A coldness grew up between them, a coldness unrelieved now by even so
much as bad temper. They met less often and hardly ever worked together.
At times they tried to avoid each other, so painful was this
estrangement to them both. The lines deepened on Elizabeth's face and
her mouth grew hard. She darned Ralph's socks with a shrinking dislike
of the texture and feel of them, and ordered his meals with a sickening
distaste for food. She felt that the daily round of life was growing
more and more unendurable. Breakfast was the worst ordeal, heralding as
it did the advent of another useless day. Ralph liked eggs and bacon,
which he would have repeated _ad nauseam_. She could remember the time
when she had shared this liking, but now the smell of the frying bacon
disgusted her. Ralph did not always trouble to eat quite tidily, and he
chewed with a slightly open mouth; when he wiped his lips he invariably
left yellow egg-stains on his napkin. She began to watch for those
stains and to listen for his noisy chewing. His face got on her nerves,
too; it was growing daily more like Uncle John's, and not young Uncle
John's either--old Uncle John's. His eyes were acquiring the "Don't hurt
me" look of the portrait in the study. Something in the way his legs
moved lately suggested approaching old age, and yet he was not so old;
it must be Seabourne.
"Oh, do let's get away from here!" she burst out one morning. "Let's go
to America, Australia, the Antipodes, anywhere!"
Ralph dropped his paper to stare at her, and then he laughed. He thought
she was trying to be funny.
3
At Leaside things were little better. A dreariness more tangible than
usual pervaded the house. Milly alternated between moods of exuberant
hopefulness and fits of deep depression, when she would cling to Joan
like a sickly child. "Don't leave me! Oh, Joan, you mustn't leave me,"
was her almost daily entreaty. She was difficult to manage, and insisted
on practising in spite of all they could say; but these bursts of
defiance generally ended in tears, for after a short half hour or so the
music would begin to go tragically wrong, as her weak hand faltered on
the bow.
"Oh!" she sobbed miserably, whenever this happened; "it's all gone; I
shall never, never play again. I wish I were dead!"
Any emotion brought on a violent fit of coughing, which exhausted her to
the verge of faintness, so that in the end she would have to be put to
bed, where Joan would try to distract her by reading aloud. But Milly's
attention was wont to wander, and looking up from the book Joan would
find her sister's eyes turned longingly to the open window, and would
think unhappily: "She's just like a thrush in a cage, poor Milly!"
Mrs. Ogden grew much more affectionate to her younger daughter, and
caressed her frequently; but these caresses irritated rather than
soothed, and sometimes Milly shrank perceptibly. When this happened Mrs.
Ogden's eyes would fill with tears, and her working face would
instinctively turn in Joan's direction for sympathy. "Oh, my God!" Joan
once caught herself thinking, "will neither of them ever stop crying!"
But this thought brought a swift retribution, for she was tormented for
the rest of the day over what she felt to have been her heartlessness.
The maidservant left, as maids always did in moments of stress at
Leaside; and once again Joan found herself submerged in housework. After
her, as she swept and dusted, dragged Milly; always close at her heels,
too ill to help, too unhappy to stay alone.
It took a long time to find a new servant, for Mrs. Ogden's nagging
proclivities were becoming fairly well known, but at last a victim was
secured and Joan breathed a sigh of relief. They scraped together enough
money to hire a bath chair for Milly; it was the same bath chair that
Colonel Ogden had used, only now a younger man tugged at the handle.
This man was cheerful and familiar, possibly because Milly was so light
a passenger and looked so young and ineffectual. He joked and spat at
frequent intervals--the latter with an astounding dexterity of aim--and
Milly hated him.
"I can't bear his spitting," she complained irritably to Joan. "It's
simply disgusting!"
It was history repeating itself, for Mrs. Ogden accompanied the bath
chair but seldom, and when she did so she managed to get on the
patient's nerves. The daily task fell, therefore, to Joan, as it had to
a great extent in her father's lifetime.
4
At this period Joan's hardest cross lay in the fact that she was never
alone. She had grown accustomed to having her bedroom to herself during
term time, but now there was no term time for Milly, and, moreover, Joan
had moved into her mother's room. Milly complained that if Joan was
there she lay awake trying not to cough, and that this choked her. She
said, truthfully enough, that she had had a room to herself at Alexandra
House for so long now that anyone in the next bed made her nervous,
because she couldn't help listening to their breathing.
This change was not for the better so far as Joan was concerned, for
Mrs. Ogden had become abnormally pervading in her bedroom since her
husband's death. During his lifetime he had been the one to dominate
this apartment as he had dominated the rest of the house; but now that
James was corporeally absent there remained only his memory, which took
up very little room; all the rest of the space was purely Mrs. Ogden,
and she filled it to overflowing.
