Today, walking with quick short steps beside Emma down Angel Lane, with the bells pealing and the sun warm on her face, she felt that he would be there. Else why was she so specially happy today? She hardly knew how to contain herself. As they turned to go down the flight of steps that led to the market place she turned and looked back up Angel Lane to Worship Street, and saw a river of color flowing under the Porta. It was the gentry going to the Cathedral, the men in curly-brimmed top hats and cutaway coats of bottle green, russet and mulberry, the women in little hats with wonderful full skirts swinging over stiffened petticoats. Polly loved to see them, they were so gay. “O look, ma’am!” she cried to Emma, but after one contemptuous glance Emma walked on down the steps with her head in the air. She, by birth, belonged to that bright galaxy of stars, but she had fallen from them because her brother had gone into trade and got drunk at the Swan and Duck. And they had let her fall. Well, let them go to the Cathedral. She was going to St. Peter’s, her father’s church, for that had fallen too. With Mr. Penny so old and wandering in his head it had become lonely and almost derelict, with a congregation so sparse that in bad weather it did not always go into double figures. Yet it was rich in possessing the whole of the affection and loyalty of which Emma Peabody was at present capable.
They came out of the sunlight into the dark porch, and from there into the dim mustiness of the church. Out of the corner of her eye Polly saw Job beside the broken monument, and her heart leapt. She could only give one quick glance but after it she could see him as clearly as she would ever see anything in this world. He wore a peat-brown coat that was now much too small for him, strained across his chest and buttoned tight so that no one should see the state of his shirt, blue trousers with patches at the knees, and broken boots. He had scrubbed his face until it shone, but being pressed for time at the pump that morning he had not continued the good work to ears and neck. He sat crouching a little forward, as though he thought he would be less noticeable that way, with his brown hands on his knees to hide the patches, and his eyes under the tumbled dark mass of hair on his forehead were bright with mingled pleasure and fright. To sit behind Polly and look at the top of her bonnet appearing over the back of the pew was bliss, and he liked old Mr. Penny, but he did not like it when the other members of the congregation stared curiously at him. It was a measure of his love for Polly and his affection for Mr. Penny that he came at all.
St. Peter’s did not frighten Polly because it was broken and neglected, and she was so sorry for it that she was fast coming to love it. The paving stones were cracked and uneven, the hangings faded and torn, the tall old pulpit looked tottering into ruin and there were cobwebs everywhere. Every available space was crowded with memorial tablets, surmounted with cherubs with broken wings, funereal urns and skulls. Yet it had beauty, for there was very old glass in the windows. It darkened the church but when the sun shone it spilled deep and glorious color all over the cracked paving stones, the dusty pews, the chipped cherubs and skulls and urns, and the congregation. It was shining today and when they settled themselves for the sermon Polly saw that the meager congregation was arrayed in all the colors of the rainbow. Her lips parted in delight, for they were as royally dressed as the gentry had been. Seeing her smile and afraid she was about to giggle Emma hushed her; Mr. Penny was smoothing out the crumpled bits of paper on which he had written out his sermon and looking down at them pleadingly, his mouth trembling. Polly lifted her face, and the smile was for him now because his torn old surplice was lilac, crimson and gold.
He was a tall old man, thin and stooped, with wispy white hair and bewildered watery blue eyes. For a great many years he had been vicar of one of the loneliest villages in the fen, but after his wife had died there he had become somewhat melancholic, and ten years ago the Bishop had brought him to the city. The move had come too late to do him much good, for though he had never lost faith in his God he had lost faith in himself. Year after year the great church out in the fen had remained half empty, while year after year the cold damp vicarage had moldered to pieces about himself and Letitia, because it was one of the poorer livings. And now year after year the congregation at St. Peter’s grew smaller and smaller. The vicarage was less vast here, the stipend a little more, but that did no good to Letitia. It was a pity that they had not thought to move him before Letitia died, but he bore no grudge. Only he could not help it going round and round in his head, as it was doing now, so that he could not remember his text, which he had failed to write down at the head of his sermon. He looked desperately up and down the pews and saw how the girl in the black bonnet and gray cloak, a girl whom he liked almost as much as the shabby boy who hid by the monument at the back of the church, was smiling at him. And her bonnet was golden and her cloak rose-color and saffron. “The king’s daughter is all glorious within,” he said. “Her raiment is of wrought gold.” Then he rambled off into a sermon about something entirely different and everyone went to sleep except Polly and Job. Polly stayed awake thinking about Job and Job stayed awake thinking about Polly.
