by Ursula Bloom
A little reflection would not hurt Jasmine. Mary went and washed up. When she had finished, having scoured the detestable sink, she found the dining-room empty save for Johnny sitting peacefully and happily in the armchair. ‘I wiped the floor with the little beast,’ said Johnny, not without some pride. ‘The little rat fairly shook ‒’
‘Oh, Johnny, I hope you weren’t hasty.’
‘I said exactly what I thought, and it was particularly unpleasant. By the way, where is Jasmine going?’
‘Jasmine?’
‘Yes. I met her hauling a great box along with her. She didn’t see me, silly little fool.’
Mary did not answer. She went upstairs to look. The room was in disorder, with clothes tumbled about it, drawers ransacked, everything in upheaval, and the suit-case from under the bed had gone. She came downstairs with her heart thudding dully within her. She knew what had happened now.
VII
There were a few sickening moments when she felt the unutterable crushing sensation of defeat pressing down upon her. Jasmine had cast her away, and had gone to Hubert and his people. She went down the stairs in their wretched ‘box’ and she walked into the dining-room and told Johnny. The tears were falling down her face like rain, the thick streaming rain that falls in strings. She told him. Even Johnny winced.
‘Good God!’ he said.
‘You must go down and fetch her back, you really must, Johnny.’
‘Absurd! She’s in a temper; she’ll get over it. If you’re going to pander to the child you’ll be for ever pandering. She’ll be back at tea-time, you mark my words.’
He let Mary have her cry out; he assured her that it was reaction after the difference of opinion; he was most persuasive.
They sat on talking, this brother and sister who had never really known each other’s hearts, and yet who now extended a warm comfort to each other in this wretched room. They sat on until it was tea-time, and when Jasmine did not return he explained it and said that with the evening he would go down to the Simonds’ and fetch her back.
‘She is under age,’ he said, ‘we can compel her. It’ll give her a jolly good lesson, though a jolly good whipping is what she wants, artful little monkey! Of course George ought never to have been allowed to breed.’
‘Johnny, how can you be so coarse?’
They ate their tea and she washed up. She felt as though she had climbed a long and strenuous hill, and, nearing the apex, was about to see before her a wide vista, or ‒ nothing! There was the hush of expectation in her heart, a latent terror; she was afraid to plumb the depths of her emotion and afraid to think. She wanted Johnny to go now; he must go. But Johnny waited until just before supper. It was one of those deliciously cool evenings after the heat of the day. People, their work done, had gathered at their gates in ones and twos; the sea, receding with the low tide, purred happily to itself like a contented baby; a light wind stirred the sweet peas in the front border, that light wind which is born before sunset and sunrise, a light and lusty wind that sings to itself. Then Johnny went.
Mary tried to occupy herself with some needlework, but it was hard. She sat there, with Mr. Roberts next door playing ‘Pleasant are Thy Courts above’ with one finger, and she found herself wondering if the courts above really were pleasant, or if they, too, were fraught with the horrid unpleasantnesses that continually rear their unwanted heads in this life of ours. The evening went on. As the clock ticked solemnly she incessantly thought of Jasmine. Johnny was so long, there was no need for him to be so long. She wondered if he had gone to the Royal again; of course, she had been a fool to trust him. But when he did come back, she knew that he had not been to the Royal. He was worried, and he was alone.
‘She isn’t there,’ he said.
‘Not there?’
‘No. Hubert isn’t there either. It’s my firm opinion that there is a lot more of old George in Jasmine than we had supposed.’
‘Johnny!’
‘Well, Hubert is missing and she is missing.’ He waved his hands helplessly.
Quite quietly she answered: ‘Jasmine has got to be found.’
‘I daresay, but where is she?’
‘Have the old people seen her?’
‘No, and Hubert hasn’t been home to tea either.’
‘Have you been to his surgery?’
‘No; it’s locked up, of course.’
‘We’ll go there right away.’
‘But, Mary ‒’
She said firmly: ‘We’ll go there right away.’
