“Then why don’t you tell me,” he begged her. “Let me hear you say it.”
He had buried his face against her breast by now, his arms folded round her. All the courage which earlier in the evening had supported him had ebbed away again by now, leaving him helpless and afraid.
“Say it,” he repeated. “Say it.”
“I do love you,” she said slowly. “I don’t love anyone else.”
“Oh, Mary,” he said. “You’re all I’ve got. You’re everything.”
And opening the neck of her pretty dressing-gown he began kissing her again.
Chapter XXVII
John Margo went on the next Tuesday to see his mother; and again on the following Tuesday; but after that there was no point in going any longer.
Old Mrs. Marco’s end when it had come, was very sudden. For three brief days she had rallied. She had been able to get about the room and her mind had cleared. She had realised that she was living in Hesther’s house, and she was worried because her son was away so much. He was like his father, she said to Hesther—quiet and secretive and in need of watching; and in saying this she allowed herself the first disloyal remark which she had ever made about the departed Mr. Marco. It was as though inside herself old Mrs. Marco was aware that she would be there for only a short time longer and felt that there was no further use in pretending; all her life she had kept up the myth of Mr. Marco’s respectability; and then, at one stroke she shattered the whole image of this saturnine, morose man with the high collar and the mutton-chop whiskers. “He wasn’t always what he seemed,” she said darkly. “He prayed beautifully, but some nights he didn’t come home at all.” And when Hesther made no reply, old Mrs. Marco told her that it was she, his mother, whom she had to thank for having made John Marco as steady as he was. “He’s like a rock, my son is,” she observed proudly. “Like a rock.”
When Hesther got up, Mrs. Marco was still rambling on about John Marco’s childhood; and about revival meetings she had known, when young and old had plunged themselves into the tank unable to restrain themselves; and about the way evil and wickedness were increasing in the world so rapidly that the Second Coming could not be far off. She was still talking to herself when Hesther gently closed the door on her.
And then, next morning, when Emmy took her in a cup of tea, Mrs. Marco was lying there, propped up among the pillows, silent at last.
It had been an untidy finish. The old lady had obviously awakened in the night, because she had started eating again. There was a plate of tea-rusks left beside her and one of these rusks was still fixed between her teeth. After all her years of self-denial and discipline and preparation, when her Maker finally called to her she was sitting up in bed nibbling biscuits like a school-girl.
It was Emmy whom Hesther sent to tell John Marco. Already she saw—indistinct as it was—her opportunity; the very fact of the funeral would bring John Marco beside her at the grave-side. She no longer deluded herself with foolish expectations. But, never for a single moment after that night when he had left her, had she entirely given up hope.
On her return to the house Hesther made Emmy repeat every word, every syllable, that John Marco had uttered. At first, Emmy said, she had been kept waiting; she had been kept waiting so long in fact that she wondered whether he ever intended to see her at all. And when, finally, she had been shown into his room he had treated her as a stranger, as someone whom he had never seen before. But the news of his mother’s death had very clearly disturbed him; he had begun walking about the room and he had questioned her closely as to the circumstances. Had it been painless? Had the old lady had any premonition? Why hadn’t they sent for him? It was not until Emmy had said diffidently that she expected that they would see him at the cemetery that his aloofness had returned to him.
“I shall not be there,” he had said.
“Not be there?” Emmy had repeated. “Not be at your own mother’s funeral?”
And John Marco with that terrible deliberation that had always frightened had answered slowly.
“I shall sit with her,” he had said. “I shall come to the house to-morrow night as usual. But I shall not be at the funeral.”
When Hesther heard this she knew that it was not going to be old Mrs. Marco in death who was to draw them together again. And on the Tuesday evening of the visit she sat in the wicker chair in her bedroom and listened to her own husband’s feet pass her door and go into the room opposite.
As John Marco entered the room, his nerve, for a moment, left him; it was very quiet in there and the subtle odour of death pervaded the place. It was like stepping with eyes open into the tomb.
