|IT might very well have occurred to Sam to retort that he and Effle had
not “their silly heads in the clouds” any more fantastically than had
Anne her self when she retreated to Madge’s and watched her loved son
only through the eyes of Kate Earwalker. But it did not occur to him
and, if it had, Effie at least would have disproved the retort. Effle
outstripped them all.
The truth was that as soon as Effle knew what was the matter with
her she was not appalled, dismayed, ashamed, or any of the things
appropriate to a young lady in her situation, but simply and purely
exultant. Unhappiness fell from her like a cloak, and left her radiant
with joy. And she had called herself a realist!
She was a realist; she was engrossed with fact, not with the
circumstantial detail of her fact. She hardly wanted Sam now, she had
him, she was miles and leagues from care, alone in a shining world with
her transcendant fact. Courage returned in full flood to her and she
brimmed with bravery and pride.
She was out of work and must find work quickly which would pay her
well. She was going to suffer, she was going (to put it mildly) to
be misunderstood. What did it matter, what did anything matter in
comparison with her exultant fact? She was going to be the mother of his
child. Marbeck was not a dream; Marbeck was coming true, and the truth
and the glory of it swept her to a heaven which only women know.
Perhaps she was a trespasser within the gates, but they had opened to
her and they would not close. She might be prosecuted for her trespass.
Let them try! You cannot hurt invulnerability. She was a world within a
world, self-satisfying, self-complete, not so much derisive of the other
world as utterly forgetful of it. Her cloud of glory hid it from her
eyes, and if she peeped at all through breaches in the cloud she
saw people as one sees them on the road beneath a mountain-top, like
crawling ants.
A knock came at her door, and she looked bemused through a gap in the
clouds into the eyes of Dubby Stewart, but it was not to look at the
world which did not understand. It was to look at Dubby, who loved her.
And Dubby knew. It had not been difficult to know. She had refused him,
she had let him see why, and Sam and Effie had been away from Manchester
at the same time. It was not precise evidence, but he had written
leaderettes on evidence not more exact and did not doubt the facts. They
had kept him from her till now, but he could keep away no longer. And
before he went into her room he knew all there was to know.
“Effie,” he said, “I’m not sure if I’m welcome.”
“Oh, but you are,” she said. “I ought to have written to you long ago.
I’ve been home weeks from my holiday.” It was no use trying to see
Dubby as a crawling ant, and she gave her hand in friendship.
“That breaks the ice,” he said.
“If there was ice to break.”
“Well,” he reminded her, “I said I didn’t love and run away, and I did
more or less run away. I came one Sunday because I said I would, but
I couldn’t do it again. The trouble with me is that I ought to be a
journalist, and after about twelve years of it I’m still human.”
“Dubby! I’m sorry!”
“All right, Effie; I didn’t come to bleat. That’s only an apology for
not coming before. And now I’m here----”
“You’ll have tea,” she said quickly, going to the bell, but he caught
her hand before she pulled.
“Do you want to put a table between us? Do, if you must”--he released
her hand--“but I’d hoped it would not come to that. Shall I ring the
bell, Miss Mannering?”
“You needn’t punish me by calling names. Don’t ring.” She armed herself
with courage, and turned to face him.
“Thanks. Really thanks, Effie. I know I’m a bore, but if the old song
has a good tune to it I don’t see why I shouldn’t sing twice. It _is_
a good tune,” he went on with a passion which belied his surface
flippancy. “It’s the best I have in me, which mayn’t be saying much,
because I’ve a rotten ear for music, but this tune’s got me badly, like
the diseases they play on the barrel-organs, and I can’t lose it. I
get up to it in the morning, and I go to bed to it at night, and it’s
ringing in my ears all day. Effie, I’m not much of a cove and I’ve
flattered myself that sincerity departed from me when I cut my wisdom
teeth. I tried to live up to that belief and it’s only half come off.
