“I came back on purpose, Sybil.”
“I’m so glad.”
“There is something wrong in this house. What is it? Tell me.”
She resumed her seat, and for the moment he saw nothing but her bowed head. Then her eyes lifted to meet his.
“Oh, I’m such a failure, Walter.”
“Failure! How? Is it——”
“Don’t you know?”
“Jam? But I thought——”
He looked confused, and seeing it she threw a cushion on the floor at her feet.
“Walter—why did you come back?”
“I was afraid.”
“Of me, or for me?”
“Both.”
His miserable face touched her.
“Dear man, I want to talk. Turn out the light and come and sit here. Yes, like that. I suppose I ought to have told you this before, but—I so loathed the idea of failure.”
“But what do you mean?”
“It is the child. She is spoiling my life. She hates me with a quite incredible hatred. Yes—you don’t know, it’s horrible.”
She bowed her head, and Burford, sitting at her feet, seized his wife’s hands.
“But I thought——”
And then she told him, simply and without malice, of the humiliating struggle she had waged with his child. She hid nothing. She showed him the Jam he had not seen, the Jam of his absent hours, the little hard-eyed vixen who became a thing of ingenious hatred directly his back was turned.
“I did not tell you, Walter, because I thought I could win her in the end. I wanted to win her, for your sake, and I have failed.”
He bowed his head over her hands.
“Forgive me, dear. Failed—no. It is I who have failed. I have been blind.”
“There was nothing for you to see.”
“Yes, but there was. And I should have known. Nor was I quite honest with you, Sybil—in the beginning.”
She looked startled, troubled.
“Walter—you wanted me—for myself?”
“Oh, yes, yes. I wanted you so much that I did not tell you everything about the child. It was so hard to tell, and I felt that it told against myself.”
“Tell me now.”
He leaned against her knees and looked at the fire.
“The fact is—that child has always inspired me with hatred, shrinking. My own child—too. It seemed horrible, and I have fought it, but always it has been there. No. It was not because of her mother. It was there before all that happened.”
She let her arms lie on his shoulders.
“How terrible for you, dear.”
“It seemed so wrong, so damnably wrong. And then you came into my life, and I thought that you might be able to find the soul in her.”
“I tried.”
“Sybil, I believe there is no soul there, or if there is one it is the soul of a devil.”
He was silent for a moment as though making some most solemn decision.
“The child will have to go. Deliberately she has tried to spoil our lives. She shall go.”
“But can we let her go. We are responsible.”
“I am very responsible, but I will not have her in the house. She shall go to some school, some particular school.”
“But the holidays, Walter?”
He was inexorable.
“She shall spend them with my sister. I will not have her near us until some change has been worked in her, if any such change can be worked. I am responsible, and my responsibility means that she must suffer. Suffering is the better medicine, dear; without it we are mere brutes and horrible—selfish children.”
She was troubled, dismayed.
“Oh, why did I fail? We have both failed, Walter.”
He drew her head down on to his shoulder.
“I think we are too soft, too sensitive. She would beat us every time. Besides, my prejudices are too fierce just now. She needs strangers, some perfectly impartial atmosphere, people whom she cannot hurt.”
Janet Burford went to the school that her father found for her, knowing that she had lost the battle, but the soul of the child was hard. She was full of excitement as to the school. It was a new world to conquer—full of other children to be impressed and bullied.
But St. Monica’s was an exceptional school, because it had an exceptional woman at the head of it. It was a little world within a world, penetrated by the personality of Mary Gordon, that magnetic woman whom the girls adored. She was known among them as “The Beloved”; but this woman of charm and wisdom could turn eyes of ice upon the vulgar, the insolent, and the self-assertive. The whole school followed her glances, and smiled when she smiled.
Jam made a dramatic entry. She asserted herself on the very first night.
She was confronted with Mary Gordon.
“You are a very ignorant and silly little thing. We must change all that.”
