She ought to have told Mr. Blenkinsop to give up all thoughts of the
little house. It was ill-omened, it was a place in which no happiness
would be found. She ought to have told him that, and to have asked him
to think again before he acted, to have pointed to herself and told
him that the world would be against him, and the world had a nasty way
of making its displeasure felt, but she had been thinking of her own
misery, she, whom Ethel called unselfish, and she had not warned him
of his dangers, the disillusions which are worse when they come to
unlawful lovers, the bonds which tighten irksomely when there is only
chivalry to prevent their being unloosed. And Mr. Blenkinsop would
have replied that this was no concern of hers, just as Hannah would
have replied to any friend who had tried to interfere with her. Mr.
Blenkinsop would much prefer being left to look after himself; he was
as old as she was, as he had taken care to tell her, and it was odd
that he should have taken her into his confidence at all, but, for some
reason or other, that was what people did. Ruth, Ethel, Robert Corder,
had all done it and perhaps Mr. Pilgrim would find he had to ask her
how he had best deal with the duty pressing on him in connection with
herself! That would not surprise her; nothing would surprise her after
the events of this day, and it seemed impossible that it should be
only a few hours since she had stood in the lane and seen the chimneys
of her house.
She lay in bed, and the peace she had felt in the dining-room would
not stay in a mind busy with pictures of that house. She saw it as
it was when she saved it from the sale of everything else her father
had possessed, a four-roomed cottage washed in a pale pink which was
stained with drippings from the roof: there were overgrown, weedy
flower-beds under the windows, but the true cottage flowers were there,
and there were apple trees, with whitened trunks, in the rough grass of
the orchard. She was a girl then, resisting the advice of her elders
against keeping a property she could not use, and she had kept it and
let it to the young farm hand who already occupied it, and who had gone
to the war and not returned. She tried not to see it as it was when
she had made it ready for her own soldier, the flower-beds weeded, the
rooms re-papered with her own hands, the outside walls washed anew
and the stains hidden, and a blue feather of smoke rising from the
chimney, like a banner in honour of her happiness, but, try as she
would, she could not help remembering it. She remembered how the pink
of its walls had been coarsened against the lovely pink of the apple
blossom, and how all the colours, the green of the grass, the new green
of the trees, the blossom, the waving tassels of the larch trees beyond
the house, the red-brown plumage of the new fowls, had seemed more
brilliant, more delicate and more wonderful than any colours she had
seen before, and she remembered the absurd, pretty things she had said
to herself about them all, and had said to no one else.
That silence was a comfort to her as she turned restlessly in her bed.
She had given him everything she had except the tenderest and most
foolish of her thoughts, restrained from giving those by some instinct
which she had not acknowledged, and for which she now thanked God. And
again she found excuses for him. She had never been sentimental, never
shown herself sensitive; she had been gay and practical and energetic
and when the time came for parting, she had gone off with a light word,
pretending, in her pride, that his conception of their relationship was
her own. He had not understood that she could be hurt: that was it: he
had not understood.
She pressed her fingers against her eyeballs and, as though she had
pressed a button, the pictures moved away, leaving nothing but a blur
of darkness, shot with gold and blue and purple, and this passed, too,
and there was the orchard again, in the sun, and Mrs. Ridding was
hanging washing on a line swung between two apple trees. Hannah saw her
quite clearly, with the sunshine on her fair head, her arms raised, a
clothes peg in her mouth, and the baby crawling in the grass, clumsily
and carefully fingering the daisies and pulling them off at their
heads, and Hannah cried 'No, no!' in a voice that startled the narrow
quietness of her bedroom. They should not have her cottage. It would be
ill for them and, somehow, ill for Hannah. They must go somewhere else,
yet, when she pictured them elsewhere, she had the same sinking of the
heart.
