Hannah had the homeless and the childless person's dislike for
Christmas. There were a few people from whom, in the course of her
career, she had not been completely severed, and to these she wrote,
but the paucity of her acquaintances and her lack of real intimacy
with them were very present to her at this time of the year and almost
persuaded her of some failure in herself, but it was not easy, and
Robert Corder had lately emphasised the fact, to make friends outside
the house in which she was a dependent, and to most of the people
she had served, often wholeheartedly, sometimes with misguided zeal,
becoming absorbed in their affairs as though they were her own, she
remained as mere Miss Mole, whose importance vanished with her useful
presence. She was accustomed to this state of things but it still
amazed her. A human being, to her, was a continuous wonder, a group
of human beings made a drama of which she was half creator, half
spectator, and she was baffled to know how people amused themselves
without this entertainment which never palled and never ended. Hannah
was not one of those who considered it a waste of time to lose a
train and have to wait on a station platform, who shut their eyes,
or read a paper, in railway carriages: she was thrilled by the sight
of strangers and by the emanation of their personalities, and it was
hard to understand that they did not get the same excitement from her
neighbourhood.
When she considered the Corder family dispassionately, she could see
that the material for her drama was not promising. The egoism of the
Reverend Robert offered the most scope, for the egoism of a person
whose abilities are mediocre must have a humorous element, but in
Ethel, in Ruth, in the quiet Howard, in Captain Jim Erley, in his
shirt-sleeves, as he busied himself about the gas, how could she find
so much interest? Was her own egoism enlarging the significance of
these who made her little world or was she really seeing the whole
world in miniature, which was all the ordinary human eye could manage?
The shaking of an empire was not more agitating than the imminence of
Howard's disclosure about the ministry; the intrigues of diplomacy
were not more complicated and needed no more skill than Mr. Pilgrim's
intrusion into this life shared with the Corders, and the news of a
great victory could hardly gratify its engineers more deeply than Uncle
Jim gratified Miss Mole when he stepped off the dining-room table and
said, 'You've done Ruth a lot of good. If I'd known you were here I
might have stuck to the sea a bit longer.'
'Think of that!' Hannah said, concealing her pleasure under this light
retort. 'But you might have been drowned on your next voyage and Ruth
wouldn't have liked that. The reason she looks so happy is because
you're here.'
'No, she's different. Not so jumpy. I'm grateful to you.'
'Well, I'm not a permanency,' Hannah said rather tartly, 'and she must
learn to rely on herself.'
'You're not going to leave them, are you?'
'I don't know.'
'I shouldn't blame you,' Uncle Jim muttered indiscreetly. He put
on his coat and Hannah felt that he would have said more if he had
remained without it. She had lost her buccaneer, but the brother of
Mrs. Corder, the brother-in-law of the Reverend Robert was still there
and her desire to know what the feelings of these three had been in
connection with each other, was almost a pain.
She took a step at a venture. 'Is that a good photograph of Mrs.
Corder, in the study?'
'It depends who's looking at it. My brother-in-law would say no,
I should say no, and so would Ruth, but we'd all mean something
different. She was something different with all of us, I suppose.'
'And what would Mr. Samson say?'
'Who's he? I've never heard of him.' He made a grimace. 'One of the
deacons?'
Hannah laughed and did not answer. She had learnt another thing she
wished to know, but she had not finished yet. 'You can't have had time
to see much of your nephew.'
'Well, we stayed up rather late last night,' he said, and he and Hannah
eyed each other calculatingly; he measured her trustworthiness and she
his willingness to trust.
'I'm not supposed to know about him,' she said at last. 'I'm surprised
Ethel hasn't told me, but she's rather preoccupied, perhaps.' She gave
him a sidelong look out of eyes in which green was the predominating
colour, but these words struck no response from Uncle Jim; he had not
received Ethel's confidences as well as Howard's, and Hannah left this
side issue. 'Family disturbances are very bad for Ruth,' she said.
'I'd like to adopt her,' Uncle Jim said suddenly, and, just as
suddenly, Hannah felt a rush of enmity towards him.