I’ve tried to make a raree-show of life, to sit outside and watch the
puppets play, and life’s won. Life’s got me down, and I’m inside now.
I’m where you’ve put me, and a good place too: I’m near the radiator and
it warms the cockles of my heart. But I never liked radiators. Mind you,
I can do with them and I can be grateful for them. If a season ticket
for life for a seat near the radiator is all that you can give me, I can
keep a stiff upper lip and thank you for what I’ve got. But I never had
a passion for radiators, and I do like fires. There’s life in a fire
Must it be just the radiator, or can you make it hearth and home for
us?”
“Dubby,” she said, “I told you before.”
“I know. Nothing doing in second thoughts?” She shook her head.
“All right. I only got drunk last time. This time it will need the binge
of my life. I’d cherished hopes of this.”
“Drunk,” she said reproachfully. “With a stiff upper lip?”
“Oh, I dunno,” he said. “It takes a stiff upper lip to get me to the
dentist’s, but I make him use an anæsthetic all the same. Still, if
you’d rather I didn’t----”
“I think it would be braver.”
“Right. But I’d like to hit something. There’s nobody you’d like me to
hit, is there?”
“Of course not.”
“Sure?” he said. He had it well in mind that somebody ought to hit Sam.
“Let’s get back to where we were before I made a stump oration--to when
I came in and you looked at me like a friend.”
“I hope I always shall.”
“All right. It’s the privilege of a friend to be impertinent, and I’m
rather good at impertinence. You see, Effie old thing, you’re supposed
to be one of the world’s workers, and you’re not at the office to-day.
You haven’t been at the office for weeks. I know, because I gave Florrie
half a crown.” Florrie was the maid. “And it isn’t that you’ve come into
money, because Florrie tells me you’ve been starving yourself.”
“I’ve not.” Effie was indignant. She had not starved herself. While
all was dreary, food had certainly not attracted her, but neither had
anything else; and she expected to take a lively interest in it now.
“Really I’ve not.”
“What you say goes,” he said. “And Florrie imagined it, but she didn’t
imagine the part about your not going to the office, and if anything’s
wrong there, don’t forget that I know Branstone pretty well. I can talk
to him like a father.”
“There’s nothing wrong, anywhere,” she said, and, indeed, things were
not only not wrong but exuberantly right, only she could not tell him
why.
“You’re sure of that?” he persisted. “There’s nothing you can tell a
pal? Nothing you can tell me, when you know I’d walk through fire for
you? Damn it, I can’t pretend. I’m not a friend. I’m a man in love, and
I ask you to be fair.”
“Dubby,” she pleaded, “don’t make things too hard for me.”
“Is it I who make them hard?” he asked, “oris it Sam?”
She looked at him amazed, and certainly Effie was stupid then, or, at
least, too wrapped up in her great preoccupation to be alert. “Oh, don’t
be petty,” she said. “I didn’t debit you with jealousy.”
“No? No? And yet I have a certain right to be jealous of him. I think
you won’t deny it.”
It wasn’t what he said or even the deep bitterness of his tone, it
was something in his eyes, like a hurt animal’s, which made her quite
suddenly, and as a thing apart from his words, see what had happened.
But she did not see even now the whole of Dubby’s love and the beauty of
his knightly move.
“You know!” she said. “Dubby, you knew when you spoke just now. You knew
that Sam and I----”
“I told you I had a word with Florrie.”
“Florrie?” she asked. “What could Florrie tell you?”
“Nothing,” he said, “that she knew she told. Guessing is another of the
things I’m good at.”
She saw it then, to what perceptiveness his love had brought him, to
what high action. It had sped her cloud and she saw, clear-eyed as he,
his fine, impeccable fidelity.
“Oh! And I called you petty! I told you you were jealous. Dubby, I
didn’t know. You’d have done that for me!”
“Well, you see,” he apologized, “I’m in love with you.”
“Why can’t we order love? Why does it come all wrong?” she cried.
