‘Because you yourself become unpleasant, like the trimmed-up void.’
‘Or the furbelowed skeleton, or the rose on a chicken-bone. If you were not an evangelist by profession, you would be an artistic anarchist by nature.’
‘Then I stick to my profession,’ she said, a little breathlessly.
‘Oh do! We should feel very much like the naked chicken-bone, if you took away all the rose-leaves of your professional angelicism.’
But he sent a chill to her inmost heart, a sense of dread also, as if the North Pole had drawn near, to silence all life. The cold, deliberate will which lies inside the emotional anarchist was horrible. It was like wrestling with a skeleton. Queer, that tonight, when she was going to her lover, she should find herself wrestling with the cold skeleton of Clifford’s abstract will. She was in the arms of Clifford’s skeleton will, and the cold void between the ribs of the skeleton was pressed on her heart.
She went upstairs early, took a bath, and lay in her bed awhile. At half-past nine she got up, slipped a dress over her batiste nightdress, threw her pyjamas on the bed, as she did in the mornings, and went to the head of the stairs. The light w still burning in Clifford’s room. She opened the door of the service stair-case. The servants had not gone to bed.
She went back to her room, put on rubber-soled shoes, a thin, dark coat over her dress, and softly went down into the hall.
Marshall had not locked up. He made the round of the doors about ten o’clock. She softly opened the door of the hall, put her key in the yale lock, and closed the door without letting the catch click. Marshall would push the heavy bolts in a few minutes.
She was not afraid. If she met anyone, she would just have said: I am going for ten minutes to walk in the park, before. I go to bed. — A half-moon was shining. No one would be surprised. And in the morning, she would just walk in when they doors were unfastened, about half-past seven: or even go in through the kitchen: and say the same: — I went for a walk in the park. She had gone out in the early morning before. She loved the hour. No one would be in the least surprised. And her bedroom she had left exactly as she left it in the morning, when; she got up. If the maid went in, everything was perfectly natural. The only possible risk was that something quite unusual would happen in the night, sufficient to make it necessary for her to be called. But that was a remote risk. She walked quietly across the half-lit park, with a certain hardness in her heart.
It was this that made her sad. The day had so hardened her heart, she could not unharden it. And it was the wrong heart to be taking to such a rendezvous.
As she got close to the park gate, she heard him softly open it for her. So! he was there! She almost wished she could have been left alone, quite alone, tonight. Her heart was in the wrong mood. — But she had to submit to the chain of circumstances.
‘You’re well on time,’ he said quietly, as she brushed past him.
‘Yes!’ she said, looking at her phosphorescent watch; five minutes to ten. ‘It was perfectly easy.’
He closed the gate silently, and strode after her down the broad riding, where a strip of light fell from the low moon. But she walked in the shade. And he walked at her side, not touching her, in silence. Neither of them could say anything. She was feeling a little hard, and a little hostile, as she tramped in the dew over the grass and flowers of the riding. The night was perfumed with flowers, though it was too early for honeysuckle.
As she went up the slope beyond the long dip, she suddenly asked him:
‘Do you feel all right? I was so afraid you’d strained yourself this morning, lifting that chair.’
‘No, I’m all right,’ he said. ‘I’d forgotten it was only this morning. It seems a long time since, doesn’t it?’
‘Years!’ she said.
They trudged on again in silence. She seemed to hear all sorts of sounds in the woods.
‘There are strange little noises!’ she said, standing still to listen; and he stood also.
‘It’s the trees, expanding or contracting, and rubbing against one another,’ he said. ‘They’re always moving and easing themselves. You could sometimes say they was talking.’
‘How queer!’ she said, moving on again.
At length she saw the yellow light of the cottage, and stood still.
‘Did you leave a light?’ she said.
‘I allers leave a light at night,’ he said. ‘Then nobody knows if I’m in or out. But I blow it out when I go to bed.’
