Dudley hardly knew, himself, why he spoke diffidently about his plans
for Sunday, and why he did not tell Hal outright that he was taking
Doris Hayward to a picnic at Marlow, given by mutual friends of his and
theirs—friends of the old vigorous days, when he and Basil Hayward had
gone everywhere together, and Hal had still been a boisterous
schoolgirl. Perhaps he felt she might seem to have been rather unkindly
left out.
As a matter of fact, an invitation to include his sister had been
given; but, for reasons he hardly stopped to face, he chose not to
mention it. That was after he had learnt from a visit to the little
Holloway flat that nothing would persuade Ethel to leave her brother,
who had been ailing more than usual of late, and Doris would accompany
him alone.
It had been with a curious mixture of feelings he had heard this.
Things were very pitiful up at the little flat, and though his inmost
sympathy had gone out generously enough to both girls, with a
perversity born of narrow insight he had reserved the deepest of it for
Doris.
It seemed to him that she was so young to face such circumstances, and
at such an early age to become saddened by the vicissitudes of life. In
the depths of her wide blue eyes he saw unshed tears, and the little
droop of her pretty mouth went straight to his heart. He wanted to
gather her up in his arms, and kiss her and pet her till she was again
all sunshine and smiles.
He was not unaware that Ethel probably suffered more, but her way of
showing it, or perhaps hiding it, appealed to him less. Instead of that
mute distress of unshed tears, her quiet eyes wore an inscrutable veil.
It was as if the anguish behind the veil were something too terrible
and too sacred to be looked upon by a workaday world; but Dudley only
knew that a wall of reserve was between him and her trouble.
And her firm, strong mouth had no engaging droop at the corners. It was
only if anything a little firmer, almost to sternness.
Dudley believed that Basil was dying at last, after his weary
martyrdom, and he believed that Ethel knew it; and in some vague way it
hurt him that she gave no sign, and refused to be drawn into any speech
concerning his increased weakness.
Doris, on the other hand, spoke of it in a faltering, tearful voice,
adding a little pitifully that it made it harder for her that Ethel was
so distant and unsympathetic.
In a sense the circumstances nonplussed Dudley altogether. Some inner
voice told him that such a depth of wondrous, unselfish devotion as
Ethel showed to her invalid brother could not live in the same heart
with hardness and want of sympathy; and yet there was the evidence of
the swimming, melting eyes and drooping lips of the younger sister left
out in the cold.
Perhaps it was unfortunate that on that very evening of Dudley’s visit
Ethel had come home rather earlier than her wont, to find Doris not yet
returned from her daily outing, and, in consequence, the fire out and
the sick man shivering with cold. He had looked so dreadfully ill that
she had hastened first to get some brandy to revive him, only to find
Doris had forgotten her promise to get the empty bottle replaced that
morning.
In desperation she had hastened to the other little flat on the same
floor, hoping its inmate might chance to have a little to lend.
The tenant was a lonely, harsh-featured spinster, who eked out a
precarious living by teaching music. Ethel knew her slightly, as a
gaunt woman who usually toiled up the stairs with a sort of scornful
weariness of herself and everything else.
She knew that because she was not fashionable, nor striking, nor
well-dressed, she taught mostly in rather second-rate schools, and
often had to take long journeys to her pupils, coming home tired and
worn at night to an empty, comfortless little dwelling, to light her
own fire and cook her own evening meal.
She knew, too, that she was a gentlewoman, the daughter of a poor
clergyman, left penniless, to fight a hard world alone. Had her own
home been happier, she would gladly have asked her to join them
sometimes; but the weight of Basil’s illness, and her own usual
condition of weariness, had left the invitation always unspoken.
“A little brandy,” the music-teacher echoed, with a quick note of
concern; “yes, I believe I have a drop. Is it your brother? Let me come
and see if I can help?”
“Thank you,” Ethel had replied, trying not to allow her voice to show
how much she would have preferred not to accept the proffered help. “I
think I can manage quite well.”
But the gaunt spinster followed her across the little landing
obstinately. She had seen Doris out half an hour before, and knew that
she had not yet returned.
“Ah, you have no fire,” she said, in her somewhat grating voice; “if
you will let me I will light it,” and without more ado she had procured
coals and wood for herself, and was down on her knees before the empty
grate.
