Christmas Eve had dawned long before Hannah went to sleep. She could
not help thinking about Robert Corder and though, having learnt
certain forms of self-control, she did not toss and turn on Wilfrid's
mattress, she was unhappy and restless in her mind. She tried to keep
back the persistent thought by recalling as many past Christmas Days
as she could and vainly hoped sleep would overtake her before she had
done. There were the Christmas Days of her childhood, like glorified
Sundays, with the church bells ringing a livelier chime and the sounds
of the cows and the horses in their stables and the feet of the farm
hands and her father as they moved about the yard and did those jobs
which no festival could interrupt, and when she was very young, Hannah
would mentally transport one of their own cow sheds and some of their
own cows to a distant land where palm trees grew, and imagine the
infant Christ opening his eyes to see the soft brown ones of Daisy,
Cowslip and Primrose. The church bells and the church decorations
were all the gaiety Hannah got out of those early Christmas Days. She
opened her stocking alone, in the darkness, received more than usually
hearty kisses from her parents when she went downstairs, and solemnly
walked with them to church, and she had not been aware of missing
anything. After church and greetings among neighbours, which gave her
a secret feeling of grandeur, of participation in a rite, there was
the Christmas dinner of a turkey they had reared from babyhood, a nap
for her father and mother in the afternoon and a quiet time for Hannah
playing with her toys and those imaginary friends who lived in one of
the kitchen cupboards, and came out and went back at her will. When
she was at school in Radstowe, she heard about parties and pantomimes,
and jogged home, at the beginning of the holidays, to that quiet place
where such things were not, but by this time she had books and the
people in them for her companions, and the friends who lived in the
cupboard had been absorbed into herself, to issue as manifestations of
Hannah Mole with all their beauty and ability, and such adventures, in
embryo, as must befall the brilliant and the fair.
And here she was, a housekeeper in Beresford Road, at fifty pounds a
year, remembering nearly twenty Christmas Days far from the big farm
kitchen, with the tall clock ticking time away in the callousness
common to all clocks, the smell of burning wood, the noises of moving
beasts, of clinking pails and slow, heavy footsteps. Few later events
were as clear to her as the details incident to that country life, and
there came over her as she lay in bed, conscious of the wide-spread
city outside her window, a hunger for quiet places and the conditions
in which she had been bred. It would have been better for her if she
had stayed in the farm when her parents died, struggling against
debt, forcing a living out of the fields which responded with such
faithfulness to care, with her own livestock about her and in time,
perhaps, she would have married some young farmer who put capacity
before good looks, and by him she would have had lusty children,
clumping to the village school in their rough boots, as she had
done, their little ears and noses whipped red by the wind. A good,
hard life, that would have been, worthier of an active human being
than this trailing from house to house, a dependent on the whims and
tempers of other people and a victim of her own; she would have been
spared her disillusionment about that love affair which had seemed so
romantic until she discovered that a man might be a hero in battle and
an essential weakling when the inspiration was removed; and there would
have been no time for making drama of every look and word she met and
heard, when she was wrestling with the enduring things, the fruits of
the earth and her own body. But, at nineteen, a girl who had faith in a
different future and saw every possibility of adventure and happiness
in the world beyond, would have been wise, indeed, if she had taken up
that heavy burden so that, at forty, looking back, she might escape
this vision of herself dragging her skirts through other people's
dust. Now it was with an effort that she remembered to believe in the
goodness of things as they were, for the cruelty she had inflicted on
Robert Corder was the first deliberately unkind thing she had ever
done, and it had shocked her into a humility she sadly lacked and made
her hope it would be a lesson she would not forget. Was he asleep, down
there, in the room he had shared with the woman who had never breathed
a word to him about Mr. Samson? It horrified Hannah to think of the
grief that might be gnawing him at the first realization that he had
not had all the confidence of his wife, the first suspicion that she
had withheld it because of something unreceptive in himself, and if
such suffering as this was beyond his power or did not fit the measure
of his devotion to his wife or the devotion he had expected from her,
he must be in a supreme state of irritation at having revealed his
ignorance to Miss Mole. His words might be twisted into another meaning
or explained as inapplicable to his wife, but his look of amazement,
his dumbness, his perfect stillness, must be as memorable to him as to
Hannah. He would not forgive her for possessing that information, she
could not forgive herself for passing it on, yet she could not help
maliciously wondering how he would try to punish her. She had learnt,
by this time, that his actions did not match his anger, but he would
probably find himself compelled to say something in an attempt to blur
the memory of his sharp-cut silence and to put Miss Mole in her place.
She hoped he would; if he could show the wound she had given him, she
would feel easier at having dealt it, but, by accident or design, he
disappointed her, in the morning, and when she went into his study in
the afternoon, while he was out, to see that his fire was burning,
she thought Mrs. Corder looked at her reproachfully and she realised
that indulging her spite against the husband had involved betraying
the wife's little secret, with all the implications of Hannah's own
invention, dissatisfaction, lack of confidence and a taste for a
robuster companionship than Robert Corder could offer. Hannah felt
almost physically sick. The consequences of her indiscretion were
possibly less than she liked to think the consequences of any action of
hers could be, but there was a special brutality in telling tales of
the dead: nothing could have induced her to tell them of the living,
yet she had ignored a greater obligation in her desire to score a
point, to get a cheap triumph over a man she despised. If she could do
that, what could she not do?