The fight began, or rather—it was Jam who fought, for “The Beloved” and the school remained serene and detached and contemptuous. She foamed, to be given looks of indifference; she was ignored; no one ever troubled to call her a little beast. She was left chained up with her own hatefulness, and in a little while something in her realized that “The Beloved” was too strong for her.
She fell; she grovelled. She was under the spell of that woman whose eyes smiled at all the others, but who never smiled at her, and this little savage outcast crawled and whimpered for a smile. She alone was hated in the world of “The Beloved.” She began to cry out to be loved.
* * *
Jam was away for two full years, and she saw her father twice a term. At first she shrank from him and was sullen, for his eyes were like the eyes of “The Beloved.”
Then life changed. Smiles, a glimmer of good-will came into it; contempt and indifference began to vanish, for love was chastening the child of hate.
* * *
One July, Jam came home. No one met her, for she had arrived by an earlier train, and she entered the familiar house and opened a familiar door.
Sybil was sitting on the sofa, and Jam had a glimpse of a small, yellow-haired boy squatting on the floor, diligently thumping a footstool with a wooden spade.
The child at the door faltered. Then a sudden arm was stretched out to her.
“Jam, dear, I’m so glad to see you back.”
Jam’s face crinkled; she burst into tears.
PATERNITY
Her father was a little snuffy man, who, after living for fifteen years as a widower in the white house at the end of Prospect Terrace, had developed mannerisms and personal peculiarities that were neither criticized nor questioned.
“Mary—I’m waiting.”
He called her peremptorily. At a quarter to eleven every Sunday morning he would stand on the dining-room hearthrug, holding his top hat and his cane and his gloves, waiting for his daughter to go to church. Always he said the same things, and said them at the same time and in the same way.
He had a habit of sniffing; also a long pinched nose with blue veins on it, a narrow forehead, a precise mouth. Every button of him was done up. When he walked up the aisle of the parish church he carried his top hat in his right hand and just as high as his shoulder. He joined in all the responses. During the sermon he sat bolt upright and as stiff as a back-board, sniffing rhythmically, and on his face an expression of alert scepticism, as though he were waiting to catch the preacher tripping.
His hobby was catching people out. He was the sort of person who when he read a novel, scattered question marks and scrawls in pencil here and there, and if he found a mistake in the grammar he wrote to the author about it. He addressed frequent letters to The Times. He was fond of sending anonymous postcards to prominent people with whose views he disagreed.
“Sir,
“I beg to suggest that your opinions are dangerous and fallacious. I beg to protest——”
He was always protesting in his fussy, futile way; blowing his long nose like a trumpet, and sn
iffing his way through life towards an Evangelical elysium.
Mary was lame.
But her lameness was less an affliction than was her father, Mr. Frederick Fishenden, of 17 Prospect Terrace, Barham-on-Sea. Mr. Fishenden had been a civil servant, and had retired on a pension and five thousand pounds or so invested in trustee stocks. He belonged to an age when Jehovah still sat at the head of the table, had his slippers fetched, and ate roast beef and Yorkshire pudding on Sundays, and would not allow—sir—that any female had any sex outside the marital bedroom.
Mary had an allowance of twenty pounds a year, out of which she had to pay for her postage and her travelling expenses, such as they were. She was plain, pleasantly plain, and romance in its conventional form had not entered her life. Her father, neither in his person nor in his opinions, encouraged romance. Any young man hesitating outside the green door of No. 17 Prospect Terrace, and meeting that little old cock-sparrow of a man, might well have turned tail and sought adventure elsewhere.
Mary was useful to her father. She ran the house and kept the books, and was expected to darn his socks, and every Saturday evening she had to produce her weekly accounts.
“The books, my dear.”
His audit was a solemn business. He sat in a cane-backed chair, jigging a foot and sniffing, and checking each item.
“Four bloaters on Tuesday. How’s that?”
“Two in the kitchen, father.”