Ethel turned away with a sick, helpless feeling over Doris’
selfishness, and after administering a few drops of brandy, chafed the
sick man’s hands and feet. When Basil felt better he glanced up
curiously at the strange, dried-up-looking female who had just
succeeded in persuading a cheerful blaze to brighten the room. She
looked back into his face frankly.
“You needn’t mind me,” she informed him; “I’m only the music-teacher
from the opposite flat.”
“You seem to be rather a kind sort of music-teacher,” he said, with his
winsome smile, “even if you do only come from the opposite flat.”
The hard face relaxed a very little, and she shrugged her shoulders.
“Oh, well, it isn’t easy to be kind,” she answered, “when you don’t
stand for much else in the universe but a letter of the alphabet.” She
turned back to her grate and commenced sweeping up the ashes.
Basil roused himself a little further and looked interested.
“What letter do you stand for?”
“Just G.” She gave a low, harsh laugh. “G is the letter that
distinguishes my flat from the others, and it is all I stand for to God
or man.”
“I see.” His white, pain wrung face looked extraordinarily kind. “Well,
G, I’m very deeply grateful to you for coming across to light my fire;
and I’m glad there happened to be a G in the universe this afternoon.”
She turned her head away sharply, that neither of them might see the
sudden, swift mist that dimmed her eyes, but she only answered:
“All the same, if there had been no G, and no you, the universe would
have had an atom less pain in it, and no one have been any the worse.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” he told her, “because Ethel couldn’t have
done without me, and if you put your head in at my door occasionally,
and just remark to F that G is across the passage, F will be glad the
universe didn’t decide to leave G out of the alphabet.”
The woman looked at him a moment with a curious expression in her eyes.
Then she said:
“Well, if _you_ can take the insult of a maimed, or joyless, or cursed
life like that, it oughtn’t to be so very hard for me to be glad I
happened to be able to come over and light your fire.”
“Nor so very hard to come again.”
“Ah!…” she hesitated, then said to him, looking half-defiantly towards
Ethel: “Time after time, when I thought you were alone, I’ve wanted to
just look in and see if you were all right. But I didn’t like to.
People don’t take to me as a rule, and I’m… I’m… well, I’m not an
ingratiating sort of person, and I guessed, probably, you’d all rather
do without any help I had to give.”
“It was kind of you to think of us at all,” Ethel said, not quite sure
whether Basil would like her to come in or not.
“You guessed wrong,” was his answer. “_I_ think it would be very nice
of you to look in occasionally. It certainly seems rather absurd for
you to be all alone there, and I all alone here, when we both want a
little company. I’m sure the alphabet was not meant to be so
unsociable.”
“It just depends.”
She got up from her kneeling posture on the hearth, and stood, a
grotesque apparition enough, looking at him with her greenish,
nondescript eyes. Her hay-coloured hair was tightly drawn back from a
high, bulging forehead, her eyebrows were so light they scarcely showed
at all, while her nose, which started in a nice straight line, had
failed her at the last moment by suddenly taking an upward turn in an
utterly incongruous fashion. She had high cheek-bones, a parchment
skin, and a mouth that was not much more than a slit; the grotesque
effect of the whole being heightened by a long, thin neck, which she
made no effort to cover with a neat high collar, but accentuated by a
half-and-half untidily loose one.
She wore a cheap, ready-made blouse, with absurd little bows tacked on
down the front, which Ethel longed to abolish with one sweep, and her
skirt, which had shrunk considerably in front, sagged in a dejected
fashion behind.
Yet to Basil’s kindly eyes, there was something behind it all that was
attractive. For one thing, she was so eminently sincere. One felt she
had no delusions whatever, concerning her appearance or her oddities;
and though she looked out upon life with that scornful, resentful air,
she had yet a keener sense of humour and a clearer brain than most
women. Under different circumstances she might have been a success.
As it was, she appeared to have got into a wrong groove altogether,
and, unable to extricate herself, to have merely become an oddity.
Basil, from his couch, looked up at her with friendly eyes, and she
finished:
“One may want a little company, without wanting just any company.”
“You think you will find me even duller than nothing?” and his eyes
twinkled.
“You know I didn’t mean that. You are clever, and well-read, and
probably fastidious. I’m… well, you see what I am! and no good for
anything except trying to restrain horrible children from thumping till
they break the notes.”
“I thought you said you were a music-teacher?”
“That’s what they call it,” with a dry grimace; “but when I dare to be
honest, I have too much respect for music.”