Joan did not realize to what an extent her mother had spread until they
came to share a room. There was literally not an available inch for her
things anywhere. The drawers were full, the cupboards were full; on the
washstand was a fearsome array of medicine bottles which, together with
a quantity of unneeded trifles, overflowed on to the dressing-table. And
what was so disheartening was that Mrs. Ogden seemed incapable of making
the necessary adjustments. She was far from resenting Joan's invasion;
on the contrary, she liked having her daughter to sleep with her, and
yet each new suggestion that necessitated the scrapping or the putting
away of some of the odds and ends was met with resistance. "Oh! not
that, darling; that was given to me when I was a girl in India"; or,
"Joan, please don't move that lacquer box; I thought you knew that it
came from the drawing-room at Chesham."
Her years of widowhood had developed the acquisitive instinct in Mrs.
Ogden, who was fast becoming that terrible problem, the hoarder in the
small house. With no husband to ridicule her or protest, she was able to
indulge her mania for treasuring useless things. Joan discovered that
the shelves were full of them. Little empty bottles, boxes of various
size and shape, worn out hair-brushes, discarded garments, and even
threadbare bedroom slippers, all neatly wrapped up and put away against
some mythical day when they might be wanted, and all taking up an
incredible amount of space. In the end she decided that she would have
to let her own possessions remain where they were, in Milly's room.
Far more oppressive than lack of room, however, was the consciousness of
a continual presence. It seemed to Joan that her mother had begun to
haunt their bedroom. It was not only the exasperating performance of
communal dressing and undressing, but she was never able to have the
room to herself, even during the day; if she went upstairs for a few
minutes' solitude, her mother was sure to follow her, on some pretext or
another.
In spite of the hoarding instinct Mrs. Ogden was exaggeratedly tidy, and
spent a great deal of time in straightening up after her daughter, with
the result that the most necessary articles had a maddening way of
disappearing. Mrs. Ogden had the acute kind of eye to which a crooked
line is a torture; a picture a little out of the straight or a brush
askew on the table was all that was required to set her off. Once
launched, she fidgeted about the room, touching first this and then
that, drawing the curtains an inch more forward, fiddling with the
obdurate roller until the blind just skimmed the division in the sash
window, putting a mat straight with the toe of her slipper, or running
her fingers across the mantelpiece, which never failed to yield the
expected harvest of dust. Sharing a bedroom, Joan found herself doing a
hundred little odd jobs for her mother that she had never done before.
It was not that Mrs. Ogden asked to be waited on in so many words, but
she stood about and looked the request. Rather than endure this
plaintive, wandering glance, Joan sewed on the skirt braid or found the
lost handkerchief, or whatever else it happened to be at the moment.
But the long nights were the worst of all. Side by side, in a small
double bed, lay the mother and daughter in dreadful proximity. Their
bodies, tired and nervous after the day, were yet unable to avoid each
other. Mrs. Ogden's circulation being very bad she could never sleep
with less than four blankets and two hot-water bottles. The hot, rubbery
smell of these bottles and the misery of the small double bed, became
for Joan a symbol of all that Leaside stood for. She took to lying on
the extreme edge of the bed, more out than in, in order to escape from
the touch of her mother's flannel nightgown. But this precaution did not
always save her, for Mrs. Ogden, who got a sense of comfort from another
body beside her at night, would creep up close to her daughter.
"Hold my hand, darling; it's so cold." And Joan would take the groping
hand and warm it between her own until her mother dropped asleep; but
even then she dared not leave go, lest Mrs. Ogden should wake and begin
to talk.
Lying there uncomfortably in the thick darkness, with her mother's hand
held limply in her own, she would stare out in front of her with aching
eyes and think. During those wakeful hours her brain worked furiously,
her vision became appallingly clear and all-embracing. She reviewed her
short past and her probably long future; she seemed to stand outside
herself, a sympathetic spectator of Joan Ogden. When she slept she did
so fitfully and the sleep was not refreshing. She must hire a camp bed
she told herself over and over again, but where to put it when it came?
There was not a foot of unused space in the bedroom. She thought
seriously of flinging herself on Milly's mercy, and begging to be taken
back into their old room, but a sense of self-preservation stopped her.
She was certain, whatever the doctor said, that Milly's lungs were
diseased, and she did not want to catch consumption and probably die of
it. Queer that, for there was not much to live for in all conscience,
and yet she was quite sure that she did not want to die.
With the morning would usually come a gleam of hope; perhaps on that day
she would see Elizabeth, perhaps they would be as they had been, the
dreadful barrier of coldness having somehow disappeared in the night.
Sometimes she did see Elizabeth, it is true, but the barrier was still
there, and these meetings were empty and unfruitful.