'But that,' she said coldly, 'could not be arranged in a few days,
within which time we're going to have trouble.'
'And I don't see how it's to be avoided.'
'The right words in the right quarter--' Hannah said thoughtfully. She
did not believe that Robert Corder had any great desire to see his
son a minister with a more valuable degree than his own and a social
distinction he had missed. He would, of course, be able to make Howard
feel his inferiority, but it would be less easy to suggest it, allied
with fatherly love, to other people, and nothing else would satisfy
him. A little flattery, a little comparative disparagement of Howard,
would do much to mollify him, but who was going to offer it? There was
no hope of that from Uncle Jim and it would come somewhat startlingly
from Miss Mole. Even Robert Corder might suspect some motive in
her admiration, and Hannah sighed audibly at the difficulty, the
impossibility, of acting wisely for the future.
'The right quarter,' said Uncle Jim, 'seems to be this Mrs. Somebody
who's financing the boy. It's very awkward for him. He's had two years
of her patronage and that's what's going to worry his father most.
Throwing her money in her face! And I gather she's a lady of some
importance.'
A slow smile curved Hannah's lips. She had a sense of power which
affected her physically, with a tickling feeling of pleasure. She was
in haste to use that power, her mission to the Corder family enlarged
its sphere, she saw herself as an appointed agent, and, for the moment,
she had finished with Uncle Jim.
'You'll see Mrs. Spenser-Smith at the party,' she said.
'Must I go to the party?' he asked in dismay. 'I haven't got any
evening clothes.'
'They won't be missed,' Hannah assured him.
She dusted the table on which she meant to cut out Ruth's silk dress,
and, looking busy, she spread out the material and fetched her pins
and scissors, and Uncle Jim watched these preparations critically, for
a few minutes, before he rolled away. Then Hannah ran upstairs to her
room, enjoying her unnecessary stealth. She sat down by the wide-opened
window with a pad of note paper on her knee, and the energy she had
meant to concentrate on a letter to Lilla was dissipated through the
eyes which could see the coloured roofs of Radstowe, the plumes of
smoke, the spires, the factory chimneys, the distant fields sweeping up
to the high ground which blocked the view of her own country. For her,
much as she disliked the day itself, the approach of Christmas was the
approach of spring in the West country. There might be snow and frosts
later, but always, at this season, there was a damp mildness in the
air, a message telling her that the earth was being stirred by tiny
pushing feet, pressing downwards so that spikes, eager to be green,
might reach upwards, and she fancied she could smell primroses, that
scent delicate as the flower's colour, soft as its pale cup. She knew a
place where she thought primroses might be blooming even now, standing
up among their strong crinkled leaves like some marvellously fine work
on the rough palm of its maker, but from that thought and the view of
Radstowe she turned aside. The primroses grew too near her cottage and
innumerable reminders of other lives lessened the urgency of the task
she had set herself.
This was to write her little letter of thanks to Mrs. Spenser-Smith,
as Robert Corder had directed, in the first person, and to do it with
a gratitude which would make Lilla flush in annoyance and conceal the
letter from Ernest, and she meant to add a threat that if Lilla chose
to make trouble about Howard, her loving cousin would know how to make
it for her, but this proved more difficult than she had thought and she
tore up her attempt. Lilla might appear in Beresford Road, confident
of her ability to right anything and demanding to know what it was.
It would be better to go and see her, to suggest a probable cause of
offence, to drop several hints from which Lilla could pick up the one
she thought least objectionable, to leave her in no doubt that Hannah
had a counter-stroke for any indignant thrust at the family whose
welfare she had so much at heart, and to set Lilla wondering at this
loyalty. Lilla would curb any amount of indignation rather than have
her relationship to poor Miss Mole made known. She would have been
wiser to have announced it, regretfully, as a distant connection, from
the first; now she must face the accusation of snobbishness and suffer
from the truth of it, the accusation of deceit and explain it away
without convincing anyone.
Hannah had no time to spare, but she made enough of it for the
expedition across the downs and an interview with Lilla which sent her
chuckling home again, burdened though she was with Christmas presents
for the Corders.
'As you are here, you may as well take them and save the postage,'
Lilla said.
