It struck Marion that it was very beautiful in this room that night. The
white walls were bloomed with shadows and reflections, and the curtains
of gold and orange Florentine brocade were only partly drawn, so that at
each window there showed between them an oblong of that mysterious blue
which the night assumes to those who look on it from lit rooms. On the
gleaming table, under the dim light of a shaded lacquer lamp, dark roses
in a bowl had the air of brooding and passionate captives. Different
from these soft richnesses as silk is from velvet, the clear flame of
the wood fire danced again in the glass doors of one of the bookcases:
and at the other, choosing a book in which to read herself to sleep,
stood Ellen, her head a burning bush of beauty, her body exquisitely at
odds with the constrictions of the product of the Liberton dressmaker.
She held a volume in one hand and rested the other on her hip, so that
there was visible the red patch on her elbow that bespeaks the recent
schoolgirl, and all that could be seen of her face was her nose, which
seemed to be refusing to be overawed by the reputation of the author
whose work she studied. In the swinging glass door beside her there was
a diffusion of reflected hues that made Marion able to imagine what she
herself looked like, in her gown of copper-coloured velvet, sitting in
the high-backed chair by the fire. She was glad that sometimes, by
night, her beauty crawled out of the pit age had dug for it, and,
orienting her thoughts as she always did, she rejoiced that Richard
would find such an interior on his return.
"Have you found a book you like?"
"No. There's lots of lovely ones. But none I just fancy. I'm inclined to
be disagreeable and far too particular this evening. Are these your
books or Richard's?"
"Nearly all mine."
"You must be intellectual then. Now mother was different. No one could
have called her an intellectual, though she could always take a point
if you put it to her. Do you know, you're not like an elderly pairson at
all. Usually one thinks of a lady of your age as just a buddy in a
bonnet. But you've got such an active mind, not like a young pairson's.
I'll take Froude's 'Life of Jane Welsh Carlyle.' That ought to do."
"I shouldn't take it if I were you. It's too interesting. It'll keep you
awake."
"Oh, I'll not sleep in any case. I feel awful wakeful. But it'll be all
right as soon as Richard comes."
Her tone, betraying so unreproachfully that she quite expected that till
then things would be all wrong, reminded Marion what evenings of aborted
intimacies and passages of slow liking truncated by moments of swift
dislike, had passed in this room whose appearance she had been watching
with such satisfaction. She reflected on the inertia which inanimate
matter preserves towards the fret that animate creatures conduct in its
midst, the refusal of the world to grow grey at anybody's breath.
Exhibited by nature in the benedictions of sunlight that fall through
the court windows on the criminal in the dock, or the rain that falls on
the flags and Venetian masts of the civic festival, it has an air of
irony. But there is obstinacy about the way a chair keeps its high
polish though its sitter cries her eyes red.... With alarm she perceived
that she was showing a disposition to flee from a difficult situation
into irrelevant thought, which she had always regarded as one of the
most contemptible of male characteristics. She checked herself sharply.
It was necessary that she should use the remaining moments of the
evening in making Ellen like her.
"I think I'll wish you good-night, Mrs. Yaverland," said the girl.
"Let me come and see if you've got all you want."
But there was nothing Ellen wanted. She passed into the room of bright
new things and sat down on her bed and expressed complete satisfaction
in dogged tones. "Indeed, that gas-fire's sheer luxury," she said, "for
I'm strong as a horse. Really, I've everything, thank you...."
"Let me brush your hair."
As she took out the coarse black pins, her heart rejoiced because
Richard would have all this beautiful hair to play with; yet as she
brushed it out she wished that his thirst for beauty could have been
gratified by some inorganic gorgeousness, some strip of cloth of gold in
whose folds there would not lie any white triangle of a face that had to
be understood and conciliated. Her wish that it were so reminded her how
much it was not so, and she bent forward and looked over the girl's
shoulder at her reflection in the glass. "It is a face that believes
there is no foe in the world with which one cannot fight it out," she
thought. "Well, that is probably true for her. I, with my foes who are a
part of myself, am unusually cursed. If these young people have ordinary
luck they ought to make a fine thing of the world, and I will enjoy
standing by and watching them. Oh, I must make friends with her. We have
many things in common. I will talk to her about the Suffragettes. What
shall I say about them? I do honestly think that they are splendid
women. I think there was never anything so fine as the way they go out
into the streets knowing they will be stoned...." A memory overcame her.
"Ah!" she cried out, and laid down the brush.
"What's the matter?" exclaimed Ellen, standing up. There was a certain
desperation in her tone, as if she thought the tragic life of a
household ought to have a definite closing-time every night, after which
people could go to bed in peace.
"I forgot--I forgot to take some medicine. I must go and take it now.
And I don't think I'd better come back. I'm sure you'll brush your hair
better yourself. I'm sure I tugged. You're so tired, you ought to go to
bed at once. Good-night. Good-night." By the slow shutting of the door
she tried to correct the queer impression of her sudden flight, but knew
as she did so that it sounded merely furtive.
In her own room she undressed with frantic haste so that she could turn
out the light and retreat into the darkness as into a burrow. But
everywhere in the blackness, even on the inside of the sheet she drew
over her face as she lay in bed, were pictures of the aspects of evil
the world had turned to her that day: thirty years before, when she was
stoned down the High Street of Roothing. She was in the grip of one of
her recurrent madnesses of memory. There was no Richard to sit by her
side and comfort her, not by what he said, for she had kept so much from
him that he could say nothing that was really relevant, but by his
beauty and his dearness, which convinced her that all was well since she
had given birth to him; so her agony must go on until the dawn.