Usually he queried the amount of milk consumed. He was very touchy upon the matter of milk. He would say that he was convinced that those two wenches belowstairs washed their faces in it.
“I abhor waste, my dear.”
And every week she had to convince him that the maids did not use milk for their ablutions.
He was not only a tiresome and pompous little person, he was also a most tempestuous tyrant. Mary was allowed a little room of her own on the first floor at the back of the house. It had a high window looking out upon the narrow garden shut in by brick walls, and at the far end stood a stable. The stable was covered by a vine that sometimes ripened a crop of small white grapes. An old pear tree grew in the garden, and in the spring it was a smother of white, and in the autumn a pillar of fire. Mary loved the pear tree. Her father was always threatening to have it cut down, not because it perpetrated any definite offence, but because he liked to interfere with things and to exercise his authority.
Mary’s room was supposed to be a work-room. It was. She dealt with the mending there. Also she had an old, flat-topped desk by the window, and the desk had drawers, and one of the drawers could be locked. She kept the key of it in her pocket, for in those flouncy days women had pockets. The locked drawer was her one secret in that dull Victorian little house.
Mary’s secret was that she wrote. She had scribbled for years. As a child she had spun wonderful and impossible stories about princes and fairies and haunted castles, but now she did not write of impossible things. She had her moments of peace during the day when Mr. Fishenden was out of the house.
He took a walk from eleven o’clock till a quarter to one, marching out in his top hat with a cane tucked under his arm; he pottered up and down the parade, and met other quidnuncs, and set the world right. From two o’clock to three he slept on the sofa in the dining-room with a handkerchief over his face, and his hands crossed upon his tight little tummy. In spring and summer and autumn he took another little walk after tea, and then turned into the local Liberal club for half an hour. He did not smoke and he did not drink.
So Mary had her secret hours when she was supposed to be mending the house linen and meditating upon the complete rightness of her lot. She would wait for the closing of the green front door, and then get out her papers and sit herself down at the desk and escape in that other world. It was a wonderful world, quite beyond Mr. Frederick Fishenden’s ken.
Mary was writing a novel. She had written other novels. She belonged to that unexpected world of the Brontës and the Eliots; ostensibly she knew nothing of life, and yet the Mary who wrote somehow knew everything. The world seemed to look in at her window. The pear tree was a tree of heaven.
But her father was as inquisitive as a meddlesome child. One evening, when Mary had gone to a party at Dr. Hales—a musical party so called—Mr. Fishenden felt fussy. He went exploring. Once a week he visited the gas meter, and poked his long nose into the linen cupboard, and on this particular evening he went rummaging in his daughter’s room. He discovered the locked drawer in the desk. It annoyed him. He considered that nothing in his house should be locked against him. He tried his own bunch of keys on the drawer, but none of the keys would fit.
When Mary returned he was waiting for her. He had no qualms about asking the most impertinent of questions.
He said:
“I found a drawer locked in your desk. Why do you keep it locked? I expect to be told——”
Mary was very patient with her father. She had to be patient.
“It is my private drawer, father.”
“Private!”
His tone implied that his daughter needed no privacies.
“I keep letters and photos and things there.”
“Letters! What letters? You don’t get any letters that are private.”
He was so utterly outside her real world that sometimes she wondered at him, and was exasperated even while she wondered.
“All letters from friends are private.”
“What friends?”
“Some of the girls I knew at school.”
“Oh, girls’ letters.”
He sniffed. Such stuff could be passed over. And he remembered the gas meter.
“We have used too much gas this week. I expect those wenches have been keeping the jets flaring downstairs. You had better go down and look sometimes. Surprise them.”
She stood observing him, seeing him all round as she saw the characters in her novel. He expected her to be a sort of domestic sneak.
“The days are getting shorter. They have to use more gas.”
He snapped at her:
“Don’t argue, my dear; see to it.”
