On the way back Mrs. Tuke, too, was silent and preoccupied; she did not even always answer when Mr. Tuke addressed her, and she abruptly interrupted his remarks with an observation of her own.
“I don’t like it,” she said. “There’ll be a tragedy in that house as sure as I’m alive. He didn’t even know where his own mother was sleeping. And you can see that he isn’t in love.”
“Indeed,” said Mr. Tuke. “Then if he isn’t in love why did he have to apply for a special licence?”
“I can think of one good reason,” said Mrs. Tuke grimly.
Inside the house Hesther and John Marco were alone together. They were not talking. They simply stood there, eyeing each other across the loaded table on which stood the enormous wedding-cake, still uncut.
iii
It was ten o’clock the same evening.
There was to be no honeymoon—John Marco had insisted that he should be back at his counter by nine o’clock on the Monday morning—and they were seated at either side of the veined marble fire-place in their front drawing-room. Hesther was embroidering the collar of a dress. There were long pauses between the stitches; and sometimes for minutes on end she sat gazing into the fire. John Marco was staring into the same fire. But he was seeing different things.
Then Hesther broke the silence.
“You did better than you realised when you married me,” she said.
John Marco turned to her.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“You’re not a poor man any longer,” she said.
His mind kindled as he heard her. From nowhere Mr. Tuke’s voice intoning the twenty-third psalm came back to him. “The Lord is my Shepherd: I shall not want. ...” But somehow the words frightened him. It was punishment that he had been expecting; and this was reward. “I shall not want,” he repeated to himself; “I shall not want.” And then as he said them the image of Mary rose up before him, pale and slender, and he began to understand.
But Hesther was addressing him again.
“He left me all his money,” she was saying. “Except what the Chapel got.”
Her eyes were on him as she spoke: she was watching him.
“What are you going to do with it?” he asked.
“It can be yours if you want it to be,” she said.
He made no movement and she held out her hand to him.
“Come over to me,” she said. “Bring your chair beside mine.”
He shook his head.
“No,” he said. “Go on talking to me as you are.”
She drew in her lips at the answer; but she resumed.
“Aren’t you interested in knowing how much it is?” she asked.
He was looking hard at her, his eyes fixed on hers.
“Tell me,” he said.
“It’s twelve thousand pounds,” she answered. “Twelve thousand pounds and this house.”
John Marco got up and began to walk about the room.
Twelve thousand pounds! So the Chapel had been right in what they had whispered about Mr. Trackett: he had died a rich man. And his fortune was the kind of fortune out of which larger fortunes could be made. With that amount behind him, John Marco could go forward to anything. He could ride the world.
“It’s a lot of money,” he said slowly. “You must be careful of it.”
He was passing her chair as he said it and she caught him by the hand. She clung to him.
“I told you,” she said. “It can be yours if you want it to be. I shall trust you with it.”
“You trust me?” he replied.
“Yes,” she said. “I trust you with everything now. You’re my husband aren’t you?”
Her other hand was on his fore-arm by now, she was trying to pull him down to her.
“Kiss me,” she was saying. “Take me in your arms and kiss me.”
But he forced her hand away from him and stepped back.
“Don’t you see that it can’t be like that?” he said.
“But you’ve got to love me,” she said. “You’ve got to.”
She slid out of her chair as she said it and went down on her knees with her two arms round him so that he could not free himself.
“You can’t think that I married you so that you could go on hating me,” she said. “I want to be loved. I want you to love me.”
Then, because he did not answer, because she realised at last that he intended never to give her the answer that she wanted, she went on in a lower voice almost as though speaking to herself this time.
“I want a child,” she said almost under her breath. “I want your child.”
Her arms were still round him and he was looking down on her. Her dark head was pressed against him; it seemed that in some hopeless fashion she was seeking refuge from what she had done.
John Marco paused.
“There can’t be children,” he said. “Not in a marriage like this.”
“You mean never?” she asked.