She must get used to that, because when he was married to Ellen she
would no longer be able to sit up in her bed and call "Richard,
Richard!" and strike the bell that rang in his room--that rang, as it
seemed, in his mind, since no other sound but it ever wakened him in the
night. Not again would he stand at the door, his dark hair damp and
rumpled, his eyes blinking at the strong light, while his voice spoke
hoarsely out of undispersed sleep. "Mother, darling mother, are you
having bad dreams?" Not again would she answer moaningly, "Oh, Richard,
yes!" and tremble with delight in the midst of her agony to see how,
when this big man was dazed and half awake, he held his arms upwards to
her as if he were still a little boy and she a tall overshadowing
presence. In the future he must be left undisturbed to sleep in Ellen's
arms. That thought caused her inexplicable desolation. Rather than think
it she gave up the struggle and allowed herself to be possessed by
memory, and to smart again under the humiliation of that afternoon when
life had made a fool of her. For what had hurt her most was that she had
gone out into the world, the afternoon it stoned her, in a mood of the
tenderest love towards it.
She had risen late, she remembered, that day. All night long she had
been ill, and had not slept until the first wrangling of the birds. Then
suddenly she had opened her eyes, and after remembering, as she always
did when she woke, that she was going to have a child, she had looked
out of her wide window into the mature and undoubtful sunshine of a fine
afternoon. She had felt wonderfully well and terribly hungry, and had
hastened at her washing and dressing so that she could run downstairs
and get something to eat. When she went into the kitchen she saw that
dinner was over, for the plates were drying in the rack and Peggy, the
maid, was not there. It was incredible that she had not known why Peggy
had gone out, that she should fatuously have told herself that the girl
was probably working in the dairy; but in those days her mind was often
half asleep with love for the unborn.
She rejoiced that she had missed the family meal, for it was not easy to
sit at the table with Grandmother and Cousin Tom and Aunt Alphonsine,
unspoken comments on her position hanging from each face like
stalactites. In the larder she found the cold roast beef, magnificently
marbled with veins of fat, and the cherry pie, with its globes of
imperial purple and its dark juice streaked on the surface with richness
exuded from the broken vault-of the pastry, and she ate largely, with
the solemn greed of pregnancy. Afterwards she washed the dishes, in that
state of bland, featureless contentment that comes to one whose being
knows that it is perfectly fulfilling its function and that it is
earning its keep in the universe without having to attempt any
performance on that vexing instrument, the mind.
When she had finished, she wandered out of the kitchen aimlessly,
benevolently wishing that her baby was born so that she could spend the
afternoon playing with it.
The parlour door was ajar, and she peeped in and saw Grandmother sitting
asleep in the high-backed chair, a shaft of sunlight blessing her bent
head to silver and stretching a corridor for dancing motes to the bowl
of mignonette. She saw the scene with the eye of an oleographer. In
defiance of experience she considered her grandmother as a dear old
lady, and the hum of a bee circling about the mignonette sounded like
the peace that was in the room becoming articulate and praising God.
Enjoyable tears stood in her eyes. Drying them and looking round the
dear scene, so that she might remember it, she saw that the grandfather
clock marked it as half-past two. Now was the time that she must go for
her walk. The children would be back at school, the men would be at
work, and the women still busy cleaning up after their midday meal. She
was afraid now to walk on the Yaverland lands for fear of finding
Goodtart, the cattleman, standing quite still in some shadowed place
where she would not see him till it was too late to avoid touching him
as she passed, and turning on her those dung-brown eyes in which
thoughts about her and her state swam like dead cats in a canal; and
though she desired to revisit the woods where she had walked with
Harry, she had never gone there since that afternoon when Peacey had
stepped out on her suddenly from behind one of the pillars of the
belvedere. The marshes too she could not visit, for she could not now go
so far. But there remained for her the wood across the lane, which ran
from the glebe land opposite Yaverland's End and stretched towards the
village High Street. No one ever went there at this time of day.
Her pink sunbonnet was lying on the dresser in the front parlour, and
she put it on to save the trouble of going upstairs for a hat, though
she knew it must look unsuitable with her dark, full gown. Stealing out
very quietly so that she should not disturb Grandmother, she went down
the garden, smiling at the robust scents and colours of the flowers. She
had a feeling in those days that nature was on her side. The purplish
cabbage roses seemed to be regarding her with clucking approval and
reassurance that a group of matrons might give to a young wife. The
Dolly Perkins looked at her like a young girl wondering. The Crimson
Ramblers understood all that had happened to her. She loved to imagine
it so, for thus would people have looked at her if she had been married,
and she slightly resented for her child's sake that she was not
receiving that homage. Humming with contentment, she crossed the lane to
the wood, whose sun-dappled vistas, framed by the noble aspirant
oak-trunks, stretched before her like a promise of happiness made by
some wise, far-sighted person.
It made Marion laugh angrily, as she lay there in the bed where she had
slept so badly in the thirty years that had passed since that afternoon,
to remember how she had walked in those woods in a passion of good-will
to the world. She dreamed complimentary dreams of life, pretending that
it was not always malign. She imagined that Harry would come back before
the child was born and would cloak her in protective passion, and his
pride in her would make him take her away somewhere so that everyone
would see that he really loved her and that he did not think lightly of
her. Freely and honestly she forgave him for his present failure to come
to her. It was his mother's fault. She had made him marry when he was
twenty-one, so that he had been led to commit a physical forgery of the
spiritual fact of fatherhood by begetting children who, being born of a
woman whom he did not love, were not the children of his soul. With
aching tenderness she recalled the extreme poverty of the emotion that
showed in his eyes when he spoke of his daughters, or when, as had
happened once or twice, they had looked out of the belvedere window and
seen the little girls running by on the brow of the hill, white leggy
figures against the frieze of the distant shining waters.
