“Did you enjoy the lecture?” she asked.
John Marco was bold. In this, the intimacy of her own home, he felt that he could tell her that he loved her.
“I wasn’t thinking of the lecture,” he said.
Mary Kent dropped her gaze.
“I wish,” she said, “that we could have that lantern for the Sunday School. It would make the Scriptures so much more interesting for the children.”
But John Marco was not to be put off so easily.
“I told you I wasn’t thinking about the lecture,” he repeated. “I was thinking about ...”
It was Mrs. Kent who interrupted him. She emerged from the kitchen wearing the air of self-conscious importance that descends on all amateurs about to execute a professional operation for which they are not qualified. In her hand she was holding a massive quart bottle—she had been forced very humiliatingly to borrow it: being Amosites, the Kents were not a drinking family—wrapped up in a bath towel. She had just been boiling the bottle, and it was now so hot that it could not be held. In a few minutes the bottle was going to be applied by Mrs. Kent, neck downwards, onto the unfortunate man’s carbuncle. It was the doctor’s idea that the bottle should then be held there until, as it cooled, the vacuum inside it had sucked out the core of the inflammation. The whole scheme hinted somewhat of the torture chamber; it was medical practice at its most simple, most painful and most effective.
The peculiar nature of the operation appeared to embarrass Mrs. Kent.
“Whatever will Mr. Marco think?” she said, “me coming through like this?”
She covered up the neck of the bottle with the corner of the bath towel as she spoke, making the whole bundle appear like a swathed and probably smothered baby, and passed through into the bedroom. A few minutes later a groan indicated that she had interrupted the sufferer in a doze into which he had just dropped off.
John Marco turned to Mary Kent again. He was blushing.
“I was thinking about you,” he said.
“Were you?” said Mary Kent.
She was looking straight at him now, a smile half timid, half happy, playing across her face.
“Do ... do you mind?” John Marco asked.
“I’m glad,” she said.
She spoke so softly that John Marco scarcely heard the words. He got up and came over to her. He was trembling: his knees felt so weak that they might let him down.
“May I . . . may I call you Mary?” he asked.
She held out her hand and took hold of his. She could feel then how nervous, how frightened of her, he was; and it moved her far more than any show of strength, of self-possession, could have done. She felt happy and excited to think that she could reduce this hard, fine man, with his black, piercing eyes, to such a pass. She had an idiotic fear that he—not she—might be going to cry.
“Do you want to?” she asked.
He came closer to her until he was touching her; he was gripping her hand by now so hard that it hurt. Her head with its bright sweep of hair was against him. He could trust himself no longer and closed his eyes in the sheer happiness of the moment.
“Mary, I love you,” he said. “I loved you from the first moment I saw you.”
She did not answer for a moment, and he could feel that she was trembling.
“I like you too,” she answered.
“That’s not enough,” he said quietly. “You’ve got to love me. Say that you love me.”
“I . . . think I do,” she replied. “But I hadn’t expected anything like this to happen.”
“Then you do love me!” John Marco repeated. “You do!”
He went down on his knees beside her and his face was now close to hers.
“Kiss me,” he said.
Her lips were parted, and he could see that her eyes were smiling; smiling and still a little startled. Putting his arm round her he pulled her to him. She began stroking his hair; it was the first time that she had ever touched a man’s hair and it felt firm and crisp beneath her fingers. She kissed him, conscious of a strange new excitement within her. Then when they had kissed, John Marco began speaking to her; his voice was now low and rapid.
“Promise to marry me,” he said. “Swear that no matter what happens you’ll marry me. Don’t let anything stop us.”
She was frightened now and drew back from him, but he raised himself on his knees until his face was close to hers again. Those black, intense eyes of his were staring into her.
“Whatever happens—do you hear me?” he was saying. “You’ve got to marry me. You’re never to leave me.”
“Stop,” she said. “Please stop.”
John Marco paused and passed his hand across her forehead. He spoke gently now as though apologising.