What did this mean? she asked, starting up in bed. Propped against her
pillows, she stared for a long time at the oblong of her window, with
nothing but air and trees and hills between it and the lane where she
had stood that day, and when she lay down she did it stealthily, as
though any noise, any quick movement, would rouse into activity, into
reality, a suspicion of herself which must be allowed to die. Surely
she had enough to bear without this new, absurd, hopeless pain, but
this was one which it was in her power to stop, and she would stop
it. She lay, rigid under this determination, and suddenly, unawares,
she began to laugh, quietly, with her mouth against the bed-clothes.
Mr. Blenkinsop had always made her laugh and she would laugh now, if
she never did it again. It was queer to love a man because he made
you laugh without intention, or was the laughter born of love and the
love of a conviction that you could trust him to the end of time? She
did not know, but her laughter ceased, and the suspicion had become
reality, and it no longer hurt her.
'It is more blessed to give than to receive,' she said aloud, and she
raised dubious eyebrows above her closed eyelids and turned down the
corners of her mouth, for she had made previous trial of giving and not
receiving. 'But it depends on the person you give to,' she said, and
with surprising quickness, with more surprising happiness, she went to
sleep.
But a happiness that comes at night, when all things, both good and
evil, are possible, is harder to sustain on a cold winter morning, and
though Hannah woke to the knowledge that some beneficence had lulled
her to sleep and given her dreams of a vague felicity, she rose in a
stern state of mind and, as she twisted up her hair before the mirror,
she looked disdainfully at a face which was sadly yellow in the gas
light. That look expressed her opinion of herself and her realisation
of how she appeared to other people and, during the next few days, she
went about her work in a passionate earnestness, quite different from
the leisurely manner in which Miss Mole usually fulfilled her duties,
a manner which shirked nothing, but was not designed to impress the
rest of the household with her superior energy and ability. Now, she
washed and ironed curtains, dusted books, turned out cupboards which
had been comfortably neglected for months, overlooked the linen, got
out the sewing machine which was an instrument she detested, and made
the dining-room uninhabitable while she tore sheets asunder, turned the
edges to the middle and rapidly machined them together.
Perched in her chair, out of reach of these white billows, Ruth watched
this activity disapprovingly. 'I don't like this at all,' she said.
'And do you think I do? If there's anything I loathe it's making this
nasty little needle hop along the hems. It's like a one-legged man
running a race. I hate to make him go so fast, yet I can't bear to
let him go slowly, and I know the cotton in the spindle will give out
before I get to the end, and I detest the noise, and I hope you'll all
be very uncomfortable when you're lying on these seams. I'm not taking
any particular care to get them flat.'
'Well, I suppose it won't last.'
'No, nothing lasts. That's why I'm doing it.'
'You mean--to save the sheets from wearing out?'
Hannah stopped her turning of the handle and let the one-legged man
have a few moments rest. 'Exactly,' she said. It had been on the tip of
her tongue to say that in saving the sheets from wearing out, she was
trying to wear out her emotions, but that was not an answer for Ruth,
and she knew Ruth's questions often had more purpose than a desire for
direct information. Nevertheless, she supplied the information. 'When
sheets get thin in the middle, the careful housewife turns the middles
to the sides. Unsightly, sometimes uncomfortable, but economical.'
'But the cupboards were not getting thin in the middle, or the books.'
'Most of the books were thin all through,' Hannah said with a chuckle.
'I had a good look at them. Dusting books is one of the lesser evils,
and cooking's another. You can pause for refreshment on the way.'
'And it seems to me,' Ruth went on, 'that you're either worried about
something, or--' her voice changed its note, 'you're putting everything
in order, in a hurry. Rather like making a will and paying your debts
when you think you're going to die. It isn't that, is it?'
'I'll tell you what it is,' Hannah said with a great effect of
frankness. 'I'm bad tempered.'
'Oh! Not worried? Not worried about Ethel?'
'Ethel? Why?'
'You've been so busy, I suppose you haven't noticed, but she's been
very pleasant for the last few days. And after that row with Father! I
expected she'd be awful.'
'It must have done her good,' Hannah said.