But he had not discovered her novel. It was beyond the capacity of his little, narrow, flat-backed head to conceive the wildness of his daughter perpetrating a novel. On the whole he did not approve of novels, anything after Scott and Dickens. George Eliot he considered a monstrosity; women shouldn’t do such things. He had read Trollope. Stevenson was in the air, but Mr. Fishenden thought Stevenson thin, flimsy stuff. The fellow’s style was histrionic. Scott and Dickens had produced novels; the moderns perpetrated fiction.
One day in the spring of the year when the pear tree was in blossom Mary did up a very neat parcel. It was the manuscript of her novel, “Martin Hume,” and the manuscript was as neat as the parcel, for Mary wrote a beautiful, flowing hand. She was tempting adventure. Other and earlier novels had been relegated to an old sugar-box in the attic where they lay concealed under piles of “Sunday at Home” and missionary journals, but “Martin Hume” was different—a grown man created by a woman who had genius.
The parcel was addressed to Messrs. Lovell & Burnside, publishers, of Covent Garden, London, and Mary had chosen a time when her father was out in order to slip out and launch her parcel.
But as luck would have it she met her father at the corner of Prospect Terrace, just by the white portico of the Royal Hotel, and he stopped and pointed with his stick.
“What’s that?—what’s that?”
Her tolerant and wise grey eyes concealed amusement. She was feeling very much in blossom like the pear tree.
“Patterns, father.”
“Patterns! Patterns for what?”
“New curtains.”
“Where? We don’t want any new curtains.”
“My bedroom. I thought of buying them myself.”
“Nonsense. New curtains. The old ones are not worn out, are they?”
She smiled at him.
“Evolution is life. Everything s
hould change once in five years, even curtains,” and she walked on and past him, leaving him with a puzzled and disapproving look on his face. Evolution! Abominable word, smelling of Huxley and Darwin. Mr. Fishenden was a Liberal, but his Liberalism was progress according to Fishenden. What nonsense women talked! As if a man’s opinions and his personality were like lace curtains—to be taken down and washed, or changed according to the fashion.
Meanwhile, Mary limped up the High Street of Barham-on-Sea to the post-office, which still persisted in living in a white, bow-fronted building which was altogether charming. It belonged to the Barham of Nelson and William IV, when gentlemen wore coats of blue and of bottle green and used the English language vigorously, and had not become too sensitive about sex and the benighted heathen and wenches who wore white stockings. Mary had her parcel registered. She came out with a slight flush upon her pleasant, plain, wise face. She went and sat on a seat near the flagstaff on the cliffs and watched the shipping and the clouds coming up over the sea.
Messrs. Lovell & Burnside were a firm with traditions and courtesy. They acknowledged the receipt of Mary’s novel, but not on a postcard, so that Mr. Fishenden was none the wiser when he scrutinized the envelope. He had all the letters that came placed beside his plate on the breakfast table, and if there happened to be one for his daughter he doled it out to her.
“Who’s that from?”
“The pattern people, I think.”
She had had to wear such a mask while living with Mr. Fishenden that she was able to conceal her excitement. She carried the letter upstairs with her to her room, and opened and read it, but was ready to hide it away should the little god of No. 17 contemplate interference. The letter acknowledged the receipt of the manuscript of her novel, and informed her that the novel was in the hands of Messrs. Lovell & Burnside’s reader.
Three weeks passed. The pear tree had dropped its blossom and had put on a coat of shining green, and the vine on the stable was beginning to weave a pattern with gilded leaves. Every year Mary’s father had the little front garden above the area decorously stuffed with red geraniums, lobelia, and white marguerites, and it so happened that this bedding scheme was in progress when a gentleman and a valise arrived in a cab at the Royal Hotel. The gentleman wore an eye-glass; he had a largeness and an air of importance, and a pair of observant and ironical eyes. The Royal Hotel received him debonairly, for obviously he was made to be received in such a way.
The Short Stories of Warwick Deeping Page 65
