‘Do you want anything, Mrs Hunt?’
‘No,’ Delia said.
‘I’ll take a nap for a few minutes.’
‘Nap your head off.’ Only leave me alone. She wanted to get back again. For one moment she had had the strong biting taste of those days in her mouth—but the fool must speak and spoil all. She could scarcely breathe. Her body felt swollen. It felt monstrous. She made an effort to part her legs but they had grown together and she could do nothing except lie and endure these changes. No change taking place in her body could be so extraordinary as the one which had overtaken the child Delia. For some reason this thought gave her intense pleasure. She considered it for another moment, then closed her eyes. At once, she felt that she was falling headlong through a black torrent. She had a fancy that her husband had come in: half opening her eyes she looked everywhere in the room. Nothing. The nurse dozing made as much noise as her own laboured breaths. I was a fool to take him back, she thought, without heat. She felt only contempt for herself, no pity. She did not feel injured when he thrashed her more than when he looked at her. It was all in the day’s work, she would say. Her mind, more resilient than her body, took all such mishaps as they came. She treated her body as if it were not important, and rolled it in the dirt; but every pleasure she had had came to her through it. What alarmed her now was that it refused to obey her. It’s the end of everything, she thought.
The nurse had set two candles on the floor. Delia turned her face from them and thought of other rooms which the candles had changed and diminished. Ah, but I was young, she repeated. In those days London was smaller and grander. You knew where you were. Women like her, with no weak modesty and no fears, were apart. There were places she went where no what you called respectable woman could have gone. A sense of warm satisfaction filled her, as if her body had its own thoughts.
I never stinted myself, she said. Loud familiar music sounded in her brain. The feeling of satisfaction deepened, it became an exquisite joy; shock after shock of this joy passed through her; she felt it spreading upwards and filling her breasts with warmth: even her breathing felt easier. Now I am winning, she thought. When she felt happy she had always a sense that she was getting the better of life. She had had this sense when she rolled on the ground, when she was drunk, when she was merry, when her lusts were filled. She thought of life as a woman of her own present age, and miraculously stronger. No friend of hers, but someone of her own family—a familiar and an old enemy. Times when she was poor, or unlucky, were one up to life. Her illness was another score for that side. I’ll pay you out, she thought—you, I’ll fetch you a slap in the eye—yes, that’s it, she thought, that’s the way to live, up and at’em. The pressure in her side started again, it was like a hand opening and shutting. Damn you, damn you, she said to the other woman. She felt angry that she could do nothing but lie here with life crowing over her. You wait, she muttered. Yes, wait, I’ll show you. I’m a fool, but that’s neither here nor there, she thought, confused by the pain.
‘Nurse.’
She called twice before the inert body in the chair stirred and sat up. With a hurried gesture the nurse straightened her cap. She disapproved deeply of her patient.
‘I feel much worse.’
Stooping, the woman felt her forehead and wrist. ‘We’re going on very well,’ she said in a moment.
‘We, you fool. Are you ill in bed too?’ Groaning with with rage, Delia struck at the woman’s hand. The nurse withdrew in an offended silence. Now Delia felt past all. Her body seemed to be dissolving away from her. She tried to save it by fixing her glance on one and then on another of the objects in the room. She liked her furniture. It was ornate and comfortable. The floor was thickly carpeted so that she could step out of bed without feeling the cold, and with the chairs, the gilt bed and the dressing-table, it was another slap in the eye for life. Who could have expected her to reach this? Not that woman in Brixton who wanted to give her a hiding. Whatever happened to her, these would remain, the marks of a victory.
She let herself drift again into a half sleep. Her body flowed over the room, touching the walls, the ceiling. In a sudden panic she contracted it until it lay huddled and panting in the bed. Doors opened in her everywhere. As fast as she shut one, another sprang apart to let out a rat or a dwarf. The dwarfs were as small as children, dark, with bent legs. They ran everywhere and everything they touched shrivelled. She tried to keep out of their way. A sudden spasm gripped her. Seizing one of the dwarfs she tried to cram him into her body, but in the same moment she woke and saw the room. She was so hot that she thought she was burning. And life was standing by her bed, grinning down at her. ‘You’ve come, have you,’ she said to life. Now I am burning, she thought. A slow anger possessed her. As life stooped down and began to choke her she made a sudden effort and sprang forward. She fell on to the floor and still fighting rolled under the bed. She tore her nightgown and tore at her throat in her struggle to breathe. In the struggle she rolled back and forward, sending the chamber-pot flying against the wall; it broke into a dozen pieces and she cut herself on one of them.
The nurse could do nothing to help her. Out of her wits, she opened the door and called for help. It was four in the morning. Hervey heard her and came downstairs pulling a coat over her nightgown. ‘She’s fighting under the bed with something,’ the woman said.
They went in, Hervey reluctant, afraid of seeing an unpleasant sight. Delia was exhausted. She lay with her hand bleeding—a little blood where she had put it to her lip. Dragging and lifting, they got her into the bed. ‘She’s killed herself,’ the nurse said. ‘Congestion of the lungs, and that strength. Who would have expected her to do it?’
