by E. H. Young
She did sleep at last but not before Mr. Blackett, waking in the early hours of the morning and raising himself on his elbow into the position he had found necessary, was able to see a familiar glimmer in the darkness and give rein to those fancies which he knew were extravagant and absurd but in which he found a strange pleasure and release.
He would have been very happy if he had known that the woman who was not a widow went in search of Piers Lindsay that afternoon. It was one of Upper Radstowe’s characteristic days, with a warm drizzle and little gusts of wind that, vexed with this half-hearted rain, drove it impatiently for a few minutes and then gave it up in despair. It might go on for hours or it might tire of itself soon, but Rosamund and Miss Spanner both put on their mackintoshes. Miss Spanner also donned a mackintosh hood.
“I’m going to buy that wireless set,” she said.
“Oh yes,” Rosamund said indifferently, and then with the irritation Miss Spanner’s appearance often roused in her, she asked, “Need you really get yourself up like a cross between a middle-aged pixie and a dustman?”
“To be suitably dressed is to be well dressed,” Miss Spanner replied complacently. “You’re wearing very thick shoes,” she added suspiciously.
“Well, you see,” Rosamund glanced at Miss Spanner’s feet, “I don’t possess a pair of my late mother’s buttoned boots. Still, I don’t mind walking with you as far as the bus.”
“I’d rather like a walk into the country myself,” Miss Spanner said.
“Not with me, Agnes. If it’s exercise you want you can get it on the pavements,” Rosamund said, thinking there was no other person in the world to whom she could talk like that, knowing that though Miss Spanner put on an offended air as a matter of course, there was no grievance in her heart. “You’re an angel,” she said impetuously.
“Yes, I know,” Miss Spanner replied gently.
That sent Rosamund chuckling across the bridge, the soft rain in her face, the familiar scene subdued under the grey sky, the water leaden, but the gulls startlingly white against the mud where, crying harshly, they scolded and searched for food. She walked quickly resenting as usual the fences barring her from the short cut to the Monks’ Pool, thinking how, in each period of her life, in childhood and youth and now in middle age, she had been happy as she passed this way or had found happiness at the end of it; with her father, with Fergus and with Piers and, under the influence of her memories, some of her anxiety fell from her as she walked on the horse track beside the high stone wall, but when she found herself at the turning into the lane where she and Piers had leaned over the gate, she did not pause reminiscently beside it. She had not come to see a lover, only to find a friend. Yet, when she walked down the lane and passed the Monks’ Pool and discovered the carefully concealed turning to Lindsay’s plain brick cottage and saw him kicking off his gum boots in the doorway, it was a lover who looked at her and the good resolutions with which she had set out became a little shaky. Like Fergus, but differently, Piers did the right thing. A friend would have smiled and called out a welcome, an inept lover might have shown his joyful agitation with a fatuous grin; this man whose expression she could read through the pathetically comic distortion of his face, looked at her with the graveness of deep and unexpected satisfaction and gravely she looked at him. He, she knew, was not thinking of himself at all, except to be conscious of content, while she was trying to get behind his eyes and see herself as he saw her, in an old mackintosh and muddy shoes, an ordinary enough woman transformed by some peculiarity of vision into an extraordinary and the only one, and as he led her into a big room with a fire, on this damp day, burning at the farther end, she thought it was stupid to make Cupid blind. He was all eyes, but they were seriously astigmatic.
“I must shout for George and tell him to make us a good tea,” Piers said.
There was a low fender stool round the hearth and on this she sat, her back to the fire, her face to the room. She liked the room. There was a sort of order in what might have been a muddle—pipes and books, letters and catalogues and packets of seed on one table, a neat row of boots under another near the door, comfortable armchairs without extra cushions, a low wooden stool on which she had no doubt the tea-tray would be set, shelves with not many but very well worn books and, with its flaps down, a gate-legged table, a half-made knitted garment lying on it. Here was a lost opportunity for Agnes! She would have interpreted the disappearance of Piers as an errand of warning to someone who must not be seen, she would have watched him on his return, expecting to see him carelessly throw a newspaper over this incriminating evidence, but Rosamund asked at once, “Who knits?”
“George,” Lindsay said. “He isn’t much of a reader. He likes a sensational newspaper and when he’s finished with that he’s had enough literature for the day. And then he knits.”
“In here?”
“Yes, we both sit here.”
“Do you talk?”
“He tells me the bits of news he’s afraid I’ve missed. Crimes, mostly, and we discuss the whys and wherefores. He’s quite a student of that kind of human nature.”