“It hasn’t come so wrong but I can put it right for you,” he said,
making his offer again.
“I? I didn’t mean myself,” she said, wondering. “Love’s not come wrong
to me. It’s you I’m thinking of.”
“But is it right for you?” he asked.
“Oh, yes,” she smiled. “Terrifically.”
“Is it? When Sam has not been near you in weeks?” It was wedged in his
mind that Sam was playing the villain. “When you are here alone, do you
see him, Effie?”
“No. That’s why it’s all so right.”
He shook his head, perplexed. “It may be good metaphysics, but it sounds
bad sense. I’ll be quite honest with you. I’m suffering pretty badly
from suppressed desire to horsewhip Sam Branstone. I think he deserves
it, I know I’d enjoy it and I think you’re trying to head me off it. I
daresay it’s primitive of me, but it will do me good and I don’t mind
telling you I need good doing to me. Effie, mayn’t I go and horsewhip
Sam?”
“If anybody’s going to horsewhip Sam,” said a voice, “it’s me. I’m in
charge of this job, not you, my lad.”
They had not seen Anne come in. They saw her now, a little old woman
of the working class in her best clothes, with a bugled cape and cotton
gloves, elastic-sided boots and a quaint bonnet tied with ribbon beneath
her chin, and, unaccountably, she filled the room. They would have
passed her in the street without a second glance as one of the throng,
at face value insignificant; but this was not Anne in the street. It
was Anne in arms for Sam, and when Effie and Stewart compared notes
afterwards they each confessed to having had the same thought: that
their eyes were traitors and that what they saw was fantasy and what
they felt was real.
“I’m Sam’s mother,” she introduced herself, “and it’s like enough I were
overfond of him when he was a lad and didn’t thrash enough, but I’m not
too old to start again. You’ll be Effie? Aye, I’ve come round here to
put things in their places. They’ve got a bit askew amongst the lot of
you, and what I heard when I came in won’t help.” She looked accusingly
at Dubby. “You’ll be her brother, I reckon?”
It seemed to him the best way out. Anne had come to “put things in their
places,” and she reckoned he was Effie’s brother, which, now he thought
of it, was exactly his place. Brotherhood was thrust upon him, but he
thought he had achieved it. Plainly, for all Effie’s enigmas, there was
nothing else for him, and he let Anne put him in his place.
“Yes,” he said, without a glance at Effie, “her brother.”
“You’re a clean-limbed family,” she complimented them, and Dubby stole
a look at Effie, half humorous and half defying her to contradict his
brotherhood. “Well, I came to see Effie, but I’ll none gainsay that her
brother has a right to stay and listen, if he’ll listen quiet.”
“Yes,” said Dubby, still challenging Effie, “her brother has a right.”
And Effie did not deny him. She had her courage, but the unexpectedness
of Anne and the force of her, as if for all these years she had been
winding up her will, which now came into play like a spring immensely
braced in super-tightened coils, caused her to want an ally and she
agreed that Dubby had a right if not the one conferred on him by Anne.
“Won’t you sit, Mrs. Branstone?” she said.
“I was wondering when I should hear your voice,” said Anne. “You’re not
a talker, lass.”
“No,” said Effie.
“More of a doer.” Effie was wondering whether that was praise or
condemnation, when Anne added: “I like you the better for that, though
it’s a good voice. I haven’t heard it much, but I’ve heard it. I haven’t
seen you much, but I’ve seen enough. I’m on your side, Effie.” She
astonished them both by rising as if to go.
“But,” said Dubby, “is that all?”
Anne looked with humorous sympathy at Effie. “That’s men all over, isn’t
it?” she said. “They’re fond of calling women talkers, but a man’s not
happy till a thing’s been put in words. Me and your sister understand
each other now.”
“I’m not quite certain that I do,” said Effie.
