‘But you don’t know what you’re saying, father.’
‘Ay, I know well enough. I want you to marry Hadrian, I tell you.’
She was dumbfounded. He was a man of few words.
‘You’ll do what I tell you,’ he said.
She looked at him slowly.
‘What put such an idea in your mind?’ she said proudly.
‘He did.’
Matilda almost looked her father down, her pride was so offended.
‘Why, it’s disgraceful,’ she said.
‘Why?’
She watched him slowly.
‘What do you ask me for?’ she said. ‘It’s disgusting.’
‘The lad’s sound enough,’ he replied, testily.
‘You’d better tell him to clear out,’ she said, coldly.
He turned and looked out of the window. She sat flushed and erect for a long time. At length her father turned to her, looking really malevolent.
‘If you won’t,’ he said, ‘you’re a fool, and I’ll make you pay for your foolishness, do you see?’
Suddenly a cold fear gripped her. She could not believe her senses. She was terrified and bewildered. She stared at her father, believing him to be delirious, or mad, or drunk. What could she do?
‘I tell you,’ he said. ‘I’ll send for Whittle tomorrow if you don’t. You shall neither of you have anything of mine.’
Whittle was the solicitor. She understood her father well enough: he would send for his solicitor, and make a will leaving all his property to Hadrian: neither she nor Emmie should have anything. It was too much. She rose and went out of the room, up to her own room, where she locked herself in.
She did not come out for some hours. At last, late at night, she confided in Emmie.
‘The sliving demon, he wants the money,’ said Emmie. ‘My father’s out of his mind.’
The thought that Hadrian merely wanted the money was another blow to Matilda. She did not love the impossible youth — but she had not yet learned to think of him as a thing of evil. He now became hideous to her mind.
Emmie had a little scene with her father next day.
‘You don’t mean what you said to our Matilda yesterday, do you, father?’ she asked aggressively.
‘Yes,’ he replied.
‘What, that you’ll alter your will?’
‘Yes.’
‘You won’t,’ said his angry daughter.
But he looked at her with a malevolent little smile.
‘Annie!’ he shouted. ‘Annie!’
He had still power to make his voice carry. The servant maid came in from the kitchen.
‘Put your things on, and go down to Whittle’s office, and say I want to see Mr. Whittle as soon as he can, and will he bring a will-form.’
The sick man lay back a little — he could not lie down. His daughter sat as if she had been struck. Then she left the room.
Hadrian was pottering about in the garden. She went straight down to him.
‘Here,’ she said. ‘You’d better get off. You’d better take your things and go from here, quick.’
Hadrian looked slowly at the infuriated girl.
‘Who says so?’ he asked.
‘We say so — get off, you’ve done enough mischief and damage.’
‘Does Uncle say so?’
‘Yes, he does.’
‘I’ll go and ask him.’
But like a fury Emmie barred his way.
‘No, you needn’t. You needn’t ask him nothing at all. We don’t want you, so you can go.’
‘Uncle’s boss here.’
‘A man that’s dying, and you crawling round and working on him for his money! — you’re not fit to live.’
‘Oh!’ he said. ‘Who says I’m working for his money?’
‘I say. But my father told our Matilda, and she knows what you are. She knows what you’re after. So you might as well clear out, for all you’ll get — guttersnipe!’
He turned his back on her, to think. It had not occurred to him that they would think he was after the money. He did want the money — badly. He badly wanted to be an employer himself, not one of the employed. But he knew, in his subtle, calculating way, that it was not for money he wanted Matilda. He wanted both the money and Matilda. But he told himself the two desires were separate, not one. He could not do with Matilda, without the money. But he did not want her for the money.
When he got this clear in his mind, he sought for an opportunity to tell it her, lurking and watching. But she avoided him. In the evening the lawyer came. Mr. Rockley seemed to have a new access of strength — a will was drawn up, making the previous arrangements wholly conditional. The old will held good, if Matilda would consent to marry Hadrian. If she refused then at the end of six months the whole property passed to Hadrian.