“Never!” he repeated.
Her arms dropped to her side and she released him. He went over and stood by the mantelpiece with his back towards her. But Hesther did not move. She remained half-sitting, half-kneeling on the mat in front of the fire.
“If you give me a child,” she said, “you can have all the money.” She paused. “That’s what I had always wanted to do with it—give it to my husband.”
She rose to her feet as she said it and began going round the room in the manner of a woman preparing for the night. She went over to the windows to see that they were latched and then crossed over to the door.
“I shall leave you now,” she said, still in the same quiet voice. “You can come up when you’re ready.”
The room seemed very quiet after she had left him. The whole house was quiet; it hadn’t warmed yet to the new life being lived within it. Instead, it was trying to absorb him into it, to enfold him in the kind of existence that it had always known; he could feel the four walls closing in on him. But the mood passed, and he saw the room in its old light again. It was a prosperous, solidly-comfortable sort of room. The rich ox-blood red of the paper set off the dark glow of mahogany. And over on the side table was a fine gleam of silver. It was all his. Already he had got so much. But how much more was he prepared to take?
The thought set him trembling. His heart began to hammer. He paused uncertain for a moment. Then turning out all the lights he began to mount the stairs.
Outside her door, he paused again. Then he passed his hand across his forehead and went in to her.
She was seated in front of the mirror brushing out her hair. It fell about her shoulders in dark heavy waves. The pink wrap she had on was new. He could tell that it had been bought specially to please him; there was a luxury, a wantonness, about it. It was gathered in under the bosom with a thick silk cord and spread out over the hips in long shining folds. He had never seen a woman in such clothes before. And the room was full of scent; his nostrils were filled with it as he stood there. Her hair, too, was fuller than he would have imagined. By day she wore it screwed up to nothing in a hard unshapely roll; he had hardly noticed it. But now it covered her. And in the light of the two candles in front of the mirror it glistened. He stood where he was, looking at her. In that gown and with her hair all about her she was almost beautiful.
When she heard the door close she got up and came over to him. She put her arms round him again.
“Hold me,” she said.
She could feel his breath on her face, as his arms came round her. This was the happiness for which she had been waiting. She wished for his sake that she had been younger, fairer. He seemed so firm and powerful himself. The child that would be born to them would be strong and upright like its father.
She let her whole body go limp so that he had to support her. She closed her eyes.
“Say that you love me,” she said. “Say that you love me. Tell me that you don’t regret Mary now. I’ll give you ...”
But at the sound of M
ary’s name his mind cleared. He no longer smelt the scent in the room and felt the softness of her hair brushing across his hand. He pushed her away from him.
“You fool,” he said. “Why do you have to remind me of her?”
He stood for a moment longer, then turning his back on her he crossed the room and swung the door to behind him. As he went down the stairs he saw only a face with grey, wide eyes and a coil of gold above a white neck, in the darkness ahead of him.
The sound of crying, bitter humiliated crying, came through the darkness after him.
He was asleep in the big armchair before the burnt-out embers of the grate in the drawing-room when Emmy found him next morning. He was sleeping so soundly that she had pulled back the velvet curtains on their runners before he stirred. Then he roused himself suddenly as though not knowing where he was and stood staring into the yellow March dawn of Bayswater.
Emmy did not move. She just stood there, nodding her head knowingly as she looked at him.
Book II
John Marco, Elder
Chapter XI
The Election of the Synod was a triennial affair; it had occurred in the year when John Marco had got married and now it had come round again. Six new pillars of the Chapel had to be elected—or the old ones chosen anew: there was no limitation to the length of service. Only this year there had to be at least one fresh one: Mr. Chilp, who had been an Elder for upwards of eleven years—he had been sixty-three when he was first called upon—had gone the way of Mr. Trackett and had been trundled off to Kensal Rise in a handsome oak coffin lined with crinkly satin.