“Well, maybe you’re right,” conceded Anne. “It’s a fact that I told Sam
last night I was coming round here to give you a piece of my mind, and I
don’t notice that I’m doing it. The need seemed to go when I set eyes
on you, and I’m pretty full of a thing I want to do, only I’ve not quite
got the face to ask.”
“What is it, Mrs. Branstone?”
“I want to kiss you, lass,” said Anne.
Dubby Stewart had for the second time that day the impression that women
talked, so to speak, in hieroglyphics.... There seemed to be a kind
of feminine shorthand to which only women held the key, and he did not
understand the sudden softening of Ellie’s face nor her quick response.
And he did not know why, when Anne kissed her, Effie said, “No, no,” nor
why Anne said, “It isn’t no. It’s yes.” A kiss, it seemed, had various
meanings.
Anne in effect had conveyed to Effie that she thanked her and, more, she
honoured her. Effie denied that she merited honour and Anne maintained
that she did.
“Aye,” said Anne, “he’s had two dips in the lucky-bag and he’s drawn a
prize this time. It’s more than any man deserves, but we’ll not grudge
it Sam, will we, Effie?” And to Dubby the thing took on a fresh
aspect of bewilderment. If that meant anything, it meant that Anne was
welcoming a daughter. Didn’t the woman know that Sam was married?
“I’ve grudged him nothing,” Effie said.
Anne meditated that, then looked at Effie with a touch of what was, for
her, shyness. “You’ve grudged him nothing,” she disagreed, “except your
pride in giving up. And you can do it, you can give up, but Sam’s nobbut
a man, and they’re a weak flesh, men. He looks the shadow of himself,”
she exaggerated resolutely.
“Does he?” said Effie anxiously, and Anne nodded a sombre face. “What do
you want me to do, Mrs. Branstone?”
“I want you to give up giving up. Sam said a thing to me last night.
He said you’d make him find salvation. Well, happen; but what’s certain
sure is that you made him find love. He’s found it, lass, and he mustn’t
lose it, and he will if you leave things where they are. He’s trying
to do a thing that isn’t, possible. He’s trying to live aside of Ada,
loving you. He’ll try to love her for the love of you, and kiss her,
telling himself he’s kissing you, and it will not be you; and the love
he tries to bring her will turn to loathing in his heart. And what’ll
happen then, when love goes sour within him? Eh, lass, you took yon lad
to heaven and you’re sending him to hell.”
It was not fair to Stewart. It was hardly bearable: he was not her
brother and he hadn’t the feelings of a brother. He saw great happiness
in Effie’s face, as if two happinesses mingled there, the one of giving
up her dream, the other of awakening to a sweet reality. He saw her put
out a hand towards Anne, surrendering, consenting, giving all in one
swift, heady leap from cloud to earth, and then he saw her sway, and
caught her in time to break her fall.
Anne eyed him sharply. “Have you heard of your sister’s fainting before,
lately?” she asked, busy on her knees with Effie.
“Yes. Florrie told me. Twice. Can I do anything?”
“I’ll bring her round,” said Anne. “But you can do something. You can go
to Sam at his office and tell him he’s wanted here. Tell him I want him,
and there’s news for him. Send Florrie up as you go, and you needn’t
take that horsewhip with you, neither.”
“No. I needn’t take it now.”
So Dubby, Effie’s brother, went out on an embassy for Anne. “Feeling it?
Feeling?” he thought, “you God-abandoned devil, what right have you to
feel? A journalist. A looker-on. There’s a story in this for you.
There’s the guts of a story given away to you with a cup of tea... on,
no, we didn’t have the tea; given neat, and you can’t be decently
grateful. What’s the title? ‘The Charwoman’s Son’? No, damned if it is.
Something about brother. Brother! Yes, you blighter, brother... brother,
and proud of it. ‘Pride of Kin.’ That’ll do, and God help me to live up
to it.” He turned into Sam’s office and delivered his message in a cold,
unemotional voice. It seemed that Effie, brave herself, was the cause of
bravery in others.