'I'd rather she wasn't quite so nice, though, and I wish you wouldn't
be so busy about things that don't really matter. You see, I'm afraid
you'll miss something important.'
'Well, if I do, you won't. Don't be so fussy. I'll tell you what we'll
do to-morrow. We'll have our walk.'
'But the spring isn't here.'
'Then I'll have it alone.'
'No. I didn't mean that, but it's rather like the cupboards and the
books, isn't it?'
'I don't see the resemblance,' Hannah said, turning the handle of the
sewing machine again, but Ruth had found the right reason for Hannah's
suggestion. They must have their walk while they could and if they were
together when spring came, well, then they could have another.
Ethel was amiably ready to look after Doris and the house. Not a single
gleam of her eyes betrayed any jealousy that Miss Mole and Ruth were
going off together with sandwiches in their pockets and no expectation
of returning before dark; she showed no further anxiety for the moral
welfare of her young sister, and Hannah and Ruth both silently came
to the conclusion that their absence suited her. This was unfair to
Ethel who had her own consolations and who was doing her best to be
pleasant to Miss Mole, preferring her, in the capacity of housekeeper
in spite of her dark past, to the possibility of Miss Patsy Withers as
a stepmother, and Ethel knew no more than they did that this was the
day Mr. Pilgrim had chosen for ingratiating himself with her father,
obeying the instinct which recommends a piece of scandal shared for the
sound knitting of a bond.
Unconscious of this danger in the rear, Ruth and Hannah started, and if
the trees had been in bud they could have fancied it was April. There
was a lovely mildness in the air and it was a day on which something
delightful ought to happen as, indeed, it did, for instead of going
through Albert Square and reaching the bridge by way of The Green,
Hannah dived into a narrow, twisting lane, with mysteriously untidy
gardens on one side of it and the backs of houses on the other, and,
twisting and turning in their descent, they came into a square where
dirty children played on the steps of Georgian houses, and when they
had passed through this and a narrow street, they were on the road
running parallel with the docks. These were places which Ruth, living
all her life in Upper Radstowe, had not seen before, nor had she
crossed the docks by the footbridges Hannah knew, some of them, to an
adventurous imagination, hardly wider than a plank, with a hand-rail on
one side only.
'Bad places on a dark night,' Hannah said solemnly.
'And very exciting now,' Ruth replied appreciatively.
It took them some time to get across the docks and stand in another
county, for everywhere there were ships; big ones moored alongside
warehouses and loading or unloading; sailing ships piloted by tugs and
looking, Hannah said, like sad widows in their pathetic dignity under
their bare masts and yards, and the tugs were like the undertakers,
in a fuss about the funeral. There were dredgers with endless chains
of buckets, picking up the river mud, and there were rowing boats and
men shouting and locks being opened and shut. The sky was blue and
bluer when the gulls struck across it and on the right, high up, the
suspension bridge was like a thread, and the carts crossing it were the
toys of midgets.
'We might stay all day,' Ruth said.
'We might, but we're not going to. We've got to have our walk.'
'Oh, don't say it like that, as though it's the only chance!'
'For the benefit of our health,' Hannah said. 'Why didn't you wait and
let me finish my sentence?'
They had their walk, up a long winding hill until they reached the
level of the bridge, along a pleasant road bordered with the woods that
sloped down to the river, across fields and through copses, to the
Monks' Pool, where the red trunks of firs were mirrored in the water.
There, rather late in the day, they ate their lunch, and dusk seemed
to be deepening round them though the sky was a pale blue circle like
a reflection of the pool, and the tops of the trees which circled the
water made a fringe for the patch of sky, and when they had thrown
their crumbs for the age-old carp which were said to live in that
water, they walked home slowly, saying very little, happy in each
other's company, and passed over the spangled bridge and saw the docks,
spangled too, far below them on one side and the dark river on the
other.
'It's been a lovely day,' Ruth said, on a deep breath, when they
stood outside the door in Beresford Road, but when they entered the
dining-room and saw Ethel sitting by the fire, they knew it had not
been a lovely day for her.