They met in the vestry for the task of election. It was a high bare room, painted in moderate pea-soup tones and with a large coloured photograph of the Rev. Mr. Sturger hanging over the chairman’s table. There was something in the photograph that gripped the beholder. Perhaps it was the eyes, small and deep-set, like twin jewels. They had been famous eyes in their time. But they were undeniably uneven. The left one pierced straight to the heart of the onlooker while the right gazed mildly past his ear into space. In some miraculous fashion they contrived in that divided look to combine knowledge of the world with meditation. And the eyebrows were bafflingly individual, too. The one over the intense eye was high and arched like a comedian’s; the other was beetling and set in a perpetual frown: it threatened. It was, of course, impossible to say what expression the mouth was wearing: it was obscured somewhere in the dense jungle of his beard. And now all that was left of him, of his thunderings and his comminations, his gentleness with little children and his tears over repentant sinners, his fearlessness in the pulpit and his adroit handling of finance, was this enigmatic Mona Lisa-like portrait which hung in the Chapel of the Sect that he had founded.
John Marco took his seat under the portrait and waited for the room to fill up. He looked a trifle older, perhaps; his face was leaner and the hard lines on either side of his mouth had grown deeper and more sharply cut. But this served only to accentuate the look of strength, of authority even, that he possessed. He was better dressed than he had been. Very obviously, he was the one tailored man in the whole vestry. But it was not his clothes that distinguished him in that baggy, unfashionable company of Paddington tradesmen. It was the way he sat. With arms crossed and his chin tilted upwards over the hard points of his collar he seemed to command the rows of chairs in front of him.
Beside him sat Hesther. She was dressed expensively in black and heavily veiled. She sat with bent shoulders and her hands folded in her lap.
There were usually fifty or sixty present at these elections; the real, solid bed-rock of Amosism was there. By the time seven-thirty came round, it would have been impossible anywhere in London to find more four-square fundamentalists gathered together in less space.
And punctually to the minute, Mr. Tuke came in, put down his gloves and his tall hat and declared the meeting open. The five existing Elders sidled into the room after him. Their average age was sixty-eight; they were dignified respectable persons, not exactly exciting perhaps, and with a faint air of the moth-bag about them; but staid, incorruptible, reliable.
The vestry was almost full by now; those who arrived late would have to stand. Mr. Tuke liked to see it like that, liked to see visible and manifest proof of the democracy of the Order. It was a Brotherhood, a sodality, meeting to choose its own spokesmen, and their first duty after election would be to confirm Mr. Tuke’s own appointment. He was in no doubt as to the outcome, of course; but there was something so reassuringly simple, so Galilean, about it all—so different from the Church of England in which an agnostic Prime Minister could choose the Bishops and rich, ungodly men gave away the livings.
Mr. Tuke’s address was manly and to the point. He reminded them that this was a solemn and important occasion and urged any who were unserious or frivolous at heart to leave now before the proceedings commenced. As no one left, Mr. Tuke accepted his audience at their face value and went on to outline the character of the ideal Elder. He must be experienced in life’s lessons, he said; inflexible in the face of opposition but humble in his own soul. He must be a lion and he must be a lamb. Mr. Tuke glanced round last season’s Synod as he said it and prayed hard that the Lord might release him from this gaggle of grandfathers. And before he closed he made a brilliant rhetorical appeal for youth.
“We cannot,” he said, his voice rising like a singer’s, “ever be blessed with too much young blood. We need a great bowl of it into which we can dip.” He paused in one of those sudden silences that are as eloquent as words. “How beautiful,” he went on, “are the lines of the hymnist: ‘There is a fountain filled with blood drawn from Emmanuel’s veins’. It is a gushing youthful fountain shooting up to the ceiling and lapping over the edges in its fulness.” The image had become too sanguinary, however, and he discarded it. He allowed his voice to drop to a lower register, almost a conversational one, and said pleadingly: “After all, our Lord wasn’t an elderly man, remember. He had no grey hairs, no aching bones. He was young, he was vigorous, he was athletic. We need all kinds of soldiers in our fight against the Devil—strong arms as well as white heads. So let us see if there isn’t anyone young amongst us—young but nevertheless married and with the experience which springs from marriage—who has shown by his bearing, and by his record of attendance both in Chapel and in that blessed nursery, our Sunday School, who could be raised to sit in the conclaves of the Synod.”
