by H. E. Bates
Finally it was done: all the rooms had been cleaned and aired, the last of the big heavy foot-worn carpets had been turned and re-laid, the clumsy mahogany furniture had been polished and set back in its original places, as though it had never been moved. And suddenly there was nothing to do. The wet January days, which had seemed so short, began to seem very long, and the house, which had seemed so bustling and alive, began to recapture the air of silence and death.
Like a veneer, the lively effect of clearing-up the house began to wear off, leaving a drab under-surface of realities, a troublesome sense of loss, a dread of loneliness and bills and formalities. There was a will. The rector had left a little over a hundred and fifty pounds. With the books and the furniture, it was to come to Rose; so that there would, perhaps, after the sale, be two hundred and fifty pounds.
She realised that it was nothing. It might last her, with care, with extreme, bitter care, for five years — no more than a day out of the life which lay before her. To supplement it she might do a little private teaching. She would see: she would have to see. The house would no longer be hers; there would, of course, be another rector. These things seemed to her a cruel complication of realities, a kind of equation she had never been brought up to solve.
But one thing she saw, instantly. The servant must go. And having sacked her she felt at once an insufferable loneliness. Parishioners called in the afternoons and she called in return on them, but after darkness she sat there, in the vast house, absolutely alone, with nothing to think of except herself and her dead father, her mind fretted by its own fears and its half-imagined fears. She was driven to bed at nine o’clock and then eight and even earlier, with the Bible from which her father had taught her to read a passage every night since childhood. Upset one evening and going up to bed early to cry herself to sleep she woke, half through the night, to remember that she had forgotten, for the first time, for as long as she could remember, to read that passage. She went downstairs with a candle to find her Bible. As she came back the candlelight fell on something white lying in the passage, by the front door. She picked it up, a letter.
It was a note from Abrahams, asking her if she could not go up to tea on the following day. Inexplicably she felt offended. The very tone and language of the letter seemed offensive: ‘What about coming to tea one day, say to-morrow (Thursday). Should like to discuss question of memorial to Reverend. Need not reply. Will send car.’ It was so common, so detestable that she felt quite suddenly enraged.
In the morning, trying to forget the letter, she succeeded only in recalling its words and renewing her own annoyance. She went about in a state of prim, rigid vexation, the very attitude she would adopt if she were to meet Abrahams. But beneath it all she was inexplicably afraid of seeing him.
And quite suddenly she saw it differently. She would go: of course she would go. Not to go would seem so childish, so discourteous. She was not sure that it was not even her duty to go.
So in the afternoon she was ready, in black except for the thin stitched lines of white on the back of her tight black gloves, when the car arrived. No sooner was she sitting silent, behind the chauffeur, than she wished she had not come.
As the car drove down the hill from the rectory, towards the village, and then up by the private road through the park she stared out of the windows at the wet January landscape, noticing for the first time the red misty flush of elm and beech buds, and then, in the park, the first flicker of aconites, coldest yellow, uncurling in the winter grass. Farther up, under the shelter of the house and its yews, a few odd half-opened snowdrops, like frailest white toadstools, bloomed about the grass. The flowers, so early, filled her with a sense of comfort shot with flashes of envy.
In the house it was so warm that she could have fallen asleep. She and Abrahams sat by a huge fire of wood in the drawing-room, she with her hat and gloves still on, parochial fashion, the words ‘I mustn’t stay’ rising from long foolish habit to her prim lips.
‘Ah, make yourself at home,’ said Abrahams, genially.
Dotted about the room, on tables and in the deep window sills, were bowls of blue and white hyacinths, whose fragrance she breathed with an unconscious show of deep pleasure, longingly.
Abrahams seemed pleased and was telling her how he had planted the bulbs himself and how much he had given for them when tea arrived, the pot and jugs and tray of silver.
‘After tea I’ll show you in the conservatory,’ said Abrahams. ‘Interested in flowers, I know?’
‘I am indeed,’ she said.
She had withdrawn herself again, sitting stiff, straight up, on the edge of the chair.
‘Take your things off,’ Abrahams insisted, ‘while I pour out. You’ll be cold when you go out again.’
‘Oh! I mustn’t stay.’
‘Be blowed. What’s your hurry? Not such a lot to get back for, have you?’
She could have wept. There was a kind of forced geniality about his words which seemed to her brutal. They were full, too, of unconscious truth. She knew so very well that there was no hurry, that she had nothing to get back for. And she could have wept at her own hypocrisy and from the pain of his unconscious truth and brutality. But she removed her gloves instead, finger by finger, aloof and meticulous, folding and pressing them on her lap and then gently rubbing the blood back into her starved white fingers.
‘You’re cold,’ said Abrahams. ‘Why don’t you come nearer the fire?’
‘My hands are just a little chilled,’ she told him. ‘That’s all.’
‘Know what they say!’ he laughed. ‘Cold hands — warm heart.’