It was indeed not so much emotion as a sense that in other circumstances
these things might have aroused an emotion which, with his comprehensive
greed of all that was lovely in the universe, he regretted being
without. If he had only been with her now he would have been given that,
and would have found, like her, that it is possible to be ardently in
love with an unknown person. She was so sorry he was not here. But she
knew that he would come soon, and then he would have the joy of seeing
his true child, the child of his soul, and beyond the spiritual joy that
must come of that relationship he would have the delight of the
exquisite being she knew she was going to bring forth. For she knew then
perfectly what Richard was going to be like. She knew she was going to
have a son; she knew that he would have black, devout and sensitive
eyes. She knew that he would be passionate and intractable and yet held
to nobility by fastidiousness and love of her. She imagined how some day
in a wood like this, but set in a kinder countryside, Harry would kneel
in a sunlit clearing, his special quality of gaiety playing about him
like another kind of sunshine, while there staggered towards him their
beautiful dark child. He would miss nothing then, except this time of
acquaintance with the unborn, and perhaps he would not even miss that,
for no doubt he would make her the mother of other children.
At that thought she stood still and leaned back against the trunk of a
tree and closed her eyes and smiled triumphantly, and ran her hands down
her body, planning that it should perform this miracle again and again
and people her world with lovely, glowing, disobedient sons and
daughters. She felt her womb as an inexhaustible treasure. Slowly,
swimmingly, in a golden drowse of exultation, she moved on among the
trees till she came to the wood's end, and looked across the waste patch
scattered with knots of bramble and gorse at the yellow brick backs of
the houses in Roothing High Street and knew she must go no further. For
the feeling against her was very high in the village. They had told the
most foul stories of her; it was as if they had been waiting anxiously
for an excuse to talk of sexual things that they might let loose the
unclean fantasies that they had kept tied up in the stables of their
mind, that these might meet in the streets and breed, and take home
litters filthier than themselves. Men and women told tales that they
could not have believed simply that they might evoke before their minds,
and strengthened by the vital force of the listeners' hot-eared
excitement, pictures of a strong man and a fine girl living like beasts
in the fields. Not only did they tell lies of how they had watched her
and Harry among the bracken, they said she had been seduced by the young
doctor who had been _locum tenens_ here in February, and that they had
seen her in the lanes with the two lads that were being tutored at the
Vicarage. These things had been repeated to her by her grandmother in
order that she might know what disgrace she had brought on her family,
and in the night she had often lain in a sweat of rage, wanting to kill
these liars. But that day, standing in the sunshine, she forgave them.
She was glad that they had such brave yellow sunflowers in their little
wood-fenced gardens: she hoped that all the women would sometimes be as
happy as she was. She did not know that this was no day for her to
venture forth and forgive her enemies, since it was the Lord's Day, when
men ceased to do any manner of work, that they may keep it holy.
The first warning she was given was a sudden impact on a high branch of
an oak-tree a yard or two from where she stood, and the falling to
earth, delayed by the thick crepitant layers of green-gold, sun-soaked
leaves, of a cricket ball. With the perversity of rolling things it
dribbled along the broken ground and dropped at last into a mossy pit
half filled with dead leaves which marked where a gale had once torn up
a young tree by the roots; and the next moment she heard, not distantly,
the open-mouthed howl that comes from a cricket-field in a moment of
crisis. Then she remembered that it was a habit of the young bloods of
Roothing to evade their elders' feeling about Sabbath observance by
going in the afternoon to an overlooked wedge of ground that ran into
the woods and playing some sort of bat-and-ball game. This must be
Sunday. If she did not go home at once she would begin to meet the
village lovers, who would not understand how well she wished them, and
would look at her with the hostility that the lucky feel for the
unlucky. But when she turned to follow the homeward path she heard from
all over the wood scattered shouts. The lads were looking for their
ball. One she could hear, from the breaking down of brushwood, was quite
close to her. Her best plan was to hide. So she stood quite still under
the low branches of an elder-tree, while George Postgate doubled by.
Poor George! He was seventeen, and big for that, but his mind had stayed
at twelve, and he was perpetually being admitted in probation to the
society of lads of his own age, and then for some act of
thick-wittedness being expelled again. It was plain from the way that
his great horny fingers were scratching his head and his vast mouth was
drooping at the corners that it was his fault that the ball crashed so
disastrously out of bounds, and that he felt himself on the verge of
another expulsion. "Oh, ter dash with the thing!" he exclaimed
mournfully, and kicked a root, and lifted his face to the patch of blue
sky above and snuffled. Marion's heart dissolved. She could not let this
poor stupid thing suffer an ache which she was prevented from relieving
only by a fear of rudeness which was probably quite unjustified.
"George!" she called softly, staying among the branches. He gaped about
him. "George!" she called a little louder. "The ball's in the pit, among
the leaves." But he was transfixed by the wonder of the bodyless voice
and would not pay any attention to her directions, but continued to
gape. She saw that she would have to go and show him herself, and after
only half a moment's reluctance she stepped forward. She did not really
mind people seeing her, because she knew that it was only a convention
that she was ugly because she was going to have a baby. For there was
now a richer colour on her cheeks and lips than there had ever been
before and her body was like a vase. It was only when they had awful
thoughts about her that she hated meeting them, and George would not
have awful thoughts about her if she did him a good turn. So she went
over to him, pointing to the pit. "I saw it roll down there, George.
Look! There it is."
But he did not pick up the ball. He appeared to be petrified by the
sight of her. "Make haste," she said, "they'll be waiting for you." At
that he dropped his lids, and his lips thickened, and his face grew red.
