They spoke once or twice of the white stocking.
“Ah!” Whiston exclaimed. “What does it matter?”
He was impatient and angry, and could not bear to consider the matter. So it was left unresolved.
She was quite happy at first, carried away by her adoration of her husband. Then gradually she got used to him. He always was the ground of her happiness, but she got used to him, as to the air she breathed. He never got used to her in the same way.
Inside of marriage she found her liberty. She was rid of the responsibility of herself. Her husband must look after that. She was free to get what she could out of her time.
So that, when, after some months, she met Sam Adams, she was not quite as unkind to him as she might have been. With a young wife’s new and exciting knowledge of men, she perceived he was in love with her, she knew he had always kept an unsatisfied desire for her. And, sportive, she could not help playing a little with this, though she cared not one jot for the man himself.
When Valentine’s day came, which was near the first anniversary of her wedding day, there arrived a white stocking with a little amethyst brooch. Luckily Whiston did not see it, so she said nothing of it to him. She had not the faintest intention of having anything to do with Sam Adams, but once a little brooch was in her possession, it was hers, and she did not trouble her head for a moment, how she had come by it. She kept it.
Now she had the pearl ear-rings. They were a more valuable and a more conspicuous present. She would have to ask her mother to give them to her, to explain their presence. She made a little plan in her head. And she was extraordinarily pleased. As for Sam Adams, even if he saw her wearing them, he would not give her away. What fun, if he saw her wearing his ear-rings! She would pretend she had inherited them from her grandmother, her mother’s mother. She laughed to herself as she went down town in the afternoon, the pretty drops dangling in front of her curls. But she saw no one of importance.
Whiston came home tired and depressed. All day the male in him had been uneasy, and this had fatigued him. She was curiously against him, inclined, as she sometimes was nowadays, to make mock of him and jeer at him and cut him off. He did not understand this, and it angered him deeply. She was uneasy before him.
She knew he was in a state of suppressed irritation. The veins stood out on the backs of his hands, his brow was drawn stiffly. Yet she could not help goading him.
“What did you do wi’ that white stocking?” he asked, out of a gloomy silence, his voice strong and brutal.
“I put it in a drawer—why?” she replied flippantly.
“Why didn’t you put it on the fire back?” he said harshly. “What are you hoarding it up for?”
“I’m not hoarding it up,” she said. “I’ve got a pair.”
He relapsed into gloomy silence. She, unable to move him, ran away upstairs, leaving him smoking by the fire. Again she tried on the ear-rings. Then another little inspiration came to her. She drew on the white stockings, both of them.
Presently she came down in them. Her husband still sat immovable and glowering by the fire.
“Look!” she said. “They’ll do beautifully.”
And she picked up her skirts to her knees, and twisted round, looking at her pretty legs in the neat stockings.
He filled with unreasonable rage, and took the pipe from his mouth.
“Don’t they look nice?” she said. “One from last year and one from this, they just do. Save you buying a pair.”
And she looked over her shoulders at her pretty calves, and at the dangling frills of her knickers.
“Put your skirts down and don’t make a fool of yourself,” he said.
“Why a fool of myself?” she asked.
And she began to dance slowly round the room, kicking up her feet half reckless, half jeering, in a ballet-dancer’s fashion. Almost fearfully, yet in defiance, she kicked up her legs at him, singing as she did so. She resented him.
“You little fool, ha’ done with it,” he said. “And you’ll backfire them stockings, I’m telling you.” He was angry. His face flushed dark, he kept his head bent. She ceased to dance.
“I shan’t,” she said. “They’ll come in very useful.”
He lifted his head and watched her, with lighted, dangerous eyes.
“You’ll put ’em on the fire back, I tell you,” he said.
It was a war now. She bent forward, in a ballet-dancer’s fashion, and put her tongue between her teeth.
“I shan’t backfire them stockings,” she sang, repeating his words, “I shan’t, I shan’t, I shan’t.”
And she danced round the room doing a high kick to the tune of her words. There was a real biting indifference in her behaviour.
“We’ll see whether you will or not,” he said, “trollops! You’d like Sam Adams to know you was wearing ’em, wouldn’t you? That’s what would please you.”
“Yes, I’d like him to see how nicely they fit me, he might give me some more then.”
And she looked down at her pretty legs.
He knew somehow that she would like Sam Adams to see how pretty her legs looked in the white stockings. It made his anger go deep, almost to hatred.
“Yer nasty trolley,” he cried. “Put yer petticoats down, and stop being so foul-minded.”
“I’m not foul-minded,” she said. “My legs are my own. And why shouldn’t Sam Adams think they’re nice!”
There was a pause. He watched her with eyes glittering to a point.
“Have you been havin’ owt to do with him?” he asked.
“I’ve just spoken to him when I’ve seen him,” she said. “He’s not as bad as you would make out.”
“Isn’t he!” he cried, a certain wakefulness in his voice. “Them who has anything to do wi’ him is too bad for me, I tell you.”
“Why, what are you frightened of him for?” she mocked.
