The Passionate Heart (Timeless Classics Collection)

by Ursula Bloom

  She groped for a chair, and, sinking into it, watched Rupert with distressed and misty eyes. He came close.

  ‘You know how I have been feeling about her for a long time,’ he said; ‘well, it’s come to a point now. I want to marry her.’

  ‘What does Jasmine say?’

  ‘She says yes.’

  Mary felt her mouth going dry again, and she asked painfully: ‘When do you want to marry her?’

  ‘As soon as I can.’

  She stood up. ‘I went to a doctor to-day,’ she told him, ‘and the verdict was bad. In Jasmine’s own interests it should be quite soon.’

  ‘I’m sorry. What did the doctor say?’

  ‘Oh, nothing. It isn’t much. One never knows. With Jasmine married I could go into a hostel, somewhere with no housekeeping, and nurse up. Only, Rupert, it ought to be soon.’

  ‘What about her father?’

  ‘He must be told, of course, but there is no consent to bother about. There is no need to wait. I’ll get her trousseau.’ She gasped suddenly. She had no money and later she would need money badly … to die! Odd that it should cost money to die; but it did. She modified her version. ‘I’ll do what I can; we are not rich, you know.’

  ‘I’m very sorry about you being so seedy,’ said Rupert.

  ‘Please don’t worry about me. This should be one of the happiest days of your life, of both your lives, of … of all our lives.’

  ‘It is. She’s a darling. By jove, I’m lucky.’

  She smiled again. ‘And Jasmine is lucky, too, for you’re a dear.’

  ‘May we call her in and tell her you agree?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Mary called her in. Jasmine, with her bright eyes, and her colour coming and going, and already a mist as of bridal tulle about her. She went straight to her mother’s arms and clung, hiding her dear young face in Mary’s throat and whispering passionately: ‘Mummy, Mummy, does this make up for Hubert, a little?’

  Mary held her and kissed her, and, as she kissed her, she said: ‘I’m so happy, darling, so happy, and so proud.’

  PART VI: PETER

  I

  Lying in the sparely-furnished room at the Home one could look upon things. It was a pallid apricot-distempered room of tiny dimensions, and the iron bed was painted white. In the locker were the things that she needed most, and in the chest of drawers (also painted white) the rest of her belongings. On top of it, under the small hanging glass, lay an old ivory hairbrush inscribed ‘Mary’. That was all.

  She had come here for treatment. It was in London, in a poor neighbourhood, and the charges were reasonable. The matron was a hard-faced woman, in a grey, apronless uniform. Some of the nurses were nice, others were unfriendly; nurses are like that. Their intimacy with pain and suffering habitually embitters them. They cannot adopt the broader, saner outlook of the masculine mind, which, absorbing knowledge, metes out but pity in return. Few of these women pitied. They said that sympathy did not help a patient; they knew so little of humanity, so little of life, and they were satisfied with that little. There lay the folly.

  But the bed was comfortable, and here they made the pain better. Dr. Hix had recommended her to Dr. Jerome, and he had managed to get Mary into the Home for a small interval at a very moderate charge. Dr. Jerome had been the spar to which she had clung in her sea of hopelessness.

  She had been to see him soon after Jasmine’s engagement. George had paid the necessary three guineas, after much protest.

  She saw it all again as she lay in the slim bed, and she recalled it gratefully.

  Sitting in the sunny, queerly-shaped room overlooking the park, with the divan, and the persian rug, and the fire. Her utter hopelessness, the leper shut out from the rest of the world. Before her only the gruesome pain, only the bitter despair, and then the lingering, tortured end. She knew Dr. Jerome as a cancer specialist; here came all such poor condemned people as herself. Well might they write above his door: ‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.’

  He came in. He was different. She knew that instantly. Was he young or old? She could not tell. A fairish man, with light brown eyes ‒ or were they blue? ‒ with a well-knit figure beneath his long white coat. His eyes read down into her soul, and she, looking up at him, saw him as a being ageless, timeless, limitless. In his able hands she saw the chance of life; it radiated from him; he was life. It issued in streams from his vivid personality. If she could only stay with him he would

  save her. That room had become very still.

  ‘Well?’ he asked.