“It’s only because I love you so,” he said, “that I can’t bear ...”
But he was never able to finish the sentence. At that moment there was a sudden scream from the adjoining room, a scream followed by the sound, confused but unmistakable, of bare, running feet.
It was Mr. Kent. Never spartan in the endurance of pain, and with the reserves of his courage sapped by the shootings of the carbuncle, he had found Mrs. Kent’s hot bottle too much for him. At one moment, he was lying on his face with his handkerchief stuffed into his mouth, ready for anything that his wife might do to him; and, at the next, as he felt the white hot pain go plunging into him, he had let out a shriek and was scrambling out of bed and across the bedroom.
He paused for a moment, his narrow chest heaving, holding onto the wash-stand. Then, at the sight of Mrs. Kent, advancing towards him, the torturing bottle still held in the bath-towel in her hands, his nerve finally left him. With another little squeal of terror he tore open the door and ran into the safety of the living-room.
In his long flannel night-shirt that buttoned up at the wrists and fell below his ankles, and with his tufts of greying hair erect upon his head, he made an astonishing and terrifying figure; and also, now that he saw there was a stranger in the room talking to his daughter, a very shame-faced one. He muttered something that might have been an apology and turned back towards the bedroom. But not in time. The face of Mrs. Kent, scarlet at this fresh humiliation, appeared round the door. She got hold of her husband by the back of his night-shirt and gave a jerk. Mr. Kent was a small man and Mrs. Kent was a powerful woman. Mr. Kent seemed suddenly to sail through the air like a ballet dancer on a wire. The bedroom door slammed and all was silence again.
John Marco went over and took up his hat and coat. He was the respectable lay-teacher again.
“I oughtn’t to have come to-night,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry, too,” Mary answered.
They stood in front of each other like strangers.
“I’m afraid I invited myself at a rather awkward moment.”
“Oh no. It was my fault. It was really. I asked you to come in.”
And then suddenly they both laughed and John Marco went over and kissed her for the second time.
“When may I come again?” he asked. “Say when I may come.”
Mary avoided his eyes.
“You’ll have to ask my father, when he’s better,” she said. “You’ll have to ask him if we may see each other.”
“May I ask him?” he said.
And Mary nodded her head.
“Yes,” she answered.
Then because it was late and because she felt that she ought to be there in the sick-room, she said good-bye to him and they went into the dim, opaque-looking hall together. At the foot of the stairs he stopped.
“But when may I see you?” he asked.
She paused and in the half-darkness he could see that she was smiling at him.
“I shall be at the school on Sunday,” she said.
With that she pulled open the front door for him and he stepped into the street. It had been raining since he had gone inside and the pavements under the shine of the lamps now gleamed ahead of him like gold.
To his surprise there was a light in his mother’s room as he passed it. She called out to him. It was strange how despite her deafness, she could always hear any sound that she had set her mind on. Evidently she had been lying awake, waiting for him.
He went in and kissed her. She was sitting up in a confusion of shawls and bed-jackets—so that she appeared not little and frail, but vast and boundless—her Bible open on her knees. Her hair brushed out in plaits for the night hung in two wisps no lower than her shoulders. Because her sight was bad and the room was lit only by a candle she held a heavy reading glass in her hand.
“Where have you been?” she asked.
And then before he could tell her, she went on to explain why she had lain awake for him.
“There’s been a young lady here asking for you,” she said. “She came twice. She said she was Mr. Trackett’s niece.”
Chapter V
They were all gathered together in Mr. Tuke’s drawing-room—even the organist, who had discovered an empty seat in the mourning carriage and had insisted on coming back with them.