She was frigid. She tried to put into her silence an austere disapproval of that familiarity. It did not succeed. He had poured out tea and was handing the cup to her, not noticing either the austerity of her silence or her sudden confusion as she took the cup.
‘You drink that — you’ll feel a little warmer about the gills.’
‘Thank you,’ she said.
With the cup in her hands she tried to renew the old austere silence. But she needed the tea and she began to drink with tiny sips, cautiously, the thin scraggy guides of her neck tautening as she tried to swallow noiselessly. Abrahams drank also, stirring his tea briskly and then drinking with quick guzzling sips. Watching him, she forgot her resolution to be silent in her revulsion at the sound of his loud sipping and the sight of the tea-drips shining like spittle on the bristles of his greyish moustache.
She watched him, fascinated, until he put down his cup and wiped his tea-wet moustache with the back of his hand.
‘Well now,’ he said, ‘about the Reverend.’
She wanted to protest, as always, against the use of that word. It was the very emblem of his familiar vulgarity. But it was useless. He went on quickly, before she could speak:
‘I like to see a man have his due and — well, no use beating about the bush, Miss Vaughan. I should like to see a memorial put up to the Reverend. That’s what. A stone or a window — anything, I don’t care as long as it’s for the church and is worthy of your father.’
He stopped abruptly. With her cup still in her hands, Miss Vaughan was crying, the thin half-checked tears falling soundlessly on her black dress and into her tea-cup.
He let her go on, without a word or a gesture. And vaguely she was aware of his silence as being a comfort to her, and her tears began to come more easily, without pain, giving her relief.
At last she could blow her nose and lift her head and glance sideways through the window, in the pretence that nothing had happened and in the hope also that he would act as though nothing had happened.
But he took her cup, and emptying the slops into the basin, said:
‘Nothing like a good cry. I know what it is to lose someone.’
The words brought the tears stinging up to her eyes again, but she twisted her lips and kept silent. She felt sorry, then, not for herself but for him.
‘I should —’ she began, but she could go no furt
her.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘Drink your tea.’
She found herself obeying, drinking with confusion but with a strange and inexplicable sense of comfort.
‘We can talk about it later,’ he said.
She only nodded. Her eyes were red from crying and her voice hardly audible, and in her black clothes and black hat she looked old and pale, tired out.
He suddenly jumped up. ‘I was going to show you the conservatory, wasn’t I?’
The old prim austerity of manner came back to her as his voice resumed its turn of familiarity.
‘Oh! no, I think I must go.’
But he took no notice and before she could protest they were through the hall, where she had once used the telephone, and through the glass doors leading to the conservatory, the damp warmth of the place and the breath of its flowers and ferns meeting them heavily and sweetly as they entered.
He was very proud of the place. He had fitted up electric lamps in the roof along the stages where the flowers stood and he began to switch the lights on and then off and then on again so that she could see the difference between the flower-colours and greenness in the raw January light and in the white lamp-brilliance. The scents of hyacinth and freesia were exotic, the colours of the waxy petals very pure and delicate. And unconsciously, for the first time, she lived for a few moments outside herself, delighting in the flowers, forgetting that attitude of parochial stiffness which she had worn for so long that it was almost like second nature. Abrahams, delighted also, gave one or two of his sudden heavy laughs and she laughed also almost without realising it. Between the laughter she touched and breathed the flowers, all except the frail powdery pink and yellow primulas, cowslip-scented, which he would not let her touch.
‘You don’t want to be infected, do you?’ he asked.
‘With what?’
He told of the skin disease which the touch of the primula could give.
‘Oh! that’s just a story,’ she cried.
‘No, it’s right.’
‘Well! I don’t care!’ she cried. She buried her face in the pink candelabra of blossoms with a sensation of doing something very delicious and abandoned.
It was not until she was back, alone, in the silence of the rectory that the significance of her behaviour struck her fully, and at the thought of it she broke out in a perspiration of shame, her prim soul curling up within her with horror. Oh! she had been very stupid. It had all been very silly, very thoughtless. And memory only made it more vivid and painful.
She went to bed early, trying to forget it. But in the morning a messenger and a message arrived from Abrahams, the messenger with pots of pink hyacinth and primula, the message asking her if she would go to tea, and again discuss the memorial, on Sunday.
As she read the note and saw the flowers she went very weak.
‘There is no answer,’ she said.
She went about for the rest of the week in an agony of shame and indecision. Yet the answer had to be written. There was no help for it. It was her duty to write.
She delayed answering till Saturday and then wrote, fearfully, to say that she would endeavour to look in, if she might, after Sunday school. The word endeavour she felt, kept her at an austere distance. It made her answer negative of all emotion, saved her from new embarrassments.
In the park the aconites had opened back flat, vivid lemon, in the watery January sun, and higher up, under the yews there were myriad snowdrops among the stiff dark crocus leaves. And again, in spite of herself, she was envious.