The figure under the sheet looked so small now, so ridiculously small; it was scarcely larger than a big doll and the hand when he touched it was as cold as china. He drew back for a moment, frightened. This thing lying there, as rigid as if in some preposterous fashion it were holding its breath, wasn’t his mother; she had already slipped out through the mesh and was free. She was up there among the harps and the seven-branched candlesticks, while he was dragging a cane-seated chair across the oil-cloth to sit with the image that she had discarded.
When he at last could bear to do so he folded back the sheet and looked. The face seemed more tranquil than in life he could ever remember it. The lines were still there, running in a close net-work under the eyes and merging with the puckers round her mouth. But somehow she looked younger than he had known her; it was as though in death she had discovered, in part at least, the secret of perpetual youth.
As she lay there she appeared simply to be resting; and perhaps she was resting, he reflected. Now that the spark was out, her mind was no longer troubling her; it had ceased casting up those black shadows from the past that had kept deceiving and confusing her. She was as she had been when he was a young man in Chapel Villas. There had been no Hesther in his life when she had looked like that; and no Mary. The Old Gentleman had still been a power in the shop, and Mr. Tuke was his friend. And the years that had changed her into a shapeless, tottery old witch had left their mark on him as well. It was a tired, bitter man who sat there looking at that unmoving face; a man without friends and without a family; someone in the prime of his days who was as cold and alone as she was.
But he halted his thoughts and drove them forward again towards the future; this lingering over his yesterdays was too disturbing. Not to remember, however, was impossible. Everything that he had ever done, or hoped to do, was linked to that silent figure that lay in front of him. And going down on his knees, as he had been trained to do, he started to pray for her.
“Oh Lord,” he began, “take this, Thy sister, into Thy fold and protect her for evermore. Let Thy arms be about her and her head on Thy bosom. Let her no longer think of those things which have hurt and injured her. Let her forget this, my marriage, that has been troubling her. Let her ...” But it was no use. This wasn’t the way real Amosites prayed. He had turned his back on it for too long, and the magic of communion had forsaken him. Those words of his reached nowhere; they were simply echoes of what was going on in his own mind. Abruptly, impulsively, he bent forward and kissed the dead face below him, bracing himself against the chill of touching her. Then he gathered up his hat and his gloves and went quickly from the room.
During the last few minutes Hesther had been standing in her room ready for him: her plan was ready and prepared inside her mind. As he emerged, she would go out and meet him and would lay her hand on his arm. Once she was there, once she was touching him again, he could see how much she needed him: and at that one moment more than any other when his mind was purified by contact with the everlasting, he might come to her. Her lips were moving as she stood there in the darkness, waiting; prayer to her seemed every day to grow easier and more natural.
But it all happened so suddenly. Before she had realised even that he had left the room, he had passed in front of her door and was on his way down the stairs. The disaster of it stunned her: her plan, her subtl
e, brilliant plan, was shattered: and there was nothing left. But wasn’t there? She could still catch him, still show him that she belonged. Holding up her skirts, she ran to the top of the stairs, saw his dark figure in the hall below and called after him.
“John! John!” she cried. “Stop. I need you.”
For a moment he paused. He half turned his head. Then, as she called again, he straightened himself again and went forward as though he were alone and had heard nothing.
The front door slammed behind him, rattling the loose fanlight above it, and he was gone.
ii
Mr. Tuke closed his watch with a snap.
“Time we were off,” he said. “We don’t want to have to rush things.”
But Hesther was reluctant to move.
“Let’s give him five more minutes,” she said. “Just five more minutes in case he’s been held up anywhere.”
She was standing at the window looking up Clarence Gardens as she said it. Mr. Tuke regarded her sadly and shook his head over the pity of it. He had seen her standing so often at the same window waiting in vain for her husband to return. It seemed heart-breaking to him that anyone should waste her substance in that way.
But he was patient.
“Very well,” he said. “We must give him every opportunity. It’s not nice to think of a man missing his own mother’s funeral.”