Then he raised his head again and looked at her with eyes that were not
dull, as she had always seen them before, but hot and bright, and he
began to shift his weight slowly backwards and forwards from one foot to
the other. Her heart grew sick, because all the world was like this, and
she turned again to the path home. But through the tree-trunks in that
direction there came two other boys in search of the ball--Ned Turk, who
to-day was the station-master at Roothing station, and Bobbie Wickes;
and at the sight of her they stood stock-still as George Postgate had
done, and, like him, dropped their heads and flushed and lifted lewd
faces. A horror came on her. It was as if they had assumed masks to warn
her that they had some secret and sinister business with her. Then one
pointed his hand at her and made an animal noise, and the other laughed
with his mouth wide open. Neither said anything. Their minds were
evidently engaged in processes beneath those which find expression in
language. She stiffened herself to face them, though she felt frightened
that these two boys, whom she had known all her life, with whom she had
ridden on the hay-wains in summer and caught stickle-backs in the marsh
dykes, should change to these speechless beings with red leering masks
who meant her ill.
For the first time she felt herself too young for her destiny. "I am
only nineteen," she cried silently. Tears might have disgraced her but
that the child moved in her as if it had looked out at the frightening
figures through her eyes, and she suddenly hated Harry for leaving her
and his son unprotected from such brutes as people seemed to be, and was
vivified by the hatred. She made to walk past the boys back towards
Yaverland's End, but as she moved they sent up shrill wordless calls to
their fellows who were still in the fields, which were immediately
answered. She realised that any minute the woods would be full of lads
whom the sight of her would change to obscene creatures, and that being
consolidated in this undisturbed place they would say and do things that
would hurt her so much that they would hurt her child. There was nothing
for it but to leave the cover of the wood and cross the waste space and
walk down Roothing High Street and go back to Yaverland's End by the
lane. Her mood of forgiving love for the village, which the cricket-ball
had interrupted, had been so real that she felt as if a pact had been
established between it and her, and she was quite sure that she would be
safe from the boys there. If they were tiresome and followed her, no
doubt somebody like Mrs. Hobbs, who kept the general stores, would take
her in and let her rest till it was dark, and then see her home. She
turned round and walked out of the wood, and because she could not, in
her heavy-footed state, trample through the undergrowth, she had to
follow the path that led her to within a yard or two of George Postgate.
She could see from the workings of his large face that he was forming
some plan of action. And sure enough, when she passed him, he cried out
"Dirty Marion!" and twitched the sun-bonnet from her head. The sudden
movement made her start violently, for though she had not known what
fear was until she conceived, she now knew a panic-terror at anything
that threatened her body. That made the boys shout with laughter and
call to their friends to hurry up and see the fun.
The sunshine that beat down on the unshaded field was hot on her bare
head. It would be awkward too, going into the village hatless and with
ruffled hair. But she must not be angry with George Postgate, for indeed
the incident had been to him only a means of gaining that popularity
with the fellows that his poor stupid soul so longed for and had so
often been refused, and he could not know that the fright would make her
feel so ill. Since the first agonising months of her pregnancy, when
nausea and faintness had pervaded her days, she had never felt as ill as
this. A sweat had broken out on her face and her hands; she had to
pant for breath and her limbs staggered under her. But she would be all
right if she could sit down for one moment. There was a hawthorn stump a
little way off, and to this she made her way, but as she sunk down on it
a clod of earth struck her in the shoulder. She spun round, and another
broke on her face. Grit filled her mouth, which was open with amazement.
She had been deaf with physical distress, so she had not heard that the
boys had gathered together on the wood's edge and were now marching
after her in a shouting crowd. Something in her attitude when she turned
on them made them fall dumb and stock-still for a moment. But as a gust
of wind ruffled her hair and blew her skirts about her body a roar of
laughter went up from them, and earth and dry dung flew through the air
at her.
As she set her face towards the High Street again, which still seemed
very far away, she sobbed with relief to see that old Mr. Goode, the
carrier, had come down to the end of his garden to see what the noise
meant, and that he had almost at once gone back into his house. Of
course he would come out and save her. In the meantime she pushed on
towards the houses, that because of her sickness and her fear rocked and
wavered towards her flimsily like a breaking wave. A heavy clod struck
her in the back, and she shrieked silently with terror. If they hurt her
she might give birth to her baby and it would not live. She had not had
it quite seven months yet, so it would not live. At that thought anguish
pierced her like a jagged steel and she began to try to run, muttering
little loving names to her adored and threatened child. She looked
towards the road to see if old Mr. Goode was coming, and was surprised
to see that he was standing at the gate of the field with two other men
and a boy. And though they were all looking towards her, they made no
movement to come to her help. Perhaps they did not see what was
happening to her. It did not matter. She would be there in a few
moments. One of the boys had found a tin can and was beating on it, and
the sounds made her head feel bad. She staggered on, looking on the
ground because of the sun's strong glare.
When she found that her feet had reached the patch of rutted ground that
was around the gate, she sobbed with thankfulness. She threw out her
hands to the multitude of people who had suddenly gathered there, and
cried out imploringly, for if someone would only take her to a place
where she could lie down she would be all right and she would keep her
child. But none of them came to her, and her deafened ears caught a
sound of roaring. She could not see who they were and what they were
doing, for all things looked as if she saw them through flowing water.
But she knew the tall figure by the gatepost must be Mr. Goode, so she
stumbled to him and raised her head and tried to find his kind face.
But, like the boys, he wore a mask. Veins that she had never noticed
before stood out red on his forehead and his beard twitched, and the
funny lines that darted about his eyes, which had become small and
winking, made his face a palimpsest in which an affected disgust
overlaid some deep enjoyment. He did not seem to be looking at her;
indeed, he averted his eyes from her, but thoughts about her made him
laugh and send out a jeering cry--wordless like the call of the boys.