She felt curiously detached from him, and from his voice. And he, in his quiet, almost correct speech, seemed to know it.
He quietly unlocked the door, and bolted it when she had entered. There was a red fire, a singing kettle, and the table set with plates and tea-cups and a white cloth.
‘Shall you eat something?’ he asked her.
‘No thank you! But you eat.’
He stood hesitating.
‘There’s pork-pie, and cake, and cheese —’ he said.
She looked up at him. He was a little pale and remote.
‘No, I won’t eat anything,’ she said. ‘But you eat.’
‘Not if you don’t,’ he said, going to the pegs to hang up his coat and his hat.
‘I shall take off my shoes,’ she said. ‘My feet are wet with dew, in these canvas shoes.’
She sat down in his arm-chair and slipped off her tennis shoes, putting her feet on the shining steel fender. The room was warm, after the chill night outside. She still had on her coat.
He sat in a small chair back against the wall. Above his head was the big sheet of the parish almanach, nailed up where the ‘likeness’, as he called it, had hung.
‘But you eat!’ she said. ‘Do have something! I’m sure you eat at this time, don’t you?’
‘A bit of bread and cheese, maybe,’ he said.
‘Well, do eat it now.’
He seemed to think about it. Then he said:
‘Nay! I don’t feel like eating, if you don’t.’
She looked at him. Why should her not eating prevent him? But she left it.
She was getting hot. She stood up and slipped off the thin coat, then looked again at the parish almanach. He, in his shirt-sleeves, had bent over and was unfastening his leggings.
‘Tell me,’ she said. ‘Tell me, if you don’t mind, what made you marry your wife.’
He lifted his face, flushed with stooping forwards, and looked at her with puzzled eyes.
‘What made me marry her?’ he repeated vaguely.
‘Yes!’ And she looked into his eyes. ‘You didn’t really love her when you married her, did you?’
He met her searching eyes for a moment. Then he took his two leather gaiters, put them together, and laid them by the wall at the side of the chair, saying as he did so:
‘I don’t know as I ever loved anybody — ever knew what it meant, if it comes to that.’
Then he stooped and began unlacing his heavy boots, that looked so ponderous beneath the legs in their dark worsted stockings.
Connie pondered a minute. Perhaps she did not know either.
‘But you didn’t even like her, did you?’ she persisted. ‘At the time you married her, did you even like her?’
There was something insistent, almost magisterial, in her question. He put the toe of one boot to the heel of the other, and shoved this boot off.
‘Why!’ he said. ‘It’s all bygone, an’ can’t be helped nor altered now —’ He spoke with a queer unwillingness and apology. ‘What does it matter, now?’
And he stooped to unlace the other boot.
‘It matters,’ she said. ‘Your wife is the third party. You haven’t forgotten her. And I don’t understand. I should like to understand what was between you.’
He pulled off the second boot, and set it beside the first. Then he went to the scullery, fetched the coal-shovel and a piece of sacking, and taking his boots, began carefully to free them of mud and clay, scraping the dirt into the coal-shovel.
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p; ‘Do you think you need bother yourself about it?’ he said, looking up at her with the same unwilling eyes.
‘I should prefer to know,’ she said; ‘because it puzzles me. But I don’t want to if you’d rather not tell me —’
The dog rose from a shallow box where she had been quietly lying, and came softly, gingerly across to him, stood looking up at him. He looked down at her abstractedly. She vaguely waved her tail, still looking at him.
He lifted his head and said to Constance:
‘It doesn’t matter to you, does it, why I married or didn’t marry?’
‘Yes!’ said she, frowning slightly. ‘I think you must have had such an awful boyhood, with your mother and that father who wasn’t even your father! ghastly! And then to marry that woman who was older than yourself, and must have been instinctively much lower than you were —’
He had let his hand slip from his thigh, and hang at his side. The dog softly intruded her nose into the hollow of the fingers, and softly put her head sideways, as his hand unconsciously closed round her brown face, in a motionless caress. And so the gentle bitch sat still, with her cheek nestling against his hand. Till his fingers softly began to touch the silky mat of her hanging ear.