“He’d get on very well with Agnes,” Rosamund said.
Sandra’s plan for Agnes only needed the small alteration of substituting George for Piers. That would be an altogether happy solution, for what else could be done with these permanent attachments who, wrenched from their places, would suffer cruelly? It was a thousand pities Agnes was not a faithful servant or George somewhat higher in the social scale. And yet, did it matter? In spite of being with Piers, the sense of unreality returned to her. She felt this was just an interlude or one of those confused dreams in which the worry of possessions lost and trains missed mingles with a wonderful happiness and the knowledge that it cannot last.
“I think you have all you want already,” she said, when George had brought in the tea. He, too, had a slight limp, but his waxed moustache gave him a martial air. “I can’t make scones like these. Piers, shall we pretend we never leaned over that gate?”
“Yes, if you like,” he said cheerfully, and added, “If you can.”
“That’s just it. I can’t.”
“Why should you?”
“Because it makes me feel a little messy.”
“No it doesn’t, but you know that’s what other people would call it. If there’s any mess, it isn’t of your making.”
“No. I should have been faithful to Fergus as long as he was faithful to me.”
“But he hasn’t been. That’s my good luck.”
“Though of course,” she went on, “I should still have wanted you to like me rather more than you should.”
“Nothing could have prevented that.”
“How nice you are,” she said. He had not touched her and there was a delicate delight in his restraint and her own.
“From that first day in Bertha’s garden when she hurt her foot,” he said.
“Was it? And Agnes was convinced you were gazing with all that anxiety at your lost love.”
“So I was. But she was lost a very long time ago. When I came back from the war and found she was on the point of marrying Blackett. But I soon recovered.”
“Oh, what a pity! For her, I mean. Lovely for me, though.”
“And for me.”
“But oh dear, it’s just as Sandra said. No one gets anything without robbing someone else. And I think Mrs. Blackett’s miserable. I’m sure she hates him. I think she’d like to kill him, slowly. She’ll never get rid of him in any other way. He won’t give her a chance, he’s too respectable, though he’d like to.”
“But she has the children.”
Rosamund laughed. This seemed to her a thoroughly masculine remark. But she had not come to talk about Mrs. Blackett; she had come to talk about Felix.
“What can I do?” she asked when she had done. “Just trust in God? But then, you see, I have a
superstitious feeling that He’s more likely to help me if I behave myself—yes, I knew you’d laugh—if I do without—” she made a little gesture, “this sort of thing.”
“Funny idea of God!”
“And then, I shouldn’t like the children to know about it. Not yet. And perhaps Felix is doing just what I’m doing myself.”
“Then he’s being very good.”
“But I’m not in a strong position, am I?”
Thinking that her position, weak or strong, could make little practical difference, but realizing that there were other powers, he looked at her very tenderly. “Well, let’s pretend,” he said, “if that’s any comfort to you. I’m just the greengrocer again and I’ll try to be obliging and polite, but I’ll never say an unnecessary word, I’ll never look at you.”
“Oh, I don’t see why you shouldn’t look, just now and then, just to tell me that you like me still.”
“No, not a look,” he said, speaking with cheerful stubbornness to a corner of the room.
“I shan’t be able to bear it.”
“It’s your own choice,” he said in the same tone.
“I’m disappointed,” Rosamund murmured, like an aggrieved child. “I thought at least you’d protest.”
“Protest!” He jumped up and stood over her. “Protest!” he repeated. “I simply daren’t begin. Do you realize how long, at the quickest, we’ve got to wait? And here are you and here am I—What does that man think he’s playing at? Haven’t you heard from him?”
“Not yet, but I expect there’s some good reason.”
“Good enough for him, no doubt, but not for me. It’s effrontery, to make a request like that and then ignore you.”
“Not effrontery. He’s just erratic.”
“You’re strangely tolerant about him.”
“And you ought to be grateful to him.”
“And so I am,” he said, but he did not let her go until she had promised to write again to Fergus that night. She would rather have let things slide and had as little as possible to do with the shaping of them. She had faith in her unassisted good fortune.