“Well, you won’t have to weary your soul restraining me from thumping
anything, so it will be a change to come and talk to me. We’ll turn the
tables, and I’ll try and restrain you from thumping the universe too
hard.”
“It would be much more to the point if we thumped together: I, because
I’m not wanted, and it’s an insult to foist me on to mankind whether I
like it or not; and you, because… well, because you are a strong man
cursed with helplessness.”
“Very well, if you come in that particular mood, we’ll just play
football with the bally old universe, so to speak. The main point to me
is, that we take a rise out of the powers that be, by being a source of
entertainment occasionally to each other. As our alphabetical
significance in the general scheme is next door to each other, we may
as well get what we can out of the circumstance.”
She turned aside, looking half humorous and half satirical.
“It sounds well enough as you say it, but I expect the powers are
sneering diabolically at us both. However, if you’ll let me try to be
some sort of company, I’ll come across again soon—”
A latch-key was heard in the door, and a moment later Doris entered.
When she saw the two women she looked taken aback, and stammered
something about not knowing the time.
“When I got in Basil’s fire was out, and he was perished with cold,”
Ethel said coldly; “and as I had to go to Miss... Miss -”
“Call it G,” put in the music-teacher, with a comical twist of her
mouth.
“—for brandy, she came over and lit the fire for me.”
“I couldn’t help not knowing the time,” Doris murmured in a low,
grumbling voice, and went away to take her hat off.
The music-teacher glanced from one to the other, as if about to say
something, but changed her mind and moved towards the door. On the
threshold she looked back, and said in her short, dry way:
“If F wants anything of G, G will be ready to come instantly.”
“Thank you,” Basil and Ethel replied together, the former adding, “And
don’t forget to put your head in at the door occasionally, by way of a
reminder.”
Ethel said no more to Doris, because she felt it useless, but her
silence as they prepared the evening meal together signified her
disapproval. She was deeply worried about Basil’s failing strength, and
longed to speak of it to someone who could understand; but felt such
selfish forgetfulness as Doris showed shut her out from any sympathetic
discussion.
Then Dudley came, and while Doris looked woebegone and sad, Ethel’s
face was a little stern with stress and anxiety. Basil tried valiantly
to be cheerful enough for all three, but the effort cost him almost
more strength than he could muster.
After Dudley had gone, carrying with him the image of Doris’s plaintive
prettiness and pathetic solitariness, and thinking gladly of the
pleasure it would be to take her to Marlow on Sunday, Ethel slipped on
her knees beside Basil’s couch, overcome for a moment by the burden of
his suffering, and the difficulties of their lives.
Often after Dudley had been, and some little act or glance or word had
seemed to emphasise the barrier between them, her yearning over Basil
had broken down her courage. When she had lost them both, what would
become of her then? was the question that utterley undid her, finding
no reply beyond a sense of empty darkness.
She told herself she would go right away to another land—to some far
colony—where she could begin life afresh, with her haunting memories
kept in the background. She would not stay to see the awakening come to
Dudley, if Doris were his wife, nor struggle through the long months at
the General Post Office, when the end of each day’s labour brought no
welcoming smile from Basil.
She would not settle down alone in a dingy little flat as their
opposite neighbour, to become a mere letter of the alphabet to God and
man, surrounded by countless other cyphers of as little meaning and
account. She would go away to some new, young land, with her vigour and
her courage, and carve out a path with some semblance of reality and
value.
Only, could she ever get away from the awful emptiness that would come
to her with the loss of Basil, and the utter lack of any incentive to
carry on the unequal struggle?
Basil laid his hand on her bowed head, and for a little while seemed
unable to speak. Then he steadied his voice, and rallied her with his
brave, whimsical thoughts.
“Wouldn’t the dear old pater have enjoyed G? She’s just the kind of
oddity he doted on. Fancy her teaching music of all things. It must be
only scales and exercises. I think she’s splendid to see the
incongruity herself, and refuse to call it music when she dare be
honest. What a grotesque figurehead she looks, chum, doesn’t she? I
thoroughly enjoyed talking to her.”
But Ethel could not answer to his cheeriness just yet.
“Basil, why are so many humans just mere letters of the alphabet in the
general scheme?”
She had slid into a sitting posture now, and leaned her head against
his arm.
