MISS MOLE
A NOVEL BY E. H. YOUNG
Author of _William_
LONDON · JONATHAN CAPE · TORONTO
FIRST PUBLISHED JULY, 1930
SECOND IMPRESSION JULY, 1930
THIRD IMPRESSION SEPTEMBER, 1930
FOURTH IMPRESSION SEPTEMBER, 1930
JONATHAN CAPE LTD. 30 BEDFORD SQUARE LONDON
AND 91 WELLINGTON STREET WEST, TORONTO
JONATHAN CAPE & HARRISON SMITH INC.
139 EAST 46TH STREET NEW YORK
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
IN THE CITY OF OXFORD
AT THE ALDEN PRESS
BY E. H. YOUNG
WILLIAM
THE MISSES MALLETT
MOOR FIRES
THE VICAR'S DAUGHTER
MISS MOLE
CHAPTER I
The voice of her new friend, bidding her good night, followed Miss
Hannah Mole as she went down the garden path, and the laurel bushes,
as she brushed by them, repeated in a whisper, yet with a strange
assurance, the persuasive invitation of Mrs. Gibson to come back soon.
'Yes, yes, I'll come!' Hannah called out hurriedly and she glanced
over her shoulder as the golden patch on the path disappeared. Mrs.
Gibson had shut the front door: she had returned to the problems which
ought never to have arisen in her respectable house, and Hannah, freed
from the necessity for action, for the expression of sympathy and
the giving of advice, was able to admire the skill she had shown in
these activities, but first, because she was grateful by nature as
well as appreciative of herself, she offered up thanks for the timely
justification of her faith in the interest of life. That faith had been
persistent though, latterly, it had demanded a dogged perseverance, and
at the moment when she most needed encouragement it had been supplied.
She would not ignore the creditable quickness with which she had
grasped the opportunity offered; it was, indeed, only to those with
seeing eyes and hearing ears that miracles were vouchsafed, and who but
Hannah Mole, at her impact with Mrs. Gibson's broad bosom, would have
had the prescience to linger after her apology and give Mrs. Gibson
time to recover her breath and explain why she stood outside her gate,
bare-headed and in a flutter.
On the same spot Hannah now stood, a little breathless herself,
through excitement and the effort to reconcile her good fortune with
the small deception she had practised on her employer. The effort was
not successful and she renewed her conviction that the power which
controlled her life was not hampered by man's conventional morality,
otherwise, she would surely have been punished and not rewarded for the
lie which had induced Mrs. Widdows to send her companion shopping at
the hour when she should have been mending Mrs. Widdows' second best
black dress. Yes, Hannah should have been knocked down by a motor car
or, worse still, have been robbed of her purse, for hiding the reel of
silk and pretending she could not find it.
The crowded little sitting-room had been unbearably hot. A large
fire blazed and crackled, the canary made sad, subdued movements in
its cage, Mrs. Widdows' corsets creaked regularly, her large knees
almost touched Hannah's own, for the two women sat near each other to
share the lamplight, and Hannah, luckier than the canary, had found
a means of escape. Too wise to suggest that she should go out and
buy the necessary silk, she had merely remarked with regret that it
would be impossible for Mrs. Widdows to wear the second best dress
on the morrow, and, at once, Mrs. Widdows had indignantly driven her
forth with orders to return quickly. And nearly two hours had passed
and the silk was still in the shop. Hannah was indifferent about the
silk, for the reel she had removed from the work-basket was in the
pocket of her coat, and she was twopence halfpenny and an adventure to
the good, but the passage of time was a serious matter, so serious
that another hour or two would make no difference. She glanced up the
street, and then down, and while she seemed to hesitate between duty
and desire, she had already made her choice. She would go down, towards
the traffic and the shops. By the light of the street lamp, she looked
at the old-fashioned flat watch she carried in her handbag. It was six
o'clock. Most of the shops would be shut, but there would be light
and movement; tram-cars full of passengers would be leaping in their
advance, like strange beasts rejoicing in their strength; people on
foot would be streaming homewards from the city of Radstowe, and Miss
Hannah Mole, who had no home of her own, would look at these people
with envy but with the cynical reflection that some of those homes
might be comparable to that of Mrs. Widdows--stuffy and unkind, or to
the one she had just left--holding tragedy maliciously streaked with
