by A. J. Cronin
‘We’ve had a most delightful time,’ Miss Hocking was saying. They were nearly at the point of parting, ascending the hill together. ‘Such a shame to separate. Only some laths – and plaster!’
‘Well, I promise you I’ll think about it,’ said Lucy definitely, with a smile. ‘And thank you again for your kindness.’
They parted affectionately, set out to enter their respective shells.
And Lucy did think about it, though, of course, she did not decide at once. She turned the matter over in her mind with her native caution, weighing everything for and against the proposed change. Then, ten days after that initial offer – it had been frequently repeated – an incident occurred which, striking upon her mood, influenced her strongly towards a decision.
It was a visit from Polly. Yes, Polly arrived one evening – perspiring, panting slightly from the stairs, hanging with good clothes: the fur cloak, the hat with the feathers, the heavy jet beads, the half-buttoned bursting boots: yet, despite it all, slatternly as a fishwife, and nervous, too, under her enormous affability. Lucy received her frigidly. Polly had done nothing; she was not Joe; but she was, nevertheless, from the enemy’s camp, and she had so patently come at Joe’s suggestion ‘to see how the land lay’ that her attempt at subtlety hung upon her ludicrously as her lamentable garments.
‘The boss was wonderin’ how you was gettin’ on,’ said Polly, after much preliminary chatter. Often in the higher flights of her ponderous wit she alluded to Joe as ‘ the boss’.
‘Oh,’ said Lucy uncompromisingly.
‘Have you seen Neddy lately?’ Neddy was the Reverend Edward Moore.
‘No!’ said Lucy, more uncompromisingly.
Polly looked relieved. How much she suspected Lucy never knew, but she suspected something; and she was so obviously an emissary bent upon conciliation, upon the salving of Joe’s damaged reputation.
It was so like Joe to have sent her; impossible for him to be consistent – even in this! No! He must blubber a little, no doubt, and propitiate his conscience by sending out Polly as a peacemaker. Lucy’s lips drew in. As if she could even tolerate to look at him after what had happened!
‘Why don’t you let the boss do a bit for you?’ Polly was saying. ‘He’s a good sort. Look what he done for me.’
She ruffled her feathers, and smoothed her fur suggestively.
‘Not a penny less than twenty pound, this cost, and it’s all bought and paid for by me brother.’
‘Yes?’ said Lucy.
‘Ah! You’ve only got to stick in with the man to get the right side o’ him. It don’t do no good rubbin’ him the wrong way. He’s free with the money when he’s in the mood. Sure, there’s too much o’ the poker up your back, Lucy.’
‘That’s where I’ve been to blame,’ agreed Lucy, with a biting irony.
Polly stared at her suspiciously. ‘Well, I’ve an invite for you to come over to the Tavern, a personal invite from Joe himself, and if you’re not too high and mighty you’ll take it. In fact, it’s my own opinion that Joe means to put his hand in his pocket for you, so it’s a fool y’are if you don’t come.’
Lucy’s lip curled.
‘I prefer to be a fool,’ she shot out with a curling lip.
Again Polly stared at her, gathering together her coat, which had fallen widely into folds slack as her own adiposity.
‘Sure, you’re a fool,’ she said slowly, getting up. ‘You’re that perfect you can’t see what side your bread’s buttered on. If you’d only watch yourself, you mighta come over and stayed with us.’
‘I’m sorry,’ bit out Lucy, on the spur of the moment. ‘I’ve other plans. I’ve been asked by a lady – a lady, I said – to share her house with her.’
‘You have, have you?’ A half-malignant astonishment tempered the words.
‘So you may tell your brother I don’t require his generous assistance. No!’ Lucy gave a short, contemptuous laugh. ‘I shan’t require to join you above the Tavern after all!’
The irony was lost on Polly, but her red face flooded with a higher colour at that laugh.
‘It’s a wonder ye ever married on to our family at all,’ she declared, with a toss of her blousy head. ‘You’d think we was dirt beneath your feet!’
‘I married Frank Moore,’ returned Lucy sharply. ‘He was a gentleman.’