Mr. Rockley told this to the young man, with malevolent satisfaction. He seemed to have a strange desire, quite unreasonable, for revenge upon the women who had surrounded him for so long, and served him so carefully.
‘Tell her in front of me,’ said Hadrian.
So Mr. Rockley sent for his daughters.
At last they came, pale, mute, stubborn. Matilda seemed to have retired far off, Emmie seemed like a fighter ready to fight to the death. The sick man reclined on the bed, his eyes bright, his puffed hand trembling. But his face had again some of its old, bright handsomeness. Hadrian sat quiet, a little aside: the indomitable, dangerous charity boy.
‘There’s the will,’ said their father, pointing them to the paper.
The two women sat mute and immovable, they took no notice.
‘Either you marry Hadrian, or he has everything,’ said the father with satisfaction.
‘Then let him have everything,’ said Matilda boldly.
‘He’s not! He’s not!’ cried Emmie fiercely. ‘He’s not going to have it. The guttersnipe!’
An amused look came on her father’s face.
‘You hear that, Hadrian,’ he said.
‘I didn’t offer to marry Cousin Matilda for the money,’ said Hadrian, flushing and moving on his seat.
Matilda looked at him slowly, with her dark-blue, drugged eyes. He seemed a strange little monster to her.
‘Why, you liar, you know you did,’ cried Emmie.
The sick man laughed. Matilda continued to gaze strangely at the young man.
‘She knows I didn’t,’ said Hadrian.
He too had his courage, as a rat has indomitable courage in the end. Hadrian had some of the neatness, the reserve, the underground quality of the rat. But he had perhaps the ultimate courage, the most unquenchable courage of all.
Emmie looked at her sister.
‘Oh, well,’ she said. ‘Matilda — don’t bother. Let him have everything, we can look after ourselves.’
‘I know he’ll take everything,’ said Matilda, abstractedly.
Hadrian did not answer. He knew in fact that if Matilda refused him he would take everything, and go off with it.
‘A clever little mannie — !’ said Emmie, with a jeering grimace.
The father laughed noiselessly to himself. But he was tired....
‘Go on, then,’ he said. ‘Go on, let me be quiet.’
Emmie turned and looked at him.
‘You deserve what you’ve got,’ she said to her father bluntly.
‘Go on,’ he answered mildly. ‘Go on.’
Another night passed — a night nurse sat up with Mr. Rockley. Another day came. Hadrian was there as ever, in his woollen jersey and coarse khaki trousers and bare neck. Matilda went about, frail and distant, Emmie black-browed in spite of her blondness. They were all quiet, for they did not intend the mystified servant to learn anything.
Mr. Rockley had very bad attacks of pain, he could not breathe. The end seemed near. They all went about quiet and stoical, all unyielding. Hadrian pondered within himself. If he did not marry Matilda he would go to Canada with twenty thousand pounds. This was itself a very satisfactory pr
ospect. If Matilda consented he would have nothing — she would have her own money.
Emmie was the one to act. She went off in search of the solicitor and brought him with her. There was an interview, and Whittle tried to frighten the youth into withdrawal — but without avail. The clergyman and relatives were summoned — but Hadrian stared at them and took no notice. It made him angry, however.
He wanted to catch Matilda alone. Many days went by, and he was not successful: she avoided him. At last, lurking, he surprised her one day as she came to pick gooseberries, and he cut off her retreat. He came to the point at once.
‘You don’t want me, then?’ he said, in his subtle, insinuating voice.
‘I don’t want to speak to you,’ she said, averting her face.
‘You put your hand on me, though,’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t have done that, and then I should never have thought of it. You shouldn’t have touched me.’
‘If you were anything decent, you’d know that was a mistake, and forget it,’ she said.
‘I know it was a mistake — but I shan’t forget it. If you wake a man up, he can’t go to sleep again because he’s told to.’
‘If you had any decent feeling in you, you’d have gone away,’ she replied.
‘I didn’t want to,’ he replied.