She attacked the fire viciously, wishing it was her own body she was
belabouring, and then she sat back on her heels with the poker still in
her hand, and nodded at Mrs. Corder, whose face was fading away as the
twilight deepened, assuring her that she would try to make amends for
this offence, pleading to be forgiven for what life had made her, and
again Hannah wished she had not left the country. She would have been
too much occupied to be spiteful, and instead of kneeling in front of
Robert Corder's fire she would have been busy at her own, and, as it
was Christmas Eve, there would be coloured candles on the mantelshelf
above the big kitchen fire, and coloured candles on the table spread
for tea, with thick slabs of bread cut ready for the hungry children,
with their reddened noses and ears, when they came in from playing
about the farm, bringing with them a whiff of sharp air, of earth,
manure and stables as they opened the door. The number of the children
was indefinite. It was not a detailed picture Hannah saw framed in the
kitchen where her own quiet childhood had been sheltered; it was an
impression of arms and legs and faces, of voices which had not known
the softening influences of a boarding school in Radstowe, and of a
vague man, the father of these children, whose temper varied with the
weather and who had an unwillingness to take off his muddy boots until
he went to bed.
At two fields' distance from the farm, its blind end facing a rough
lane from which a path wound through the orchard to the front door,
was the cottage she had refused to sell because of the craving for
possessing earth which came of generations of farmers and returned to
her strongly now. It was hers, yet she could not see nor touch it.
Her commonsense, partnered so strangely with her carelessness and a
readiness to lose her property rather than emphasise her ownership,
had forced her to tell her tenant, as she called him ironically, of
each change of her address, for this was only fair to the cottage and
the land, and if he cared to think she was asking for the rent he had
light-heartedly promised to pay, she must suffer that with the rest
of her disillusions, but, as she sat on her heels in the firelight,
thinking with nostalgia of the country she could often forget for weeks
at a time, she decided that she must be done with a sentiment already
ten years old and go and see if the roof had fallen in or the apple
trees been pruned. She had more hope for the roof than for the trees.
He would act if the rain dripped on him as he lay in bed, but the
welfare of a tree would seem to him a fantastic matter to make a stir
about, even though, or perhaps because, it was her tree and not his own.
The cottage had been let until the war came and emptied it, leaving it
vacant for her wounded hero and herself, and what she had saved out
of the rental she had spent in furniture and repairs and in starting
the little poultry farm which was to supplement, with its profits, the
hero's war pension. What had happened to those hen-houses? Were there
any descendants of the original fowls? She pictured rotting wood and
rusty wire and a few mournful birds wandering about the orchard, and
she saw the refuge she had intended for her old age occupied by the man
whose commerce with her had created the probable need for that refuge
before her working days were over. She had lost her actual and her
potential savings and, when she listened, she could hear the feet of
Mr. Pilgrim, an echo of the sound she had heard so defiantly ten years
ago, coming nearer with a menacing deliberation, and, as the study door
opened and she looked round with a start, she was astonished to see
Robert Corder's tall figure and gladder at his arrival than she could
have believed possible, though she was discovered on the hearthrug,
making free with his domain.
'Is that you, Ethel?' he asked, peering towards the figure by the fire
which must have illumined it adequately.
Hannah smiled at the subtlety of this rebuke. 'I'm afraid it's me,' she
said gently. 'I came in to see that the fire hadn't gone out, and fires
have such a reminiscent effect.'
'A pleasant one, I hope,' he said, kindly making an excuse for the
unwarrantable lingering.
'No,' Hannah said. 'Not at all. Perfectly horrid, in fact. But there,
what does it matter? I'll light the gas. And when we're not allowed to
have coal fires any more, there'll be a lot of changes. We shan't be so
much inclined to think about our sins, and babies bathed by electric
radiators won't be the same as babies bathed by open fires, lovers
won't be so romantic and, in the face of scientific improvements, we
shan't think about the past.' She struck a match and shielded it while
she looked at him. 'Do you think those will be changes for the better?'
It was obviously his duty to answer this question, which might just
as well have been put without so much elaboration, but it was a duty
Miss Mole should not have imposed on him and he answered coldly, and
indirectly: 'I think we must always be prepared to suffer for our
mistakes.'
'Oh, I'm prepared.' She lit the gas and turned to him again, and her
face had a disconcertingly elfin look. 'Prepared,' she repeated, 'but
not what I should call really satisfactorily equipped,' and she turned
to go, but Mr. Corder, as usual, called her back.
'There will be the chapel waits here, this evening, Miss Mole. You have
not forgotten that, I hope.'
'Coffee and cakes,' Hannah said promptly. 'I'm so glad you reminded
me.' She would have been sorry to miss the opportunity of watching his
Christmas geniality with the minstrels.