“Effie! My mother! What have you to do with them?” asked Sam, amazed.
“I’ve given you a message,” said the taciturn herald.
“But what’s behind it, Dubby? Is Effie ill?”
Stewart was silent.
“Is she--dead?”
Dubby was tempted to say he didn’t know. It; seemed to him that things
went too happily with Branstone, that it was fit, if only for the twenty
minutes which it would take for him to reach Busholme, to let Sam think
that Effie might be dead, to let him taste the flavour of torture.
Dubby suffered and would suffer, not for twenty minutes but, he gloomily
anticipated, for a lifetime. Let Sam have his minutes of it! Then he
remembered he was Effie’s brother, and before Sam had his hat and coat
on, malice had left him. “It’s all right, man,” he said. “She’s neither
ill nor dead. They’ve got good news for you.”
CHAPTER XXIV--THE NEW BOOK OF MARTYRS
|IF there was news which Anne must send posthaste to hid him come to
hear, and if Effie was neither ill nor dead, he need not overtax his
wits to guess it. Yet he had never thought of this very natural sequel
to the Marbeck week, and the plain fact is that he did not much want to
think of it now.
“I like your Effie,” Anne told him. “I like her very well. She’s going
to make a grandmother of me.”
He thought his mother had never been fatuous before: she thought he took
the news morosely, and perhaps her expectation had been too high. She
assumed that a child was the first consideration of a man’s life; which
is not true, even, of all women and true of only a minority of men.
Nor was Sam, in fact, morose. He had never been more intensely and
silently alive. In itself, this thing was right with a shining exultant
rightness which warmed him to the marrow. It crowned and completed
Marbeck and it crowned and completed him. He who was childless was to be
a father, and by Effie! He had nothing but a thankful emotion for that,
and looked with yearning eyes at Effie, giver of all else, who was now
to give him this. He had not known her wonder could increase.
He saw that more was expected of him than that he should look at her
adoringly. Anne was on tip-toe with anticipation. Her difficulty, if
indeed she had acknowledged to herself that there was any, had been to
make these visionaries see that love mattered and that Ada did not;
and her success with Effie had been complete. She had never doubted of
success with Sam, the weaker vessel, for there was love, sufficient in
itself; and there was now the added argument of Effie’s child. She could
not see that he had any choice.
He stood there conscious of the expectancy of their regard, and knew
that he was failing them. He thought they took a blinkered view, seeing
the child and nothing else. To them, apparently, the child came first:
they were hypnotized by what was, really, an afterthought, and there was
the greater need for him to keep a steadfast eye upon the truth. As he
saw it, the truth was that he had put his hand to another plough; on
Hartle Pike he had lighted such a candle by Effie’s grace as he trusted
would never be put out; and he had gone to Ada. True, Ada had gone
from him, but that was temporary and trivial, whereas here was a real
distraction and he saw two loyalties before him--to Effie and the idea,
and to Effie and her child. It seemed to Sam that the first was the
greater of these two.
He had wrestled with an afterthought before, one which hardly yielded
in temptation to that which now confronted him, and he had thrown it. He
had refused to contest Sandyford because there was not room for politics
in a scheme which included Ada, and still less was there room for Effie.
He felt faint with discouragement at the thought that Effie, unless
appearance belied her, had capitulated to her afterthought, but he stood
firmly by their treaty. They had decided that duty came first; he had
shouldered duty; and he, at any rate, had no room for afterthoughts.
He was loyal to Effie and the Marbeck pact, duty’s bondsman, Ada’s
husband. He made a gesture of decision, which Anne misinterpreted.
“Aye,” she said a little smugly, “this settles it all right. It wasn’t
common sense in you to part before, but I reckon there’ll be no parting
now.”
“No,” said Effie softly, “not now.” She stole a look of shy, glad
confidence at Sam, and he found it extraordinarily difficult to meet
her eye, and still more difficult to say what he must, at any cost, get
said.