She put on the old prim parochial attitude, sitting with her gloves on, as Abrahams talked of the memorial to her in the warm drawing-room. ‘Yes, I see,’ she would say, in agreement; or ‘I am not prepared to say,’ in disagreement. It was as if she were stiffly resolved not to commit herself, again, either to tears or laughter.
‘Well then,’ said Abrahams, as she rose to go, ‘you’ll decide between the broken column and the stained window.’
‘It is very kind of you.’
‘The sooner we know the better. What if you come up again on Sunday?’
‘Oh! I really don’t know.’
She spoke as though terrified, as though to say ‘Yes’ and to come again were against all her most cherished principles of duty and propriety.
‘You can send a note and tell me,’ said Abrahams, ‘when I send some more flowers.’
She fled, half-glad to be back in the rectory with its silence and damp book-odours and solitude.
But on the following Sunday she was half-glad to leave it again. The agony of the silence and solitude had begun to wear her thin and white, thinner and whiter even than before. To see the aconites, to sit in the warm drawing-room, to talk with a fellow-creature again — it was all a little intoxicating to her.
Then, quite suddenly without preparation, as they were having tea and talking of the memorial, deciding on the stained glass, Abrahams asked if she would marry him.
She sat silent, staring, her face absolutely blank in pained astonishment. Suddenly, as if to reassure her, Abrahams smiled. She turned upon him instantly with a voice of half-weeping protest:
‘You’re joking! You’re joking.’
He rose and put his arm on her shoulder. ‘No, no. I’m serious, I mean it.’
‘I — I — I …’ but she could not speak and he sat for a long time with his arm on her shoulders while she sat struggling with her tears and astonishment.
‘Don’t cry,’ he said. ‘Don’t cry. All in good time.’
She wept openly. He reasoned with her a little afterwards, but it was that unexpected tenderness in his voice which finally decided her. She tried to reason against it all, but the recollection of that emotion always triumphed.
A week later she accepted. The question of love never touched her. She had long ago begun to teach herself that marriage and love were words which did not interest her. She reasoned that it was not a question of love, but of duty, and she was secure in that.
They were married in the spring.
III
The rains of late winter continued desolately into spring, drenching the crocuses until they bent over like limp spent candles of orange and purple and white, weighing down the first greenish canary buds of the daffodils by the lake, along all the low-lying land by the stream, the park was flooded, the young leaves of celandine struggling up, yellow-tipped, through the water, and Abrahams was worried because even when the rain ceased and the sun had attained its first spring-power, the water did not drain away. In his concern he would walk down to the stream every morning, testing the height of the water by the wooden stakes he had had driven in and marked, pacing up and down the grass, pausing often, to consider what might be done. He would come back to lunch with a frown on his face, impatient: he wanted the place right, and he must have it right, he would have it right. Rose would say nothing but ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ as his tone demanded, obedient to a half-conscious resolution never to assert herself, never to disagree, never to do anything which might bring them into a state of intimacy. She often committed a kind of sin against herself in order to keep up that negative serenity. If Abrahams suggested deepening the stream she too would say, ‘I was thinking so myself’, or if he changed his mind abruptly, thinking that he might raise the banks of the stream, she would change her mind also, saying, ‘I feel sure it would be better’. But it was a sin of duty, the sin that she had practised so long with her father that it was already both a habit and a virtue. She was scarcely conscious of it. And if Abrahams asked, as he did very rarely, for her opinion, she would manage, by some remark like, ‘Oh! it’s quite beyond my poor brain,’ to excuse herself and at the same time flatter him. Whatever he did must be right.
So when the question of the floods and the stream worried Abrahams she was worried also, and going down to the stream with him one afternoon she stood or paced about the grass in a pretence of harassed thought, just as he did. At last, when Abrahams had walked far up the brook t
o survey from a fresh point, she sat down for a moment on the deer-smoothed bole of an elm and watched the flood water and the yellow hosts of celandine in the damp places beyond. The stream itself came down quietly and the spring air was so still that she could hear every drop of its gentle fall into the lake below. Then, quite suddenly, as she sat watching and listening, the whole problem of the flood seemed clear to her. Surely all that they had to do was to widen the stream and deepen its fall and make a new weir into the lake, so that the stream could take more water and take it faster.
She got up and called Abrahams, timidly, and when he came back to her she told him, repeating often ‘I know it’s quite silly and impossible’. He listened and walked down to the waterfall and then, looking upstream, considered it all. Standing still, she watched the sunlight on the flowers and the water again in a state of timid apprehension until he disturbed her with a shout of excitement:
‘You’ve got it!’ He was already hurrying upstream to her. ‘Can’t think why it didn’t come to me before. Can’t imagine for the life of me why I didn’t think of it.’ He was very excited.
‘Oh! You would have thought of it,’ she said.
‘I don’t know so much, I don’t know so much,’ he kept saying, as they hurried back to the house. ‘You must have been thinking it all out on the quiet.’