She realised that he and these people whom she could not see, but who
must be people who had known her all her life, had come out not to save
but to see her ill-treated and to rejoice. She stood stock-still and
groaned. Her head felt wet, and she put up her hand and found that a
stone had drawn blood behind her ear. The boys pressed close about her
and beat the tin can in her ears, and one stretched out a stick and
touched her, which made Mr. Goode and the unseen enemies laugh. But at
that she shrieked. She shrieked with such terrible anger at those who
insulted the mother of her child, that all their jaws fell and they
shrank back and let her pass.
But when she had gone a few paces up the road someone shouted something
after her, and there was a noise of laughter and then of the shuffling
of many feet behind her, and jeers and cat-calls and the beating of the
tin can. She went on, looking to the right and the left for some old
friend to come out and take her to shelter, but now she knew that there
would be none. These people would drive her on and on. And when she got
home to Yaverland's End, if they would let her go there, and did not
trample her down on the roadside first, she would lose her child. The
core of her body and soul would be torn out from her, and all promise
of pleasure and all occasion of pride. For there was no pleasure in the
world save that to which she had looked forward these seven months, of
seeing that perfect little body that she knew so well and kissing its
smooth skin and waiting for it to open those eyes--those black eyes; and
there could be no greater degradation than to bring forth death, when
for months the sole sustenance against the world's contempt had been
that she was going to give birth to a king of life. There danced before
her eyes all the sons of whom she was to be bereft in the person of this
son. The staggering child, the lean, rough-headed boy of ten with his
bat, the glorious man.
Now her loss was certain. All the people were running out into the
gardens of the little houses on the right and throwing up the windows
over the shuttered shops on the left, and all wore the flushed and
amused masks that meant they were determined that she should lose her
child. Mrs. Hobbs, who kept the general store, the kind old woman whom
she had thought would take her in, and Mrs. Welch, the village drunkard,
were leaning over adjacent garden walls, holding back the tall, divine
sunflowers that they might hobnob over this delight, and their faces
were indistinguishable because of those masks. Even Lily Barnes,
standing on the doorstep of the nice new Lily Villa her husband, Job
Barnes the builder, had built for their marriage, with her six months
old baby in her arms, was thus disguised, and seeming, like Mr. Goode,
to look through her old friend at some obscene and delicious fact, sent
up that hooting wordless cry.
Marion was so appalled that a woman carrying her baby should connive at
the death of another's that she stood quite still and stared at her,
until the boys behind her thrust her with sticks. When she passed the
alley between the post-office and the carrier's she saw the cattle-man,
Goodtart, looking out at her from its shadows; he did not move, but his
dark brown eyes were more alive than she had ever seen them. A stranger
stepped out of the inn and laughed so heartily that he had to loose his
neckerchief. Of course she must look funny, walking bareheaded, with
earth and blood caking her hair, and her skin sweating and yellow with
nausea and her burdened body, her face grimacing with anguish every
time Ned Turk danced in front of her and beat the tin can in her ears.
"Oh, my baby, my baby!" she moaned. Ned Turk heard the cry and repeated
it, screaming comically, "Oh, my baby, my baby!" All the crowd took it
up, "Oh, my baby, my baby!" She shut her ears with her hands, and wished
that wherever Harry was, he might fall dead for having left her and his
child to this.
Then from the porch of the cottage at the angle of the High Street and
the Thudersley Road, the cottage where Cliffe, the blind man, lived with
his pretty wife, there stepped out Peacey. For a moment he shrank back
into the shadow, holding a handkerchief in front of his face, but she
had recognised the tall, full body that was compact and yet had no
solidity, that suggested a lot of thick fleshy material rolled in itself
like an umbrella. It was her last humiliation that he should see this
thing happening to her. She lifted her chin and tried to walk proudly.
But he had come forward out into the roadway and was coming towards her
and her followers. He did not seem quite aware of what he was
approaching. He walked delicately on the balls of his large and light
feet, almost as though the occasion was joyful; and he held his face
obliquely and with an air of attention, as if he waited at some
invisible table. There hung about him that threatening serial quality
which made it seem that in his heart he was ridiculing those who tried
to understand his actions before he disclosed their meaning in some
remote last chapter. It struck her, even in the midst of her agony, that
she disliked him even more than she disliked what was happening to her.
She had thought that he would smile gloatingly into her sweaty face and
pass on. But she saw swimming before her a fat, outstretched hand, and
behind it a stout blackness of broadcloth, and heard her pursuers halt
and cease the beating of their tin cans, and came to a swaying
standstill, while above her there boomed, gently and persuasively,
Peacey's rich voice. She could not pin her fluttering mind to what it
said, because she felt sickish at the oil of service, the grease of
butlerhood that floated on it, but phrases came to her. He was asking
the village people what would happen when the squire came home and
heard of this; and reminding them that they were all the squire's
tenants. A silence fell on her pursuers. From the rear old Mr. Goode's
kind voice said something about "A bit of boys' fun, Mr. Peacey"; Ned
Turk piped, "We don't mean no 'arm," and the crowd dispersed. It
shuffled its heels on the cobbles; it raised jeers which were mitigated
and not sent in her direction, but were still jeers; it beat its tin
cans in a disoriented way, as if it were trying to save its self-respect
by pretending that Mr. Peacey had been so much mistaken in the object of
their demonstration that there was no harm in going on with it.
She was left standing in the middle of the road, alone with Peacey. She
realised that she was safe. If she could rest now she would keep her
child. She knew relief but not exultation. It was as if life had been
handed back to her, but not before some drop of vileness had been mixed
with the cup. There was nothing to redeem the harm of that afternoon:
the quality of her rescue had exactly matched the peril from which she
had been rescued. When Peacey's voice had boomed out above her it had
expressed agreeable and complete harmony with the minds of the crowd; it
had betrayed that he, too, could imagine no pleasure more delightful
than stoning a pregnant girl, that he had his position to think of, and
he begged them to have similar prudence. He had risked nothing of his
reputation as a just man in Roothing to save her. To this loathsome
world Harry, who had been her lover for two years, had left her and her
divine child. She looked up at Peacey and laughed.