She was rousing all his uncontrollable anger. He sat glowering. Every one of her sentences stirred him up like a red-hot iron. Soon it would be too much. And she was afraid herself; but she was neither conquered nor convinced.
A curious little grin of hate came on his face. He had a long score against her.
“What am I frightened of him for?” he repeated automatically. “What am I frightened of him for? Why, for you, you stray-running little bitch.”
She flushed. The insult went deep into her, right home.
“Well, if you’re so dull——” she said, lowering her eyelids, and speaking coldly, haughtily.
“If I’m so dull I’ll break your neck the first word you speak to him,” he said, tense.
“Pf!” she sneered. “Do you think I’m frightened of you?” She spoke coldly, detached.
She was frightened, for all that, white round the mouth.
His heart was getting hotter.
“You will be frightened of me, the next time you have anything to do with him,” he said.
“Do you think you’d ever be told—ha!”
Her jeering scorn made him go white hot, molten. He knew he was incoherent, scarcely responsible for what he might do. Slowly, unseeing, he rose and went out of doors, stifled, moved to kill her.
He stood leaning against the garden fence, unable either to see or hear. Below him, far off, fumed the lights of the town. He stood still, unconscious with a black storm of rage, his face lifted to the night.
Presently, still unconscious of what he was doing, he went indoors again. She stood, a small, stubborn figure with tight-pressed lips and big, sullen, childish eyes, watching him, white with fear. He went heavily across the floor and dropped into his chair.
There was a silence.
“You’re not going to tell me everything I shall do, and everything I shan’t,” she broke out at last.
He lifted his head.
“I tell you this,” he said, low and intense. “Have anything to do with Sam Adams, and I’ll break your neck.”
She laughed, shrill and false.
“How I hate your word ‘break your neck’,” she said, with a grimace of the mouth. “It sounds so common and beastly. Can’t you say something else——”
There was a dead silence.
“And besides,” she said, with a queer chirrup of mocking laughter, “what do you know about anything? He sent me an amethyst brooch and a pair of pearl ear-rings.”
“He what?” said Whiston, in a suddenly normal voice. His eyes were fixed on her.
“Sent me a pair of pearl ear-rings, and an amethyst brooch,” she repeated, mechanically, pale to the lips.
And her big, black, childish eyes watched him, fascinated, held in her spell.
He seemed to thrust his face and his eyes forward at her, as he rose slowly and came to her. She watched transfixed in terror. Her throat made a small sound, as she tried to scream.
Then, quick as lightning, the back of his hand struck her with a crash across the mouth, and she was flung back blinded against the wall. The shock shook a queer sound out of her. And then she saw him still coming on, his eyes holding her, his fist drawn back, advancing slowly. At any instant the blow might crash into her.
Mad with terror, she raised her hands with a queer clawing movement to cover her eyes and her temples, opening her mouth in a dumb shriek. There was no sound. But the sight of her slowly arrested him. He hung before her, looking at her fixedly, as she stood crouched against the wall with open, bleeding mouth, and wide-staring eyes, and two hands clawing over her temples. And his lust to see her bleed, to break her and destroy her, rose from an old source against her. It carried him. He wanted satisfaction.
But he had seen her standing there, a piteous, horrified thing, and he turned his face aside in shame and nausea. He went and sat heavily in his chair, and a curious ease, almost like sleep, came over his brain.
She walked away from the wall towards the fire, dizzy, white to the lips, mechanically wiping her small, bleeding mouth. He sat motionless. Then, gradually, her breath began to hiss, she shook, and was sobbing silently, in grief for herself. Without looking, he saw. It made his mad desire to destroy her come back.
At length he lifted his head. His eyes were glowing again, fixed on her.
“And what did he give them you for?” he asked, in a steady, unyielding voice.
Her crying dried up in a second. She also was tense.
“They came as valentines,” she replied, still not subjugated, even if beaten.
“When, to-day?”
“The pearl ear-rings to-day——the amethyst brooch last year.”
“You’ve had it a year?”
“Yes.”
She felt that now nothing would prevent him if he rose to kill her. She could not prevent him any more. She was yielded up to him. They both trembled in the balance, unconscious.
“What have you had to do with him?” he asked, in a barren voice.
“I’ve not had anything to do with him,” she quavered.
“You just kept ’em because they were jewellery?” he said.
A weariness came over him. What was the worth of speaking any more of it? He did not care any more. He was dreary and sick.
She began to cry again, but he took no notice. She kept wiping her mouth on her handkerchief. He could see it, the blood-mark. It made him only more sick and tired of the responsibility of it, the violence, the shame.
When she began to move about again, he raised his head once more from his dead, motionless position.
“Where are the things?” he said.
“They are upstairs,” she quavered. She knew the passion had gone down in him.
“Bring them down,” he said.
“I won’t,” she wept, with rage. “You’re not going to bully me and hit me like that on the mouth.”
And she sobbed again. He looked at her in contempt and compassion and in rising anger.
“Where are they?” he said.
“They’re in the little drawer under the looking-glass,” she sobbed.
He went slowly upstairs, struck a match, and found the trinkets. He brought them downstairs in his hand.
