Next morning about eleven the mummer took off his hat in his very largest
manner to the ladies, and the bow was so deferential, and seemed to betoken
so much respect for the sex, that even Mrs. Ede could not help thinking
that Mr. Lennox was very polite. Ralph too was impressed, as well he might
be, so attentively did Dick listen to him, just as if nothing in the world
concerned him as much as this last attack of asthma, and it was not until
Mrs. Ede mentioned that they would be late for church that it occurred to
Dick that his chance of catching the eleven o'clock train was growing more
and more remote. With a hasty comment on his dilatoriness, he caught up a
parcel and rug and shook hands with them all.
The cab rattled away, and Ralph proceeded up the red, silent streets
towards the Wesleyan church, walking very slowly between his womankind.
'There's no doubt but that Mr. Lennox is a very nice man,' he said, after
they had gone some twenty or thirty paces--'a very nice man indeed; you
must admit, mother, that you were wrong.'
'He's polite, if you will,' replied Mrs. Ede, who for the last few minutes
had been considering the ungodliness of travelling on a Sunday.
'Don't walk so fast,' Ralph cried.
'Well, then, we shall be late for church!'
'Which, then, is the most important in your eyes--Mr. Peppencott's sermon
or my breath?'
'I'm not thinking of Mr. Peppencott's sermon.'
'Then of his voice in the prayer. Lennox may be no better than an actor,'
he continued, 'but he's more fellow-feeling than you have. You saw yourself
how interested he was in my complaint, and I shall try the cigarettes that
used to give his mother relief.' He appealed to Kate, who answered him that
it would be as well to try the cigarettes, and her thoughts floated away
into a regret that Mr. Lennox had not been able to come to church with
them, for she was reckoned to have a good voice. It may have been a memory
of Dick that enabled her to pour her voice into the hymn, singing it more
lustily than Mrs. Ede ever heard her sing it before. It seemed to Mrs. Ede
that only God's grace could enable anyone to sing as Kate was singing, and
when the minister began to preach and Kate sat down, her eyes fixed, Mrs.
Ede rejoiced. 'The word of God has reached her at last,' she said. 'Never
have I seen her listen so intently before to Mr. Peppencott.' Kate sat
quite still, almost unconscious of the life around her, remembering that it
was on her way from the potteries that she had learnt that there is a life
within us deeper and more intense than the life without us. Dick's kisses
had angered her at the moment, but in recollection they were inexpressibly
dear to her. Her fear had been that time would dim her recollection of
them, and her great joy was to discover that this was not so, and that she
could recall the intonations of his voice and the colour of his eyes and
the words he spoke to her, reliving them in imagination more intensely than
while she was actually in his arms just before that terrible fall or in the
shop and frightened lest Mrs. Ede or Ralph should come in and surprise
them. But in imagination she was secure from interruption and hindrance,
and could taste over and over again the words that he had spoken: 'I shall
be back in three months, dear one.'
A great part of her happiness was in the fact that it was all within
herself, that none knew of it; had she wished to communicate it, she could
not have done so. It was a life within her life, a voice in her heart which
she could hear at any moment, and it was a voice so sweet and intense that
it could close her ears to her husband and her mother-in-law, who during
dinner fell into one of their habitual quarrels.
Ralph, who had not forgotten his mother's lack of sympathy on their way to
church, maintained the favourable opinion he had formed of Mr. Lennox.
'It's unchristian,' he said, 'to condemn a man because of the trade or
profession he follows,' and somewhat abashed, his mother answered: 'I've
always been taught to believe that people who don't go to church lead
godless lives.'
Sunday was kept strictly in this family. Three services were attended
regularly. Kate hoped to recover the sensations of the morning, and
attended church in the afternoon. But the whole place seemed changed. The
cold white walls chilled her; the people about her appeared to her in a
very small and miserable light, and she was glad to get home. Her thoughts
went back to the book she had fallen asleep over last Sunday night when she
sat by her husband's bedside, and when the house was quiet she went
upstairs and fetched it. But after reading a few pages the heat of the
house seemed to her intolerable. There was no place to go to for a walk
except St. John's Road, and there, turning listlessly over the pages of the
old novel, the time passed imperceptibly. It was like sitting on the
sea-shore; the hills extended like an horizon, and as the sea dreamer
strives to pierce the long illimitable line of the wave and follows the
path of the sailing ship, so did Kate gaze out of the sweeping green line
that enclosed all she knew of the world, and strove to look beyond into the
country to where her friend was going.
Northwood, with its hundreds of sharp roofs and windows, seemed to be
dropping into a Sunday doze, under pale salmon-coloured tints, and the
bells of its church sounded clearer and clearer at each peal. Warm airs
passed over the red roofs of Southwark, and below in the vast hollow of the
valley all was still, all seemed abandoned as a desert; no whiff of white
steam was blown from the collieries; no black cloud of smoke rolled from
the factory chimneys, and they raised their tall stems like a suddenly
dismantled forest to a wan, an almost colourless sky. The hills alone
maintained their unchangeable aspect.