Hervey was looking closely at Delia. Her big gross face, the mouth gone slack, was as if empty. As Hervey watched, a little colour suffused it. The eyes were open. They were alive, staring, bold, used.
Some impulse deep in Hervey recognised its like in Delia. She stooped closer, trying with an unconscious passion to see the brain moving behind the eyes. A strong excitement filled her, the sense of sharing in a mystery. Behind her the nurse fumbled with the candles. Only one remained alight; the rest of the room was so dark that it might have been underground. Delia’s face changed. She moved her eyes and looked straight at Hervey, with her bold cynical gaze, the flame of the candle wavering in her eyes. She’s alive, Hervey thought. ‘Do you want something?’ she asked, smiling. Delia winked at her. ‘Whoops, dearie,’ she said in a breathless whisper. She closed her eyes again and kept them closed. She had no further need of help.
‘What’s that? Has she spoken?’
‘She’s no more dead than you are,’ Hervey laughed. Far less dead, she corrected herself. She stumbled back to her room and slept at once.
In the morning, going out to her work, she looked in Delia’s bedroom. A big man, in a travelling coat down to his ankles, stood at the end of the bed.
It was the first time Hervey had seen Delia’s husband. She knew that he lived mostly in Ireland—he was an officer in the Black and Tans—and her faint feeling of distaste for his profession strengthened to active enmity. She looked at him without speaking. He had a smooth face, the planes curiously flattened, nose fleshly and strong, narrow guarded eyes—a hard face, hard-mouthed and arrogant. He returned her gaze with an encouraging smile, which increased her dislike. Turning her back on him she spoke to the nurse, took one look at Delia, who was sleeping, her face grey in the daylight, and went out. Her heart quickened uncomfortably. As she stepped into the street she was trying to account for her dislike. It was unaccountable, a breath across a mirror: it came, she thought, from the past—he had reminded her a little of Captain Gage. No—from the future, she said. But that was nonsense. She hurried on, half running to get away from the image of herself standing like a stock before that inexplicably alarming figure.
Chapter XXII
Time Passes
In December of that year it came to Hervey that she had been in Lon
don two years and was not famous yet. She was sitting in the editorial room, correcting proofs of The Week. Renn at the other desk had raised his head and was staring at the window. She followed his glance. There was nothing to see except the sky, like a river of grey water, between the buildings. She jumped up, seized her coat, and went out. For an hour or more she walked eastwards, through the streets and squares in which half the world’s wealth comes to report for service abroad. She passed the tall new offices of what had been, until she sold it, her grandmother’s firm. An old shame dyed her cheeks. I asked her to give me work: I went there wearing my thick coat because its length made me, I thought, look older; when she snubbed me roughly I cried. Am I never to forget it? She felt pleased that the firm had been sold because there was no one, no Garton, Roxby, or Hervey, to carry it on. It was a just punishment. I could have carried it on, she said.
The sight of a top-hatted man stepping into a car outside the building infuriated her. Had there been a stone near her fingers she would have seized it. He was a usurper, and the lawful heir trudged past him with a crack in her shoes. She. turned back, and half running, brushing against people in her impatience, she entered the room where David Renn was still staring at the window, as if he had not moved for an hour, and asked him if she could go to Danesacre for a few days.
‘As long as you like,’ David Renn said, without looking at her. ‘Go there to-day and stay over Christmas.’
Her anger, discontent, fell off like a shadow passing; she was ashamed of them, of herself. I ought to stay with him, she thought. But she turned and went out of the room again—it was four o’clock, she would run across to Penn at his office, tell him that she was going, run home, pack, send a telegram, and take the night train to Danesacre. It meant four cold hours in the early morning waiting at York, but it was worth it. It saved a whole day.
When she came into Penn’s room, her old room., it was empty, except for a young woman typing out letters at a desk near the window. My desk, Hervey thought. She spoke to the young woman, making use, as she did when she was nervous, of her dazzling smile. On this occasion it woke no answering warmth. The young woman only looked at her, with a cold inquisitive stare, and went on with her work. Hearing Penn on the stairs, Hervey went out of the room to meet him. She told him her news.
As she was going out she asked, struck through by an unpleasant feeling : ‘Who is that girl in there?’
‘Girl?’ Penn said. He smiled. ‘She’s the typist I share with another man. She admires me, because I brought her in here.’ He could not refrain from telling her this. It gave him a strange quick pleasure, almost as though he were making a confession.
‘Did you know her?’ Hervey asked. She felt something unreal in his manner, under the jaunty voice. But what is it? her mind asked. What is wrong with him?
He said, No he had never set eyes on her until she came to be interviewed, then he had felt sorry for her. Why? Oh—nothing. He laughed loudly again, and Hervey decided that it was all a lie; for some reason, probably for no reason at all, he had made up this foolish story. She sighed impatiently and let it pass from her mind.