'And how am I to explain where I got them?'
'That's your affair, Hannah. I've never known you at a loss for a lie,'
Lilla said severely.
Hannah pecked her cheek and wished her a happy Christmas. 'And you'll
see us all at your party. I didn't mean to come and embarrass you,
dear, but Mr. Corder insisted that I should. He implied that he
wouldn't enjoy it without me.'
'You won't get me to believe that,' Lilla said, but she was puzzled.
A woman who attended to a man's comfort could be a potent influence
and men were very simple. Perhaps she had reckoned too surely on the
safety of Hannah's plain exterior. She was capable and Lilla could not
deny her a peculiar kind of charm. Her arrival involved worry, but
her departure took something exhilarating from the house and if she,
who had disturbing doubts about the niceness of Hannah's conscience,
could feel like this, how much more likely was Robert Corder to become
dependent on her gay resourcefulness. And Lilla remembered that there
were years of Hannah's life of which she did not know the history, and
it suddenly occurred to her that Hannah's anxiety for the happiness of
the Corders could more naturally be interpreted as anxiety for herself,
and this thought made Hannah's playful threats more dangerous, for, bad
as it was to have a cousin who was a housekeeper, it was worse to have
one with a past.
Willingly carrying the parcels, to save Lilla a few pence, Hannah
hurried back. There was bound to be a storm when Howard broke his news,
but she believed she had reduced its violence and curtailed it. She had
done a lot for Ruth, according to Uncle Jim, she had done something for
Howard, and, if she could secure a reasonable existence for Ethel, her
life, she told herself dramatically, would not have been lived in vain,
but the last was the hardest of her undertakings and when she cast
about for that middle-aged minister who might solve Ethel's problem,
she could see no one but Mr. Pilgrim, bearing olive and myrtle for
Ethel and a sword for Hannah Mole.
She threw a longing glance at Mr. Samson's windows as she passed.
There was the old gentleman who might have been her salvation, but he
had already told her that he lived on an annuity and had no dependents
to consider except the cats and birds, and for their future he had made
arrangements. 'Then what is the good of my coming to see you?' Hannah
had asked, and sent him off into one of his throaty chuckles.
Undeterred by the thought of the annuity, she went to see him that
evening when the family was gathered in the drawing-room. She had made
him a new night cover for the canary's cage as a Christmas offering,
and she hoped to give it to him and return before her absence was
discovered, but Mr. Samson detained her. He had found among the jumble
of objects he had collected in his travels, a fine piece of lace for
Miss Fitt, and when she had thanked him and heard how he acquired it
and how much less than its value he had paid for it, when he had draped
it round her shoulders and said that that, at least, was not a misfit,
it was nearly ten o'clock and time for Mr. Corder's tea, and Mr. Corder
was hovering in the hall when she opened the front door.
He looked at her bare head, at the parcel in her hand, and for the
first time, he was openly angry with her, too angry to notice the
tautening of her body and the lift of her head. He considered it most
improper for Miss Mole to leave the house without warning; nobody had
known where she was; they were all extremely worried, and had searched
everywhere for her.
'Not everywhere,' Hannah said, smiling a little. The trump card was up
her sleeve and she was going to bring it out. 'If you had called next
door you would have found me with Mr. Samson.'
'Mr. Samson! I very much object, Miss Mole, to any member of my
household visiting that disreputable old man.'
'Is he disreputable? I think he's lonely, and he misses Mrs. Corder.
She used to go and see him regularly, you know--at least once a week,'
Hannah said, and she went upstairs to lay away, like a magpie, her
lace with her roll of Chinese silk, but she had not reached her room
before her triumph left her. She had been unreasonably reprimanded
and provoked, but was it worth while to hurt the man? Moreover, she
had been hoping for this occasion and she was ashamed. She had rushed
across the Downs to do these people a service because it was one she
would enjoy, and, indulging herself again, she had done more harm than
she had prevented. She had imperilled the peace and goodwill for which
she had pretended to be so anxious and planted a little barb, from
which the wound might fester, in the heart of a man about whom she had
chosen to know nothing but the worst.