She looked away into the distance. At last she asked:
‘What do you persecute me for, if it isn’t for the money. I’m old enough to be your mother. In a way I’ve been your mother.’
‘Doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘You’ve been no mother to me. Let us marry and go out to Canada — you might as well — you’ve touched me.’
She was white and trembling. Suddenly she flushed with anger.
‘It’s so indecent,’ she said.
‘How?’ he retorted. ‘You touched me.’
But she walked away from him. She felt as if he had trapped her. He was angry and depressed, he felt again despised.
That same evening she went into her father’s room.
‘Yes,’ she said suddenly. ‘I’ll marry him.’
Her father looked up at her. He was in pain, and very ill.
‘You like him now, do you?’ he said, with a faint smile.
She looked down into his face, and saw death not far off. She turned and went coldly out of the room.
The solicitor was sent for, preparations were hastily made. In all the interval Matilda did not speak to Hadrian, never answered him if he addressed her. He approached her in the morning.
‘You’ve come round to it, then?’ he said, giving her a pleasant look from his twinkling, almost kindly eyes. She looked down at him and turned aside. She looked down on him both literally and figuratively. Still he persisted, and triumphed.
Emmie raved and wept, the secret flew abroad. But Matilda was silent and unmoved, Hadrian was quiet and satisfied, and nipped with fear also. But he held out against his fear. Mr. Rockley was very ill, but unchanged.
On the third day the marriage took place. Matilda and Hadrian drove straight home from the registrar, and went straight into the room of the dying man. His face lit up with a clear twinkling smile.
‘Hadrian — you’ve got her?’ he said, a little hoarsely.
‘Yes,’ said Hadrian, who was pale round the gills.
‘Ay, my lad, I’m glad you’re mine,’ replied the dying man. Then he turned his eyes closely on Matilda.
‘Let’s look at you, Matilda,’ he said. Then his voice went strange and unrecognizable. ‘Kiss me,’ he said.
She stooped and kissed him. She had never kissed him before, not since she was a tiny child. But she was quiet, very still.
‘Kiss him,’ the dying man said.
Obediently, Matilda put forward her mouth and kissed the young husband.
‘That’s right! That’s right!’ murmured the dying man.
THE BLIND MAN
Isabel Pervin was listening for two sounds — for the sound of wheels on the drive outside and for the noise of her husband’s footsteps in the hall. Her dearest and oldest friend, a man who seemed almost indispensable to her living, would drive up in the rainy dusk of the closing November day. The trap had gone to fetch him from the station. And her husband, who had been blinded in Flanders, and who had a disfiguring mark on his brow, would be coming in from the outhouses.
He had been home for a year now. He was totally blind. Yet they had been very happy. The Grange was Maurice’s own place. The back was a farmstead, and the Wernhams, who occupied the rear premises, acted as farmers. Isabel lived with her husband in the handsome rooms in front. She and he had been almost entirely alone together since he was wounded. They talked and sang and read together in a wonderful and unspeakable intimacy. Then she reviewed books for a Scottish newspaper, carrying on her old interest, and he occupied himself a good deal with the farm. Sightless, he could still discuss everything with Wernham, and he could also do a good deal of work about the place — menial work, it is true, but it gave him satisfaction. He milked the cows, carried in the pails, turned the separator, attended to the pigs and horses. Life was still very full and strangely serene for the blind man, peaceful with the almost incomprehensible peace of immediate contact in darkness. With his wife he had a whole world, rich and real and invisible.
They were newly and remotely happy. He did not even regret the loss of his sight in these times of dark, palpable joy. A certain exultance swelled his soul.