“I’m not so sure,” he said at last, wishing the earth would swallow him.
At that moment he would cheerfully have given a hand to escape having to
differ from them. They were Effie and his mother: they were his mother
and Effie: the two women to whom he owed everything: more, he loved
Effie so that every fibre in him yearned for her, and, even more than
that, he was delicately sensitive to Effie in her present case. But it
couldn’t change him. His loyalty was engaged, to fanaticism, to another
Effie, high Effie of the hills, of the crusade and the idea; and this
seemed to him somehow, a lower Effie, an Effie who had dipped the
flag of her ideal to a coming baby, whilst he was faithful to the old
unbending Effie who had thrown an imitation wedding ring away. It almost
seemed as if she wanted that ring back, base metal though it was.
A case, perhaps, of splitting hairs, but, at any rate, the case of a man
with a faith at one extreme and at the other his miserable conviction
that happiness was not for him. He had abandoned happiness when he left
Marbeck, and lived now in a place where happiness was barred by Ada.
“I’m not so sure,” he repeated drearily. “You see, there’s Ada and I
have to be fair to her.”
“Ada’s left you,” snapped Anne. A contentious Sam was not going to find
her amiable.
He chose to put it in another way. “My wife,” he said, “is staying at
present with her father. Yes, mother,” he went on firmly, “I’m going to
be fair to Ada and I’ve to guard against unfairness all the more because
you won’t be fair. You won’t be ordinarily just. You always hated Ada.”
“Yes,” she agreed viciously. “I’m a clean woman. I always hated vermin.”
Sam turned to Effle immensely heartened by this virulence. “You see!” he
appealed, calling to witness the hopeless bias of his mother. It was, he
wished to imply, this blind hatred of Anne for Ada which accounted for
his mother’s attitude, her exalting of--well--the mistress over the
wife, her flagrant unmorality. He tried to put all this into his
gesture. “And you,” he reinforced it, “you sent me to her, Effie.”
She bowed her head, admitting it, but Anne was not prepared to let it go
at that. “Even Effie,” she said “can make a mistake. She would not send
you now.”
And, looking at Effie, he saw that it was true. He had seen it from the
first and it bothered him profoundly. Effie had changed: there was, in
all they said, this noticeable stressing of the “now,” to differentiate
them from the “then.” What was it? Anne’s arguments, or the baby, or had
Effie, uninfluenced by either, really changed her mind about the Marbeck
treaty? he couldn’t believe that last. Marbeck was infallible and he was
dogged in the faith. He responded to the Marbeck creed like the needle
of a compass to the meridian, and if with this needle also there was
deflection it was corrected by his racial stubbornness. He had his
people’s queer, infatuated pride in the contemplation of their own
tenacity, even when, perhaps mostly when, it hurts to be tenacious.
Whereas Effie had known ever since Dubby Stewart brought her back from
cloud-land that Marbeck was very fallible indeed, or, rather, Marbeck
was one thing and living up to Marbeck was another. If he had said,
instead of only thinking, that she was a lower Effie now, she would not
have contradicted him, though she did not want a wedding ring of either
metal. She wanted Sam. She was changed from the idealist who thought she
could be happy as a sign-post and a spiritual guide. She had come down
to Mother Earth where men and women live. At Marbeck they were on an
altitude where the air was too rarefied for human lungs, and she wanted
to fall with Sam from selflessness to mere humanity.
“No,” she agreed again with Anne, “I should not send you now.”
“I shall have to think this out,” he said. Effie admitted to being
earthly, and he was horribly dismayed! “Effie,” he cried in pain, “don’t
you see?” he wanted desperately to be understood by her, if not by Anne.
“I see,” she said, and not without pride either. Whatever was fine in
him, whatever reacted from an Eflie come to earth, was due to her,
and she was proud of him even when, as now, he used her tempered steel
against her.
