Hannah went into the cold, dreary dining-room. Long ago, she had
removed the dejected fern from the middle of the table and Uncle Jim
had improved the behaviour of the gas, but now the fire was nearly out
and nothing could change the aspect of a room which had not a single
article of beauty in it, except the chrysanthemums in a shallow bowl of
Hannah's purchasing. She put her face against the flowers and drew in
their bitter scent before she took off her hat and coat and knelt down
to stir the fire, and she cast a grim look at the hat as it lay, upside
down, on the chair. She was glad she had not bought a new one for her
happy day in the country, yet there would have been an excellent irony
in spending her savings on adornment for the occasion, and, from the
artistic point of view, that would have been the finishing touch, the
master stroke, to this comic tragedy, for undoubtedly, there had been
something comic about it, and that, perhaps, was what made it harder to
bear. There would have been consolation in seeing herself as a purely
tragic figure and that relief had been denied her.
Nothing had been further from her thoughts than tragedy when she
reached Radstowe station. The sun was shining. Mr. Blenkinsop was
watching for her from the entrance, the tickets in his pocket. He had
secured seats in the waiting train, and Hannah sat in the corner of
a first class carriage with her feet on a foot-warmer that was really
hot, too hot for the welfare of her shoes, which she was willing to
jeopardise rather than disregard Mr. Blenkinsop's efforts for her
comfort. Mr. Blenkinsop sat opposite to her and he wore the kind of
country suit she did not imagine he possessed, and she had a passing
regret for her own shabbiness and then forgot it. She was too busy
looking out of the window to think about herself, and when she looked
at Mr. Blenkinsop it was only for response to her pleasure and the
knowing remarks she made about the fields, what was to be sown, or had
been sown in them, and how the ploughing had been done.
When she remembered the journey, and it was a slow one, giving her
plenty of time to look at the winter landscape, more exquisitely
coloured than a summer one, she thought Mr. Blenkinsop had treated
her as though she were a child; he answered intelligently, but seemed
preoccupied, as grown-ups will be, but once he broke a silence by
announcing that the house they were going to see was not to be sold,
but to be let.
'So much the better,' Hannah said. 'A house can be a millstone round
your neck. But I think you'll find the train service inconvenient.'
'So much the better,' he echoed with a smile that vexed her in its
complaisance, and the child he was taking into the country became the
alert Miss Mole, who asked if he intended to resign his work at the
bank.
At this, Mr. Blenkinsop had the grace to look a little embarrassed.
'I'm thinking about it,' he confessed.
Ah, she thought, things were easy for people with an income they had
not to earn; they could take risks; they need not be afraid of being
found out; yet she had compensations; no day, for instance, could
ever be for Mr. Blenkinsop, with his inheritance from his mother and
as many holidays as he liked, what this day was for her, and he, who
was potentially free, could not get the full flavour out of a brief
and lovely pause in a perpetual state of dependence on the whims and
prejudices of other people. The sense of space, the fields, rippling
gently into a distance where they lost their colour in the pale blue of
hills so dimly outlined that they might have been clouds, were giving
Hannah a liberty of spirit which made her material bondage unimportant,
and she did not envy Mr. Blenkinsop; indeed, she felt a sort pity for
him. His material bonds might be nothing, but what spiritual ones was
he forging for himself? She looked at him, trying to keep that question
from shaping itself into words, and he smiled at her, rather shyly, as
though he knew what was in her mind and wished to reassure her.
It was at the junction, when they changed to a still slower train,
that Hannah began to be uneasy for herself, and now there was another
question she dared not ask him. This train looked old enough to be the
very one in which she had journeyed to Radstowe for those wonderful
days with her parents, the very train which had taken her part of
the way to school and back again, and every field they passed, every
spinney and farmhouse was familiar.
She said, a little breathlessly, 'But this is my own part of the
country!' And she was not surprised, she was resigned to the ruin of
her day, when, at her own station, Mr. Blenkinsop told her that it
was here they must get out. She stood apart while he asked directions
of the porter, so fearful was she of hearing the impossible words she
dreaded, and then, defying her premonition of evil, she took the broad
road to the right, instead of the one that led towards home.
'No, it's this way,' Mr. Blenkinsop said, pointing with his stick, and
he set off at a good pace.
'Not so fast,' Hannah begged. Her mind was like a map in which she saw
every house and cottage in the district reached by this road. 'How many
miles?' she asked.
'About two.' She stood still and Mr. Blenkinsop anxiously enquired if
that was too much for her.
'No, no.' There was still a little hope and a good deal of courage in
her heart. 'Tell me about the house,' she said, as they walked on.
Mr. Blenkinsop had not applied to any agencies for the cottage he
wanted. He had heard of this one in a roundabout fashion which ended in
a customer at the bank, and back again, through this customer, he had
made his appointment with the owner, a procedure which suited his own
desire for secrecy.
'And I think those must be the chimneys,' he said.
It was then that Hannah stopped dead. She had a physical feeling of
sickness, a horrible, shrivelling feeling in her breast, as though her
heart, with all its generosity and courage, had been squeezed in a hard
hand to the size of a pea and, for a moment, she felt murderous at this
outrage. Then shame swooped over her like a great flapping, threatening
bird, and the robin piped his gay derisive note.