Chapter XXX
This easy-going optimism was a national as well as a personal attribute but, while she had it for her own comparatively small affairs, as though they were too unimportant to be dealt with seriously, she differed from the mass of her countrymen who seemed to see in the very greatness of the threat overhanging the world its impossibility of fulfilment, to find comfort, too, in the belief that a bully was necessarily a coward and a large volume of sound indicated very little action. They were admirable in their general decency and moderation, these people going about their business under a clear sky: they would have been more admirable if, as they were to do later, they had adopted that calm cheerfulness, the natural behaviour of people living in a reasonable world, as a symbol of determination and endurance, and it astonished Rosamund that anyone who had lived through the last war should be able to forget treachery, should refuse to believe that those capable of it and incapable of remorse, dead to the very idea of that emotion, amazed at having it expected of them, had obligingly changed their character; should refuse to believe, too, that beastliness within its own borders would not spread beyond them.
“It’s that Black Forest,” Miss Spanner said.
“How?” Rosamund asked. “Oh I see what you mean. Everybody so friendly and kind and such lovely scenery. And they enjoy such simple, innocent pleasures.”
On this subject, at least, there was no wilful misunderstanding between these two. Miss Spanner’s wireless set had arrived and she spent much of her time in sitting with her ear close to it, for she kept the sound very low out of consideration for the people in the house and because she had the feeling that thus she was the recipient of special information.
“And did the young lady blench when you gave her the address?” Rosamund asked.
“Not she! Not a quiver!”
“Of course not. I don’t suppose she knows it.”
“Cunning of him,” said Miss Spanner. “But she knows it right enough and that thistledown effect is about as trustworthy as the amiability of the Black Forest.”
“I hope so, for her sake,” Rosamund said. “It’s a rude world.”
Yet for her it was being kind. She felt clean and innocent now when the greengrocer arrived in the Square. She let Miss Spanner do the buying of the vegetables and listened with amusement to her comments on Lindsay’s longer visits to the Blackett household.
“There’ll be trouble there,” Miss Spanner prophesied again with relish.
“I shouldn’t be surprised,” Rosamund said, with an indifference very reassuring to her friend. There was still that vague horde of suitors threatening the future but the immediate danger had passed.
And one of Sandra’s fears had been dissolved. Chloe’s mother-in-law, as Sandra saw for herself when Mrs. Stephens paid an enthusiastic call on Rosamund, was not at all upholstered. Her floating garments seemed to adhere by magic to her small body and apparently she wore no corset of any kind. Chloe would be safe with her except, possibly, from too much love. James wrote cheerfully from the farm; Felix looked less strained and was oftener at home and Rosamund liked to think, though sceptically, that what Lindsay called her foolishness had had a hidden wisdom and influence in it, that Felix, too, was pretending to be a greengrocer for somebody but, with the puzzled hope that there was some sense in suffering, she would have been less sceptical if she had suffered more. She did not suffer at all. This watching for Piers and exchanging a few casual words with him, this doubting, at times, whether a man who loved her as she should be loved could be so persistently successful in avoiding her, her own refusal to trick him into breaking the word she had persuaded him to give her, all this she made into a sort of game, very amusing to herself, though apt to become monotonous, and quite unsuitable as the pastime of a woman preparing for her daughter’s marriage. And, secretly, she was glad she could avoid telling him that there had been no answer from Fergus except a telegram saying impudently, “No hurry.” This message had enraged her with its assumption that the choice was his alone but, she had to admit, it came as a relief; she need not take any action. She could go on drifting, trusting in her luck and putting no spokes into the wheel of destiny. Nevertheless, anger was her first emotion when she opened the telegram and then she laughed and Miss Spanner, who had a genius for appearing at what, for her, was the right moment, asked sharply, “What’s the joke?”
“Something you wouldn’t understand, Agnes dear.” She sighed. “I don’t really understand it myself.”
“But I suppose you can tell me who it’s from.”
“No.” Rosamund smiled sweetly in a puzzled way. “There’s no name on it. Funny, isn’t it?”
“Bah!” said Miss Spanner, marching to the window and then rapping on it loudly.
“What are you doing?” Rosamund asked. “If you’re cross, hit something more solid than my window.”
“I want to speak to someone with a little sense,” Miss Spanner said. “That’s Rhoda Blackett out there and I haven’t seen her for some time,” and she went to the door to meet her. “You’ve been neglecting me,” she said when they were in her room.
“It’s examinations,” Rhoda said. “Oh, that’s new, isn’t it?” she asked, looking at the handsome piece of furniture which was Miss Spanner’s wireless set.
“Yes, and it’s a very good one. Walnut, you see, and nicely polished. The top makes a useful table, too. I really needed another,” Miss Spanner said, as she cautiously squeezed her way to a chair. “And I shall be able to spread out my ornaments a little. I think the ruby glass looks very well on it, don’t you?”