His eyes dwelt on her with what might have been forgiveness. "You'd best
come into Cliffe's cottage," he said, and went before her. It struck
her, as she followed him, that to people watching them down the street
it would look as if she was following him almost against his will or
without his knowledge. Well, she must lie down, and this was the only
door that was open to her. She must follow him.
Once they were within the porch he bent over her solicitously, and
through his loose-parted lips came the softest murmur: "Poor little
girl!" Had he said that for her to hear, or had some real tenderness in
his heart spoken to itself? Was he really a kind man? She looked at him
searchingly, imploringly, but from his large, shallow-set grey eyes,
which he kept fixedly on her face, she could learn nothing. In any case
she must take his arm, or she would fall. She even found herself
shrinking towards his pulpy body as he pushed open the door, because she
was afraid the people inside might not welcome her. She did not know the
Cliffes, for they were Canewdon people who had moved here four or five
years back, when Grandmother was too old and she was too young to make
friends with a young married woman. But its trim garden, where on golden
summer evenings she had seen the blind man clipping the hedge, his
clouded face shyly proud at such a victory over his affliction, while
his wife stood by and smiled, half at his pleasure and half at her own
loveliness, and the windows, lit rosily at night, had often set Marion
wishing that Harry and she were properly married. Because she had
received the impression that this was a happy home, she was uneasy, for
of late she had learned that happy people hate the unhappy. But the
shaft of sunlight that traversed the parlour into which they stepped was
as thickly inhabited with dancing motes as if they were stepping into
some vacated house given over to decay. There was dust everywhere, and
the grandfather clock had stopped, and the peonies in the vase on the
table had died yesterday; and the woman who stood in the middle of the
room, looking down at her hands and turning her wedding ring on her
finger, was not pretty or joyous. Her face was a smudge of sullenness
under hair that was elaborately dressed yet was dull for lack of
brushing, and her body drooped within the stiff tower of her
thickly-boned Sunday-best dress. She looked at Marion without curiosity
from an immense distance of preoccupation. There came from a room at the
back of the house the strains of "Nearer, my God, to Thee," played on
the harmonium, and at that she made a weak, abstracted gesture of
irritation.
"Go and get a basin of water and a bit o' rag. The girl's head's
bleeding," said Peacey, and she went out of the room obediently. He
collected all the cushions in the room and piled them on the horsehair
sofa, and helped her to lie comfortably down on them. Then he walked to
the window, and stood there looking out until Mrs. Cliffe came back into
the room. He took the basin without thanks, and set it down on a chair
and began to bathe Marion's head, while Mrs. Cliffe stood by watching
incuriously.
"Now then, Trixy," he said, not unpleasantly, "you'd best go into the
back parlour and listen to your beloved husband playing hymns so
trustfully."
She went away, still without speaking, and Marion, no longer feeling
defensive before a stranger, closed her eyes. Really his fat hands were
very gentle, very clever and quick. After a few moments he had finished,
and she was able to turn her face to the wall and talk to her baby that
had been saved to her, and to exult that after all she would see those
eyes. She shivered to think how nearly she had lost him, and was
transfixed by her hatred of Harry. She turned hastily and faced the
room.
Peacey was watching her with his quiet eyes. He said in a silken voice,
"This sort of thing wouldn't happen to you if you were married to me."
She lay quite still, looking at the ceiling. She knew that what he said
was true.
"You've looked at me as if I were a pickpocket, you have," he went on,
"just because I want to marry you. I don't hold it against you. You're
young. That young, that it's a shame this has happened to you. But after
to-day perhaps you'll judge me a bit fairer. You see, I'm older than
you, and I've seen a bit of the world, and I know how things are. And I
knew you'd have a nasty jar like you had to-day before you were through
with it. And I don't doubt you'll have a few more before you're done. It
ain't too good for the little one, if you'll excuse me mentioning it.
You can't expect a man of any feelings to look on without trying to do
what he can."
She looked up to scan his face for some sign of sincerity, and found
herself for the first time wishing that she might find it and have
reason to distrust her own dislike of him. But he was sitting sideways,
with his head turned away from her, and she could see nothing of him but
his hot black clothes and his fat hand slowly stroking the thigh of his
crossed leg in its tight trouser. A sigh shook the dark bulk of his
back.
"Me of all men," he said softly, "who had such a mother."
There was a long pause. She grew curious.
"Is she dead?" she asked.
"Died when I was ten. Not a soul's ever cared for me since then. I'm not
sorry. It's made me remember her all the better. And she was one of
God's saints."
His voice was husky. She muttered, "I am sorry," and was annoyed to find
that she really was.
"Why need you be?" he asked. "There's those that haven't that much to
look back on. All I want from you, Miss Marion, is to let me help you.
Or at least not to think ill of me for wanting to help you."
He sat still for a moment and continued to stroke his thigh.
"Marion," he began abruptly, and then paused as if to brace himself.
"Marion, I hope you understand what I'm asking you to do. I'm asking you
to marry me. But not to be my wife. I never wouldn't bother you for
that. I'm getting on in life, you see, so that I can make the promise
with some chance of keeping it. And besides, there's more than that to
it. How," he asked, lifting his head and speaking mincingly, "should I
presume to go where Sir Harry's been? I would never ask you to be a wife
to me. Just to accept the protection of my name, that's all I ask of
you."
They sat for a while in the embrowned sunshine of the dusty room.