‘Oh! He wasn’t that different from Joe!’ threw back Polly maliciously. ‘ He was fond enough of the girls himself when he was younger. I could tell you a thing or two if you’d care to hear it.’
Lucy’s small nostrils dilated; her eyes sparkled with a frosty glitter.
‘Get out of my house!’ she said with cold distinctness. Inflamed by her rage, she was a little theatrical; but she was not conscious of being theatrical. She wanted this contemptible, vulgar-tongued woman out of her house; and so, without scruple, she instructed her to go. And, indeed, Polly went, muttering above her palpitating chins, compelled by that hard stare in Lucy’s eye.
It seemed, therefore, as though fate had prearranged that she accept Miss Hocking’s offer. But it was not fate which had designed it; fate had not even swung the balance in favour of acceptance; it was she, and that which was within her, which so shaped the course of her destiny. She had told Polly that she was going, and go she would; nor, on second thoughts, did she wish to draw back. Upon the day following Polly’s visit she told Miss Hocking that she had agreed to fall in with her suggestion, and Miss Hocking was delighted. How delighted she was! The wave of optimism whose crest she perpetually rode swelled even higher than before. She was enthusiastic about the happiness each would derive from the change, urging Lucy to express her lightest whim upon matters of comfort or cuisine, making Fairy sit up on his fat haunches by way of demonstrating his approval. It was all very pleasant and amusing!
At first Lucy had the idea of retaining her house and of letting it furnished: it would have been a welcome additional source of income: but the agent who controlled the affairs and amenities of the villa was adamant. Both saturnine and adamant! No such thing had ever been done, or ever could be permitted to be done, in so select a locality as Ardmore Road. He indicated, however, that it would be a matter of ridiculous ease to relieve her of the remainder of her lease and find a new tenant for the empty house.
She was faced, therefore, with the necessity of selling her furniture. Storage was, from its high rental, out of the question, and Miss Hocking’s single flat could not accommodate the furnishings of two. Lucy almost hesitated. It was a drastic step, and she was aware of its irrevocability. Nevertheless, the needs of the immediate future were more pressing than the remote, and Peter would be at school for another five years. Besides, she had weighed up everything before; she had decided; and she would not draw back.
Her furniture went down to a local sale-room, and was disposed of without auction, through the agency of a dealer. She was wrung by the parting. It cost her a bitter pang to relinquish the familiar objects which time and usage had made so absolutely her own. When she had bought them so eagerly with Frank – she remembered her sanguine expectation on that day, the profound and intimate arguments with Mr Gow upon the virtues of oak and mahogany, her own earnestness, her smiling side-glances to Frank – yes, when she had polished them through the years with the warm pride of possession, had she ever considered that she would dispose of them like this? And she received so little – a miserable sum of little more than thirty pounds!
Certain things she retained – her own wardrobe, a picture that had been her mother’s, the rocking-chair from her bedroom, on the round knob of which, still faintly dented, Peter, clutching at her skirts, had cut his teeth.
Then, one night towards the beginning of February, she came home from business, and went along the front towards her house for the last time. There was no need for this journey – the house had that day been emptied – but the peculiar sentiment which sometimes swayed her was the impulse of the pilgrimage.
She let herself into the
naked little hall. The house, stripped of everything, wearing an aspect void and unfamiliar, holding nothing substantial, yet peopled, it seemed to her, by images, teeming with actions past, hung with a tapestry woven from the intimacies of her life, held a strange yet hollow dignity.
Tears rushed into her eyes. Here Frank had loved her: here Peter had been borne; from here, violently, madly, had she rushed into that fog to defeat herself, to destroy her love – and Frank.
And suddenly she sobbed uncontainedly. How had it all come about? Turning, she went out into the garden: the crusted soil, sealed now against the winter, held but a few stalks, sapless stems, and the callow apple-tree all shorn, immobile, its two arms outstretched, a thin and gawky scarecrow of a tree. The pebbles upon the path, washed by the rains, polished by the frost, glistened whitely – those pebbles which Frank and she had gathered to strew upon the walk.
