by E. H. Young
“And he won’t be,” Miss Spanner prophesied. Beauty like Chloe’s would have inspired that thin-necked deacon to a gay defiance of old Mr. Spanner.
“But he has been, already. He ought to have said, ‘Let’s be married to-morrow,’ and now I don’t think I’m going to marry him at all.”
“Then,” said Miss Spanner slowly and praying for guidance, “you’re not willing to take risks, either. There are all sorts you know!”
“Perhaps,” Chloe said. “I hadn’t thought of it like that.”
“And if it’s perfection you’re after, you may as well realize that you’ll never get it, but I think you’re getting pretty near.”
“Do you? So do I, really, but I was vexed. Yes, perhaps I ought to take my kind of risk, too. It’s not so exciting, though!”
“It’s much more important. It will keep you busy for a lifetime.”
“Rather fun,” Chloe admitted. “What a good thing I came to you! I had a feeling you’d put me right. Thank you, Miss Spanner, dear. But mind, it’s a secret.” She bent down to kiss her and left her with a warm and fragrant sense of triumph.
Chapter XXXIX
The children’s mother had to appear as faultless in the children’s eyes as he could help to make her. That had been the principle on which Mr. Blackett had always acted, any other would have been a reflection on his own judgment, and difficult as it was not to show his displeasure on this occasion, he made an effort and he was annoyed to find that this was the less necessary because Bertha was behaving with quite an unusual urbanity and ease. She had offered no apology and expressed no regret for her absence and, but for Mary, who had her uses, he would not have known, for he could not ask, where his family had been and why Bertha had gone to the expense of a hired car. He reserved his questions and criticisms and the matter of Rhoda’s bicycle to be dealt with, for a more private hour. He listened with what apparent interest he could summon to Mary’s account of their various outings and Cousin Piers’s farm and Mrs. Blackett listened with real interest to all Flora had to tell. Rhoda was the skeleton at the feast. She was miserable and she could not pretend to be anything else. Here they all were, having one of their prim meals again instead of their picnics in the kitchen or the garden and she knew that the cause of her father’s lack of instructive comments on his holiday was the seething annoyance he tried to hide. She made only one remark throughout the meal. Roused to unbearable irritation by Flora’s little affectations and superior air, she said scornfully, “Anybody’d think you’d been at least as far as the North Pole.”
“There’s no need for jealousy, Rhoda,” her father told her. He knew how to vex her. “It will be your turn next.”
“I’m afraid that may be a long time away,” Mrs. Blackett said.
“Next year, if all goes well.”
“But that’s so unlikely,” she replied, quietly taking the liberty of having an opinion.
Mr. Blackett merely dropped his smooth eyelids and kept them dropped. His wife’s statement, taken in any sense, was not one of which he could approve, nor would he discuss it at the moment, but he said, offering his words with modesty, “I have a strong belief in the efficacy of good thoughts,” and he raised his eyelids, to think how very ordinary his wife looked, though comely in a humdrum way, and how unappreciative she was, mutely inviting Mary to a second helping of pudding while he spoke, and he remembered the thin, elegant creature, so remote from any connection with puddings, to whom he could certainly not have uttered his last words—they would not have been suitable—but who understood a side of him unknown to Bertha, the important side which had been repressed by circumstances and duty and he was amazed at his own steady business and domestic achievements and resentful against those who had made them necessary and took them for granted. The other woman had expressed her surprised admiration. Physically indolent or delicate or perhaps both, her mind had been very alert and it had been exhilarating and, at first, a little shocking, to look at her, relaxed in her chair, not beautiful but exquisite, consciously decorative from head to foot, and hear her lazy voice discussing morals and religion as well as books and pictures with much greater licence than he had ever allowed himself in his thoughts. But he would not be behindhand with her. He hurried after her and caught her up and roamed with her freely, even where there was a suggestion of trespass. She had hinted at an unfortunate marriage; he was significantly reserved about his own, for a woman can say things which a man must not. He knew he would never see her again. Far back in his mind there lurked a dreadful suspicion that he might have seen less of her if he had not been the only available man who was possible as a companion, but she had given him a standard by which Bertha was definitely dull and Mrs. Fraser, vital and provocative as she was, seemed almost coarse. Minute by minute, however, he knew he was returning and must return to the Upper Radstowe edition of Herbert Blackett who had a strong moral sense and strict views of propriety for his family and, as an example to it, for himself. He could no longer be the essential artist, susceptible to all forms of beauty and restricted by no conventions. He was a middle-aged man in the paper trade with a wife and three daughters to guide and provide for and an unacknowledged anxiety about the future in the just possible folly of taking up another country’s quarrel. In such lamentable circumstances, he was anxious, too, about his own position as a false prophet. It might have been wiser to be less positive but things had become more critical than he had ever expected and his mind had always been attuned to those of the country’s leaders, he had approved so heartily of all they had done and left undone during the past years that he had felt sure he was safe with them, and in his household he could not bring himself to speak without authority. It obviously did not do to speak in other tones. This had just been proved by Bertha’s lack of attention to his last words, uttered with what he thought would be impressive quietness. He did not speak again and when he retired to his study, with an eye for any disorder and dust in it, nobody and no coffee followed him.