He rose and stood over her, drooping his sleek head benevolently. "Ah,
well," he said, "I'd best leave you alone. God knows I never meant to
intrude on you. Perhaps you would take a little doze now, and after tea
I'll take you home." He looked on her moistly, tenderly. "Think kindly
of me if you dream." Some emotion coagulated his voice to a thick, slow
flow. "You'll be the only woman who ever has thought of me in her dreams
if you do. I've never had anything to do with women all my life. You
see, I know I've got an ugly mug. I wouldn't dare to make love to any
woman in case I saw--what I've seen in your face--what I saw in your
face that night I came out on you from the belvedere. Oh, I don't blame
you, Miss Marion. You're young--you're beautiful. You've had a real
gentleman for your sweetheart. But I don't see why I shouldn't help you.
Still, if you don't see it so...." He sighed, and brought his hands
together and bowed over them. His eyes passed deliberately over her
matronly body, as if he knew his thoughts about her were so delicate
that no suspicion of indelicacy could arise out of his contact with her.
"Poor little Miss Marion," he murmured in an undertone, and wheeled
about and padded to the door. He turned there and stood, his body
neckless and sloping like a seal's, and said softly, "And don't think it
was me who put Lady Teresa up to coming down to Yaverland's End
to-morrow morning. It is her ladyship's own idea. I said to her, 'Leave
the poor girl alone.' I have always said to her, 'Leave the poor girl
alone.'" His voice faded. He moved vaporously out of the room.
One is too harsh to one's dead self. One regards it as the executor and
residuary legatee of a complicated will dealing with a small estate
regards the testator. Marion shook with rage at the weak girl of thirty
years ago who lay on the sofa and stared at the grained panels of the
closed door and let the walls of her will fall in. Then it was that her
life had been given its bias towards her misery. Then it was there was
conceived the tragedy which would come to a birth at which all present
should die. "What tragedy? What tragedy?" she said derisively, sitting
up in bed. There spoke in her the voice of her deepest self. "The
tragedy," it answered composedly. "The tragedy. Did you not know almost
as soon as Richard stirred in you that he would have eyes like black
fire? Were you not perfectly acquainted long before his birth with all
the modes in which his body and soul were to move, so that nothing he
has done has ever surprised you? Even so, you have always known that the
end of you and yours will be tragedy." "What could happen to my
Richard?" she argued. "He is well, he is prosperous, he has this lovely
Ellen who will be a watchdog to his happiness. Tragedy cannot touch him
unless the gods send down fire from heaven, and there are no gods. There
are no gods, but there are men, and fire that comes from the will." She
groaned, and lay back and wrapped the sheets round her closely like
cerements, as if by shamming dead she could cast off the hot
thoughtfulness of life. But indeed she gained some comfort from this
dialogue with that uncomfortable self, for she knew again how wise it
was, and its predictions seemed irrational only because it had
remembered all that her consciousness had determined to forget for fear
it threw so strong a light on her fate that she would lose her courage
to live.
Her reasoning self was a light, irreligious thing, and thought about
what she should eat and what she should drink and where she should
sleep, but this other self had never awakened save to speak of Harry or
Richard. She trusted it, and she could recall quite definitely that on
that afternoon thirty years before it had sanctioned her decision to
abandon conflict and do what people wished to do. It knew, what her
consciousness had forgotten, of how she herself had felt when she was
within her mother's womb, and it was able to warn her that her unborn
baby was seriously thinking of revising its decision to live. While she
had staggered under the stones, the child had quailed in the midst of
her terror like a naked man above whom breaks a thunderstorm; her nerves
had played round him like a shaft of lightning, her loud heart-beat had
been the thunder. Now her fear-poisoned blood gave it sickly
nourishment, at which the foetal heart beat weakly, so that the embryo
knew what the born know as faintness. The system of delicate mechanical
adjustments by which it poises in the womb was for the moment
dislocated, and at this violent warning of what life can be its will to
live was overcast by doubt. If she could rest here now, and go home and
have a long sleep, and sit all the next morning on the brow of the hill
and watch the fishing-boats lie like black, fainting birds on the
shining flats, the child would feel her like a peaceful fane around it
and it would decide to live. But if Harry's mother came to see her next
day it would forsake her.
She would come very early, for she was one of those people who suffer
from a displaced day as others suffer from a displaced heart, and rose
at six. Long before Marion had completed the long sleep that was
necessary for the reassurance of her child she would be shaken, and look
up into her grandmother's face, which she did not like, for though the
expressions that passed over it were the same as they had always been,
it was now overlaid with a patina of malice. She would smile now, as she
dared to years ago, when she used to tell her little granddaughter that
Lady Teresa had come to give her a present for reciting so nicely at the
church school concert, but all her aspect would mean hatred of this girl
who had been given the romantic love that she had been denied, and hope
that its fruit might be destroyed. The room would be tidied; her drowsy
head would be tormented by the banging of drawers and the rustling of
paper. Out of consideration for Lady Teresa's feelings the photograph of
Harry by her bed would be turned face downwards. That she would not
really mind, for she would have liked to take it out of the frame and
tear it to pieces; but she would have to pretend that she minded.
Then there would burst into her room the trailing and squawking
personality of Lady Teresa. She would bring with her a quantity of warm
black stuffs, for she was one of the most enthusiastic followers of
Queen Victoria in the attempt to express the grief of widowhood by a
profusion of dark dry goods, and she would sit close to the bed, so that
Marion would lose nothing of the large face, with its beak nose and its
bagging chin and its insulting expression of outraged common sense, or
of the strangulated contralto in which she would urge that there was no
reason why any sensible gel should not be proud to marry the butler at
Torque House. By sheer noisiness she would make Marion cry. The child
would doubt again.... Since these things would have happened she could
not do other than she did. Her surrender was the price she had to pay
for Richard's life.