“These?” he said, looking at them as they lay in his palm.
She looked at them without answering. She was not interested in them any more.
He looked at the little jewels. They were pretty.
“It’s none of their fault,” he said to himself.
And he searched round slowly, persistently, for a box. He tied the things up and addressed them to Sam Adams. Then he went out in his slippers to post the little package.
When he came back she was still sitting crying.
“You’d better go to bed,” he said.
She paid no attention. He sat by the fire. She still cried.
“I’m sleeping down here,” he said. “Go you to bed.”
In a few moments she lifted her tear-stained, swollen face and looked at him with eyes all forlorn and pathetic. A great flash of anguish went over his body. He went over, slowly, and very gently took her in his hands. She let herself be taken. Then as she lay against his shoulder, she sobbed aloud:
“I never meant——”
“My love—my little love——” he cried, in anguish of spirit, holding her in his arms.
Odour of Chrysanthemums
I
The small locomotive engine, Number 4, came clanking, stumbling down from Selston with seven full waggons. It appeared round the corner with loud threats of speed, but the colt that it startled from among the gorse, which still flickered indistinctly in the raw afternoon, outdistanced it at a canter. A woman, walking up the railway-line to Underwood, drew back into the hedge, held her basket aside, and watched the footplate of the engine advancing. The trucks thumped heavily past, one by one, with slow inevitable movement, as she stood insignificantly trapped between the jolting black waggons and the hedge; then they curved away towards the coppice where the withered oak-leaves dropped noiselessly, while the birds, pulling at the scarlet hips beside the track, made off into the dusk that had already crept into the spinney. In the open, the smoke from the engine sank and cleaved to the rough grass. The fields were dreary and forsaken, and in the marshy strip that led to the whimsey, a reedy pit-pond, the fowls had already abandoned their run among the alders, to roost in the tarred fowl-house. The pit-bank loomed up beyond the pond, flames like red sores licking its ashy sides, in the afternoon’s stagnant light. Just beyond rose the tapering chimneys and the clumsy black headstocks of Brinsley Colliery. The two wheels were spinning fast up against the sky, and the winding-engine rapped out its little spasms. The miners were being turned up.
The engine whistled as it came into the wide bay of railway-lines beside the colliery, where rows of trucks stood in harbour. Miners, single, trailing, and in groups, passed like shadows diverging home. At the edge of the ribbed level of sidings squat a low cottage, three steps down from the cinder track. A large, bony vine clutched at the house, as if to claw down the tiled roof. Round the bricked yard grew a few wintry primroses. Beyond, the long garden sloped down to a bush-covered brook-course. There were some twiggy apple trees, winter-crack trees, and ragged cabbages. Beside the path hung dishevelled pink chrysanthemums, like cloths hung on bushes. A woman came stooping out of the felt-covered fowl-house half-way down the garden. She closed and padlocked the door, then drew herself erect, having brushed some bits from her white apron.
She was a tall woman of imperious mien, handsome, with definite black eyebrows. Her smooth black hair was parted exactly. For a few moments she stood steadily watching the miners as they passed along the railway: then she turned towards the brook-course. Her face was calm and set, her mouth was closed with disillusionment. After a moment she called:
“John!” There was no answer. She waited, and then said distinctly:
“Where are you?”
“Here!” replied a child’s sulky voice from among the bushes. The woman looked piercingly through the dusk.
“Are you at that brook?” she asked s
ternly.
For answer the child showed himself before the raspberry-canes that rose like whips. He was a small, sturdy boy of five. He stood quite still, defiantly.
“Oh!” said the mother, conciliated. “I thought you were down at that wet brook—and you remember what I told you——”
The boy did not move or answer.
“Come, come on in,” she said more gently, “it’s getting dark. There’s your grandfather’s engine coming down the line!”
The lad advanced slowly, with resentful, taciturn movement. He was dressed in trousers and waistcoat of cloth that was too thick and hard for the size of the garments. They were evidently cut down from a man’s clothes.
As they went slowly towards the house he tore at the ragged wisps of chrysanthemums and dropped the petals in handfuls along the path.
“Don’t do that—it does look nasty,” said his mother. He refrained, and she, suddenly pitiful, broke off a twig with three or four wan flowers and held them against her face. When mother and son reached the yard her hand hesitated, and instead of laying the flower aside, she pushed it in her apron band. The mother and son stood at the foot of the three steps looking across the bay of lines at the passing-home of the miners. The trundle of the small train was imminent. Suddenly the engine loomed past the house and came to a stop opposite the gate.
The engine-driver, a short man with round grey beard, leaned out of the cab high above the woman.
“Have you got a cup of tea?” he said in a cheery, hearty fashion.
It was her father. She went in, saying she would mash. Directly, she returned.
“I didn’t come to see you on Sunday,” began the little grey-bearded man.
“I didn’t expect you,” said his daughter.
The engine-driver winced; then, reassuming his cheery, airy manner, he said:
“Oh, have you heard then? Well—and what do you think——?”
“I think it is soon enough,” she replied.
Selected Stories Page 10
