Ruth's door was open when Hannah went up to bed and there was no light
in her room. Had Mr. Corder been up and blown it out, in the cause of
discipline? She was ready to rush downstairs and upbraid him, when a
sharp-whistled note called her in.
'I got into bed,' Ruth said slowly, 'and the matches weren't on the
table so I couldn't light the night-light and I thought I'd wait till
you came up.'
'If you got out of bed to open the door, why didn't you get the matches
at the same time?'
'The door wasn't shut,' Ruth said.
'I see,' said Hannah. She admired the strategy and the adroitness of
Ruth's explanation and she had to control the gratified twitching of
her lips as she lighted the guardian lamp. 'But, in future,' she said
severely, 'I shall light it myself when you go up to bed.'
'Ten minutes after would be better. Then you can turn out the gas, too.
I don't like turning out gas. I have to get out of bed again to see if
I've done it properly. Several times. Did you do that?'
'There was no gas in my home. Lamps downstairs, candles upstairs. And
on a very moony night, I didn't light my candle. We don't pull down
our bedroom blinds in the country, and the lady could look in if she
liked and I could look out and see her trailing her skirts over the
tree-tops. And the owls used to hoot as she went by.' She straightened
the quilt over Ruth's motionless little body. 'Go to sleep. Good night.'
'Just shut the door for a minute, please Miss Mole,' Ruth said quickly.
Hannah obeyed, and as she turned back to the bed she was thankful for
the nights of her childhood in the bare bedroom with the sloping roof
and the open window free of these lace curtains and venetian blinds and
she was sorry for Ruth who was saying slowly, 'I don't believe I've
ever heard an owl.'
'Not in Beresford Road, I'm afraid.'
'No, not owls.' She looked at Hannah as though she meant to say
something, and then decided to say something else. 'Do you go to your
home when you have a holiday?'
'It isn't mine any longer. It was sold when my father and mother died,
twenty years ago.'
'Twenty years! Then,' said Ruth, shutting her eyes and creasing her
forehead, 'I suppose you've got used to it by this time,' and Hannah
knew Ruth was thinking about death and about her mother, and the
question it had been impossible to ask Robert Corder was answered.
She felt a sharp pain in her throat, yet she could envy Ruth a love
which, in all probability had been without a blemish. The memory of it
was something to be cherished, and such a memory had been denied to
Hannah Mole.
She heaved a deep sigh. 'I don't think getting used to things is the
right way to deal with them,' she said. 'I think--' she was talking
more to herself than to Ruth, 'I think that's wasting them. You've got
to use them all the time.' She changed her tone and said cheerfully,
'And I didn't lose the whole of my home. I kept a tiny bit of it, a
little cottage and an orchard. I couldn't bear to let it go and that's
all I could afford to keep when the debts were paid.'
'Then you can go there, in your holidays, and hear the owls again.'
'Well, no, I can't very well,' Hannah said.
'Why not?'
'It's let.'
'Oh, I see. What a pity. But you get the money for it.'
'That's the idea,' Hannah said.
Ruth sighed regretfully. 'I'd like to hear those owls, Miss Mole--'
there was the pause Hannah was beginning to know--'do you like parrots?
I hate them.'
'You're full of hates, child. What's the matter with parrots? God made
them, I suppose.'
'Yes, but he made Mr. Samson, too. When you were in the country, you
hadn't any neighbours, had you?'
'Cows, sheep, horses, pigs, the owls--'
'But not a parrot or Mr. Samson. I wish he didn't live next door. He
always tries to talk to me when he sees me, over the hedge of the back
garden. And once he asked me to go into the house. He said he'd got a
kitten for me. So I said I didn't like kittens, but really, Miss Mole,
I adore them. But I was frightened of him and sometimes I dream about
him. But I used to find--I mean, if you talk about nasty things to
somebody, they stop worrying you.'
'And how long has this been worrying you?'
'Oh, ever since--about two years ago when he tried to give me the
kitten.'
'Poor old man!' Hannah said.
'I think he's an old beast.'
'There you are again! Is there anything you happen to care for, besides
kittens?'
'Lots of things,' Ruth said.
'Well, I should like to hear about them, some time, for a change. And I
daresay Mr. Samson's lonely too.'
'Too?' Ruth repeated with a catch of her breath.
'Yes. Like me,' Hannah said. 'Good night.'
A surprising answer for that little egotist and a good exit, she said
to herself with satisfaction. It would do Ruth no harm to learn that
other people, even those middle-aged people who seem so secure to
youth, could suffer like herself, and Hannah doubted whether, until
this moment, anyone in the house had given Miss Mole a thought detached
from some personal connection. Her comfort and happiness, for which
the family might have felt some responsibility, was either assumed
or ignored. She could well believe that Robert Corder considered any
inmate of his house a fortunate person, but even to Wilfrid, who was
as much an alien as herself, she was only a kind of mirror in which he
could study his own reflection, while Ruth's growing curiosity was only
a love of hearing stories. This lack of interest was not flattering,
but it had its advantages--like everything else--she told herself, as
she entered her dark bedroom and went to the open window.