But as time wore on, sometimes the rich glamour would leave them. Sometimes, after months of this intensity, a sense of burden overcame Isabel, a weariness, a terrible ennui, in that silent house approached between a colonnade of tall-shafted pines. Then she felt she would go mad, for she could not bear it. And sometimes he had devastating fits of depression, which seemed to lay waste his whole being. It was worse than depression — a black misery, when his own life was a torture to him, and when his presence was unbearable to his wife. The dread went down to the roots of her soul as these black days recurred. In a kind of panic she tried to wrap herself up still further in her husband. She forced the old spontaneous cheerfulness and joy to continue. But the effort it cost her was almost too much. She knew she could not keep it up. She felt she would scream with the strain, and would give anything, anything, to escape. She longed to possess her husband utterly; it gave her inordinate joy to have him entirely to herself. And yet, when again he was gone in a black and massive misery, she could not bear him, she could not bear herself; she wished she could be snatched away off the earth altogether, anything rather than live at this cost.
Dazed, she schemed for a way out. She invited friends, she tried to give him some further connexion with the outer world. But it was no good. After all their joy and suffering, after their dark, great year of blindness and solitude and unspeakable nearness, other people seemed to them both shallow, prattling, rather impertinent. Shallow prattle seemed presumptuous. He became impatient and irritated, she was wearied. And so they lapsed into their solitude again. For they preferred it.
But now, in a few weeks’ time, her second baby would be born. The first had died, an infant, when her husband first went out to France. She looked with joy and relief to the coming of the second. It would be her salvation. But also she felt some anxiety. She was thirty years old, her husband was a year younger. They both wanted the child very much. Yet she could not help feeling afraid. She had her husband on her hands, a terrible joy to her, and a terrifying burden. The child would occupy her love and attention. And then, what of Maurice? What would he do? If only she could feel that he, too, would be at peace and happy when the child came! She did so want to luxuriate in a rich, physical satisfaction of maternity. But the man, what would he do? How could she provide for him, how avert those shattering black moods of his, which destroyed them both?
She sighed with fear. But at this time Bertie Reid wrote to Isabel. He was her old friend, a second or third cousin, a Scotchman, as she was a Scotchwoman. They had been brought up near to one another, and
all her life he had been her friend, like a brother, but better than her own brothers. She loved him — though not in the marrying sense. There was a sort of kinship between them, an affinity. They understood one another instinctively. But Isabel would never have thought of marrying Bertie. It would have seemed like marrying in her own family.
Bertie was a barrister and a man of letters, a Scotchman of the intellectual type, quick, ironical, sentimental, and on his knees before the woman he adored but did not want to marry. Maurice Pervin was different. He came of a good old country family — the Grange was not a very great distance from Oxford. He was passionate, sensitive, perhaps over-sensitive, wincing — a big fellow with heavy limbs and a forehead that flushed painfully. For his mind was slow, as if drugged by the strong provincial blood that beat in his veins. He was very sensitive to his own mental slowness, his feelings being quick and acute. So that he was just the opposite to Bertie, whose mind was much quicker than his emotions, which were not so very fine.
From the first the two men did not like each other. Isabel felt that they ought to get on together. But they did not. She felt that if only each could have the clue to the other there would be such a rare understanding between them. It did not come off, however. Bertie adopted a slightly ironical attitude, very offensive to Maurice, who returned the Scotch irony with English resentment, a resentment which deepened sometimes into stupid hatred.
This was a little puzzling to Isabel. However, she accepted it in the course of things. Men were made freakish and unreasonable. Therefore, when Maurice was going out to France for the second time, she felt that, for her husband’s sake, she must discontinue her friendship with Bertie. She wrote to the barrister to this effect. Bertram Reid simply replied that in this, as in all other matters, he must obey her wishes, if these were indeed her wishes.
For nearly two years nothing had passed between the two friends. Isabel rather gloried in the fact; she had no compunction. She had one great article of faith, which was, that husband and wife should be so important to one another, that the rest of the world simply did not count. She and Maurice were husband and wife. They loved one another. They would have children. Then let everybody and everything else fade into insignificance outside this connubial felicity. She professed herself quite happy and ready to receive Maurice’s friends. She was happy and ready: the happy wife, the ready woman in possession. Without knowing why, the friends retired abashed and came no more. Maurice, of course, took as much satisfaction in this connubial absorption as Isabel did.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated) Page 630