“It doesn’t matter so much about the men; they can go out into the
world and make friends by the way, and become something more if they
wish; but what of the single women, who have to work for their living,
and have nothing much to look forward to but a sort of terror as to
what will become of them when they can work no more? If you could see
some of them at the office, with that drawn, dried-up, joyless look,
scraping and saving and starving for dread of the years ahead: it’s so
unfair, so grossly, hideously, cruelly unfair.”
“It perhaps won’t be when you see all round it, chum. It is so obvious
we only see one side of things here. When we see the other side it will
all look so different.”
“Perhaps, but in the meantime they are here, now, in our very midst,
all _these unwanted_ women. If you saw as much of them as I do, I think
you would feel even the letter had better not have been supplied. A
blank would have meant so much less suffering. A penniless woman
without attractiveness, and with neither husband, child, nor father
wanting her, is such an anomaly. She just drags on, hating her
loneliness, dreading and fearing the future or illness, merely existing
because she is called upon to do so for no apparent reason.”
“But she can always make friends, chum. If she is kind and cheerful and
hopeful she will soon win love of some sort.”
“Yes… yes… but, Basil, to be all that, when one is weighed down with the
inequality of chance and a horror of the future calls for a heroine;
and Life didn’t bother to make many of them heroines. She doesn’t seem
to have paid much attention to them at all. Orphans and widows and sick
people she remembers; but the lonely, ageing, hardened, unwanted
spinster! It sometimes seems to me it is just sentimentality to be
persuaded everything is all right.
“I don’t believe it is all right. There’s too much useless, silent
aching, and useless, passionate resentment over circumstances that it
seems should either never have been, or should be remedied if any
Guiding Hand has power. I have determination and I’m strong, Basil; the
future doesn’t frighten me badly yet, but when you are gone, I feel as
if the loneliness might half kill me, and as if then I ought to have
the right to become a blank if I wish, since I was never consulted
about becoming a letter in the great alphabet.”
He did not seek to stay her, knowing with his deep insight that to get
such thoughts spoken was better than to brood inwardly; and because of
his unshakable faith in her courage, he was not alarmed by them.
Yet he could not offer any comfort. Had not the enigma of useless pain
racked and torn his soul piteously through the long years of his
illness, leaving him indeed with a wonderful courage, but not with a
theory that would fit the needs of suffering mankind? He could bear his
own ills, because he had trained and taught himself to take them as a
soldier takes the miseries of a hard campaign; but the general sum of
suffering was another matter; and he shrank from saying either that
suffering was sent by God to do good, or that it was necessary to the
human race.
All he knew was simply that ills bravely borne seemed aided by some
mysterious power outside their bearers; whereas the craven and the
grumbler seemed but to add to their own burden. For the rest, though he
would not say it for the pain it gave her, the knowledge of his growing
weakness was already a solace to him, and he watched with hidden
eagerness for the day that should set him free. At least a corpse was
no drain upon the slender purse of a beloved sister; and the gnawing
ache of his helplessness and uselessness would be stilled for ever.
If only Dudley had cared for her? From his vantage-ground of the
looker-on, with his unnaturally sharpened sensitiveness, he knew
perfectly how matters stood and how hopeless the desire seemed.
Dear old Dudley, his life-long friend, would probably marry Doris and
learn his mistake too late; and Ethel, with her fine nature, would go
to some one else.
Well, one could not change either one’s own little circle of fate, or
the universe, just to suit oneself; one could only hope for the best,
while there was still room for hope, and cultivate that soldier-spirit,
undaunted even in a losing fight.
In the meantime there was the lonely, unwanted spinster opposite, with
her immediate claim of nearness and loneness; and, as if to direct her
thoughts into another channel, he said:
“You know, chum, I believe G was quite serious about wanting to come in
here sometimes. Why not find out which afternoons she comes home early,
and let her come and get tea and have it with me here. Then Doris need
not worry about getting back in time.”
“But if you are feeling weak it will tire you so, Basil, to have a
stranger. You will feel obliged to talk to her.”
“No, I don’t think I shall; and it would be nice to feel she was rather
glad not to be a blank after all. Let her come one afternoon and try.
Perhaps one way of grappling with the problem of human suffering—the
best way—is to try and alleviate the atom of pain that is nearest each
one of us.”
She assented to please him, and then kissed his forehead with a
lingering, adoring tenderness, marvelling that such a sufferer could so
think for others. Then she went quietly to bed, feeling, as the gaunt
spinster had tried to put it, “If _you_ can bear your ills so, surely I
might manage to bear mine more courageously.”