The shadows were lengthening, and the night was riding up quickly from over the sea. She went upstairs and slipped into a coat; only then did she realise how her hands were shaking. She tried to be controlled, but her limbs refused to obey her mental demand. She must be calm, for Jasmine needed her mother to lean upon, though in all probability the poor child did not guess it. Mary and Johnny locked the cottage door, and she put the key in her bag, a heavy iron key; even in her distress its lumbering size irritated her. She took Johnny’s arm, and they went together.
A soft, freshly sweet air, and the turn at the end of the road, where people stood in groups, the long expanse of street, and at the end the tea-shop, shuttered for the night. Its long white curtains were closely drawn, only the pale squares of cardboard notices showed themselves: ‘Teas and light luncheons provided’, ‘Moderate charges’, ‘Morning coffee’. Above were the narrow windows of Hubert’s surgery, also veiled discreetly in cretonne; no chink of light showed. They rang the bell, but no answer came. She rang again, and although it was not cold her teeth chattered together from the sheer anticipation of some nameless horror. Johnny had become absorbed. He was watching the windows above with assiduous attention.
‘There,’ he said suddenly, as though Mary’s intangible theories had become suddenly tangible, ‘there!’
She looked up. Yes, the curtain had moved; it had been twitched aside for one half-second and in the gloom a pale disc of a face glimmered from within. Intuitively she knew that Jasmine and Hubert were there. It was Johnny who called in a strong voice:
‘Hi, there, hallo!’
There came no response.
‘They’re there,’ said Mary, still making her desperate attempt to remain calm. ‘I know they are there. What are we to do, Johnny?’
The light of battle shone in Johnny’s eyes. He had become almost boyish again, as he had done in those days of the Boer war, when he had, in his own phraseology, ‘smashed people’s ugly faces in, and be damned to the consequences.’ He stooped and groped in the road, then he called quietly, but with a significant firmness:
‘If you don’t open the door, I’ll break the window.’
The tea-shop was providentially situated back from the street, and the evening, now encloaking the town in a greyish mist, hid them. Johnny waited for the response which he did not get, then he threw. The tinkle of chinking glass seemed ominously loud, it was more like a pistol shot, and it was accompanied by a shrill scream, a girl’s scream. Jasmine! Mary looked round apprehensively. Had her hearing magnified the noise, or would the whole town be disturbed? No, there seemed no answer. Johnny’s voice was demanding.
‘Open this door, or I go for the police.’
Then suddenly upon the stillness of the night came Jasmine’s voice, wailing and uncertain. ‘Mummy, Mummy, where are you, Mummy?’
And Mary’s answer, torn from the depths of her passionate heart: ‘Here, darling, here.’
Someone opened the door and they blundered up the bare scrubbed stairs and across the landing, with the pattern of the lino blurred by innumerable feet into nothingness. They entered the surgery, with the curtain waving where the window had been broken. It was Johnny who switched on the light, and disclosed Hubert standing by the dental chair and looking, as usual, very uncomfortable. In the far corner, crouching against the wall, was Jasmine. Her shingle was unruffled, but her frock was torn at the throat, and her eyes told Mary a hundred truths. They were no longer Jasm
ine’s eyes, they were hunted.
‘Mummy,’ she called weakly.
‘My darling.’ Mary had her in her arms again, and held her close. Nothing mattered now, nothing at all.
It was then that Johnny did what he had been aching to do ever since he had come to Dornsands: he landed out at Hubert. It was all too easy! Hubert received the blow full on his pasty face and immediately crumpled up into the dental chair, snatching at a tray and bringing down with him a goodly and clattering collection of forceps and probes. Then Johnny laughed. It was so much better fun than getting drunk, to see that loathsome little beast crumple up like that.
‘Take Jasmine home,’ he told Mary. ‘I’ll deal with him.’ They went out into the night.
VIII
In their own room Jasmine told Mary. She lay there among the pillows, her reflection gleaming in Mamma’s tallboy, and her eyes brimming with tears.
‘It was Uncle. I couldn’t stand it. I went to the surgery because I did not know where to go. He was finishing the last patient, and I said I’d wait. Then, when he came out, I told him.’