It was when the service was over that the wonderful thing began to happen. Polly, coming out into the porch with Emma, saw to her astonishment that Job was still there, his back to the people, intent upon one of the torn bits of paper that flapped from the notice board. He did not turn around and she scarcely even dared to look at the back of his head and his unwashed neck as she stood waiting for Emma to finish her conversation with old Mrs. Martin from the baker’s shop. Emma, as the daughter of a former vicar, was a person of importance in the tiny St. Peter’s congregation, and she loved queening it among them. “Yes, ma’am, my daughter Mary’s home,” said old Mrs. Martin. “The one who went out to America. You remember her, ma’am? Your dear father baptized her.” And then, as Emma was graciously pleased to remember Mary, she went on, her old face flushing as the presumption of what she was about to ask: “I suppose, ma’am, you couldn’t honor us by drinking a dish of tea with us today?”
“Thank you, Mrs. Martin,” said Emma, “but I never leave my brother alone on a Sunday.”
“Mary’s leaving for London tomorrow, ma’am,” said old Mrs. Martin sadly. She was very disappointed and she feared she had presumed too far. Polly could not bear her disappointment.
“Ma’am, I will give Mr. Peabody his tea,” she said. “And he will have the paper and Sooty. He will not be lonely. He would like you to have the pleasure.”
“It would be such an honor, ma’am,” said Mrs. Martin. “I remember as though it were yesterday how your dear father—” She stopped and wiped away a tear, caused actually not by remembrance of the late Mr. Peabody but by a draft operating upon weak eyesight. But Emma was touched. She was also torn two ways by jealousy of Polly presiding over Isaac’s tea and a sudden longing to be made much of. No one even in her childhood had petted her. The nearest she had ever come to a knowledge of tenderness was occasionally now in her later years, with these old women who saw her through the rainbow mist that softens all outlines of the past. She was not aware of saying yes but without her knowing quite what happened she found herself climbing the steps toward Angel Lane very flustered and out of breath, and committed to it. She stopped and looked accusingly down at the top of Polly’s bonnet. “Polly, did you hustle me?” she asked sharply.
“Oh no, ma’am,” said Polly from within her bonnet. Her face could not be seen, and her voice was small, correct and demure, but Emma had a sense of small bells chiming, of jubilation and laughter all inside the bonnet. She put out her hand against the wall to steady herself, then climbed on. At the top of the steps she stopped again and asked, “Who is that disreputable boy who was in the porch just now?”
“I don’t know, ma’am,” said Polly within the bonnet, adding severely, “He should wash his neck.”
3.
Elaine Ayscough settled back in her seat with a sense of almost unbearable malaise. Adam had just climbed up into the pulpit. It was a high pulpit with a great sounding board and w
hen he got to the top at last and stood there with his big head hanging a little forward, his ugly nose jutting beaklike from his sallow face, peering out and down at the congregation, with that hideous thing curved over his head, she thought he looked like the Punch of a Punch and Judy show. She thanked heaven that as Dean Adam did not have to preach often, and she took it as a personal injury that the Canon in residence should have sprained his ankle and forced him to preach today, for she hated hearing Adam preach. She hated it as much as he hated preaching. Marriage was a queer thing. She did not love Adam, yet she knew things about him. She knew preaching made him miserable, though she did not know why, and when he was in the pulpit every nerve in her body seemed to be taut. With an effort of her very strong will she tried to detach and calm herself, for she did not want to have another of her headaches; they were aging her. Adam’s sermons were always very long, entirely incomprehensible, and often inaudible too because his deafness made him raise his voice too much, so that it just boomed in the sounding board like surf in a cave and nobody heard a word. She could feel in all those nerves in her body that were not yet quieted how the congregation was resigning itself; to endurance, to meditation, to the planning of menus or wardrobes, each mind running to its own habitual harbor as a ship runs to shelter in a rising wind. But none of them was turning to sleep. In other churches in the city people were possibly sleeping through a sermon, but not here. People did not sleep when the Dean preached. Subconsciously they were too disturbed.