In the sunk lane, in sight of her own chimneys, she looked about her
for escape. She could not face the man to whom she had given everything
she had, she would not look at him and see the full folly of her
surrender and her treasure broken at his poor feet of clay. The black
bird hovered, the robin piped, and she knew she had been befooling
herself for years, making excuses for him, clinging to every memory
that had beauty in it, and now the fingers, which had so quickly grown
flaccid in hers, were insolently snapped in her face. This was the man
she had loved! Her shame lay in his character and her misreading of it,
not in the physical intimacy which, though it was misery to remember
it, was comparatively unimportant, and no power could have dragged her,
accompanied by Mr. Blenkinsop, into his presence.
'I can't go,' she had said. 'I can't go. You must go alone,' and she
had scrambled up the steep, earthy bank into a little wood, and there,
as she heard the breeze very softly singing in the pine trees and felt
their needles under her feet, she knew that the black bird had not
followed her and she felt no shame, only a purely human grief that
anyone could have hurt her so cruelly.
At this point in her memories, Hannah stopped and dropped her face into
her hands. The rest was a confusion of woods and fields and lanes,
with Mr. Blenkinsop at her side and the bird shadowing them again.
She did not know where she had gone, or what she had said, or whether
she had been silent. Kind Mr. Blenkinsop, had he but known it, was
retarding her recovery from shock. She longed to be free of him. Alone,
she could have steadied herself and concocted more of her excuses,
striving to find something not altogether dishonourable in this sorry
business, but Mr. Blenkinsop persisted, and a funny pair they must
have made--a distraught woman pursued by a solemn gentleman who vainly
hoped for a clue to this mystery, and the longer she left her behaviour
unexplained, and she might so easily have invented something, the more
impossible explanation became, but, in truth, she hardly thought of
him, except as someone she did not want, and someone who subtly made
the conduct of the other more abominable.
She realised, and she grew hot, that he had treated her as the mental
case she actually was, and, but that he had made her eat and drink, he
had let her have her way which was that of physical exhaustion, until
at last he had found a station and a train, and back they had jogged,
in a darkness that hid the beauties she had rejoiced in earlier in the
day.
Her weariness and her poverty in friendship assailed her now. For the
first time in her career she had behaved like a baby, and she was
denied the luxury of having someone who would bear with her in that
state and think no worse of her, and that, at the moment, was the
greatest luxury she could think of. There was Mr. Samson and there was
Wilfrid who both, in their different ways, would have offered sympathy
and comfort, but Mr. Samson was not sensitive to human emotions and
Wilfrid was too young to be made a confidant. On the shoulder of
neither of these two could she lay her weary head. There was no one to
look to beyond herself, and after all, this despondency would pass.
She had had enough experience of unhappiness to know that it need not
be permanent if she willed otherwise, and she willed it now with all
her might. She told herself it was a good thing she had finished with
the remains of her sentiment about her cottage and its occupant, and
if she had lost her first motive for frustrating Mr. Pilgrim, she had
found another in the simple necessity of earning her bread, yet, like a
fool, she was encouraging Mr. Corder to have him to the house! That was
the fault of Mrs. Corder who could hear every word spoken in the study
and could do nothing more. It would be cowardly and cruel not to help
her, moreover Hannah knew that what was not worth risking was not worth
keeping, and while she was prepared to risk, she was also prepared to
fight.
She sat there, waiting for Ethel to return, but it was Wilfrid who came
in first, and, at once, she said, 'You did well to give me that brooch
and remind me that Cupid is blind.'
He hesitated for a moment and if, like everybody else, he knew of her
excursion with Mr. Blenkinsop, he made no reference to it. 'In wounding
Ethel?' he asked. 'Is this Pilgrim fellow as bad as that? We had the
hell of a Sunday dinner, Mona Lisa. What did you want to go out for?'
'You may well ask that! But all things work together for good.'
'To those who love God. I've always told you God's the uncle and no one
loves him at present, so there's not much hope. Why couldn't he take
Ethel into the study and give her a wigging, instead of poisoning the
food? But he wouldn't have enjoyed it so much without an audience. I
did my best. I tried to look bored, but he went on and on. Streams of
indignant eloquence! I wonder he had any breath left for the evening
service. I found I had an engagement for tea and supper, and I think
I'll change my lodgings. My poor dear mother doesn't pay three guineas
a week to have her son's nerves shattered. I want a nice, comfortable
landlady and peace in which to pursue my studies.'
'You'd better try Mrs. Gibson. She may have some rooms to let before
long.'
'But then, I don't want to leave you, Mona Lisa. You are the
extenuating circumstance.'
'I don't extenuate indefinitely.'
'Ah, you're wanting to change your lodgings too! Now, if you'd start a
boarding house of your own--'
'I've thought of that but I've no money and I've been told I'm too
young. That surprises you, doesn't it? But it shows you what some
people think about me! And now they'd add that I haven't enough sense!
No, I can't bother with a boarding house. All I want is a little hole
to crawl into--a nice dry cave, but people aren't allowed to live in
caves nowadays, are they? Everything always belongs to someone else.
When I leave my present situation, I'm going to be a charwoman. A home
of my own, if it's only an attic, and no questions asked so long as I
can scrub. I ought to have done it years ago, but I suppose I had some
ridiculous notions about gentility. You'd better go to bed. I'm waiting
up for Ethel and it will be no help to me if she finds you here!'