How artfully, moreover, it was disguised from her that she was going to
pay any real price! She looked back through the past at Peacey's conduct
of that matter as one might look through the glass doors of a cabinet at
some perfect and obscene work of art. He had laid his hand so
wonderfully across his face while he was speaking of his ugliness, so
that the drooping fingers seemed to tell of humility and the
renunciation of all greeds. And that candid, reverent gaze which he
turned upon her to-day had been so well calculated to speak of purity to
one who had shivered under sidelong leers. He had indeed that supreme
mastery over vice which comes of a complete understanding and dilettante
love of virtues. He knew how the innocent hunger for love and pity, and,
knowing well what these things were, he could speak as one who came as
their messenger. Loathingly and yet giving homage to his workmanship,
she recalled that later scence by which he had added a grace note to his
melody of wickedness and made so sweet a song of it that her will had
failed utterly.
Mrs. Cliffe had come in with a cup of tea and some cake on a tray.
"You'll feel better for this," she said, and while Marion had ate and
drunk she had stood by the window and looked at her. It seemed to Marion
that she had greatly changed of late. Before, she had belonged very
definitely to the shop-assistant class, which differentiated itself from
the women-folk of the village by keeping shapely and live-witted even
after marriage. But now she stood humpishly in her great apron like any
cottager's wife, and her hand, which she set akimbo, looked red and raw
and stupid. The way she stared at Marion's figure, too, was indicative
of a change from her pristine gentility.
"Funny I never heard of you being like this," she said at last.
"It is. I thought everyone was talking about it."
"They may be. But there's times when one doesn't listen to what people
are saying." For a time she was silent. "Ah, well," she meditated
bitterly, "it doesn't pay to do wrong, does it?"
"I haven't done wrong," said Marion.
"So you say now," Mrs. Cliffe told her, "but there'll come a day when
you see you have." She drew in her breath with a little gasp as Peacey
put his head in at the door.
He looked sharply from one to the other, and then advanced to Marion's
couch, rubbing his hands genially. "Now then, Trixy," he said teasingly,
"you don't want me to talk too long to your beloved husband, do you? I
might go telling him things about you, mightn't I? You run along and
look after him." Mrs. Cliffe retired quite taciturnly, nothing in her
face responding to this rallying, and he bent quickly over Marion. "I
hope she hasn't been worrying you?" he asked. Concern for her?--it
sounded just like concern for her--made his voice tremble. "That's why I
hurried back. Women are so narrow-minded to their poor sisters who
haven't been so fortunate. I thought she might have been making you feel
a bit uncomfortable."
"Oh no," said Marion.
The mask of his poor ugly face, which had been grotesque with pitying
lines, became smooth. He sighed with relief, and sat down by her side,
very humbly.
"But she was beginning to talk rather strangely," the poor fool Marion
had continued. "I think she's altered very much lately."
"Do you know, I was thinking so myself," Peacey had answered
reflectively. "I wonder if she's got anything on her mind. I wish I
could find out. One doesn't like a 'ome of friends not to share its
worries with you, without giving you a fair chance to 'elp. I must see
whether I can get it out of 'er."
Oh, he was a kind man. He was certainly very kind. She put down her cup
and braced her body and her soul, and said, "Mr. Peacey...."
The world had deceived her utterly that day; and yet there was one in
that cottage who had suffered more than she, for by her suffering she
had bought no Richard. Poor Mrs. Cliffe! She was a woman of sixty now,
white-haired, and fine-featured with the anxious fineness of one who has
for long lived out of favour with herself and has laboured hard for
re-establishment; but the fear still dwelt in her. Most times that
Marion passed down Roothing High Street, and saw the old woman sitting
knitting in the garden while her old blind husband shuffled happily here
and there, they would but bow and smile and look away very quickly. But
every now and then, perhaps once a year, she would put down her knitting
so soon as Marion came in sight and come into the road to meet her and
would give her nervous, absent-minded greetings. Then she would draw her
into the furthest edge of the pavement, because the blind have such
sharp hearing, and she would whisper:
"Have you heard from _him_ lately?"
"No."
"He's still at Dawlish?"
"They say so."
"Do you think he will ever come back?"
"No. He will never come back."
"Ah." She would stand looking past Marion with her face cat's-pawed by
memory and her fingers teasing the fringe of her shawl, till from the
garden the blind old man would cry lovingly and querulously, "Trixy,
where are you?" and she would answer, "Coming, dearie." As she turned
away she would murmur: "I shouldn't like him to come back...."
Poor Trixy Cliffe! She should have known only the sorrow of pure
femalehood, such sorrow as makes the eyes of heifers soft. Women like
her should be harvested like corn in their time of ripening, stored in
good homes as in sound barns, and ground in the mill of wifehood and
motherhood into the flour that makes the bread by which the people live.
But there must have been some beauty working in her soul, for Peacey
went only where he saw some opportunity to cancel some movement towards
the divine, being a missionary spirit. So she had been delivered over to
that terror which survived for ever. Even in the exorcised blue
territory of a good old woman's eyes. "Oh, poor Trixy, poor Trixy!"
moaned Marion, weeping. But it struck her that she was enjoying herself,
and she sat up rigidly and searched her soul for the smuggled
insincerity. "I must be lying," she said aloud with loathing. "I really
cannot be pitying Trixy Cliffe because in my heart of hearts I care for
no one but Richard. I would knead the flesh of anyone on earth and bake
it in the oven if that were the only food I could give him. What am I
doing this for? Ah, I see. I am hanging about this fictitious emotion
simply because I do not wish to go on and remember Roger." She held out
her hands into the blackness and cried out, "Oh, Roger, forgive me for
shutting you out of my memory as I have shut you out of everything else.
I will remember everything, I will!" She lay down and let all pictures
reappear before her eyes, but her mouth was drawn down at the corners.