He lifted his eyes again and looked into Constance’s eyes.
‘Who’s been talking to you?’ he said.
‘Oh, I asked Mrs Bolton. But I asked her! Naturally I wanted to know about your life.’
‘You’d hear nothing rosy from Mrs Bolton,’ he said, with slow irony.
‘Rosy! No indeed! Dreadful! — But it seemed so queer, that you married that Bertha Coutts.’
‘Why queer to marry her more than anybody else?’ he said.
‘I don’t know! I got an impression of her — and of Beggarlee. and the Couttses — all rather awful. I think you had a very hard childhood—’ she lingered and paused.
‘It might seem hard to one of your sort, maybe,’ he said. ‘It; was no harder than anything else. It would be harder for me to have to live in Wragby. An’ I’d as leave marry Bertha Coutts as Sir Clifford, comes to that. It’s the way you look at it.’
‘Perhaps! — When you were a boy, at Beggarlee, did you know her then?’
‘Yes, I knew her. The Coutts lads, Dan and Jim, was my chief pals. They gen me my tea i’ their house, many a time, when my mother wouldn’t have us in.’
‘And they were very common — low?’
‘They might’a bin! But they was as good as me. An’ they’d give yer as much bread-an’-drippin’ for your tea as you wanted: which was more than my mother ever gave anybody.’
‘And how much older was she than you?’
‘Five years.’
‘And how did she treat you when you were a little boy?’
‘I don’t know as she iver took much notice of me. And I took none of her.’
‘Didn’t you like girls?’
‘I kep’ away from ’em.’
‘But with low boys like the Coutts boys? —, she said.
‘What?’ he asked.
‘Didn’t they go with girls? Weren’t they rather horrid, with’ girls?’
‘Oh, they talked a lot of dirty talk. They said fuck! an’ shirt! if yer said anything to ’em. An’ I did same. But they had no more idea of girls than I had, afore they went to pit an’ began to get on towards being men.’
‘And did they go with girls then, or with women?’
‘I don’t know. With what they could get, I suppose. That is, sometimes! Once in a blue-moon.’
‘And did you do the same?’
‘No! I kept clear of women.’
‘All the time till you were married?’
‘Yes.’
‘Were you virgin when you married Bertha Coutts?’
‘I didn’t know as men was iver virgins.’
He twisted the dog’s ear round and round.
‘But you’d never been with a woman?’ Constance insisted.
‘No!’
‘Why not?’
‘I didn’t want to.’
‘But you like women — or you like woman —’ she emphasised.
He did not answer this.
‘And did you never go with a woman before you went with Bertha Coutts?’
‘No. I never did.’
‘Then why did you go with her?’
‘’Appen she made me,’ he said, with a faint twist of a smile. His face was pale and strained. He looked down at the dog, which looked up at him.
‘Dost want thy supper?’ he said to Flossie, in an artificial voice.
He picked up the shovel and went into the scullery, the dog at his heels. In a minute Connie could hear the dog lapping something in the darkness. But he was slow returning.
When he came back at last, silent in his stocking feet, and sat in the chair away against the wall, carefully wiping and drying his boots, Constance returned to the charge.
‘Tell me how she made you take up with her,’ she said.
He looked up, his face hard.
‘Have I got to tell you?’ he said, queer and hard.
‘Yes, do tell me. I feel it is important.’
‘Why?’ he asked softly, almost mocking.
‘If you and I are to be more than just mixed up in an affair —and I think we are more than that — then it is — it is important to me.’
He stared away into the air for some time in silence. Then suddenly he said:
‘Ah well, I told her, an’ she was the first. I might as well tell you, as is the second.’ He paused, and Connie waited. ‘When I was a lad of about eleven or twelve,’ he said, ‘I went in their house one night, winter-time, for Dan an’ Jim, An’ there was nobody in only her—’
‘Bertha?’ said Constance.