There was a little dust, as he found by running a finger across a shelf, but there was no disorder. Everything was exactly as he had left it and the room and his books were a solace to him; the emptiness of the Square and no more than the usual sounds of distant traffic were like a promise of peace. It was difficult to believe that, elsewhere, there was agitation, that messages were being buzzed across the world, that countless people anxiously awaited news. There seemed to be no reason why he should not have his coffee and he left his study to discover the cause of this delay. He heard the clatter of china and cutlery from the basement where Rhoda and Mary were washing up and, overhead, footsteps were going to and fro, drawers were opened and shut, furniture pushed here and there.
“What are you doing, Bertha?” he inquired when he met her on the landing.
“Taking away the things I had left in Flora’s room,” she said, “and making up your bed.”
“My bed?”
“The big one,” she said.
“You haven’t been sleeping in it?”
“Oh no,” Mrs. Blackett said.
“Why not?”
“I couldn’t. I didn’t want to,” she replied and, without looking at him, she hurried past him.
He was touched, ashamed of his late disloyalty. As a wife, Bertha had the qualities he most desired in one and this shyness which made her perennially a girl had a value he knew he would not find elsewhere, it was a tribute no one else could pay him, not Mrs. Fraser whose beauty and gaiety teased him, nor his late sophisticated companion who had put him on his mettle and enlarged his vision of himself. So, smiling a little slyly, her neglect and unpreparedness forgiven, he followed her into the bedroom, but there his eagerness was checked. The bed was not in its usual position. It now faced the windows instead of standing against the wall, an arrangement which did not suit him, and Mrs. Blackett was plumping up the pillows instead of waiting modestly
for the embrace he had intended for her. Nevertheless, he did not wish to lose his moment and he said amicably enough, “Why thus?”
“For a change,” she said.
“The very last thing I wanted!” he said, and took a step towards her but, with a practised hand, she flung the sheet across the bed and the little breeze it made, her concentration and the unagitated deftness of her movements cooled his ardour. She might have been a landlady preparing for an unexpected and not too welcome lodger.
“Surely all this,” he said, “might have been done before.”
“It will be done in time,” she said, and she wanted to add, “It will be done all too soon!” She wanted to cry out her detestation of sharing that bed with him, of any sort of contact with him. She saw, in a serious quarrel, what would be, at least, a temporary escape; she felt she was losing her grip on herself and that power of getting an amused satisfaction from deceiving him which had supported her for so long. These last weeks had put her badly out of practice and while, meticulously, she spread the blankets, she knew she must recover her skill. What else could she do? Her plight was that of many other women ill-mated. She had three children and she had no money, but she remembered that elderly, patient man saying quietly, “And I’ve got sons,” and as she looked up Mr. Blackett saw an indefinable change in her face. It had been placid as it always was but stiffer, and it had softened now that her immediate little task was done. He was touched that she should make so serious a matter of it and his tenderness returned.
“Bertha,” he said, his arms round her at last, “you’re pleased to see me?”
“You didn’t seem very pleased yourself,” she said.
“No. I was disappointed. I was, I must confess, a little hurt. And then, I was astonished to see you arriving with the Frasers, and in a car. I was astonished and not pleased to see Rhoda on a bicycle. I hope,” he added in sudden alarm, “you haven’t bought it for her.”
“I haven’t, though it wouldn’t have cost nearly as much as Flora’s holiday.”
“But you see,” Mr. Blackett said gently, “I happen to disapprove of bicycle riding for girls. However, we need not discuss all that to-night. We mustn’t quarrel to-night. But we have never quarrelled yet, have we?”
Mrs. Blackett did not answer. She went on with her own thoughts. There were those boys, too, across the road and, thinking of them, tall and tanned and as lithe as tigers, she was able to ignore the unpleasant boredom of being fondled by Mr. Blackett. It was petty to care what happened to her own body when lovely young ones like theirs were threatened, yet it was better that the ugliest of physical disasters should overtake them than that their minds should be indifferent or poisoned or imprisoned. The choice had to be made between temporary material ease and permanent spiritual evil. So Mrs. Blackett thought while her husband became aware of something new in her reception of his caresses. She did not try to escape them, she did not accept them with her charming shyness; she was simply allowing them to happen.
“What is the matter with you?” he asked irritably. It was the first time he had ever come so near acknowledging defeat from her.
Rocking slightly as he let go, then standing still where he had left her, she said, “I was thinking.”
“There is a time for everything.”
“Yes, that’s why I was doing it,” she said.
“And a time, if I may remind you, for my coffee,” he said.
And it was time for something else, as Rhoda’s voice warned her from the stairs. “Are you corning? It’s nearly nine o’clock,” she called.
“No, I’m not coming to-night,” Mrs. Blackett replied. She went on to the landing and said with a half-mischievous look which Rhoda could interpret as she liked, “I’ve forgotten to make your father’s coffee.”
Rhoda immediately responded with a grimace. “But it’s very important to-night,” she said.
