dark splotch which was his face upon the whiteness of the pillows, ‘George, what are you going to do?’
‘I know what I am going to do,’ he returned. ‘You’ve never been in love. You’ve never felt any emotion. You can’t understand what it is for Dorothy and me.’
‘But, George, my future.’
‘You would think of yourself. I’ve never met anyone like it before. What about me? You’ve spoilt my life.’
‘I?’ She checked a sob in her throat.
‘Yes, you married me under false pretences.’
‘George, what do you mean?’
‘You hadn’t any money; you hadn’t any warmth of feeling; then there was Peter.’
‘Nothing wrong ever.’
‘So you say.’
‘George, what about Agnes? What about Emily? What about Flora?’
‘Pooh, you imagined it. You were only too pleased to make a lot of it.’
‘You lost your curacies.’
‘Yes, because you would interfere. If I’d been left alone I’d have taught them a thing or two. Horrid scandalmongers.’
‘George, the past is dead and done with; it is the future that matters. I can’t stay here like this.’
‘I don’t want you to stay here,’ exclaimed George irritably. ‘You can’t imagine you are any joy to me, can you?’
She thought dismally of their giving up the living and making a fresh start. Then the futility of their continued fresh starts appalled her. She was clinging tenaciously to a wreck of a marriage. The tears made channels down her cheeks, her voice became sodden. It all hurt so horribly. ‘George, I’ve got to live.’
‘Oh, I’ve no doubt you’ll try and wrest the last penny from me.’
‘That isn’t fair.’
‘You’re not being fair to me. What’s to become of me, I should like to know?’
‘If …’ she choked and started again: ‘If I take Muriel, you could stay here. I suppose splitting the income means we shall both be wretchedly poor?’
‘Money again,’ he sneered. ‘You don’t care how poor I am. If I have love I shall be all right.’
She steadied herself against the bedrail, the vividity of the moonlight drenched her. ‘George, you loved me once. Can you let it all go like this? What are we to do?’
If only she were a stronger woman, if only she had courage! She was afr
aid of the future, which menaced her; she was horribly afraid. George seemed to have no ideas left as to what they might do. He still lay sprawling in the bed, sadly stripped of any romance. She wondered how she could ever have supposed George to be a romantic hero. After all, he was nothing but a philanderer; he bleated vaguely of warmth, of passionate emotion, and love, about all of which he knew nothing. The moonlight was pitiless, it showed him up in his worst light; George curled up in bed, his generous curves, his muscles which were flabby fat. If only there had been one lovable trait left, if only there had been some spark to which she could look, some remnant of the George whom she had once supposed that she loved. For she wanted to stay here, more than all else. She wanted him to open his arms and take her to the warmth of his heart; to hold her there, to comfort her. She felt like a hurt and bewildered child, with no dear presence to whom she might turn. There was no one to console her. She whimpered a little, genuinely afraid of the strangeness of her position.
‘It’s no good coming here and nagging at me,’ said George, although she had not spoken a word. ‘There’s nothing to be gained by that. Nothing at all. I made a fool of myself. I was young when I married, too young to know what I was doing.’
‘You were twenty-five.’
He turned restlessly. ‘You are always so dreadfully exact. Thank Heaven I have none of your finicking habits.’
‘You had been engaged three times before.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘Johnny.’
‘Johnny is a nice one to talk. He got Isabel into trouble and had to marry her.’
‘You knew a little about that,’ she said crudely.
‘You’ll say it was my child next.’
‘That might be as true as your assertion that Muriel is Peter’s child.’
George sat up in bed and encircled his knees with fat arms garbed in pink flannelette. ‘I thought there was something in it. Then Muriel was his child.’
‘You mean you admit Isabel’s was yours?’
‘I mean nothing of the sort. It is disgusting. For goodness’ sake leave me. Take the child, take my money, take my home, but go … leave me love.’