With that Mr. Tuke sat himself down. Without actually mentioning John Marco’s name, he could scarcely have been more explicit. The incongruous impetuosity of the wedding arrangements had now been forgotten, obliterated by three years of exemplary, unexceptional conduct; whenever the young man was not working he seemed to be worshipping. He now taught for two full periods every Sunday, and as often as not he attended the evening service as well as the morning. Moreover, with his address in Clarence Gardens he was a man of some position and standing in the neighbourhood. And Hesther Croome had proved herself a model as Mrs. John Marco; she would be so suitable as an Elder’s wife. As yet unfruitful, they were nevertheless of the obvious stuff of parents.
After waiting long enough for the last of the late-comers to arrange themselves, Mr. Tuke pushed back his chair and slid forward onto his knees onto the hassock that the verger had left for him.
“Let us open the proceedings with a silent prayer,” he said. “Let us ask God’s guidance in our selection.”
The sixty men and women in front of him all got down onto the hard floor of the vestry—there were no hassocks for them—and an intense, charged stillness filled the room; it was as though a dynamo were running. Mr. Tuke kept them there on their knees for two minutes by his watch and then, getting up onto his feet, addressed them in a bright, refreshed kind of way.
“We’re ready for nominations, now,” he said. “Suggestions, please.”
The name of Mr. Hartshorn was put forward first. Mr. Tuke looked towards him with disappreciation. He was seventy if he was a
day, and wore a false, celluloid-looking dicky. But it was all right; he was not supported. Only a thin flutter of hands was raised on his behalf. Then Mr. Tottel and Mr. Cheeble, both well into their sixties, were proposed—and rejected. No candidate, it seemed, met with anything like general approval. In the fifth row, John Marco was sitting with his arms still crossed. His mouth was tightly closed and he seemed aloof from the whole proceedings. He had apparently no nomination to make, and had taken no part in the voting so far.
Mr. Tuke could stand it no longer: he expanded his chest like a swimmer.
“Come, come,” he said. “Are there no young men in this parish whom we can trust? Will no one propose a brother who is in his prime?”
“I propose Brother Marco.”
It was Mr. Morgan who spoke. An Elder himself, until his health had forced him to relinquish his position, his voice was listened to. And he liked the idea of having his best assistant in the Synod: in a sense it was more distinguished to employ an Elder than merely to be one.
“Bravo,” said Mr. Tuke loudly. “Those in favour.”
There was a general stir in the vestry this time as the hands came up. Soon the air was filled with them. So far as Mr. Tuke could see John Marco’s and Hesther’s were the only ones not raised. He smiled; this was not the first time he had swayed a congregation. But he proceeded to do his duty according to Mr. Sturger’s Book of Rules.
“Is anyone opposed to our Brother’s election?” he asked. “Does anyone wish to raise his voice against?”
“I do.”
The words uttered in a shrill, strained voice came from the back of the vestry. For a moment, Mr. Tuke could not believe them. In all his experience of these elections he had never before encountered such a thing. He felt personally insulted. And the effect of the interjection was deplorable. Every head in the room was twisted round in an effort to see who it was who had spoken, and some people were actually kneeling on their chairs to see. As for the interrupter himself, he was invisible, obscured somewhere behind all those rows of Brethren. Out of the whole company, indeed, only two people preserved their dignity—Hesther and John Marco. They had not moved. With faces rigidly fixed in front of them, they sat there as though nothing had happened. But John Marco had gone pale.
I Shall Not Want Page 13
