Robert Corder's work took him out of the house for a great part of
the day, but it also brought him back at times when a business man is
in his office and knows nothing of domestic affairs until he returns
to find a meal awaiting him and the work of the day apparently done.
Robert Corder was conscious perforce of the doings of the household. He
would swing down the garden path in the morning and meet the butcher's
boy carrying a recognisable joint, and if the joint did not appear in
a cooked condition that evening, he would wonder where it was and why
Miss Mole had ordered it a day before it was needed, or he would come
back and see half the drawing-room furniture in the hall and get a
glimpse of Miss Mole doing something with a duster or a feather broom.
His study was never disturbed in this manner. The fire was lighted
before breakfast, and the room, presumably, dusted and swept, and when
he was in the house he chose to sit there, but, even in that sanctuary,
he could not be unaware of sounds and movements. He could hear the
front door and the back door bells when they were rung and the thumping
feet of Doris as she ran up the three stairs from the kitchen, and if
she did not introduce a visitor into the study, he would, as likely
as not, hear her voice, with its Radstowe burr, calling Miss Mole to
settle some question with which she could not deal herself. He could
distinguish Ethel's prancing step from Miss Mole's quick, even one, and
sometimes, when he heard the front door shut, he would stroll to his
window to see whether it was his housekeeper or his daughter who had
gone out. When it was his daughter, he would have a slight feeling of
discomfort: when it was Miss Mole he felt an active irritation. There
was something wrong with Ethel's appearance and he could not give it a
name, but he knew she did not look definitely feminine, like Miss Patsy
Withers, in spite of her bright colours, or completely unconscious of
herself, as her mother had been, and she certainly was not pretty.
That, perhaps, was a good thing. It would have been a great and highly
distasteful anxiety to have had a daughter who attracted young men, and
Ethel had given her heart to her work and seemed to be content. People
spoke very well of her in the chapel and told him he should be as proud
of such a daughter as she should be of such a father. This praise of
her seemed to him somewhat exaggerated, but there was no doubt she was
a good girl and her fits of passion seemed to be less frequent, but
it was difficult to be patient with her nervousness and secretly he
resented, while he benefited from, her protective plainness.
When he watched Miss Mole it was with definitely antagonistic feelings.
The alert bearing of her head, her quick step, seemed to him unsuitable
in a housekeeper, and arrogant in a woman who had no pretensions to
good looks. If she had to be plain and thin, she should also have been
meek, and he supposed it was possible to be domestically intelligent
without looking as though she had some secret source of satisfaction
in herself. That look had been growing on her lately and he could not
but connect it with the visit and the letter of Mr. Blenkinsop. He
had seen her as an unfortunate woman, undesired by any man, and he had
despised her accordingly, and with the suspicion that Samuel Blenkinsop
had found something in her which he had missed himself, he immediately
set about searching for it and felt uneasy. He remembered, too, his
discovery of Wilfrid, sitting on the floor and talking to her, not
dutifully, but with enjoyment sparkling in his dark eyes, and it was
increasingly evident that Ruth liked her.
Robert Corder did not understand that he was always jealous of those
who gave to some one who was not himself and of those who received:
what he did realise was that Miss Mole had some mysterious power to
make certain people like her and that she did not like him, and as
it was impossible for him to like a person first, he remained in his
state of irritated interest and curiosity. Mrs. Spenser-Smith had been
wise in her choice of a housekeeper: his house was well kept, his food
was well cooked, and Ruth looked healthier, but Mrs. Spenser-Smith
probably had no experience of Miss Mole as an inmate of her house, of
this personality which gave every promise of being properly negative
and then developed signs of positive character. Not once, since her
arrival, had Miss Mole asked Robert Corder's advice. The kitchen range,
the gas, the hot-water, might go wrong, and Miss Mole was equal to
them or found some one else to manage them; she had no difficulty in
keeping her accounts; she brought him no tales of dilatory or dishonest
tradesmen. This peace from domestic care was what he wanted, what Mrs.