Anne watched with a grim appreciation his anxiety to make a pikestaff
plain. “We all see,” she said. “You’re none so deep and we’re none so
daft as all that. You’ve got a maggot in your brain, and I know the
shape of it. I’ve had the same in mine, and if you’ll think back ten
years, you’ll know what I mean. We’re the same breed, Sam, and we can
both do silly things and stand by then and suffer for them. I flitted
from you to Madge, and I didn’t set eyes on you from that day till last
night. That’s what I mean by suffering.”
And there, in those few words, the tragedy of ten years stood confessed.
Parted from Sam, she lived in exile, suffering, and, of course, he had
known it and deliberately forgot it, so that the point of her revelation
was not its truth, but the amazing fact that she should speak of it at
all. Anne had the pride which suffers silently.
“Mother!” he said, distressed for her.
“Nay, none of that,” she bade him harshly. “If I were soft enough to
let it hurt me, that’s my look out. But here’s the point, Sam. There’s
another woman soft about you, too, and she’s not the same as me. I’d
had you since I bore you, and I were not young when you and me came to
a parting; but she’s young, and you’ll none make Eflie suffer the road
I suffered while there’s strength in me to say you nay. I’d have gone to
my grave without your knowing this if it hadn’t been for Effie. It’s not
good for a man to know too much. They’re easy stuffed with pride.”
She pretended, with deep magnanimity, to think that he had not known
until she told him, but they both knew very well that he had always
known. She dwelt deliberately on it now to inform him, not of her
suffering, but of the intensity of her feeling for Effie. It was so
intense that she could speak of her own suffering: for Effie’s sake she
had unveiled, thrown off her stoicism, and flung the spoken truth as a
challenge and a revelation at him.
He knew what speaking in this manner cost her, but he was stubborn still
in relating all she said to her ungovernable hate of Ada; whereas Anne
did not hate Ada ungovernably, but only when Ada hurt Sam.
Again he said “Mother!” and got no further with it.
“I know I’m your mother,” she said, “and you can stop thinking of me now
and think of Effie.”
“I’m trying to,” he said.
“Well?” said Anne impatiently. She hadn’t imagined an obstinacy which
would not yield to what she had said. Surely he knew the sacrifice of
pride she made in saying it! And there was Effie, too, who said little
and looked the more.
“I don’t know,” he despaired.
“Then others must know for you,” said Anne, and when his lips only
tightened at that, “Sam,” she pleaded, “surely you’ll never go against
the pair of us.”
But there were two Effies, and he wasn’t “going against” them both,
while he held Anne to be mesmerized by hate of Ada. For all that, it
desolated him to be in opposition to them now, to Anne and Effie, the
women who counted, the women who gave. “Still,” he had to say, “there’s
Ada.”
He said it, as he hoped to say it, finally. He wanted to get away from
these two, to escape from their distracting presence to a place where he
could think. After all, Hartle Pike had not settled his problem, and
he must try somewhere else--Platt Fields, perhaps. They had a sort of
space.
But he could not escape--not, at least, till Anne had played her
ace. Anne had not finished yet, though she had hoped ten years in the
wilderness had been enough. It seemed that they were not, and she must
wander still. Well, she could do what she must.
“Oh, aye,” she said dryly, “there’s Ada. There’s your bad ha’penny,
and I reckon summat’ll have to be done with her. But if you’ll stop
worrying, lad, and if worst comes to the worst, I’ll take Ada on
myself.”
Effie started towards her. “No, no,” she cried.
“You hold your hush,” said Anne. This was Anne’s game, not Effie’s.
Sam was still staring at her. “You!” he said. “What can you do?”
“I can see you and Effie happy, and I dunno as owt else matters.” It
did not matter what the cost was to Anne. “When you used to come home to
your tea from Mr. Travers’ office, what you left was always good enough
for me, and I can stomach your leavings still.”
It startled Effie, who had thought herself a specialist in sacrifice.