Not that it could be called a large party. There was Mr. Tuke, smooth and rubicund as usual, but with a purple woollen comforter round his neck because of the cold. Circulating round him like a planet was Mrs. Tuke. She was the most meagre of women, a mere fleshless and bloodless backbone in black satin; if Mr. Tuke had been a vampire and Mrs. Tuke his victim, she could not have looked more depleted and anaemic and he more full-veined and nourished. On the chair over by the fireplace Mr. Trackett’s niece, Hesther Croome, was sitting. Her hands were crossed on her lap and she was silent. Only her eyes gave an indication of any life within her: and they were straying perpetually. From the way she kept glancing at John Marco it was almost as though she were sizing him up, sizing and weighing him, so that if it ever came to a difference between them she would know which of the two was the stronger. For his part, John Marco had tried all the afternoon to appear indifferent to her. He had himself looked in her direction more than once; but he had been careful each time to look away again before their eyes could meet. Even so he had not failed to be conscious of her perpetual scrutiny. He sat there awkward and uncommunicative, his shoulder still aching from the sharp edge of Mr. Trackett’s coffin.
The funeral, Mr. Tuke confessed to himself, had not been a success. The sparseness of it had shocked and disappointed him; he liked to preside over a forest of black veils and bared heads, not over six mutes—one of them an amateur dragged in against his will—a domestic servant, and one relative. At the graveside they had looked more like a group of people waiting for a bus than an assembled company of mourners; they had, Mr. Tuke felt, made him look ridiculous in the eyes of the resident Anglican chaplain. But there it was; it was the comment of the world upon Mr. Trackett. For fifty-three years Mr. Trackett had schemed and laboured to grow rich: he had worked ceaselessly, guarding every penny. And, in the result, even in a country where people enjoy funerals, not so much as one friend or acquaintance had come forward to pay his respects at the end. It was as though the whole of London had united in principle to boycott this final episode in a life at once so strict, so sterile and so anti-social.
It was not that alone, however, that had ruined the funeral. It was the weather. The morning had been so densely foggy that the funeral horses clopping along towards the Harrow Road had seemed not like ordinary horses at all, but like legendary and heraldic beasts prancing and gavotting through the mist. To the occupants of the carriage all that was to be seen through the inferior, rattling square of window was a pageant of swirling yellow nothingness that swept past, without cessation and without variety, so that only the sound of shunting trains served to distinguish the metropolitan activity of Westbourne Bridge from the semi-surburban deathliness of Kensal Rise Approach.
The cemetery itself, had nothing to commend it, shrouded in the encompassing blanket of fog. Its outlines and dimensions were vague and uncertain and, in a way, alarming. For, though all that one could see was a near-by huddle of plunging marble doves and truncated columns and wax-flowers under glass domes, there was a suggestion that this wilderness of death extended through the fog for miles and miles. It was as though, once having ventured through the high iron gates and past the late-Gothic chapel, one was then on a gravel highway that led right into the heart of those limitless prairies of grave-stones amid which a man might walk endlessly in circles until he dropped trying to find his way back to the living world of Acton or West Hampstead.
But worst of all was the fact that Mr. Tuke’s voice had gone. Despite his garglings and his lozenges and his throat sprays, the aphonia had persisted. What had begun as a common cold had suddenly developed into a sinister ailment attacking Mr. Tuke’s chief instrument of livelihood. In the chapel and at the graveside, instead of declaiming the great Biblical truths about the dust and ashes, he had been forced to whisper them to the tiny circle around him as though they were all a kind of indelicate secret. And throughout the whole time he was reciting, he was wondering what was going to be the effect on a man of his age who, already suffering from his chest, was forced to stand about on a great heap of dank, London clay in a fog. That was why, safe at home again at his own fireside, he was now drinking down scalding tea with an almost feverish abandon. He had just taken his fourth cup when he noticed that Miss Croome was eating nothing.
“What can I press you to?” he asked.
But Miss Croome shook her head.
“A little more,” Mr. Tuke said. “Just a little more to keep us company.”
Miss Croome, however still refused. And for a moment Mr. Tuke laid his hand on her shoulder.
“I understand,” he said. “Times like these. I feel for you.”