Elaine, having severed her connection with Adam, let herself drift into the sanctuary of her own beauty. Looking down she saw with pleasure how her wide silk skirts were faintly patterned with the far colors of the stained-glass windows. Her slim gloved hands lay in a patch of purple light, as though she held violets. She was aware of the great Cathedral soaring about her and felt more kindly disposed toward it than she usually did. It was beautiful in sunlight, a fit setting for her loveliness. She was not a religious woman but she did feel a profound and at times almost a humble thankfulness that she had kept her beauty. It had been the same today as it had always been. As she had rustled up the nave to her pew of honor beneath the pulpit, tall and slender, and sunk gracefully to her knees, her face devoutly bowed into her hands, she had felt all the eyes upon her just as she had always done. She did not mind if they stared in envy or even dislike, so long as they stared. It was not so much that she wanted admiration as that she wanted comfort. Years ago when there had seemed nothing else to live for she had made a raison d’être of her own beauty, not realizing that as life goes on a raison d’être becomes increasingly possessive. Sometimes, during the wakeful hours of the night, she knew that she no longer owned her beauty, but that her beauty owned her. Then she would be very afraid, wondering if when it left her she would be simply a thing dropped on the floor.
The grating voice above her obtruded itself again. The severance had not been complete; it never was in marriage. Her hands made a sudden convulsive movement of exasperation in her lap, and she had the fancy that Adam had seen it. The Deanery pew was too close to the pulpit; far too close when it was your own husband who was preaching. They were too close. She folded her hands again, gently, for she must not crush the violets in her lap. She must not hurt Adam who had given them to her. Fool, she said to herself, they’re not flowers, they’re light. But it was too late now to tell herself that; she was already back again in the little Chelsea drawing room and Adam had just put the violets in her lap. A drifting mood, encouraged, is like a current at sea. You have no control over where it will take you.
They had met each other first at a dinner party, her first party after the ritual period of mourning for her young scamp of a husband was over at last. She had been gay that night. She had finished with her black clothes, with lawyers and condolences, with pretending to be grief-stricken when she was not, with the whole boring business of widowhood, and could enjoy herself again. She had very little money and would have to do something about that shortly, but meanwhile she was gay, and ready to be entrancingly kind to the grotesque middle-aged man who had taken her into dinner. He was distinguished and scholarly, she had been told, wellborn and well off, or she would not have bothered with him. She rather admired breeding and scholarship and was adept at concealing her own lack of both. She was a clever woman, with the chameleon’s gift of taking color from her environment. Her gaiety that night was not obtrusive but it gave an enchanting warmth to her usually rather remote and classical beauty, a warmth that seemed to the desolate man beside her a glow of heavenly kindness.
Adam just at this time was extremely desolate. He had already been a schoolmaster for some years, having failed as a parish priest, but he was not enjoying it. He did not make friends easily. He knew little of women and had always been rather afraid of them. He fell in love now, at forty, for the first time, and it could scarcely have gone harder with him. It was months before he could bring himself to propose to Elaine, so inhibited was he by the thought of his own unworthiness, so scared of in some way hurting her fragile purity with his clumsiness, and he could never have done it had she not been a widow. That somehow was a help. But even so his wooing was so stumbling and constrained that Elaine, involved with other men, did not recognize it for what it was, and when at last he made his humble declaration she was so taken by surprise that her usual finesse failed her. The mask slipped and though after a moment or two she answered him correctly enough he had seen the astonishment, the slightly contemptuous amusement. She saw that he had seen, saw him flinch, and she was sorry. He had touched something in her.