This was the very ferocity of self-denial.
So far, tired and overstrained, Effie had found peace in resigning the
leadership to Anne, but here was a lead she could not follow. It was not
that she mistook Anne’s purpose or doubted her capacity. Her faith in
Anne was young but adamantine, and she knew that if Anne replaced
Sam with Ada, and made herself heir to the Marbeck plan, she would
unquestionably do for Ada what Sam had undertaken to do. But the thing
was simply not good enough.
“No, Mrs. Branstone, no,” she said firmly.
“Get oft’ with you,” said Anne impolitely. “I can tackle Ada with one
hand tied behind my back.”
“Of course,” Sam agreed, “you could, but you are not going to. Ada’s my
job.”
“I can be pig-headed as well as you, my lad,” Anne menaced him.
“It’s not that, mother.”
“No, it isn’t that,” said Effie, conceiving perhaps that it was time for
her to enter into this tragicomedy of rivalry in self-surrender. “Sam’s
right. Ada does matter, and it is I who am the failure, I who have
broken faith, I who was arrogant. I thought that I could bear a torch,
and I can only bear a child. But I know now what I have to do. I can go
away. I can disappear.”
It seemed to Anne that this was serious because obviously it was a way
out; but she thought it a way much more appalling in prospect than the
plan she had proposed for herself of “taking Ada on.” She took alarm. In
another than Effie it might have been heroics, but Effie’s was not the
stuff that mouths bravado. Anne granted that, and saw a tragic chasm
yawn She signalled her alarm to Sam, who answered it with a glance which
made appeal to her, whilst yielding nothing of his obstinacy.
“If you go away,” he said, “my mother goes with you. I’ve meant that
from the first.”
Anne nodded without enthusiasm. Certainly that was a solution and
equally not the solution. It gave Sam to Ada, and Effie, it
appeared, was not seeing it as a solution at all. There were strange
possibilities, Anne thought, in this young woman, and she did not want
them to be tested too far. Effie was not a talker, and when she said
a thing she did not overstate. There was danger. Well, Anne was
forewarned, and addressed herself in her most humorous, common-sense
manner to laugh it out of court. One can deal with danger in worse ways
than to apply to it the acid--ridicule.
She put her arms akimbo and surveyed Effie and Sam appraisingly. “I
dunno,” she said, “that there’s a pin to choose between the three of us
for chuckle-headed foolishness. We’re all fancying ourselves as hard as
we can for martyrs and arranging Ada’s life for her. It hasn’t struck
any of us yet that Ada’s likely to arrange things for herself.”
And if Sam’s impulse was to say gloomily: “It isn’t likely at all,” he
repressed it when Anne’s eye caught his, and said instead, “That’s so,”
without knowing why he said it and without believing it.
The flicker of a smile crossed Effie’s face; Sam as conspirator struck
her as crudely humorous. Anne saw the smile and understood, but brazened
it out. “Of course it’s so,” she said, defying Effie. “Ada’s a poor thing
of a woman, but she’s none beyond having a mind and speaking it. I was
always one to take the short road out of trouble, so I’ll go along to
Peter Struggles’ now.”
“Very well,” consented Effie, and Anne understood her to mean that
the crisis, if one had impended, was postponed. “But,” said Effie, “of
course, I saw.”
Which was, in its way, a challenge; it was, at any rate, to tell Anne
that Effie knew what had been suspected of her.
Anne met it as a challenge. “Well?” she said.
“You were quite wrung, Mrs. Branstone,” said Effie quietly. “I’m not a
coward.”
Anne was tying her bonnet-si rings, and found it convenient to look
down. She preferred, just then, not to meet Effie’s eye. “I know I’m
overanxious,” she mumbled in apology.
“And there’s no need,” said Effie, a little cruel in her victory.
To Sam the conversation seemed to have slipped into another dimension.
He hadn’t the faintest idea what they were talking about.