With a final wrench she tore herself away, locked the house, came sadly along the front, her eyes red-rimmed with weeping.
The key she left at the agent’s office, and, overcome by a strange lassitude, she came up the hill, ascended the stairs to Miss Hocking’s flat in Victoria Crescent, and paused before Miss Hocking’s door. Then, slowly, she entered that door.
Chapter Eight
Miss Hocking’s flat was artistic. No bunched roses or beribboned forget-me-nots adorned the walls, which were, instead, papered to a reseda green, admirably adapted to display the Burne-Jones mezzotints and the Rossetti women who, with up-tilted chins and sensuously curving lips, gazed palely from their rough oak frames. In general, the furniture was good – furniture, doubtless, that had descended in the family – and it wore the stamp of genuine antiquity; Miss Hocking’s bed, indeed, was a large four-poster that carried its canopy with historic dignity. But there were newer pieces – a what-not, a canterbury, some playful little knick-knacks – which betokened a feeling for the modern decorative art.
In the drawing-room, the piano, bearing no photographs, was swathed by a fringed satin scarf, and the ’cello, leaning by the canterbury like a roué at a buffet, justified that scarf with an air of romantic negligence. Yet there was nothing raffish in the air, nothing Bohemian! Holman Hunt – also upon the walls – forbade that strictly, inducing something of a devotional austerity.
And there were books – quantities of inherited books, and some uninherited and uncut – lying upon the table, denoting a penchant for the dilettantism of the day.
Moreover, an easel stood unashamedly in its corner, and a bowl of pot-pourri upon the hearth. No bourgeois aspidistra could be seen, but instead, tendrils of wandering sailor, trailing from a bamboo stand, tastefully supplied that touch of greenery demanded by the age. Green, indeed, even to the lampshades, was the tone of the flat, and Miss Hocking herself – when she discarded her tailor-mades – affected this colour: trailing green square-yoked dresses with full sleeves, fashioned of a shot-silk fabric that rustled with seductive majesty.
Certainly the house had quality, a charming quality shared equally with its owner, a quality which Lucy found impressive but which, in some strange fashion, eluded her. She liked the house, she liked her new companion – to do otherwise was impossible – yet she could not ‘place’ Miss Hocking, who, admitting herself to be a wanderer – outcast was the word she laughingly employed – remained in Ardfillan for some reason unexplained. She had few friends – a little changing coterie, perhaps – and no relations but a brother, seldom mentioned, who lived still in her native town in the south of England. Yes, there was something which escaped Lucy, some underlying quantity which puzzled her.
This was what she felt as she sat at the window of the drawing-room upon a Sunday some weeks after her arrival. They had just had luncheon, an excellent cold luncheon left ready by Mrs Dickens – Lucy refused to recognise the sobriquet – and now she was in a mood of quiet introspection. Glancing out of the window, she observed the pleasant waving screen of foliaged trees, now masking, now revealing, the discreet view of the private gardens opposite; she saw a carriage roll slowly away from one of the mansions underneath; the faint throbbing note of a piano came to her through the quiet of the afternoon; the sun shone upon her and cast her shadow behind into the room. Through the uncertain state of her mind she felt the charm, the orderly peace, of those surroundings, drawing from her being a sensuous response which wavered tenuously between happiness and regret. Suddenly Miss Hocking came into the room.
‘Time for our constitutional!’ she exclaimed positively. ‘Walk and the world walks with you. Sit and you sit alone.’
Lucy, whose morning had been occupied by church, and who had meant now to take her ease, looked up.
‘I rather wanted to have a rest,’ she said mildly. ‘I’m tramping all week, you know.’
‘Time for your walk!’ insisted the other, in her usual high humour. ‘A glorious day! Fairy is simply bursting to get out! A wind on the heath. Walt Whitman’s weather. He can’t miss his exercise, neither can you.’
Fairy, sunk in the torpor of digestion, endeavouring to secrete himself beneath the sofa, now exposed one protesting eye.
‘Well,’ began Lucy – she hardly cared to offend the other, whose effusive good-nature alone excused the insistence of her manner – ‘I don’t feel like walking much.’