humour. In nearly twenty years of earning her living, as companion,
nursery governess or useful help, she had lost all illusions except
those she created for herself, but these appeared at her command and,
stirred by her late adventure, she was ready to find another in the
approach of each person she met. In Prince's Road, however, there
were not many people and such as there were walked quietly, as though
the influence of the old terraced houses on one side of the road were
stronger than that of the later buildings on the other. It was the old
houses that gave its character to the street and here, as elsewhere
in Upper Radstowe, the gently persistent personality of the place
remained, unmoved by any material or spiritual changes since the first
red bricks were well and truly laid. It was like a masterpiece of
portrait painting in which a person of another generation looks down on
his descendants and dominates them through the union of the painter's
art and something permanent in himself. Even where the old houses had
disappeared, their ghosts seemed to hover over the streets and Hannah,
too, walked quietly, careful not to disturb them. In no other place
of her acquaintance did the trees cast such lovely shadows in the
lamplight, and on this windless night the leaves were patterned with
extraordinary, ethereal clearness on the pavement. Now and then she
paused to look at them, puzzled that the reflected object should always
seem more beautiful than the original, and eager to find some analogy
to this experience in her mental processes.
'Not the thing itself, but its shadow,' she murmured, as she saw her
own shadow going before her, and she nodded as though she had solved
a problem. She judged herself by the shadow she chose to project for
her own pleasure and it was her business in life--and one in which she
usually failed--to make other people accept her creation. Yes, she
failed, she failed! They would not look at the beautiful, the valuable
Hannah Mole: they saw the substance and disapproved of it and she did
not blame them: it was what she would have done herself and in the one
case when she had concentrated on the fine shadow presented to her, she
had been mistaken.
She pushed past that thought with an increase of her pace and reached
the wide thoroughfare where the tram-cars clanged and swayed. Here she
paused and looked about her. This part of Radstowe was a new growth,
it was not the one of her affections, but on this autumn evening it
had its beauty. The broad space made by the meeting of several roads
was roughly framed in trees, for in Radstowe trees grew everywhere, as
church spires seemed to spring up at every corner, and the electric
light from tall standards cast a theatrical glare on the greens and
browns and yellows of their leaves.
At Hannah's left hand, in a shrubbery of its own, there stood a
building, in a debased Greek style, whither the Muses occasionally drew
the people of Radstowe to a half-hearted worship. The darkness in which
it was retired, suddenly illuminated by the head-lights of a passing
car, dealt kindly with its faults, and there was mystery in its pale,
pillared façade, a suggestion of sensitive aloofness in its withdrawal
from the road. When Hannah passed this temple in the day-time, her
long nose would twitch in derision at its false severity and the
rusty-looking shrubs dedicated to its importance in the æsthetic life
of Radstowe--had the gardener, she wondered, chosen laurels with any
thought beyond their sturdiness?--but now it had an artificial charm
for her: she could ignore the placards on the enclosing railings and
see it as another example of the city's facility for happily mixing the
incongruous.
She stood on the pavement, a thin, shabby figure, so insignificant in
her old hat and coat, so forgetful of herself in her enjoyment of the
scene, that she might have been wearing a cloak of invisibility, and
while she watched the traffic and saw the moving tram-cars like magic
lantern slides, quick and coloured, no one who saw through that cloak
would have suspected her power for transmuting what was common into
what was rare and, in that occupation, keeping anxious thoughts at
bay. To-night she could not keep them all at bay for though she was
pleased with her adventure and the speculations in which it permitted
her to indulge, she was altruistically concerned for the other actors
in it, and it would have obvious consequences for herself. Mrs. Widdows
was not a lady to whom confidences could be made or who would accept
excuses, and Hannah would presently find herself without a situation.