Spenser-Smith had told him he ought to have and what Ethel had not
been able to give him, but he would have been better pleased if he
could have believed that Miss Mole was making determined efforts and
overcoming her natural disabilities for his sake, instead of taking
everything in her easy stride. He knew nothing of Miss Mole's real
difficulties, of the constant caution necessary to prevent Ethel's
jealousy when any two members of the family paid more attention to each
other than they did to her, to give her encouragement without raising
false hopes, to damp down her threatened returns to sentimentality
about Wilfrid, to give her the position of mistress of the house
while she did nothing to sustain it. Miss Mole had to intervene in
the quarrels which sprang up so quickly between the sisters, to avoid
giving evidence of the sympathy between Wilfrid and herself, to steer
conversations into safe waters and, above all, to conceal the control
she really exercised. It was exhausting work but it did not exist for
Robert Corder. The family of the minister of Beresford Road Chapel
should be, and therefore was, a happy one, and his own griefs, his
consciousness of the different treatment he received in the chapel from
what he received at home, were not allowed to mar the concord, but it
seemed strange to him that while Mrs. Spenser-Smith should be ready,
almost too ready at times, to help him and Miss Patsy Withers brought
her rather touchingly simple little problems for him to solve, his own
children should give him little and ask for less. There were no signs
of Howard's improvement in this or any other direction. He showed no
affection and no enthusiasm, and Robert Corder was confirmed in his
opinion that it was a mistake to make things too easy for a young man:
his father had fought for his position and kept it; Howard accepted his
advantages and did not use them. Robert Corder could speak of these
dissatisfactions to no one, now that his wife had gone, and while she
lived he had hardly noticed them, and there had been no Miss Mole to
add to them. To discuss Miss Mole with Mrs. Spenser-Smith would be to
criticize her judgment; to deplore the faults of his children might be
to admit failures of his own, and when Miss Withers referred to them
in terms of praise he could not buy her sympathy at the cost of her
envy of a life in which work of eminent importance was combined with
the amenities of the happy home he had made, yet it comforted him that
she knew of the little rift in the lute for which he could not possibly
be blamed. She seemed to have an intuitive distrust of Miss Mole which
agreed with his own, and it was increased, no doubt, by Ethel's story
of the mattresses. It was wrong of Ethel not to have told him. It was
a small matter, but it was indicative, and it was necessary for him to
keep an eye on the stranger in the house. If it had not been Wilfrid's
mattress, he would have taken action, but he could not pamper the boy,
even in the cause of discipline.
Such thoughts as these underlay his life when he was in the house;
outside it, they were forgotten if no one jogged his memory, and he
strode about the streets, visited the sick, attended his committee
meetings, with an energy and liveliness which gave him a reputation as
a man of action. His actions were generally those of his committees,
but his enjoyment of an authority which never presented itself to his
mind as being safely diluted, his look of vitality, his handsome head,
his conviction that he was of importance in the religious and civic
life of Radstowe, had a suggestive value for others as well as for
himself. To those who were sad or sick, his entrance was re-animating;
knowing this, he was able to help them as he sincerely desired to do,
and it was inevitable that he should suffer from a feeling of neglect
and of misvaluation when he returned to his home where his importance
and his usefulness were diminished by the dullness, or the wilfulness
of its inmates.
He had no great power for concentration and no desire for peace in
which to meditate or to read and, unless he had callers to interview,
he had little to do in the house when his letters were written and his
sermons prepared, and he had time and willingness to listen to the
sounds of voices, feet, bells and doors, to conjecture or to criticise.
He would hear a murmuring from the kitchen as he passed through the
hall and, sometimes, a burst of laughter, and making some excuse, such
as the need for another pair of boots, he would penetrate into the
kitchen regions and find Miss Mole and Doris mysteriously busy at the
table or the stove, when he had expected to find one or both of them
idle.
'The Christmas puddings are ready for stirring,' Hannah said to him on
one of these occasions. 'Will you have your stir now?'
'My stir?'
'Everybody has to stir, for luck.'