Penn went with her to King’s Cross. A moment before the train moved he drew a flat parcel from his coat and gave it into her hand. It was a bag, a small leather handbag. Hervey did not care for it—it was not, she could see, good leather—but she cried out with pleasure. She was touched by his kindness.
‘I thought I’d like to give you something, you haven’t got many things,’ Penn said, gently and smiling.
Danesacre in winter is pinched between a grey jagged sea and iron moors. The shops are decorated for Christmas with a little coloured paper and evergreens and holly, and at night they are brightly lit, some with fancy lights under the coloured paper, so that there are pools of red, green, and yellow light on the pavements, and the children press their foreheads against the glass. The evening before Christmas Hervey and her mother went out to see the shops. This was what they had always done, from the beginning, and as she walked down the steep streets and crossed the bridge over the harbour, the water black and silent, with the lights from the houses broken into it, she felt the strong excitement we feel when some trivial thing we used as a child is put into our hands. But it is not only excitement, it is pity, a deep wish to be safe now as then, and recognition, more surprising than any, that something was offered to us at that time which cannot be taken away or destroyed. And it may happen that the thrill of a lighted window in winter lasts longer with us than any of the great emotions, of love or ambition, and is perhaps the only one we shall keep at the end.
Mrs Russell was excited and very happy. She talked, a thing she hardly ever did, of her youth in her mother’s house near Middlesbrough. Hervey had not seen this house, but she knew that it was a great place and as splendid as her grandmother could make it. She thought of it as old and charming. Actually it was neither, but for Sylvia Russell too, as for her daughter, it had become more than a great house. It marked the defeat she had prepared for herself and did not accept; and each time she bought a chair or a curtain for her own it was because it reminded her of one in her mother’s house and when she had it it was another advance, an inch, towards an ever-receding glory.
‘We girls liked Christmas because it was the only time in the year we could be sure of keeping my mother with us,’ Mrs Russell said. ‘There were the presents—Clara spent weeks, months, making hers—almost always it was something quite unspeakable, a work-bag or a stool, such things as my mother never used—and then as like as not she pushed it out of sight instantly. I remember one Christmas when Clara made a dreadful woollen scarf, oh dreadful, and my mother’s face when she took it, and then weeks afterwards we saw it being used to tie round some books that were going to the office. Poor Clarry. I was sorry for her then, but the truth is she has no idea how to manage anything.’ She said this as if she had not managed her own life so that it had been a ceaseless fight to get less than a morsel of the fineness she craved.
‘We had very little pocket-money,’ she went on. ‘My mother never thought that we needed any, and so we had to plan and scrape. Of course any shop would have served us, but we would as soon have set fire to our clothes as order anything we couldn’t pay for at once. We were happy, though. We laughed a great deal, and rode about the moors. One summer I had a grey silk habit. It was the thickest silk you ever saw. I wore long black gloves with it.’
Her eyes were very bright, a bright pale blue. She glanced at her hands. The fingers were swollen with much work, the wrists thickened.
Hervey saw her looking at them. She felt a familiar rage and grief. Why have you grown old? Why are you tired? When her mother was like this, gay and yet so tired and finished, she felt as though a nerve were being drawn out of her own body. She pretended not to notice anything. ‘You must have looked very fine,’ she laughed.
‘Grey always suited me,’ Mrs Russell said.
‘Why don’t you have a grey dress for the spring?’
‘Yes I might do that,’ her mother said. She considered. Was she, Hervey wondered, seeing only the other dress?
‘I’ll give it you for your birthday,’ she said, eagerly.
Mrs Russell would not agree at once. ‘We’ll see,’ was all she said. But the idea pleased her. The girl saw that, and longed to give her something better than she had ever had. ‘When my ship comes in I’ll buy you a fur coat,’ she cried.
Mrs Russell laughed. Hervey’s presents were a joke in the family. She would give away her own skin if she knew you wanted it, her mother said. But her generosity was more nerves than heart.
The next morning she woke early. Richard was still asleep in his cot. She saw his face, the skin clear and delicate, his eyelids weighted down with the black heavy lashes, and she felt an old fear. I am utterly responsible for him, she thought. She promised him again that he should have everything, she would get him everything.
Lying in her bed, she could see as far as an older part of the town
, where they lived when she was a child. She saw the roofs and the tops of trees, with fields between. Now she began trying to trace the streets and to recall their names and the look of the old houses. There was one street she remembered where grass grew between the stones.
An exquisite happiness filled her as she looked at them from this distance and tried to recall how they had seemed to her. What was surprising was the silence. There were no sounds in her memory, but all was still; and in stillness and in bright airs the child lived its tranced life. Surely one day, she thought, a child will stand by the steps of Number 5 and look at the laburnum with my eyes. And she thought that when that happened she would come to life again, and the story would begin afresh. The narrow unfashionable houses would see her again; she would run down the hill to the harbour, and the grass thrusting between the stones would fill her with the old delight and surprise. Ah, then I shall be happy, she thought.
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