Like so many beautiful women Elaine had a flair for making disastrous marriages. Her French marriage was a degrading, exhausting business and it was now that she began to build her life about the fact of her beauty and find sanctuary there. Her beauty was her armor. While she looked as she did she could preserve her pride. Luckily neither of her earlier husbands had learned the trick of survival and after six years in France Elaine came back to England a widow again, as delicately beautiful as ever but also as impecunious as ever and not quite as physically tough as she had been. She was actually feeling as fragile as she looked, and there was a vague fear in her mind. What next? It was a wet November and the friend whose Chelsea home she had chosen as her refuge seemed with each day that passed less and less sensible of the honor done her. The fear grew.
The rain passed and there came a Saturday of sunshine. She was not fond of walking but to escape from Rosamond she went to Kensington Gardens and walked there. She still wore her widow’s weeds and they were shabby now, and her nose was pink at the tip from a slight cold. She was not looking her best and she knew it, and the knowledge did nothing to cheer her. The sun was warm and golden, and droves of gentle yellow leaves floated about her, but her fear obsessed her mind and she did not know it, and she did not see the tall black figure coming toward her. But he saw her, solitary and fragile, a poignant note of sorrow in the drifting golden glory. His heart seemed beating in his throat and for an instant he did not know whether to go back or go on. Had it seemed that all was well with her he would have turned back that he might not obtrude an awkward memory upon her, but to see her drifting toward him with the leaves, as lost as they, kept him where he was. He could perhaps be of service to her.
“Madam Blanchard,” he said gently, for he had known about her marriage. She stopped, recognized him and held out her gloved hand to him. He bowed over it and offered her his arm. “Madam, shall we walk together a little way?” She accepted his arm and they strolled on together, conversing of the weather. He was as ugly as she remembered him but she was instantly aware of a new ease in him, a new dignity. Humble as ever, he yet had an air of authority. His clothes had been well brushed by butler or valet, his top hat was immaculate. She read the signs and looked up at him with a smile of entrancing sweetness. He murmured a few gentle words of condolence and for a moment she wondered how she should accept this sympathy. With pathos, drooping on his arm like a bird w
ith a broken wing, or with the truth? She decided for the truth. “You need not condole with me, sir,” she said with bitterness. “I am thankful that my marriage has ended.”
She had made the right decision. He was shocked, and a compassion so vast overwhelmed him that all diffidence, all sense of shame because of the past, was lost in it. He asked her if he might serve her in any way and she shook her head. He asked her if he might take her home and she accepted his offer. She took him up to Rosamond’s pretty drawing room, where the lamp had been lit and the tea table laid before the fire, and the two pretty women made much of him. He told Elaine that he was still a schoolmaster, in town for today only, but he would be spending his Christmas vacation here. Might he call upon her then? She smiled agreement as she bade him good-by. After he had gone it transpired that Rosamond knew about him. He was now headmaster of a famous school. Her nephew had been caned by him. She seemed not to mind now if Elaine stayed with her till after Christmas.
Elaine conducted her distinguished lover through his second courtship with admirable skill, and as the days went by with real sincerity. The greatness of his love for her by turns touched, exasperated and frightened her, but she was grateful, for it was sweeping her to honor and security. And he was a good man. It was his sheer goodness, she realized now, that had touched her before, touched her innate fastidiousness. She believed herself utterly sick of carnal men. She would try to make him a good wife. She hoped that they might be happy. A week after Christmas he brought her a diamond ring and a bunch of violets, kneeling beside her to put them in her lap.
Then began that strange long sorrow that had worn them both down. Elaine did all she could. She possessed a sense of drama, of fitness and occasion, and only the most discerning guessed that she had not been born to the position she filled with such grace. She moved through her days with dignity and correctitude, a beautiful hostess and a mistress able to command the obedience if not the affection of her servants. She conducted her flirtations with such skill and decorum that again only the discerning were aware of them, and she was meticulously careful in all the outward observances of the religion that was her husband’s life.
The Dean's Watch Page 14