She knelt down and, laying her hands on the sill, she rested her chin
on them. The roofs of the opposite houses were wet with a shower the
clouds had dropped as they scurried before a harassing little wind,
like ships sacrificing their cargo under pursuit, and the wind that
chased them brought to Hannah's credulous nostrils a damp smell of
apples and moss. Far away, against the dark sky, sweeping in ascending
fields from the docks of Radstowe, she thought, or imagined, she
could see the high ground hiding her own country. It lay snugly
behind that barrier, with its little farms and orchards, its flat
lands criss-crossed by willow-edged ditches and cupped by hills. It
was a country that satisfied two sides of Hannah's nature. She loved
the homeliness of the farms and cottages, washed with pink or white,
each with its big or little orchard where spotted pigs rooted in the
long grass: she loved the hills groined with pale limestone and their
solitary moor-like tops where the heather became black with distance,
but it was in the mingling of the familiar and the unknown that she
found her chief delight. They seemed separate, but they were one: the
homesteads and the fields were only flesh on the bones of earth and the
same heart was beating under the grey rocks and the apple trees, just
as Hannah's heart was beating alike for the woman who wanted her own
fireside, and the one who wanted to wander, the one with a sane desire
for love and its obligations and the other who had learnt to fear
anything in the nature of a contract.
Her own fireside was over there, behind the barrier, and if she ever
sat at it again it would be alone, or with a dog or cat for company. It
was ten years since she had been inside the house and since then she
had seen it only once, coming upon it stealthily and peering through
the apple trees to make sure of its existence outside her dreams. She
had taken care not to intrude on the tenant, lest he should think she
came in search of the rent he never paid, but she had seen that the
house was really there, a little flat-fronted cottage, badly needing
another wash of pink, with a plume of smoke very blue against a cold
grey sky. That was five years ago and anything might have happened to
it since then. It hurt her to think of it neglected, perhaps deserted.
It was cruel to ignore it, absurd to own property about which her pride
forbade her to ask questions, she was acting with recklessness of the
future when she might want her home, but she had been a fool and she
must pay for her folly.
The folly had had its sweetness and she remembered the sweetness and
folly together, the precious and the worthless, without any sense
of incongruity. All life could be likened to that episode, and all
human beings, and the worst sorrows came from the failure to accept
imperfection, knowing it for the alloy it was and yet, by some strange
spiritual alchemy, seeing it as pure gold.
'Like a wedding ring,' Hannah said, twisting her lips ironically.
A little spatter of rain fell between her and those memories. She
looked from the dim line on the horizon to the lights of Radstowe, far
below on her left hand, and she thought they were like the camp-fires
of innumerable explorers in a strange and dangerous country. Each man
tended his own fire sedulously and to one, as to Hannah Mole, what lay
beyond the ring of light was hopeful adventure; to another, as to Ruth,
the justification of his fears was in the darkness.
Hopeful adventure, even here in Robert Corder's house! She was grateful
to Fortune who, in making her a servant, had remembered to give her
freedom and happiness in herself. She might have been meek and dutiful
and dull inside as well as out, or she might have been discontented
and defiant. She was lucky, she thought, as she knelt there with her
face towards the cottage which might be crumbling and her back to
the narrow room which held everything else she had, for the chief
of her possessions, as she knew, was the power to see those lights
as camp-fires, and herself as an adventuress. She was not sure she
told the truth in saying she was lonely. Yes, lonely and tired too,
sometimes, and chilled by the thought of poor and solitary old age, but
these were moods that passed and there remained for her good company
the many natures in her own thin body. And the rich old gentleman was
steadily approaching.
The thought of him reminded her of Mr. Samson, who had offered Ruth a
kitten, and withheld information from Robert Corder. He seemed to make
a habit of talking to people over hedges; she would give him another
opportunity, she decided, and very busy with her inventions about him,
she undressed swiftly. He might be a bad old man, but he might be a
rich one, and if he was so free with his kittens for a little girl, she
said to herself in the vulgar manner that made Lilla wince, he might be
equally free with his money for an older one.
'Upon my word,' she said aloud, 'I believe I'd marry anyone who asked
me--except Robert Corder,' and she chuckled as she got into bed and
chuckled again when she remembered that she was lying on Wilfrid's
mattress.
That was a dishonourable trick, she supposed, but it did not prevent
her from sleeping well. It was not the first she had played in the
course of her career and it would not be the last. Each week she
took threepence from the housekeeping money to put in the plate on
Sunday, and she owed Mrs. Widdows exactly a penny halfpenny, the price
of a reel of silk. But what did Mrs. Widdows owe her in the form of
kindness? And why should she pay for listening to sermons she could
hear for nothing from Robert Corder on any other day of the week? These
rigid codes of conduct were made for people who did not know morality
when they saw it. It was immoral for the hardest-worked person in the
house to lie on the hardest bed: it would be wrong for Mr. Corder's
housekeeper to let the offertory plate go by without a contribution,
but it was worse to rob the poor in the person of herself. She was
quite happy about the weekly threepence and quite safe, for, to do
Robert Corder justice, he did not interfere with her expenditure or
over-look her accounts, and she recognized his little outburst for what
it was, but there might yet be trouble with Ethel about the mattress.
Strange that, in a world where pain seemed inevitable, there should be
trouble about a mattress! Yes, it seemed inevitable, not for her, who
knew how to protect herself, but for nearly everybody else: for little
Mrs. Ridding with that enigmatical look on her face, for Ethel, busy
with her suspicions, for Ruth with her fears, even for Mr. Blenkinsop
with his frustrated desire for peace.
She fell asleep, thinking of Mr. Blenkinsop with the bags of gold under
his arms.