Doris turned aside with a giggle. She was embarrassed by the presence
of the minister in the kitchen and by Miss Mole's airy way with him,
and Robert Corder, interpreting this sound correctly and reacting to it
immediately, took the opportunity to prove his essential homeliness.
He stirred manfully, circling the wooden spoon through the unwieldy
mixture and an unmistakeable scent, very pleasant but forbidden, rose
to his nostrils.
'I hope there is no brandy in it,' he said seriously.
Miss Mole looked disappointed. 'I know some people prefer beer,' she
said, 'but I think brandy's better. I ought to have asked you.'
He dropped the spoon. 'But Miss Mole, you must know we never have
intoxicants in this house, and I happen to be the president of the
Radstowe Temperance Society.'
'Does it count,' she asked meekly, 'when it's cooked and in a pudding?
I'm so sorry. What can we do about it? I can't possibly eat all these
puddings by myself.'
'Waste would only be an aggravation of the mistake,' he said sharply,
'but, another time, Miss Mole....'
He went away, very much disturbed. Surely the woman could not be as
simple as she seemed, and if she was not, what was she? And this was
the sort of thing which could be ignored in an ordinary household but
was of real importance in one like this. Doris would spread the story;
it might have a far-reaching effect on the girl's attitude towards the
drink question, and probably the brandy had been bought through that
young man whose relationship to Doris had affected Robert Corder's own
attitude towards the girl, as towards some one not quite unspotted from
the world of the flesh, and it would be impossible to offer Christmas
pudding to any visitor to the house.
He returned hurriedly to the kitchen.
'And the mincemeat?' he enquired.
'I'm afraid that is contaminated, too,' Miss Mole replied.
No, she was not simple, and he remembered the mattresses. He had an
impulse to order the destruction of the savoury mess, to let the family
go puddingless at Christmas, but he hesitated and the ardour of his
indignation left him, and he did nothing. What he needed in his house
was a little committee of people like himself which would frame and
pass resolutions and give orders in which responsibility was shared.
Alone, he felt that, in some way he would be baffled and his position
worsened, but when the pudding appeared on Christmas Day he would
quietly refuse to eat it and he hoped Miss Mole would feel ashamed.
Then swiftly, with the glibness acquired by answering awkward questions
at his class for young men, he arranged such tolerant, humorous
comments as might be needed, on domestic accidents and the lenience
which must be extended to others in affairs of conscience, but he felt
very bitter towards a woman who put him to these shifts and, as the
object of his suspicions and dislike, she became oddly fascinating:
he liked looking at her and despising her for her lack of beauty, he
enjoyed listening to her and silently sneering at her remarks: he was
puzzled by the frankness which alternated with her slyness and he did
not see how he was to get rid of her without less petty reasons to
offer Mrs. Spenser-Smith, a practical woman who would make nothing of
the little objections he could name and who would not understand that
a mere personality could trouble his peace of mind. He saw himself
permanently saddled with Miss Mole and, two days after the pudding
incident, he found more causes for mistrustful speculation.
He saw her go down the garden path in what might be taken for her best
apparel and, as she went up the road, she waved a hand gaily towards
the next door house. It was growing dusk, but he saw her hand plainly
in its light glove and the light glove offended him. She was not at the
tea table and when he asked where she was Ethel reported that she had
gone out. He made a dubious sound and Ethel, tactlessly loyal to Miss
Mole, said quickly: 'She has to go out sometimes.'
'I am quite aware of that, Ethel. Do you know where she has gone?'
'She said she was going to see Mrs. Gibson first,' Ethel said, and he
allowed a sufficient pause to elapse before he made some reference to
Mr. Samson. Had anyone seen him lately? Did he still live alone?
Ethel said she had not seen, and was not interested in, the horrid old
man, but Ruth said, a little shyly: 'He isn't horrid. It's just his
face and that's not his fault. Miss Mole says she thinks he's rather
nice, like everybody else when you get to know them.'
'And how has Miss Mole discovered this?'
'Oh, she just knows things like that,' Ruth said contentedly,
pretending not to notice her father's covert sneer.