‘Don’t cry, darling. Just tell me as you feel you can.’
‘I told him what Uncle had said, and what you had said; he told me that I couldn’t come back. We’d be married, right away, as soon as ever we could manage it. He said we must not drag the old people into it, because that would be the first place where you would look for us. He said the surgery was the place; we’d hide there. I ‒ I thought it would be fun.’
‘But, darling, you knew that it would be wrong. You could not stay there all night with Hubert.’
‘Mummy, to do wrong you’ve got to do wrong, haven’t you? It wouldn’t have been wrong, one sleeping in one chair and one in the other?’
Mary standing there stared before her mutely. After a moment’s silence the girl went on: ‘It was all right at first, quite all right, and rather fun. Then he changed. I don’t believe men are like women; he wasn’t Hubert any longer.’
‘Poor, poor darling.’
The girl had hidden her face in the pillow; she gasped a little as she told her story. ‘He wanted … oh, you know.’
It was Mary who came to the bedside and knelt there in the narrow passage between the great bed and the tallboy.
‘We came in then, Jasmine? You must tell me that, please, dearest.’
The girl nodded. ‘Yes. Only I hate him now. I hate him like poison … he seems a sort of poison. You were so right, Mummy, and I was so wrong. It is the end of it all, and I’m sorry I behaved so badly.’
And she sobbed again, in an abandoned way. But Mary felt that perhaps she would gain a great comfort by her weeping. She would let her cry. Later, when she admitted the victorious Johnny, with her old grey dressing-gown round her shoulders, Jasmine was still crying. Johnny was bright with glory.
‘I simply wiped the floor with him,’ said he; ‘I’d been aching to do it for days; two black eyes … beauties … he won’t dare face his patients for a month, if ever. Now, what about Jasmine?’
‘She’s getting over it.’
‘Look here, Mary, you’d better get that girl married. She’s been lucky this time, but her luck won’t hold! It’s too good to last. See what I mean?’
‘She’s been very unlucky.’
Johnny helped himself to a drink of water, and, having gulped it down, put the glass with a chink on the sideboard. ‘Unlucky?’ he repeated in amazement, ‘unlucky, did you say? Damned lucky. If it had been anybody but that little cad she’d have been done for. But mark my words, Jasmine is old George’s daughter all right, and you’ll have to get her married, or regret it.’
‘Johnny, that isn’t kind.’
‘I daresay, but it’s true. Bless my soul, what a night! You should have seen the finish. I fairly pummelled him. A pretty mess-up this has been. It will be all over the place to-morrow.’
‘Yes, and we can’t afford to leave. We ought to leave, for Jasmine’s sake, but it is impossible. My allowance is not big enough.’
‘Oh, you’ll live it down. Isn’t there anybody you’ve got an eye on for Jasmine?’
‘Nobody.’
‘Well, then, send her away to a job.’
‘She’s all I’ve got.’
‘She seems to be too much of a handful.’
‘Johnny, what can I do?’
‘What I say.’
‘But I shall be so lonely.’
‘Oh, well, if you put it that way ‒’ he hesitated, and suddenly reached out a hand. ‘Why don’t you marry?’ he asked; ‘there’s a lot of men might fancy you. It isn’t that you are good-looking, but there is something about you, something distinguée. You haven’t had much of a time; why don’t you gather up the bits, as it were, and have a fling?’
‘Because,’ she said, ‘I just couldn’t! … There was a man once, you know ‒’
How odd! Standing here in the moonlight, with the hysterical sound of Jasmine crying in the room above, and Johnny grown middle-aged and abutting in the portion of his person where a man should not abut; standing here and talking about Peter. She could almost visualise the ghost of him beside her. Peter, with darkness round his eyes, and the mouth that promised so much . . . gleam of gold lace, and buttons, deep sullen blue. ‘I loved him … passionately,’ she admitted at last, and her voice had sunk to a whisper.
Oh, passionate heart! Impelled into the narrow roads of convention and of upbringing, loyal with a splendid but ill-advised loyalty. She had never admitted it before; and now here, in this incongruous room, to Johnny of all men; Johnny, with his puffed-out face, and his abutting figure, and the grey ghost of this other man beside her.