He was careful to emphasise the last sentence very distinctly as he said it; he wanted to make it quite clear what he really thought of John Marco.
Outside, the mutes—all six of them—were growing restless. They were standing in a small, resentful group on the pavement staring up at the house. Even one of the black horses—chosen by the firm of undertakers for his appearance, and looking like the eldest son of Death himself—was pawing at the roadway like a hackney waiting for the flag to be lowered. And Mr. Tuke, standing beside Hesther with his watch open in his right hand, again might have been the starter.
“It’s obvious now,” he said with finality as the second hand came upright for the fifth time, “that he doesn’t intend to come.”
Hesther bowed her head.
“At any rate, not here,” she answered. “Perhaps he’ll be at the cemetery.”
“Perhaps he will,” said Mr. Tuke. and he raised his thick black eyebrows as he said it.
The journey to Lower Paddington Cemetery was not long; this twenty-acre park of dissolution lay right in the centre of things. You had, however, to be someone—someone with one foot already in the grave so to speak—to be able to get in there at all; and it was only because Mr. Marco had inherited an impressive granite catacomb (on which during a lean period he had once tried to raise a small loan and failed) that Mrs. Marco was privileged to go there at all. As it was, her party swept through the gates like ticket-holders.
Throughout the ride Mr. Tuke had felt curiously melancholy and depressed. Clarence Gardens by now had become inextricably entangled in his mind with memories of death and disaster; and as he bumped up and down on the hard leather cushions of the coach he could not help remembering the dismal, unattended funeral of Mr. Trackett.
To-day, however, the sunshine was brilliant. As they neared the burial ground and the marble confections of the stone-masons rose into view, it was like stepping into the vanished glories of Greece. But the feeling of uneasiness within Mr. Tuke remained: for all his knowledge of the world and his personal reserves of grace he did not altogether feel at his ease sitting next to a writer of anonymous letters.
The Chapel at Lower Paddington was dingier than at Kensal Rise simply because there was less doing there. The dust rolled out of the hassocks when anyone knelt on them; and it was as much as the light could do to fight its way through the windows. Removing his hat and pulling off his gloves Mr. Tuke took his place on one side of the shining oak coffer, and Hesther in the front pew sat facing him with a handkerchief held to her eyes. The mutes, all wearing their professional countenances of sorrow, stood lined in a row along the back.
For a moment, Hesther raised her head, glanced round the room and then started to cry. At first Mr. Tuke sympathised with her: he approved of women who cry at funerals. But slowly the real significance of that glance came to him. It wasn’t old Mrs. Marco she was crying for, it was her husband. And once Mr. Tuke had realised that, he wished that she would stop it. It seemed sheer blasphemy that she should want such a man there at all.
The Marco catacomb when they reached it had been got all ready for them. The big iron gates had been oiled and greased, and a little sand had been sprinkled on the steps. There was an air of homeliness about the threshold. But within, the place still had the undisguisable oppression of the vault. After the bright sunlight outside, the sudden deprivation of warmth and brightness seemed physical and personal. Even Mr. Tuke shivered as he stood there. And in the close confines of the cell, Hesther’s emotions became still more noticeable, more distressing. Every intake of breath was audible to Mr. Tuke. It was almost as though she were actually in his arms and sobbing there.
Mr. Tuke deliberately shut his ears to it all. He isolated himself. With his eyes closed and his hands folded across his prayer book he was intoning the final passage of the Amosite order of burial . . . “As we were once purified by water,” he was declaiming, “so now, life’s pageant over, are we purified by earth. Grant, 0 Lord, that . . .”, when one of the mutes touched him by the shoulder.
“Excuse me, sir,” he said, “the lady’s fainted.”
Mr. Tuke opened his eyes immediately; opened his eyes and stared. There lying on the stone floor of the catacomb with her legs spread open in vacant, unthinking fashion lay Hesther. She had slid down to the floor silently and unobtrusively just as he had closed his eyes and begun praying.