‘Tut-tut! Not tired of living yet!’ broke in Miss Hocking, with her customary raillery. ‘ You don’t know how pretty you are today! Mustn’t die until you’ve worn out that new dress. It’s too becoming. Upset all the lady angels!’
Lucy smiled. ‘All right – if you’d like me to come’; and she rose to get her hat and gloves.
‘Excellent!’ exclaimed Miss Hocking. ‘ Come, Fairy! Fairy! Mustn’t be a lazy dog.’
She made an excited note of invitation with her tongue, and cried: ‘Bunnies! Bunnies! Bunnies! Come and get bunnies!’ To which the animal, emerging upon its stomach, essaying twitchingly to find its legs, at length responded with a feeble growl.
They went out, Miss Hocking still talking, Fairy wandering despondently at heel.
The walk was to be short – so much had been agreed – but Pinkie marched exuberantly; before long they found themselves away from the usual Sunday promenaders, amongst the high woodland which screened the foothills above the point of Rhu.
‘Might as well get down to Rhu! Come back by the sea road!’ said Miss Hocking gaily. ‘We love a long tramp, and it’s a bewitching day.’
‘It’s rather a far way round, though.’
Lucy’s new shoes were stiff, the right one already hurting her heel.
‘Oh, no, no! Do come along! Wonderful here’; and she marched off again, taking a path which swung into the adjacent woods.
Reluctantly, Lucy followed; she disliked being dragged about like this; yet the wood was lovely, shady and calm. The lime and beech leaves, limp from their own freshness, hung suspended in a green spray; the chestnuts, burdened already by a bristle of white spears, drooped languidly; profuse wild flowers enamelled a blue and yellow pattern upon the turf.
‘We’ll have a rest, you know,’ called out Miss Hocking encouragingly. She was still ahead, like the forager of an expedition. ‘Of course we shall! A lovely spot near here!’
She went on talking over her shoulder, discussing the weather, the trees, the flowers. She made little poetical declamations; she whistled back the bird-calls with a merry air; desperately she enticed Fairy to the chase of unseen rabbits; she betrayed a giddy, intoxicated love of life.
Then, half way through the wood, she paused beside a flowering wild-cherry tree.
‘This is the place!’ she exclaimed. ‘This is where we have our siesta. Lie down! Lie down and be at ease!’
Triumphantly she flung herself upon the grass, straightening her long limbs luxuriantly. Lucy sat down beside her; she took off her hat and lay against the bole of the tree, letting her palms rest on the cool foam of fallen blossoms by her side.
‘I’m hot,’ she said reproachfully. ‘ You walk
like a regiment.’
A few white petals fluttered lightly downwards from the branches through a web of sunlight, and settled on her hair. Half closing her eyes, she added: ‘And I feel sleepy.’
‘Sleep, then,’ suggested Pinkie; she was making a daisy-chain for Fairy. ‘I’d like you to sleep. If I’d my ’cello, I’d play you to sleep. You would sleep beside me!’
But Lucy did not sleep; instead, from beneath her half-lowered lids she gazed at the other curiously. It gave her a strange sense of intimacy to be here alone in the heart of the wood with this extraordinary and beautiful woman, whom she seemed hardly to know. The thought now struck her forcibly as she observed the other’s massive yet elegantly moulded form, stretched in some abandon upon the grass. Almost an embarrassment the thought became, the longer she dwelt upon it.
‘My legs?’ said Miss Hocking, looking up suddenly. ‘ You’re admiring them!’
Lucy coloured, and withdrew her eyes sharply. She had in a sense been thinking –
‘They’re rather good, I think,’ continued the other, smoothing her calves appraisingly. ‘A Grecian curve, you know. Oh, yes! You should see me when I’m undressed, or even in my bloomers. Quite charming!’
Lucy looked pointedly away, and drew the hem of her own skirt tightly around her ankles. She detested that sort of talk. Her modesty, like her pride, was excessive. She was not the sort of woman who studied intimately her own form, let alone the form of another in the act of disrobing. But Miss Hocking displayed an eager pertinacity, an almost avid enjoyment of the topic.