  ‘I know I haven’t any chance; you needn’t try to veil it,’ she told him.

  He sat down by her on the sofa, he took her cold hand in his warm live one. ‘We all have a chance,’ he said; ‘if you think like that you won’t live. We none of us go on living when we give up hope. I’m going to do all I can, but I can do nothing if you won’t help me.’

  She said curiously: ‘What are you?’

  ‘I? I’m a doctor.’

  ‘I know, but you are something else besides; you are real.’

  She felt that her thoughts might be profane, but he reminded her of a Christ more than of a man. He was so God-like in his ageless ego.

  ‘What I am doesn’t matter; it’s what I am going to do for you that matters. I am going to make you better, but you’ve got to want to live.’

  ‘I have little to live for.’

  ‘You’re married. You have a child.’

  ‘Yes, but I am separated from my husband, and Jasmine will be married next month.’

  ‘Probably she will need you more than she has ever needed you before,’ he said, and smiled. ‘Now, I have a nursing home. I shall want you to come there for treatment every little while.’

  ‘I haven’t the money.’

  ‘Nonsense. I will fit the costs to suit your income. We’ve got to put hope into you.’

  She thought of the line, ‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter here’, and of its absurdity. He was powerful; out of his immense personality he radiated hope.

  When she left him she walked into the park, and she smelt the soft smell of autumn and saw new lights, blue lights, about the trees. She had never noticed the loveliness of life before. It was very beautiful. London with the twilight setting in, in amethyst smudges down the streets, and with the park hidden in a haze the colour of sloes and of grapes, and all blue beauty. She went home comforted; she went home with a big strength ready for her battle, and some of Dr. Jerome’s terrific personality eddying within her. It was not going to be so difficult after all.

  II

  Jasmine’s wedding was a quiet affair. By then, of course, the girl had had to be told a little. Mary had had to explain her immediate movement to put Jasmine in a bedroom of her own. The child must run no risk. Mary had concocted the maddest stories of talking in her sleep, and had, she supposed, covered it very well. But Jasmine had been suspicious.

  ‘What will you do after I am married, Mummy?’

  ‘I am selling everything.’

  ‘But why? You must live somewhere.’

  ‘I shall come to London to be near you. Rupert won’t deny me that little favour. Rupert knows you are all I have got.’

  ‘That’s a nice plan,’ said Jasmine approvingly.

  The furniture was sold a week before the wedding, for the simple reason that money for the trousseau had to be found. When George, in a flying visit, had been appealed to, in mild amazement he had protested that he had not a sou.

  ‘Good heavens,’ said George, ‘why, I thought she was marrying a rich man?’

  ‘So she is. But we can’t expect Rupert to pay for her trousseau.’

  ‘I don’t see why not.’

  ‘But, George ‒’

  ‘Oh, you’ve always got such extraordinary ideas. I’m not proud. He is rich, he has a title, they’re supposed to be somebodies; I am sure I don’t see why they shouldn’t. Anyway, I can’t.’

  George again washed his hands of the who
le business. Jasmine, he objected, had never consulted him about her engagement, so why burden him with her trousseau? And, anyway, what about poor Hubert? George took on the role of the devoted lover, and believed that Jasmine was still devoted to the young fellow at heart.

  One could never do anything with George when he adopted that attitude. He was proud enough of the wedding, and he insisted upon alluding to Jasmine as ‘her ladyship’, even before the knot was tied; he spoke of her thus because it gave him a feeling of advancement in life, but to such banalities as paying for her ladyship’s petticoats and vests he could not descend.

  ‘So stupid being so grand,’ said he. ‘Tell him you can’t afford it, and he’ll pay.’

  But Mary was proud. The clothes must be in keeping with Jasmine’s station, and she bought only the best, but the accounts for them made her sick at heart. It was a cruel thought that all Mamma’s furniture, such splendid old stuff too, should fall beneath the hammer. Mary had known it from her earliest youth, and it literally gave her a pain to see it sold; but it had to go.

  ‘Little enough I’ve got out of my marriage,’ said George. ‘You had no money, and even the furniture, that should have been mine by rights, you insist on selling and grabbing all the money. Thank God I’m not so keen on money. I hate it.’