The fact that she had done such a thing irritated him still further. But in moments such as these he was a man of prompt and effective decision.
“Well, don’t stand there doing nothing,” he said. “Help me to carry her out.”
And because he wanted to do everything he could to preserve the proprieties, he insisted on taking her legs himself. There seemed to him something downright indecent about a handsome stranger in a frockcoat’clasping the unconscious Hesther above the knees.
She was proved to be heavy, however; very heavy. And she kept on slipping. By the time Mr. Tuke had reached the broad gravel highway that ran through the cemetery, he was sweating. His blind, clerical collar had slipped up round his neck and the black shirt-front was creased and puckered. But he struggled on stumbling and slipping—to the contempt of the little cortège behind him who were used to carrying heavy weights without either slipping or stumbling.
The sight of the mourning carriage, when he turned a corner past a handsome granite Parthenon and came suddenly upon it, was so welcome that Mr. Tuke instinctively speeded up. The man in front was quite unprepared for this unexpected acceleration and, for a moment, the unconscious Hesther was folded up between them. Then the undertaker’s man recovered himself and they reached the waiting horses almost at the double. The resident chaplain, an old silvery incumbent of the Church of England, stood in the doorway of his little shrine looking on in amazement. He had always disliked Nonconformists, and Amosites more than most of them: there was a kind of devout heartiness about them that grated on him. But to see a minister of God scrambling into a coach with a fainting girl in his arms, like a couple eloping, was more than he could endure. With a final gesture of disgust he went inside and shut the fancy Gothic door behind him.
Hesther began to come round as they got her onto the seat. She made little stirring movements with her hands and began whimpering.
“Take me home,” she said feebly. “Take me home. I want to lie down.”
The party of mutes had caught up with them by now. They climbed into their places, and the carriage began to move off. Just as they were scrunching rapidly down the gravel past the gates, Mr. Tuke started searching desperately round on the seat beside him. In the rush o
f departure he found that he had left his top hat behind him.
Letting down the window with a bang he thrust his head out and addressed the driver.
“My hat,” he said. “My hat.”
But the driver who did not know what he meant, merely nodded: he supposed that Mr. Tuke was airing his feelings and, being a man of God, could not allow himself to say more.
iii
At half-past-six John Marco left Tredegar Terrace and went into the florist’s. The girl behind the counter expected him to buy roses or even orchids: there was an expensive look about him that suggested that he might be the sort of gentleman who would put down half-a-sovereign and his card on the counter and so make some fortunate woman happy. But instead, he bought Arum lilies—a great vase-ful of them. And he insisted on carrying them away himself. He left the shop holding the enormous sheaf, with the white, soapy faces of the flowers peering up over his shoulder.
Outside, he hailed a hansom and followed the mourning carriage along the same route that it had taken two hours earlier. The scent of the lilies rose up and made the air sickly and sweet; John Marco’s nostrils were full of it. It drugged him. He no longer seemed to belong to this world at all and the hansom trotting smartly up the Edgware Road might have been a balloon cruising in empty space. In this remoteness—even the shop fronts and the people on the pavements seemed shadowy and unreal—his thoughts came and went as they pleased. But a woman standing on the street corner with a small boy beside her remained in his memory long after he had passed her, and he began to think of his own son—Hesther’s son. The boy must be almost as tall as that child, he supposed. He was four now—or was it four and a half? Soon he would be going to school, like other boys. He wondered as he sat there with his hands clasping the iron canopy that rose up in front of him, whether the child ever asked after him. And if he asked what did Hesther tell him? Or had the child long since given up asking altogether? Did he even know he had a father? he wondered. The child had always been asleep when John Marco went to Clarence Gardens; asleep in the small room that led out of Hesther’s. Perhaps he did not even know that anyone came to the house; did not know that every week there was a man who went swiftly up the stairs, stayed for an hour in one room and then went as swiftly down the stairs and out of the house again. And now even that would be over.
I Shall Not Want Page 30