‘Life’s funny,’ she said, ‘and I never told anyone before. I did what I supposed to be right, and it was wrong. That is all.’
Johnny swallowed hard. ‘Look here, Mary,’ he said, ‘that fellow has got to be found. He is the man to get you out of this mess. I’m the man to find him. I will, old dear, honest Injun, I will. I’ll set about it at once.’
‘You won’t find him.’
‘I bet I will.’
‘I know where he is, and if it comes to that ‒’
‘Where?’
For one instant she demurred, and then suddenly, vividly conscious of his proximity, with a whimsical little sob she answered, ‘Here,’ quite faintly.
‘No, sensibly, where?’
She went over to the box of stairs and put her foot on the first one, the one that creaked. After all, if one had no dreams in life, it was not worth much. The dream had been the best part of it. She could feel him now, her hand closed over his, no longer cold with the deathly chill, but warm with a pervading radiance.
‘He is here ‒ holding my hand,’ she told Johnny, and she left him supposing her to be quite mad.
IX
Poverty can be very cruel. There was no escape from the consequence of Jasmine’s folly. Mary could not afford to move on her miserable pittance; it was as much as they could do to live on it, there was nothing more for extras. Hubert, for the same reason, could not forgo his practice. The story leaked out in some strange manner, and was tittle-tattled from door to door, with a good deal added to it and nothing ever deducted. One sensed it in the air, by the way in which people looked at Jasmine, quite obviously suspecting the worst. It was hateful. But they had to make the best of it, and to endeavour fruitlessly to live down something much too big for them.
In the first few weeks Jasmine took her mother closely to her. They were nearer to each other, they represented more than they had done for many months.
Then George came down and was given a rigorously censored version of the affair. He retorted in that irritatingly innocent manner of his: ‘There! You let her have affairs, yet mine you jump on to.’
‘There is a difference,’ Mary reminded him.
‘I don’t see it,’ he answered. He did not mean to see it.
The episode had taken a lot out of Mary, much more than she cared to admit.
When she saw her face in the glass she was amazed at the deep pits and hollows appearing in it. New lines had commenced a lacework about the corners of her eyes, and those same lustrous eyes of hers seemed to have receded into her face. Her colour, too, had never been good, but its paper whiteness seemed to have greyed. ‘I hope I am not going to be ill,’ she said to herself. But the summer had been trying and the lodgers had caused so much extra work.
‘Of course,’ George had said, ‘if you insist on making money, I shall dock the allowance. That’s only fair, to take from it what you make extra. I am entitled to it.’
That had taken some time, the business of talking him round, for George, though he despised all matters mercenary, was mulish over finance. The lodgers had not been all profit. They were the overflow from the Royal Hotel, and some of them had not paid, or had taken the soap and the towels, whilst others had complained bitterly about everything; one old man had even made love to Mary, coming into the kitchen and putting an adipose arm round her waist. She had hated the ignominy of lodgers and had said so repeatedly. She vowed that she would take no more. Then, in the last week of September, she broke her vow. A chauffeur came in one evening, sent by the hotel. A nice enough young man in a spotless uniform. She told him that she did not take servants.
‘I ‒ I haven’t anywhere else, madam,’ he said. ‘I’d be no trouble, if you’d see your way.’
She seemed to recognise that he was something better, and, seeing her demur, he pressed his cause again. In the end she took him. He came in and went out again, and he had not gone long before a great grey car drew up at the door, in the amethyst shadowing of the September evening. A young man jumped out, a slender young man with a fresh face, and he rapped loudly. It was Jasmine who went to speak to him, and Mary rightly supposed him to be the chauffeur’s master. She herself was in the scullery and stayed there to finish her task. An hour later she went into the sitting-room, and found the stranger still there. He got up.
‘I am so sorry. I came for my chauffeur, but he isn’t here. Your daughter has been entertaining me. I come from the Midlands, and we seem to know a lot of mutual friends.’