‘Bertha! An’ I dunno what she said. On’y I know she lift her clothes up an’ showed me — you know what. — They wore them split drawers then, girls did.’
He came to an end.
‘And what did you do?’ said Constance.
‘I did nothing.’
‘What did she want you to do?’
‘She wanted me to come an’ feel. But I never knowed afore then as women had hair there. Black hair! An’ I don’t know why, it upset me an’ made me hate the thoughts of women from that day.’
‘But what did you do? What did you say?’
‘I don’t know. I suppose I ran off.’
‘And did she never say anything to you again, then?’
‘No! She went to Sheffield a bit after.’
‘There was a pause. Constance pondered.
‘And you hated the thought of women because they have hair the same where men do?’
‘Yes! I know now I was a fool. But that was it.’
‘And you went on hating the thought of them?’
‘Yes.’
There was a long pause.
‘And then when she came back — how old were you?’
‘When she came back afore we got married? I was just twenty-one.’
‘And she was twenty-six?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘And how did you come together?’
‘Well! When she looked at me, I knew she remembered. And she knew as I’d never been able to forget. So she sort of made up to me. And so we got married. I was in th’ black-smith’s shop then.’
‘And when you were married, didn’t you mind any more about the black hair?’
He was silent. The dog came padding to him.
‘Go an’ lie down!’ he said to her softly, And softly, she went.
Constance waited for an answer.
‘Yes! He said at last. ‘I couldn’t touch it. I couldn’t do nothing to her.’
‘And what did she say.’
‘She said, wait a bit. An’ we waited. An’ then she asked me about everything, an’ I wouldn’t tell her. But she never got mad with me, an’ never threw it up at me. She seemed as if she wanted me to be all right. So in the end I told her: an’ she cried. — She cri
ed a’ one night. Then in the morning, she said, if I shaved her. An’ so I did, an’ she laid there so still. An’ then it come up in me, an’ I wanted her —’
He came to a stop, there was silence.
‘And you loved her!’ said Constance, in a low voice.
‘Ay — for a time,’ he murmured.
Again there was a long pause.
‘Then why did you leave off loving her?’ said Constance, still rather dully.
‘Why —!’ he said, rather bitterly, ‘I suppose I was so pleased with myself, and with her for having me, I made myself a bit cheap to her, let her do as she liked with me. An’ then she began to play tricks on me — an’ wouldn’t cook my dinner — an’ wouldn’t sleep with me — an’ when she did sleep with me, she wanted it all her own way, I was nowhere: as if she was the man, an’ me the woman. I came to hate her. And because I wouldn’t give in to her, an’ had a right set-to with her once or twice when she let me come home to no dinner — though she was strong as I was, if it comes to that — she went off to her mother’s an’ left me alone in the house. But I made shift for myself. After that, whenever she got worked up, she went off to her mother’s an’ set Dan an’ Jim against me, swearin’ they’d break every bone in my bloody body—’
He ended in reminiscent bitterness.
‘But there was a child?’ said Constance.
‘Ay! That come the year o’ th’ war, when we was living here — She’d come back quieted down, after she’d been off to her mother’s — never told nobody. An’ she’d sort of make a set at me again. But I got sick, body-sick an’ soul-sick so I joined up to get away. An’ while I was in the army I sort of got myself clear of her. When I come home, in 1920, it wasn’t home, it wasn’t nothing. She kept, threatening to go off. And when she went, I was glad to be at peace, an’ be myself again, like I was when I was a lad. I always felt like somebody else when she was about—’
There followed a long silence.
‘So you never really loved her,’ said Constance at last.
‘No, I never did. An’ she always said it. But I was gone on her that first year, she knowed that. She did as she liked with me, turned me inside out like a glove. And I let her. That’s what I had to pay for ever after.’
‘But she loved you.’
John Thomas and Lady Jane Page 26