It was a familiar experience but, in this case, her contempt would
have to be assumed, and she made a rapid calculation of her savings,
shrugged her shoulders and took a half turn to the right. A cup of
coffee and a bun would strengthen her for the encounter with her
employer and, as she sipped and ate, she could pretend, once more, that
her appearance belied her purse and that she was one of those odd, rich
women who take a pleasure in looking poor. She was good at pretending
and she thanked God sincerely that her self-esteem had enabled her to
resist the effects of condescension, of the studied kindness which
hurts proud spirits, the slyer variety she had encountered, in her
youth, from men, when compliance and disdain were equally disastrous to
her prosperity, the bullying of people uncertain of their authority,
and the heartlessness of those who saw her as a machine set going
at their order and unable to stop without another. Her independence
had survived all this and it was, as she knew but could not regret,
her conviction of her dignity as a human being which, more than any
of her faults, had been her misfortune, but it had its uses when she
demanded a bun and a cup of coffee of young women who respected richer
appetites, and she went on in this confidence, and with pleasure for
though this street might have found itself at home in any city, she
knew what lay beyond it and she treated herself as she would have
treated a child who thinks it has been cheated of a promise: there was
not much further to go, the surprise was close at hand, and when it
came she rewarded herself with a long sigh of pleasure.
She stood at the top of a steep hill, lined with shops, edged with
lamp-posts, and the shops and the lamp-posts seemed to be running,
pell-mell, to the bottom, to meet and lose themselves in the blue mist
lying there. Golden and russet trees were growing in the open space
which the mist now enwrapped, their branches were spangled with the
lights of still more lamps, and though the colours of the trees were
hardly perceptible at that distance and in the increasing darkness,
Hannah's memory could reinforce her sight and what she saw was like a
fine painted screen for the cathedral of which the dark tower could
be seen against a sky which looked pale by contrast. Whether the
prospect was as lovely to others as to her she did not know, nor did
it matter; the wonder of it was that her childish recollections had
not deceived her. She had stood on that spot, for the first time,
thirty years ago when, after a day's shopping, she and her parents had
halted for a moment before they made their descent on their way to the
station, and the lights, the mist, the trees peering through a magic
lake of blue, had been no more fairy-like to her then than they were
now. There were things, she told herself, that were imperishable, but
she smiled as she remembered how her father had attributed the fairy
blue to the damp rising from the river and how her mother had sighed
at the downward jolt. For the small Hannah--and she pictured herself
in her queer clothes and country-made boots, with her father, gnarled
like one of his own apple trees on one side of her, and her mother,
as rosy as the apples, on the other--it had been a journey of delight
which suffered no diminishment, for no sooner had they reached the blue
and lost, in gaining, it, than they turned a corner and were in the
midst of a confusion as exciting as a circus, for here huge, coloured
tram-cars--and Hannah never lost her love for them--were gathered
round a large triangle of paving, and when one monster, carefully
controlled, glided away to the sound of a bell and the spluttering of
sparks overhead, another would take its place, and the first would be
seen growing smaller as it gathered speed and swaying in the pleasure
of its own strength. There seemed no end to these leviathans, with
their insides illuminated as, surely, that of Jonah's whale had never
been, and when she was hustled into one of them, with pushings from
both parents, before she had had her fill of gazing, she almost lost a
glimpse of the masts and funnels of ships rising, as it seemed, from
the street, and though she was to learn that here a river carried in a
culvert met the water of the docks, knowledge, which spoils so much,
had not deprived the young Hannah, or the mature one, of a recurring
astonishment at the sight.
Much had changed in the city since those days. The steep street
roared with ascending and purred with descending motor cars; there
were more people on the pavements--where did they come from? Hannah
asked, thinking of the declining birth-rate--but she did not resent
their presence. A throng of people excited her with its reminder that
each separate person had a claim on life, a demand to make of it as
imperious as her own, and an obligation towards it, a thought that
was both humiliating and enlivening. And she had no miserliness in
her pleasures, no feeling that they were increased by being hidden.
Involuntarily, she half flung out a hand as though she invited all
these strangers to share with her the beauty spread out below, and it
was with regret, but a pressing hunger, that she turned into a tea shop
a few paces down the street.