He stirred up his own tea as he spoke and drank it off at a mouthful. The room then became silent again. Mrs. Tuke took the cup from him and automatically filled it up again. The organist pulled out his handkerchief and brushed a few crumbs off the arm of his chair. Miss Croome’s eyes rested on John Marco. John Marco crossed his arms and stared into the fire.
For the first time he found himself beginning to feel sorry for this girl. Compared with Mr. Tuke and the rest of them she was living in a world of private desolation of her own. To Mr. Tuke and the organist one funeral was very like another; they met death on equal and professional terms. To Mrs. Tuke, Mr. Trackett’s decease had meant no more than the setting out of another teacup. But to Miss Croome it represented something different; as she had followed the massive oak box with its beaded edges and its ornamental handles out of the house, she must have been thinking all the time that she would be going back to a home that could hold for her nothing but loneliness and the bleak face of life.
He wondered vaguely what would become of the girl. She was probably thirty already, he reflected, and he could not picture any man wanting to devote his life to her. At the thought, he glanced towards her pityingly—and their eyes met. Somewhere inside the black depths of hers she seemed to be smiling at him.
The organist was getting up to go; he was bending very low over Mrs. Tuke’s hand and thanking her for her hospitality.
Mr. Tuke turned towards Miss Croome who was stirring.
“Please don’t feel that you ought to go,” he said. “You can stay with us as long as you like. You must think of this as another home now.”
His invitation was interrupted, however, by Mrs. Tuke, who had come back into the room from seeing the organist off. She approached Mr. Tuke like a foster-mother.
“We’re going to get you straight off to bed as soon as everyone’s gone,” she said briskly. “We’re going to rub your chest and give you a hot rum and milk.”
“Not rum,” said Mr. Tuke hurriedly. “Not rum. Hot milk, perha
ps. But not rum.”
Mrs. Tuke caught her breath and flushed. She had, she realised, been guilty of a major indiscretion. The rum that she and Mr. Tuke took when they had a cold was a secret between the two of them, something that had to be smuggled past the Amosite conscience. For a minister of Mr. Tuke’s standing to admit to toping in the privacy of his own bedroom was tantamount to ecclesiastical suicide.
But Mr. Tuke was already covering up the blunder.
“In any case,” he said, in his husky, unfamiliar voice, “I cannot go to bed now, ill as I am. I have just invited these two young people to stay.”
John Marco left the mantelpiece where he had been standing.
“No, Mr. Tuke,” he said. “You’ve done enough for to-day. You took a risk in being there at all. You mustn’t neglect yourself.”
Mrs. Tuke looked at John Marco gratefully; he struck her as being an unusually agreeable young man. And Miss Croome, too, made it plain that she was not stopping.
“Thank you,” she said, “for everything you’ve done for me. I shall never forget it. I must go back now. I’m very tired.”
Mr. Tuke turned to John Marco: he was not quite able to disguise his sense of relief.
“Then you perhaps will see Miss Croome to her home?” he said. “She ought not to be allowed to go back alone.”
John Marco drew in his breath sharply; it meant going back to the house that he wanted to forget. He glanced quickly towards Miss Croome as Mr. Tuke said it. He thought that in her face he saw that fleeting smile again.
“That would be very kind of Mr. Marco,” she said. “I shan’t take him far out of his way.”
Mrs. Tuke smiled kindly and led Miss Croome upstairs to get her coat; it had been left folded upon the bed in Mrs. Tuke’s bedroom. The bed itself was a double one; it had as much brass work about it as a marine engine. Under the white counterpane it looked chaste and un-connubial. The whole room, indeed, looked unconnubial. Over the mantelpiece hung a large coloured photograph of the Rev. Levi Sturger, founder of the Amosite dissension; his bearded, pug-like face was set in a frown that seemed ready at any moment to deepen into anger at the first glimpse of the carnal and voluptuous. Perhaps that was why the Tuke’s had been blessed with no off-spring; perhaps every time at the magical and tantalising moment, the bearded image on the wall shining in the light from the street lamp outside had caught their eye and prevented them.
I Shall Not Want Page 6