  The sale being at the cottage and the cottage being in a poor locality, the prices were not good. Still, the whole lot fetched a fair sum, and she could not grumble. She and Jasmine were in rooms for the time being. A week later Jasmine was married.

  It was a November day, unpropitious, for there was very little sunshine, and wraith-like mists about the trees. As Mary went across the dewy churchyard on George’s arm, she saw a half-dug grave mouldering in one corner. The panoply of death is hideous. She shuddered and pulled herself away. Soon, she thought, soon … and then she remembered Dr. Jerome and a faint hope suffused her. Death is an impersonal affair, it never happens to oneself; to all the rest of the world, yes! She raised her head proudly.

  The service was quick.

  There was Jasmine coming up the aisle in her white loveliness; she looked more like a flower than a girl, for her face had gone lily-pale, and her eyes were dark and lustrous under the wreath of her name-flower. She had been crying, there were tears on her cheeks still. Rupert was nervous, his face was flushed, and his young eyes keenly blue. He and his best man had had more than a ‘couple’ to keep up their spirits, and now he was vaguely alarmed that he might show it.

  Mary hardly realised the service. She was so overjoyed that now Jasmine was safe; she would be protected. She could never fall back into George’s hands. Later, when it was all over, they went into the vestry, mildewed and smelling of disuse; they clung together.

  ‘Mummy, Mummy!’ cried Jasmine, and she was actually sobbing.

  Pungent smell of lilies and orange-bloom, of mildew and death, and assailing loveliness of jasmine. A wedding and joy, and, outside in the bleak and sterile churchyard, a grave half-dug. ‘It’s all wrong,’ Mary told herself. ‘I’m dying, and I’m trying to pretend I’m not. I ought to feel different, and I don’t. Not yet.’

  She told George that night. Everyone had gone. There had been a last glimpse of Jasmine from the car window, Jasmine seeming strangely aged as she looked out searchingly for her mother. Everyone had gone, and George was waiting to catch the late train. He came into the room, hushed in Jasmine’s absence. It was a square room with a shiny horsehair sofa under the window, draped incongruously with a lace antimacassar. There was a bamboo fern-stand in one corner, from which hung baskets of dying ferns. Mary was sitting on a slippery horsehair armchair, with its low seat and tall back, and wearing its antimacassar much as old ladies wear their caps. George came in and sat opposite, one eye on the marble clock which took up all the space on the slender mantelshelf. It was a dreary November night, with the wind howling outside, and the landlady had brought them in two cups of cocoa to sip by the frosty fire.

  ‘And I went up to the specialist,’ Mary added. ‘He was very nice, but, of course, it is quite hopeless.’

  ‘You mean …?’

  ‘I have at the most six months to live. It’s inoperable.’

  George stared dully, with his mouth gaping. After a moment tears welled into his eyes, and he put out a flaccid hand. ‘You mean nothing can be done? Oh, Mary, what ‒ what will happen?’

  ‘I am not crying.’

  ‘You were always so aloof, so glacial.’

  ‘I wonder.’

  ‘We didn’t understand each other very well, and now ‒ now I’m frightened,’ he whispered like a little child afraid of the dark.

  ‘I haven’t meant to be aloof,’ she told him. ‘Sometimes I wondered if you understood. I don’t think you understand now; still, you’ll be free soon.’

  She was sorry she had said that. It was bitter and cruel. It was the sort of thing that hurt him, and it did not avail her in the least. She apologised in a muffled voice, but George had taken up the cudgels.

  ‘Being free won’t help me now; you wouldn’t free me when I wanted to marry Flora.’

  ‘I thought you’d finished with her?’

  ‘Yes, I have.’

  ‘But there’s Mrs. Knight. Surely you want to do the right thing by her?’

  ‘There has never been anything between me and Mrs. Knight. I have never so much as kissed her.’

  ‘But I saw you kiss her!’

  George glared fiercely. ‘Then you’d no business to be looking,’ he declared. Really, one could do nothing with George! He continued after a moment, a little abashed: ‘I’m sorry. I oughtn’t to talk to a dying woman like that.’