“I know, but there’s nothing I can do about it, is there? And I do know how to make coffee!”
“Well, I can go, can’t I?”
“Of course.”
“But mind you don’t tell Flora.”
“Go quickly,” Mrs. Blackett said, and she stood, like a sentry, at the head of the stairs until Rhoda was safely away.
Mr. Blackett, darting to the window as the front door was shut, was in time to see his daughter entering the Frasers’ house without ceremony. It was too late to call her back and Mrs. Blackett did not give him an opportunity for reproach. With her purpose achieved, she went down to the kitchen. She had come to the conclusion that with Rhoda it was absurd, because it was useless, to present a united parental front, nor was it salutary for Mr. Blackett to believe in its existence and when he followed her into the cavern he rarely entered she said at once, “Rhoda will bring back the news. I expect you saw her go across the road.”
“Why should you expect that?”
“Because so little escapes you,” she said sweetly, and she told herself that she had only to fool this man to the top of his bent and she could do what she liked with him except make him into the kind of man she wanted. For less than that, the price would be too heavy. She would never be able to change the contents of his mind of which self was the chief ingredient and already her own mind was warped enough by her passive deception of him. She would have been a better woman, she thought, if her behaviour had seemed worse and perhaps—this was an altogether new idea and a disturbing one—he would have been a better man, and, all at once, she felt deeply sorry for him in his unconscious isolation. There was no one in the world, except himself, who really cared for him, there were very few who cared for her. They had each lived in a mean little world, his of self-satisfaction, hers of pandering to it for her own amusement and hers, she feared, was the meaner. Twenty years ago they might have helped each other but he did not know he needed help and she was too young, too wretched to give it, too sure he would not understand her if she asked for it, and here they were, looking at each other across the kitchen table, complete strangers bound to each other for life. She was nothing to him, really, but a competent housekeeper and a licensed release for a highly sensual nature and if, at this moment, he had crumbled into a little heap of dust, easily disposed of, she would have issued from the confinement of a cell into endlessly open country. And this honestly cruel thought softened her heart a little until he hardened it again by running his tongue swiftly across his upper lip and telling her that he did not like this running to and fro between the houses, that Mrs. Fraser was not a suitable acquaintance for her or for his daughters.
“No,” Mrs. Blackett agreed, “I often wonder why she bothers to be so kind and friendly—your coffee’s ready—because really she must think we are all very dull.”
“Dull!” Mr. Blackett repeated.
“Stodgy,” said Mrs. Blackett unexpectedly. “You see,” she added innocently, “she doesn’t know you very well.”
“No indeed,” he said. “I have taken, I have had to take, some care to prevent it. That is the kind of woman she is.”
“The kind you find so attractive,” Mrs. Blackett said quietly.
Chapter XL
The room seemed to be full of people when Rhoda entered it and all the fuller because two of the seated figures, those of James and Paul, rose at once and embarrassed her a little by an attention she had seldom had the chance to receive. She liked it, however, and other signs of welcome, especially Miss Spanner’s sharp nod and the friendly grin of James, but almost at once Big Ben began to strike and everyone fell silent. James, motioning Rhoda to the chair he had left, stood against the mantelpiece, his head bent attentively, his profile towards her. All the Frasers were there except Felix, and Rhoda thought, not for the first time, that here, too, a house without a father in it was a very pleasant place and for a little while she hardly heard what the impersonal voice was saying. She was more interested in seeing how t
he people in this room were listening to it. Miss Spanner had dropped her darning. She looked rather fierce, as though she had a grudge against the distant speaker; Mrs. Fraser and Chloe sewed steadily; Sandra watched their faces and Paul watched James, in his view the most important person present, the one who might be actively and, to Paul, enviably concerned in what was going to happen. And Rhoda, when she looked at James, was surprised to find herself unhappy. As she saw him standing there he seemed to her to have grown much older, to have changed into a man who would not want the friendship of a schoolgirl or bother to tell her all the things she longed to know about the farm. She felt unhappier still when, at the end of the news he, like the others, said nothing and then went out of the room. He would not have done that if she had been a grown-up visitor. He would have waited for her to go, perhaps he would have seen her safely across the road instead of leaving Sandra to watch her from the doorstep. She was hurt but she did not blame him. He could not be expected to think about her at a time like this and she had never wanted him to think about her in what she would have called a silly way, nor had there been anything of that kind in her thoughts of him, yet now, the distance she saw widening between them, the graveness of his manner as he listened, his easy, firm pose against the mantelpiece, gave him, hardly consciously to herself, the charm, the perfection of the unattainable.
She crossed the road with the slowness of her disappointment yet she was too quick to hear Sandra calling her to come back.
“Where’s Rhoda?” James had said. “I wanted to show her some photographs.”
Then Sandra had called but Rhoda had already, rather sadly, shut the area door.
“She can see them to-morrow,” James said. “Can you get her across here? I don’t want to meet the old man or Flora.”
“Yes. We’re rather friends. She’s nice but,” Sandra said regretfully, “not pretty.”
“If she were pretty she wouldn’t be so nice.”