  Mary winced. ‘You needn’t put it quite so crudely. It is a little comprehensive, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I don’t seem to be able to say the right thing ever. Here’s Jasmine married, and we hope to goodness happily, but personally I don’t like the look of that young man; I think he drinks. Now this.’

  ‘I am sorry to be so much nuisance. George, I’ll try and make it as brief as possible.’

  ‘You’re only saying that to harrow me.’

  ‘I didn’t do so intentionally.’

  ‘Well, it harrows me all the same.’ He wept again. Anything more irritating one could not imagine than George sitting on a shiny horsehair sofa and weeping crocodile tears. Then suddenly he caught sight of the clock again, and remembered his train; he gathered his things together rapidly. ‘Something will have to be done about it,’ he declared. ‘I’ll think it over. You ought to come back to Pebbridge.’

  Hope, a sudden golden gleam of it, filled her. Pebbridge, with the Georgian pillars on either side of the wide step, and the roses crushed redly against them. Pebbridge, with the laburnum dripping goldly from the fragilely leafed boughs; the lawn, and the paddock beyond where the young lambs danced on sheep-nibbled turf. Further on, the farm, with the stallions turned loose in the church meadow. It had meant so much to her, that tiny village in the valley; she wanted it so badly. She stood still and she quivered full of her yearning for home.

  ‘If I come, George, these women …?’

  ‘What women?’

  She began again. ‘Is Mrs. Knight there?’

  ‘Of course she is there. She cooks for me. She is my housekeeper.’

  ‘I ‒ I couldn’t be there with her.’

  George shrugged his shoulders. ‘You always did make difficulties,’ he complained; ‘how can you expect a man to give up everything?’

  She let him go quite thankfully.

  III

  Lying here in the tiny attic room of the Home, there was plenty of time to revise life, to look through its chapters again, to edit it. She now saw for the first time many of the errors which she had made, many of the opportunities by which she had not benefited.

  The pain had come upon her suddenly. She had not supposed that it would be as bad as all that. Something settled firmly in her right side, an octopus-like creature which, stretching its clawi
ng tentacles, sucked at her vitals, and was ravenous in its demands. Their rigorous refusal to give her morphia reminded her starkly that there was worse to follow. They would treat her with rays, doctoring her up for a while, and then let her go again into the world which she would soon know no more.

  She stayed in those intervals in a pitiable place called a ladies’ hostel. It was in Gower Street, a grimly grey street, stretching up to New Oxford Street, where there are many similar institutions. It was cheap, and it offered a feeble sort of companionship. That was all that one could say in its favour.The general sitting-room with its yellowed curtain stiff with dirt, its wan fires and uncomfortable chairs, its few poor tenants. There was Mrs. Gunn, who lectured on cookery when she could find anywhere to lecture; Mrs. Stevens, who did nothing and therefore found time heavy on her hands; Mrs. Robbins, who played patience. There were others who came in in the evenings, people engaged in work all day; they paid less because they stipulated for a cubicle, for breakfast, and for dinner, only; but the intimate life of the hostel was confined solely to Mrs. Gunn with her wispy head, her furtive eyes, to Mrs. Stevens, arrogant and snobbish, and dear fat little Mrs. Robbins poring endlessly over her well-thumbed cards. She was a humble little person, this Mrs. Robbins, a widow, and she let Mrs. Stevens, whose husband had run away, order her about disgracefully. Mrs. Stevens said that really she was rich, but poor pending a suit in Chancery. It was not always the suit in Chancery either; sometimes it was the return of an uncle from Australia, or the arrival of a delayed ship from the Indian Ocean where it had been fishing for pearls, or a mysterious will. She had rich relations, titled people; she gave one to infer that ‘Stevens’ was an adopted name. Dear old soul, how she loved to cloak herself in the shroud of mystery, wrapping it about herself shawl wise.

  ‘The people here,’ she told Mary, ‘they grate. They’re not used to things like I am. I hate dinner with no dessert. I hate milk in my coffee. I once had a friend who was a duke; I don’t believe in repeating names, it doesn’t do, but he was a famous duke. He said to me “Emily” ‒ he always called me Emily ‒ “what is life without its trimmings?” Wasn’t he right?’